Orphan X

10 Cloak and Dagger

Evan felt a surge of distrust. He realized he was pressing the phone tightly to his cheek and forced his hand to relax. “Where did you get this number?”

“A girl. A Hispanic girl.” The woman on the other end of the phone was breathing hard, sending bursts of static across the connection. “Are you the Nowhere Man? Really?”

To hold the signal, he took the northeast stairwell up, jogging but landing lightly to preserve the steadiness of his voice. “Did the girl give you a name?”

“I can’t remember. Wait, Miranda something. No—Morena. She wouldn’t say what her last name was.”

“What did she look like?”

“Pulled-back hair. Skinny. Tweezed eyebrows.”

“Any marks on her arms?”

“She had a scar — inoculation mark, maybe.”

Evan felt microscopically reassured. He recalled Morena’s words: I’ll do it quick. I wanna get all this behind us as fast as I can. But still.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“I don’t want to give you my name. These guys after me, they’re serious. How do I know you’re not with them? Or that girl you sent? This could all be a ploy.” Her speech was pressured, the sentences tumbling out one after the other.

“So what would you like to do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. God, how the hell did I get here?”

He moved up several more flights, holding the phone to his ear, leaving her the silence to draw her out. Given his suspicion, he wanted more data — a change in tone, background noise, a trip in her cadence that suggested that her words were rehearsed. Were it not for her sharp breaths, he would have thought she’d hung up.

He reached the penthouse floor and moved swiftly down the hall toward his place.

“Meet me somewhere public, then, I guess,” she said. “Where you can’t hurt me.”

“Public.”

“Yes. Like a crowded restaurant. Hello? Are you still there?”

He slid into his condo, put his back to the closed door. “I’m listening.”

“Bottega Louie. Downtown. Tomorrow at noon. I’ll wear amber-tinted sunglasses, even inside.”

She hung up before he could respond.

Evan liked nothing about it.

He didn’t like not knowing the client’s name. He didn’t like her setting the meeting place. He didn’t like the cloak-and-dagger setup, contrived enough to make it feel like a trap. But would any party dangerous enough to try to take him down actually attempt such a hackneyed approach? The maneuver, torn from countless Hollywood movies, pointed to inexperience. Or, to play the figurative double negative, was it intended to appear bumbling and therefore catch him with his guard down?

He had elevated even his usual level of caution, switching out his pickup for a white Chrysler he kept stashed at the safe house near LAX. He sat behind the wheel of the forgettable sedan now, facing off the fourth floor of the open-air parking structure. Through tactical binoculars, he looked across West Seventh at the designated meeting spot of Bottega Louie below.

The caller had wanted a crowded public place, and the upscale patisserie definitely qualified. Work-casual patrons crammed the ten thousand square feet of marble that stretched from Baroque bar to brick oven. More diners waited at the take-out counters near the front, clamoring over sumptuous tiers of macarons.

A woman wearing the promised amber-tinted sunglasses sipped water at a table flush with one of the showcase windows. Evan had tried three parking levels to find the right angle, and here it was, sniper-perfect.

She was either tactically unsophisticated or dangling herself out as bait.

She looked to be in her late thirties and was strikingly attractive, though it was hard to get a good look at her face given the oversize sunglasses. Her shiny black hair, dyed, was collected in the back just below her crown like a gathered drape, ending in a blunt line at the nape. Bloodred lipstick struck a contrast with her porcelain skin. A three-inch band of bracelets ringed her right wrist — thin leather straps, beads, and colorful herringbone weaves. Her fingernails, a rich shade of eggplant, tapped nervously on the table. High, choppy bangs capped off the hipster vibe.

Evan upped the magnification, zeroing in on a tattoo behind her ear. The inkwork proved to be a mini-constellation, three stars in an oddly pleasing asymmetrical pattern. He searched his mental database but produced no military or gang affiliation that matched the markings. Another personal touch, then, nothing more.

Her body language stayed tight and closed, her arms crossed, her shoulders angled away from the hubbub. Beneath the table her knee jacked up and down.

She was either nervous or a damn fine actress.

He checked his fob watch, then dialed his phone.

The hostess picked up on the second ring. “Bottega Louie.”

“May I please speak to Fernando Juarez?”

“Fernando Juarez? Who is that?”

“One of the barbacks who works there. It’s an important matter regarding his tax returns.”

“Oh. Okay. Sorry. Hang on.”

Through the mil-dot reticle of his binoculars, Evan watched the waitress thread through the tables and speak to the bartender. Her attention shifted to a man stocking bottles. The same man had taken a smoke break in the alley before opening shift, giving Evan opportunity to approach with a folded note and a crisp hundred-dollar bill.

The waitress handed Fernando Juarez the cordless phone. Pinning him in the crosshairs, Evan saw the man’s mouth move even before the voice came across the line.

“Hello?”

“Repeat after me: ‘Yes, okay. I will handle this when I get home.’”

“Yes, okay. I will handle this when I get home.”

“You remember our arrangement?”

“I do.”

“She is sitting at table twenty-one. Now is the time.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Fernando hung up. He finished with the bottles, wiped the bar, then walked over to the woman in the sunglasses and handed her the note. Evan watched her unfold it.

It told her to exit the restaurant and go to the newsstand across the street.

As she read the directive, her back curled in a paranoid hunch. Her sleek hair whipped her cheeks as she turned her head this way and that, looking around the restaurant, eyeing various diners. He watched her face. She was scared. She took a sip of water to settle herself, then gathered her things and hurried out.

