Prodigal Son

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “Well,” Evan said. “Maybe not nothing.”

  She looked at him.

  “Are you okay to wait here a few minutes?” he asked.

  “What if they come after me? Smash a window?”

  “You’ll be safe here. No one will get into this truck.”

  She hesitated. Gave a quick, nervous nod.

  He handed her the key. “Don’t drive off.”

  No smile.

  He climbed out and started back for the party.

  47

  White Knight

  Cutting through the crowded foyer, Evan brushed against a partygoer and lifted a stainless-steel ballpoint pen from the guy’s shirt pocket. It slid free of the pocket protector smoothly. Climbing the stairs, he thumbed the tip off and dropped the spring and the ink refill from the barrel so all that remained was a smooth metal tube.

  As he headed up the second-floor hallway, he heard Rishi’s voice carrying through the partially open door. “—and when you’re on the prowl, pay attention to their eyes, Scotty. Women on the pill blink an average of nineteen times more a minute than women who aren’t. That’s how you know they’re active, right?”

  He stepped inside the room. The orgy bed was now empty, but Rishi and his compatriots—Zack and Scotty—remained in their chaise longues, half disrobed. To the side a trio of women were pulling on their clothes.

  Evan said to them, “You might want to leave.”

  The women took one look at his expression and scurried away, clutching high heels and shirts to their chests.

  Evan looked at Rishi and his two friends. “You hurt the young woman.”

  Rishi glanced over at him, stroking his beard, his biceps rippling. “Who are you talking about? The one with the ripped jeans?”

  He didn’t bother according her a name.

  Evan felt his jaws tighten, an ache in the bone. “And the ripped shirt,” he said.

  “I think you’re gonna want to move along before you get yourself hurt.”

  Rishi’s two sidekicks looked more tentative, but they covered with lupine grins.

  “Look, White Knight,” Rishi said, “we don’t procure the product.”

  “You mean the girls?”

  “Women,” Rishi said. “Don’t be disrespectful.” He leaned back, spreading his beefy arms along the top of the couch. “This Valley is about one thing. Resources. The right VC. The right engineers. You know the most valuable resource? Time. But young women who are DTF? They’re inexhaustible resources. They’re the one reward we get. So we outsource the selection process. That girl—Cammy?—she gave her ID to the bouncers yesterday, man. She knew why she was here. You don’t agree to come to a party like this looking like that and think it’s for your personality.”

  “That’s true,” Evan said.

  “I did nothing illegal.”

  Evan said, “No.”

  “She had a choice.”

  “Yes.”

  “She could have left at any time.”

  “Maybe.”

  “She’s legal.”

  “By seventy-two hours.”

  “Hey, man.” Rishi gave a big shrug. “If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

  Zack and Scotty laughed.

  “No,” Evan said.

  “How would you know?” Rishi said.

  “Because,” Evan said, “I’m a hammer.”

  Rishi stared at him. Then he stood up, his shirt unbuttoned down the front. He was a thick guy, all muscle and bloat. His friends stood up, too.

  “Okay,” Rishi said. “So we’re gonna do this?”

  Evan’s gaze stayed level. “Do you know what a tension pneumothorax is?”

  Rishi rocked back on his heels. “A what?”

  “A torn lung leaks air inside your chest cavity, increasing pressure. That prevents the lungs from filling. Then it prevents blood from getting to the heart.”

  Rishi looked at his friends. Back at Evan. Laughed. “You’re a weird fucking dude. But that’s okay. I like weird dudes.”

  He stepped forward and swung at Evan’s head. Evan ducked and sidestepped.

  Rishi regained his balance, turned, and tried another cross. Evan leaned back, the wind from the punch fanning his face.

  Flustered, Rishi threw a haymaker. Evan weaved right and crouched, tightening his hand, the weighted knuckles of the glove stretched tight across his flesh.

  He drove a compact punch into Rishi’s right side just beneath the armpit.

  There was a pleasing pop, and then Rishi drew in a screeching breath.

