Chapter 5 Eternal Outsider
Eternal Outsider
Earpiece screwed in, he streamed the proceedings: “—when guess who charges outta the barracks in his chonies, waving a locked-and-loaded boomstick? But who’s on the roof?
Not some muj Santa but the fucking radioman from Operations.
Dude screams, almost falls off the roof.
Turns out he was up there diddling with the dish when Stojack stormed out and gave him the brown-star cluster. ”
Laughter rolled through the earpiece, along with murmured conversations, the clink of bottles, the noise of someone sobbing quietly and receiving comfort.
From the other side of the road, Evan noticed the faintest tremble of the windowpane.
He could not see the podium from this vantage but he could make out a swath of mourners.
Ragged beards on the men, luxuriant hair on the women, a few folks missing limbs.
Carrot sticks with dip, cubed orange cheese on Dixie plates, Pabst Blue Ribbon toasts despite the morning hour.
Alone in the truck that Tommy Stojack had built and outfitted for him, Evan listened and observed. The faintest tug at the base of his lumbar on the left side announced itself, a lingering ache from a violent showdown he’d had in a ghost town a couple of months back.
Stretching in the driver’s seat, he looked at the military challenge coin leaning against the dashboard’s instrument cluster. It read NO GREATER FRIEND. NO WORSE ENEMY.
He’d been given it by a woman he’d once helped. More precisely, he’d been given half of it. The other broken piece she’d gifted to Tommy, who’d been lowered into the dirt of the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery last month.
Before he’d died, Tommy had soldered the halves together for Evan.
“—really loved him. He was a crusty bear. Big ol’ softy inside, though. When my … When my niece got raped, he took her out twice a week for a year, taught her to shoot. So let’s all hoist a glass. Fair winds and following seas, you dear, sweet man.”
Tommy was the best armorer and the finest shot Evan had ever known, as well as a procurement and R&D specialist for various three-letter agencies.
Dreaded by the bureaucratic class but beloved by spec ops, veterans, and emergency services, he’d been a bridge between Evan and the legitimate world.
Now he was gone, leaving behind an armorer’s lair stuffed with ordnance, munitions, gear, equipment, and an abyss in a place inside Evan he didn’t know he had.
When Evan had deserted the Orphan Program, feared and hunted by those in highest power, he’d had the clothes on his back, brimming bank accounts in nonreporting countries, and not one single relationship.
From the age of twelve, he’d been raised apart from anyone else, rotated through grueling training sessions conducted by a blur of subject-matter experts, senseis, and instructors.
The only consistent face had been that of his mentor, Jack Johns, who’d overseen his tutelage, teaching him everything but the strange language of intimacy.
The hard part isn’t turning you into a killer, Jack had pounded into his head. The hard part is keeping you human.
Staying human while committing unsanctioned assassinations at the behest of orders issuing from the shadowy underbelly of the DoD had proven untenable, even for Orphan X.
Evan had finally slipped off the radar, reconstituting himself under another of his operational aliases.
As the Nowhere Man, he took on personal missions unsullied by political considerations.
That meant helping people who were being terrorized by others, people who had nowhere else to turn.
As the Nowhere Man, he operated as he always had. Alone.
Tommy had become his first anchor to mankind. They’d earned each other’s trust, step by step.
They had become friends.
Evan’s first.
“—med-boarded out, PTSD bullshit. Man, I was so lost. Still just a kid, twenty-four, wet behind the ears. He catches wind, my phone rings. He says, ‘Get to Las Vegas. Worse men than you have crashed on my couch for a spell.’ So I do. First morning I go in to hit the rainlocker, thing’s full up with—” A chorus of unintelligible shouts.
“That’s right. Fucking moonshine in the bathtub.
Like he’s some Prohibition bootlegger.” The slightest crack of the voice.
“Miss you, brother. Broke the mold, that’s for sure. ”
Evan tried to imagine what would happen when he died.
No funeral or memorial, no fruit plates and rambling reminiscences—certainly no poster-board prints on easels.
He’d never had his picture taken, not since grade-school yearbooks from his foster-home days, and those had been carefully expunged from any public record, along with the other scant traces of his childhood.
When he did finally catch a bullet, nothing would change in the world around him.
He’d simply remain what he’d always been: the Nowhere Man.
He rested his hands at the ten and two. What the hell was he doing out here eavesdropping on a memorial service?
He’d skipped Tommy’s funeral. His profession had inured him to rituals that were not his own.
He dealt in blood and sweat, not buglers wailing “Taps” and twenty-one-gun salutes.
He had no need for any of it—color guards and flag-folding protocols, higher brass showing off chest candy and unit pins pounded into coffin lids, shovelfuls of dirt and solemn suits with epaulets of closet dust. And now, weepy speeches at a podium, apocryphal tales burnished into legend.
And yet.
Here he was, watching and listening, the eternal outsider looking in.
Behind the window, a grizzled vet hugged a teary young serviceman. A trio of women in tight white jeans marveled at a blown-up photo of younger-days Tommy. A little girl in a bright yellow dress ran through the guests, waving a fairy wand and banging into knees.
Evan would’ve liked to be in there near the celebration.
He would’ve liked to say a few words about his friend.
He would’ve liked to give Tommy a proper good-bye.
But the notion of conveying intimate emotion in a public setting among others raw with grief was unthinkably messy and contaminating, a break from everything he’d been trained to be. It would’ve required courage that he did not have.
On the passenger seat, the RoamZone gave its distinctive chime.
