Prodigal Son

by Gregg Hurwitz

  But for Evan it’s the end of the line.

  And yet it makes no sense. Why go to all this trouble for a simple frame-up? The puzzle pieces don’t fit no matter how many ways he turns them in his head.

  They pull off the interstate at a deserted rest stop, and he assumes one of the cops has to take a leak. But then the rear door opens and he’s yanked out onto the curb. The bigger cop sidles behind him, hands low.

  “Wait,” Evan says, panic rising. “Wait.”

  But the cuffs fall free with a clink. A knee bumps his kidneys, and he stumbles onto the little patch of browning lawn beside the restrooms.

  The cop circles back to the driver’s side, and the squad car takes off.

  Evan stands there alone, a breeze cooling the sweat on his back. The air smells of cleaning solution, exhaust, and sewage. Blood hardens on his cheek. He watches the cars zoom by on the interstate below and has absolutely no fucking idea what to do next.

  A familiar dark sedan turns off and climbs the slow arc of road to where he stands. The windows are tinted. All of them.

  It stops before him.

  The passenger window slides down, accompanied by an electronic purr.

  Evan cannot see the driver, not across the passenger seat and the dark interior.

  The voice that calls across is as smoky as a pilfered swig of bourbon from Papa Z’s liquor cabinet.

  “My name is Jack,” it says. “Are you ready to begin?”

  20

  Bad Company

  Duran’s old apartment complex had gone to hell in the months since he’d laid eyes on it. He lurked in the darkness beneath the sagging carport of the meth house next door, a black wave of guilt roiling through him. How could he let his Sofia live like this? How could his ex-wife not have told him how bad the neighborhood had gotten since he’d left?

  He knew the answer to that already.

  Because he was unreliable. Because he hadn’t shown up. Because he couldn’t do much to help aside from mail most of his measly paycheck to her every month.

  Because he wasn’t good for much and never had been.

  It was colder than L.A. had any right to be, even at night, even in December.

  He stared at the window of Bri’s apartment. A halogen floor lamp illuminated the living room, giving him a decent vantage through the security screens. That old-timey travel poster of Paris still hung on the wall. Bri had always dreamed of going to France but hadn’t gotten any farther east than Phoenix once for a human-resources conference. Among other laundry a pink sweatshirt rested over the couch back, which was the closest he’d gotten to seeing Sofia in one year, five months, and thirteen days.

  She’d been so little when they’d moved in. Back then the apartment smelled of fresh paint, new carpet, and promise. When he’d get home from work, she’d toddle out and hold her arms up to him. She’d put her bare feet on top of his shoes and they would dance in the kitchen, and the stove would smell like fresh tortillas and spiced beans, would smell like home.

  His throat was closing up, and he looked down and blinked till the ground stopped blurring. How far the fall from grace, from that kitchen filled with life to a rickety not-to-code room in El Sereno. One night, lubricated with a pint of the cheap stuff, he’d drawn a sketch of his daughter, re-creating her features one by one, each line a love letter, every curve a memory etched into his brain. He kept it tacked to the wall as a comfort and a punishment, a reminder that he’d left a mark on the planet but had been too flawed to build on that foundation.

  His thoughts pulled to the smooth, smooth taste of rum and the feeling when it hit the blood, how it eased the cramps in the chest and loosened his focus so that for a few precious moments everything seemed warm and touched by grace. Even him.

  He reached for the mantra, worn threadbare from repetition in his mind: An alcoholic alone is in bad company.

  There was a crash from the backyard behind him. In trying to stand up, one of the meth heads had knocked over a barbecue. The man had a beard and no visible lips, an unsettling effect, as if his wiry facial hair had sprouted teeth. Red charcoal lumps dotted the concrete of the backyard and the six or so broken spirits stared down at them as if they were tea leaves prophesying the future.