  Evan pulled himself upright and looked at Rishi.

  For a moment they were eye to eye.

  And then Rishi toppled to a knee. He clutched his ribs, his mouth guppying.

  “Your lung is collapsing right now,” Evan told him. “I punctured it with your sixth rib. That drowning sensation? It’s from negative pressure building in your chest cavity. It’ll get worse.”

  Rishi fell back onto his rear end, his legs squirming on the carpet. His friends looked on in horror.

  “You will suffocate from this,” Evan said. “Unless.”

  He fished the stainless-steel pen tube from his pocket and held it up. Zack and Scotty watched him, their pale faces bathed in sweat. Evan flipped the tube at them. Zack bobbled it but managed to hang on.

  “An emergency chest decompression.” Evan stepped forward. “Excuse me.”

  Zack and Scotty parted, and Evan knelt over Rishi, whose mouth was stretched in an oval, his face purpling. Evan peeled Rishi’s shirt aside and used his thumb to find the second rib space in the midclavicular line. He looked up.

  “Come here.”

  Scotty fell to his knees.

  “Put your finger right here. No. Here.”

  Scotty complied, his hand trembling.

  “You need to punch the tube through into the chest cavity to relieve pressure,” Evan said.

  Tears dotted Rishi’s cheeks. He waved his head back and forth, clawing the carpet, his lips struggling for words. He mouthed, Do it. Do it.

  “One of you probably should,” Evan said. “Decide among yourselves. Because I’m not going to.”

  As Rishi thrashed from side to side, Zack and Scotty started shouting at each other, fumbling the pen tube between them. Rishi’s Pixel phone had dribbled out of his pocket. Evan scooped it up and pressed Rishi’s thumb to the screen to open it.

  No one seemed to notice.

  Evan stood up. Looked down at Rishi. His eyes bulged, the sclera pronounced.

  “You could have left at any time,” Evan said. “You had a choice. Until you didn’t.”

  He walked out, Zack and Scotty still locked in a panicked argument behind him. He’d just reached the stairs when a bellow of pain rolled up the hall, Rishi’s breath coming back online. Moving down the stairs, Evan entered the security setting of Rishi’s phone and updated the thumbprint setting to match his own.

  Crossing the front yard, he fished the gum out from beneath his upper lip with his tongue and blew a bubble.

  * * *

  Evan drove Cammy back to an apartment building worn down by too many generations of tenants with no stake in ownership. Stucco with missing chunks, weedy front lawn littered with cigarette butts and dog droppings, a bicycle wheel locked to a parking meter, the frame long liberated.

  She hesitated in the driver’s seat. “Can you walk me in?”

  He climbed out and followed her up a set of splintering stairs to her apartment. She clicked on the lights, peering into the dark bedroom nervously.

  Evan said, “Want me to check the space for you?”

  “Yes, please. I’m gonna go change.”

  She cast off his hoodie and disappeared into the bathroom. The blinds were drawn, the sheets mussed, plastic water bottles collecting on the nightstand—the environment of someone who slept a lot. He searched the closet and looked beneath the bed to set her mind at ease. The place called to mind Andre’s sad little room above the Chin
ese restaurant.

  A thin stack of bills and work scholarship time sheets rested on an IKEA desk in the corner, laying out Cammy’s hours and telling a familiar story of mounting student debt. A grade-school class picture of herself was tucked into the frame of a mirror above the bureau, a reminder of who she used to be.

  One thing he’d learned time and again was that you never could tell what kind of private hell people were fighting through.

  He heard the hinges squeak behind him and turned around.

  Cammy was standing in the bathroom doorway wearing only a bra and panties. She had a bruise on her lily-white skin across the strokes of her ribs.

  He lowered his gaze.

  Her toenails, painted baby-girl pink, were chipped. He thought about her paying for the pedicure out of the hours she spent working the front desk at the Foothill College Fitness Center. That school picture—third grade, maybe fourth.

