Chapter 57 The X Always Held
The X Always Held
Walking his third surveillance route past the burrito joint, Evan stared again at Taswell Kinley at a high-top table inside. It was a busy street, pedestrians herd-deep on the sidewalk, the kid coming visible only in the gaps between them.
Taz. He’s in charge of tech.
From the nerve center of Luke Devine’s scarlet room, Joey had gotten Evan the location for Taswell Kinley.
Now it was a matter of taking him down and leaving him for Templeton.
Brandon Burke was trickier—no registered phone, no place of residence.
Joey was still working through his last-knowns.
Between her and the Brain, she’d get him soon enough.
Evan took roll call of the punctures, cuts, and bruises from his battle with Goliath.
Then he turned down the volume on them. He could resume registering pain when the mission was complete.
Already it was roaring inside him, not hypervigilance, not OCD, but the harmonized hum of his proper operational filters, all aligned, all in their proper place.
Armed with floor plans and blueprints, he’d nailed the Third Commandment.
Moving briskly along the sidewalk, he held the space around him as a sphere—surrounding streets, subway lines, higher floors, tunnels beneath the earth.
Within that outermost peel of the fixed environment, he maintained another layer of cognizance—cars, windows, traffic, humidity, crowd flow, individuals, props, weapons, and anything else distinct, changing, not bolted down.
The route to the target resided here, and various paths of egress.
Nesting within those, in the core, was Taswell Kinley.
All his bones and muscle and tendon and pliable cartilage, and every possible movement they might make.
At the center of the core was an X.
Above and around it, the other layers gyroscoped madly. But the X always held.
The dead center of Evan was the dead center of everything else. And as long as he didn’t waver or misstep, he could hold that awareness, could register all the layers synchronously.
The nearest police station was 5.7 miles away, the response time for calls this distance shockingly consistent at four and a half minutes. They had six units out patrolling. Midday traffic patterns would slow the arrival of backup, but once it started arriving it would shore up fast.
The burrito joint had a single-stall bathroom with no exterior window, a janitor’s closet off the kitchen, and one back route through a twelve-foot run of corridor and a rear door.
Visible in one of four store surveillance cameras Evan had hijacked and accessed on his RoamZone was a thick smear of ketchup on the floor by the trash bins, enough to send a heel out from under you.
Opportunity was everywhere—varied knives in the kitchen, steaming grills ready for business, mop and bucket in the southwest corner deployed in the dining area every hour on the hour.
There was a girl in a wheelchair in the booth nearest the bathroom, a mother with two boys at a four-top, and an elderly couple at the register who could need minding if—hat tip once more to Tommy—things got sporty.
The amendment to his code had been hammered into him at the kitchen table with Anca: Promise me. Promise me you will not kill anyone. She’d knocked the table, her chest, grabbed the hem of her dress. This? This is real.
Mercy.
It was real to her.
She had been made real to him.
So it was real to him now as well.
His code weighed more now. It had more to carry.
Taz gummed at his food, burrito juice dribbling across his thigh.
A blank face lowered to a phone screen, a face that might’ve looked intelligent in another light, with its tall proud forehead.
A pair of glasses and a side part and you could almost see him as a functional member of society.
But no. Instead he gave off a non-aura, a pervasive nothingness.
Everything about him was languid except his jittering eyes.
Those eyes, bearing the reflection of the screen, betrayed the rabbit-fast insanity jangling within, choked down behind that dumbed-out, lukewarm psychopath exterior.
Swept along at crowd-speed, Evan managed a last glimpse through the window.
Taz looked pathetic. He wore old-man khakis, a starched-to-hell pair from forever ago. His build was scrawny, his hair ugly stiff, mud-colored with a reddish tint, dandruff spots visible at distance. And his forehead, that proud forehead, had lines in it already, squiggly middle-aged lines.
His lips were parted and not slightly and he was breathing through his mouth and tapping away at the screen, gazing into it as intently as if it were the Oracle at Delphi. He appeared to be deep in thought.
Evan couldn’t help but wonder what a creature like him could possibly be thinking about.
Memes against this one gray suit (a side-part politician who, Taz figured, was a cuck libtard or incel fascist) were exploding.
