The last orphan, p.17
The Last Orphan, page 17
He was crying, snot threatening to clog the straw.
The place was a shithole, splintered floorboards and drafty windows, mousetraps and Chinese take-out cartons on the kitchen counter. It smelled of mold and dog piss. There was no furniture in the main area except for the rickety table and a sticky couch that would fluoresce under a black light. There were only two chairs, one of which they’d considerately adhered to Steve to support his inoperable legs. Rath sat backward in the other, his arms crossed along the top rail, facing him.
Not wanting to risk an encounter with the couch, Gordo had settled on the floor, tumbling the final inches and landing hard enough to creak the foundation. He’d torn a sheet out of his doodle notebook and was busy folding it into something with his sausage fingers. The ratty dog had taken up at Gordo’s side, sitting and watching the proceedings with sad, wet eyes.
With effort Rath could ratchet shut the scarred right side of his mouth, but he felt the lower lip tugging down now, wet with saliva. He fingered the point of his Ka-Bar; he’d already cleaned it in the sink, which held two dead cockroaches and a puddle of olive pits. “There’s a way to take someone’s eye out and turn it clear around so they can see their own ear,” he said. “But I’ve never done that. Need proper medical training, I think, to keep the optic nerves intact.”
Steve the White Pimp snuffled. “I don’t know what you want, man. But I got people. People who’ll come looking for you.”
“They say a decapitated head can still see for ten seconds, but that’s a crock,” Rath said. “They always pass out from the shock. Not so much as a blink of recognition. So.” He pulled the test tube out of his pocket and waggled it, sending the contents into a frenzy. “We set up something more fun.”
“What the fuck is that? Wait—just wait, okay? Just hang on. What did I do? I can make it right. Look, you’ve made your point, okay? I won’t fuck with you. If I overlapped with … with a friend of yours, a daughter, whatever, I can make it right.”
“Oh,” Rath said, “We don’t care about any of that. We care about your big mouth.”
With the scrap paper, Gordo had made a fortune-teller like the ones schoolgirls played with, four origami pinchers with hidden flaps and messages. Grinning with childish pleasure, he snapped the beaks open and closed in different patterns with his enormous thumbs and index fingers. The dog observed, cocking her head with interest. Rath could see that he’d drawn doodles on some of the flaps.
Gordo could be a hoot.
Steve the White Pimp wheezed a little, drawing Rath’s focus once more.
“You see, Steve, you talk too much,” Rath told him. “Whining to anyone who’ll listen. And we were happy to let you do that in your own little cesspool here, but recent events have made that … inconvenient. So.” He fixed him with an ugly glare. “You know how this ends, don’t you?”
“What…” A tendril of drool leaked from the corner of Steve’s mouth, thin as a spider thread. Rivulets of blood darkened his jeans, striping the denim from knee to ankle. He tried to jerk his legs, but his duct-taped shoes didn’t budge and the internal work of the tendons in his knees made him go stock-still with pain. A guttering breath until he could talk again. “What have I been talking too much about?”
Rath removed the stopper. “That doesn’t matter anymore.”
“But you don’t have to do this. Why do you have to do this?”
“Maybe he’s right,” Rath mused. One of the captives had made it up out of the test tube and circled the lip. Its cutting mandibles trembled. An inch and a half was a lot of ant. “What do you think, Gordo? Should we give him a fighting chance?”
“Yes.” Spit bubbled at Steve’s lips. “Yes please yes please yes please.”
Rath asked, “What’s his fortune say?”
Gordo grinned wide. A game. He worked the paper fortune-teller open and closed, open and closed. The dog leaned forward and gave it a sniff. Gordo paused, angled the spread paper cup at Steve. “Choose a number.”
“What?”
“Choose. A. Number.”
Steve’s visible eye bulged and strained. It was funny how an eyeball looked moving around when the head couldn’t. “Th-three.”
Gordo peeled up the matching flap. Stared at it. “Uh-oh.”