  So much humanity reduced to flesh and function.

  “Do I owe you anything?” The question was strained; she’d had to force it out.

  He felt the words like arrows to his sternum. He kept his eyes lowered. “What if everything you thought about yourself was wrong?”

  “God, am I that fucked up?”

  He crouched, picked up his hoodie where she’d sloughed it onto the floor, and offered it to her. She took it, her head drawn back. Then pulled it on, zipped it up. The waistband touched the tops of her knees.

  “You were cursed with being pretty, which means the world told you what you were supposed to be before you could figure it out for yourself,” he said. “But what if who you could be is something vastly more important and powerful? Some men are afraid of that. Especially in an attractive young woman. Do you want to let them write your story?”

  “Important.” Her nostrils flared. “Powerful.”

  “Sure.” He held her gaze. “What if?”

  Tears ran down her cheeks though she made no sound.

  He crossed to the cheap desk, picked up the phone, and called the operator. He asked to be put through to a rape-crisis hotline.

  After a few rings, an older woman’s voice answered. “Counseling.”

  Evan said, “A young woman here has been through a traumatic experience.”

  The woman said, “Who’s this?”

  Evan turned and held out the phone to Cammy. She stood staring at him, her arms folded, tears still running silently down her face.

  She uncrossed her arms.

  She took the phone.

  He walked past her to the door. As he shut it behind him, he heard her say tentatively, “Hello?”

  A pause. He eased the door shut. Her voice carried faintly through the panels.

  “My name is Cameron,” she said. “Someone hurt me.”

  48

  Better Than Real Life

  Evan called Joey on his drive back to the Stanford Park Hotel.

  She picked up with a full mouth and made some sort of vowel sound in greeting.

  “What are you eating?”

  “Room service,” Joey said, “might be my favorite thing in the world.”

  “You got the footage from my contact lenses?”

  “The good doctor’s supervillain lair. Uh, yeah. His tech is lit.”

  The streetlights of Palo Alto rolled by overhead, an upside-down river of LED blue. “It’s less lit when it might be trying to kill you.”

  “You’re such a drama queen,” she said.

  He felt a faint throb on his forehead where the defused robotic bee had struck him. After the evening he’d had, he could muster no retort.

  Fortunately, Joey was not one to let a silence linger. “I read some of the code off that laptop on his lab bench. A lot to dig through. I’ll need a day or two and a Costco pallet of Red Bull.”

  “I have a Pixel phone for you, too,” Evan said. “One of Molleken’s guys. He looks to be logged in to a couple databases so you can poke around behind the firewall. I changed the security thumbprint to match mine so you can get in.”

  She snorted. “I can get in without that. Those things only record partials. I have a digital master fingerprint I built using the most common whorls, loops, and arches.” She took another bite of something and mashed it around in her mouth. “Works seventy-two percent of the time.”

  “How come every time I talk to you, I feel less intelligent?”

  “I just hold up a mirror, X.”

  “When he snapped my photo with the robotic bee, did my facial features go into the system?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s the whole point. That shit is between you and the microdrone. It doesn’t need anything else. No records in the system, no accountability. And thank God. Your Scooby-Doo disguise—bubble gum in the lips and a hat—would’ve only gotten you so far.”

  “Molleken seems to have top-secret security clearances. Looks like he’s even cleared to access sensitive compartment information.”

  “Judging from the Predator drone parts littering his lab, I’d say, ‘Duh.’ He should be the poster boy for the military-technological complex, but there’s virtually no mention of his overlap anywhere. That Area 6 shit makes you fall off the map fast.”

  “Next stop is Creech North. I need your help prepping.”

  “’Kay. I need to get home anyway. My neighbor’s watching Dog. She’s this lonely divorced Realtor with the worst ombre hair-dye job ever who, like, binges on home-improvement shows and subsists entirely on Truffle Kerfuffle—”

  “Truffle…?”

  “It’s an ice cream—hello?—and I told her I’d be back tomorrow for Dog.”

