Lone Wolf, page 2
Abandoned by X as surely as she had been.
She felt a weightlessness in her stomach, a roller-coaster drop where her body couldn’t catch up to the rules of physics.
X was reliable.
X honored his word.
X had that phone on him always.
The Second Commandment decreed it: How you do anything is how you do everything.
Evan stuck to that edict with the same OCD meticulousness with which he kept his penthouse psychotically spotless and tidy.
The Nowhere Man didn’t take breaks. He wasn’t allowed to. The very thought was a perversion of natural law.
She realized she’d forgotten to breathe, and she gulped in a hunk of air and finally broke eye contact with the abandoned phone.
Like Evan, the seven-thousand-square-foot condo was designed for maximum efficiency. Slab, stone, stainless-steel fixtures. The floor-to-ceiling windows made the penthouse’s floating starkness apparent, like a Scandinavian tree house hovering twenty-one stories above Wilshire Boulevard. With its discreet-armor sunshades and glass walk-in vodka freezer, it usually felt cool and contemporary.
But today it felt like a crypt.
Her legs were growing numb.
What the hell could have gotten to Evan? What made him disappear?
His last mission had been crazier than most. At its conclusion, he’d gone to Texas in search of the biological father he’d never known, a onetime rodeo cowboy named Jacob Baridon. Even though X had been resistant to the whole thing, Joey had tracked down the location for him behind his back.
Had he caught up to his father?
Was that what had pushed him over the edge?
Or was it something worse?
And if he had disappeared ’cuz of something to do with his bio dad, did that mean this was all her fault?
No. She wasn’t gonna blame herself for Evan’s choices. Not even if she felt panic bubbling up her throat at the thought of him going missing. Clearly he’d gotten back here safely enough to leave his phone behind. He’d probably wander in soon enough with some stupid excuse and get all brooding and moody when she tried to ask what happened.
She’d wait here, give him until nightfall. Not that she was happy about it. In fact, she was the kind of mad she could feel seething beneath her skin.
She stomped over to the RoamZone and with a few furious flicks of her thumbs changed his ringtone to something he’d find maximally embarrassing. Then she glared around at all the annoyingly dust-free surfaces, every last thing in perfect place.
Throwing open the cupboards, she rearranged the height-ordered glasses so they were all messed up. She interspersed salad plates with dinner plates, giving each stack a jagged rise that would make Evan twitchy.
The high midday light was starting to bleed into oranges and golds, the sun not really caring too much about the arbitrary deadline she’d given Evan to get back home.
Shoving her way into the glass-walled freezer, she took a pull of vodka straight from the bottle, some variety that cost more than the national median income and had been, like, filtered eleventy billion times through panda hide.
It tasted fine.
She paced some more.
Dusk was coming on.
She retrieved a box of paper clips from a kitchen drawer, then charged back to the master suite with the levitating bed held aloft by the push of neodymium rare-earth magnets and the pull of steel cables. After lining up the paper clips on the floor, she flicked them one by one into the magnetic field so they pinged invisibly onto the bed’s Houdini undercarriage.
When she ran out of paper clips, she did missile dive-bombs onto the bed to see if she could get it to sway on its cables.
She couldn’t.
In the north-facing window she could see the last reflections of light dwindling in the windows along the Wilshire Corridor as nightfall smothered the sky.
She couldn’t imagine her life if X was gone for real. Even if he was stubborn and a colossal pain, he was the only person who got her, got the kind of rough she’d come from and the kind of rough she still was. Her brain couldn’t compute the levels of lonely she’d feel if he’d finally gone and gotten himself killed.
Or if he’d taken off and left her like everyone always did.
Anger swelled up fast and familiar. She threw open the bureau drawers. His socks were folded tight like hand grenades and lined up with mathematical precision. She pulled them apart and shoved strays in his shirt drawer and threw others across the floor. Then she contemplated cleaning the toilet with his toothbrush, but she thought of that one look he got when his eyes crinkled at the edges and he couldn’t help but be gentle as only a once-brutal man knew how to be.
