“Can we come in?” Mia asked.
Evan stepped aside, letting them enter. Peter scooted around the kitchen island, Mia spinning in a slow three-sixty to take in the great room. “Wow. Serious digs.”
It occurred to Evan that no one had been inside his place socially. Ever.
“We wanted to bring you this.” She set the grocery bag down on the counter. “And to make sure you’re not … you know. Dead.”
Peter was leaning with both hands and his forehead against the Sub-Zero, exhaling in an attempt to fog the stainless steel. Mia and Evan moved farther into the condo, edging into a relative privacy. She drifted by the kickboxing station and gave the heavy bag a little poke.
“So how exactly did you wind up with your stomach…?” Her hands came up. “Wait. I don’t want to know. I can’t know.”
He walked over, leaned against the opposite side of the heavy bag. “It was you. You cleaned up the blood for me.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Why? You didn’t owe me anything. What I did for you and Peter—”
“It’s not because I owed you, Evan. It’s because I wanted you…” She wet her lips. “Well. Maybe you’ll know what it means to need someone now.”
A sensation tugged at him, decades old. Something he’d seen in the faces of those kids he used to watch in passing cars. The bundle of sticks, vulnerable to Jack’s knife. Bright thermoses and bag lunches. He thought about that moment in Mia’s bedroom, the softness of her lips, the piano trill that straightened her spine. What makes you happy? How different from Katrin with her passion tattoo and bloodred mouth, all allure and high stakes and porcelain skin, intoxicating right up until the moment she slipped a knife beneath his ribs. What makes you happy? What if that moment with Mia, laced with a hint of lemongrass and scored by “Hymn to Freedom,” had taken a different course? Argue with me. Make it my fault. Get angry.
“Consider it a parting gift,” she said.
His face must have shown more than he wanted it to, because her eyes welled and she said, “I’m sorry, Evan. But I—we—can’t have you around. It’s too dangerous.” She reached out, her fingers resting lightly on his chest. “I’d be an irresponsible parent if I—”
“Thank you,” he said. “For what you did.”
She inhaled, her chest rising. “This is it, then.”
“Okay,” he said. “This is it.”
She turned to go, then paused. “Your forehead,” she said. “It’s cut.”
He lifted his fingers. A nick from the blowback when he’d shot out the window. “It’s nothing.”
“Nope,” she said, digging in her purse. She came out with a colorful Band-Aid and stripped off the wrapping. Kermit with his gaping grin.
“Really?” Evan said.
“’Fraid so.”
He bent to her, and she smoothed it onto his forehead with her thumbs. She hesitated, then kissed his forehead. “Good-bye, Evan.”
“Good-bye.”
He heard her shoes tap over to the kitchen and then two sets of footsteps moving to the front door. It opened and closed.
For a time he stood there, the ghost of her lips lingering on his face.
51
*&^%*!
The ten RFID fingernails overlay Slatcher’s own, though since the press-ons had been designed for normal-size hands, they looked more like painted stripes. They always made him feel like a girl playing dress-up in a too-small gown. The fully pixelated contact lens, seated on his right eye, scrolled the virtual-messaging session with Top Dog, rendering the texts midway to the dashboard of the purple Scion. He sat in the shoved-back driver’s seat, his fingers tickling the air, giving answers he did not want to give.
Top Dog was angry, and when Top Dog was angry, you typed faster.
YOU STILL HAVE NO LEADS ON ORPHAN X. HOSPITALS, ERS, MORGUES.
Slatcher noted the lacking question mark. Nonetheless he replied. NO.
The green cursor barely had an instant to blink before TD’s next text sprang up: WHAT IS ORPHAN V’S CONDITION?
The car hugged the curb on an idyllic suburban street lined with willows. Fallen silver-blue leaves collected on the windshield wipers. Using the back of his hand, Slatcher blotted sweat from his brow. The windows magnified the midday Vegas sun, turning the car desert-hot even in cool December.
The movement inadvertently rendered some symbols: *&^%*!
IS THAT SUPPOSED TO BE A JOKE?
NO. SORRY. TECH MALFUNCTION.
ORPHAN V?
HOSPITALIZED. OUT OF COMMISSION. HER BACK LOOKS LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF A CREATURE FEATURE.
HOW ABOUT “KATRIN WHITE”?
A drop of sweat trickled down the bridge of Slatcher’s nose, making it itch, but he didn’t dare scratch it. I LET HER GO. SHE SERVED HER PURPOSE. SHE DID RIGHT BY US.
SHE’LL NEED TO BE CLEANED UP.
He regretted the implicit order. He preferred to play by fair rules, but Top Dog had no such moral qualms. Slatcher typed: IMMEDIATELY?
NO. SHE GOT CLOSE TO HIM. I WANT HER WATCHED. ANOTHER LINE IN THE WATER.
COPY.
ORPHAN X TOOK OUT ALL YOUR FREELANCERS?
EXCEPT ONE. BUT IT DOESN’T MATTER. I WILL HANDLE EVERYTHING PERSONALLY FROM HERE ON OUT.
YOU’D BETTER, TD typed. OR I WILL.
Another implicit threat. A second drop of sweat forged down Slatcher’s forehead. The itch on his nose grew in intensity. He forced his fingers to type. COPY.
WHAT’S YOUR PLAN?
Laughter and shouts carried from the school playground across the street.
MORENA AGUILAR. SHE’LL LEAD US TO HIM.
I WANT HER WRAPPED IN SURVEILLANCE. WHATEVER IT TAKES.
Slatcher lifted his gaze to the little girl sitting on the swings. A teenage girl crouched in front of her, her hands gripping the chains. Almost lost in the sea of playing kids, they spoke closely, intimately.
THAT’S WHY I’M HERE, Slatcher replied.
The teenager stood, kissed the younger girl on the cheek, and turned. Watching Morena walk away, Slatcher reminded himself not to reach to turn the ignition key just yet.
Instead he finished typing: SHE WON’T LEAVE MY SIGHT.
52
The Other Guy’s Hand
On the third day, Evan finally entered the Vault. Within twenty minutes he’d cleaned up the Castle Heights surveillance footage. It was odd watching himself zombie-stumbling through the corridors, smearing charcoal along the walls. An entire seven minutes of his life that he had little memory of, operating unconsciously on the training drilled into his body. He fast-forwarded to find whatever else would need to be deleted. A short while later, Mia appeared in the corridor of the twelfth floor. On various monitors he followed her to the elevator, up to the twenty-first floor, then along his corridor. She paused outside his penthouse. He’d left the front door ajar.
She entered and moved tentatively toward his bedroom. He was lying on the bed, unconscious. Going quickly to him, she checked his pulse. Then his forehead. For a time she sat beside him and held his hand. He watched the minutes tick by.
Then she left the penthouse, closing the door firmly behind her. She returned to her condo and emerged a minute later, bucket and brush in hand. It was the middle of a night in which she’d already endured a home invasion. She’d only just gotten her traumatized boy put to bed. And yet there she was, scrubbing the floors, walls, and elevator for nearly two hours.
Protecting him.
He was standing to leave when he spotted an icon that an e-mail had arrived, after a long journey of autoforwards around the globe, into the in-box of the.nowhere.man@gmail.com. He couldn’t remember the last one he’d received.