Chapter 10
Fuck-Around-and-Find-Out
It was a pocket of heaven.
Devine’s was the grandest of the grand estates lining Meadow Lane, a slender spit of sand dunes and hardscaping dropped like God’s dock between the Atlantic and Shinnecock Bay.
The water was New Englandy slate leavened with tropical aqua, shockingly clear for this splintery stretch of coastline.
The breeze held salt and the air held the cries of seagulls and the tremulous bass of the ocean washing itself against rich, powdery sand.
The house sign staked in the earth, letters patterned like a kilt, spelled out TARTARUS, named by a Scotsman in the schmatta trade with a Miltonian sense of humor.
The quartz stone of the circular driveway glinted like crusted diamond.
Robins warbled unseen in the poinsettia sway of red maples.
In the front gardens bursting through stretches of lush lawn, bees bustled and butterflies docked on moonflowers despite the fact that it was February in New York, which made the invertebrate pageant technically impossible.
The front door rose before them like a portcullis made solid just for spite.
Devine’s mansion alone had no guard shack, no smart-doorbell technology.
If you dared to confront him, you rapped for entry.
Heels to the edge of the porch, Joey breathed through her teeth, her gaze pulled north and north up the towering rise of the mansion. “It’s so … peaceful.”
“Just wait,” Evan said. He squared his shoulders and knocked.
The boom boom boom reverberated through unseen chambers.
The door’s opening was an enormous slab hinging out from a cliff face.
One armed guard answering, three armed guards behind her at the ready. Sounds of mayhem rolled over their shoulders—a crash, a roar, a shattered bottle.
Given the size of the door and the interior, Evan caught not a glimpse but a gape at the cathedral-size foyer, the octopus head to the tentacles of the compound.
A multistory water feature hurled down a tidal wave manicured into a liquid Zen sheet.
The snaking halls seemed to have been rearranged, and he could have sworn the last time he was here the grand sweep of the antebellum staircase curved in the other direction.
The guards recognized Evan and snapped back, tense, arms positioned for the draw but not overtly so. They looked like they were cringing more than anything else. They stood like former soldiers but wore matching jackets and had name tags, a concession to the corporate.
Evan said, “May I come in?”
The guards moved five steps backward in unison.
Evan crossed the threshold, Joey at his back.
A spell of dizziness washed through him, the needle point of his compass spinning, pulled by a polar confusion of magnetism.
He saw now that there was a slender gap in the waterfall from a failed nozzle, a glitch like a smear of lipstick across an incisor, revealing a view of the rusted pipeworks beneath.
And then his perception warped into clarity and he saw it all, saw through the mansion’s backdrop to the levers and pulleys, and felt not grandeur but an awareness that the whole wild illusion was designed to inspire grandeur.
Suddenly he felt steady, legs firm once again beneath him.
“You know who I am.”
At the spearhead of the guards, the woman, KESHISHIAN from her name tag, said, “No.”
Upstairs came a string of bellowed Latin in the rough cadence of ancient poetry. Joey eased slightly behind Evan’s shoulder, and he sensed her breathing quicken.
The guard closest to Evan had his hand in an old-timey hover over his hip holster. His fingers wobbled and fear crept into his eyes and kept creeping, the situation suddenly unstable.
He drew.
Evan lunged sideways, caught the hand as it rose from the holster, fired down through the top of the guard’s boot, then broke the scaphoid and triquetrum with a precise twist of the shooting wrist.
The guard gave a warbling scream, a perversion of the birdsong outside, and canted sideways.
Keeping a one-armed embrace across his collarbones, Evan moved him like a shield as he skipped into a stomping side kick that shattered the ankle of the guard to their right.
As he toppled on the caved leg, Evan stripped the Glock from the hip holster, rotated fifteen degrees, and shot the third man in the wrist of his right hand.
His pistol rattled off across the forever marble.
Still clamping the first guard like a chest shield, Evan had Keshishian in the sights now and she hadn’t even managed to clear leather. Her hands were up, painted but short-cut fingernails flared, and her face held the stunned awareness that this was what true terror felt like.
The full choreography passed through Evan’s mind in the time that he blinked.
But none of it had actually happened.
Evan was still standing before the guards arrayed in their apprehensive arc. All guns remained holstered, all limbs intact.
He said, quietly, “If you draw, I’m going to break that wrist and shoot you through the foot.” He turned his attention to the other three. “Then I’ll smash your ankle and shoot you through the wrist.”
Keshishian said, “What about me? I’ll just be standing here batting my eyelashes?”