Then she was bawling. Shit.
Ugly-crying, with snot and everything.
She allotted herself five minutes to be a mess. She only took three.
Then she moved through the bathroom, past the tempting toothbrush and into the shower. Gripping the hot-water handle, she waited a beat for it to scan the vein pattern in her palm. It gave a nearly imperceptible vibration and then she twisted it the wrong way and swung open the secret door disguised seamlessly in the tile pattern.
She entered the Vault.
The Nowhere Man’s inner sanctum, a hidden space he’d retrofitted to be the nerve center of his operations. No more than four hundred square feet filled with server racks, computer hardware, weapon lockers, and an L-shaped sheet-metal desk. Exposed beams matched the pattern of the public stairs to the roof above, the ceiling encroaching down on the forgotten storage area that had never even made it onto the building blueprint.
Aside from X, she was the only person who’d ever seen it.
Collapsing into his chair and clicking the mouse, she brought to life the hidden micro-OLED screens mounted to the three concrete walls that embraced the desk. Two of the walls featured pirated feeds from around the building, an intimate look at the spaces and corridors of the Castle Heights Residential Tower. The other showed the measly file Joey had compiled on Evan’s “father”—a few credit-card charges clustered around Blessing, the most Texas-sounding town in all of Texas.
A fresh swell of regret washed through her for pursuing Jacob Baridon when Evan had told her to leave it alone. The Fourth of the Ten Commandments X lived by—Never make it personal—meant he avoided telenovela drama like this at all turns. Not that he always could. A while back, he’d met his mother briefly and learned that he had a half brother, Andre Duran, who needed his help. Turned out Evan and Andre had actually been in a foster home together like a million years ago and had never suspected they were related. If Joey ever found out she had a half-sibling? She’d be all over that shit. But not X. After helping Andre, he hadn’t been in touch with him even though the guy lived right here in Los Angeles and had a cute daughter and everything.
Never make it personal.
That was Evan.
And yet Joey had pushed him. Found an approximate location for his father. And led him right onto the only kind of terrain Orphan X wasn’t trained for.
She rubbed her eyes. Then she felt someone watching her.
Evan’s little aloe vera plant, Vera III, looked up at Joey from the desk, noirishly lit in the artificial light of the OLED monitors. Inhabiting her bowl filled with rainbow-colored glass pebbles, she was Evan’s only companion here in the penthouse, probably because she placed as few demands on him as he did on her.
“I don’t know where he is,” Joey told Vera.
Vera converted carbon dioxide to malic acid with seeming concern.
“Fine,” Joey said. “I’ll call Tommy.”
Tommy Stojack, a nine-fingered armorer with a workshop off the Strip in real Las Vegas, was Evan’s most trusted contact. Tommy not only conducted R&D for government-sanctioned black groups but also machined ghost weapons for a few unsanctioned individuals, X included. Over the years, he and Evan had fallen into a cadence where they relied on each other.
Calling up videotelephony software she’d personally encrypted, she pinged Tommy.
Three rings, five, seven.
Then he answered, that bulbous nose looming large as he squinted at the screen like a Boomer. He was driving somewhere, his phone resting on one knee, jouncing around. A biker’s mustache framed his upper lip, the bottom one pooched out with Skoal. “Roadkill Spreads and Delicacies. Taking out or dining in?”
“Gross.”
He gave a double take, noted that it was Joey. His baggy hound-dog eyes looked happy to see her, even if his mouth didn’t follow suit. “What do you want?” he said, over a wash of engine noise from his rig.
“Evan’s missing,” Joey told him. “Three days.”
“How do you know he’s missing? Insteada off being himself somewhere?”
“He left his RoamZone here at—” She caught herself. Evan’s operational security protocols meant that not even Tommy could know where he lived. “Left it behind.”
“What? He left the RoamZone? That thing’s always stuck to him like shit on a shovel.”
“Thus my call.”
“And you think what?”
