Lone Wolf, page 5
Under Jack’s tutelage, he’d trained himself to relax through the initial discomfort and restlessness until his body recognized that this was a shape it was designed to embody, an arrangement of tendons and fascia and bones that could realign more than merely his physical self.
But aside from when that happened?
Meditation sucked.
As it did now. He felt unsettled, dysregulated, every scrape and bruise a needling distraction. His thoughts spun from Andre and Sofia to Mother and Doris to that ugly-ass dog named Loco. What the hell was he doing?
He’d abandoned his RoamZone.
He’d drunk too much.
He’d disregarded Jack’s Ten Commandments for no good reason.
And in doing so he’d allowed a little old lady to knock him down a flight of stairs.
Ever since he’d entered that prefab in Blessing, Texas, he’d felt disconnected from his training, alienated from himself. He’d left what happened there in the rearview, but it wasn’t receding.
That meant it was time to turn around and look it in the teeth.
* * *
Evan waited on the porch in the fifty-grit wind as a man’s weight creaked the floorboards inside, approaching the closed front door.
Evan’s shoulders were already squared, his spine erect, arms and hands loose at his sides. No nonverbal tells, no expectations, nothing he’d dare to call hope.
When the door opened and Evan laid eyes on Jacob Baridon, the first thing he registered was how little he felt. No flare of recognition, no spark, no surge of emotion.
He might have been looking at any other stranger in the front half of his sixties. Baridon was handsome gone to seed, salt-and-pepper stubble, tousle of hair showing beneath the brim of a beat-to-shit straw Stetson Gunfighter. The cowboy hat, cocked back on his head, looked a part of the man himself, as if he’d been designed for that very thing, molded into the most complementary form to fill it. Lanky and fit, he wore a denim shirt with pearl-colored buttons, dark blue 501s, and full-quill ostrich boots in a pecan brown that had been sun-beaten to a tawny shine at the toes. He smelled of cigarette smoke, dried sweat, and earth.
At six foot and a bit he was taller than Evan, but he hung his head in a loose-and-easy way that spoke to good-natured endurance in the face of all the shit life can throw at you. A closer look showed a touch of rot—skin sallowed on incipient jowls, smoker-yellow stalagmites climbing his incisors, a two-inch gap between the welt and the outsole of the left boot that could be fixed for five bucks or with a needle and thread and a modicum of care.
Average of build, not too handsome, Evan stared up at him. He did not feel defensive.
He did not feel defensive.
He did not feel defensive at all.
The man didn’t speak first, that would have been too much of a concession, but his face was open and without anger.
“My name’s Evan. I might be your son.”
He said it without need and with a touch of annoyance, as if he was just as put out to have arrived here at the edge of a state that was not his own as this guy might be from having someone drive up and pound on his door.
“Huh,” Baridon said with a lack of alacrity that seemed to suggest he’d acted his role in this script a time or two before. “Okay. Well, come on in.”
He pulled the door further ajar and heeled back out of the way in a single smooth gesture that held a kind of masculine elegance.
Evan entered.
The double-wide was dilapidated but impeccably clean, a bizarre combination. Shoes lined neatly on a patch of torn-up carpet, chipped counter wiped clean, each threadbare pillow perfectly straight on the lopsided couch.
Jacob turned around to face a mirror hung haphazardly in the middle of one paneled wall, pulled off his hat, and ran his fingers through his hair, examining his scalp.
Evan stood facing his back. “This your place?”
“This? Nah. A lady I was knockin’ boots with let me crash here when she moved back in with her old man. Lucky stuff—she inherited it after her mom had one of them strokes turns you into a vegetable.”
Baridon kept at his hair in the mirror and Evan realized: He was checking for thinning.
“Well?” Baridon said to his reflection.
Evan was silent.
“This is where you tell me who your mom is,” Baridon continued, not unkindly. He turned around briefly to favor Evan with eye contact. “There was a lotta ass back then.” A bonding snap of the head. “You been there.”
When Evan spoke his voice was perfectly steady. “Veronica LeGrande.”
“Redhead?”
Evan’s heart rate was nice and steady, he’d guess a tick above sixty. His pulse was normal. He was fully inside his body.
He said, “No.”
Baridon settled the hat back on his head, lumbered over to the couch, and flung himself down in a Huckleberry sprawl. “Come on then,” he said. “Have a seat.”
Evan stared at him for maybe three full seconds. Then he walked over and sat in a ripped armchair opposite the couch. “College girl,” he said. “Went to Vassar. Bit of money.”
Now Baridon had his phone out and he was scrolling through messages. “Don’t really remember.” Now and then he flashed his eyes up at Evan. His attention was 80 percent on the phone, 20 percent on Evan. “Wait. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Vassar girl. Okay. How’s she doing?”
“She’s dead.”
“Wow. Life, huh?” His focus went back to the phone and lodged there.
Twenty seconds passed, maybe thirty. When Baridon looked up, he did a tiny double take with his eyes as if he’d lost track of the fact that he had company. “What?”
Evan said, “You were on your phone.”
