Begin Reading #6
There’s light-years’ distance between Rusty and Evan’s biological father, the man whose name he carries as his middle name.
The man who spent the entirety of their seven minutes narcissus-drawn to the mirror, devoting his attention to his hairline, fingers crawling along his widow’s peak in search of thinning.
A louche philanderer, rugged and handsome, with puckers at the edge of his movie-star grin.
A stubbled cowboy visage radiating devil charm, slack-jawed not by the appearance of his son but at the sight of the folded hundreds in Evan’s pocket.
And yet.
Evan thinks of the cheesy inspirational poster from the changing room. The words of Jack Johns, his handler and father figure: Next time. The two best words in the English language.
Is there a seed of something inside him that might be called hope?
“X?”
His hands tighten on the steering wheel. “I don’t know.”
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. I’ll do this.”
Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack.
“Oh,” she says.
A single syllable but the tone of it is awful. It holds sadness. And worse, something adjacent to pity.
“What, Joey?”
“He’s in Blessing, Texas, still. But. He’s … he’s not doing well, X.”
Impatience seethes in him. “Hospital?”
“Hospice.”
Sound seems to vacuum itself from the vehicle, leaving behind a barely audible tinnitus ringing, the air-held memory of a struck tuning fork.
More breathing. Then more sounds of typing. “Count Your Blessings Hospice Home,” she says. “I’ll text you the addy.”
The cute-as-pie name, for some reason, enrages him. A punch line to an inconsequential life and a whimper of an ending. Evan takes a breath and then another breath. His heart rate is steady, pulse normal, body temperature perfect. He just needs the noise to finish coming back into the world.
“X? You okay?”
“Yes.”
“I mean, he’s your father.”
“Jack was my father.”
“I know, I just mean, still. You know.”
“Diagnosis?”
“Hang on. Let me … Medical.… Lung cancer. Stage four.”
Evan recalls the yellow stalagmites climbing the incisors of Jacob Baridon’s winning smile.
The man had a loose-and-easy posture and moved with a kind of masculine elegance that evades Evan, who is all calculated angles and machine precision.
A retired rodeo cowboy chasing tail and living down to his last dollar.
Carefree and careless. Right up until he hit the Count Your Blessings Hospice Home.
Joey’s fingers have sped up, her nervous energy channeled into movement. “I’m just … hang on … hacking into his phone … seeing if…”
He lets her gallop.
Two minutes pass or maybe five.
Her breath puffs unevenly across the receiver. It likely smells of Red Vines and Dr Pepper. He imagines her burrowing through an insignificant man’s insignificant digital imprint, searching out something, anything, a crumb of meaning that might bring Evan comfort.
Her voice arrives as if from some great distance: “He made a bunch of searches about you online recently.” The words carry a lovingly solicitous note that cheese-grates his discomfort, a mother offering a crying child an ice cream cone.
“A bunch?”
“Well,” Joey concedes, “three. He made three.”
“What?”
She hesitates and he knows what is coming will be thin gruel. “‘Evan.’ ‘DNA database.’ ‘Jacob Baridon boy Vassar graduate.’”
The latter, Evan’s mother’s alma mater.
Three Google searches, he thinks. Grand paternal effort.
“X, you okay?”
“Quit asking me that.”
“Are you—? I mean…” Joey regroups. That same non-silence pervades the line. “How do you feel?”
Evan says, “I don’t.”
He hangs up.
Blackfish Credit offers personal loans, soft credit checks, debt-consolidation services, and quick funding. It is a legitimate business.
Which provides excellent cover for the illegitimate business Jonathan Hay facilitates beneath the surface.
Mr. Hay has a half dozen Ivans, damage men who run side loans for exorbitant interest rates. This provides a significant amount of cash, which Hay launders through Blackfish.
For obvious reasons, he holds office space on the top floor of a Century City office building with limited access and strong security measures in the lobby.
Evan enters the building now, his tinfoil swan perched on his palm, ready for delivery. The lobby smells of some piped-in floral fragrance, the tiles scrubbed clean.
“Grubhub delivery from Peking Palace,” he tells the receptionist.
“Which office?”
He squints at some scribbles he made on the receipt from the restaurant. “Something Something Accounting on ten?”
There are three accountancies on the tenth floor.
“Which one?”
Again, he pretends to try to decipher the receipt. “Can’t tell.” He shows it to the receptionist, who looks unimpressed.
“Go up and ask,” she says. “There are a few.”
“Copy that.”
He heads to the security station, which has a metal detector and X-ray conveyor belt. An obese guard is propped against a stool, half sitting, half standing, looking bored senseless. He flops a plastic dish down on the table in front of Evan.
