Orphan X: A Novel (7 page)

Evan dropped onto one of the picnic-table benches facing the restaurant. Through the windows he observed a young girl sitting alone in a corner booth, coloring with crayons, her tongue poking out one cheek in a show of concentration.

He considered just how young an eleven-year-old was.

A few moments later, Morena backed out through the kitchen’s swinging doors, plates expertly stacked up along her forearms. She delivered the meals, checked on her younger sister, then set about busing tables. After a while she breezed outside, squinting into the sun, and dropped a ketchup-sticky laminated menu in front of him.

“Take your order?” She finally looked over her at-the-ready pad, registered his face, and jerked in a breath.

He said, “Exhale. Smile. Nod your head at me as if I just asked you something.”

She did all three unconvincingly.

“It is safe now?” she asked.

“Yes.”

He hadn’t noticed how clenched-up she was until her shoulders unlocked, settling a solid inch. She lowered pad and pen, and he saw the shiny wine-red scar on her inner forearm where she’d been branded by the heated muzzle of Detective Chambers’s gun.

“Can we go back there?” she asked. “Pack up our stuff?”

He’d told her to take Carmen and stay at a friend’s house until he contacted her again. It had been only one night, but he could see in her face that for her it had felt like an eternity.

“Yes,” he said.

“Can you take care of Pokey? He was
mamá
’s.”

It took a moment. The bird. “I’ll figure something out,” he said.

“What happened to
him
?”

Evan shrugged. A small gesture, but she understood.

“What if they think it’s me who did it?”

“He had a lot of enemies,” Evan said. Still, she looked unconvinced. “When he turns up,” he added, “it’ll be clear that no seventeen-year-old girl could have done that.”

His peripheral vision caught Carmen’s face moving from profile to full circle in the window across from them. He clicked his eyes over, and sure enough, she’d paused from her coloring to watch him. She must have sensed his stare as he’d sensed hers, because she quickly took up her crayons again.

Evan raised the menu, pretended to peruse it.

“I have to go now,” he told Morena. “I have one thing to ask of you. Only one thing. So please listen carefully.”

“Okay. Anything.” Morena was holding her breath again.

“Find someone who needs me. Give them my number: 1-855-2-NOWHERE.”

“I remember it. Of course I remember it.”

“It doesn’t matter how long it takes you. It matters that you find someone in as bad a situation as you and your sister were. Someone trapped and desperate. You tell them about me. Tell them I’ll be there on the other end of the phone.”

Morena took a beat. “That’s
it
?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s the only charge?”

“Yes.”

She looked incredulous. They always did. And he knew she would buckle down and honor the commitment, as had every client before her. Evan had never come into contact with a single one of them after a mission was over, and yet the next call had always come.

“Okay. I mean, I’m
happy
to, believe me, but…” She looked down at the fat, untied shoelaces of her knockoff sneakers.

“What?”

“Why don’t you just find them people yourself?”

“If I looked, I would find the same sorts of people in the same sorts of situations. Do you understand?”

Morena’s face remained blank, her plucked eyebrows arched and still.

He tried again. “When
others
look, they find people needing my help who I might not find myself.”

“’Cuz we go different places? With different folks?”

“Yes. And you’ve experienced things I haven’t. Which means you can
see
things I can’t.” He set down the menu. “So I need your help like you needed mine.”

What he
didn’t
add was that the act of helping was itself empowering, even healing. He wanted Morena to have something to do, the focus of an important task. She’d have to search and assess and then finally step in to give a second chance to another person who had been battered into helplessness. And when she completed her job, when she handed off that untraceable number, she’d be on the other side of the equation—a leader, not a victim.

Closure was a myth, but the undertaking might help her get her foot on the next rung of the ladder.

“I’ll find someone, then,” she said. “I’ll do it quick. I wanna get all this behind us as fast as I can. No offense.”

“None taken. Do it quick, but do it right.”

“I will.”

“Give my number to only one person. Understand? Only one. Then forget that number forever. This is a onetime service, not a help line.”

She bit her lower lip. “So we’re done?”

