The man was ill. That much was easy to see. A tic seized his face every few seconds, making him shake his head as if clearing water from an ear.
He’d once been a paragon of excellence, one of the finest weapons in the government’s arsenal. And now this.
He clutched a rat-chewed sleeping bag. Dirt crusted his earlobe. He wore sweatpants over jeans to ward off the cold.
He jittered from foot to foot, then halted abruptly and screwed the toe of his sneaker into the earth, back and forth, back and forth. He was mumbling to himself, spillage from a brain in tatters. Gray hair, gray stubble, gray skin, a face caving it on itself.
Jack had come to Alabama to find him.
But locating a homeless man was like trying to find a glass cup in a swimming pool. Hard to know where to start and easy to miss even when you’re looking right at it.
Yet Van Sciver had resources that Jack didn’t.
It had taken some time, but now here they were, in the shadow of the freeway overpass. Commuters whizzed by above them, an ordinary Birmingham morning in ordinary motion, but down here among the puddles and heaps of wind-blown trash, they might’ve been the last humans on earth. Nearby a fire guttered in a rusted trash can, the stench of burning plastic singeing the air.
The man convulsed again, one shoulder twisting up, plugging his ear. Van Sciver reached out and clamped the man’s jaw, the hand so big it encircled the lower half of his face.
The man stilled. Van Sciver stared into his mossy brown eyes. Saw nothing but tiny candlelight flickers from the trash-can fire behind him.
Van Sciver said, “Orphan C.”
The man did not reply.
Around the concrete bend, Van Sciver could hear Thornhill shooing away the last of the homeless from the makeshift encampment. They were skittish and tractable and had good reason to be. There’d been a rash of attacks against the community of late, a neo-Nazi group curb-stomping victims in the night, lighting them on fire.
Van Sciver snapped his fingers in front of the man’s nose. The man jerked away. The tic seized him once more, the skin of his cheeks shuddering beneath Van Sciver’s hand. Van Sciver squeezed harder, firming the man’s head.
“Do you remember Jack Johns?” Van Sciver asked.
“I’m dead Orphan dead man walking never knew never never knew.”
“Back in 1978 Jack Johns conducted your psyops training. Nine sessions at Fort Bragg. Have you been in touch with him since?”
“The woman’s head like an open bowl it was an open bowl and I did it used to kill people for a living you know used to kill them and poof I’d be gone and no one ever knew no one ever knew anything ever knew me I never knew me never did.”
“Did Jack Johns ever mention Orphan X?”
The man’s eyes widened. His tongue bulged his lower lip. “Don’t know don’t never he’s a ghost he’s never been and never was and never will be.”
“Do you know anything about Orphan X?”
The man’s eyes achieved a momentary clarity. “No one does.”
Van Sciver released the man, and he staggered back. Van Sciver knew from Orphan C’s file that he was fifty-seven years old. He could’ve passed for eighty.
The last medical tests before he’d retired and dropped out of sight had shown the beginnings of traumatic brain injury, likely from a rocket-propelled grenade that had nearly gotten him in Brussels. Since then he’d deteriorated further, PTSD accelerating what the physical trauma had begun, taking him apart piece by piece. It made him unsafe, a glitchy hard drive walking around unsecured.
“R!” Van Sciver called out.
Thornhill ducked back through a sagging chain-link fence and jogged over, sinew shifting beneath his T-shirt. He wasn’t wearing his usual shoes today.
He was wearing steel-plated boots.
“I’m done here,” Van Sciver said. “He’s got nothing for us.” He regarded the man again, felt something akin to sadness. “There’s nothing left to get.”
The man’s face seized again, and he tweaked forward, facial muscles straining. “People taking and taking like bites little piranha bites until there’s nothing left until they’ve nibbled you down to the bone and you’re dead a skeleton held together by tendons just tendons.”
“I got this,” Thornhill said, putting his arm around the man and walking him to the drain. “Come on, buddy. You’re okay. You’re good.”
The man shuddered but went with him.
Van Sciver folded his arms across his broad chest and watched.
“I’m sorry you’ve had a rough time,” Thornhill told the man. “It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault. You can’t help what you are. Hell—none of us can.”
The man nodded solemnly, picked at the scruff sprouting from his jaundiced neck.
Thornhill removed a can of spray paint from his jacket pocket, gave it a few clanking shakes, and started to spray something on the concrete by the drain. The man watched him nervously.
“I knew a guy,” Thornhill said, the sprayed lines coming together to form a giant swastika. “Loved dogs. Had a whole raft of them taking over his house, sleeping on his couches, everywhere. Well, one day he’s out driving and sees a sign on the road. Someone’s giving away baby wolves.”
He pocketed the can of spray paint, set his hands on the man’s shoulders, and turned him around. Then he knocked the back of the man’s leg gently with his own kneecap and steered him down so he was kneeling before the drain.
“So he figures what the hell. He takes this baby wolf home, raises him just like a dog. Feeds it, shelters it, even lets it sleep on his bed. The wolf gets bigger, as wolves do, grows up. And one morning just like any morning, this guy, he’s building a shed, fires a nail gun right through his shoe.”
Thornhill tilted the man forward toward the raised strip of concrete running above the drain. “There you go. Just lie forward on your chest.” He positioned the man. “So this guy comes limping through his backyard, scent of blood in the air. His dogs are all frantic, worried. Can sense his pain, right? They’re worried for him. But that wolf? The wolf doesn’t see a problem. He sees an opportunity.”
Thornhill reached down, opened the man’s jaw, set his open mouth on the concrete ridge. “So he tears out his owner’s throat.” The man was trembling, his stubble glistening with trapped tears, but he did not resist. He made muffled noises against the concrete lip. Thornhill leaned over him, mouth to his ear. “Because that wolf was just biding his time. Waiting, you see, for his owner to show the tiniest vulnerability.” Almost tenderly, he repositioned the man’s head. “No matter how docile it seems, a wolf will always be a wolf.”
Thornhill reared back to his full height, his shadow blanketing Orphan C. Thornhill firmed his body, raised one of his steel-plated boots over the back of C’s head.
Van Sciver climbed into the passenger side of the Chevy Tahoe. Even with the armored door closed, he heard the wet smack.
That was okay. Yesterday had given them a pair of solid leads. C had been the least promising of the two.
On to the next.
Van Sciver opened his notebook and peered at the address he’d written inside. This one held his greatest hope.
Outside, Thornhill tugged off his boots and threw them into the trash-can fire.
Van Sciver removed his phone from the glove box and called Orphan V.