  “Look at you, all grown up.”

  “I’m sayin’. Adulting’s hard business, X. But I gotta learn for when—”

  “I know, I know. For when you take over for me.”

  “Glad you’re finally on board with the plan.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Hey, where’d you go after you left the battle lab? You shut off the feed, like, an hour ago.”

  He thought of Cammy leaning on the newel post to hold herself up. I never said no. Standing in the doorway of her bathroom wearing nothing but a bra and panties, diminished and scared.

  “Just had to handle something real quick.”

  “’Kay. See ya here.”

  She clicked off.

  * * *

  When Evan entered his hotel suite, the connecting door to Joey’s room was open, the TV blaring. He walked through to find her indelicately passed out, sprawled on the mattress, one arm flung over her head into the pillows, mouth ajar, drooling. Her laptop, the remote, and various plates littered the bedspread around her, the wreckage of a Caesar salad and a cheeseburger. A sole stubby french-fry survivor rested aslant on the plate next to a well-plowed mound of ketchup.

  She often started when woken up, a panic reaction from her childhood, so he crossed the room as quietly as he could manage. He thumbed down the TV volume a few notches and then pulled a throw blanket gently over her.

  One eye was crusted with sleep, and her whistling exhalations carried the scent of onions, but he felt no ping of his OCD initiating disgust or aversion. There was no part of her that he didn’t find endearing.

  He wondered what that meant.

  The realization cut him at the knees, and he lowered himself to sit on the bed to her side. He thought about Veronica looking at him, that flare of pride before she’d found out who he really was: He told me that you were chosen out of the boys’ home. To do good. He thought about that sketch Andre kept thumbtacked to his wall, his daughter lovingly rendered, each line of her face resurrected from memory. He thought about Cammy’s parents and everything they might have wished for. And then her on the stairs, blouse ripped, breast exposed.

  “Damn it,” he said softly.

  Joey shifted, for once waking calmly. She stretched, wiped her mouth. “Language.”

  “Sorry.”

  She rolled over onto her side, yawned inelegantly.

 
; His thoughts pulled to Andre. At one time he’d had something so precious. In Sofia, a daughter with life in her eyes. Evan pictured her in the laundry room of her building, wearing her mom’s bra on her head and mugging for the other ladies. And Brianna, tough and smart enough to raise an eleven-year-old girl on her own. A kitchen table to share meals at and someone to tuck in at night.

  Resentment stirred in him—no, something deeper. Envy? That Andre had all this and had thrown it away. And yet Evan was stuck with him. If he turned his back on Andre, he’d be turning his back on Veronica, and then he’d never find whatever he was looking for.

  And yet he had something far more valuable right here in front of him. He watched Joey’s back rise and fall with her breaths. Crumbs on her pillowcase.

  “Can I…?” Evan hesitated.

  She said, “What?”

  “Can I pet your hair?”

  She looked up at him. “Uh, sure?”

  He did.

  She closed her eyes. Then opened them. “This is weird, isn’t it?”

  “Kind of,” Evan said. “Should I stop?”

  “No.” She snuggled down into a pillow. “I might like it.”

  Her head was warm, her locks glossy and smooth. Her skull felt fragile and soft.

  She kept her eyes closed. “We never … I don’t know, just like get lunch. Go to a movie.”

  “You want to go to a movie?”

  “That’s not the point,” she said. “The point is, what are we? You’re not my dad. You’re not my uncle. You’re not my big brother.” She opened her eyes, and as always he was taken by the depth of their green. “So, like, who are we? What are we good for?”

  He kept stroking her hair. He knew what he was good for. He just wanted to be good for something else.

  She arched her spine, lazed back into a fetal curl. “This isn’t real life.”

  Evan pictured Cammy’s dark room, the bills piling up, her chipped pink nails, the way she’d looked at him from the threshold of the bathroom.

  He said, “Maybe this is better than real life.”

  But Joey was already asleep.

  49

  A Nobody