Orphan X

20 Red Hands

He stayed with her all day as she wept but did not presume to hold her. At nightfall she pulled him onto the bed and curled into his chest like a child. Those three tattooed stars peeked out from behind her earlobe. Her fingers, resting on his chest, were laden with rings, and bracelets circled her thin wrist, rippling snakelike when she shifted her hand. Her breaths were broken, irregular from all the crying. He rested his hand on her side over the fragile cage of her ribs. When her arm brushed his knuckles, her skin felt soft as cream.

“They’re gonna find me next,” she said. “And they’re gonna kill me.”

“No.” Evan stared at the popcorn stucco of the ceiling. “They won’t.”

“Why should I believe you now?” Her voice held no note of malice.

“Because they’re not gonna be around much longer.”

He stroked her hair gently until she fell asleep. Then he slipped out. He’d already told her that he needed to run down a few angles and would be back in the morning.

He drove once again to Chinatown. Thirty-six hours later, the apartment complex was still an active crime scene, too populated for him to penetrate. He was eager to investigate the sniper’s perch, eager to stand where the sniper had stood, to breathe the same air and see what it told him.

The pop of that gunshot kept returning to Evan, cycling in his mind. Sam White, with that sun-toughened skin, the crinkles at the temples. His final words to his daughter: Whoever you’re with, I hope he protects you. Evan filled in the blanks, painting the scene from the other end of the phone. The recoil of the pistol, the snap of the head, the concise black dot of an entry hole. And then that distinctive crumpling of a body once life has left it, the herky-jerky cascade of limbs, the limp neck, the chalk-outline sprawl on the floor.

Once home and in the elevator, he found himself standing beside Mrs. Rosenbaum, who clutched her tiny snap purse to her belly with both hands as if to ward off snatchers. “Two more days,” she said, holding up a pair of pruney fingers in case he required a visual. “Two more days until my son visits with my grandchildren. He’ll fix my doorframe, no doubt about it. Then I can tell that useless manager…”

That voice from the phone looped in Evan’s head, drowning her out: We don’t care about money. Not anymore.

The elevator groaned upward. Evan sensed Ida’s gaze as she craned to look up at him.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He managed a nod.

“You’re just standing there breathing,” she said. “Not even the usual ‘yes, ma’am, no, ma’am’ nonsense. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“At least there’s that now.”

“I believe this is your floor.”

“Oh. Well.”

For the rest of the ride up, he relished the silence. Entering his place, he beelined for the freezer, then shook himself an U’Luvka martini for so long that his palms adhered to the stainless steel. He poured the vodka over even more ice in a tumbler, craving the antiseptic chill, wanting his teeth to ache as much as his red hands.

Pop of a gunshot.

Thump of deadweight.

Dad? No. No. No!

The tumbler was at his lips. He could breathe the sharp fumes, taste them even at the back of his tongue.

Sending a high-level kill team in on a $2.1-million marker seemed overzealous, but Vegas was clearly willing to go to extremes to teach a lesson to the next big-ticket loser.

This is our advertising cost. For the next time.

Before he knew what he’d done, he’d hurled the glass across the counter at the back of the sink. It exploded pyrotechnically, shards and ice catching light, throwing rainbow prisms on the muted, blue-tinged paint of the ceiling. The crash sounded unreasonably loud off the tile and metal and concrete.

It’ll be okay, he’d told her. It always has been before.

An image slotted back into place in his mind: Sam’s DMV picture, taken on an ordinary day in an ordinary life. A denim shirt collar poking up into view. Tousled gray-white hair.

Dad taught me pretty much everything.

Evan’s legs moved him down the hall, past the row of Japanese woodblock prints and the nineteenth-century katana mounted on the wall. He cleared the doorway, and the master suite sprawled before him.

Pop of a gunshot.

He found himself on his knees before the bureau, tugging open the bottom drawer, sweeping aside his boxer briefs to reveal that carved crescent catch.

Thump of deadweight.

His fingernail caught, and the false bottom of the drawer lifted. He removed the thin veneered particleboard and dropped it onto the floor beside him. On his knees he stared down into the newly revealed depths of the drawer, his breath tight in his throat.

Inside rested a torn blue flannel shirt, stiff with blood that had gone black with age.

A relic.