Most of them outta Bulgarian troll farms, judging by the grammar and style.
Taz gleaned the dude took some bribes or something but he said it was fake news, but anyways and regardless, the memes had him, like tiny him, in this one stupid-looking pose Photoshopped into all these weird places like on Taylor Swift’s nose or on top of the French tower or whatever, and then someone started a hashtag to make the memes, like, pornier, and so alluva sudden there’s this gray suit’s face appearing in, like, holes everywhere and there’s no way he wouldn’t be forever associated with holes—ha, pretty funny.
Taz was having trouble focusing and he remembered he took Adderall this morning but figured another might help so he palmed that and washed it down with a sip of Coke.
A few blocks over, B-Roll was already lining up Blanca at his pad and the posse was due to head over any sec once they got the go text and he didn’t know what to think and feel about that so he tried to think and feel nothing. At least he had practice at that.
His stomach hurt again and he was having trouble chewing the burrito ’cuz his mouth was super dry, prolly the Seroquel and clonidine.
A couple tables over a mom was sitting with two boys in Little League uniforms. When Taz’s dad had been around those few weeks of his fifth-grade summer, he’d signed Taz up for Little League.
Taz had sucked at it, afraid of the ball, only made it to two practices.
The boys’ uniform looked familiar—maybe the same team?
—but he couldn’t make out the team name across the chest. His hand was up and he was reverse-pinching the air to zoom in on the lettering so he could apply the filter but he was doing it IRL! Brain glitch.
He heard a strange bark of a laugh—his own, how strange—and went back to the phone to use the actual camera zoom but he’d leaned on the screen by accident so all the apps were dancing like to move or delete them and he stared down at them all pinned and wriggling for his attention.
So many shiny, shiny buttons, portals to all the friends and famous people and girls who lived inside them, each app its own world, its own mood, uppers or bennies or quick little hits of heroin.
Like a fucking buffet and he could just graze and partake, could have whatever he wanted.
Wait—why had he gone on the phone again? Couldn’t remember.
He had a mouthful of sodden something, like a cud, a worked-over burrito bite. He’d forgotten to keep chewing.
He was weary from gorging. He had everything he wanted but he couldn’t get full. He just. Couldn’t. Get. Full.
He had sour cream on his chin and no napkin so he wiped with his hand and then wiped it off on his pants.
It was kind of deadening to have everything he wanted inside his phone all the time.
His palms were sweaty and he thought about what that one school shrink had told him one time, that sometimes your body tells you stuff you might not know in your head yet, and he realized he was bracing himself for the text from B-Roll.
His fingers felt tingly. They got that way sometimes when he smoked too much sativa in the morning, made him all spinny. He could bring it down with those indica gummies Finn-Finn stole from the dispensary, or else more clonidine.
Another fantasy about Blanca rolled through his head but it wasn’t like his usual fantasies, it was G-rated.
In this fantasy she was like Other Blanca but older obviously, someone he could just hang with and laugh and they could be friends, like, real friends, too, and he could see them chilling on a couch watching a movie with his arm across her shoulders.
He anxious-checked his phone for B-Roll’s text—still nothing. When he looked up, he saw a guy walking past on the sidewalk. Their eyes met for a second. Taz could’ve sworn he’d seen him walk by before. He looked like nothing much, just a man-man.
Checked his phone again. He was breathing hard. His palms were sweaty. The burrito sat like a blob in his gut.
Who was he kidding? His G-rated fantasy of some Hallmark life with Any Blanca was out of reach. He knew himself, knew what he looked like, what his insides were like, a fucking useless loser the world just extracted from—his money, his time, his attention. They all just wanted to suck him dry.
Felt like there was a black hole in his sunken chest. He stared at the screen of his phone, waiting for a text he hoped would never come.
He didn’t notice the man-man enter the restaurant.
Cutting through the bustle, Evan took a high stool next to Taswell. The kid didn’t take note. He was fixated on his phone, thumbing through YouTube shorts. His other hand rested on his belly, fingers waggling in a wave pattern, and he was rocking slightly. Stimming.
Evan cleared his throat.
The kid didn’t notice.
Evan said, “Taswell Kinley.”