Lone Wolf, page 4
Which is why she’d carved out forty minutes of Me Time after work today before Amar from accounting emailed over the capital expenditures report for her to review. Stone-resin bathtub filled to the brim, Butterball bath bomb from Lush, ERIMAJ’s “Conflict of a Man” bumping from her Samsung Edge. Relaxing into the soapy water, she took a single healthy hit of OG Kush from her vape pen just to loosen the screws a touch and nestled into her inflatable neck pillow. She’d lit a few chill-out candles on the counter, but her thoughts kept drifting back to the sheer volume of cash required to take care of both parents and bail her brother out. Her brain scrambled to hatch ideas for how she could generate a next-level payday.
Deciding she needed to go lights-out to give her overburdened brain a rest, she pulled a silk sleep mask over her eyes and sank into the bathtub until the warm water slid up to her chin.
That’s when Karissa stepped into the bathroom holding a frayed extension cord.
She’d taken her shoes off in the foyer, her socks silent on the tile, an added precaution in case the music thumping from the Samsung Edge stopped. The bathroom smelled delicious—cocoa-butter bubble bath, and mint-vanilla wafting from the candles. Easing forward, she halted over the freestanding bathtub, her reflection drawing into rippling view in the lightly foamed surface of the water.
Okonkwo was rocking her head from side to side, lips moving with the lyrics. Her cropped haircut had taken both a hair dryer and curling iron out of contention, though Karissa probably wouldn’t have gone for either these days; appliances had gotten trickier with their ground-fault interrupters. The most dependable objet d’électrocution was a toaster oven, but acute midbath Pop-Tart cravings weren’t common enough for a coroner to buy the notion of a tubside toaster.
So here she was wielding a frayed extension cord. After the fact she’d plug the Samsung charging cord into the power strip, which would paint an elegant picture of accidental death: Mildly Stoned Soaking Executive Charges Phone, Disaster Ensues.
Karissa loved these moments. This proximity to another soul about to be extinguished. Watching the flare of the nostrils, the faintly heaving chest, each precious breath transformed into something momentous. The kind of concentrated power she felt inside, God trapped like a genie in her chest.
Okonkwo was humming a bit now, one set of toes emerging from the water to drum against the rim of the tub. Beneath the cloudy water, her clavicles and the tops of her arms were visible but the rest of her naked body faded away like a magic trick.
Karissa leaned over her. Closer, closer, until their noses almost touched. She felt Okonkwo’s breath against her chin, tasted her mint toothpaste.
An adrenalized tickle came on deep in her stomach, in her loins. She could do anything. She could be anything. She was everything.
Slowly she straightened back up. Extended her fist, clenching the power strip, over the water.
The track stopped on Okonkwo’s phone. With a squeak of her heels against the bathtub, she slid up and shoved her mask to her forehead with the heel of her hand.
She clocked Karissa standing over her and started. Her eyes narrowed, pupils tightening, a hard intelligence concentrating in her stare. “Who the fuck are you and what are you doing in my bathroom?”
Karissa dropped the power strip into the water.
A faint fizzle.
And nothing else.
Karissa sighed.
With all the safety codes and regulations these days it was getting harder and harder to stage a basic accident. Arc-fault circuit interrupters, OSHA-approved wiring, surge protectors, and self-grounding outlets in wet and dry rooms alike. Some bathtubs were even plumbed with plastic pipe to reduce the likelihood of an electrical current.
It was like they were trying to put her out of work.
Okonkwo stared down at the power strip that had plopped between her legs, then followed the snake of the plugged-in cord over the lip of the tub. Her gaze rose to find Karissa’s.
What fear it held was quickly overtaken by anger.
“Damn,” Karissa said. “I’m sorry, sweetie. We’ll have to go another way.”
Okonkwo’s hands sloshed up in unison to grip the sides of the tub to hasten her rise.
Karissa moved in a flash, leaning over the water, cupping the balls of Okonkwo’s shoulders and plunging her to the bottom. Clamping her neck would’ve been easier, of course, but that would leave bruises and bruises would leave questions.
