Prodigal Son

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “I got in a tussle in the yard last June,” Danny said. “Guy got his head caved in on a dumbbell. Wudn’t my fault. They tacked on ten more years.”

  Evan let it settle, the weight of another lost decade. “Maybe good behavior,” he said.

  Danny looked up through the curtain of bangs, his eyes flashing blue. “Nah,” he said. “I ain’t gonna behave good. Not for all them days.” He noted something in Evan’s face, drew himself up as best he could, shoulders pinned back as far as the chains allowed. “Don’t you fucking pity me. I’m fine in here. Better, even. Last I was out, it was all fucked up. People walking around with the Internet in their pockets now. Little phones smarter than I am. Don’t make no sense.”

  Evan nodded, lowered his eyes. Heat in his fingertips, his neck. It took a moment for him to identify the sensation.

  Grief.

  For what? For the wasted life sitting before him? Or for the fact that it could just as easily have been him on the other side of the table? If Jack hadn’t shown up. If Evan hadn’t gotten himself chosen. If he’d been found lacking.

  He pictured the polished shine of his seven-thousand-square-foot penthouse. The freezer room containing tens of thousands of dollars of vodka. Stocked bank accounts in nonreporting territories. Safe houses and vehicles. The floating bed.

  “I put in forty hours a week,” Danny continued, a hint of boastfulness creeping in. “Prison furniture. I spray the polyurethane and shit. Sometimes I sew mailbags, too. Puts seventeen cents a hour toward my commissary account.” He caught himself, seeming to realize that seventeen cents wasn’t worth bragging about. A quiet cough shuddered his shoulders, a loose, wet rattle like a car engine that refused to turn over. He finished and lifted his eyebrows, his ears shifting back, the left lobe lost to a smear of burn tissue. “You heard about Ramón?”

  Evan nodded. “Overdose.”

  “And Tyrell? Finally got his dumb ass in the army, shot to shit over in Buttfuckistan somewhere, poor fool. Served him right.” Danny’s face loosened with emotion. “May he rest in peace.”

  So many lost boys.

  Evan said, “Yeah.”

  “We used to ride him hard about his sister being a whore.” Danny cocked his head a bit too severely, a med-induced twitch. “You think she was a pro or we just liked to give him shit?”

  “Probably the latter,” Evan said.

  The old camaraderie felt good, a comfort he had never known to seek. The fact that his life shared a common stream of history with someone, anyone.

  “Man, she was fine, wasn’t she?” Danny said. “That caboose.”

  “She was. More woman than any of us could handle. Easier to call her a whore than admit she scared the shit out of us.”

  Danny’s head jerked a few more times. He scratched at his hair. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe she was just hot and that showed us for the weak-ass little boys we were.”

  Evan felt a smile coming up beneath the surface. “Remember when Papa Z went to the hospital that time with gastritis?”

  “That fat motherfucker always had gastritis.”

  “He was gone for—what?—two weeks?”

  “And he didn’t want to tell nobody ’cuz the state’d cut off the checks. So there we were, a buncha savages in the house—”

  “Inmates running the asylum.”

  “Shit, brother, that whole month we had sleep for dinner.” With a flick of his head, Danny cleared his hair from his eyes. “And ’member we used to steal plums off Old Man Pinkerton’s tree?”

  Evan smiled, gave his best Ewelius Pinkerton voice. “‘You motherless bastards get offa my lot ’fore I give you the whupping your long-gone daddies never did.’”

  Danny rocked a bit and laughed. “Those plums, shit they was good.” The grin faded. “Till they weren’t,” he said. “It’s like that in here. It was like that for Tyrell and Ramón and the rest of us, too. There’s a season fruit is ripe, right? But if you miss it, it goes all rotten. We didn’t get picked. So we went rotten.” He cleared his throat. “You got picked, though, didn’t you?”

  A coughing fit seized him. He tried to raise a fist to his mouth, but a metallic clank stopped it at his sternum.

  Evan leaned back, away, picturing a mist of germs settling across the table between them. His OCD revved up, that internal scanning software that assessed infection, contamination, decay. He tried to keep the disgust from his face, but Danny locked onto it.