“Not yet. Your biological father. You were right. He died a few years ago. He had some assets, still unclaimed. A checking account with $37,950 in it. You’re a cosigner on the account.”

“No I’m not.”

“Now you are.”

She slid the pen behind her ear, dropped the pad into her apron, coughed out a note of disbelief. “How?”

He smiled. “The bank’ll be mailing an ATM card in your name to your aunt’s address. Your dad had a union job, came with a small life-insurance policy. A lump sum of fifty grand, never claimed. You’re now the beneficiary. That’ll get you started. You’re eighteen in two months. You can get emancipated or remain under your aunt’s care until then. You have your life back.” He stood and stepped away from the picnic table. “Now we’re done.”

He noticed movement in the window across the patio again and glanced over to find Carmen looking out at them.

“You’ve taken good care of your sister,” he said. “You should be proud of yourself.”

Morena’s eyes moistened. She blinked a few times quickly and gave her sister a little flare of the hand.

Carmen raised her hand to wave back, revealing the unmarred skin of her inner forearm.

When he walked away, Morena was standing with her knuckles touching her lips, regaining her composure. She didn’t thank him.

She didn’t have to.

*   *   *

The next afternoon, between checking on his safe houses, Evan swung by Boyle Heights and took a pass around Morena’s block. The young mothers were there in the front yard across the street, shoving their strollers and smoking. He parked one street over and cut through the backyard into Morena’s place.

The lawn chairs had been left behind, as well as the mattresses in the bedroom, but the bedding was gone and the closet was empty. The stained fish tank remained with its Elmo sticker. Evan checked behind the door and saw that the girls had taken the trumpet, and this gave him an unexpected flicker of happiness.

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

Standing in the empty room, he placed an anonymous call to the Humane Society and asked them to send someone to this address.

He walked out into the main room toward the tiny kitchen nook. The surfaces had been wiped down, everything left tidy. On the counter a half-filled bag of birdseed pinned down a handwritten note, which read,
“I don’t have this month’s rent. I don’t know when I will. I’m sorry. I hope you don’t come after me.”

Evan looked at the note for a time, then crumpled it up and laid down six hundred-dollar bills.

He fed the bird on his way out.

9

A Damn Saint

The ice cube singed Evan’s fingertips as he twisted the palm-coded hot water lever in the shower and stepped through the hidden door into the Vault. He crossed to the sheet-metal desk and nestled the cube gently into the spikes of the tiny aloe vera plant. Vera seemed not unappreciative.

He slid the black RoamZone into his pocket, though it wouldn’t be ringing anytime soon. It had been only five days since he’d put three bullets into Detective William Chambers. It would take a while for Morena Aguilar to find the next client. The shortest time between the end of a mission and the next caller had been two months. Now was Evan’s brief window to settle back and relax.

He thought about taking a drive to Wally’s Wine & Spirits on Westwood Boulevard and picking up a bottle of Kauffman Luxury Vintage vodka. Distilled fourteen times and filtered twice, once through birch coal, once through quartz sand, it was produced from the wheat of a single year’s harvest, making it one of the only vodkas released with a specific vintage, like wine or champagne. Excessive, perhaps, as was the price tag, but it was as pure and clean as any liquid he’d tasted.

He threw on a sweatshirt, grabbed his keys, and headed down in the elevator. Inevitably, it stopped on the sixth floor, and he smelled the flowery perfume even before the doors parted to admit Mrs. Rosenbaum.

Evan braced himself for more tales of her beloved Herb, may he rest in peace, but instead Ida cast a caustic glance over the top of her rose-colored spectacles and announced, “I hear that you’ve been sneaking out of Mia Hall’s place at all hours.”

The Honorable Pat Johnson of 12F, acting less than honorable, must have spread the word.

Evan pictured the sleek teardrop bottle of Kauffman vodka, his reward if he could make it through this elevator ride and afternoon rush hour. “No, ma’am.”

