“A bullet goes for around twenty-five cents. These arrangements cost a touch north of that. So you require me for something. Or you wouldn’t go to the trouble.”
René’s stare, lasering out from behind that Saran Wrap skin, was as unnerving as it was direct.
“Where am I?” Evan asked.
“Think of this as a private-sector rendition.”
“Where am I?” Evan asked again.
“That’s not relevant.”
“What’s relevant is relative,” Evan said.
“Good point. It’s not relevant to me for the purposes of this conversation. And what’s relevant to me is the only thing that matters anymore.”
René’s hand dipped behind a lapel and came out with Evan’s RoamZone phone. He held it aloft theatrically, then dropped it on the floor and smashed it with the heel of his dress shoe. He stomped on it again until the Gorilla Glass cracked and the innards showed. Then he picked it up and tossed it into the fireplace.
Evan didn’t move his head but watched with his eyes.
René turned, a bead of perspiration carving its way down his flushed cheek. “You are in my hands. On my time. There is no help coming for you.”
“I don’t wait for help. I am the help.”
“Well, you’re doing a fine job thus far.”
“I haven’t started yet.”
“Let’s hope you’re smart enough to cooperate. If you do, everything will stay precisely this pleasant.”
“Pleasant,” Evan said.
“Pleasant is relative as well,” René said. “Do you have a name?”
Did he really not know who Evan was, or was this an act? Evan watched him closely for any tells. “I do.”
“What is it?”
“Evan.”
“Your last name?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
René remained several steps back, safely tucked behind Chuy, who was still dumbly holding the stainless-steel domes. The cart, pushed up against Evan’s legs, had the added advantage of pinning him to the bed. Evan took a croissant from the tray and set it on the bedspread beside him. He removed the napkin from the slender bamboo ring. Dex watched him carefully, flat eyes peering out from their doughy recesses.
René said, “I don’t know who you are, but we saw the wreckage you left behind at that house in Fullerton. Were you a client of Hector Contrell’s?”
His tone, Evan noted, held no judgment.
“No.”
“You had a business conflict with him?” René asked.
“No.”
The steel gaze appraised Evan. “You’re too skilled to be an angry relative or the like,” he said. “So what were you there for?”
Evan stared at him.
Realization dawned, excitement asserting itself across René’s features. “You just didn’t like him. I respect that.” He wet his lips. “Who are you?”
Evan stared at him some more.
René said, “Your driver’s license appears to be real, but it’s not. No other identification on you. Your fingerprints turned up nothing.”
Evan rubbed his thumb across his finger pads, only now noticing the faintest trace of blue ink among the whorls. Another violation.
“We looked at the registration of your 4Runner,” René continued. “The vehicle is owned by a shell corp in Barbados. We kicked over that rock and found that shell corp held by another in Luxembourg. I have a feeling that the more rocks we kick over, the more rocks we’re going to find.”
Evan picked up the bamboo napkin ring, peered through it like it was a telescope. It was about two inches long, which was long enough.
“I think I understand,” René was saying, “this thing you’re playing at.” He circled a hand at Evan.
Evan slipped the bamboo ring over his forefinger and middle finger. The hollow stem fit snugly, locking the knuckles.
Turning the fingers into a weapon.
“I’m not playing,” Evan said.
He leapt to his feet and drove his sheathed fingers through Chuy’s eye, straight into his brain. Blood spurted over the white linen. As Chuy tumbled back, quivering in his death throes, René recoiled in horror.
Two dogs, four guards, and counting.
The remaining pair of narcos had their AKs raised, but Evan knew damn well they hadn’t gone to all this hassle to gun him down on an overpriced bedspread. Hurling the cart aside, he lunged forward. Dex looped an arm around René’s midsection, spinning him out into the hall.
Before Evan could close the distance, he heard a hissing behind him. He wheeled around, sourcing the noise to the heating vent, only now grasping that it was—
10
The Strange Language of Intimacy
Blood on his neck, swollen cheek, wrists still scraped raw from handcuffs. Evan’s small for a twelve-year-old, scrawny, and can’t remember the last time he had a full belly.
He has undergone a daunting set of initiation rites to land here, in this passenger seat of this dark sedan, heading God knows where. He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know what he will be used for. He doesn’t know anything aside from the name of the man driving.
Jack Johns.
Maybe this time everything will be different, and—
Evan stops the thought. Hope is dangerous. In his brief life, he’s done his best to eradicate it.
Jack clears his throat. “You no longer exist,” he tells Evan. “You went away for a felony and disappeared into the system.”
“’Kay,” Evan says.
Jack bobs his bulldog head.
An hour later they cross the murky green water of the Potomac and forge west into Arlington, Virginia. The commercial district gives way to tree-lined streets, and then there are more trees and fewer streets. Finally they turn off between twin stone pillars onto a dirt road and wend their way back to a two-story farmhouse.
The silence has grown oppressively thick in the car, and it feels risky to break it. Evan waits until they’ve pulled in to the circular driveway and gotten out by the old-fashioned porch. Then he asks, “Where are we?” and Jack says, “Home.”
The house smells damp but pleasant, redolent of burned wood. Evan regards the foyer and the family room with suspicion. He doesn’t trust the maroon carpet runner up the stairs, the plush brown corduroy couches, the pots hanging from a brass rack in the kitchen. The spectacle of undeniable domesticity leaves him humming with distrust.
“Would you like to go upstairs, see your room?” Jack asks.
“No.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to know what I’m here for.”
“Later.”
Evan gathers his courage, does his best to summon Van Sciver. “After everything I did to get here, I think I’ve earned some respect.”
Jack regards him calmly. “If you have to ask for respect, you’re not gonna get it.”
Evan does his best to digest this. The words feel less like a slap than a solid wall dropped before him from a lofty height.
Jack says, “Someone smarter than either of us once said, ‘If you want a quality, act like you already have it.’”
Evan stares at Jack, and Jack stares right back at him.
Evan blinks first. “’Kay,” he says.
They head up the flight of stairs to a dormer room with a wooden bed. On the mattress the sheets are folded crisply, ironed into neat squares.