Never Here. Always Watching.
There is a procedure for Nowhere Man calls.
First and always: Do you need my help?
Because if someone is unwilling to receive help, there is nothing Evan or anyone else can do for them.
So he asks again because she did not answer precisely.
“Yes,” she says, her voice hoarse from weeping or dread.
“Where did you get this number?” Evan asks, now hustling from Melinda’s bedroom and up the cool slate floor of the hallway. On the walls, Vietnamese silk paintings float past at eye level.
“A girl gave it to me. I was having—I get panic attacks?—was having one at the bodega at my corner. That’s where—it’s the only place I’m allowed to go. And even then one of his guys waits right outside.”
Evan notes the word choice—“allowed”—and files it for future investigation.
“She saw me, helped me breathe.” Her words are loud but blurred, as if her mouth is pressed right up against the microphone. “She said you saved her. That this is, dunno, a helpline?”
By Melinda’s front door, a bamboo mat houses a neat array of plastic black and brown slippers. Resting beside them, his steel-toed Original S.W.A.T. boots look anachronistic and crassly American.
Shoving his feet into them, he asks, “What’s her name?”
“Blanca something.” Sounds of fumbling, the white-noise rush coming louder. Definitely water. “She bought a burner phone for me there since I can’t—they track all our purchases.”
“What’s she look like?” Evan asks.
He shoulders through the massive front door into the bizarre alley-moat of polished black stones and Thi?n-like water features that serves as a buffer between Melinda’s actual home and the outer stucco facade that matches the surrounding houses in the gated community.
Like Evan, Melinda lives a double existence, her secret life hidden within a shell of normalcy.
He passes through the second front door and onto the curb where his Ford F-150 pickup awaits.
Like Evan, the truck can blend in anywhere.
The discreet armoring from NIJ Level IV ballistic windows, the self-seal tires, and other discreet embellishments are all but invisible to the untrained eye.
“Hispanic or something,” the young woman is saying. “Super pretty. Like Disney Channel pretty. Selena Gomez pretty.”
Evan has no idea what the latter two sentences mean but the first descriptions are correct. Blanca was the last person Evan helped, the one he charged with passing along the secret phone number.
“What’s your name?” he asks, climbing into his pickup.
“What’s your name?”
“Evan.”
The words come rushed with adrenaline: “Is this for real? Are you real?”
“Yes.”
“Because if I tell, it could be real bad for me.”
He feels the slightest heart-rate increase, an uptick to fifty-five or fifty-six beats per second.
“He’s dangerous,” she whispers.
“So am I,” Evan says. “But on your behalf.”
“What if I don’t deserve to be helped? After what I’ve done…”
Silence now.
Evan imagines her with a fist pressed to her mouth, eyes squeezed shut.
“What have you done?” he asks quietly.
“I can’t say.” The words, hushed with horror.
“What can you say?”
“Brooke.”
He jacks the truck into drive, eases out from the curb. “What?”
“My name. You asked my name. Brooke. Brooke Hawthorne. I don’t … I don’t want to say more. He knows everything. He could be listening right now even. I shouldn’t have called. I shouldn’t even be saying this over the phone.”
“Where are you?”
“Roosevelt.”
At the guardless station, the gates to the community part languidly and he eases his inconspicuous truck out onto the streets of Porter Ranch. “Hotel or city?”
“City.”
“Which Roosevelt?”
“Long Island. By Queens.”
Blanca is from New York City, another point of confirmation.
“Would you rather talk in person?” he asks.
“I can’t leave.”
“What do you mean you can’t leave?”
“I can’t leave my place. He’s always watching.”
“Is he there now?”
“No. He’s never here.”
Never here. Always watching.
“Where are you now?”
That low whisper again: “In the bathroom.”
The background noise, then, is a running shower to hide her voice. From what? Hidden surveillance? Cameras? Someone in the next room?
She blurts: “We get half days on Mondays—”
“Who’s we?”
“—when we don’t haveta work. I don’t think he watches then ’cuz there’s nothing to watch. But still … I don’t know. I don’t know. I shouldn’t have called you.”
“Would you like me to come to you on Monday?”
Nothing interrupts the pause but the beating of shower spray against a basin.
“No. I … Yeah? No. I don’t know.”
Evan aims the F-150’s built-to-spec push-bumper assembly, ideal for ramming vehicles and smashing through gates, onto the 118 East freeway ramp.
“How about this,” he says in his best approximation of gentleness, “I will get to Roosevelt by Monday and we can talk again then and determine if you think it’s safe to meet up.”
“You … You would seriously do that?”
“Yes.”
“What if it’s not safe?”
“Then I’ll wait nearby until you are ready to see me.”
Now Brooke is crying softly with relief or terror or disbelief or probably all three.
She sounds like a little girl. Something has broken open inside her, which threatens to break something open inside Evan, but he refuses to allow her emotion ingress.
This is how he must hold himself intact to do what he does.
It is also why he cannot allow his relationship with Melinda Truong to turn into something else.
And why he cannot occupy the space required to be with Candy McClure or Mia Hall or anyone else.
He is a trained assassin who is trying to remember what it means to be human. It is harder than one might think.
“Who is he?” Evan asks, when she pauses to draw breath.
“I can’t say. I can’t. I—shit, shit—I have to go. Break’s over.”
A click and the line is dead.