Orphan X

44 Self-Fueling Engine

Katrin sat in the empty office, her back to the wall, regarding the untouched fast-food bag beyond her feet. Her window, her sole luxury, had been taken from her, boarded with plywood and reinforced with steel bars. When she moved, the thick plastic zip-tie bit into her ankle. It was hooked to the metal leg of the desk above a sturdy crossbar, and in the hours she’d passed here alone, she’d made zero headway on the heavy screws. Truth be told, she’d given up after several attempts and a broken thumbnail. The screws weren’t going anywhere, and neither was she.

Stress was taking her apart, bit by bit. Her slow-burning terror had materialized as nausea, swelling at intervals, then receding. The thudding at her temples competed with bouts of light-headedness. She knew that she was dehydrated and calorie-depleted, but the thought of food brought on a fresh wave of queasiness. The smell of carpet cleaner choked the air and seemed to coat her mouth, her lungs.

She could hear heavy boots thunking around down the hall and the grumble of deep voices. Once in a while, she heard Candy as well, a feminine murmur and then bursts of laughter from the men.

Slatcher had stripped Katrin of her possessions, including her watch and phone, so she had no way to keep track of the time, but it seemed that Candy came every few hours to take her to the bathroom.

Which is why now, only twenty or so minutes after her last trip to the toilet, Katrin was confused to hear those hefty boots tapping up the hall.

Confused and not a little scared.

Candy entered now on a breeze of perfumed air. In her hand swayed a fresh McDonald’s bag. Replenishments.

“Your Gandhi hunger-strike routine isn’t gonna get you anything but weak,” Candy said. “And I don’t think you wanna be weak. For you or for Sam. So what say you grow the fuck up and deal a little, ’kay, partner?” She flashed her dimples and lofted the new bag across the room. It landed with a wet thud at Katrin’s side.

Candy turned around, her hips somehow playing an outsize role in the simple act, and vanished through the door.

Katrin stretched for the bag, static fuzzing her vision. She was weaker than she thought. But when she unfurled the greasy cheeseburger wrapper, the rising smell forced her to lay it aside. She breathed the carpet-cleaner air for a time.

Then she reached for a french fry. Trying to fight her stomach into place, she held it before her face.

For the entire taxi ride back from Mulholland, Evan kept his RoamZone open to Katrin’s tracking screen. It remained infuriatingly stagnant.

He asked the driver to drop him several blocks from Castle Heights, then jogged back and went straight to the penthouse, hauling up his rappelling rope and harness before anyone noticed them blowing in the wind. The act brought to mind pulling up a drawbridge, a metaphor Jack might have appreciated — Evan, alone in his fortress once again.

He pit-stopped in the Vault to fuzz out damning intervals of the building’s surveillance footage from earlier in the evening. The footage, sparingly monitored in real time by Joaquin over the top of his Maxim magazine, was rarely reviewed after the fact, but Evan preferred never to rely on luck. Exiting the penthouse with his recharged RoamZone in hand, he rode the elevator down to Mia’s place and tapped gently on the door, having no idea what to expect.

A darkness occluded the peephole, and then the door swung open. Her curled hair tamped down from a shower, Mia looked at him, then gestured to the couch. Peter’s door was closed, the boy presumably asleep.

Evan walked to the couch and sat. Mia took an armchair opposite him, pulling her legs in under her. The pieces of Marts’s gun had been collected in a Ziploc freezer bag, which rested on the coffee table between them, positioned like a conversation piece.

Which, Evan supposed, it was.

Mia’s voice was husky from crying. “Did you … kill them?”

“No,” Evan said. “But they’ll never bother you again.”

“Thank you for protecting me. Thank you for protecting Peter. And I mean that — deeply and sincerely.”

“But?” he said.

She leaned forward, lifted the Baggie a little, and let it clunk back onto the table. “You took this gun apart so fast I couldn’t even see your hands move. You beat those men — seasoned violent offenders — like nothing I’ve ever seen. You swung in through Peter’s window like friggin’ Spider-Man. What are you?”