  The party unfroze, the people rumbling back into motion. The bearded man hit a pipe and then let a wasted girl shotgun the smoke right out of his mouth. She slumped back against a torn lawn chair, a sack of bones topped with straw hair. The other tweakers did hot rails of crushed meth, snorting it off what looked like an amputated tennis racket handle, eyes rolling white, hands jittering, tongues poking Morse-code patterns in their cheeks.

  It brought Duran back to his childhood, where he’d seen a lot of things kids weren’t meant to see and some stuff beyond that. It had been like a tour of duty, his childhood, a state of mind to be endured. His senses had been alive then, that was for sure. So much unrealized potential, so many dreams of who he could be and what he’d do when he got there.

  And here he was hunted and terrified, hiding under the cover of a meth house, looking at the apartment where his lost wife and daughter lived, a zippered pouch in his back pocket holding ninety-nine dollars and change.

  How was it possible to fuck up this badly?

  The cat-piss and paint-thinner scent of meth was making his brain hurt. He stepped out from beneath the carport, leaning against a decrepit oak tree, its bark cracked like the skin of a wizened elder.

  A car rolled past, deep bass bumping, the headlights illuminating a rusty knife discarded in the gutter amid scattered squares of aluminum foil. Each square had a dark patch in the middle, heroin residue staring up like a cyclops’s eye.

  Duran wanted to cry. He wanted to vanish through his shoes into the dirt and never come back. He wanted to see his daughter and say good-bye before they—whoever they were—caught up to him.

  He hadn’t dared to go to his house, holing up in the off-the-books sublet. And he knew he shouldn’t be here either. But he couldn’t help it. He didn’t want to go out without looking Sofia in her deep brown eyes and telling her that having her as a daughter was the one true thing this life had given him.

  A flicker of movement caught his attention, and he looked across into the apartment. Sofia spun into view holding a basket of laundry, approximating a ballerina’s pirouette. Her dark hair whipped across her face. She hoisted the basket onto a hip the way Bri always did and vanished through the front door into the hall.

  Duran had forgotten to breathe.

  Eleven years old and still a kid. A few inches taller, sure, but her face had barely changed. Her features hadn’t yet started to shift with the run-up to the teen years. Beautiful round cheeks still padded with baby fat. Those long eyelashes. That awkward child’s grace as she danced, fluid and unbalanced all at once, a glorious spinning top that could capsize at any second.

  Still his little girl.

  For a moment he forgot himself, taking a step away from the tree toward the apartment building. And then he halted, the circumstances crushing in on him.

  What was he thinking? If he had any contact with Bri and Sofia, that would put the fake deputy marshals on their tail. The same people who’d used dark magic to open up Jake Hargreave’s carotid and bleed him dry.

  All these long, lonely months, Duran could have swallowed his shame and shown up, could’ve given Sofia a Daddy Hug, the one where he picked her up and swung her around till her Crocs flew off. And now when every last instinct tugged at him to cross the dark alley and knock on that door, he couldn’t.

  Not without putting her at risk. Her mother, too.

  He started to turn away when a flicker of movement caught his eye. A man melting from the shadows along the front of the building. He stood before the very window Duran had been watching, his hands in his pockets, staring into the living room through the security screen.

  The man was perfectly still. Thirty yards away beneath the ancient oak, Duran stayed perfectly still, too.

/>   Then the man headed for the apartment’s entrance.

  Duran stepped forward, plucked the rusty knife from the gutter, and started after him.

  21

  Busted Creatures

  Evan kept his hat off and wore short sleeves, the better to distinguish himself from Andrew Duran in the event that a guided missile was watching from ten thousand feet above.

  How odd that after so many years spent flying below the radar, he now had to make himself visible for his own safety.

  The hardware-store Schlage on the apartment building’s front door yielded to a rake pick and a tension wrench, the pins popping into alignment with a readiness that suggested they’d been compromised enough times to know the drill. A rectangle of unpainted wood delineated where the latch-guard plate had been snapped off with a crowbar.

  The hall smelled of onions and garlic, someone’s dinner hanging heavy in the unventilated air. Laughing and gossiping issued from a lit room with a wide doorless entry up the hall—a lounge? a communal kitchen? As Evan neared, he heard the thump of machines, the scent of laundry detergent cutting through the stale air.