A burst of Okonkwo’s breath bubbled up immediately, scared out of her, which meant a quicker route to the desired outcome. Her hands rose to slap at Karissa’s biceps and her knees windshield-wipered, spilling water over the brim.
There’d be some mop-up work, but not much.
Karissa took care to keep her grip even on the shoulders. She wanted no contusions, no fingernail scrapes.
Homicidal drowning was nearly impossible to prove and far less likely than the obvious story; a hot bath and marijuana had dilated Okonkwo’s blood vessels, causing her to faint and slip beneath the surface.
Occam’s razor was a helpful bitch.
Karissa’s shirt was drenched, her sleeves plunged in to the elbows. Okonkwo bucked one last time, her back arcing. Her feet were still jerking but there was no power in her anymore, just her nervous system shuddering to a halt. The foam at the surface had cleared, allowing Karissa to stare straight down in Okonkwo’s eyes. There was hatred in them and then an empty sort of peacefulness.
Tiny bubbles clung to her eyelashes.
Karissa held her under for a few more minutes. And then let go.
With filled lungs, Okonkwo’s body did not rise.
Karissa sat back on her heels and caught her breath.
Now she’d ticked two out of three off her quarterly cleanup. She was pleased with her improvisation; preserving a staged accident was key for two reasons.
She didn’t like patterns.
And she’d planned the next one as an evident homicide.
7
Orphan X and the Case of the Missing Dog
The picture Sofia had chosen for the flyer was patently ridiculous. Loco mounted in a front carrier over Sofia’s sternum, his legs splayed as if he were parachuting. One enormous ear was enormouser than the other. Bulging wet eyes. Jaws parted slightly, the tip of his tongue hanging blissfully over the jagged row of his bottom teeth, which seemed rammed into the gums at random angles.
Evan pressed the flyer to a wooden post on the second floor of the apartment complex and hammered a staple through Loco’s neck like a bowtie. Though far from extravagant, the complex leaned upper-middle-class with a furnished lobby, foreign vehicles in the carports, and smoked glass rimming the outdoor walkways. Packages from Amazon, Walmart, and Solventry were mounded on some of the doormats like Christmas gifts, which spoke to trusted building security. Given the block Sofia lived on, he understood why she’d called these the “fancy apartments.”
Before approaching, he’d done a spot check of the building but hadn’t bothered to memorize all the surrounding streets. It was a tiny erosion in the Third Commandment—Master your surroundings—but the past few days had put him through the spin cycle and a missing dog was hardly a mission requiring maximum vigor.
He moved along the floating walkway, heading back toward the stairs. On the thoroughfare below, a Google Street View vehicle drifted by, its all-seeing 360-degree camera poking up from the roof like a periscope. Evan’s lab-engineered shirt looked as plain as he did, but an adversarial pattern hidden in the design threw off machine-vision algorithms and thwarted facial-recognition software. Despite that, he turned away until the car coasted out of sight.
One of the windows at his side was open, the dinner party inside lubricated with red wine and Miles Davis. Evan reached the next post and stapled Loco’s face to the wood.
A sandpapery voice issued from a dark patch farther down the corridor. “Do you have clearance to post materials on privately owned property?”
Evan peered into the shadows. “What sort of clearance?”
“Supermajority vote by the board.”
He moved close, an ancient woman’s shape resolving from the darkness. She was so old she looked as if she’d never been young. Tight gray curls shellacked into a turtle shell around her face, body hunched into a shape like an inverted U, head floating where her shoulder should be. In one liver-spotted claw, she clutched a combo walking stick–chair contraption that looked like it came out of a Soviet lab in 1982. With a snap of her arm, she flung out the tripod base, and lowered herself onto the sturdy seat. The hem of her housedress fluttered low over swollen ankles, brushing the tops of black orthopedic shoes with Velcro straps.
Jack had instilled in Evan a respect for elders. Due to his distaste for ideology, Jack ensured that each of his lessons combined the strategic with the moral. Preceding generations bequeathed you the world, despite all its imperfections and shortcomings, he’d told twelve-year-old Evan. For that they deserve an assurance that you won’t make them irrelevant. If you do, you wind up fighting the past and destabilizing the present.