“Look,” Baridon said. “It was really nice meeting you. I mean that, truly.” A pause. “But I have a girl coming over. Gotta get the tail while the gettin’s good. You been there, I’m sure.”
Evan said, “Right.”
“I do want to talk more and all that, you just caught me at a bad time.”
The tight layout put the kitchen right on top of them. One of the cupboard doors was missing and Evan could see the dishes inside. The plates were ordered by size and perfectly stacked, the cups lined up like soldiers, mugs arranged by height.
“I understand,” Evan said.
“So come back some other time and I’ll buy you a beer. How ’bout that?”
Evan rose.
He’d laid out five strides to the door and took them now, counting them off. His hand was on the knob when Baridon said, “Wait.”
Evan turned around.
Baridon was standing boldly, feet splayed, stiffened legs pushed slightly forward to put his crotch on display. “I hate to ask this. I mean timing and all.” A sheepish smile that looked jarringly youthful. “Can I borrow twenty bucks? The ATM at the bar’s shot and I promised her, you know, I’d take her for a burger. I mean I got it, I got plenty, but the ATM’s out and I’m not gonna drive all the way to the bank.”
Evan felt his weight—even between both feet. His posture was solid, dignified. That was what he could do right now.
He reached into his pocket. Pulled out the inch-wide stack of folded hundreds, peeled off the top bill, and extended it to Baridon.
It took a moment for Baridon to reset himself in his boots. He sidled forward and took it, the gesture forcing him into a little bow. “Hey, man. All right. Appreciate it.”
The exchange should have felt vindicating in a strategic or biblical sense, but it didn’t. It didn’t whatsoever.
Evan turned around. He walked through the door.
“Hey, I’ll pay you back for sure.”
Evan kept on to the borrowed Wrangler.
“Next time you’re around look me up!”
Evan drove away from the pink-painted double-wide with its dimpled roof. He did not look in the rearview.
The dirt road was long.
He drove for a good distance.
Then he pulled over onto the verge and vomited into the dirt.
10
Lupine Menace
Karissa abided by two rules when she required a getaway driver.
One: Choose someone wholly unconnected to her.
Two: Choose someone willing to do anything, because quite often on her jobs the need to do anything arose.
She preferred former military, since they’d already broken the seal to the real world; every last one of them had written a check with their life to have a job, food, health care.
The homeless encampment at the Veterans Administration in Westwood had spilled outside the gates and up along the San Vicente Boulevard sidewalk. There was an advantage to setting up on this side of the spiked wrought-iron fence; being off federal property put the shanties into the purview of softer “community policing”—no drugs searches, no harassment, plenty of privacy.
The lineup of rugged gray tents sporting American flags was referred to in the media as “Veterans Row” instead of “Skid Row,” a fancy bit of language play to take the stink off the mini-slum that had sprung up a syringe’s throw from affluent Brentwood cafés and boutiques. The encampment had a feeling of semipermanence to it—potted plants, couches, even a few rickety bookcases—and it was maintained with pride.
Sitting in a stolen black Chevy Suburban, Karissa watched the denizens working their shifts, collecting trash, sweeping the pavement. Two shirtless men played chess with soap carvings on an overturned Amazon delivery box. A woman with dusty hair sat on the curb, repetitively running her hands up the nape of her neck. A portly wizard draped in a regal gown of rags sat on a lawn chair smoking a blunt with Falstaffian aplomb.
They wouldn’t be useful.
Through her Steiner tactical binoculars, Karissa singled out two of the homeless vets who’d been mopping up the porta-potties. One black, one white, muscular builds showing through army-green T-shirts, no signs of tooth erosion or caved cheeks from drug use. Working with focused efficiency and serious expressions, they retained their military posture, carrying themselves with dignity. As they moved back to their shared tent, the others parted deferentially.
Because of her current employer, money wasn’t an issue, which meant she could proceed with speed and efficiency. Grabbing the Pelican laptop case off the console, she climbed out. Given her diminutive stature, she had to slide off the seat, jam her heels into the runner, and hop from there. The truck was lifted to accommodate bigger tires; she’d chosen it in the event a pursuit took her off road.
Hoodie pulled up, reflective Oakleys hiding her eyes, full-finger gloves made of tactical rubber. The night air smelled of car exhaust and the sickly-sweet stench of garbage. She disappeared into the human flotsam on the sidewalk, no one paying her any mind. There were various ruckuses—a shouted confrontation over a bottle, schizo nattering, someone sawing a piece of plywood.
Reaching the charcoal tent, she slipped inside.
The domed interior was more spacious than she would have anticipated. The men sat on opposing cots, one scrubbing his throat with a wet washcloth, the other reading. The latter wore a pair of wire-frame eyeglasses that looked oddly delicate on his weather-beaten face. The trapped air held breath and body odor, the smell of a den. When she rose to her full height, the tarp of the ceiling didn’t brush the top of her head.
They alerted to her entry, chest muscles shifting as they swiveled their heads. They emanated a lupine menace that relaxed once they took her measure. Five foot four and female didn’t represent a threat.
“You don’t just walk into a man’s home,” the reader said.
“Do you know how to drive?” she asked.