  “You ain’t no better’n me.”

  “No,” Evan said. “I’m not.”

  Danny drew back his head haughtily. “Okay. So long as we have that shit straight.”

  “We have it straight.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “Andre. He’s in trouble.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  The explanation came haltingly, the words jumbling up at Evan’s mouth. “I … used to help people—”

  “Help people how?”

  “—but I’m retired.”

  “Then why are you—”

  “Because Andre…” Evan couldn’t grab hold of the thought to finish it.

  “That’s what they took you to go do?” Danny asked. “Help people?”

  An Estonian arms dealer sprawled on the floor, chest sucking blood, a mist of blood speckling his lips. An NGO worker garroted in a public bathroom in Cairo, slumped beneath a shattered urinal. A drug lord sitting lifelike in a São Paulo steam room, terry towel twisted around his neck, marbled white skin glistening with condensation.

  Evan said, “Yes.”

  “And what’s up with Andre?”

  “Some highly connected people are trying to kill him. I want to find him first.”

  “You try Bri? The ex?”

  “I did. She doesn’t know. She said he visits you.”

  “Yeah. You add it all up, I been inside twenty-three years.” Danny’s stare was unrelenting, accusatory. “He’s the only visitor I ever had.”

  “When’s the last time he came?”

  “Fifty-three days ago.”

  The thought of Danny’s tracking each day since was too distressing to linger on, so Evan pushed past it. “Did he say where he was living?”

  “No. Well, wait. Yeah, El Sereno somewhere. Not that that helps narrow shit down much.”

  “Did he mention anything about it? Anything at all?”

  “Rented some shitty room he complained about. You know Dr. Dre, always bitchin’.” Danny smiled affectionately. “Upstairs from a Chinese restaurant, said he always reeked of kung pao chicken or some shit. I told him I’d sell my left nut for Chink food.”

  “He ever write to you?”

  “He sent me some sketches—you ’member how that boy could draw? But that was years back.”

  “Has he been in touch any other ways?”

  “Wires money to my commissary account now and again. Even when he’s broke. Twenty bucks here. Twenty bucks there.” Danny wet his chapped lips. He had a sore at the edge of his mouth, cracked and runny. “Takes me a hundred eighteen hours of work to make that much. Twenty bucks.”

  “When’s the last time he sent you something?”

  “Right before his last visit.”

  “How’d he send it?”

  “MoneyGram. It’s all the assholes allow here. Costs four-fifty at Walmart for up to fifty bucks. Fuckin’ waste. Twenty-six and a half hours’ work just for the fee—I done the math.” Danny tried to clear his throat, but it turned into another coughfest. It seemed to go on forever. When he finally settled down, he said, “You still never told me what exactly you do. Or why you snuck in here under some fake name.”

  The double doors behind him clanged loudly once more and swung open, letting in a spill of morning light.

  “Time’s up,” the CO called out.

  Evan stood as Danny managed to extract himself from the picnic bench without the benefit of his hands. They faced each other.

  Evan could smell him even at three feet away. It was hard to l
ook him in his ruinous face. This living, breathing part of his past. Like a piece of himself he didn’t want to acknowledge.

  Danny leaned forward on his soft orange canvas deck step-ins and for an awful moment Evan thought he was going to hug him. But instead he looked at Evan through strands of sweat-darkened hair and said, “You’re the lucky one. That’s all that separates you and Ramón. Or you and Andre. Or you ’n’ me. Luck.”

  Evan said, “Okay.”

  “So look in the mirror, boy. And smile that you’re on the right side of the glass.”

  “Gallo!” the CO yelled. “Move it.”

  But Danny stayed put. The skin of his forehead, taut with emotion, went lax, giving way to furrows. “They lock that cell door at eight forty-five P.M., that’s when you feel it. The hours and minutes and years waiting on you ahead. It’s like the sun. Can’t look straight at it. Probably the same for you. Where you came from. What you left behind. Look too hard and you’ll go blind.”

  Evan said, “Thanks for the info on Andre.”

