The Damage Man (Orphan X #11.5)

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Evan Smoak, aka Orphan X, aka the Nowhere Man, is pissed off about vodka.

This can happen, even to the finest assassin of this or any generation.

Early this morning, a shitty liquor store at the edge of not-so-glamorous Hollywood posted a bottle of Kauffman Vintage vodka on its website. Evan’s web crawler picked up on it immediately, sending him an alert.

Standing now inside the optimistically named Tinsel Town Tipples examining said bottle, he sees that the seal is already broken. A quick sniff confirms that the zaftig bottle has been emptied and refilled with an inferior spirit.

He hands the bottle back to the clerk, a bald, stocky man of indeterminate Eastern European provenance. “This isn’t Kauffman.”

The clerk pauses from probing at his molars with a dental pick. His lack of hair makes his head’s perfect roundness all the more pronounced. “Eez Kauffman! Say right here. Fuck you.”

Evan says, “Right.”

He walks out, tilts his face to the midday Los Angeles sun. Car exhaust is plentiful here, along with prostitutes and baggies of crank.

Deep breath. Hold. Exhale.

Onward to his Ford F-150.

At first he thinks the man he spots quivering by the dumpster is another meth-head. But then he sees the guy’s clean pants and button-up shirt, hears the note of fear in his voice.

“I can’t,” he says, to someone out of sight. “If I had it I would, believe me.” His hands fan up, showing his palms. “Give me another week. Please. He’s just a kid.”

A gravelly voice floats from around the corner. “He’s twenty-four. What’s owed is owed.”

Evan’s jaw has clenched, nearly imperceptibly. He relaxes it.

He shouldn’t get involved. Never make it personal.

But he’s blown through the Fourth Commandment enough times now to consider it a yellow light.

“One week,” the first man pleads. “I’ll figure something out.”

“Your son’s had two months. You can’t cover him, you shouldn’t’ve asked for a meet.”

Evan changes course, heads to the scene by the alley.

The man being threatened is older than Evan thought at first glance, closing in on fifty. Creases at the edges of his eyes, threads of gray at the temples, his face burnished from working in the sun. The button-up shirt isn’t dress but blue-collar, a name patch announcing him as RUSSELL.

The man threatening Russell is a decade and change younger. He wields no weapon, but his posture conveys menace and a willingness to fight. The asphalt of the alley glitters with glass from shattered bottles.

As he sees Evan approach, he bounces his shoulders like a boxer. “Keep it moving, Chad. Not your business.”

Chad.

Evan has found thug dialogue unimaginative of late.

He keeps on, nearing the alley.

The man’s hand dips to the pocket of his brown canvas camp jacket. There is a bulge in the fabric but not a significant one. Knife, probably, or perhaps a crappy little .22. “The hell do you want?”

Evan considers. “Kauffman Vintage vodka.”

The man’s grimace shows off a gold incisor that was likely an inspired fashion choice in his youth. He blinks twice. “What?”

“I know, a long shot here, but in sterquiliniis invenitur and all that.”

“Huh?”

“‘In filth it will be found.’” Evan continues toward the man, unrushed. “It means that the thing we need is in the last place we want to look. In this case, the world’s only vintage vodka.”

The hand emerges, gripping a petite Ruger Lite Rack LPC. The man holds it loosely aimed between Evan and the asphalt, expecting a grand reaction.

“Nice pistol,” Evan says. “They make it for grown-ups?”

The barrel jerks up and Evan strips the pistol from the man’s grip and punches him once in the nose, high at the bridge to drive his head into the cinder-block wall. The noises hang in the air like comic-strip sound effects—crunch of cartilage, smack of bone into concrete.

The man slides down the wall, his jacket pulled up above him like a tattered parachute.

His nose is a mess, eyes tearing, rolled to white. His mouth gapes, rasps fluttering a wispy mustache.

Evan turns to Russell, who is leaning back on the heels of his worker boots, and proffers his hand.

“Evan.”

“Rusty.”

“What’s with your friend?”

Rusty runs his hand across his close-cropped hair, his scalp glistening with sweat. “My son owes the wrong guys money. He’s out of time. I asked for a meet to possibly extend and—fuck, fuck—I don’t know what to do now. You shouldn’t have hurt him.”

“He shouldn’t have pointed a gun at me.”

Evan crouches over the semiconscious man, digs out a wallet. The license photo shows a healthier-looking Cyrus Holt, sans wispy beard, doing his best to look upstanding.

His head is lolling from the blow, so Evan cups his chin and rights it before snapping a photo of his face with his encrypted RoamZone phone. When he lets go, Cyrus tips over and groans into the asphalt.

Rusty is spinning in slow circles, palming the top of his head. “What am I supposed to do now? What am I supposed to do?”

Evan says, “That’s on me now.”

Footsteps crunch broken glass behind them and then the Tinsel Town Tipples clerk appears, gripping a handle of Chopin.

He pauses briefly to take in the tableau in the alley and then continues, unfazed. “If no Kauffman, then the Chopin,” he says, shaking the bottle at Evan. “I give good price.”

