As the cop leaned in for his radio, Evan stayed tight on him in case he went for the mounted shotgun. But the cop’s nerve had deserted him.
“Unit Seventeen to Dispatch. I have apprehended the suspect and am heading home to HQ, over.”
“Copy that, Seventeen. We will call off the cavalry.”
Evan reached around the cop, yanked the transmission into neutral, and snatched the keys from the ignition. Both men jerked clear as the cruiser forged through the mud, bounced across the ditch, and plowed off the road. Bushes rustled around it, and then it was gone.
Evan said, “March.”
At the point of Evan’s ARES, the cop walked off the road, through a stand of ash trees, and onto the marshy land beyond.
“Kneel,” Evan said.
The cop stopped on a patch of bluegrass. His knees made a sucking sound in the wet earth.
Evan stood behind him. “Close your eyes.”
“Wait.” The word cracked, came out in two syllables. “My daughter? The five-year-old? Her name is Ashley. She waits up, watches for my headlights every night. Plays with her American Girl doll in the bay window by the kitchen. Won’t go to sleep until I’m there.” He choked in a few gulps of air. “I promised her I’d always come home. Don’t make a liar out of me. Please. Don’t make a liar out of me.”
Silence.
“Do you have kids? A wife? Parents, then. Think about them, how they’d feel if you… you… Or if something happened to them. Think about how you’d feel if it was something someone did. Something that wasn’t even necessary. If they were taken from you.”
He fell forward onto his hands. His eyes were still closed, but he felt his fingers push into the yielding earth. He thought about his body landing here, taken in by the spongy ground.
He waited for the bullet. Any second now. Any second.
Would he feel it, a pinpoint pressure at the base of his skull before the lights went out?
He thought about the chewed corner of his daughter’s blankie, the smell of her head, how when she was a newborn her feet used to curl when she cried.
He thought about his wife’s face beneath her white veil, how he couldn’t quite see her, just a sliver of cheek, of eye, until the minister had said the magic five words and he’d lifted the soft tulle fabric and uncovered her beaming back at him.
He thought about how dying only meant one thing, and that was not seeing them again. How lucky he was to have been given that purpose. And how wretched it must be for all the lost souls out there who floated through their years, adrift and alone.
Twenty minutes passed, maybe more, before it dawned on him that he wasn’t dead.
He opened his eyes, peered down at his hands, lost to the bluegrass.
He pulled back onto his haunches, moving as slowly as he’d ever moved, and turned around.
There was nothing there but wind shivering the leaves of the trees.
14
A Pang of Something Unfamiliar
Evan stood at the trunk of the Cadillac. Golden light filtered through the high windows of the ancient barn, lending a fairy-tale tint to the hay-streaked ground and empty stables. He braced himself and opened the trunk.
The girl erupted from inside.
This time Evan was ready. He ducked, and the tire iron strobed by, fractions from his skull. She landed, spun, and came at him again, but it was halfhearted. She knew she’d lost her one good shot.
He stripped the tire iron from her hands and deflected her onto the ground. She lay there panting, a strand of glossy brown-black hair caught in the corner of her mouth.
“Well,” she said, and spit out the strand. “Can’t blame me for trying.”
“No,” Evan said.
She sat, laced her hands across her knees, rolled back slightly onto her behind, and looked up at him. Broad cheekbones, long lashes, vibrant emerald eyes. The pose was youthful, disarming. She might have been watching a movie at a slumber party. But there was something haunted beneath her strong features. As if in her brief life she’d seen more than she’d wanted to.
“You killed him, didn’t you?” she said.
“The cop?”
“No,” she said. “Not the cop.”
“Who?”
“I only had him for a few months,” she said. “I finally had someone who…” Then she went blank, a screen powering down.
“Who?” he said.
Silence.
He tried a different tack. “What’s your name?”
“Joey.” Same empty expression.
“What’s it short for?”
Her eyes whirred back to life, clicked over to him. “None of your business.” She looked up at the high rafters. “Where the hell are we?”
“Off the beaten path.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Leave the Caddy here. There’s a working truck outside a storage shed a klick and a half north. I take that and leave you here. After.”
“After what?”
“You give me the package. We can go through your things, piece by piece. Or you can tell me. But there’s no way this isn’t happening.”
She just stared at him.
“Look, Joey, you know how this works. You are a classified government weapon—”
“No. Let’s be clear.” She stood up, half crossed her arms, one hand gripping the opposite elbow. Her shoulders tensed, rolled forward. Defensive. “I’m a defective model of a classified government weapon. I got pulled off the assembly line.”
“Meaning?”
“I washed out, okay? I didn’t make it.”
“Who was your handler?”
“Orphan Y,” she said. “Charles Van Sciver.”
Hearing the full name spoken aloud in the muffled damp of the barn — it was a profanity. For a moment Evan was unsure if she’d actually said it or if he’d conjured it, spun it into life from the primordial soup of his own obsession.
He breathed the sweet rot of old wood. His throat felt dry. “He trained you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Until he didn’t.”
He fought to grasp the contours of this. “Van Sciver was neutralizing the remaining Orphans. Everyone that wasn’t his inner cadre.”
“Yeah, well, he decided to rev up recruitment again. More assets, more power.”
A stab of eagerness punctured Evan’s confusion. “So that’s the package? Information on Van Sciver.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t have any of that.”
“Then what were you doing in that apartment?”
“I lived there,” she said. “What were you doing in that apartment?”
“Jack Johns sent me.”
Her stance shifted at once, forward ready. “Who the hell are you? How do you know Jack Johns?”
“He was my handler.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Bullshit. Where is he?”
“He’s dead.”
Her eyes welled with an abruptness that caught him off guard, emotion rushing to the surface. “I knew it. You killed him.”
“Jack was a father to me.”
“No. No.” Her hands were balled up tightly. “If that was true, if he was your handler, you wouldn’t have killed those cops.”
“I didn’t.”
“Never let an innocent die.”
“The cops are all—” He cut off in midsentence. “What did you just say?”
It seemed all the oxygen had gone out of the barn.
“Nothing.”
“The Tenth Commandment,” Evan said.
She glowered at him. And then her face shifted, just slightly.
No one would have gotten the Commandments out of Jack. Evan knew that. Which meant she knew it, too.
“The First,” she said. “What’s the First Commandment?”
“‘Assume nothing.’” He drew in a breath. “The Eighth?”
“‘Never kill a kid.’” She brushed her hair out of her face, her lips slightly parted, her expression heavy with something like awe. When she spoke again, it was a whisper. “You’re Orphan X.”