Prodigal Son

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Her back and shoulders, covered with rippled scar tissue from a chemical burn, felt feverish against the seat. The twin propellers roared. They were nearing ten thousand feet, at least by the look of the earth below.

  Over the headsets, Jumpmaster Steve kept on. “I repeat: I own the rear of the plane. Every thousand feet is six seconds. You’re gonna pull at three thousand feet when you start to see ground rush.” A condescending wink at Candy, Call Me Maddy, and Sister McKenzie. “Don’t worry, ladies, if you pass out, an automatic activation device will make the chute deploy anyway.”

  One of the guys pried his gaze off Candy’s superior tits to look at Jumpmaster Steve. “At what altitude is that?”

  “Don’t be a nervous Nellie,” the jumpmaster said.

  Dude-bro’s friend shouldered his bud, keyed to talk over the channel. “Just remember, man. Fat chicks and fags do this all the time.”

  Candy set her jaw, stared out the window. Ever since she’d left the Orphan Program, she spent her time trying to find a charge. Anything to make her feel something besides the discomfort of her back, an itch that went beneath the skin all the way to the bone. At times it felt like she was composed of discomfort.

  As Orphan V she’d been arguably the finest black-ops assassin at the DoD’s disposal, worthy of being mentioned in a breath with Orphan X. She and X had a colorful and complex history, taking opposite paths to wind up in a version of the same place.

  Out in the cold.

  She’d briefly hooked up with an old associate in Frankfurt who was running skin-care products in spas that surreptitiously extracted DNA from potential targets, but an Interpol raid had netted the associate, leaving Candy with too much time on her hands and little to do.

  So she was here, chasing some kind of thrill, anything to throw a spark back into the dry tinder of her life.

  “And make sure you’re cautious jumping out,” Jumpmaster Steve continued. “Fall flat, dumb, and happy, careful feet control, no backsliding. Got it, ladies? We don’t want any midair tinkling.”

  The guys laughed, and Call Me Maddy and Sister McKenzie obliged with a titter, but Candy could see in their eyes that they felt demeaned.

  Her phone hummed in her pocket. She pulled it out.

  A text from 1-855-2-NOWHERE.

  It read, WANNA COME PLAY?

  For the first time in a long time, she smiled. She unhooked her harness seat belt, flung the vinyl straps aside.

  “Whoa, whoa, little lady,” Jumpmaster Steve said, leaping up. “I haven’t cleared us to—”

  Candy flipped off her headset, strode over, and struck the red control button embedded in the skin of the craft. The side door started to open.

  Wind whipped at them. Jumpmaster Steve was screaming at her, but mercifully his voice couldn’t be heard. He moved to grab her, and she caught his arm, pronated the elbow, turned him around, and dumped him face-first back into his seat.

  She stepped past the guys and young women ensconced in their designer jumpsuits and walked out the door, giving a little hop to launch her into a front flip. She corkscrewed twice for good measure and then caught the wind, rotating into a head-to-earth body position to speed her descent, arms at her sides, a rocket launched at the rising ground.

  What a delightful feeling to have someplace to be.

  58

  A Whole Other Kind of Loneliness

  After Evan knocked, he heard no noise inside the rented room at the top of the stairs and worried that Andre had split. Or worse. Evan had left Joey to coordinate with Orphan V for the time being while he locked down this side of the mission.

  He knocked again, and then there was a shuffling noise within, the sound of a limb banging into something, a muffled expletive, and then Andre’s wan face at the door, leached of human color. Charcoal-hued bags under his eyes, puffy with toxicity. His hair hangover-ruffled. His stubble had seemingly gained another full day’s growth in the few hours since Evan had left him.

  He had a potato chip stuck to his cheek, which he now groped for, peeled off, regarded, and then flicked away. He stank of rum and body odor, and Evan felt a vestigial flutter of repulsion, an old familiar urge to back away down the stairs and leave him to his lair.

  But he ignored it.

  And held steady, staring into the face of his half brother. He searched for any sign of himself in Andre’s features, any hint of their shared blood, but Andre looked no more like Evan than any other boy from the Pride House Group Home. What a surreal twist of fate that bound them together in their DNA. Any thought of sharing this secret with Andre evaporated at the sight of him; some arcane rule Evan hadn’t known to abide by prevented him from sharing what Veronica had not yet decided to share herself. Which was fine—it was all too much for Evan to comprehend right now, let alone convey.