“No, ma’am,” he answered. “I don’t have that clearance.”
“Who will clean them up?” She gestured at the flyers fluttering along the second floor and the visible posts downstairs. “Who will repair the damage to the building edifice? And moreover, do you even live here?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t.”
“Did you know that property crime has been precipitously on the rise in Los Angeles?”
“I did not, ma’am.”
“Did you know that vandalism causing property damage in excess of four hundred dollars is classified as a felony rather than a misdemeanor?”
“You seem to know a lot more than I do, ma’am.”
“I am a ninety-seven-year-old woman with her faculties intact. I basically know everything.”
He was uncertain of a reply that she might find suitable.
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to,” she said. “I know how these robbery crews work. You come by under some pretense.” She gave a disdainful sneer at the stack of flyers in his hands. “A missing puppy. But you’re really sneaking around here casing these condos.”
“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” Evan said. The stairs were a few paces beyond her provisional perch, so he started toward them.
She stiffened. “I know your type, too, with your army boots and all. If you think you can intimidate me, you’re sorely mistaken. I grew up in Brooklyn back when it was still Brooklyn, young man. I want you to look at me. Look me in the face and ask yourself…” She rose with more haste than seemed probable. “Do I look scared?”
He never imagined that a version of his own words rendered through a nonagenarian could contain such menace. Giving her a wide berth, he slid past her en route to the stairs. “You certainly do not.”
With crossed arms, she observed his descent before disappearing back inside.
Reaching ground level, Evan drew in a breath of night air. A breeze wafted over the scent of the deep fryer from the taco joint across the street. He looked at the line of telephone poles stretching up the block, flyers waggling on all of them like Most Wanted posters with countless renegade Locos staring out.
Orphan X and the Case of the Missing Dog.
What idiocy.
As he turned to leave, he caught a glint from beneath the second-floor walkway. Tucked beneath the overhang and nestled beside a swallows’ nest was the black lens of a surveillance camera. It aimed directly down at the base of the stairs, capturing the newel-post onto which Sofia had hooked Loco’s leash.
If he could identify the camera model, Joey should be able to hack the system remotely.
Tucking the remaining flyers beneath his arm, he started up the stairs once more. The wrought-iron railing had plenty of space between the bars. Nearing the top of the stairs, he stooped to peer through the rails. The camera was just out of reach, smudged from the mud pellets of the swallows’ nest. He dropped to all fours on the second-to-top step and shoved his arm through to the shoulder, straining until his fingertips wiped off the offending mud.
Reverse white lettering caught the ambient light: IRONKLAD KAM.
Good news—IronKlad’s system was Swiss cheese and he knew Joey had an exploit for it.
Pleased, he withdrew his arm, clamped down on the flyers, and prepared to rise.
He sensed movement above him.
He turned to look up.
The ancient woman loomed over him on the landing, her folded walking stick–chair drawn back like a cricket bat.
Before he could raise a protective arm, she swung it down at him, catching him just beneath the jaw with the pan of the plastic seat.
His heel slipped and he had a brief searing moment of what-the-fuck-itude before his shoulder blades hit squarely a few steps down, knocking the breath out of him. Through a squall of liberated flyers, he tumbled ass over teakettle, her backlit form swimming into view with each rotation, and then he hit the ground and saw nothing at all.
* * *
Evan blinked up at two faces peering down at him. The old lady, wearing a victorious sneer. And a middle-aged woman gone shapeless beneath an embroidered peasant dress that looked more utilitarian than bohemian.
“Mother, look what you did.” Resting her hands on her knees, the woman crouched over him, her big blue eyes tornadoes of aggressive empathy. “Do you need me to call you an ambulance?”
As Evan pulled himself up to sit, an airborne flyer swooped up from the sidewalk, Loco’s photocopied mug smacking him in the face. He crumpled it free and rose.
