Orphan X

26 Unnerved

Sitting at his personal command central in the humid semidark of the Vault, Evan sipped two fingers of U’Luvka over ice and watched the surveillance feeds of the loft. Katrin slept fitfully, stirring in the throes of an unpleasant dream. She had plenty of reason to be unnerved.

He was unnerved himself, and this was not a sensation he was accustomed to experiencing.

He was used to missing puzzle pieces, equations that didn’t add up in full, but something was more significantly off kilter here. He didn’t know how he and Katrin had been tracked — not once but twice. He didn’t know who wanted to kill them. He didn’t know that he could trust his client.

He rewound the footage to confirm that Katrin hadn’t strayed from the loft. She hadn’t even left the futon. Next he called up the readings from the microchips in her system to test if he could grab the GPS signal, but none showed. Likely she was too far from her last meal, the digestive juices not stimulated sufficiently to charge the sensor particles in her tract.

His rules required that he zero in on the people who were pursuing them. And, from there, zero in on the Vegas outfit who had hired them.

Aside from the phone number of Sam’s killer, as untraceable as his own, his only concrete information was the nickname he’d heard spoken during the motel raid: We got two down, Slatch.

The monitor to Evan’s left loaded results from NCIC, the National Crime Information Center computerized index, the pride of the FBI. The powerful data-mining engines of the Alias File had been churning for a while now, ever since he’d typed “Slatch” into the search field, putting to work all those tax dollars he didn’t pay.

Three results popped up now. The first, Julio “Slatch-Catcher” Marquez, a Mexican-mafia gangbanger currently serving a dime in Lompoc for armed robbery. Beneath that, Evelyn Slatch-Donovan, a Hollywood madam with ties to organized crime. Dismissing them both, Evan clicked on the third. Only a single picture of Danny Slatcher existed on federal record, a surveillance shot of him stepping off a speedboat onto a dock, a panama hat and sunglasses obscuring his features. But his form — that vast, bottom-heavy build — was undeniably that of the man Evan had spotted in the motel parking lot.

A pulse started up in Evan’s neck, his heartbeat quickening with the thrill of a lead putting out.

In Slatcher’s right hand was an elongated Pelican case, the very size Evan himself used to transport sniper rifles. It seemed extremely likely that Slatcher was the man behind the scope in Chinatown who had fired the shots at Katrin. For now Evan would operate on that assumption.

Two names were listed under Slatcher’s known associates. The first, marked “deceased,” had been a dirty banker out of Turks and Caicos, the man’s file showing about what one would expect for a deceased money launderer. Ball bearings within ball bearings.

The next brought up a few fuzzy photos of a woman with a thick mane of hair — probably a wig — riding helmetless on a green-and-white Kawasaki. “Candy McClure.” Maybe she was the woman from the Scion, but it was hard to tell. There was no other information listed for her, just the few blurry photos and a name.

Evan moused over to Danny Slatcher’s criminal-record history and pushed the button.

What he saw cut his excitement off at the knees.

Two words that carried a host of implications. Not to mention complications.

Evan realized he was clenching his teeth. He clicked the next link, for Slatcher’s ATF Violent Felon File, knowing already what he’d find.

And the next. And the next.

Evan set down his highball with a clink, looked over at Vera in her mound of glass pebbles. But the plant had nothing to offer.

Danny Slatcher was not a two-bit gun for hire. Or a high-end hit man for the mob. He was something much more lethal.

Evan didn’t like the notion singeing the hairs on the back of his neck, making the acid crawl the walls of his stomach. He knew now that he had to get to Slatcher’s perch in Chinatown to reconstruct the shooting from the other side of the scope. Whether LAPD still had the building sealed off or not, Evan had to infiltrate the crime scene.