Dark horse, p.4
Dark Horse, page 4
Now there were seven of each. But six of the boots.
By the time the new articles of clothing arrived, the numbers would still be off by one.
It was okay. He could handle this.
He started to walk out.
Halted at the threshold of the bedroom.
His place was a mess, covered with sawdust and tools and fucking half-drunk water bottles with germs of other people on them. He could manage this—barely—along with the unfinished state of the penthouse, but having his clothing count misaligned was too much. Distress roiled in his stomach, pressed at the backs of his eyes.
He reversed course, plucking one item from each stack on the floor. Then one hanging shirt and watch fob from the closet.
Holding the mound of brand-new items against his chest, he walked back to the fireplace, tossed the RoamZone to stick against the rise of the flue, and threw the clothes into the fire.
Now there were six of everything and order had been restored to the universe.
With an exhale he uncramped the muscles around his neck. Stared into the flame. Took measure of his breath. Felt the coolness at his nostrils, his throat, the expansion of his ribs, the belly.
A sound pierced his awareness.
The RoamZone.
Ringing.
He stared at the phone stuck magnetlike to the chimney before him. The tech enhancements he’d made to his RoamZone included a holographic display incubated by Chinese and Australian researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne. Visible without 3-D glasses, the images thrown beyond the device were twenty-five nanometers thin—a thousand nanometers skinnier than a single strand of hair.
Right now the pop-up visual displayed a phone number with a South Texas area code.
Evan tapped the holograph to answer, the RoamZone reverting to speaker mode.
Adrenaline and anticipation converged into something dangerous and delicious. The start of a mission that could lead to his death or another piece of his salvation.
He took a breath. Exhaled to calm.
Then said, “Do you need my help?”
6
A Catalog of Horrors
The voice from the phone was deep, resonant. “Will you help anyone who is in need?” Holographic electric-blue sound waves augmented the audio, rising and falling with each consonant.
Evan’s question had rarely been answered with a question. He felt the heat of the fire against his chest, his face. “If they’re worthy.”
“I don’t know, then.”
“What?”
“If you’ll find me worthy.”
An unusual start, unlike any preceding mission. Evan let the man breathe. He sounded troubled. A faint kiss of a Hispanic accent, a formality to the cadence of his words. Unrushed, composed. A man accustomed to being listened to.
“So that’s what you do?” the man asked. “You help people? Outside the law? People who no one else is willing to help?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want for it?”
“Nothing.”
A note of incredulity. “Nothing?”
“No money. No credit. And no permission.”
A long silence. Then the man said, “A man who needs none of those things can move the world.”
“How did you get this number?” Evan asked.
“From the Esposito cousin. Rogelio Esposito.”
The young worker with the forearm scar. Evan had given him the phone number less than twenty-four hours ago.
The man spoke again. “He has family in Eden. My town. An aunt and her boy who nature has been unkind to. They are good people. He is a good boy, too.”
“Describe him,” Evan said.
“He’s a Mexican,” the man said. “Brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin. A scar on his forearm.”
“What’s it from?”
“Hot-mix asphalt. I had him put to work here one fall. He went to school briefly with…” A slight hesitation. “With my daughter.”
“What is your name?”
“Aragón Urrea. Perhaps you have heard of me.”
“I have not.”
A very long silence. “I have heard of you. The Nowhere Man.”
The conversation was stilted, long pauses and awkward hitches. Evan asked carefully, “Why do you think I would have heard of you?”
“I am not a good man. And now, now God has punished me.”
“How have you been punished?”
“My daughter has been taken. By my enemy.”
“Who is your enemy?”
“Cartel.” Aragón breathed. “My competitors.”
Evan stared at the RoamZone stuck to the flue at eye level, the dancing blue light emitted from the screen sculpting the contours of the voice.
“You’re cartel?” Evan said. “And you’re calling me?”
“I’m not cartel. I am an unconventional businessman.”
“Assume I’ve already heard every version of that argument,” Evan said. “So we can skip this part. You said you know who I am. So I’ll ask you again: Why are you calling me?”
“Do you know of La Familia León?”
Evan did. He gave the revelation the respect it deserved.
The Leones had muscled in on the Zetas in Nuevo León, one of the Mexican states floating below the border of South Texas, and they had affiliate franchises starting to metastasize throughout the American Southwest. There was only one way to take on the Zetas—the most vicious cartel in the world. To be more vicious. Inspire more fear. Project more terror. Stories had spread, some apocryphal, some not, a catalog of horrors.
Mass graves in the desert, desiccated limbs sprouting from the sand like gnarled roots.
Crack-blitzed teenage initiates carving organs from their rivals and eating them while the hemorrhaging victims looked on.
Kingpins smuggling lions onto their ranches and cultivating in them an appetite for human meat.
Gunmen storming nightclubs, hurling decapitated heads across dance floors.
Home-invasion squads forcing federales to watch the violation and dismemberment of their wives, their sons, their daughters.
An orchard of fifty-five-gallon oil drums sprouting in an abandoned salvage yard, each one plugged with a concrete-encased corpse.
Journalists mummified in duct tape, left to bake to death in the trunks of abandoned cars, the metal dented from their feet and heads.
