Van Sciver snapped his fingers in front of the man’s nose. The man jerked away. The tic seized him once more, the skin of his cheeks shuddering beneath Van Sciver’s hand. Van Sciver squeezed harder, firming the man’s head.
“Do you remember Jack Johns?” Van Sciver asked.
“I’m dead Orphan dead man walking never knew never never knew.”
“Back in 1978 Jack Johns conducted your psyops training. Nine sessions at Fort Bragg. Have you been in touch with him since?”
“The woman’s head like an open bowl it was an open bowl and I did it used to kill people for a living you know used to kill them and poof I’d be gone and no one ever knew no one ever knew anything ever knew me I never knew me never did.”
“Did Jack Johns ever mention Orphan X?”
The man’s eyes widened. His tongue bulged his lower lip. “Don’t know don’t never he’s a ghost he’s never been and never was and never will be.”
“Do you know anything about Orphan X?”
The man’s eyes achieved a momentary clarity. “No one does.”
Van Sciver released the man, and he staggered back. Van Sciver knew from Orphan C’s file that he was fifty-seven years old. He could’ve passed for eighty.
The last medical tests before he’d retired and dropped out of sight had shown the beginnings of traumatic brain injury, likely from a rocket-propelled grenade that had nearly gotten him in Brussels. Since then he’d deteriorated further, PTSD accelerating what the physical trauma had begun, taking him apart piece by piece. It made him unsafe, a glitchy hard drive walking around unsecured.
“R!” Van Sciver called out.
Thornhill ducked back through a sagging chain-link fence and jogged over, sinew shifting beneath his T-shirt. He wasn’t wearing his usual shoes today.
He was wearing steel-plated boots.
“I’m done here,” Van Sciver said. “He’s got nothing for us.” He regarded the man again, felt something akin to sadness. “There’s nothing left to get.”
The man’s face seized again, and he tweaked forward, facial muscles straining. “People taking and taking like bites little piranha bites until there’s nothing left until they’ve nibbled you down to the bone and you’re dead a skeleton held together by tendons just tendons.”
“I got this,” Thornhill said, putting his arm around the man and walking him to the drain. “Come on, buddy. You’re okay. You’re good.”
The man shuddered but went with him.
Van Sciver folded his arms across his broad chest and watched.
“I’m sorry you’ve had a rough time,” Thornhill told the man. “It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault. You can’t help what you are. Hell — none of us can.”
The man nodded solemnly, picked at the scruff sprouting from his jaundiced neck.
Thornhill removed a can of spray paint from his jacket pocket, gave it a few clanking shakes, and started to spray something on the concrete by the drain. The man watched him nervously.
“I knew a guy,” Thornhill said, the sprayed lines coming together to form a giant swastika. “Loved dogs. Had a whole raft of them taking over his house, sleeping on his couches, everywhere. Well, one day he’s out driving and sees a sign on the road. Someone’s giving away baby wolves.”
He pocketed the can of spray paint, set his hands on the man’s shoulders, and turned him around. Then he knocked the back of the man’s leg gently with his own kneecap and steered him down so he was kneeling before the drain.
“So he figures what the hell. He takes this baby wolf home, raises him just like a dog. Feeds it, shelters it, even lets it sleep on his bed. The wolf gets bigger, as wolves do, grows up. And one morning just like any morning, this guy, he’s building a shed, fires a nail gun right through his shoe.”
Thornhill tilted the man forward toward the raised strip of concrete running above the drain. “There you go. Just lie forward on your chest.” He positioned the man. “So this guy comes limping through his backyard, scent of blood in the air. His dogs are all frantic, worried. Can sense his pain, right? They’re worried for him. But that wolf? The wolf doesn’t see a problem. He sees an opportunity.”
Thornhill reached down, opened the man’s jaw, set his open mouth on the concrete ridge. “So he tears out his owner’s throat.” The man was trembling, his stubble glistening with trapped tears, but he did not resist. He made muffled noises against the concrete lip. Thornhill leaned over him, mouth to his ear. “Because that wolf was just biding his time. Waiting, you see, for his owner to show the tiniest vulnerability.” Almost tenderly, he repositioned the man’s head. “No matter how docile it seems, a wolf will always be a wolf.”
Thornhill reared back to his full height, his shadow blanketing Orphan C. Thornhill firmed his body, raised one of his steel-plated boots over the back of C’s head.
Van Sciver climbed into the passenger side of the Chevy Tahoe. Even with the armored door closed, he heard the wet smack.
That was okay. Yesterday had given them a pair of solid leads. C had been the least promising of the two.
On to the next.
Van Sciver opened his notebook and peered at the address he’d written inside. This one held his greatest hope.
Outside, Thornhill tugged off his boots and threw them into the trash-can fire.
Van Sciver removed his phone from the glove box and called Orphan V.
28
Her Version of Normal
In a McMansion in the impressively named and decidedly unhilly gated community of Palm Hills, Candy McClure strode through the kitchen wearing two oven mitts patterned with cartoon drawings of the Eiffel Tower.
Classy.
Her fuck-me lips, which would be her best feature if there weren’t so many to choose from, were clamped around a candy cane. Sucking. She’d plumped them out further with lip liner and tinted gloss, which made things entirely unfair for anyone with hot blood in his — or her — veins. This was by design.
She had more assets than the other Orphans, and she was unafraid to deploy them.
Contour-fitting Lululemon yoga pants and a muscle tank gripped her firm body, showing off everything she had to show off while hiding everything she needed to hide.
Such as the scar tissue that turned her back and shoulders into an angry, swirling design better suited to pahoehoe lava than to human skin.
She leaned forward and removed a fresh apple pie from the oven. It smelled wonderful. On the counter rested a bag of powdered sugar, a tub of shortening, and a flask of concentrated hydrofluoric acid, effective at dissolving flesh and bone.
She was a domestic goddess.
On the easy-care quartz-topped island, her phone chimed. She flung off the mitts, leaned beneath the hanging copper pots, and picked up.
Her boss’s voice came through. “Code.”
She glanced at the screen. “‘Iridescent motor,’” she said. “My nickname in high school.”
“Are you still undercover?”
Steam rose lazily from the pie. A lawn mower started up somewhere outside. Curlicue writing on her apron read “Kiss The Baker!”
She said, “Deep cover.”
“Target identified?”
She smiled, felt the peppermint seep between her teeth, cool and tingly. “Yeppers.”
She pulled her red notebook over from its place by the salt and pepper shakers, tapped it with a Pilot FriXion pen. The notebook held her extensive and detailed mission notes. And a new recipe for delicious shortbread cookies.
For nearly two weeks, she’d been living here in this steamy slice of Boca Raton paradise, drawing the attention of the men and the ire of their wives. She’d been tasked with identifying who in the upscale community was on the verge of bundling $51 million in a super PAC opposing Jonathan Bennett. Van Sciver had backtracked bank records and data comms and found that someone in Palm Hills had masterminded the operation from a rogue cell-phone tower. Given that the negative campaign threatening to hit the airwaves was the start of a push for post-election impeachment, it was no wonder the mastermind was doing his best to keep his machinations — quite literally — off the grid.