Orphan X

3 Broken Like Me

The ringing of the RoamZone phone seemed straightforward enough.

However.

The direct-inward-dial number itself, 1-855-2-NOWHERE, originally acquired through a Bulgarian Voice over IP service, was set up so that calls were digitized and sent over the Internet through an encrypted virtual private network tunnel. The tunnel was routed through fifteen software virtual telephone switch destinations around the world to the Wi-Fi access point and VoIP adapter belonging to Joey Delarosa in apartment 19H across the street. From there it was popped back into the Internet via Verizon’s LTE network. If, by some miracle beyond miracles, the secret-handshake men ever traced the data stream to that point and stormed Joey’s place, Evan could watch the whole debacle from behind his lowered sunscreen.

After every significant contact, Evan rotated the phone service where he parked the number. Right now it was housed by a company in the Jiangsu province of China, a jurisdictional and logistical nightmare for any inquiring mind. The phone hooked seamlessly into the GSM network, functioned in 135 countries, and utilized prepaid vending-machine SIM cards that Evan crushed and replaced on a regular basis.

He rose, his bare feet tapping the polished concrete as he crossed to the kitchen counter.

He answered the phone as he always did. “Do you need my help?”

The voice came in on the faintest delay. “Are you … I mean, is this a joke?”

“No.”

“Wait. Just … wait.” A young woman, late teens. Hispanic accent, maybe Salvadoran. “You’re real? I thought you was like … like some urban legend. A myth.”

“I am.”

He waited. Heard breathing, faster than usual. This was common.

“Look, I’m in trouble. I don’t have no time to screw around if … if…” A choked-down sob. “I don’t know what to do.”

“What’s your name?”

“Morena Aguilar.”

“Where did you get this number?”

“A black guy give it to me.”

“Describe him.”

The First Commandment: Assume nothing.

“He had a beard, all scruffly like, with some gray. And his arm was broke. In a sling.”

Clarence John-Baptiste. A meth gang took over his house in Chatsworth last fall, held him and his daughter captive. Clarence and his girl had not been treated gently.

“Where do you live?”

She gave an address in Boyle Heights, East L.A., in the flats below the Los Angeles River. Lil East Side territory.

“When should we meet?” Evan asked.

“I can’t … I don’t know.”

Again he waited.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow in the middle of the day?”

“Where can you meet?”

“I ain’t got no car.”

“Is it safe to meet at your residence?” he asked.

“Midday, yeah, it is.”

“Noon, then.”

Noon was good. He would require three hours to sweep the surrounding blocks, to case the house, to check for digital transmitters and trace signatures of explosive materials. If this was a trap and he had to engage, he’d engage on his own terms.

The Ninth Commandment: Always play offense.

Later, in the Vault, Evan drank fresh chamomile tea as he ran Morena Aguilar through the databases.

Aside from hard-core terrorist intel, law-enforcement databases are by and large connected to the Internet. The vast majority of criminal and civil records can be accessed by any local police department’s patrol car with a mobile data terminal. This includes any Panasonic Toughbook laptop hooked to the dashboard of a basic LAPD cruiser. Each of those laptops talks directly to CLERS, CLETS, NCIC, CODIS, and literally hundreds of other state and federal databases.

Once you crack a dashboard computer on a single cruiser, you can get your hands on Big Brother’s control board.

Evan wasn’t a master hacker by any stretch of the imagination, but he’d made his way unattended into various cruisers and uploaded a piece of reverse SSH code into their laptops, leaving a virtual back door open for himself.

Now, tucked in the hidden room, Evan cruised the information superhighway to his heart’s content, gathering particulars for tomorrow’s mission and sipping the last of his fragrant tea.

For the past forty-five minutes, Morena Aguilar had been sitting on the overturned recycle bin on the front porch of the dilapidated tract house, her hands wedged beneath her legs so her thin arms bowed outward. Her bare feet bounced nervously on the splintering wood, her knees jerking. Her dark hair was cinched back so hard that it conformed precisely to her skull before tumbling curly and wild from a rubber band. Darting eyes, ducked head, a hint of sweat sparkling at her temples.

