Orphan X

9 A Damn Saint

The ice cube singed Evan’s fingertips as he twisted the palm-coded hot water lever in the shower and stepped through the hidden door into the Vault. He crossed to the sheet-metal desk and nestled the cube gently into the spikes of the tiny aloe vera plant. Vera seemed not unappreciative.

He slid the black RoamZone into his pocket, though it wouldn’t be ringing anytime soon. It had been only five days since he’d put three bullets into Detective William Chambers. It would take a while for Morena Aguilar to find the next client. The shortest time between the end of a mission and the next caller had been two months. Now was Evan’s brief window to settle back and relax.

He thought about taking a drive to Wally’s Wine & Spirits on Westwood Boulevard and picking up a bottle of Kauffman Luxury Vintage vodka. Distilled fourteen times and filtered twice, once through birch coal, once through quartz sand, it was produced from the wheat of a single year’s harvest, making it one of the only vodkas released with a specific vintage, like wine or champagne. Excessive, perhaps, as was the price tag, but it was as pure and clean as any liquid he’d tasted.

He threw on a sweatshirt, grabbed his keys, and headed down in the elevator. Inevitably, it stopped on the sixth floor, and he smelled the flowery perfume even before the doors parted to admit Mrs. Rosenbaum.

Evan braced himself for more tales of her beloved Herb, may he rest in peace, but instead Ida cast a caustic glance over the top of her rose-colored spectacles and announced, “I hear that you’ve been sneaking out of Mia Hall’s place at all hours.”

The Honorable Pat Johnson of 12F, acting less than honorable, must have spread the word.

Evan pictured the sleek teardrop bottle of Kauffman vodka, his reward if he could make it through this elevator ride and afternoon rush hour. “No, ma’am.”

She sniffed. “We have enough problems around here, what with the dry rot. Can you believe it? Here in Castle Heights! The whole frame around my front door, falling to pieces. Ten complaints over two months, and do you think the good-for-nothing manager’s done a thing about it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, my son, he’s coming in for the holidays, bringing his wife and my two beautiful grandchildren. And he said if my door’s not fixed by then, he’ll do it himself. Can you imagine? A name partner in a major New Brunswick accountancy, and he’d do carpenter work for me?”

Mercifully, they reached the lobby, and when Ida paused at her mail slot, Evan made a getaway down the stairs to the garage. He’d just stepped around the pillar, bringing his pickup into sight, when a voice called from behind him.

“Wait! Evan!”

He turned to see Mia run-walking toward him in her midheel shoes, still dressed from work.

She paused, looked down at her shoes. “Screw it,” she muttered, yanking them off and continuing toward him in stockinged feet. “Look, sorry, I know this is weird, but can I borrow your truck?”

Evan was speechless.

“That woman from 3B blocked me in with her stupid Range Rover. Beth someone.”

“Pamela Yates?”

“Sure. Whatever. Beths and Pamelas are the same type of woman. Everyone knows that.” She reached him, her foot skidding in an oil stain. “I have to run over to my brother’s in Tarzana and pick up Peter. It’s a schlep, I know, but he doesn’t get a lot of time with … well, male role models. Wow, that’s a dated phrase. But you know what I mean. I just came home to drop off some files, ran up, and now — look.” She flailed an arm at the SUV boxing in her Acura. “I can’t find Beth-Pamela anywhere.” She only now seemed to register the keys in Evan’s hand. “Oh. You’re going, not coming? Where?”

He blinked once, twice. “To get vodka.”

“That qualifies as an outing? What a life. Look, can I please just take your truck to get my kid? I’ll grab you vodka on my way back. What do you like? Absolut? Smirnoff?”

He just looked at her.

Her phone gave a personalized ring, the theme song from Peanuts. She snapped it up. “I’m coming, Walter. On my way.” Hung up. “Come on,” she pleaded. “I promise I won’t crash. And if I do, I’ll prosecute me.”

“I don’t loan my truck out.”

“Why? Cocaine stashed in the wheel wells?”

He looked at the door to the lobby, hoping that Pamela Yates would miraculously appear, but it remained stubbornly closed.

“Come on,” she said. “It’s a semi-emergency.”

He forced a tight grin. “I’ll drive you.”

“Oh shit,” Mia said.

Her foot had smeared oil on the spotless passenger-side floor mat of Evan’s truck. Evan tried to assess the damage without being too obvious. “It’s fine,” he said.

However, she was looking not at her feet but her phone. “Missed a work call.” She speed-dialed while gesturing for Evan to get onto the 405, which was as jammed as a parking lot.

Driving in traffic. To Tarzana. To pick up a kid.

It kept getting better.

