Begin Reading #7
“Both sets of books are on there. The prosecutor’s gonna need that.”
“Let’s not get hasty. I’m a negotiator. Let’s negotiate.”
“Get up.”
“You want … what? Cash? I’ve got a safe in the storage closet.”
“Get up.”
Hay slides his feet off the desk, bucks forward in the chair. “Not interested in cash? What then? A friend of yours borrowed money from us? How much? A hundo? Two hundo? Well, I don’t get my hands dirty for less than a mil. That’d be one of my associates.”
“Third and last time,” Evan says. “Get up.”
Hay makes prayer hands and tilts them at Evan, one of Evan’s least favorite alpha displays. “Let’s take it calm. You and I? We can clear the debt no prob—”
Evan picks up the stapler, thumbs the catch so it wings open. He slaps Jonathan’s head twice rapidly with the business end, thwacking two staples into his crown.
“Hey, fuck! Fuck, okay! What the hell.” Jonathan tumbles out of his chair, rises unsteadily. A tendril of blood snakes down from his hairline over his eye. “I’m up, okay? I’m up.”
Evan slams him over the desk, zip-ties his hands at the small of his back. Then he shoves him onto the blotter, belly down, and secures his ankles.
He picks up the laptop and walks out.
Hog-tied on his desk, Jonathan bucks and shouts after him. “Hey! You can’t just fucking leave me like this.”
Evan heads down the hall. The trussed-up Ivans, rustling and grunting, plead with him as he passes.
He hides the laptop beneath some empty files in the bottom drawer of the front desk. He will let Mia and her team know where to find it. And the guns.
He is eager to get back to Blake and Rusty. He imagines they are in dire need of relief from the threat and from each other.
When he crosses the lobby for the door, the receptionist calls out, “Find ’em okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Evan says. “Mission complete.”
“X?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, okay?”
Evan is driving back to Rancho Park. Due to the Kevlar armor hidden in his door panels, the windows do not roll down, which means that he cannot clear the scent of Peking duck from his vehicle.
The thought of it seeping into the upholstery grinds at the base of his brain.
Despite the latex gloves, he is sure that the smell has also roosted beneath his fingernails and he cannot wait to get home, burn his mission clothes, and take a scouring shower.
But first he has to deal with Rusty and Blake. And whatever Joey is calling him about.
“For what?”
“I shouldn’t have done that search for your father.”
“He’s not my father. And I asked you to.”
“But I should’ve known you’d get all … dysregulated.”
“I don’t get dysregulated. And it’s not your responsibility.”
“I know, X. But it feels like it is. Don’t you feel bad when I get upset?”
Evan says, “No.”
She laughs. “Okay, okay. But look. I mean, he did try’n find you.”
“A Google search.”
“It’s not nothing. I mean, he thought of you, right? At least he thought of you.”
He takes in the helplessness in Joey’s voice, her eagerness to bring him some salve for whatever he is experiencing right now, and a ray of love for this seventeen-year-old girl shines through him, so powerful he can scarcely believe it.
He cannot comprehend what he has ever done that makes him deserve her devotion.
For most of his life, Evan has persevered in the unbridgeable chasm between being a killer and staying human.
More than anyone else, Joey has been his bridge across the abyss.
This girl who came up in the foster system, caught the worst end of the Orphan Program, who had no one and nothing when Evan met her.
The crack she’s put through his armor has opened him up to boundless vulnerability.
And suddenly he hates the world for what it has done to her and still will do to her, hates it for the chain around the refrigerator in her foster home that guarded the food from the kids, for the death of the mom-aunt she so dearly loved.
He mourns for the grief she’ll feel when her dog is gone, when Evan himself dies by steel, lead, or the inevitable failing of his own body, for the age that will someday pain her own joints and creak her bones.
This mission has broken some part of him open. He doesn’t understand what it is that he is feeling beyond a surfeit of maudlin emotion.
All of a sudden his OCD is standing at full attention.
A dry splotch of espresso mars the plastic cupholder in the center console.
Deltas of road dust film the windshield beyond the compass sweep of the wipers.
His window is pebbled with water spots. His skin itches.
He can feel where his hair brushes the top of his forehead unevenly.
He scrapes the dried spot on the cupholder hard enough to bend back his thumbnail.
What is it he tells Joey? If you feel more, you have to feel more.
He can feel the gunk beneath his thumbnail now, the pressure of it. He needs to clip the keratin to the quick and soak his digits in hot water.
“Are you gonna go see him, X? Before he dies?”