Ex-girlfriends found stiff and eyeless in alleys, the Leones gang sign carved between their shoulder blades with butcher knives.
“I’ve heard of them,” Evan said.
“Years ago a distant associate of mine was taken,” Aragón said. “They call it white torture. Blinding bright light beamed into his eyes as they hung him from a rail for five days, arms behind his back. And then? Darkness. And silence. Removing each sense one by one until you don’t know if you are dead. Until the only way you know you are alive is from pain. Your senses revolt and long for it. Pain. They said he begged to be crucified again, that he beat his head against the floor until the cartilage of his nose was smashed flat to his skull. Just to feel.”
The fire leapt before Evan, a dance of orange and red.
“I visited him sometime afterward in a facility,” Aragón continued. “He was broken, twitching, a living tremor shaped like a human body. His eyes were dead. He had no light left inside him. I have never seen a human being look like he looked. I had to pause outside his hospital room and sit to catch my breath. For me, with the things I have seen, the things I have done. For me to need to catch my breath…” The thought trailed off and died.
The pain in his voice was tangible, a deep ache thrumming beneath the surface of the words.
“These savages,” Aragón said. “They obey no rules. My eighteen-year-old daughter is in their hands. She is a beautiful girl. She is pure of heart. She is untainted by who I am and what I have done. She is good. She is as good as I am not. And they have her.”
“Why are you calling me?”
“When I was a little boy, I vowed never to let fear in again. Not all the way. Until now. Now it has gotten in. And I think I might die from it.”
There was such desperation in him, raw and unformed, the desperation of a man who had long forgotten what it was to be desperate.
“You asked if I need your help,” he said. “I do. I need your help. Will you help me?”
When Evan reached out to pull the RoamZone free from the metal rise, his hand was the slightest bit unsteady. He swiped the screen, disabling the holographic mode, and pressed the screen to his warm cheek.
He heard the faintest sound, like broom whiskers brushing dryly across a floor. The sound of Aragón Urrea weeping. Evan ran his thumb across his hairline, freeing beads of sweat.
He said, “I don’t know,” and disconnected the line.
7
The Dark Man
The crossing at Laredo had been seamless. ICE, Border Patrol, Mexican customs officers—none of their focus was on people being smuggled south across the border.
So here Anjelina was, away from the reach of her father or any law and order she had ever known, trapped in the gilded cage of this god-awful estate that felt more like an homage to Scarface than anything of the real world.
Gaudy gold sconces, Carrara marble floors, a bed the size of a small boat on which she floated like Ophelia in the stream in that one painting Mr. Hirsh kept on the homeroom wall. Anjelina felt just as lifeless, just as transformed. One hand resting on her chest, one on her stomach, willing her heart to slow. It thumped against her palm as if begging to be let out.
She’d been ensconced in an upstairs corner room with two large windows facing the front and side of the mansion. Between billowing tassel curtains parted like a bodice, she could see men patrolling the resortlike grounds with assault rifles. A swimming pool out of some MTV party show, rock waterfalls and bikinied girls with glazed eyes and flat laughs. And somewhere the one everyone talked about. The one everyone feared.
El Moreno.
The Dark Man.
She couldn’t see him, but she heard the low hum of his voice, how the others hushed in reverence when he spoke, and she could make out a curling wisp of cigar smoke lifting through the beams of the pergola.
She turned her head from the window and stared at the high ceiling. A garish chandelier billowing with glass beads. Or maybe they were diamonds.
She’d learned from her father that wealth could be limitless. It could be so large that it became an abyss impossible to fill.
She wasn’t crying, not exactly, but she felt tears sliding down her temples. She couldn’t muster the strength to sob. She felt the specter of death hovering about her. In a sense she had died already and could not know if she’d be reborn.
With her fingertips she pressed on the puffy edges of her eyes. She ached all the way through, terror soaking her to the bone. She’d never imagined she could feel like this.
From outside, she heard the voice once more. She couldn’t make out the words but their cadence was intense, aggressive, drug-fueled. Only the one voice spoke. There was silence for El Moreno.
She turned away from the window onto her side in the fetal position. She clutched her stomach.
And at last she sobbed.
8
Easily Traumatized
Evan was standing in the glass freezer room at the kitchen’s edge contemplating the sparse vodka options when his front door burst open. By the time he caught up to himself, he had cleared the threshold, mist streamers spilling over his shoulders, ARES 1911 drawn from his Kydex holster.
He was aiming at Joey’s center mass.
She smirked at him, sticking her hands above her head. Her Rhodesian ridgeback padded in at her side, then sat, cocked his head, and regarded Evan with a wrinkled brow.
“Hey, X,” Joey said, “Shoot a girl, why dontcha? It’s not like you texted moi.”
He holstered the pistol back in the appendix carry position beneath his shirt. “I’m not used to traffic through here.”