“What, man? What?” The glass straw protruding from Steve’s nostril bobbed with agitation.
Gordo turned the fortune-teller to face the other men. Beneath the numeral was a drawing of a big red ant with jagged jaws.
A row of wiggly creases appeared on Gordo’s shiny forehead. “Thass too bad.” Frowning down at the paper, he lifted the other flaps. “Whoops,” he said. “Looks like I messed up. They’re all ants.”
Leaning in at Steve, Rath gripped the glass straw to steady it and brought the tip of the test tube to meet the tiny opening. There was some spillage, the diameter only wide enough to accommodate one ant at a time. Finally the living jumble worked itself out into a flow. Urged by gravity, the bull ants began to stream up the throat of the straw.
Steve kept one bloodshot eye pegged hard to the side, watching as the parade approached his face. His grunts yielded to a hoarse scream that sent flecks of saliva across the wood. But he couldn’t look away.
Though it was an elaborate technique, Rath hoped it wouldn’t stretch too far into the night.
After all, they still had to drive out to Wellesley.
32
Mr. Hard Boundaries
“Sue Ann’s Organic Enemas. How can I provide excellent service for you today?”
Staring at the panoply of guest-room tassels, Evan hesitated before replying into the RoamZone, “Tommy?”
Stojack’s voice came crisply over the line. “You already spelunking up my sphincter about your replacement truck? You just ordered it.”
“No,” Evan said. “I need you to arrange a safe house for me.”
“I thought you had ’em scattered everywhere like rat turds.”
“Not in Boston.”
“You want me to set up a safe house in Boston? I am an icon of masculinity and a marksman par excellence. Not a fucking travel agent.”
A feminine voice cut in. “I can do it.”
“Joey?” Evan was on his feet, pacing beside the regal bed, the scent of Winter Mantel diffuser threatening to choke him. “What are you doing? This is an encrypted line.”
“Duh,” she said. “I’m the one who updated the encryption protocols for you.”
“Get off the goddamned call.”
Tommy laughed a low, raspy laugh that threatened to deteriorate into a coughing fit. “Hiya, Joey.”
“Tommy! Hi!”
“Ain’t it cute how his voice gets all tense when he’s mad?” Tommy asked.
“Seriously,” Joey said. “And he’s probably doing that tight-jaw thing, you know, when the corners flex out?”
Evan made an effort to unclench his teeth. “I can’t have you popping onto this line, Joey. That’s a hard boundary.”
“Well,” Tommy said, “I’m gonna let you two dog-sniff each other’s butts and get this domestic matter resolved. Time for me to rack out.”
He hung up.
“So,” Joey said. “Does this mean you don’t need me to set up a safe house in Boston for you?”
“You can’t do this again,” Evan said. “Ever.”
“Got it, Mr. Hard Boundaries. Maybe that should be your new code name. Especially since you’re having trouble keeping your comms secure, which seems kinda important if you’re running around calling yourself the N—”
“Josephine.”
“’Kay. What do you need? Where are you?”
“I’m staying at the Seabrooks’ house—”
“You’re what?”
A long, cold silence Evan was at a loss for how to interpret.
“Mr. Hard Boundaries?” Joey’s tone was suddenly, intensely angry. “Staying with a fucking client? Two seconds ago you were, like, in federal custody.”
“Ruby had been threatened, so she asked me to—”
“Oh, well, she asked. That all makes sense now. There’s this thing called the Fourth Commandment you used to care about. ‘Never make it—’”
“She’s a nineteen-year-old kid who—”
“‘—personal.’ You can’t just blow up your operational protocols. What is she, like, your surrogate daughter now? Sure you don’t want to move in for good, pick out curtains together?”
“She’s been through a lot.”
“Yeah? Did she survive growing up in the foster-care system?”
“No.”
“Has she been hunted and shot by government assassins?”
“No.”
“Can she tunnel data over DNS and ICMP packets so she can exfiltrate it without detection?”