Next to him Mia spoke sternly into the phone. “This is District Attorney Mia Hall. I need that update ASAP.” She hung up, leaned back, and sighed. “Thank you. Seriously. You saved my ass on this one.”

She clicked the button to lower the window a few times, and nothing happened.

“Why won’t the window go down?” she asked.

Because there was no room for it to retract after Evan had hung Kevlar armor inside the door panel. The windows themselves were made of laminated armor glass. The Ford F-150 came with a beefed-up suspension to handle the added weight, and as the bestselling vehicle in America for decades, it had the added advantage of blending in virtually anywhere. He’d taken other steps to prepare the truck as well, disarming the safety systems, removing the airbags, and disabling the inertia-sensing switches in the bumpers that render power to the fuel pump inoperable in a collision. To protect the vulnerable radiator and intercooler, he’d added a built-to-spec push-bumper assembly up front. If shot or punctured, the run-flat tires self-sealed with a special adhesive compound distributed internally with each rotation, and a support ring “second tire” hidden at the core served as a contingency to that contingency. In the back, flat rectangular truck vaults neatly overlaid the bed, providing secure storage while remaining inconspicuously lower than the tailgate. Like him, the vehicle was prepared for varied and extreme contingencies while never drawing a second glance.

Mia clicked the window button again. “Well?”

“It’s broken,” he said.

“Oh.” Her stare dropped to the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “Where’s the stain? From last week?”

It took him a moment to realize she was talking about the blood that had sopped through the sweatshirt when they’d been crammed into the elevator together. What was he gonna say? That he kept a dozen black sweatshirts mission-handy?

“It came out,” he said.

“Grape juice. Came out.” She eyed him skeptically, then settled into her seat, at last noticing the traffic. “Oy,” she said. “Why didn’t you take Sepulveda?”

Evan waited at the curb outside the little clapboard house, engine running. At last Mia emerged from her brother’s front door with Peter in tow, his hair still spotty on the sides from the duct-tape incident. His backpack, nearly as big as he was, bounced on his shoulders, threatening to topple him. As she helped him into the compressed backseat of the truck, her iPhone rang with the Jaws theme. She frowned down at the screen, then wiggled it at Evan. “Sorry. This is that call. Confidential.”

“I really need to—”

“I know. Buy vodka. Gimme a sec?”

Before he could reply, she’d stepped away.

Silence from the backseat. Evan looked across at Mia pacing on the browning front lawn, phone at her cheek, gesticulating intensely. The call didn’t seem to be wrapping up anytime soon.

Evan had to tilt the rearview mirror to bring Peter into sight. Evan cleared his throat. “Your mom’s pretty busy with work, huh?”

“Yeah. She puts away killers and stuff. This one guy? He shot someone. How do you shoot someone anyway?”

“Twice in the chest, once in the head in case they’re wearing ballistic armor.”

Peter swallowed. “I meant, how could someone just kill someone?”

Oh.

“Practice. A lot of practice, I’d imagine.”

“I don’t get people who hurt other people.” Peter cradled his arm gingerly, and his shirtsleeve slid up, exposing a bruise on his biceps.

Evan thought about the boy’s injuries the past few times he’d seen him — the scraped forehead, the skinned elbow — and put it together. He turned around in the driver’s seat, tilted his chin at the bruise. “That’s not from dodgeball, is it?”

Those big charcoal eyes took his measure. Then Peter shook his head. “Josh Harlow,” he said, in his raspy voice. “A fifth-grader. What am I supposed to do?”

“Take out a knee.”

“Really?”

“If he’s bigger, yes. But I’m joking. About you doing it, I mean.”

“Oh. Then what should I do?”

“I don’t know. Ask your mom.”

“Yeah, right.”

Mia was across the front yard now, back turned, jabbing a finger at the air, the work call veering into some sort of conflict. Evan drummed his hands on the steering wheel impatiently. He wondered where Morena and Carmen were at this precise moment. Heading to their aunt’s or perhaps already there. Safe. He thought about the way that Chambers’s arm had jerked up when he dropped onto the plastic tarp, his expression illuminated by the strobe of the three suppressed muzzle flashes — shock, then fear, then terrible recognition.

Peter had said something.

Evan lifted his eyes to the rearview. “What?”

“Every time he comes after me, I think I’m gonna do something,” Peter said. “Stand up for myself. But I never do.”

Evan felt an itch beneath his skin, the urge to leave this conversation, this house, Tarzana, to get home to his pristine kitchen and shake a martini so thoroughly that the pour left a sheet of ice crystals across the surface. Peter jounced his heels lethargically into his seat, a disheartened thumping. Evan looked at the kid and felt something tug at his chest.

He inhaled deeply. “You know the two best words in the English language?”

Peter turned his eyes up at him.