“I don’t know,” Joey said. “What if he needs our help? What if he’s in trouble? What if he was killed in an extreme gender-reveal mishap?”
“Then at least we’d have something to laugh about.”
“Tommy!”
“C’mon, girlie girl. Tell me you wouldn’t love to chisel that shit on his tombstone.”
“I think … I think he went to find his father.”
“Why do you think that?”
Guilt permeated her hesitation. “I mighta dug up a location for him. Maybe whatever happened set him off.”
“You’re so worried, why don’t you just find him?”
“Oh, sure. Tracking down the Nowhere Man. That should be a snap.”
“You know him pretty good. Ask yourself what he’d get up to if he left his phone behind.”
“‘What Would Evan Smoak Do?’ Said: No one ever.”
“You check his safe houses?”
Joey hesitated a split second too long. “… Yeah.”
Why hadn’t she thought of that? Her fingers were moving already, pulling up the internal surveillance feeds from the dozen or so safe houses Evan kept scattered around the greater Los Angeles area.
East L.A.: empty.
Westchester: empty.
Boyle Heights: empty.
Tarzana—holy shit.
There he was, sitting on the couch of the sparsely furnished bungalow, staring at … It looked like he was staring at nothing. And swaying ever so slightly. On the floor before him were several vodka bottles, which a quick zoom and image enhancement showed to be empty.
“Just spotted him.” Even to her own ears, her voice sounded dry and strained. “I’ll call you back when I get to him.”
“Bated breath, crossed fingers, thoughts and prayers.” Tommy spit a jet of tobacco juice through his gap teeth out the window and hung up.
Joey studied Evan some more, her mouth ajar with disbelief.
He was drunk.
Not quaffing two fingers of some vodka distilled by Amazonian warrior queens in northern Anatolia and then poured over a geode-shaped ice cube. But fucking hammered.
You shoulda seen him.
It was a disgrace.
4
The Kentucky Fried Fuck
Evan heard a pick set scratching at the front lock of his Tarzana safe house. When the door swung open, a cold, hard light fell across the bungalow, and his pupils contracted. The glare made his brain ache.
He had his ARES 1911 raised and aimed but was not as surprised as he’d have thought to see Joey stride inside, her angry walk with her Doc Martens stomping out ahead of her. The diamond pendant glinted at her chest, a concession to the elegant, striking a contrast with her flannel and scowl, both oversize.
“What the Kentucky Fried Fuck?” she said.
He lowered the pistol. “Language.” His voice was cracked, desiccated.
She threw something at him. It struck his chest, not gently, and fell into his lap.
His RoamZone.
“You’re not allowed to just disappear and not have the Nowhere Man phone on you,” she said. “What if someone needed you and you didn’t answer?”
Though she’d violently heeled the door shut behind her, he could still feel the aftereffect of the blast of daylight, an ice pick through his corneas. He shifted on the couch, his boot knocking over an empty bottle of Cîroc. It rattled noisily on the hardwood, describing an excruciatingly lethargic arc across the floor to stop at Joey’s feet.
She looked down at it as if that just said it all.
Maybe it did.
Her hands were on her hips, rarely a good sign. “It’s not just you, you know. You have responsibilities to—to people, okay?”
The alcohol was wearing off, leaving a dull ache in Evan’s cranium. He’d vomited once cleanly last night, the kind of avian regurgitation when the booze hits bottom and your stomach says, Nope, and sends it right back out in the form it came in.
He lifted his chin slightly to indicate the refrigerator. “Saline.”
When she walked to the kitchen, her boots knocked the floor with slightly less vehemence, a promising development. She poked through the takeout by the sink. “You,” she said, “left shit on the counter. Isn’t that one of the signs of the apocalypse?” She was joking, but the tremor of concern in her voice betrayed her. “And besides, you shouldn’t use plastic straws.” She held up the offending utensil.
The throbbing in his head intensified. “It came in the bag.”
“As a proper La-La-Land-ian you should get your own, you know, made out of bamboo or steel so you don’t, like, strangle turtles.”