“Dear, oh dear. Don’t stand up too fast. Do you need some water? You might have a brain hematoma.” A breathy, ethereal woman with pale skin and a seemingly perpetual nervous smile, she was damp and agitated, curlicues of baby hair embellishing her high forehead. She rubbed her hands together and then placed a palm on Evan’s brow, inexplicably checking for a fever.
Evan shook free. “I’m fine.”
“He got what was coming to him,” Mother said, wobbling forward on the post of her cane-chair.
Having underestimated her once, Evan took a wary step back.
“Mother, stop it right now.” An apologetic glance at Evan. “She’s been captured by cable news. Everything’s a threat.”
“I’m standing right here, Doris,” Mother said.
Doris ignored her. “I’m calling you a doctor at once.”
“A doctor! You should call the police.”
“No, no,” Evan said, rubbing his swollen jaw. “No doctor.”
“My mom didn’t really intend to hurt you—”
“I sure as hell did.”
“—and I really hope, we really hope…” Doris clutched her wide pink hands at her stomach, her lips trembling with concern.
“What?” Evan said.
“That you won’t pursue legal action against us.”
A mini tornado of flyers twisted around them, and Evan snatched a few from the air. “I’m not going to sue you. I’m fine.” He crouched to pick up another flyer, and Doris squatted next to him, sweeping up a few more. “I have to go,” he said. “I’m busy.”
“If you have to tell people you’re busy,” Mother said, “then you’re not busy.”
Evan took the flyers from Doris and nodded at the old woman. “Ma’am.”
He walked away, photocopies of Loco clustering at his boots like dead leaves.
Doris called after him, “Don’t forget to have someone wake you up every twenty minutes tonight in case it’s a concussion!”
He trudged several blocks to his Ford F-150, climbed in, gripped the wheel, and released a breath through clenched teeth.
He checked his jaw in the rearview. It was comically red at the hinge, as if he’d been stung by a wasp. His left elbow was bruised, his cargo pants torn at both knees, and his shoulder blades felt as if they’d been massaged with a cheese grater.
He texted Joey the address of the building, information on the IronKlad surveillance cam, and what he needed. A half second later, an incoming video-call request blinked up. He threw the RoamZone at the windshield, where it stuck in place, the antigravity suction case adhering it to the pane. For a few seconds he debated not picking up. Then he knuckled the screen.
Joey’s face appeared. “X! Hold up. I’m on with Tommy. We were just talking about you behind your back.”
“I don’t want—”
But it was too late, her chewed-to-the-quick black-painted fingernails flying beneath the lens. Within an instant, Tommy stared out beside her on the split screen.
Evan said, “No need to talk right now to either of—”
“Wait a minute.” Joey leaned in, her head angled. “What happened to your jaw?”
“Nothing. It’s—”
“Looks like you got coldcocked,” Tommy said. “Who the hell caught you off guard?”
“No one. Can we just—”
“Uh-uh,” Tommy said. “I don’t give a shit if a blind kid with a Wiffle-ball bat beat you like a piñata, there ain’t no room for ego or pride on a mission, no matter how small. There’s just ground truth.”
Joey nodded along vehemently. “That’s right.”
“So cough it out,” Tommy said.
Their faces were frozen in matching expressions of outrage and adamancy, Tommy’s rugged and biker-mustachioed, Josephine’s smooth and feminine. They waited on a response with more intensity than the occasion demanded.
Evan inhaled deeply. “Fine,” he said.
8
Laughing
Joey and Tommy kept laughing.
9
The Man Himself
Finally home in Penthouse 21A, Evan lay supine on a training mat in the spacious great room. He’d tidied up the passive-aggressive mess Joey had left for him but was still finding objects out of place. He’d given up for the time being and worked out on the heavy bag, sweating the alcohol from his system. Now his torso and head were propped up by two yoga blocks, one on the middle height running vertically between his shoulder blades and the other on end supporting the back of his head. Matsyasana helped open up his throat, chest, and abdomen, splaying his rib cage up toward the ceiling and encouraging his shoulders to melt to the floor.
