One of the barstools knocked on its side. The burner cell phone smashed to pieces. He crouched over the electronic entrails, touching the few dark spots on the floor next to them. When he lifted his hand, crimson filmed his fingertips.
The drops were not excessive — maybe a bloodied nose from the slap? He knew that Katrin was alive. They didn’t want her.
Since the loft was burned, he wasted no time leaving, reclaiming the Taurus up the street, and racing back to the Elysium Park house he’d just left. He replayed Vasquez’s cover story in his head. The elaborate tale — humble illegal alien with no one to turn to, evil drug lords, the Down-syndrome daughter to be parted out for organs — now seemed implausible, hitting all the right marks to tug at Evan’s insides. The photo of “Isa” had even been planted in Memo’s wallet in place of a driver’s license, the first place Evan would check.
Slatcher had done his research, building a simulation of a Nowhere Man mission with just the right veneer of desperation and helplessness.
A few minutes later, Evan stood in the dusty interior of the ramshackle house, surveying the scene. A pocketknife on its side, blade pried up. Two sets of severed nylon flex-ties on the floorboards. And no sign of Memo Vasquez.
Disgusted with himself and not at all surprised, Evan started for the Burbank parking lot to swap out vehicles. A question smoldered in him: How had Slatcher located the loft? Evan’s mind spun, cycling through various possibilities.
Midway to Burbank, an impulse seized him, and he screeched off the freeway and pulled in to an alley behind a strip mall. Arid heat blew through the back vent of a dry cleaner, bagged and hung garments cycling on the track inside like disembodied souls.
From the trunk he yanked out the Hardigg Storm Case and put together the nonlinear junction detector. He wanded the Taurus meticulously, lingering over every spoke and panel, even sliding beneath the car on the rough blacktop to check the undercarriage. He ran the circular head over the inside upholstery, decapitated the headrests, yanked every item from the glove box. Tearing out the floor mats, he scanned them as if wet-vaccing the fabric.
The detector gave out only its customary crackle of static.
A few people exiting the dry cleaner offered him curious stares, but he ignored them, focused on his task, his sweat-heavy shirt clinging to him. He tugged out the spare tire and checked it, then disemboweled the first-aid kit, scattering its pieces across the ground. The tire iron was clean, as was the carpeted trunk mat, which he ripped out and exposed inch by inch. He shredded the black foam inside the Hardigg Storm Case, strewing it like wads of cotton across the alley.
Sitting among the wreckage of the car, he breathed hard, catching his breath, at a loss.
His stare pulled to the wand itself. A terrible suspicion pulsed to life in his chest.
Rising, he picked up the detector. Then he hurled it against the asphalt, shattering it to pieces. Stomping with his heel, he fractured the plastic handle.
Inside was a tiny digital transmitter.
Crouching, he plucked up the pea-size tracker, held it between his thumb and forefinger, and glared at it.
Hiding a transmitter within the very wand designed to detect it was an unrivaled piece of tradecraft.
He walked over to the dry cleaner’s delivery van parked beside him, unscrewed the gas cap, and dropped the transmitter inside the tank. That should keep Slatcher and his team running circles around the city for a while.
In the ravaged car, Evan drove to the airport-adjacent parking lot and picked up his truck. He drove home, trying to piece together when Slatcher’s team could have bugged the wand.
The first time Evan had used the Taurus was just before Slatcher’s assault on Katrin’s motel room. The car had been clean then — there was simply no way they could have known about it before. And once Evan and Katrin had fled the motel through the back window, he’d watched Slatcher with his own two eyes. Slatcher had no tracking intel — he was waiting on comms from his field team in the room, and then he’d turned to study the street. No, there had been no transmitter hidden within the car when Evan had first taken Katrin to the loft.
Which meant that Slatcher had planted it when Evan returned to Chinatown to sneak into the sniper’s nest. The scene of the attempted shooting was the most logical place to stake out. Slatcher would have known that Evan would return there eventually.
That burned every location Evan had driven to after Chinatown.
He ran through them in his head. He’d gone to the loft later that night when he and Katrin had sex, though he’d left precipitously after getting the call from Memo Vasquez, likely before Slatcher could scramble his team and set up for the kill. Next Evan had taken the Taurus to Vegas, putting Slatcher back on Morena’s trail at the aunt’s house. Though Slatcher had followed Morena to the Bellagio Casino, he’d been aware that Evan was somewhere on the premises, which is why he’d put Candy McClure into play on the casino floor.
Evan had visited Tommy Stojack as well, but Tommy demanded that his clients park miles away and bus to see him, so his workshop was safe. On the way back from Vegas, Evan had stopped by Memo Vasquez’s house, giving Slatcher notice that Evan had taken the bait on the fake caller. Because Evan had switched vehicles in Burbank before coming home, Castle Heights was still presumably clear.
When he’d returned to the Elysium Park house this morning, Slatcher had probably tracked him by the transmitter the whole way there, then waited to get real-time visual confirmation from the not-so-hidden pinhole camera that it really was Evan. That location put Evan too far away to get to Katrin in time, so Slatcher knew he was clear to crash the loft and take her.
It was pretty goddamned obvious why Orphan Zero was considered the best.
Once home, Evan went immediately to his loft and checked to see if Katrin’s GPS signal had magically reappeared despite the fact that he’d received no alert. It had not.
Until she ate and her digestive juices charged the microchips in her tract, the signal would be dormant. This carried with it a silver lining: If Slatcher wanded her down for a signal — and Evan had little doubt he would — nothing would show up unless he happened to scan her immediately after a meal. Something told Evan that feeding Katrin was low on Slatcher’s list of priorities. But there was a deadline on the signal as well. Katrin likely had one more day, maybe two, before the minuscule sensors passed through her system.
Then she’d be lost for good.
Next he called up the surveillance footage from the loft. He watched Katrin pacing around the kitchen island as she was prone to do. A creeping unease found its way beneath Evan’s skin, the slow-burn horror of observing a person unaware that something terrible was about to happen to her.
Katrin moved to the tinted wall of glass, and then her body stiffened with terror. She scrambled for the cell phone, half slipping on the slick floor.
Evan watched her dial with trembling fingers. Watched her mouth move frantically, the conversation branded in his memory. The sound, fuzzy yet audible: People are here — the ones from the motel.
She listened to him, ran to the door, glanced through the peephole. Her hands were fumbling at the dead bolt when the door flew in violently, knocking her back. She staggered but managed to keep her feet.
Slatcher flashed inside, backhanding her. Though his blow seemed almost an afterthought, Katrin’s head snapped around as if her neck were a well-greased swivel. The phone skittered away.
The woman, Candy McClure, was at Slatcher’s heels, a battering ram swinging playfully at her thigh. With a casual, hip-swaying gait, she crossed to the phone and smashed it with one of her chunky heeled boots. Slatcher gathered Katrin up. She lolled in his grip. Candy went to her other side, flipping Katrin’s arm so it slung drunkenly over Candy’s shoulders, and they sailed out the door.