“Not that I’m awa—”
“Then I’m not impressed. I mean, look at her life. Look at her gear. MacBook Pro, iPhone—she’s running a fucking Brother scanner-printer from Staples. She’s so basic. And her social media, making all these, like, literary allusions, like, ‘Look how educated I am.’”
“What are you talking about, Joey? What’s going on?”
“I’m just sick of it. How much everyone cares so much about some people when they’re not even worth it and not at all about others.”
“You don’t know what anyone’s worth.” The door was closed, but Evan made sure to keep his voice down. “You’re a sixteen-year-old girl. Not a moral authority.”
“No? Who is, then? The assholes running everything? Politicians? Luke Devine? The president? Tell me, X. Who’s doing such an excellent job with the moral stewardship of the world that I don’t have to worry my pretty little head about it?”
“Joey. Her brother’s throat was slit. That’s all I care about. The rest is just words.”
“No,” Joey said. “Fuck that. You know how many of my friends died? Foster siblings? Drug use, domestic abuse, shot by cops. And I didn’t get to boo-hoo all over social media and have the fucking president of the United States get involved three minutes later.”
“That’s not how it—”
“Up there in Richville, when something happens to them, it’s an outrage. All of a sudden it’s, like, what? Life might not be fair for us? We might be powerless? Our kids might not be safe? And then the whole world comes crashing to a halt and pays attention to them and forgets about everyone else. It’s been three days since you got captured, and I almost could’ve never seen you again, and now you’re only paying attention to—”
She caught herself. She was breathing hard, emotion brimming, threatening to break, and he knew she was mortified for what she’d revealed.
“No,” Evan said. “I’m not. I won’t.”
“You will,” Joey said. “Everyone always does.”
Her anger had burned off. There was nothing left but a lifetime of heartbreak, of being reacquainted time and again with her own insignificance. He knew that pain himself, knew it deep down where he could pretend to forget it most of the time.
He sensed that what he said to her next could matter more than anything he’d ever told her.
A piercing screech sounded from downstairs.
The alarm.
The house had been breached.
ARES drawn, he hurtled toward the door. “Damn it,” he said. “Joey. I have to go. I’ll call you back.”
“Sure,” she said, and hung up.
33
Inefficient Idiocy
Bundled in her bathrobe, Deborah stood in the hallway of the ground floor, staring up at the hockey puck of the smoke detector in the ceiling and looking shockingly unalarmed.
She lifted an eyebrow archly. “Evan No-Last-Name,” she said, “we have to stop meeting like this.”
The detector screeched again like a ravenous pterodactyl.
“What the hell,” Evan said, holstering his gun, “is that noise?”
“The battery needs to be changed,” she said.
“That’s the low-battery alert?” It was the worst sound he had ever heard in his life. “It sounds like an incoming-missile siren.”
“Yes.” She dragged a chair over from the defunct telephone nook. “And, miraculously, they only go off in the middle of the night to create maximum psychological distress. Don’t you have one?”
Evan had electronic noses with quartz-crystal microbalance sensor arrays and AI pattern-recognition systems embedded in the door and window frames that could detect and analyze the slightest trace of smoke, airborne pathogens, or dangerous gases. When triggered, they sent a three-toned distress signal to his RoamZone and threw a colored sunrise simulation into the room during sleeping hours.
He said, “No.”
Deborah stepped up onto the chair, wobbled a bit as she reached for the ceiling. Another life-ending screech vibrated Evan’s brain and nearly sent her toppling.
He said, “Why don’t you let me—”
With a wrench she twisted the circular unit free, ripped out the battery, and let both pieces tumble to the carpet.
They breathed the blissful silence.
Evan offered his hand, and she took it daintily and stepped down. She gave him a smile. “As long as we’re up,” she said, “we might as well eat something.”
* * *
“You need to send Norris,” Rath said into the phone.
