Orphan X

4 I’ll Be Waiting

On his way home, Evan ran the circuit of his safe houses, checking up on them. He owned numerous properties spread throughout the area — a town house on the Westside, a cottage in the Valley, a ranch-style home in the crappy neighborhood beneath the LAX flight paths. He made sure the lawns were watered, junk mail cleared off the porches, lighting-control systems varied. The banal façades hid alternate vehicles, mission-essential equipment, weapon caches. Jack had always stressed the importance of maintaining multiple “loadouts,” gear prepped for a grab-and-go.

After all, Evan never knew when he’d have to vanish. He held a place of honor on numerous most-wanted lists, but none that could be advertised. He had to be careful at airports, borders, and embassies, though he’d been to an embassy only once in the past five years, and that was to neutralize a clerk who’d been a key player in a human-trafficking ring.

By the time Evan reached Castle Heights, the setting sun bathed the building’s side in an orange glow. He parked and headed through the lobby, passing a half dozen kombucha bottles floating in a tub of melted ice on the refreshment stand. Apparently the beverage initiative had not been the rousing success the HOA had hoped for.

In the seating area across from the door, the L.A. Times sports section rustled and dipped, Johnny Middleton’s face appearing above the top of the page. He was staking out the kombucha.

Evan sped up. The swish of nylon sweatpants accented Johnny’s slide off the cushioned chair. “Evan. Evan!”

Evan had no choice but to halt.

Johnny caught up. Clearly peeved, he glanced over at the forlorn beverage tub. When he looked back, a smug expression filled his round face. “You should really come by for a workout.” He tapped the martial-arts logo on his sweat jacket, which showed two fists colliding. Innovative. “I can get you a free pass.”

Before Evan could respond, Johnny feinted at him with a jab.

The fist came in lazy and offline. Evan saw the angles with perfect clarity — a double-hand deflection, gooseneck the wrist, shatter the bone and rake the elbow tendons, then a chicken-wing arm control for the takedown, his knee crushing Johnny’s floating rib upon impact with the floor.

Instead he flinched slightly. “Not really my thing,” he said.

“Okay, chief,” Johnny said, backing away, arms spread in a show of magnanimity. “Consider it an open offer.”

Even walked over to the elevator and stepped inside when a tumult by the door to the garage drew his focus. Mia and Peter stumbled into view, their arms laden with grocery bags. Evan held the elevator for them while they shuffled inside, crowding him. As they ascended, he could barely make out Peter beneath the oversize shopping bags.

“Need a hand?” Evan asked.

“We’re good, thanks,” Mia said.

An iPhone rang somewhere on her person, the theme from Jaws. Kneeing apart the various items she was carrying, she fumbled for her purse. A plastic drugstore bag slid off her hand, and Evan caught it before it hit the floor. The phone stopped ringing, and Mia sighed with resignation, then began hoisting various bags back into position.

Evan became aware of Peter’s stare on the side of his face. Peter lowered his head, scrutinizing Evan’s ankle. Evan subtly tugged up his pant leg, a ta-da move to show off the sock. Move along. Nothing to see here.

The intense stare returned to Evan’s face.

“Evan what?” the boy asked.

“Excuse me?”

“What’s your last name?”

“Smoak.”

“Like from fire?”

“But spelled different.”

“What’s your middle name?”

“Danger.”

“Really?”

“No.”

Nothing. And then the boy gave the faintest grin.

Mia looked away to hide her own smile.

The elevator dinged its arrival at the twelfth floor. “If you’re done giving Mr. Danger the third degree…” Mia said, mussing Peter’s hair and tugging him out after her.

Too late, Evan looked down, noticing Mia’s drugstore bag still twisting in his fingers. He reached for the doors as they bumped shut, and then he was riding up to the penthouse level with her belongings. Returning them would have to wait.

Tonight he had work to do.

