Evan had no idea what he was talking about.
“They taught me that anger is a secondary emotion. That it usually covers fear, sadness, guilt. I thought this was helpful at first. I spent so much time trying to excavate the feelings that lay beneath, to see if that would help me control myself better.” Gadds’s meaty features had turned ruddy. He looked more than slightly unhinged. “But do you know what I discovered?”
Evan said, “No.”
“For me? Anger just covers more anger .”
“They say knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment.”
“Who says that?”
“People who quote Lao-tzu.”
Gadds swept his shiny locks back off his forehead. “Who the hell are you?”
Evan said, “The Nowhere Man.”
Gadds had no immediate reaction, but from the corner of his eye Evan sensed Hurtada’s face loosen slightly.
“The Nowhere Man?” Gadds said. “That some sort of secret identity?”
“Something like that.”
“I heard of him, chief,” Hurtada said. Sweat glistened in his buzz cut. The wrist of his gun hand was slightly slack, the muzzle dipping. “People call him, and he helps them, like some kinda vengeance service. I thought he was … you know, like a urban legend.”
“Well,” Gadds said, “looks like he bleeds the same as everyone else.” He stood up, pressed his knuckles into the chocolate leather of his blotter. “So what is it exactly that you do, Nowhere Man?”
“Why don’t you call my number and find out?”
With some effort Gadds converted his scowl into a smile. He dragged the phone closer on his desk and punched the speaker button. The dull whine of the dial tone filled the office. He stared at Evan expectantly.
Evan said, “It’s 1-855-2-NOWHERE.”
“I get it,” Gadd said. “That’s cute.”
He snatched one of the pens from the gold-plated swivel and began punching in the numbers. The men stood expectantly. Evan watched closely.
“And also?” Evan said.
Gadds finished dialing, looked up.
Evan said, “Thanks for gathering all your men in one place for me.”
Gadds’s head jerked down at the phone speaker as the call went through.
In the blastproofed front room, Evan’s RoamZone did not ring.
Instead it forwarded the call.
To the tiny circuit-wired detonator inside the fresh magazine he’d inserted into his ARES 1911.
That magazine wasn’t packed with bullets.
It was packed with C4.
The boom was impressive.
The aluminum forging of the ARES provided plenty of shrapnel. The plates on the walls turned the room into a steel box, amplifying the overpressure waves that Evan had calculated from the precise dimensions of the space supplied by Trevon.
The four men were dead instantly, cut through by flying chunks of aluminum, their organs collapsed from blast pressure.
A weighty throw of flung spatter thrummed the bullet-resistant window in its frame.
Of the men inside the office, only Evan was expecting the explosion.
He skipped back from between the two men guarding him, grabbing the wrist of Hurtada’s gun hand as he fired, aiming the shot past his own chest into Corté s’s.
He twisted the fat man around, seized the remaining pen conveniently presented by the gold-plated swivel on the blotter, and jabbed it twice into the side of Hurtada’s neck.
The carotid spurt shot straight up, tapping the ceiling. It attained less height with the next heartbeat.
Evan dropped the pen and turned around. One of the doors leading back from the office still trembled on its hinges.
Russell Gadds was gone.
*
Panting audibly, Gadds ran through the warren of corridors, passing storage bays, packing rooms, surgical tables dusted with baking soda, an assemblage of recycled lab equipment, heaps of gas masks.
He couldn’t rate his anger on a scale of one to ten, but it was safe to say his terror was at an eleven.
Rounding a corner, he tripped over a shipping box filled with jugs of paint stripper. As they rattled on the concrete floor, he stared behind him up the long, unlit corridor, waiting for the Nowhere Man to appear.
Nothing.
Shoving himself to his feet, Gadds doubled back, cut through an open galley kitchen, and stumbled into a parallel hall.
Way up its length, he could see another of the doors to his office laid open.
Hurtada sprawled on the floor, one hand covering his throat, the other at his side. He was long gone, but darkness still oozed between his fingers, slowed to a trickle.
