Evan nodded at the chair he’d pulled out. “Sit down.”
Bo dragged himself across the linoleum and pulled himself up onto the chair. He’d gone red, veins standing out in his forehead and throat. “Who are you?”
“I’m a representative.”
“Okay.” Bo spread his hands on the surface of the table, grabbing maximum surface area as if he were concerned about slipping off. “Okay, my employer and I can work with that. We know there have been some irregularities. It can be worked out. Which supplier do you represent?”
“Trevon Gaines.”
Evan watched the flush drain slowly from Bo’s face, leaving his lips with a bluish tinge.
“I want your employer’s name. And I want the name of the other man, too. The one who helped you kill Trevon Gaines’s family.”
“I can’t…” Bo clung to the life raft of the table. “”You don’t understand. You don’t know what he’ll do to me.”
“Will it be worse than what I’ll do to you?”
“Yes.”
They sat a moment, two friends at a breakfast table.
“I understand you’re scared,” Evan said. “Let me fast-forward to one hour from now. Your other knee will be shattered. Both elbows. Your wrists. Every finger. Your jaw, broken so badly you’ll be gagging on your own blood. Which will make it that much harder for you to choke out the names that you’re going to give me anyway.” He leaned forward. “I will get my answers. And you will die. The only question is, how do you want to spend the next hour?”
Bo bent his head down, nostrils flaring as he drew breath. “Why do I have to die?”
“How many people did you kill at Trevon’s mother’s house?”
He closed his eyes. “That was different.”
“Not to me.”
“That was business.”
“And this is my business.”
“Please, God.” Reality was dawning now. Bo palmed his forehead, which had gone shiny with sweat. “There’s gotta be another way. Money. Something. I can set it right.”
“Seventeen dead. You ruined Trevon Gaines’s life. You terrorized that young man.”
“It was my orders.”
Evan thought about Trevon’s notepad with his goals for the day. The stuffed frog tucked in up to its chin. It’s all my fault.
He stood. “I’m done talking now.”
Bo bolted back in his chair, held up his hand. “Okay. Okay.”
He told Evan what he needed to know.
Afterward Evan walked over to the gas stove, flopped down the door, and turned it on high. He found a matchbook in one of the drawers, bent a matchstick around the front flap, and thumb-flicked it against the striker.
“Wait. Jesus Christ … you can’t just—Motherfucker, wait! ”
On his way to the door, Evan left the matchbook on the end of the counter, the stick burning down toward the rest of the pack, a makeshift fuse. Already the smell of gas laced the air.
Bo fell out of the chair and struck the floor with a yelp. Gritting his teeth, he started pulling himself arm over arm across the kitchen toward the matchbook.
Evan adjusted the pistol in his hip holster and walked out.
He crossed the street, got into his Taurus, and pulled away from the curb.
He’d gone half a block when he heard the boom.
38
As Long a Long Shot As Ever There Was
Evan was in desperate need of vodka. Aside from the hour-and-fifteen-minute nap he’d grabbed in his car, he hadn’t stopped moving in four days. Driving the speed limit south on the 405, he headed for a long-term-parking lot near LAX, where he’d changed out his truck for the Taurus. He never returned to Castle Heights after a leg of a mission without at least one vehicle switch.
He pictured the slender bottle of Tigre Blanc in his freezer, the smooth French wheat vodka a world apart from the Spirytus he’d utilized in D.C. to scorch his esophagus and to liberate Doug Wetzel’s head from his body.
It was still early in the day, but given his travels Evan hadn’t yet caught up to Pacific Standard Time. Half of his internal clock was set to East Coast time, while the other half readied itself for bed in Europe.
The soporific thrum of his tires across the asphalt was making his head nod. He was just reaching to blast the air-conditioning into his face when his RoamZone gave its distinctive ring.
The car’s hands-free audio system pulled the incoming call through the dashboard, and Evan found himself confronting a mobile number he didn’t recognize on the screen.
The Seventh Commandment decreed that he take only one mission at a time. His last client had already chosen Trevon Gaines, which meant that no one else should be calling the Nowhere Man’s encrypted line.
He clicked to answer, hesitated, then said, “Do you need my help?”
“No…” The familiar feminine voice shattered through his grogginess like a mainlined hit of epinephrine. “But you need mine.”
*
Over the past few years, Orphan V and Evan had tried to kill each other on numerous occasions. As elusive and deadly as Evan, Candy McClure had an array of specialties, among them making the bodies of her targets disappear. While defending himself, Evan had kicked her onto her own bottles of concentrated hydrofluoric acid, her back and shoulders taking the brunt of the damage.
She’d not forgotten that.
The past half year had brought Evan a number of revelations, among them an awareness that Candy’s allegiances might have shifted away from the Program. The files on the flash drive he’d lifted from Doug Wetzel seemed to bear that out; she was now among the targets on the president’s wish list.
Before making contact with Evan, she’d come to Los Angeles, a decent guess since a number of their run-ins had been in this city. She’d given a meet location and hung up before he could argue.
He parked a full ten blocks away and approached the destination cautiously, taking side streets and cutting through people eddied around gourmet-food trucks.
From the safety of a crowded sidewalk, he stared across Wilshire Boulevard at the entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Restored streetlamps from the 1920s and ’30s formed a large-scale assemblage in the front. The two-hundred-plus cast-iron lamps had been painted a flat gray and placed neatly on a tight grid. At dusk they imbued the air with a Hollywood glow, part dream, part drunken fantasy.
Patrons threaded among them now, a few unoriginal souls striking Gene Kelly poses for iPhone shots. Evan scanned the rooftops, the parked vehicles, the faces in the crowd. When he looked back at the forest of streetlamps, Candy was standing among them, perfectly motionless.
At first glance she was tough to identify, having changed her hair color and appearance yet again. She was masterful at drawing attention to her body—which was worth drawing attention to—and changing her carriage and posture. Today she wore a long-sleeved bodysuit top stretched tightly down into a pair of dark blue jeans. Half circles of skin showed at her hips where the leg holes pulled high above her thick leather belt. Black cowboy boots, dark glasses, glossy pink lipstick. Her hair, dyed a vibrant rose gold, hung down her back in a knotted rope, swaying like a horse’s tail.
Everyone noticed her, yes. But she directed the eye in such a way that not one male or female observer would be able to recall her facial features with any detail.
Before revealing himself Evan watched her, looking for any tell that she had backup in the area. It was impossible to read her eyes behind the dark shades, and her training was such that she was unlikely to supply any nonverbal cues.
He gave a final look around and stepped out from the cover of the crowd.
She picked him up as he was entering the crosswalk and turned away, casting a glance over her shoulder that in another context would have been seductive. He followed her inside, sidestepping museum visitors to keep her in view. She carved west from the entrance, and he came up behind her, close enough to hear the taps of her boots against the concrete.
They passed through the Sunday throng, children bickering, parents grabbing sippy cups from beneath strollers, a foursome of flirty college kids huddling over a museum-campus map, giddy from the proximity. Evan kept part of his focus on Candy, the rest on the periphery. Orphans operated in the shadows, navigating their way through the underbelly of the world everyone else lived in. But much of their work was also out in the wide open, their footprints invisible to everyone but conspiracy theorists and fellow intelligencers.
Ahead in the LACMA courtyard, a thick multitude of durable tubes fell from a raised steel grid, forming a penetrable sculpture. A few kids spun inside the exhibit, arms spread, the yellow-lime hoses draping their arms and shoulders.
Candy stepped into the embrace of the piece, the tubes rustling and then shaping around her form like dense jungle vines. Evan followed her in, parting the way with bladed hands.