  The conversation became audible. “What’s Jimmy up to?”

  “Twenty-five to life.”

  Laughter. “You know how to pick ’em, girl!”

  “Don’t I, though?”

  “Lemme guess. Armed robbery.”

  “Nothing so glam. Check kiting. Seventh offense. Se-vunth. Got him on RICO or some shit ’cuz of his dumb-ass cousin Renny.”

  “Renny? He the peach who said LuLu’s diapered baby had ‘junk in her trunk’?”

  “The very one.”

  Evan reached the doorway and peered inside at four women and a girl sorting their laundry from various mismatched machines. Brianna stood at the end, thumping a shuddering dryer with the heel of her hand; he recognized her from the DMV photo he’d pulled up. At her side Sofia held a basket brimming with more clothes.

  “Thing’s been broke two weeks now,” Brianna lamented.

  A woman with copper skin and well-kept hair the color of snow mm-mm-mm-ed her agreement. “Busted lock on the front door, gang tags spray-painted above the garage.”

  Another woman in an ill-fitting spandex dress chimed in. “Yeah, well, the squeaky wheel don’t get shit if it ain’t in a zip code where rich folk hear it.”

  “Language, ladies,” Brianna said, giving up on the dryer. “Can’t you see this innocent child here?”

  Sofia had secured one of her mother’s bras over her head, the cups rising on either side like mouse ears. “Who, moi?”

  As the other ladies laughed, Brianna tugged the bra free and flopped it back into the basket. “See what I deal with?” As Brianna spoke, Sofia mouthed her mom’s words, engendering more laughter.

  Brianna swatted her daughter on the arm, then planted a kiss on her forehead.

  Evan stepped forward into a rush of warm air. Specks of lint snowflaked over the dryers, and a softener sheet remained impossibly airborne above a leaky vent, a feather riding a cartoon character’s snores.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Duran?”

  Brianna stiffened. “Miss,” she said. “Ramirez. My maiden name.” She took the basket from Sofia and set it on a cocked hip. “What’s he done now?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about that,” Evan said.

  “Is he okay?” Sofia’s dark eyes were wide, glazed with fear.

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to help him.”

  Brianna bulldozed at him, leading with the basket, forcing him to step aside. “You can talk while I fold in my apartment. And don’t get no ideas. You try anything stupid, all these ladies up in here saw your face, ain’t that right, ladies?”

  Evan was treated to a chorus of suspicious glares and disapproving clucks.

  He said, “I will be the picture of chivalry.”

  As he followed Brianna and Sofia up the hall, he heard one of the ladies say, “Chivalry, hell. My ass would settle for employed.”

  Brianna’s apartment was tidy and well kept, a contrast to what he’d seen of the building. Vacuum marks in the carpet, dishes neatly stacked on the kitchen shelves, photos of Sofia lined on a side table. A rickety desk held an outdated laptop and a pile of bills.

  “Sofia,” Brianna said. “Go to your room.”

  Sofia looked at Evan. “Just tell me if he’s okay.”

  “I don’t know,” Evan said.

  Sofia took her index finger in her opposite fist, bent it till the knuckle cracked. “Did he kill that man?”

  Brianna said, “Sof. Room. Now.”

  “I’m guessing it’s more complicated than that,” Evan told Sofia.

  Sofia retreated down the brief hall, closed the door, then silently opened it a crack and peered out. She saw Evan looking, raised a finger to her lips, and winked.

  He winked back at her, returned his focus to Brianna. She dumped the laundry on the couch, got on her knees, and started folding. “Talk,” she said.

  “I’m a friend of a friend of Andrew’s.”

  “No you’re not. Andrew doesn’t have friends like you. Clean shirt, clean clothes, smell like soap. You need a better lie.”

  Evan didn’t rise to the challenge. “I’m told he’s in some real trouble.”

  She snapped a T-shirt harder than seemed necessary and folded it crisply. “You think?”