Sensing a change in the air, Gadds spun around frantically, but there was no one behind him.
With a moan he lunged up the hall to the Rage Room with its padded, soundproofed door, as secure as a vault.
He lurched in, slamming the door shut behind him and shoving it until he heard the autolock engage. The room had been replenished at his command, a new stock of delicate furniture and valuables there for the smashing.
For a few seconds, he stood at the door, his sweaty forehead pressed to the padding, trying to get his breathing under control. He told himself to pay attention to his body cues.
Pulse rate galloping. Fire in his belly. Pins and needles pricking his scalp.
The same tricks that worked to control anger should work to control fear. He grabbed for one technique after the other, but nothing worked to slow the torrent.
He backed away from the door, brushing against an accent table and toppling a Tiffany-style lamp. At the crash he whirled around.
A figure stepped out from behind the china hutch.
He wore a catcher’s mask.
He held a baseball bat, end-weighted, heat-treated, and double-walled.
Blood dripped from his hands, dotting the floor at his feet as he approached.
“I take it back,” he said. “Maybe I’m not finished just yet.”
64
Let It All Out
Trevon Gaines sat at his little breakfast table, an open can of corn centered on a place mat, a spoon handle sticking out of the top.
Evan said, “Can’t you eat?”
Trevon said, “No, sir.”
“But it’s yellow.”
“All my food is yellow. And orange.” Trevon was at last wearing new eyeglasses, having dispensed with the ones he’d taped at the hinge. He knuckled the new pair up the bridge of his nose.
It took him a few seconds to lift his stare from the can, and Evan was reminded once again of his goals for the day: 1. Make more eye contact with folks.
Trevon looked at Evan for as long as he seemed able to manage and then looked away again. “So that’s my only job now? To repay you? I find someone else in trouble like me, and then I tell them to call you?”
“That’s it.”
“But that doesn’t repay you . It just pays someone else.”
“Well,” Evan said. “It helps me keep repaying what I owe.”
“I don’t get it.”
“That’s okay,” Evan said. “I don’t always get it either.”
Cat-Cat emerged from his spot beneath the curtain, struck a bellicose pose, and hissed at Evan.
Evan said, “Why does your cat hate me?”
“Cat-Cat doesn’t hate you. He’s just moody.” Trevon blinked a few times and then scratched at his elbow a little too hard, his fingernails raising flakes of dry skin. “I wish I coulda saved them.”
His breath hitched in his chest, and he closed his eyes, pressed the side of his head with his palm, and started murmuring to himself.
Evan couldn’t make out the words, but he knew what Trevon was saying.
We don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself. We don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself. We don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself.
“Trevon? Trevon? ”
At last he opened his eyes.
“I’m proud to know you,” Evan said.
“Thank you.” Trevon’s eyes darted away uncomfortably. “Thank you for everything.”
“Maybe,” Evan said, “it’s okay to cry now.”
“No , that’s not what Mama…” Again Trevon trailed off, squeezing his eyes shut. But he pulled himself together, bobbing his head. “I hafta take the bus to meet Kiara. She called me from her connection in Houston, and I told her. I told her everything—’cept about you. She was … I never heard her cry like that. I never heard anyone cry like that. And it’s just me she’s coming home to now, and I’m worried…”
“What?”
“I’m worried I’m gonna disappoint her. ’Cuz…’Cuz … I know I’m special, but I don’t know how to act normal.” His voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. “And that can be frustrating for people. I don’t want to be frustrating for her, ’cuz I’m all she has left. And what if…”
Evan waited, gave him the space to fight the thought to the surface.
“What if I’m not enough?” Trevon pushed the can of corn away. “What should I do?” His eyes implored Evan. “I don’t know what to do.”
Evan thought of Trevon’s neatly made bed, his stuffed frog, the scrawled list of goals for the day.
“Just be yourself,” Evan said. “Because who else can you be?”
Trevon stared at him, his eyes wide.
And he smiled.
*