Grand Avenue, one of Downtown’s main thoroughfares, hummed with traffic, and she had to wait for a break before darting across. Evan followed her with the binocs. As she neared the newsstand, he dialed another number. The worker there, sitting on a barstool reading a thrice-folded edition of La Opinión, picked up a cracked phone receiver held together with electrical tape.

“Hola. L.A. News ’n’ Views.”

“There is a woman approaching wearing dark glasses. Over your left shoulder. There. May I please speak to her briefly?”

The man glanced over, gave a disinterested shrug, and offered her the receiver. “Iss for you,” he said, returning to his magazine.

The woman stepped away, stretching the telephone cord. “What is this?”

“I’m not sure I can trust you either. I will meet you at a crowded restaurant, but it won’t be one you choose. Do you see that bus up the hill? In a minute and a half, it will stop at the bus shelter a block south of you. It will take you to Chinatown. Get off at Broadway and College. Lotus Dim Sum is in the Central Plaza. I will meet you there. Go now.”

Her head snapped up to watch the bus’s wheezing advance. “And if I don’t?”

“Then I can’t help you.”

This time he hung up first.

Evan had taken numerous precautions, but now was the vulnerable moment, where nothing was left except the approach. The woman sat at the edge of the bustling restaurant, her back to the window. Lobsters and catfish stirred lethargically in tanks, and shiny metal dim sum carts flew to and fro, trailing steam and tantalizing scents.

Evan’s Woolrich shirt featured fake buttons for show, but the front was really held together with magnets that would give way easily in the event he needed quick access to his hip holster. His cargo pants were tactical-discreet, with streamlined inner pockets that hid extra magazines and his Strider knife while giving no bulge on the silhouette. He wore Original S.W.A.T. boots, lighter than running shoes, which looked like nothing special with his pant legs pulled over the tops.

He was as ready as he was going to be.

As he made his way through the obstacle course of waiters and carts, the woman’s head jerked up and she paused from chewing her thumbnail. He saw himself approach in the lenses of her amber sunglasses, an average guy of average size, the kind of man you’d easily forget.

“Switch seats with me,” he said.

She jerked in a quick breath, then obeyed.

The window left his back vulnerable, but he preferred to face the restaurant and, more important, he preferred to sit where she — and whoever she might have in her orbit — hadn’t planned for him to sit. As the Ninth Commandment decreed: Always play offense. He had never broken a Commandment and was not about to start now.

They settled into the curved metal chairs, regarding each other warily.

Her pale skin was almost luminous. She rolled those red, red lips over her teeth, then pursed them anxiously. She would have been distractingly attractive were he in a mood to be distracted.

“Tell me your name,” he said.

She looked down at her hands.

“Listen,” he said. “If I am with whoever’s trying to hurt you, then I’d already know your name, wouldn’t I?”

She kept her eyes lowered. “Katrin White,” she said.

“And I would also know why they — or we — are trying to harm you.”

A cart paused at their elbows. Without looking over he pointed and a few items landed on the starched tablecloth before them.

“I owe the wrong people money. A lot of money.”

“How much?”

“Two-point-one.” She scratched at her neck, keeping her gaze on the untouched food. “It’s a Vegas situation.”

“You’re a gambler.”

“It doesn’t mean I deserve to die.”

“No one is making that argument.”

“Well,” she said, “someone is.”

A guy in a baggy shirt entered the lobby, and Evan stared across the restaurant at him. Their eyes caught for a moment, and then an older man in a tailored business suit shouldered in front of the guy to the maître d’ stand. When the view cleared again, the man in the baggy shirt was greeting a woman he’d presumably come to dine with.

Evan returned his focus to Katrin. “Which casino?”

“It’s a backroom deal. Private. It moves around. No names, no addresses, nothing. You give them your number, they call you, tell you where to be. You buy in.”

“Minimum?”

“Quarter mil. Then they stake you.”

“Can get out of hand in a hurry.”

“You’re telling me.” Her knee bounced beneath the table as it had at Bottega Louie, and he wondered how long she’d been this jittery. He could see the strain in the lines of her tensed face. “These guys are big on making examples. They unzipped a Japanese businessman from his skin. Peeled him while he was still alive. At least he was for most of it. And now…” Her voice cracked. “They have my dad.”

She ran a finger beneath the oversize sunglasses, first one side, then the other.

After a moment she said, “All I have is a phone number. They told me … they told me I have two weeks to deliver.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Ten days.”

Her delicate shoulders trembled. “It’s my fault. It’s my fault he’s involved. I don’t have the money, and they’re gonna kill him.”

“I have never lost anyone I’ve helped,” Evan told her.

“Not ever?”

“Not ever.”

Her glasses settled back on the bridge of her nose, and in them Evan caught a glint of reflected light through the window behind him. Instinct tugged at him, straightening his vertebrae. A dim sum cart was rattling past, and he slid his foot out and caught it, stopping it dead in its tracks, plates and steamer baskets clanking. The server barked her displeasure at him, but he wasn’t listening.

In the stainless-steel side of the cart, he saw a distorted reflection of the three-story apartment building behind him.

In a window on the third floor, a perfect disk of light caught the sun.

A sniper scope.

He grabbed Katrin’s thin wrist. As he yanked her sideways, a round snapped past his ear and punched a hole through the solid chrome back of her empty chair, penetrating the spot where her heart had been an instant before.

Sprawled on the hot metal of the overturned cart, it occurred to him that he was, for the first time in his professional life, playing defense.