  Danny’s hostile expression loosened, the buried-deep hurt showing through. For a moment he just looked like what he was, an accumulation of vulnerabilities armored over with resentment. His eyes darted away. “You take care of yourself, Evan.”

  He trudged toward the door, disappearing into a shaft of late-morning glare.

  28

  Penance

  Driving away from the prison on the flat line of Interstate 5, Evan maxed the air conditioner to keep his body temp steady. He wasn’t sweating, but discomfort hummed beneath his skin, a kind of friction heat.

  He could still feel Danny’s presence, a soul-deep filth that had rubbed off on him. A vision of the road not taken. Locked behind bars. Dead with a needle in his arm. Blasted to pieces on the hot sand of a desert halfway around the world.

  You ain’t no better’n me.

  You’re the lucky one.

  So look in the mirror, boy. And smile that you’re on the right side of the glass.

  In two hours and change, he was supposed to meet Veronica, another reflection of a past he preferred not to see. If he drove at the speed limit, he’d reach the designated Bel Air address with time to spare. And finally he’d get some answers about how the hell she knew Andre. And figure out what other pieces of his best-forgotten childhood she held.

  Tension built in his chest until his inhalations burned. At the next exit, he screeched off, parked at the Flying J truck stop, and hustled inside. A hefty man lumbered out of the bathroom. On his way in, Evan elbowed the swinging door so as not to touch the handle.

  He slathered his hands with powder soap and washed them under hot water and then washed them again until his palms chafed lobster red. He cuffed his sleeves and scrubbed up his forearms next and then ducked his head to the tap and shoveled hot water across his face, scouring away Danny’s scent, his words, the bleach and BO of the prison air.

  He knew it was in his head, a user error that flared up when he was under emotional duress—a need to control, to purify, to set his world in order. He wouldn’t feel properly disinfected until he had a proper shower, but this would be enough to get him home.

  He hit the lever for a paper towel but then sensed the germs on his fingertips from touching the plastic so he rinsed his hands again and then turned off the faucet using the wadded paper towel. He didn’t want to touch the plastic lever again, so he mashed the soggy wad to release another scroll of paper towel, which he ripped free and used to open the bathroom door. He exited and stood for a moment, breath still coming hard.

  Then he walked outside.

  Fresh midday air, the sun like a klieg light to the east, boring through a fuzzy blue sky.

  He dug his RoamZone out from the center console, fired it up, and dialed.

  Joey picked up through her computer; he could hear the last chimes of the ringtone on a delay. “I tried you twice, but it went straight to voice mail,” she said.

  “I was in prison.”

  “Excuses, excuses. I have the background on Jake Hargreave you wanted.”

  “Go.”

  “Air force, like you said. Senior airman, active warfighter, all that. Then—get this—he got moved to Creech Air Force Base to work on … guess what?”

  Evan said, “Unmanned aircraft testing.”

  A rare moment of speechlessness from Joey. “How’d you know that?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Yeah, he was with the 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron. Till he and his sensor operator ran into some trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She snapped her gum with gunshot vehemence. “Dunno. Honorable discharge for Hargreave a few months back. His partner got ODPMC, whatever that means.”

  “Other Designated Physical and Mental Conditions Discharge.”

  “Headcase, then?”

  “Where is he? The sensor operator?”

  “In Fresno. California Veterans Reintegration Center. It’s like a compound to help vets get their heads right or something like that. But get this, it’s got crazy security—cameras and guards and whatnot. What’s up with that?”

  “The DoD prefers to keep drone-warfare intel in a dark box,” he said. “A lot of these operations aren’t even under air force command. They hook it under JSOC or the CIA.”

  Joey said, “So I guess when you have people who know lots of classified shit but might be losing their minds, you gotta lock them up.”

  “Or kill them.”

  “Ha.” A pause. “You weren’t joking.”

  “No.”

  “So?” she said. “That’s it. Another job exceptionally handled by moi.” More loud gum chewing. “Pretend you got a personality transplant and say, ‘Thank you, Joey. You’re amazeballs.’”

  “I would never say ‘amazeballs.’”