  “I’m trying to find him.”

  “Yeah? Good luck. I been trying to pin down that man for a year and change. Like when he used to go on them benders. Gone. Just gone.” She hunted through the mound before her. “How does that girl always lose one sock? Does she take it off at school?”

  Evan had never lost a sock, though Mia had made him aware that this was a domestic epidemic. He glanced up the hall again. From behind her door, Sofia mimed dramatic remorse, pressing her palm to her forehead. He bit down a grin.

  When he looked back, Brianna tossed the orphaned sock aside and held a T-shirt to her face. Evan thought she was smelling it. But then he saw her shoulders trembling and understood.

  “Ms. Ramirez?”

  When she lowered the shirt, her protective toughness had dropped from her face, and now there was just grief, pure and simple. “He’s such an idiot,” she whispered. “But he’s Sofia’s father, and I still love him despite himself, and if he got himself killed, I’ll never forgive him.”

  Evan stood there quietly.

  “I mean, no one’s perfect, right?” she continued, talking at the shirt. “We’re just these … I dunno, busted creatures. And then you have a child. A daughter. And you realize you’re it—you’re the mold, the model, the example. God help them. And you pray so hard that they’re not doomed to fail like you. You’re so desperate for them not to repeat your mistakes. Marry the wrong guy. Wind up … wind up here. Like you.”

  She threw down the shirt and rose, knees cracking. “What’s your name?”

  “Evan.”

  “Evan. Do you really think you could help him?”

  “I’m willing to try.”

  “What do you need from me?”

  “You don’t know where he lives?”

  “He had a house. But he sublet it. Couldn’t afford it no more, I guess. And he’s been living somewhere else. Won’t say where. For a guy without any pride, he sure has a lot of pride.”

  “Any regular hangouts?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Not anymore.”

  “Friends?”

  She shook her head. “That’s part of what goes wrong, right? You fold into yourself, your family. And then when it implodes, it’s just you standing there.”

  “No one at all?”

  “He did have a childhood friend. But you won’t be able to talk to him.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s in Kern Valley. State prison. Another fine influence.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know. Denny? Donnie? I wasn’t exactly supportive of the friendship.” She sighed, blew a lock of sleek hai
r out of her eye. “Andrew had a tough past. And I guess I wanted him looking forward instead of backward. But what the hell do I know? Maybe we all need to do both.”

  “Do you have any way of remembering his friend’s name? Would it be written down anywhere?”

  She bit her lip, shook her head. “I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”

  “Okay,” Evan said. “Thank you for your time. I’m sorry to disturb your Wednesday night.”

  “No problem. Wednesday ain’t exactly bumpin’ around here.”

  As he turned to go, he saw Sofia still spying through a crack in her bedroom door. She gave him a sad little wave, just her fingers fluttering.

  “If I find anything out,” he said, a bit more loudly than he needed to, “I’ll let you know.”

  Brianna nodded.

  He’d just reached the door when she said, “Hang on.”

  She waved him over to the desk. As he drew nearer, he saw that many of the bills were overdue. The rickety desk looked to be garage-sale quality, scratched and chipped and marred with stray pen marks. Brianna pointed to a scrawled series of letters and numbers on the rear ledge: “TG3328.”

  “He wrote this on here,” she said. “For when he used to log in to send a message to his friend. It’s the C-something number.”

  “CDCR,” Evan said. “California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.”

  “Yeah, that,” she said. “The inmate number.”

  Evan looked down at the wizened Dell laptop. “Is that his computer?”

  “Hail no,” she said, snatching it up and holding it to her chest. “Don’t get no ideas. Just bought it new off eBay. Used. But new to me.”

  He showed his palms. “Just asking. I appreciate your help.”

  “Don’t know how much help it was.”

  “Plenty,” he said.

  She showed him out.

  He walked down the hall, tipping an imaginary hat to the ladies in the laundry room, who side-eyed him with distrust.

  He’d just stepped out the front door and down the steps when he sensed movement behind him and felt a blade against his throat.