Reaching Rusty’s bungalow, he drifts to the curb.
“No chance in hell,” he says, and hangs up.
Rusty and Blake perch rigidly on opposite ends of the sloppy futon mattress. If they created any more space between them, they’d fall off the sides.
There is nowhere else to sit in the room, so Evan is standing before them like a divorce attorney spelling out the finer points of asset division.
In a state of shock and awe, they’ve listened to his recap of events. Now a thundering silence stretches out and out.
“I can’t believe it,” Rusty finally says. “So it’s all just … done?”
“Yes,” Evan says.
“What am I supposed to do now?” Blake asks.
“I don’t—” Evan catches himself before the last word, “care,” can escape. “… know,” he says.
Blake stands up. His posture is impeccable, likely to maximize his height. The relief on his face is palpable. He wipes his palms on his jeans, shifts from foot to foot. “I guess then…” He’s trying for the right words but seems no better at it than Evan. “Thank you.”
His shoulders make a quarter turn toward his father on the opposite end of the couch. He cannot meet Rusty’s eyes but he gives the faintest nod that way, a possible expansion of his gratitude.
Evan takes out Blake’s phone, spins it on his palm. An offering.
Blake takes it, pauses. His face is twisted with frustration, Evan believes, at not being able to convey what he wants to convey. “Thank you,” he says again, with great feeling. His hips sway slightly toward his father but he can’t bring himself to complete the turn, instead walking out.
The door clicks shut after him, and Evan and Rusty breathe in the quiet.
“I don’t know how to … How can I repay you?” Rusty says.
“Find someone else who’s in a desperate situation with no one to help them. Pass on my phone number to them—1–855–2-NOWHERE.”
“That’s what you do? Just go around … helping people?”
“Yes.”
Rusty coughs out a note of awed disbelief. “You must’ve been raised right. I bet your folks’re real proud of you.”
Evan says, “Okay, then,” and starts out.
“I will never forget what you did for us. Me and Blake. I mean, he’ll be okay now even if it’s not how I hoped it would end between us.”
Evan pauses with his back mostly turned. He says, “Maybe it’s not over.” And walks out.
Blake is crouched at the rear of his vintage Camaro, working the tire jack. The body jerks its way unevenly upward as he cranks the handle.
That rear left tire seems to have given out entirely. He’s already set out the spare at the edge of what passes for a front lawn.
He’s focused on the work, doesn’t notice Evan as he moves up the walk and climbs into his truck.
The RoamZone chimes.
A text from Joey.
That contains the address for the Count Your Blessings Hospice Home.
What he feels first is a slow burning anger, calm enough to be resentment.
At who? Joey, for pushing the issue? No.
At his in-name-only father, languishing this minute in a hospice bed, racked by a death-rattle cough, an archetype that could never be bothered to find its feet and fill out its form.
Jacob Baridon’s pending death promises neither illumination nor grief of a personal nature, just the undeniable snuffing out of the last flame-flicker of some mythic promise.
When Evan looks up, Rusty is standing on the porch.
He is frozen there, staring across the dead lawn at his son, now down on his knees spinning the tire iron. Blake works on, unaware he is being watched. One lug nut pings onto the concrete and then the other.
Observing the two men feels bizarre, as if Evan has stumbled upon some wildlife scene: Deer and Fox Sharing Water Hole.
Blake swipes at his forehead and begins to wrestle the tire off the wheel studs.
Evan pans back over to Rusty. His face is blotched red with emotion. At his sides, his hands clench loosely, release, clench again. As if he is working up his nerve.
And then he starts walking toward his son.
He is most of the way across the dead lawn when Blake takes note of him. He looks up, his expression completely unmasked, that of a little kid.
Rusty moves around him.
Squats at his side and flips the spare tire up onto its tread.
He rolls it over and he and his son take it together and guide it onto the wheel studs.
Working in silent tandem, they start to screw the lug nuts back into place.
Evan turns the engine over and drives away.
The afternoon is dry and autumnal when Evan steps out of the rented Jeep into the swelter of the Blessing, Texas, parking lot. He reaches the front of the hospice-care home and hesitates at the edge of the pressure mat.
Too late—he’s triggered the automatic door sensor. The glass rectangles part, exhaling the sickly scent of past-their-prime flowers.
He eases back a step and the doors shudder closed again.
What the hell is he doing? He has asked himself this nearly every minute of the three-hour flight to Houston and the hour-and-a-half drive to Blessing.
And still doesn’t have a good answer.