She sniffed. “We have enough problems around here, what with the dry rot. Can you believe it? Here in Castle Heights! The whole frame around my front door, falling to pieces. Ten complaints over two months, and do you think the good-for-nothing manager’s done a thing about it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, my son, he’s coming in for the holidays, bringing his wife and my two beautiful grandchildren. And he said if my door’s not fixed by then, he’ll do it himself. Can you imagine? A name partner in a major New Brunswick accountancy, and he’d do carpenter work for me?”

Mercifully, they reached the lobby, and when Ida paused at her mail slot, Evan made a getaway down the stairs to the garage. He’d just stepped around the pillar, bringing his pickup into sight, when a voice called from behind him.

“Wait! Evan!”

He turned to see Mia run-walking toward him in her midheel shoes, still dressed from work.

She paused, looked down at her shoes. “Screw it,” she muttered, yanking them off and continuing toward him in stockinged feet. “Look, sorry, I know this is weird, but can I borrow your truck?”

Evan was speechless.

“That woman from 3B blocked me in with her stupid Range Rover. Beth someone.”

“Pamela Yates?”

“Sure. Whatever. Beths and Pamelas are the same
type
of woman. Everyone knows that.” She reached him, her foot skidding in an oil stain. “I have to run over to my brother’s in Tarzana and pick up Peter. It’s a schlep, I know, but he doesn’t get a lot of time with … well, male role models. Wow,
that’s
a dated phrase. But you know what I mean. I just came home to drop off some files, ran up, and now—look.” She flailed an arm at the SUV boxing in her Acura. “I can’t find Beth-Pamela anywhere.” She only now seemed to register the keys in Evan’s hand. “Oh. You’re
going,
not coming? Where?”

He blinked once, twice. “To get vodka.”

“That qualifies as an outing? What a life. Look, can I
please
just take your truck to get my kid? I’ll grab you vodka on my way back. What do you like? Absolut? Smirnoff?”

He just looked at her.

Her phone gave a personalized ring, the theme song from
Peanuts.
She snapped it up. “I’m
coming,
Walter. On my way.” Hung up. “Come on,” she pleaded. “I promise I won’t crash. And if I do, I’ll prosecute me.”

“I don’t loan my truck out.”

“Why? Cocaine stashed in the wheel wells?”

He looked at the door to the lobby, hoping that Pamela Yates would miraculously appear, but it remained stubbornly closed.

“Come on,” she said. “It’s a semi-emergency.”

He forced a tight grin. “I’ll drive you.”

*   *   *

“Oh
shit,
” Mia said.

Her foot had smeared oil on the spotless passenger-side floor mat of Evan’s truck. Evan tried to assess the damage without being too obvious. “It’s fine,” he said.

However, she was looking not at her feet but her phone. “Missed a work call.” She speed-dialed while gesturing for Evan to get onto the 405, which was as jammed as a parking lot.

Driving in traffic. To Tarzana. To pick up a kid.

It kept getting better.

Next to him Mia spoke sternly into the phone. “This is District Attorney Mia Hall. I need that update ASAP.” She hung up, leaned back, and sighed. “Thank you. Seriously. You saved my ass on this one.”

She clicked the button to lower the window a few times, and nothing happened.

“Why won’t the window go down?” she asked.

Because there was no room for it to retract after Evan had hung Kevlar armor inside the door panel. The windows themselves were made of laminated armor glass. The Ford F-150 came with a beefed-up suspension to handle the added weight, and as the bestselling vehicle in America for decades, it had the added advantage of blending in virtually anywhere. He’d taken other steps to prepare the truck as well, disarming the safety systems, removing the airbags, and disabling the inertia-sensing switches in the bumpers that render power to the fuel pump inoperable in a collision. To protect the vulnerable radiator and intercooler, he’d added a built-to-spec push-bumper assembly up front. If shot or punctured, the run-flat tires self-sealed with a special adhesive compound distributed internally with each rotation, and a support ring “second tire” hidden at the core served as a contingency to that contingency. In the back, flat rectangular truck vaults neatly overlaid the bed, providing secure storage while remaining inconspicuously lower than the tailgate. Like him, the vehicle was prepared for varied and extreme contingencies while never drawing a second glance.

Mia clicked the window button again. “Well?”

“It’s broken,” he said.