The next morning Evan and Joey sat on their respective beds spooning gas-station-bought oatmeal into their mouths from Styrofoam cups. He’d told Joey to put the room back together, and she’d done her best, but still the closet door was knocked off its tracks, the lamp shattered, the walls battered. The wreckage of the chair was neatly stacked in the corner, a pyre of kindling. It was a foregone conclusion that Suzi Orton, cheery Airbnb patron, was going to have to retire her profile after they cleared out.
“Look,” Joey said. “Sorry I kinda freaked out last night. It’s just … I was—”
Her phone gave a three-note alert, a bugle announcing the king.
She thumped her Styrofoam cup down on the nightstand, oatmeal sludge slopping over the brim, and swung off the bed into a kneeling position before her laptop at the desk.
“A police cruiser hit on the plate,” she said, her voice tight with excitement.
He leaned over her shoulder, saw a screen grab of the black Suburban captured by the light bar of a passing cop car. The SUV was parked in a crowded Food Lion grocery-store lot, the GPS specifics spelled out below.
“Damn it.” Joey nibbled the edge of her thumbnail. “By the time we get there, they’ll be gone.”
“No,” he said. “This is good. No one drives across town to get groceries.”
She caught his meaning, nodded, and snapped her laptop shut. They threw their stuff together in less than a minute.
Before heading out, Evan left ten crisp hundred-dollar bills on the floor beneath a fist-size hole punched through the drywall.
* * *
He started at Food Lion and drove in an expanding spiral, creeping through increasingly rough neighborhoods. A few miles along their winding path, he pulled abruptly to the curb.
Joey said, “What?”
He pointed at a ramshackle single-story house a half block up that looked like most every other house they’d passed. A chunk of missing stucco on the front corner, planters filled with dirt, overstuffed trash cans at the curb. A tall rolling side gate had been turned impenetrable by green plastic strapping interwoven with the chain-link. One of the gutters had come loose and dangled from the fringe of the house like a coal chute.
“I don’t get it,” Joey said.
“The trash cans,” he said. “See those green plastic strips poking up?”
She leaned toward the dash, squinting through the windshield. “They match the fence filler.”
“Right. Someone cut and installed that privacy screen on the gate this week.” He unholstered his ARES and opened the door. “Wait here.”
He crossed the street, darted through front yards, hurdling hedges. He slowed as he came up on the house, keeping his arms firm but not too firm, the pistol pointed at a spot on the ground a few feet ahead of the tips of his boots.
The gate was lifted two inches off the concrete to accommodate the wheels. Easing onto the edge of the driveway, Evan dropped to his stomach and peered through the gap.
The driveway continued past the gate to where the yard ended at a rotting wooden fence. Parked halfway there at an angle was a black Suburban. Weeds pushed up from cracks in the concrete, brushing the vehicle’s flanks. But they weren’t dense enough to cover the license plate.
VBK-5976.
Next to it on the baked dirt of the yard were the second rented Suburban and a Chevy Tahoe.
Evan withdrew.
Jogging back up the street, he flicked a finger for Joey to get out. She climbed from her perch in the driver’s seat, locking the vehicle behind her.
“It’s there?” she asked.
“It’s there.”
As they circled the block, he could hear Joey’s breathing quicken.
They cut through a side yard next to a partially burned house. The frame of an Eldorado rested on blocks in a carport that sagged dangerously on heat-buckled steel beams. They stepped carefully, moving into the backyard. A rear patio had served as a firebreak, preserving a yard filled with dead, waist-high foxtails. Evan and Joey waded into the weeds, their shoes crunching as they headed for the rotting wood of the rear fence. Though the fire looked to be a few days old, ash still scented the air, the smell just shy of pleasing.
The warped fence had plenty of cracks and crevices that provided a ready vantage across the target house’s backyard. On what was left of the lawn, an old-fashioned round barbecue grill melted into a puddle of rust. The reddish tinge on the earth brought a host of associations to Evan, which he pushed aside, focusing instead on the house beyond.
Plywood covered two of the living room’s three windows. One sheet had been removed and set to the side, presumably to let in light. The high kitchen window over the sink had been left exposed, and the rear door was laid open.
Paul Delmonico and Shane Shea, Van Sciver’s freelancers, stood at semi-attention, focused on someone in one of the blind spots. Evan assumed the other two freelancers were holding down the front of the house. In the kitchen window, Thornhill’s head was visible. A moment later a woman stepped beside him, facing mostly away from Evan.
Midlength hair, confident posture, athletic shoulders that tapered to a slender but not-too-slender waist—Evan would recognize her bearing anywhere.
Orphan V turned around.
