Rotated out away from the second-floor wall, a leg swinging in the open air, Evan fought to keep one heel dug into the flashing. His fingers cramped around the top of the shutter. The hinge plate strained against the screw, forcing it out another quarter twist. If Evan fell, he’d either break a leg or wind up an open target on the ground below.
He rammed the gun through his belt, yanked his knife from a cargo pocket, and snapped it open. With his full weight fighting against him, he seated the tip of the knife in the flathead slot of the screw, cranking it a half turn to the right. He adjusted his grip on the knife handle and cranked it again, the screw tightening back into the wall.
Just enough for the hinge to hold.
A darkness fell across the sill.
Evan dropped the folding knife.
Yanked the pistol from his belt.
As the shutter swung him wide once more, he fired through the window.
He heard the smack of lead hitting meat.
The submachine gun knocking against the floor.
The hinge ripped the screw loose, the shutter tearing away from the wall. Evan grabbed for the window, his hands landing on the lower frame, the teeth of the remaining glass shards slicing through his flesh.
But he didn’t let go.
He hauled himself up over the sill, the shards scraping his stomach, and tumbled into his old bedroom.
No sign of Orphan A.
A pool of blood glimmered on the floor by Evan’s face. The FN P90 rested over by the desk, still rocking. Near the doorway Orphan A’s pistol lay discarded.
Evan stood.
He walked out into the hall.
The drops of blood made Orphan A easy to track. A streak pointed into Jack’s room, the second on the left past the stairs.
Evan followed. Before he could reach the doorway, he heard the thump of Orphan A’s shoulders hitting the wall right beside him.
He heard the man slide to a sitting position.
Evan put his own shoulders to the wall and lowered himself to sit back-to-back with him.
Two Orphans, separated by a single wall.
Evan said, “How you doing?”
“Not so hot,” Orphan A said. “Thanks for asking.”
A dull ache throbbed in Evan’s eardrums, the volume turned down on the world, his head stuffed with gauze. He checked his palms. Broken glass glinted in the bloody slits. “Critical?” he asked.
“Gut shot, so yeah. Looks that way.”
Four and a half inches away, Orphan A’s head tilted back to thump his side of the wall.
Evan said, “I was told you had a score to settle with me. Beyond Bennett, I mean.”
“You could say that.” Orphan A’s breaths took on a wheeze. “It was that woman you killed.”
Evan gave the words a moment to sink in.
“The heroin addict?” he asked. “The one I left in the abandoned textile factory?”
“What? No. No.”
Evan waited for Orphan A to catch his breath.
Finally A spoke again, “I was developing her as an asset, but it developed into more than that. Like it does, I guess. I don’t know. Never happened to me before. Never since.” A few more ragged breaths. “A Chechen girl. Man, she was a princess-warrior all right. Jet-black hair down to the middle of her back. Hazel eyes that glowed . I was supposed to gather DNA from her. You know, strands of hair. Cells from her toothbrush.” Orphan A paused. “A copper-washed steel shell of a sniper round with her fingerprint on it.”
Evan would have thought that the last round of punishing revelations had hardened him against fresh torments, but there it was, a new blade twisting between his ribs.
Orphan A continued, “She was pregnant, turns out. I didn’t know till later. The Russians caught up to her soon enough, put her in a forced-labor camp in Krasnoyarsk.” He coughed a few times. “Chechen women don’t do so well there. Pregnant Chechen women do even worse. They kept locking her in the ice insulator—a cold-punishment cell the size of a roomy coffin. She was tough. She made it through the first fifteen-day sentence. And the second.” His labored breaths filled the pause. “It was the fifth that got her.”
Evan cradled the revolver in his hands.
Down to one round.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I never knew I was supplying the shell that would get her killed,” Orphan A said. “Guess I never wanted to know. It’s my fault, really. For thinking I could have more in this life.” Another wet cough. “At the end of the day, isn’t it always our fault?”
Evan placed the snub nose of the revolver against the dry wall to his side.
“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
He fired.
He heard Orphan A’s body absorb the shot and then slump over onto the floor.
He sat for a while breathing the scent of his old house.