She did have lovely eyelashes. Distinct but not overdone makeup, dark paint around dark eyes, a womanly form constrained by the monkey suit.
Evan said, “That’s the hope.”
“He did, uh…” The guard with a potential gunshot foot in his future scratched at the side of his mustache, his other hand now pointedly farther from his holster. “He did kill the last shift, Kesh.”
“The last shift?”
“Of guards. He did, uh, kill them all. Like: all of them. Ya know?”
More screaming carried up one of the marble-lined halls upstairs, and a sound like the crash of cymbals.
Kesh wet her lips, which looked suddenly dry. “The Nowhere Man.” The corners of her jaw rippled barely, a micro-tensing of the molars. She studied Evan. Then raised her hands, palms out stickup-style. “Boss pays us plenty. Not enough for this.”
Evan relaxed his posture and they mirrored him.
“I’m here to help,” Evan said. “He called me. How bad is it?”
Kesh set her hands on her hips, blew a wisp of dark-chocolate hair out of her left eye. She wore chunky chestnut highlights. Her uniform was impeccable, and sharp intelligence shined through her expression. “I’ll be honest. Pretty out of control, man.”
Almost Shattered Ankle said, “We’re just trying to hold everything together. It’s, uh, it’s been a lot.”
“Copy that,” Evan said. “This is my associate.”
In his peripheral, he sensed Joey nod.
There came a slam of a door from somewhere deep in the architecture.
A moment later, a spark plug of a man, early thirties, shot across the landing above and then down the staircase, his loafers pitter-pattering over the steps, floating his torso smoothly through the descent.
He wore a black suit, sufficiently plain to be forgettable.
His bearing and artless crew cut said: marine.
Devine favored marines for his inner circle.
A tidy block of a man, he swept a wall of air in front of him. “Hold on, hold on,” he said to them all. “Let’s just cool heels a minute.” He had a hand up to Evan, fingers splayed. His base was set but his posture remained pointedly conciliatory. “We don’t need a blasting cap in a powder keg.”
Evan said, “Agreed.”
“Will Rawlings, chief of staff. I know who you are. Please—just, stay calm.”
“I am,” Evan said. “Calm.”
“Right. Right. This is…?”
“My associate.”
Rawlings nodded to Joey and she nodded right back.
Shockingly, she made a good mute. Rawlings gave each of his guards a reassuring glance in the eye, and Evan respected him for it.
From a thousand mental dossiers, Evan extracted a quick psychological profile for him.
Reliable, stalwart, competent. Lots of gym time and creatine and something else to juice it up from time to time.
His mother was likely oversexualized, arresting him slightly in adolescent virility. But she was fundamentally good.
Rawlings wore one of those fabric bracelets around his wrist, not as rustic as the usual leather strappy ones, an artistic flourish that tilted him higher on Big Five trait openness.
And he had a wedding band, which he actually wore, platinum stamped with the tiny Cartier manhole covers.
That meant a wife with her head in the Zeitgeist, exposure to a broader array of outgroups through her friends, increased tolerance for different ideas.
That’s why Devine would have chosen him—all the conscientiousness of a conservative with a liberal’s flexibility.
And if pushed, men like Rawlings could show a good amount of fuck-around-and-find-out, without which the other positive attributes were merely hypothetical.
“I don’t want to have any violence kick off,” Rawlings said. “No trouble. Nothing … unpredictable. I know your history here with Mr. Devine.”
“He asked me here,” Evan said.
“His judgment isn’t actually—” Now the sound of something toppling, the wash of spilled gallons of liquid across marble. A string of curses roared out into the cavernous foyer, linked one after another like boxcars, and they went on and on without repeating, a linguistic carnival trick.
The mansion quieted abruptly, the silence even more creepy.
Rawlings cleared his throat, started over. “His judgment isn’t in the best place,” he said. “I don’t know your intentions. But I do know what you’re capable of. And he is my responsibility. I hope you can understand that, sir.”
Evan considered.
He reached through his shirt, magnetic buttons parting, and drew from his appendix holster. The 1911 spun once in his hand.
The handle stuck out, proffered to Rawlings.
The whole flash of movement happened before anyone else could react.
It took a full two seconds for Rawlings to come off high alert. He’d drawn back, tense on his heels, but he breathed himself back down into his loafers again and took the pistol.
Evan looked past him. Now the staircase was curling up from the west side again—no, south? He stared up at the landing floating way above, a Verona arc of balcony, from which now issued voluminous coughing and sounds of gagging.
Evan reset himself. “Want to show me what’s going on?”