“I heard this new ramen place is sick,” the guy told his interlocutor and anyone else in the vicinity who might have been interested. “They have, like, a hundred flavors of shōchū.”
He shoved his way out the front gate, ignoring Evan and the rest of the world, and Evan slipped through. In case he had to beat a hasty retreat, he wedged a quarter between the latch and the frame so the gate wouldn’t autolock.
At the stairwell he finally got to use his pick set. He engaged a second quarter to keep that gate from locking also.
A fine fifty-cent investment.
He crept up to the second floor and down the corridor. Apartment 202 had a peephole. He ducked beneath it, put his ear to the door. Heard nothing inside.
Though the building was late-afternoon quiet, he couldn’t risk creeping around the corridor for long.
The apartment lock was also double-keyed. With the rake and wrench, he jogged the pins into proper alignment and eased the door silently open.
The place was dimly lit and smelled of carpet dust and greasy food. A brief foyer led to a single big studio room. No furniture.
He made out a faint scraping sound.
Pistol drawn, Evan eased through the foyer, heel to toe, minding the floorboards. More of the studio came into view. A bare mattress. A mound of fast-food wrappers. A geometric screen saver casting a striated glow from an open laptop. Then an overstuffed rucksack.
The scraping grew louder.
He eased out a breath, peered around the corner.
A girl crouched, facing away, her forehead nearly touching the far wall. She had a mane of dark wavy hair, torn jeans, a form-fitting tank top. It was hard to gauge from behind, but he guessed she was a teenager. She was bent over something, and her shoulders shook slightly. Crying?
The closet and bathroom doors were laid open, and there was no furniture for anyone to hide behind. Just her.
He thought about the double-keyed locks and wondered—was she being held captive?
He aimed the ARES at the floor but didn’t holster it. Stepping clear of the foyer, he lowered his voice so as not to startle her. “Are you okay?”
She jumped at the sound, then glanced tentatively over her shoulder. Her back curled with fear, her expression vulnerable. She looked Hispanic, but he couldn’t be sure in the dim light.
“Who are you?” she said.
“I’m not gonna hurt you.”
“Why are you here?”
He drew closer slowly, not wanting to scare her. “It’s a long story.”
“Can … can you help me?”
He holstered the pistol but stayed alert. “Who put you here?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember. I … I…”
Her posture suddenly snapped into shape, a bundle of coiled muscle. She pivoted into a vicious leg sweep, leading with the hard edge of her heel, sweeping both of his boots out from under him.
As he accelerated into weightlessness, he saw the glint in her eye matched by the glint of the fixed-blade combat knife in her right hand. A sharpening stone lay on the carpet, the stone she’d been crouching over, scraping away when he’d walked in. Already she’d rotated, spinning up onto her feet, readying to drive the blade through his sternum.
He struck the floor, the wind knocking from his lungs in a single clump, and it occurred to him just how badly he had misjudged the situation.
11
Enemy of My Enemy
Evan’s first focus was the knife.
Darting down at him like a shiv stab, all blade, nothing to grab.
Laid out on the carpet as if he were a corpse, he swept the bar of his forearm protectively across his chest, hammering the girl’s slender wrist and knocking the knife off course just before it broke skin. The tip skimmed his shirt above the ribs, slicing fabric.
His second focus was her fist.
Which she’d cocked and deployed even while her knife hand had still been in motion. He had a split-second to admire the technique—knuckles following blade with double-tap timing—before she broke his nose.
He rolled his head with the punch, tumbled gracelessly up onto his feet. She grabbed the back of his shirt, but the magnetic buttons gave way—click-click-click—and he spun right out of it. His eyes watered from the blow to the nose, but the escape bought him a much-needed second to blink his way back to some version of clarity. She flung the shirt aside and launched a barrage of kicks.
He parried, parried, parried, bruising his forearms and knuckles, holding his attention mostly on the knife.
She came at him again, a jailhouse lunge, but now he was ready for it. His hands moved in blurry unison, a bong sau/lop sau trap that simultaneously blocked and grabbed her arm. He clenched hard, slid his fist up the length of her forearm, and hit the bump of her wrist with enough force that her fingers released and the knife shot free.
They were nose-to-nose, her mouth forming an O of perfect shock. He had a wide-open lane to her windpipe—one elbow strike and she’d be over—but Jack’s Eighth Commandment sailed in and tapped the back of his brain: Never kill a kid.
He barreled her over and pinned her with a cross-face cradle, a grappling move that left her locked up, her knee smashed to her cheek, arms flailing uselessly to the sides.
“Get off me!” she shouted. “I will kill you! I will fucking—”
He pressed his forehead to her temple, immobilizing her head and shielding his eyes. “Breathe,” he said.
She inhaled sharply.
“Again.”
She obeyed.
“Where is the package?” he asked.
“What?”
“What’d you do with the package?”
“The hell are you talking about?”
“You saw the message. You beat me here.”
“Can you get your knee out of my ribs?”
Evan eased off the pressure. “What’d you do with it?”
She gave no answer. Each breath rasped through her contorted throat.
Blood was trickling from Evan’s nose, tickling his cheek. “I’m gonna let you go, and we’re gonna try this again, okay?”
Her answer came strained. “Okay.”
“I’d prefer not to have to kill you.”
“I’d like to say the same, but I haven’t decided yet.”
He released her, and they stood. They kept their palms raised, halfway to an open-hand guard. She drew in deep lungfuls, her cheeks flushed. She was expertly trained but still green.
He got his first clear look at her. Her hair fell to her shoulders, thick and dark and lush. The right side had been shaved short, but it was mostly hidden by the tumbling length of her locks, a surprisingly subtle effect. She was lean and fit, her deltoids pronounced enough to show notches in the muscle.
“I’m gonna put my shirt back on,” he said. “If you come at me, it won’t go well for you.”
Keeping his gaze on her, he backed up and put on his shirt. Next to the rucksack, a ragged flannel rested on the carpet. He tossed it to her.
She tugged it on.
Keeping a bit of distance, they stared at each other. A wisp of agitated piano reached them from outside, the concerto hitting the third movement.
“Let’s cut to it,” Evan said. “I see how you move. I know you’re an Orphan. I know who sent you.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“What’s the package?”
She answered him with a glare.
He risked a fleeting look at her rucksack. “Is it in there?”
“No.”
He crouched over the rucksack.
“Don’t touch my stuff.”
He rooted around in it, sneaking quick glances down. Clothes, a few toiletries, a shoe box filled with what looked like personal letters.
“Put those down.”
“Is there some kind of code in these papers?”
“No.”
He armed blood off his upper lip. “Is the package something on the laptop?”
“No.”
“If you’re lying, I can hack into it.”
Her mouth firmed into something more aggressive than a smirk. “Good luck.”
As he started to reach for the laptop, it suddenly alerted with a ping, the screen saver vanishing.
Four surveillance feeds came up, tiling the screen. It took a moment for Evan to register that they were streaming different angles of the outside of the apartment complex.