  “Why the hell are you back?” Andre said, snapping Evan from his trance. “I told you I—”

  “You’re right,” Evan said. “I don’t care about you like this. I care about who you could be. That’s respect.”

  Andre’s expression loosened, head lolling back on his neck, his eyes suddenly suffused with sadness. “I think I just need to sleep it off, be alone for a while.”

  “Your best thinking got you here,” Evan said. “Time to try something else.”

  Andre thumbed crust from his eye. Stared back through the doorway, leaning heavily on the knob, like it was holding him upright.

  He staggered away from the door. He didn’t get far before the metal bed frame hit him behind the thighs, forcing him to sit abruptly. He pinched at the bridge of his nose, literally hung his head.

  When Andre spoke, his voice was cracked from dehydration. “I was good at drawing. ’Member that?” He looked up, his eyes bloodshot, weary. “Thought I could grow up, draw comics one day. Batman, right?”

  “You were,” Evan said. “You were good.”

  “I coulda been something, dunno … worthwhile.”

  “You still can be,” Evan said. “Best two words in the English language: ‘next time.’”

  “If I figure it out. If I live that long. I been under the heel of this thing weeks now. All I feel is fear. At what it’ll be like when they catch me.”

  “Fear needs a future,” Evan said. “Let’s focus on the present.”

  Andre spoke now in little more than a whisper. “Don’t you feel it, too?”

  “No,” Evan said. “I just feel dread. I’ve been there enough times, at the point when it catches up. I’ve learned what it is.”

  “It worse than fear? Dread?”

  “Not worse. But it’s more awful. Because it’s my job to meet what’s coming. Which means it’s on me if I fail.”

  “How did you … how do you get there? Where you are?”

  The question was so raw, so plaintive, that Evan took a moment to find a worthy answer. He looked down, studied the tips of his boots. “I was so goddamned scared of Van Sciver. He was so much … so much bigger than I was. So I covered it. And I covered it. Afraid you guys would see.”

  “See what?”

  “Shame. At how afraid I was. How powerless. I had to prove I wasn’t a coward. So I did. I faked it again and again. Until at some point I believed myself.”

  Andre made a thoughtful voice deep in his throat. “Maybe that’s all bravery is.”

  “Maybe,” Evan said. “And bravery comes in different guises.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like standing up now, taking a shower, and getting to a meeting.”

  Andre blinked a few times quickly and shuddered off a chill. Then he rolled his head back on his neck and blew a breath at the ceiling that signaled not defeat but a different kind of giving up.

  He rose.

  * * *

  The large church basement, toasty from an overzealous heating system, felt warm and cozy. High-set hopper windows, fogging up with a kind of holiday cheer, vibrated with the buzz of trapped flies. Cookies and coffee and a boxed cake on a table in the back. The sc
ent of cigarettes rising from the clothes of the participants, who sat in folding chairs arrayed around a podium. A poster on the wall proclaimed DON’T PICK A FIGHT WITH REALITY, an aphorism Evan figured could make a good addition to the Commandments.

  He’d driven a surveillance-detection route through the surrounding blocks before approaching the All Saints Catholic Church via an alley. He’d eased Andre to the meeting step by cautious step. The basement had stairs at both ends, providing good options for egress.

  A woman in a pantsuit finished her story and said, “Would anyone else like to share?”

  Andre stirred in his chair beside Evan and reluctantly rose.

  He took the podium. “My name is Andre Duran, and I’m a alcoholic.”

  A chorus of gentle voices. “Hi, Andre.”

  “I’m about four hours sober,” he said. “So I got that shit going for me.”

  A few chuckles. Evan looked around at the others, some of whom had shown themselves intimately over the past forty-five minutes. So much vulnerability, so little negative judgment, everyone in it together, all telling their own unique stories. Or he’d thought of them as unique, at least the first four or five, but as he’d sat here and watched person after person bare their soul, he realized that this very process of truth and sharing was the thing that made their stories not so horribly unique. Their courage bound them and allowed them to shuffle together into the light of whatever tomorrow might hold.

  The flies beat themselves against the high windows, an oddly pleasing hum.

  “I been under a lot of pressure,” Andre said. “And I caved. Because, hey, what’s better when you already got a ton of problems than adding a buncha self-inflicted ones, too?”

  A lot of nods. Evan saw the wreckage in the faces around him. And some deep-seated wisdom as well.