Cyrus stirs, cheek mashed to the ground. “Guy, guy. I think I might … I think I might be dying.”

Evan says, “You’re not dying.”

Cyrus pants and squeezes his eyes shut with a thumb and forefinger. “How d’ya know?”

“That’s a different punch,” Evan tells him.

“God, oh God,” Rusty tells the midmorning sky.

“Finest vodka, my friend,” the clerk says to Evan’s back. “Both made of potato.”

“Kauffman isn’t potato-based.”

“Eez potato. Say here!”

“Chopin is. Not Kauffman.”

Cyrus rolls onto his stomach, lifts his torso a few inches off the ground, tries to crawl on all fours.

Wielding the Chopin, the clerk sidles closer, poking his head in front of Evan. His full-moon face is red, agitated. The placement of features on his head seems arbitrary—the scrunched eyes, nose, and mouth floating on the bald orb. “Potato!”

“Kauffman,” Evan says, “is made from the wheat of a single harvest.”

“Fuck you, you fucking idiot. I offer great deal! You waste my time.”

Evan says, “Right.”

Cyrus crawls less than a foot and then vomits across the backs of his hands. He stares down at the amoeba splotch of puke beneath his face. A tendril of saliva connects his chin to the ground.

“Clean up fucking mess! And get off property.”

Evan says, “Yes, sir.”

The clerk storms away, bottle swinging at his side.

“Sit up,” Evan tells Cyrus.

“… can’t.”

Evan prods his floating rib with the steel toe of one of his Original S.W.A.T.s, flipping him up onto his ass to tip against the wall. “Who do you work for?”

Cyrus’s nose is surprisingly intact, if flattened. His eyes, clogged with tears, are already swelling, inflammation puffing at his zygomatic bones.

He wipes his lip. “I think … brain bleed, guy.”

“Just a concussion.” Evan crouches over him. “Who do you work for?”

“Need … hospital.”

“I’d say so. Answer.”

“Dude who hires me is serious. He’s the damage man. I don’t actually—hang on, hang on.” A dry heave. “I don’t actually do the beatdowns. I’m just the collector for low-level street banker stuff before shit get serious.”

“Name,” Evan says. “Address.”

“Fuck, guy.” Cyrus’s pupils are dilated and glassy, stuffed animal eyes. He gags a bit more. “I need some medical fucking attention.”

Rusty is standing beside Evan now, distraught, a fist clenching the fingers of the opposite hand, the effect oddly effete for a meat-and-potatoes guy.

“Name. Address.”

“Guy, c’mon.”

“Don’t make me ask again.”

“Okay, okay, okay. I’ll tell you.” Cyrus wipes his hands on his pants, dusting both sides. “Joe Musselman. Outta Henderson by Vegas.”

“Address.”

Cyrus’s wan lips rattle off an address.

“If you’re lying, you’ll learn about the different punch.” Evan taps a number into the RoamZone.

Instead of hello, Josephine Morales answers with: “X! Glad you called. I’m, like, sooo emotional right now. Just did yoga with my favorite instructor. Inez? She’s got, like, serious Alicia Keys energy. So cool you wouldn’t believe it.”

Joey, Evan’s seventeen-year-old associate, is a world-class hacker and world-class yammerer.

“Need you to run name and address.”

“We did hips this morning,” Joey continues, undeterred. “Hips, X. We throw everything in there, unprocessed emotional shit. They’re like the junk drawer of the body.”

Evan tells her the name and address.

Cyrus says, quietly, “Wait.”

“If you think I’m getting off this couch, you’re seriously smoking Sonora Desert toads,” says Joey, now in full rattle. “I just told you! I’m wiped out. Not that you’d know anything about that ’cuz, you know, human emotion.”

Evan says, “Uh-huh.”

Cyrus: “Hang on, guy. Just … hang on.”

“We can’t all just go into a yoga studio and, like, balance on our pinkie finger and then garrote a human trafficker in the bathroom and just go on with our day.”

Cyrus says, “Wait!”

Evan pauses.

Joey: “X? X? Are you even listening to me?”

Cyrus says, “I’ll give you the real shit.”

Evan hangs up.

“Ivan,” Cyrus says. “Not Joe, Ivan. That’s it. I don’t have an address, I swear. Why would I? Just a number. Here. Here. It’s in my phone. I swear.” He waggles a flip phone at Evan.

Evan thumbs through. Sure enough, the only outgoing and incoming in the call log are from the same number, conveniently labeled IVAN.

“Just … don’t tell him you got it from me.”

“What are you planning to do?” Rusty asks Evan from behind. “I mean, this is out of control.”

Evan tosses the phone back into Cyrus’s lap. “Did you tell Ivan you were meeting Rusty?”

“No. Was seeing if he brought cash first.”

“If Ivan contacts you, tell him you crashed your car and you’re in the hospital.

” Evan holds Cyrus’s driver’s license in front of his face, showing off the address, along with the snapped portrait on the RoamZone.

“If you say anything else, I will know. I will make this incident feel like a fond memory.”

“I get it, guy. I get it, okay?”