He tossed Mia’s plastic bag on the kitchen counter and consulted the vodkas neatly arranged in the freezer, settling on the flask-shaped bottle of Jean-Marc XO. Made using four varieties of French wheat, the vodka was distilled nine times, then microoxygenated and charcoal-filtered. As he poured two fingers over ice, he noticed that a box of Band-Aids had partially slid out from Mia’s drugstore bag onto the counter. Muppet-themed, of course. The gaudy colors, so out of place against the gray slab and stainless steels, leapt out at Evan. He found something unsettling about the Day-Glo oranges and vibrant greens, though he could not put a name to the feeling.

He slid the box into the bag again and sipped his drink on his way back to the Vault. The vodka felt silky going down his throat, the texture of purity.

Morena Aguilar had armed him with two things: her on-call cell phone, now resting on the sheet-metal desk next to his trusty aloe vera plant, and a name.

Bill Chambers.

There was no scarcity of information on William S. Chambers of the LAPD. As a result of several big, well-timed busts, he’d worked his way up from patrolman to detective II, finally landing a spot in the coveted Gang and Narcotics Division four years ago. That explained how he’d managed to carve out his own little despotship in the middle of Lil East Side — controlled Boyle Heights. He was in an ideal position to do favors for the gangbangers if they helped him in turn. And so they left him to his concubinary of coerced girls, maybe even threw influence to protect him and guard the block he’d turned into his personal labor camp. Evan uncovered multiple Internal Affairs investigations, all of them hindered by misplaced evidence or about-faces by key witnesses. Next he searched the money. Chambers’s bank accounts showed multiple cash withdrawals and deposits just below the ten-thousand-dollar threshold for mandated bank reporting. Questionable activity. But not ironclad proof.

And the First Commandment demanded ironclad proof.

Evan picked up Morena’s on-call cell, a crappy plastic unit with a smudged screen, as light as a toy phone. It was a disposable model out of Mexico. When he thumbed up the text message history, he felt a sudden drop in the temperature of the Vault, a coolness at the back of his neck. A number of explicit texts from a recurring phone number contained sexual directives and instructions for Morena, some including photo references of clearly underage Latina girls in particular poses. He stared at the face of a child who couldn’t yet have been fourteen. Her features were leached of affect, the dead, red-rimmed eyes wholly detached from her body and what it was doing.

He traded the phone for his drink but found he’d lost his taste for vodka. Or anything else. Indignation burned, and he had to evoke the Fourth Commandment: Never make it personal.

In the years he’d been doing this, he’d never broken a Commandment, and he wasn’t willing to do so now.

Back to the databases with renewed energy. The phone number of the sender Evan sourced to a batch of prepaid phones bulk-sold to Costco last year. A simple bit of reverse-proxy code let him slip behind Costco’s firewall, and he checked data files at the store locations nearest Chambers’s home address. Nothing. Next he looked at several Costcos between Chambers’s house and various locations including Boyle Heights, finally ringing the cherries on a store en route to LAPD Headquarters. An account in the name of Sandy Chambers. The membership photo showed Bill’s wrecked shell of a wife, wan-faced and slight beneath the industrial lights, her shoulders hunched as if she were trying to fold in on herself and disappear. She’d managed a smile, but it looked separate from her face, something pasted on.

Starting several quarters back to coincide with the date that the batch of prepaid phones had shipped, Evan scanned Chambers’s purchase records. Cases of Heineken, Trojan condoms, deck furniture, jumbo food purchases, a digital camera. And there, seven disposable phones, bought February 13 along with a set of oven mitts and a pack of soft-bristle toothbrushes.

There was no denying that taken as a whole the facts had a certain heft to them, but the evidence could be configured a variety of ways, telling a variety of stories. When Evan got involved, there was a single outcome, and that outcome demanded certainty before the fact. He lifted his melted drink and wiped the condensation ring with his sleeve, leaving the desk surface spotless.

Morena’s cell phone rattled on the desk, indicating an incoming text.

TMRW NITE. 10. HAVE HER READY.

Evan stared at the words, waiting for his disgust to abate, for his anger to settle into something calm and unbroken. Then he texted back.

I’LL BE WAITING.