The white guy set down his washcloth on the cot next to him. “I commanded an M1151 Enhanced Armament Carrier through three fifteen-month tours in Iraq. Do you know how to fucking drive?”
She looked back at the reader. “How about you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I can drive.”
“Tactically?”
“Who the hell are you?”
To them? No one. In her jacket and sunglasses, she was nothing more than a drawn hood and a pair of bug eyes. She wasn’t pretty enough to be striking and she was too pretty to be striking in the other direction, which made her perfectly forgettable.
Crouching, she set down the Pelican case, unsnapped the catches, and lifted the lid. The bundled stacks of Benjamins gave off the verdant smell of green. Though neither man moved more than his eyes, a disruption like an electrical current moved through the tent.
“That’s a hundred,” she said. “Another hundred for after.”
Of course there would be no need for a second payment. A key aspect of Karissa’s continued success in the private sector was that she left no loose ends. The people who employed her paid for perfection and expected nothing less. When she needed a basic lookout or a wheelman, she found it helpful to find people who went unaccounted for, people no one would miss.
“After what?”
She reached beneath the currency straps and came out with two steel tent stakes. Seven inches long, with curved tops that fit neatly in the palm and pointed ends she’d sharpened to gleaming tips.
The reader pulled off his glasses. He sat up.
She stood over the open suitcase, one tent stake protruding from each fist between her index and middle fingers. “The thing is,” she said, “I only need one of you.”
With a flip of her hands, she reversed the stakes, clenching the pointed ends, the curved tops out. She straightened her arms left and right, a spike extended in the direction of either man.
Both of their feet were on the ground. They were equidistant from her. Their arms were bent slightly, hands pressed to the thin mattresses of their cots. To reach the tent stakes, they’d have to lunge.
They were trained soldiers and the tent stakes were sufficiently sharp to get the job done. No doubt there’d be some tumbling and shouting in the tight space, but that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for this stretch of tents, and battle-testing always carried some risk. She hoped that this, her first stop, would also be her last. She could use a one-and-done; the delivery date on her third target had been accelerated to tomorrow morning, and she didn’t want to have to shop at tent city downtown or the homeless village in East Hollywood.
The tang of sweat intensified. Their nostrils were flaring. She could see their pulses beating in the sides of their necks. She waited and then waited some more.
The white dude cleared his throat. “I am an American soldier,” he said. “I am a warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the United States and live the army values.”
His friend cocked his head at her, lips peeling back from clenched teeth. “That’s right,” he said. “What the hell do you think we are?”
Karissa set the steel spikes back in the Pelican case, snapped it shut, and rose to leave. “I think,” she said, “you’re not what I’m looking for.”
11
A Stolid Kind of Wisdom
Poured over the supporting yoga blocks, Evan’s body finally released. There was no tension and no engagement, just himself and gravity. On the next exhalation, his intercostals let go, his shoulders fanning wide like wings, and his chest cracked open. He felt the vertebrae popping one by one, and the end of his breath came ragged and edged with a divine kind of aching.
Eyes closed, he lay there in an endorphin haze, at last primed for meditation.
* * *
From the darkness, a forest resolves—the Virginia oaks of his youth surrounding Jack’s farmhouse. Evan is in a clearing, ankles deep in Halloween leaves. The tree trunks are gnarled, anthropomorphic, mutely observing with a stolid kind of wisdom. The sun shoots down in great columns of light stirred by living dust, and squirrels scrabble invisibly in the branches above.
He takes a full rotation, and when he comes back to where he’d started, Jack is standing before him. Preternaturally observant eyes, crow’s-feet baked into his temples, that square bulldog face.
At this point for Evan, talking to Jack feels like playing chess against himself. Though Evan has bits and pieces from their shared time, their meditative engagements have become a blur of real memories and what Evan anticipates and fills in. Maybe that’s what the memory of a person is once grief fades to a softer hue. The last trickle of immortality.
Jack spreads his hands. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“You’re the one who dragged me outta the grave to be here.” That familiar single-barrel voice, gravelly and smooth all at once.
Evan chews his lip, notices he is doing it, and stops. He feels like he is twelve years old again. “I screwed up my approach to the apartment building.”
Jack just looks at him. In moments like this he doesn’t seem to need to blink.
“The First Commandment,” Evan says. “Assume nothing.”
“Like that an old bird could hand you your ass?”
“And the Third. Master your surroundings. I let that slip, too.”
“I seem to recall one in between,” Jack says. “Funny you left that one out.”
Evan looks down at his boots sank into the autumnal carpet. The Second Commandment: How you do anything is how you do everything.
“You’re lucky you learned your lesson at the end of a ninety-year-old broad’s folding cane instead of from the muzzle of a .45.”
Evan feels an uncharacteristic need to explain himself. “When I was in Texas,” he said, “I met…” He can’t figure out the right noun.
Jack says, “I know.”
Evan is at a loss for what to say. In the brief time he’d known his mother, he’d created nothing more than a few tenuous strands of connection. With Jack dead and what he’d faced in Blessing, there is no longer even the possibility of someone else out there to represent provenance, righteousness, a last frontier.