Scared.

Parked past the intersection behind a rusting heap of an abandoned car, Evan scanned the street again through a detached rifle scope. On a patch of dead grass in the front yard across from Morena’s house, a teenage mom, also Latina, emerged with a diapered infant under her arm. She set him down to play in an aluminum-foil turkey pan filled with sand. The child looked to be mixed race, bright green eyes offset against caramel skin. As he started digging in his makeshift sandbox, she lit up a Marlboro Red and blew a stream of smoke at the sky, scratching at a strawberry birthmark on the underside of her arm. She couldn’t have been older than eighteen, but her face was grim. A cell phone bulged her back pocket. Another teenage mom shoved a baby stroller up onto the dead lawn next to her. The first one flicked a cigarette up from the pack in offering. They didn’t speak. They just stood side by side, smoked, and watched the street. Two young women with nothing else to do.

Once Evan was convinced they were harmless, he lowered the scope, picked up a black metal briefcase, and got out of the truck.

As he approached, Morena saw him coming and rose, clutching one arm at the biceps. He stepped up onto the porch. The years were heavy on her face, stress lines and a hardness behind her pretty brown eyes. The smell of hair spray was strong.

“I’m hawking reverse mortgages door-to-door,” he said. “You’re not interested. Shake your head.”

She did.

“I’m going to go around the block, loop through the backyard. Your rear door is unlocked. Please keep it that way. Now look annoyed and head inside.”

She banged through the screen door, and he stepped off the porch and kept on up the street.

Ten minutes later they were seated across from each other in torn lawn chairs in the tiny living room of the house. Evan faced the grease-stained front window. On the coffee table before him sat his locked black briefcase. If the combination was input incorrectly, it threw off eight hundred volts of electricity. It contained a voice-activated microphone, a pinhole lens, and a wideband high-power jammer that squelched any surveillance devices.

And it held papers.

The stifling air stank of birds. A ragged parrot rustled in a cage in the square adjoining bedroom. The open door looked in on two mattresses on the floor, a dresser and cracked mirror, and a battered trumpet case leaning against a long-disused fish tank.

“Carrot, please!” the parrot said. “Please! Please don’t!”

Over Morena’s shoulder Evan could see the street clearly, the two young mothers still smoking silently in the yard across from them. The baby’s wails grew audible, but neither mother made a move to comfort him.

Evan shifted on the chair, and at his movement Morena’s back went arrow straight. Perspiration spotted her shirt, a stiff button-up with a BENNY’S BURGERS decal and a peeling name tag. She made fists in the fabric of her polyester pants.

“You’re nervous,” he said. “That I’m here.”

She nodded quickly, and at once she looked like a kid again.

“Do you know how to handle a gun?”

The pause drew out long enough that he wasn’t sure if she was going to respond.

“I’ve shot some,” she finally said, and he could tell she was lying. She blotted sweat from her hairline. Her plucked brows arched high, and an empty pierce hole dimpled her nose.

He removed his pistol from his hip holster, spun it around, and offered it to her. She stared at it there on his palm.

The Wilson Combat 1911 high-end variant had been custom-built to Evan’s specs. Semiauto, eight rounds in a stainless-steel mag with number nine slotted in the chamber. Extended barrel, tuned with ramp-throat work for flawless feeding and threaded to receive a suppressor. The straight-eight sights were high-profile so that the suppressor, when screwed in, wouldn’t block them. Ambidextrous thumb safety, since he was a lefty. Grip safety on the back to ensure it couldn’t fire if not in hand. Aggressive front-frame checkering, eighteen lines per inch, and Specialized Simonich gunner grips so the gun grabbed him back when he fired. High-ride beavertail grip safety to prevent hammer bite on the thumb webbing. Matte black so it disappeared in shadow, giving no glint.