Evan broke eye contact, looking away. It was a conversation he’d never had before, and there was no way to begin it now. On Peter’s door the pirate-themed KEEP OUT! sign was torn from Alonso’s banging, and Evan considered the boy sleeping safely in the room beyond.

When it became apparent that he had no ready answer, she said, “No one knows anything about industrial cleaning supplies.”

“No.”

“So no one can ask you anything about your job.”

“I suppose not,” he said.

“Evan Smoak. Is that your real name?”

“Yes and no.”

Her mouth opened and closed a few times. “You do understand what my job is, right? I can’t know that you … that you…”

He waited.

“I can’t know whatever it is that I don’t know about you.” She smacked her forehead with a palm. “Jesus, this is insane. I sound insane. But whatever you did with those men…” Angrily, she blew a wisp of hair off her forehead. “I am a district attorney, Evan. I took an oath. Several, in fact. That job is how I support my child. And it’s contingent on — no, it’s predicated on my not breaking the law.”

“So you want to try to prosecute me?”

“If I said yes?”

“I’d be gone.”

“We’d find you.”

Evan slowly shook his head.

“I’m going to call my boss right now.” She stood. “See how we can untangle this mess. See how we can make it right.”

But she made no move for her phone. They looked at each other. The silence stretched out and out.

Evan asked, “Who called you when you left the HOA meeting today? You said it was your brother. But it wasn’t his ringtone.”

She blinked slowly, from exhaustion or confusion. “My boss. Telling me that the threats from those guys had escalated. We’ve been tracking them these past few months.”

Evan thought about that Jaws ringtone sounding on Mia’s phone, again and again. All those agitated conversations, her pacing intense circles on her brother’s front lawn. He remembered washing dishes side by side with Mia at her sink. The idiots these days, they brag about everything on Facebook. What they’ve done, what they’re gonna do.

Evan said, “That’s why you just moved here, even though your husband’s life-insurance money cleared years ago. Better security.”

Her weary gaze sharpened. “How do you know that? About when I got the money from Roger’s policy?”

He hesitated. There were so many things he couldn’t tell her, and yet he owed her something. “There are a lot of people who would like to kill me,” he began cautiously. “So I have to keep my eyes open.”

She coughed out a note of disbelief, sinking back into the armchair. “And you question me about lying?” Hunching forward, she rested her elbows on her knees. “Wait. You knew about Roger’s cancer. His life-insurance policy. So that means … that means you know everything about me, too? Peter’s adoption. My income. Where I work. You spied on me?”

His silence was answer enough.

“You were faking? The whole time?”

“No.”

“With Peter—”

“No.”

“—my freckles—”

“No.”

“—about being surprised. When I told you things about myself. That my husband had died. You already knew.” Her lower jaw sawed back and forth, her teeth grinding. “You knew.”

“I did.”

A tear spilled over the brink of her eye. Just one. “How sad for you that you see everyone this way. As potential threats. As liars. When it’s you. It’s really you.”

His hands were off his lap, trying to shape the air, but into what he was not sure. He lowered them.

“People build trust, Evan,” she said. “That’s how relationships work. That’s what they are.”

It spread through him like something physical — a pervasive sadness that this was something he had never learned and did not know.

That was the curse of paranoia. It became a self-fueling engine, heating up the more it consumed.

Evan started to reply when a sound cut him off.

A sonar ping.

At first he thought he’d hallucinated it. But no, there it was again, Katrin’s GPS coordinates chiming in his pocket.

He was standing already.

Across from him Mia’s head remained turned away. She was studying the cordless phone on the counter.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do whatever you have to do. But I have to leave now.”

She gave a faint nod without looking at him. He hesitated a moment, then picked up the Ziploc bag containing the field-stripped .45 and started out.

The Post-it beside the wall-mounted phone had been replaced. The new one read: “Make friends with people who want the best for you.”

He thought, What a goddamned luxury that would be.