In the shaft of light falling through the kitchen window, she looked quite striking. As she murmured something to Thornhill, she reached over her shoulder and scratched at a spot on her back. Evan thought of the burned flesh beneath her shirt and felt a jagged edge twist inside him.
Palms pressed to the splintering fence, he breathed the rot of the wood and watched the freelancers watching whoever was in that blind spot, two attack dogs waiting for a command. Beside him Joey shifted her weight uncomfortably, rolling one sneaker onto its outer edge. She was humming with nervousness.
The person in the blind spot stepped out of the blind spot and into view.
That broad form, the thin copper hair, the muscular forearms and blocky wrists. But it wasn’t just Van Sciver who made Joey’s breath hitch audibly in her throat; it was what he was carrying.
David Smith’s frail form draped across his arms.
Van Sciver dumped the body onto a tarp on the floor. His arms were swollen with exertion, bowed at his sides. The lines on the right side of his face caught the shadows differently—perhaps scarring, perhaps a trick of the light. Evan hadn’t laid eyes on him, not directly, since they’d shared a tense drink in Oslo nearly a decade ago.
Seeing him now in the stark light of day, Evan felt emotions shifting along old fault lines. They’d spent so many years circling each other from the shadows that some small piece of Evan wondered from time to time if he’d conjured Charles Van Sciver entirely.
But there he was, in the flesh.
And the body of the boy who used to be David Smith.
“He’s dead,” Joey said. Despite the cool December air, sweat sparkled across her temple, emotion flushing her cheeks.
Staring at the motionless, slender form on the tarp, Evan felt heat pulse in his windpipe, fired by a red-hot coal lodged in his chest.
He pushed away from the fence, looked down at the tips of his boots. He pictured the crowded bunks of Room 14 at McClair Children’s Mental Health Center. A Lego rebel riding a Snowspeeder across a rusting radiator. Jorell, too smart for his own good. In another life Jorell would be a lawyer, a philosophy professor, a stand-up comedian. In another life David Smith would be sitting down to dinner with a real family. In another life Jack was still alive and he and Evan had plans on the books to share a meal in a two-story farmhouse in Arlington.
“Wait,” Joey said. “Evan—he’s breathing.”
Evan’s head snapped back up. He watched as the boy stirred and rolled onto his side.
Evan’s jaw had tightened. That red-hot coal singed the inside of his throat, fanned with each breath. “We have to get him.”
“There are three Orphans and four muscleheads in that house,” Joey said. “Armed to the teeth. And we’re out here in the weeds with your girly gun.”
“Yes.”
“So how do you plan on getting to him?”
Evan fished the Samsung Galaxy from his pocket. “By telling Van Sciver where we are.”
He thumbed the Signal application.
A moment later a xylophone chime of a ringtone carried to them on the breeze. Evan put his eye to a knothole and peered into the house.
Van Sciver lifted the phone from his pocket and looked down at the screen. Candy and Thornhill alerted to his expression and went to him, the three of them standing in a loose huddle by the kid’s body.
They were in close enough proximity that a tight grouping of nine-millimeter rounds could take them down.
If they weren’t Orphans, Evan might consider hurdling the fence and rushing the house to get within range. But he knew he wouldn’t get three steps past the rusting barbecue before they alerted to him.
Van Sciver’s thumb pulsed over the screen, and he lifted the phone to his face. Evan watched his lips move, the familiar voice coming across the line on a half-second delay; there was a lot of encryption to squeeze the single syllable through. “X.”
“Now you’re catching on.”
“I suppose you’re calling about the boy.”
From the remove of one backyard and a disintegrating fence, Evan watched Van Sciver turn. Through the phone he heard the rustle of the big man’s boots on the tarp. Candy had one hip cocked, directing the two freelancers to keep eyes up. Thornhill’s muscles coiled, thrumming with energy, ready to go kinetic. He walked to the front of the house to alert the others.
Van Sciver said, “You took one of mine…”
Joey must’ve heard the words from the receiver, because she stiffened at the mention of herself.
“… so I took one of Jack’s,” Van Sciver continued. “But he doesn’t have Joey’s weaknesses. He’s like you and me. Tabula rasa. Jack found him and tucked him away somewhere safe. Now we have him. Like a gun without a serial number.”
“Disposable,” Evan said. “You’ll train him up, spend him when you need to.”
“That’s what we’re for, Evan, remember?”
“Orphan J. Orphan C. Orphan L. Jack. Joey. And now this boy. All to get to me.”
“That’s right.”
Candy was close at hand, hanging on Van Sciver’s words, her lips pursed into a shape evocative of a kiss. But the eyes told a different story, of dark appetites unsatiated.
