Evan hopped to his feet, broken frames falling away, the cubist pieces now cubist in three dimensions. Through the window Evan saw a beam of light appear, a golden shaft piercing the gloom of the ground-floor apartment.
The upstairs mattress, pulled back.
He looked helplessly across the street at his rental car.
Thirty yards of high visibility through traffic.
He’d never make it.
The artist rose from the sidewalk, his flat cap askew. “What kind of damn-fool nonsense is this?”
The girl thrashed free of Evan, landing on all fours. She scampered across the blanket to get away, but it bunched beneath her knees, impeding her progress.
Evan grabbed her arm, spun her up and around, and dumped her into the Cadillac’s open trunk, shattering her straight through a painting of a dissected bassoon. He slammed the trunk an instant before she started battering at it.
He snatched up the rucksack, slung it through the open rear window. “If they hear you, they’ll kill you.”
Her muffled shout came through the trunk. “How do I know you’re not gonna kill me?”
“Because I would’ve done it already.”
He hopped into the car. The keys waited in the ignition, enabling the radio and a pleasing whiff of air-conditioning.
As the concerto tinkled to a close, Evan looked out the open passenger window at the old artist. Through the window over the man’s shoulder, he saw the first shadow tumble from the ceiling.
“Sorry about your art,” Evan said, and peeled out.
He wheeled around the edge of the complex, blending into traffic, coasting past the open mouth of the horseshoe. He looked back at the building.
In the center of the parking lot, a man stood facing away, his head tilted up to take in the second floor. Waiting. He would have looked like an ordinary guy were it not for his posture; he stood with the perfect stillness of the perfectly trained.
Orphan.
One of the operators stepped out through the splintered door of 202 and gestured to the man with two fingers—He’s on the run, went down and out.
The traffic light turned red, and Evan hit the brakes, peering back transfixed as the man in the parking lot sprang into motion. He hit the front gate with his foot, vaulted up, ran four pounding steps along the high fence top, then leapt onto the outside of the stairwell cage. With a series of massive lunging leaps, he scaled the cage and then swung around onto the third-floor corridor. He jumped up, grabbed the hanging roof ledge, and spun himself onto the roof, where he stood with the command of a mountaineer claiming an apex.
He’d parkoured his way up the entire route in under six seconds. Evan allowed himself to be impressed.
The man peered down, evidently picking up the commotion on the sidewalk outside apartment #102. He began a slow rotation, pivoting like a weather vane, his eyes scanning the streets below.
Evan turned back around in the driver’s seat, cranked the sideview mirror to a severe tilt, and watched the man’s reflection. The man finished his rotation, staring down at the mass of cars at the traffic light. It seemed like he was looking directly at Evan in the Cadillac, but of course there was no way it was possible from that distance.
The light turned green, and Evan drove off.
12
Increasingly Rural Tangle
Keeping the needle pegged at the speed limit, Evan drove a circuitous route to the nearest freeway and ran past four exits before hopping off and shooting west through an increasingly rural tangle of desolate back roads. Gray clouds pervaded the sky, heavy with the promise of rain. Sure enough, a few drops tapped the roof, quickening to a rat-a-tat, ushering dusk into full night. Decreased visibility was good; it went both ways. Local law enforcement had undoubtedly already issued a Be On the Lookout for the Cadillac.
He had to change vehicles, but first he needed to get a good distance between himself and the men who’d raided the apartment compound. Then he would regroup, determine what the package was, and deal with the problem in the trunk and the myriad questions that came with it.
He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, settled his shoulders. He blew out a breath, opened his eyes, and reset himself, assessing everything as if he were confronting it for the first time.
Jack’s dying message.
A package.
An address.
A girl who was an Orphan — or at the very least Orphan-trained.
Who was hostile.
But not allied with the crew of men, led by another seeming Orphan, who had raided the apartment complex in pursuit of her, the package, or Evan himself.
A crew that had Van Sciver’s fingerprints all over it.
Which left a whole lot of questions and very few answers.
The rain thrummed and thrummed. The girl in the trunk banged a few times, shouted something unintelligible. The windshield wipers groaned and thumped.
First order of business was to do a quick equipment appraisal.
Evan’s scuffed knuckles, a fetching post-fight shade of eggplant, ledged the steering wheel. His nose was freshly broken, leaking a trickle of crimson. Nothing bad, more a shifting along old fault lines.
He inspected his nose in the rearview, then reached up and snapped it back into place.
The Cadillac’s alignment pulled to the right, threatening to dump him into the rain-filled roadside ditch. The seat springs poked into the backs of his thighs, and the fabric, dotted with cigarette scorch marks, reeked of menthol. The dome light housed a bare, burned-out bulb, the brake disks made a noise like an asphyxiating chicken, and the left rear brake light was out.
He should have stolen a better car.
Rain dumped down. That was Portland for you. Or — if he was being precise — a country road outside Hillsboro.
Big drops turned the roof into a tin drum. Water sluiced across the windshield, rooster-tailed from the tires.
He sledded around a bend, passing a billboard. A moment later smeared red-and-blue lights illuminated the Caddy’s rear window.
A cop.
The broken brake light.
That was inconvenient.
Especially on this car, since a BOLO had likely been issued. The cop would be running the plate number now if he hadn’t already.
Evan blew out a breath. Leaned harder into the gas pedal.
Here came the sirens. The headlights grew larger.
Evan could see the silhouette of the officer behind the wheel. So much like a shooting target — head and chest, all critical mass.
Hillsboro prided itself on being one of the safest cities in the Pacific Northwest. Evan hoped to keep it that way.
As he popped the brakes and jerked the wheel, the heap of a car rocked on its shocks, fanning onto an intersecting road.
Two more cop cars swept in behind him from the opposite direction.
Evan sighed.
Three patrol cars lit up like Christmas, sirens screaming, spreading out across both lanes and closing in.
That was when the thumping from the trunk grew more pronounced.
He checked the wheel, loose enough to jog two inches in either direction with no effect on the steering. He was going to have to attempt tactical driving maneuvers in a car that should not be highway-approved.
Evan had spent a portion of the summer of his fifteenth year on a specialized course in the sticks of Virginia with Jack in the passenger seat keeping one hand on the wheel, steering him through everything from evasive driving to acceleration techniques in challenging traction environments.
Just another kid out with his old man, learning to drive.