The Town Car bobbed smoothly along 1-95 toward the airport. Sitting beside him, Gordo crushed the second of two Nacho Party Packs from Taco Bell. He’d balanced each tray on the wide ledge of a thigh. Sucking liquid cheese from his thumb, he was content to leave Rath to deal with Tenpenny.
“Why can’t you just finish out the job?” Tenpenny’s voice held its trademark irritation.
“Because the Seabrook girl lives in a fancy-ass college town.” Rath scratched the burned morass of his right cheek, which the car heater had set tickling. “They got neighborhood watch, private security patrols, all that shit.”
“So you want me to send the black guy?”
“Hell yeah. Everyone’ll be too politically correct to call the cops on Double N. You know how rich white people are.”
“You’re there right now. I need this done.”
“Sure. Send Gordo waddling in. He looks like Jabba the Hutt. And I look like Jabba the Hutt’s ballsack.”
Gordo snorted. “That’s us, semper malus.”
“Fine,” Tenpenny said. “Get back to the jet. I’ll pay Norris’s ass to go tomorrow morning. By nightfall I want the girl to be past tense.”
* * *
Deborah left her cigarette in the ashtray on the window ledge, the tendril of smoke sucked out through the crack into the cool night air. She opened the freezer and refrigerator doors, took a moment to lean in and breathe the coolness, and when she turned around, her arms held a shelf of items—brown soda bottles, ice-cream carton, two freezer-chilled parlor glasses.
She set them down carefully on the kitchen table, took another drag of her cigarette, stooped to blow, then got to work fixing root-beer floats. “I did all that discipline stuff,” she said. “My whole life. But now? When I most should? I don’t want to. I want to drink root-beer floats and get fat. Fatter.”
She was perfectly slender, but Evan decided that hearing that from him right now was not what she wanted.
She slid a float across to him.
“No, thank you,” he said.
“Oh, shut up.”
Leaning back on the cushions of the bow window, she took a loud slurp through a straw and followed with another drag from the contraband cigarette. Stubbing it out, she tucked it away in another miniature preserves jar that once again appeared in her palm like a close-up magic trick.
The east-facing bow windows were heavily tinted, but even so Evan made sure to choose a chair out of the sight line from the street. “Doesn’t the smoke alarm wake up the others?” he asked.
“Yes, but they pretend it doesn’t,” she said. “It’s a domestic game, you see. Whoever finally can’t stand it has to tend to it.”
The lights in the side yard clicked on, as well as a second set on the front porch. Deborah clocked the sudden illumination with raised eyebrows.
“I reprogrammed the timers,” Evan said. “Through your network.”
“Ah,” she said. “Home security.”
A creaking of the stairs drew his focus, and a moment later Ruby entered, rubbing her eyes. “Hey, Mom.”
Deborah said, “Sweetheart.”
“Hi, guard dog.”
Evan said, “Sweetheart.”
“Which kind?” Ruby asked, chinning at the table.
“Sorry?” Evan said.
“There is a generational Seabrookian root-beer-float debate. A&W. Or Mug.”
“I don’t drink root-beer floats,” Evan said.
“Oh, shut up.” Ruby retrieved a bottle of Mug and made herself a float. She held the ice-cream carton at arm’s length, reading the nutritional facts. “A serving is a third of a cup? Who the hell eats a third of a cup of ice cream? Smurfs? Screw you, calorie content. At least announce yourself honestly.” She vigorously spooned several peels of vanilla into her glass. “I’m gonna hate-eat half the carton now.”
“That’s my girl,” Deborah said. “You show that prevaricating ice cream.”
Evan couldn’t get his mind off Joey. Was she right that people like the Seabrooks got undue attention? Or was she just mad at his priorities?
What inefficient idiocy, he thought, to be preoccupied with someone else’s feelings.
There was more movement in the house, and then Mason padded into the kitchen, wrapped in a royal-blue bathrobe. He sniffed the air. “Wow,” he said. “This kitchen. It’s so … well ventilated.”