It was all so goddamned sad if he thought about it too much.
He imagined Jack emerging from his bedroom door, brow twisted in disdain. You done bellyaching yet? That’s good, because you got work to do. On your feet, son. On your feet.
Evan shoved himself up.
Limping out, he dialed the RoamZone, his fingers leaving bloody smears on the screen.
When Trevon picked up, he sounded exhausted, wrung out. “Hello?”
“It’s me. How you hanging in?”
“I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”
Ask a personal question when someone asks you one.
Evan smiled. “I’m hanging in, too, Trevon.”
“Kiara gets home in one day, eleven hours, four minutes, and nineteen seconds,” Trevon said. “Now it’s one day, eleven hours, four minutes, and fourteen seconds.”
Evan stepped out onto the porch and cast a final look back at the house where his second life had begun.
For better or worse, this was who he was now.
This was what he did.
“Well then,” he said. “I’d better hurry.”
63
Why Fuck Around?
Evan didn’t have time for a better plan.
The D.C. mission had cramped him on one end, Kiara’s pending flight on the other.
Big Face had flown back today from Suriname, probably landing about the same time Evan had landed himself. But Russell Gadds would have taken a direct flight on a private jet, whereas Evan had flown a switchback route in economy, arriving at Orange County’s John Wayne Airport with an ache in his lower back reminding him of parachute landings that were bad and fist-to-fist clashes that were worse.
After going to a safe house to clean up the cuts on his hands, grab some load-out gear, and switch vehicles to an old Ram pickup, Evan had driven straight to the wholesale district.
From the roof of the neighboring bakery, he’d intercepted enough radio comms with a parabolic mike to know that Gadds was on premises along with his sixteen remaining associates, that they were braced and ready for an attack, and that the cinder-block building was virtually unassailable.
Though Evan was vastly outnumbered, all the targets were gathered in one location, and with Kiara due to touch down around noon tomorrow, he couldn’t risk letting any of them leave that building alive.
Not if he was to keep his promise to Trevon.
Evan pressed his palms on the thighs of his cargo pants once more to blot the blood from his cuts. Then he gripped the steering wheel with one hand and with the other lifted his ARES 1911. The contour of the grip, the high-profile straight-eight sights, the matte-black finish that gave off neither glint nor gleam—it felt like home.
He’d loaded it with 230-grain Speer Gold Dot hollow points, because why fuck around?
The industrial neighborhood was deserted for the night, the surrounding streets and buildings empty. The back edge of twilight leached from the sky, stars visible overhead even through the downtown smog.
He would have preferred more time for operational planning.
But sometimes you had to go with a full-frontal assault.
A cooling breeze blew through the pickup’s rolled-down windows, riffling Evan’s hair. Idling across the street from the compound, he watched the flicker of movement between the fence-filler strips that obscured any clear view through the chain-link.
Gadds’s men were on high alert, walking overlapping patrols around the building.
Evan waited for two of them to cross by the front gate.
Then he seated the accelerator against the floor.
The Ram shot forward, 240 horses and 420 pound-feet of torque powering more than two tons of Detroit steel through the perimeter fence.
The gate smashed down, crushing both men.
As a bonus the impact yanked down the neighboring sections of fence, the concertina wire snaring another man beneath it.
Screeching to a halt, Evan fired through the open passenger window, putting the trapped man down as he tried to untangle his bloody torso to lift his Kalashnikov.
Before the men guarding the entrance could react, Evan shot out the windshield and drilled them each with a round, painting the metal door behind him with their blood.
Kicking open the driver’s door, he jumped out and sprinted for the row of shipping containers on the west side of the yard.
More of Gadds’s men sped around the corners of the building, responding to the threat. Their rap sheets had been helpfully listed on the DEA chart, Evan pairing an identity with each shot he fired.
Richard Brewer, a dime in Lompoc for second-degree murder—center mass.
Hector DeJean, good-behaviored out for kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon—bridge of the nose.
Esau Corona, convicted and released serial rapist—left clavicle entry, dinner-plate-size chunk of shoulder blade blown out the other side.
Eight men down.