“‘Next time,’” Evan said. “Everything can change. And not just for good, right? You could win the lottery or get run over by an APC.”

“What’s an APC?”

“Armored personnel carrier.”

“Oh.”

“But that’s the thing. ‘Next time’ means the world is wide open to you. ‘Next time’ is possibility. ‘Next time’ is freedom.”

Mia tugged open the passenger-side door, hopped in, and gave the dashboard an impatient little tap. “You ready to go yet?”

Peter lolled in Mia’s arms, asleep. She struggled to carry him out of the elevator to her condo. When they reached the door, she swung her hip toward Evan and said in a loud whisper, “Keys are in my purse. Hurry. Hurry.”

A woman’s purse, filled with intimate items. He hesitated a moment before plunging his hand into alien territory.

“No, the side pocket. Other side pocket. No, those are work keys. Yeah, those. Great. You’re a doll.”

The minute the lock clicked, she pivoted inside, bumping the door and leaving the keys dangling from the knob. Evan pulled them free and followed her in to set them down.

“Sorry,” she whispered hoarsely over her shoulder. “Come in for a sec. Oh — but don’t use that bathroom.” She jerked her chin toward the powder room. “Turns out Play-Doh doesn’t flush.”

She vanished into Peter’s bedroom, leaving Evan standing in the living room. He set down the keys and turned to leave silently but then noticed another Post-it stuck by the wall-mount phone. It was one of Mia’s handwritten notes from that book: “Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.”

How different these rules were from the Commandments he lived by. Penned in a feminine hand, slapped on walls and refrigerators. What had Mia said? It’s a lot of work raising a human. He considered these alternate lives lived under a different code, this road not taken and never illuminated. He read the Post-it again and decided what the hell.

Rather than taking a quiet leave, he sat on the couch, waiting in the hush of the condo.

A few minutes later, Mia emerged from Peter’s room, stretching her lower back. “Man. I gotta stop that kid from growing any more.”

She detoured through the kitchen and came to the couch with two glasses of wine, one of which she placed in Evan’s hand.

She plunked down on the cushion next to him. “He’s a good kid. Thank God.” She took a sip, pursed her lips.

Evan sensed she had more to say, so he remained silent.

“My husband and I couldn’t have kids, so we adopted a year after we got married.” She shifted forward to set down her glass, and her skirt slid a few inches up from her knees. “Had just bought a house when…” She took up her curls in the back, slipping a hair tie from around her wrist to make a ponytail. “Pancreatic cancer. That’s just not how that story’s supposed to end, you know?” She slapped her knees gently with her palms. “But that’s how it ended.”

A night-light plugged low in the opposite wall backlit her and suffused her thick chestnut hair, tinting the edges. He noticed the delicate curve at the base of her neck, the birthmark on her temple, the way her full lips met. He had noticed a lot about her before. But never these things.

“Do you regret it?”

“The marriage? Not for a minute.” She pouted her lips thoughtfully. “I will tell you what I do regret. Not the fights, because everyone needs to fight. But the stupid fights. I mean, did he take a condescending tone to me at dinner? Did I tell him to put that thing on the calendar? The dumb-ass escalations. A day of thawing out. So much wasted time.” She shook her head, and the glow played tricks in her hair. “Don’t get me wrong. It was a real marriage with real problems, sure, but we loved each other. Oh, did I love him. A guy can love a million women. But a man, a man loves one woman a million ways.” She reached again for her wine. “God, listen to me. It would’ve been so much easier if he’d just left me. Ran off with some secretary.”

“Do people do that anymore?”

“I don’t suppose.” Another sip. “But dying?” She shook her head. “It’s torture, because he never dies really, now. He’s martyred. A damn saint. He’s perfect in my mind.”

“He’s lucky,” Evan said.

She looked him full in the face for the first time since she’d sat down. The air conditioner blew cool on their necks, and a light hummed in the kitchen, and far away he could hear the elevator stir into motion.

“God,” she said. “I’m just talking and talking. I guess that’s what people do around you. Fill the space.”

His gaze had dipped slightly to her lips, and he sensed that she was looking at his.

A buzzing emanated from his pocket, so out of place that he didn’t at first register what it was.

The black phone.

Ringing. Now.

Five days from completing his last mission. Morena had said she wanted to move fast, but this was too fast. It could only mean one thing.

Something was wrong.

The phone had never rung when he was in someone else’s presence. He was infrequently around others, and the calls were rare.

It struck him that he had tensed on the couch beside Mia. He fished the RoamZone from his pocket and rose.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to go.”

He’d already turned for the door when he registered, after the fact, the flicker of hurt in her eyes.

Stepping into the hall, he answered the phone. “Do you need my help?”

“God, yes, please.” A feminine voice, one he didn’t recognize. “They’re going to kill me.”