“Keys, phone, change.”
Evan complies.
“Cool phone, man.”
“Thanks,” Evan says.
“Run the food through the conveyor.”
“Sure thing.”
Evan steps through the detector archway and the guard hands him the dish around the side rail. A second guard watches the X-ray monitor.
From the far side, Evan can see the imagery on the screen, the tinfoil creating a solid bright white silhouette.
The swan emerges through the flaps a bit worse for wear, its lovely neck bent downward.
“Gotta open her up,” the second guard says.
“And ruin the presentation?”
The guard does not smile. He seems even more weary than the first, as if minute after minute, shift after shift, he can see before him the entire shape of his future.
Evan peels the tinfoil package open, showing the glazed Peking duck inside, steaming like a diminutive Thanksgiving turkey.
The guard waves him through and taps an access card on the security turnstile’s reader. Evan moves through to the elevators.
He rides up to the top floor, accompanied by a Muzak rendition of “Yesterday,” a syrupy synthesized flute standing in for Paul McCartney.
A men’s room is conveniently located off the floor lobby. Evan swings inside, enters a stall. Removing latex gloves from a cargo pocket, he peels open the tinfoil swan and extracts his ziplocked ARES 1911 from the duck’s abdominal cavity.
He frees the ARES and its suppressor, then snaps off his gloves and crumples the tinfoil around them and the duck, trashing the metallic ball on his way out.
Blackfish is on the east side of the top floor.
Screwing the suppressor into the barrel, he enters.
There are no pictures on the walls, no decor, limited furniture.
Old-fashioned postal chutes are embedded in the walls, no doubt a throwback enhancement the architect tossed in when the building went up in the seventies. The front desk is empty.
He steps past it into the hall leading to the offices. A conference room floats into view, big windows overlooking an expensive view. The Hollywood sign peers bleakly from Mount Lee, faded from six miles of haze.
Several of the Ivans are present, as Ivan the Original specified. Three of them, to be precise, sitting around a conference table playing poker, smoking joints and wearing cheap shiny suits.
As Evan enters, they rise in unison, cards scattering, to face him, eyeing the 1911 in his hand.
Like Ivan, they wear their profession on their faces. Damage men with baleful features hardened from a lifetime of scowling. Evan notes position, angles, bulges beneath jackets. The nearest guy, lupine with ropy muscles, sports a brass belt buckle labeling him BUCK. Or maybe it’s a brand name.
“We don’t take walk-ins,” Buck says.
Holding the pistol steady, Evan reaches into his cargo pocket and tosses a half dozen zip ties onto the conference table. “Guns on the table,” he says. “You can zip-tie one another. Or I can do it for you.”
Buck’s hand dives for his hip.
Pfft pfft pfft.
His hand explodes, an ace of diamonds fluttering free from the cuff; his holster flies off his hip, his kneecap a mosaic.
He tumbles, keeling in one direction as his still-holstered gun skitters in the other.
No one else has moved. They haven’t even had time to blink.
Buck groans, panting into the floor, his creased forehead dripping with sweat.
Evan flicks his muzzle at the table.
The other men carefully remove their pistols and place them there. Then they set about securing one another.
“Sorry, bud, sorry,” the biggest guy tells Buck as he zippers up his wrists. “But fuck you for cheating.”
They finish the job, tightening their own cuffs with their teeth.
Evan gathers the pistols and drops them down the mail chute. Then he zip-ties the men together. Lying there in a puddle, they looked like an S&M orgy or a Twister fail.
Evan kneels on Buck, whose face he most despises, and places the muzzle at his crotch. “How many more of you?”
“Just one,” Buck says through clenched teeth. “Three offices down.” Saliva webs his chin. “And the boss.”
Evan moves on up the hall.
The last Ivan, no doubt drawn by the commotion, sticks his head out of his office as Evan nears.
Evan grabs him by the ear and slams his head against the doorjamb hard enough to dent the wood. Before he regains consciousness, Evan shitcans his pistol and zip-ties him to his desk.
The next two rooms are empty, which leaves Hay’s corner office.
Evan reaches for the door lever, presses it slowly down, aims, lets the door drift slowly open.
Hay sits cocked back in a plush chair with his loafers up on the desk. “Okay,” he says, showing his hands. “You’ve done this before. I’ve done this before. Let’s be professional.”
Evan unscrews the suppressor, holsters his pistol. Then walks over to him. Hay’s desk is spotless. Leather blotter, stapler, letter opener, phone, laptop.
Evan slaps the laptop shut, slides it out of reach.
Hay temples his fingers. A musky scent of trying-too-hard cologne wafts from his dress shirt. “What are you doing?”