Evan raised the menu, pretended to peruse it.
“I have to go now,” he told Morena. “I have one thing to ask of you. Only one thing. So please listen carefully.”
“Okay. Anything.” Morena was holding her breath again.
“Find someone who needs me. Give them my number: 1-855-2-NOWHERE.”
“I remember it. Of course I remember it.”
“It doesn’t matter how long it takes you. It matters that you find someone in as bad a situation as you and your sister were. Someone trapped and desperate. You tell them about me. Tell them I’ll be there on the other end of the phone.”
Morena took a beat. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s the only charge?”
“Yes.”
She looked incredulous. They always did. And he knew she would buckle down and honor the commitment, as had every client before her. Evan had never come into contact with a single one of them after a mission was over, and yet the next call had always come.
“Okay. I mean, I’m happy to, believe me, but…” She looked down at the fat, untied shoelaces of her knockoff sneakers.
“What?”
“Why don’t you just find them people yourself?”
“If I looked, I would find the same sorts of people in the same sorts of situations. Do you understand?”
Morena’s face remained blank, her plucked eyebrows arched and still.
He tried again. “When others look, they find people needing my help who I might not find myself.”
“’Cuz we go different places? With different folks?”
“Yes. And you’ve experienced things I haven’t. Which means you can see things I can’t.” He set down the menu. “So I need your help like you needed mine.”
What he didn’t add was that the act of helping was itself empowering, even healing. He wanted Morena to have something to do, the focus of an important task. She’d have to search and assess and then finally step in to give a second chance to another person who had been battered into helplessness. And when she completed her job, when she handed off that untraceable number, she’d be on the other side of the equation — a leader, not a victim.
Closure was a myth, but the undertaking might help her get her foot on the next rung of the ladder.
“I’ll find someone, then,” she said. “I’ll do it quick. I wanna get all this behind us as fast as I can. No offense.”
“None taken. Do it quick, but do it right.”
“I will.”
“Give my number to only one person. Understand? Only one. Then forget that number forever. This is a onetime service, not a help line.”
She bit her lower lip. “So we’re done?”
“Not yet. Your biological father. You were right. He died a few years ago. He had some assets, still unclaimed. A checking account with $37,950 in it. You’re a cosigner on the account.”
“No I’m not.”
“Now you are.”
She slid the pen behind her ear, dropped the pad into her apron, coughed out a note of disbelief. “How?”
He smiled. “The bank’ll be mailing an ATM card in your name to your aunt’s address. Your dad had a union job, came with a small life-insurance policy. A lump sum of fifty grand, never claimed. You’re now the beneficiary. That’ll get you started. You’re eighteen in two months. You can get emancipated or remain under your aunt’s care until then. You have your life back.” He stood and stepped away from the picnic table. “Now we’re done.”
He noticed movement in the window across the patio again and glanced over to find Carmen looking out at them.
“You’ve taken good care of your sister,” he said. “You should be proud of yourself.”
Morena’s eyes moistened. She blinked a few times quickly and gave her sister a little flare of the hand.
Carmen raised her hand to wave back, revealing the unmarred skin of her inner forearm.
When he walked away, Morena was standing with her knuckles touching her lips, regaining her composure. She didn’t thank him.
She didn’t have to.
The next afternoon, between checking on his safe houses, Evan swung by Boyle Heights and took a pass around Morena’s block. The young mothers were there in the front yard across the street, shoving their strollers and smoking. He parked one street over and cut through the backyard into Morena’s place.
The lawn chairs had been left behind, as well as the mattresses in the bedroom, but the bedding was gone and the closet was empty. The stained fish tank remained with its Elmo sticker. Evan checked behind the door and saw that the girls had taken the trumpet, and this gave him an unexpected flicker of happiness.
“Carrot?” the parrot squawked. “Please, please? Please don’t! Carrot?”
Standing in the empty room, he placed an anonymous call to the Humane Society and asked them to send someone to this address.
He walked out into the main room toward the tiny kitchen nook. The surfaces had been wiped down, everything left tidy. On the counter a half-filled bag of birdseed pinned down a handwritten note, which read, “I don’t have this month’s rent. I don’t know when I will. I’m sorry. I hope you don’t come after me.”
Evan looked at the note for a time, then crumpled it up and laid down six hundred-dollar bills.
He fed the bird on his way out.
9
A Damn Saint
The ice cube singed Evan’s fingertips as he twisted the palm-coded hot water lever in the shower and stepped through the hidden door into the Vault. He crossed to the sheet-metal desk and nestled the cube gently into the spikes of the tiny aloe vera plant. Vera seemed not unappreciative.
He slid the black RoamZone into his pocket, though it wouldn’t be ringing anytime soon. It had been only five days since he’d put three bullets into Detective William Chambers. It would take a while for Morena Aguilar to find the next client. The shortest time between the end of a mission and the next caller had been two months. Now was Evan’s brief window to settle back and relax.
He thought about taking a drive to Wally’s Wine & Spirits on Westwood Boulevard and picking up a bottle of Kauffman Luxury Vintage vodka. Distilled fourteen times and filtered twice, once through birch coal, once through quartz sand, it was produced from the wheat of a single year’s harvest, making it one of the only vodkas released with a specific vintage, like wine or champagne. Excessive, perhaps, as was the price tag, but it was as pure and clean as any liquid he’d tasted.
He threw on a sweatshirt, grabbed his keys, and headed down in the elevator. Inevitably, it stopped on the sixth floor, and he smelled the flowery perfume even before the doors parted to admit Mrs. Rosenbaum.
Evan braced himself for more tales of her beloved Herb, may he rest in peace, but instead Ida cast a caustic glance over the top of her rose-colored spectacles and announced, “I hear that you’ve been sneaking out of Mia Hall’s place at all hours.”
The Honorable Pat Johnson of 12F, acting less than honorable, must have spread the word.
Evan pictured the sleek teardrop bottle of Kauffman vodka, his reward if he could make it through this elevator ride and afternoon rush hour. “No, ma’am.”
She sniffed. “We have enough problems around here, what with the dry rot. Can you believe it? Here in Castle Heights! The whole frame around my front door, falling to pieces. Ten complaints over two months, and do you think the good-for-nothing manager’s done a thing about it?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, my son, he’s coming in for the holidays, bringing his wife and my two beautiful grandchildren. And he said if my door’s not fixed by then, he’ll do it himself. Can you imagine? A name partner in a major New Brunswick accountancy, and he’d do carpenter work for me?”