  “You just did.”

  Evan grimaced, pinched his eyes. “I need you to find something else for me.”

  “No thanks,” she said. “I’m busy not studying.”

  “Andre Duran is living in El Sereno renting a room above a Chinese restaurant.”

  “Sounds glam.”

  “He sent a MoneyGram payment to Daniel Gallo’s commissary account at the prison about two months ago. The database should have wire details on all financial transactions, including where the money originated from.”

  “You want me to hack into the CDCR databases again, find the MoneyGram store that Duran sent the cash from, and cross-correlate with two-story Chinese restaurants in El Sereno?”

  “I want you to do precisely that.”

  “What was it like seeing Danny Gallo?” Her voice was hushed, respectful. She was such a pain-in-the-ass teenager that it was sometimes easy to forget she’d been a foster kid like him, floating through a system, devoid of past or future. “Was it weird?”

  He lowered his head, bit his lip. Pictured Danny’s pockmarked face, the tic that jerked his head to one side, that burn that had robbed his left earlobe. The image took his voice away.

  Joey came through the RoamZone, tinny over the receiver. “X?”

  “Thanks, Joey,” Evan said, and hung up.

  He walked over to where he’d left his rig at the pump station and filled the tank.

  He pictured Andre as a kid, sitting up on his bunk, sketching away. You wait and see, fools. Mystery Man’s gonna choose me ’cuz he got some taste. Then I’ll drive a big-ass Cadillac and move to Cali. They got palm trees and shit and blonde girls with juicy booties who Rollerblade in bikinis all day long.

  He thought about Danny trolling the wishing well for pennies, the wet change dumped on the counter in front of the displeased clerk. Sitting on the curb, sharing a Coke, just another two East Baltimore kids no one wanted.

  He pictured Veronica crouched by the marble carving of a newborn in the cemetery. She’d driven through the night, she’d said. Across the border from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. To dump him off with a couple unable to care for him.

  He pinc
hed his eyes, blinked hard around his thumb and forefinger. That sensation of pressure he’d felt in the prison arose once more.

  Not just grief, he realized, but guilt, too. For making it out? For surviving? For being intact?

  The Pride House Group Home had been life or death. Jockey for food. Claw up the dominance hierarchy. Fight for any shred of hope and guard it with everything you had.

  And yet Danny had shared his hard-earned Coke with him.

  The gas pump clacked off, snapping Evan back to the present. He holstered the nozzle, his eye catching on a neon sign in the travel-plaza window across the lot. Squashed between signs for Bud Light and Skoal Bandits, it glowed yellow through the grimy pane.

  MoneyGram.

  Evan twisted on the gas cap, climbed into his truck, and fired up the engine. He sat a moment, knuckles ledging the steering wheel, just breathing.

  Then he slotted the gear stick back into park.

  The glass door chimed “Jingle Bells” when he walked through into a rush of air-conditioning. He found his way to the counter and wired a thousand dollars to Inmate TG3328.

  Rumbling along the interstate toward the towering hills of the Grapevine and Bel Air beyond, it struck him that the payment was an atonement of sorts.

  A penance he owed for not turning out like Danny.

  29

  Broken Heart

  The half-acre setback in the Bel Air hills featured holly ferns and palm trees and a trickling river-moat hosting swans. A stone wall hemmed in the vast front yard, the iron gate giving way beneath Evan’s hand with a creak.

  He crossed a fairy-tale footbridge over the moat, approaching the imposing granite façade. The air carried the sickly-sweet scent of gardenias. A bright red door with a speakeasy grille confronted him. He lifted a brass knocker shaped like a sprinting greyhound, gave it a few whacks, and waited in the perfumed breeze.

  Nothing.

  He shifted, feeling the reassuring pressure of his ARES 1911 snugged to his flesh. He wore an appendix holster, the fastest concealed-carry method. The Kydex was tightly molded for retention, which could cause a striker-fire pistol like a Glock to kaboom when seating the gun but worked beautifully for a 1911 with external grip and thumb safeties. The pistol itself, engineered from a solid aluminum forging, was designed to spec and impossible to trace.