She lowered her hands, heeled the sturdy door shut behind her, and smiled, showing off the hair-thin gap in her front teeth and putting a dimple in her right cheek. A strip of her hair was shaved on the right side above the ear, a subtle undercut that gave a punk flair to her tumbling black-brown waves. She wore a T-shirt that read HACKING IS MY LOVE LANGUAGE and had an army-surplus rucksack slung over her shoulder. One leg was kicked out, the top of her Doc Martens boot rocked away from her shin, her hip shoved to the other side. She was beautiful and abrasive, quintessentially teenage.
The ridgeback, whom Joey had ingeniously named Dog, padded over and nuzzled Evan’s palm.
“Why so jumpy?” Joey asked.
“I had a call.”
“Like a call call?” She affected her pompous Orphan X voice. “‘Do you need my help?’ ‘Are you eating enough fiber?’”
“I’m mostly certain I don’t sound like that.”
“You know how they say you can’t hear what your own voice sounds like?”
Evan scratched Dog behind the left ear, and the boy leaned his big head into the touch. “I told you you can’t bring him here. You know how uptight they are about pets.”
She waved him off. “A new mission, huh? Is that why you’re in there self-medicating and it’s barely six o’clock?”
“Is it still called self-medication if you’re really good at it?”
“Uh, yeah.” She turned the latter word into two syllables. “But you can’t do another mission yet. Don’t we have to find your birth father?”
Evan’s last mission had introduced him to the mother he’d never known and a half brother who he was still figuring out what to do about. He’d discovered that he’d been the product of a brief failed affair and had learned the name of his biological father—Jacob Baridon. Baridon had been a no-shit rodeo cowboy, a hackneyed development that Evan still couldn’t get his head around. The databases had turned up little else about Baridon, and given the fact that Evan’s living quarters had Chernobyl’d, he had turned to more pressing concerns. But Joey wasn’t one to let an uncomfortable matter lie.
“I’ve had enough family reunions for the foreseeable future,” Evan said.
Joey breezed past him, smelling of bubble gum, and dumped her rucksack on the kitchen island. “C’mon, X. What if he’s out there somewhere? Don’t you have to know? What if he’s homeless? Or an oil tycoon? What if he died in, like, a tragic manscaping accident?”
“Manscaping?”
“Gawd. Read a magazine.”
“Why does everything you say sound like an accusation?”
“Why are you so dim-witted and judgmental?” She arched an eyebrow at him. “See what I did there?”
Evan looked at Dog the dog. Dog looked back at him with sympathy.
“Oh—I brought you something.” She stuck her hand in the rucksack. “Wait for it. Waaaait for it. And … wa-la!” She pulled out a crystal dish holding a baby aloe vera plant nestled atop a rainbow assortment of glass pebbles. She stared at him, beaming that high-wattage smile. “Vera III!”
All the colors jumbled together caused discomfort to swell in his chest. “Too many colors,” he said. “I don’t like rainbows.”
“Homophobe.”
“That’s not—”
She thrust the tiny plant at him. “You need someone to look after you. ’Cuz—God knows—no human would take that job.”
He poked at the pebbles and then started sorting them by color. She slapped at his hand. “Stop it. You’re violating her personhood.”
“She’s a plant.” He scowled at her.
Joey was lit up now, really enjoying herself. “Did you just microaggress me?”
“You’re gonna get a macroaggression if you keep this up.”
She ticktocked a finger at him. “Trigger warning.”
“Josephine!”
“Okay, okay. Jeez. Get with the times, X.” She poked her finger into the soil of the living wall, and he clamped his jaws shut to stop from reprimanding her. “Now that you’ve not thanked me for my gift”—she made a kissy face at Vera III—“I’m sorry, pretty girl, that you have to have such a self-absorbed daddy—do you want to not thank me for schlepping over here to fix your hardware?”
“Schlep?”
“L.A.’s a Jewish town, X. A girl’s gotta code-switch.”
“Code-switch?”
“That thing where you just repeat the last thing I said but sound stupid? Not so charming.”
“Noted.”
“Now. Tell me about the phone call and this mission we’re going on.”
“There’s no ‘we.’ I’m not even sure if I’m going on this mission.”
At last her face turned serious. She hopped to sit on the island, and Dog the dog mirrored her, plopping down at Evan’s side. “What? Don’t you have to? Isn’t that, like, unofficial Nowhere Man rules?”
“I don’t know,” Evan said. “I don’t know what to do.”
She stared at him, dumbfounded. “Say more.”
He told her about the phone call, giving her what sparse information Aragón Urrea had offered. When he finished, she sat quietly, nibbling the inside of her cheek, her face suddenly full and youthful. He imagined what he might feel if she were in the hands of La Familia León. What he might do.
The thought was too much to bear, and he pushed it away before it had fastened onto his mind with specifics. It was the first time he could recall having to terminate an imagined scenario.
She was watching his face, watching him closely.
“Once you fix the gear in the Vault, can you do a deep dive on him?” Evan asked. “I need to know everything.”
The doorbell rang. Evan and Joey stared at the door, and Dog the dog emitted a low growl. Evan said, “Hush, boy,” and Dog silenced.
Walking to the door, Evan glanced at the security monitor embedded in the wall. Hugh Walters, HOA president, stood outside, arms crossed so his navy-blue blazer pinched at the shoulders, fingers drumming briskly on opposite triceps. Peeved body posture.