He gestured again for her to take the pistol. “Just while we talk. So you don’t have to be nervous.”

She lifted it gingerly from his hand, set it on the cushion beside her. When she exhaled, her shoulders lowered a bit.

“I don’t … I don’t care about me no more. It’s her. Mi hermanita—my li’l sis, Carmen. Me, I been a screwup from the beginning. But that kid? She never done a wrong thing in her life. She’s in school right now. And she’s good at it. She’s just eleven.”

Evan glanced over at that battered trumpet case in the bedroom, then back at Morena. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen.” She took a gulp of air. Another lengthy pause. She seemed unaware of how long she let her silences go. She wasn’t sullen, but withdrawn.

“My dad left when we was young. Mi mamá found out he died a few years ago. She … um, she passed away last year. She had the ovarian cancer. And then he came in. He took over the rent for our house. He keep us here in it.”

Across the street the baby cried and cried. One of the mothers reached out and grabbed the stroller, pushed it back and forth soothingly. “Carrot, please!” the parrot squawked from the bedroom behind him. “Please! Please don’t!”

Evan focused on Morena. He did not want to ask any questions. He wanted her to have space to tell her story her way.

She tugged a cell phone from her snug pant pocket. “He gave me this. So he can text me whenever he want. I’m on call, right? But it’s okay. He only use me. Until now, I mean. My sister, she’s getting older. She’s almost out of time. He said she’s ‘coming mature.’” At this, Morena’s upper lip wrinkled. “He wanted to already, with her, the other night. I … distracted him. Like I know how. But he said next time … next time…” She bit her lip to stop it from trembling. “You don’t understand.”

“Help me understand.”

She just shook her head. Outside, tinny rap music announced a car’s approach. A guy sat in the rear of a flipped-open hatchback, holding a big-screen TV in place as his buddy drove. The car vanished, but it was a time longer before the sound faded.

“Do you have anywhere to go?” Evan asked.

“My aunt. She in Vegas. But it don’t matter.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?”

Morena leaned forward, suddenly fierce. “You don’t get it. He say if I take her anywhere, he’ll hunt us down. They have them databases now. He can find anyone. Anywhere.” And just like that, the anger departed. She made a fist, pressed it to her trembling lips. “Calling you, it was stupid. Just don’t say nothing to no one. I’ll figure out something. I always do. Look, I gotta go to work.”

He knew that her shift didn’t start for two more hours and that the burger stand she worked at was only a seven-minute walk away. He remained sitting, and she made no move to exit.

She swayed a little. “I just don’t want…” She blinked, and tears spilled down her smooth cheeks. “I just don’t want her to be all broken like me.”

She lifted a hand to wipe her cheeks, and he saw on her inner forearm what looked like an angry inoculation mark. But it couldn’t be, not given her age.

It was a brand.

Evan’s eyes shifted to the young mothers across the street. The first raised her cigarette to her mouth, and it struck him now that the strawberry birthmark wasn’t a birthmark at all. His gaze dropped to the arm of the other woman, pushing the stroller back and forth. Sure enough, a similar maroon splotch marred her skin in the same place.

Morena noticed his attention pull back to her, and she lowered her arm quickly, hiding the brand. But not before he’d registered the burned circle. About the size of a .40-caliber gun barrel.

Like, say, that of the Glock 22 that was standard issue for the LAPD.

He replayed Morena’s words: He can find anyone. Anywhere. The ultimate abuse of power. Human slavery right here in the open. Those girls across the street had on-call cell phones, too. And babies. He understood now the grimness of their faces, the hollowed-out resignation.

Morena rose to leave. She smoothed the front of her work shirt, then tilted her face back so no tears would spill. “Thanks for coming and all,” she said, “but you don’t get it.”

“I do now,” Evan said.

She looked at him.

“The whole street?” he asked.

She sank back into her chair. “The whole block.” Again her voice faltered. “I just don’t want him to get my little sister.”

Evan said, “You don’t have to worry about that anymore.”