Van Sciver’s stare picked across the backyard and snagged on the rear fence. His eyes looked lopsided even from this distance, and it took Evan a moment to realize that it was because the right pupil was larger. Evan could have sworn Van Sciver was looking through the knothole right at him. It was impossible, of course, and yet Evan still pulled back a few inches from the wood.
He knew that look, the same one Van Sciver used to issue when they gathered on the cracked asphalt of the basketball courts across from Pride House, a group of punk-ass kids with nothing to do and nowhere to go.
A look like he was trying to see inside you.
Evan took a breath, eased it out. “How ’bout you get around to telling me what makes me so special?”
Again he watched Van Sciver’s lips move, the dubbing off from the voice coming through the line. “You really haven’t put it together?”
Evan didn’t reply.
Van Sciver laughed. “You don’t really think this is just personal?”
Evan didn’t indulge him. Their earlier conversation played back in his head. You have no idea, do you? How high it goes?
“It’s amazing,” Van Sciver said. “You don’t even know how valuable you are.”
He pivoted slightly, meeting Candy’s loaded gaze. She was clearly read in on whatever reason had escalated the hunt for Evan.
Van Sciver’s shoulders rose, his neck corded with muscle, his blocky hand firming around the phone. “They sent me to the Sandpit a few times, needed to pick another name off that deck of playing cards. I caught up to him in Tikrit. Shitty little compound in Qadisiyah, jungle-gym bars and rusty Russian munitions. We’d already rained down with aerial munitions, but Habeeb’s still strolling around his little fenced-in yard, lord of his domain. I was set up with my .300 Win Mag on a rooftop at twelve hundred meters, ready to shoot the dick off a mosquito. And Habeeb comes around the yard into sight. I have the head shot, clear as day. But at the last minute, I move the crosshairs from his face to his arm, take it off at the shoulder.” His breath came as a rush of static across the receiver. “He’ll bleed out, right? But I wanted it to be slow. Guess why.”
Evan said, “To draw out the other targets.”
“No,” Van Sciver said, his voice simmering with latent rage. “Because I wanted him to know.”
Evan let the silence lengthen.
Van Sciver said, “When I catch up to you, Evan, you’re gonna have time also. To know. All your questions? I’ll fill you in at the very end. When you’re bleeding out on the ground at my feet.”
His whole body had tensed, but Evan watched him try to relax his muscles now, a snake uncoiling.
“I am hot on your trail,” Van Sciver said.
“And I’m hot on yours,” Evan said, the Samsung pressed to his cheek. “Can you feel my breath on your neck?”
Van Sciver’s expression turned uneasy. He walked into the kitchen, peered out the window into the backyard once more. “Is that so?”
“Yeah,” Evan said. “We’ve got a lock on the kid.”
Next to him Joey bristled. Her hands flared wide—What are you doing?—but he held focus on the house.
Van Sciver muffled the phone against his shoulder and snapped his fingers. The freelancers readied M4s and spread around the interior, taking up guard positions. Thornhill drew an FNX-45 from his hip holster and ambled out of sight.
Van Sciver kept his pistol in his underarm tension holster. He moved the phone back to his mouth. “If you want him,” he said, “come and get him.”
Evan said, “Okay,” and hung up.
“What the hell?” Joey hissed. “Now they’re on high alert. If they come back here—”
Evan pulled out his RoamZone, pressed three buttons, held up a finger to Joey while it rang.
A feminine voice came over the line. “911.”
“Yeah, hi,” Evan said. “I work at the McClair Children’s Mental Health Center in Church Hill. A man and a teenage girl have been lingering around the building all morning. One of our nurses said she saw that the man had a gun. Can you please get someone here right away? Hang on—Shit. I think they’re approaching.”
He hung up.
Joey gestured for him furiously, pointing through the gap. Crouching, he peered again through the knothole.
Candy swung through the kitchen, heading for the rear of the house. He couldn’t see her body until it filled the doorway to the backyard.
She held an M4.
She moved swiftly across the porch and strode out to recon the yard.
Joey backpedaled, her sneaker tamping down the foxtails loudly. She cringed at the noise, wobbled to avoid landing her other foot. Evan shot out a hand and grabbed her arm. She was frozen with one leg above the dead weeds. The brittle foxtails stretched all around them, an early-warning system that would broadcast to Candy any move they made.
Firming his grip on Joey’s biceps, Evan swung his head back to the fence. He peered through the knothole, now a foot away. The perspective had the effect of lensing in on the yard.
Candy, twenty yards away and closing.
With his free hand, Evan reached down and tugged his ARES 1911 from the holster. He kept his eyes locked on the knothole.
Candy passed the rusted barbecue, the bore of the M4 facing them, a full circle of black.
She swept toward the fence.
Evan lifted the pistol and aimed through the silver-dollar-size hole.