The untraceable encrypted phone was always with him.
When he answered as the Nowhere Man, he never knew what new mission would present itself.
What he could anticipate was that whoever dialed the number was calling from the depths of a hellish personal misery.
Caller ID was blocked.
He answered as he always did.
“Do you need my help?”
“Huh? Wait. Hold on— Do not let the fucking dog drink the Charles and Diana Dom Pérignon.”
“Devine?”
Evan had come up against the erratic billionaire on a prior mission. They spoke rarely and only on Evan’s terms.
This was not on his terms.
“What?” Devine’s voice sounded hoarse. “Look—Can you just—Can you just get here?”
“Get where?”
“The Hamptons house.”
“Why?”
“I think— I don’t know. I don’t know why.
There’s a lot going on and my brain is roaring and I can’t— You three!
Take your fucking purse dogs and get out!
—can’t seem to find a handle—and—and—there’s also a girl here in my bed who saw something bad happen to another girl—kidnapping, maybe?
—and I’ve got all these plates spinning, you see, with great geopolitical import, and I have to make choices and I don’t—”
“Stop,” Evan said.
Luke stopped.
“You said there’s a girl there. In your bed.”
“Yes. Yes. A young woman.”
Evan took a four count to draw in a breath. He held it.
“Mr. Nowhere? Why are you quiet? That’s a—That’s a terrifying silence.”
“How old is she?”
A rush of an exhale. “Twenty-six. I’m not like that.”
“You said she’s upset. Why is she upset?”
“I don’t know. Hang on.” Then, muffled: “Why are you upset?” Another pause. “I don’t know. She’s still not answering. She’s curled up in the bed.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. Nothing happened. I didn’t even have sex with her. I couldn’t figure it out.”
Evan let that pass, stayed on the seam of inquiry. “Does she need medical attention?”
“No.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Drugs?”
“What?”
“Is she on drugs?”
“No, no, no, no, no. At least nothing serious. Champagne. Very fine champagne. In fact, do you know there were only ninety bottles at the royal wedding when—”
“Are you?”
“What?”
“Are you on drugs?”
“Just the usual.”
“Which is?”
“Sixty grams of indica to slow things down. A half liter of booze by now. Maybe two-thirds? Oh—and ketamine.”
“Special K?”
“Not club. Prescribed.”
“Okay. So: your average Saturday morning.”
“Yes! Exactly. Don’t go freaking out and getting lethal.”
Devine’s concern was legitimate. He had greater influence than most nation-states, his power a threat to those in highest power.
Evan had been tasked by no less an authority than the president of the United States to execute him, and he nearly had.
Ultimately he’d determined that while Devine was a brilliant narcissist and world-class mind-fucker, he was not someone Evan could dispatch in good conscience.
Yet.
“What’s the young woman’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know the name of the young woman in your bed?”
“I did at some point. There’s a lot going on in here.”
“Give her the phone.”
“Okay. Okay.” Sounds of Devine moving.
A new speech was droning on in Evan’s other ear: “—the thing with Stojack was, he was always there, you know? No matter how down-and-out you were. No matter if you’d fucked up six ways from Sunday—pardon, ladies—or were at your worst with your missus or outta yer head with, dunno, shell shock or trauma or whatever they call it nowadays, he didn’t judge. He never—”
Evan unscrewed the earpiece, narrowed his focus.
“She won’t take it,” Devine said.
“Try again.”
“Here. Here. Just take the phone. Take it.”
A moment later came a feminine voice, hoarse and weak. “Hullo?”
“Hello. What’s your name?”
“Monica,” she drawled. “Like Santa Monica.”
“Are you free to leave?”
“What? Yeah, course.”
“Are you safe?”
“Yeah. But you should get here, maybe, if he wants you here. ’Cuz shit’s crazy.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“What? No. No. He’s, like, aggressively considerate. Wanting to make sure I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. But I don’t feel like it’s about me at all. It’s not. It’s about him.”
“Generally.”
“And it’s exhausting. He won’t stop talking. He just won’t stop talking.”
“You saw something bad happen to a girl?”
“I can’t—I don’t really know for sure. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“Listen, man, I’m not feeling good and I can’t really think straight right now with your friend vrooming around—”
“Give me that back. Give it back.” Devine sounded winded. “Her perspective isn’t the useful one here. It’s been two hours and—I can’t find the handle. I can’t find the handle.”
“Devine,” Evan said. “Why are you calling me?”
At last Luke Devine paused. His breath whistled across the receiver once, twice, a third time.
When his voice came it was strained and small, an unrecognizable whisper: “I don’t … I don’t know who else to call.”
Evan stared across the street at the memorial.
A couple of big guys were laughing hard.
He could hear their guffaws from the discarded earpiece.
A chunky woman sat on a folding chair in the back, tissue pressed to her nose, mascara streaking into black stalactites.
In that easel-mounted photo, Tommy looked young and strong, maybe the age Evan was now.
His eyes weren’t baggy or tired as they’d been since Evan had known him, but they still held the same measure of warmth.
Evan looked down at his hands on the wheel, cursed under his breath.
His other adversaries came at him with steel or lead.
But Luke Devine flipped reality like a Rubik’s Cube, tweaking patterns and perceptions.
Within the force field of his influence, he complicated the world, which meant that to contend with him, Evan had to become more complicated himself.
“Are you there?” Devine asked. “Are you still there?”
“I’ll be there in twelve hours.”
Evan slotted the truck into drive and pulled out from the curb.