The apartment complex was so sturdy that it bordered on municipal. Ten-foot security gate, metal shutters, callbox with buzzer. Evan had approached the target slowly, winding in on the address block by block like a boa constricting its prey. Then he’d parked behind the building in the shade of a tree—Hillsboro was lousy with trees—and surveilled.
The rented Toyota Corolla reeked eye-wateringly of faux new-car smell, courtesy of an overly exuberant car washer. Evan had been watching for three hours now, which was a lot of new-car smell for a man to take.
Traffic ran past steadily. A Tesla Model S flashed by, and more Priuses than he could count. Buses creaked to a stop across the road at intervals approximating ten minutes and disgorged various domestic workers and floridly bearded young men. Evan used the reflection off the bus’s windows to observe the wide parking lot enfolded in the horseshoe of the three-story complex. People came and went, and they looked ordinary enough.
Then again, so did Evan.
The same HILLSBORO HOME THEATER INSTALLATION! van drove by two times, a half hour apart. A half hour was an eyebrow-raising interval, though it was plausible that the driver had bid a job or had completed a small repair and was returning to the shop.
Evan didn’t like vans.
He gave it another hour, but the van didn’t reappear. Besides, what idiot would put an exclamation mark on an undercover vehicle?
He reapplied a thin layer of superglue to his fingertips. Superglue was less conspicuous than gloves and left him with full tactility. He pressed the fingers of his left hand to the window. They left five printless dots.
A rickety old Cadillac coasted to the curb across the street from Evan at the rear of the complex. An elderly man emerged, the strains of a Beethoven piano concerto still drifting through the open windows. He began to unload from the trunk various canvases, which he propped against the wall of the building. They featured cubist takes on musical instruments—a deconstructed trumpet, a piano turned inside out. There was a flair to his artwork, an inner life. The canvases kept coming. They lined the base of the building, filled a blanket he spread on the sidewalk, peered from the jaw of the open trunk. The man sat creakily, adjusted his herringbone flat cap, and nodded to the music.
Evan listened along with him. It was Concerto No. 3, one of Jack’s favorites. He remembered Jack’s saying that it owed something to Mozart, how all things should honor what preceded them and inspire what is to come.
He wondered how he could best honor Jack.
The question of inspiration was even thornier.
He remembered Jack’s message scrawled on the foggy window. He wondered what the hell the package was and why Jack had hidden it all the way across the continent. Something essential. A long-buried secret from Jack’s past that would lead to Van Sciver? Maybe even a torpedo that would sink him.
Evan checked his gun. Along with the skinny 1911, he’d smuggled one extra go-to-war magazine in the laptop. He’d validated the mag at a range, making sure it dropped clear. That gave him seventeen rounds, which was less than he was comfortable with. Then again, he could do a goodly amount of damage with seventeen rounds.
He heard an echo of Jack’s voice: Just don’t put all the holes in the same place.
He got out of the car. Scanning the traffic, he walked around the east wing of the building, tucking quickly into the horseshoe. At the edge of the parking lot, the callbox sprouted from the metal mesh of the security gate. It was a serious gate with a serious double-keyed lock. Another metal gate guarded the stairwell, which was itself caged.
Fire hazards to be sure, but this was a bad section of Hillsboro—whatever that meant—and the folks who lived here cared more about day-to-day safety than about the sliver percentage of a fire-induced stampede.
Jack had chosen a good place to hide the package.
On the directory, number 202 was blank. Evan scanned the other names. Given the security concerns of the residents, a button-pushing deliveryman ruse wouldn’t likely get him far.
He’d bought a rake pick and a tension wrench at a hardware store and was about to get busy when a guy yammering into a Bluetooth headset clanged out of the stairwell gate. As the man strode up the corridor toward the front, Evan pretended to punch a code into the callbox’s keypad.
“I heard this new ramen place is sick,” the guy told his interlocutor and anyone else in the vicinity who might have been interested. “They have, like, a hundred flavors of shōchū.”
He shoved his way out the front gate, ignoring Evan and the rest of the world, and Evan slipped through. In case he had to beat a hasty retreat, he wedged a quarter between the latch and the frame so the gate wouldn’t autolock.
At the stairwell he finally got to use his pick set. He engaged a second quarter to keep that gate from locking also.
A fine fifty-cent investment.
He crept up to the second floor and down the corridor. Apartment 202 had a peephole. He ducked beneath it, put his ear to the door. Heard nothing inside.
Though the building was late-afternoon quiet, he couldn’t risk creeping around the corridor for long.
The apartment lock was also double-keyed. With the rake and wrench, he jogged the pins into proper alignment and eased the door silently open.
The place was dimly lit and smelled of carpet dust and greasy food. A brief foyer led to a single big studio room. No furniture.
He made out a faint scraping sound.
Pistol drawn, Evan eased through the foyer, heel to toe, minding the floorboards. More of the studio came into view. A bare mattress. A mound of fast-food wrappers. A geometric screen saver casting a striated glow from an open laptop. Then an overstuffed rucksack.
The scraping grew louder.
He eased out a breath, peered around the corner.
A girl crouched, facing away, her forehead nearly touching the far wall. She had a mane of dark wavy hair, torn jeans, a form-fitting tank top. It was hard to gauge from behind, but he guessed she was a teenager. She was bent over something, and her shoulders shook slightly. Crying?
The closet and bathroom doors were laid open, and there was no furniture for anyone to hide behind. Just her.
He thought about the double-keyed locks and wondered—was she being held captive?
He aimed the ARES at the floor but didn’t holster it. Stepping clear of the foyer, he lowered his voice so as not to startle her. “Are you okay?”
She jumped at the sound, then glanced tentatively over her shoulder. Her back curled with fear, her expression vulnerable. She looked Hispanic, but he couldn’t be sure in the dim light.
“Who are you?” she said.
“I’m not gonna hurt you.”
“Why are you here?”
He drew closer slowly, not wanting to scare her. “It’s a long story.”
“Can … can you help me?”
He holstered the pistol but stayed alert. “Who put you here?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember. I … I…”
Her posture suddenly snapped into shape, a bundle of coiled muscle. She pivoted into a vicious leg sweep, leading with the hard edge of her heel, sweeping both of his boots out from under him.
As he accelerated into weightlessness, he saw the glint in her eye matched by the glint of the fixed-blade combat knife in her right hand. A sharpening stone lay on the carpet, the stone she’d been crouching over, scraping away when he’d walked in. Already she’d rotated, spinning up onto her feet, readying to drive the blade through his sternum.
He struck the floor, the wind knocking from his lungs in a single clump, and it occurred to him just how badly he had misjudged the situation.