“It came in the takeout bag,” he repeated. “What was I supposed to do? Bring in a straw-sniffing canine?”
“Just look in the bag,” she said angrily. “Take it out.”
“I’ll send a check to the Turtle Anti-Strangulation League.”
“Is that a thing?”
“No.”
She leaned into the fridge, digging in the vegetable drawer and coming up with an IV bag. “Tommy was worried about you, you know.”
“Tommy,” he repeated skeptically.
“Yes, Tommy. You don’t just leave your phone behind like that. Ever. That’s, like, the deal.”
She came over and tossed a saline pouch at him. It hit his chest with slightly less force than the RoamZone had.
He said, “I also need the—”
She flicked her other hand. The infusion kit landed in his lap.
It took some focus but he spiked the IV bag, leaned with a groan, and hooked it on the knob of the halogen floor lamp to his side. He milked the juice down the line, cleared the bubbles, then poked at his arm for a good vein.
“What happened?” Joey said. “Where were you?”
“Texas.”
He found a drained bottle at his feet, raised it at a tilt to see the tiny isosceles of vodka pooling at the base.
“Did you find your dad?”
He poured a few drops over the crook of his elbow to sterilize it, then ripped the top off the sterile catheter bag, uncapped the needle with his front teeth, and slid it into his vein. “Nothing,” he said. “I found nothing.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
He leaned back, stared at the ceiling, waited for the drip to start. “I don’t either, Josephine.”
She hesitated. In the half-light, her irises looked translucent, nearly jade. Her long lashes blinked, eyes flashing. Her thick black-brown hair was shaved on the right side in an undercut, long locks flipped over to cascade down her cheek. An emerald stone punctuated her left nostril. She looked tough and beautiful and suddenly fragile.
She whipped out her phone. “I’m calling Tommy.”
“Put the filters on.”
“I know how to make an encrypted call, X. I’m the one who made your encryption un-shitty.”
He felt the saline solution hitting his blood, the boost immediate. His headache evanesced, his veins swelling, bringing a flush of much-needed energy.
Then Tommy was in his face, peering out from the rectangle of Joey’s phone in extreme close-up, his mustache ballooned to Teddy Roosevelt proportions.
“Jesus,” Tommy’s mustache said. “You look like the back a my balls.”
“I think he’s having some kinda midlife crisis,” Joey informed Tommy. “Which is … unbecoming.” She held the phone at her chest aiming out so they both stared at him.
“Okay,” Tommy said to Evan. “So you caught up to Papa Smurf and now you feel like a can of crushed assholes. Lay it out for us cheap-seaters.”
Evan said, “No.”
Joey rotated the phone briefly for her and Tommy to share a look of aggravation and then swiveled it back.
“I seen you drink more times than I can count without taking off my shoes,” Tommy said. “But I never seen you drunk.”
Evan adjusted the roller clamp to increase the flow into his veins. His vision sharpened and he felt the first premonition of clarity in a day or so. “I’ve never seen me drunk either.”
Joey’s glare hardened. “Whatever happened or didn’t with your father, you need to compartmentalize that shit and deal with it on your own time.” She picked up the rugged phone beside him and flung it into his lap. “You’re X. Grow a pair.”
“Listen to sugarbritches,” Tommy said. “’N’ I’m gonna spit some truth at you, too.”
“I’m not in the mood for—”
“No. Fuck that. A friend’s a person who’s right when they tell you you’re wrong.” Tommy had inexplicably repositioned his phone camera so only a single eye peered out with speakeasy intensity. “So listen up, honcho. Whatever’s got you spunfucked, you gotta snap to and get back on yer feet. You know how, too. Start small.”
“Small?” Evan said. “‘Small’ doesn’t happen around me.”
A sudden blare erupted from his crotch: DONCHA WISH YER GIRLFRIEND WUZ HAAAWT LIKE ME?!
The RoamZone, with a Josephine Morales–amended ringtone.
Her lips parted slightly to show the hair-thin gap in her front teeth.