  “My first meeting, my sponsor told me, ‘If God seems far away, who moved?’” Andre laughed. “I been crawlin’ away for a long time. From my God, from my—” His voice caught. He pressed together his lips until they stopped trembling. “From my daughter.”

  He looked down at the podium as if there were notes he could refer to. “I remember two years back around this time. Sofia was … she was nine. I was strugglin’ real bad. Paycheck going to the liquor store. Head in the bottle. All the other families around had their Christmas lights and decorations and all that shit that takes time and … I don’t know, care, I guess. And there’s this awful feeling at the back of your head that you’re no longer just fuckin’ up your own life but someone else’s, someone too young to even make the choice or know what they’re missing out on, but they are, and you know it, and that’s a whole other kind of loneliness, and you can’t help but have the sense that someone’s watching you, not God really, but some other something, and that thing is never gonna forgive you even if she does. You’re breakin’ apart, but you try’na hold it together for the gifts, two Barbie dolls and a sweater three sizes too big, and my girl grateful for it, loving the toys that I stopped by Goodwill for the night before, that I wrapped with too much tape in leftover wrapping paper with cake and candles, and the kid is so grateful for the badly wrapped fucking Barbies you could just hate her for not knowin’ she deserves better. But you don’t. You hate you. And you see it in her eyes, how much you … you know, you’re just failing. At being a adult.”

  Andre breathed wetly for a time.

  “And instead of fighting that failure, insteada making it better, you give in to it.” He caught himself. “I did. I gave in to it. I wallowed. I told myself all my pain entitled me to something. A break, right? Just a fucking break. And I haven’t seen my baby in one year, five months, and sixteen days. And I don’t know if I’m gonna have the chance to again.”

  He sobbed into the L of his thumb and forefinger for a time, and everyone let him.

  They just let him.

  Evan looked around in disbelief. All that patience and acceptance and quiet support on display, and Evan squirming in the face of it.

  He forced himself to sit still in what he was feeling. To mirror the people around him with their prematurely lined faces, their breath heavy with coffee, clothes reeking of old cigarette smoke. He tried to see what they knew, what they’d learned.

  The First Commandment: Assume nothing.

  Including that Evan knew a damn thing about anything.

  Andre saw in Evan all kinds of bravery. But sitting here in his folding chair, Evan saw only his deficits. To talk about his deepest shame and failings here in this arena was unthinkable. He’d imagined himself as a guiding light to Andre, drawing him toward some kind of wholeness. But he realized now that Andre had just as much to teach him, if he were only willing to pay attention.

  And then Andre picked up his head. “But I’m gonna try ’n’ do better. For myself and for her. I’m gonna try ’n’ find grace again. Thank you.”

  Everyone clapped for him, and he nodded a few times and then caught Evan’s eye, his playful smile suddenly, alarmingly familiar. “I want to invite my friend Evan up to share.”

  Dozens of sets of eyes lasered to Evan.

  He felt all his goodwill toward Andre dissipate. In the windows the flies buzzed and buzzed. The scent of scorched coffee wafted from the rear table.

  “No thanks,” Evan said. “I’m good.”

  “Hey, man,” Andre said, now warming to a prankster’s grin that Evan was simultaneously glad for and enraged by. “Denial is the first stage.”

  All the gazes around him were warm, accepting, which somehow made Evan feel even more exposed. The perceived threat made his training kick in, his senses revving to high. The cold metal of the chair beneath him. The dry warmth of the air. The symphony of the trapped flies.

  One of the auditory notes had a vaguely jangling element to it, the faintest clink of metal against glass. Time slowed down, Andre and the others fading from consideration. Evan turned his head, looking over his shoulder at the hopper window to the side.

  A fly at the window caught the ambient light from a passing car, giving off a metallic glint.

  Evan’s chair screeched on the tile; he’d risen abruptly.

  He checked the front and back stairwells—doors still closed.

  Quick strides to the window, plucking a saddlebag purse from the chair beside the pantsuited woman, everyone watching him in puzzlement. He rose on tiptoes and slammed the purse to the glass. A few flies buzzed free, but several fell against the sill.

  He picked one up by a shiny glassine wing.

  Carbon-fiber thorax, copper electrodes threaded through the membranous wings, tiny stamp of the Mimeticom M on the dorsal surface. And riding the front of the convex head, the pinpoint dot of a camera.

  A surveillance drone.

  Evan swung around. He had the full attention of the room. “Sorry,” he said, handing the woman back her purse. “I hate flies.”

  Andre was on alert, all signs of joking gone.

  The room, Evan imagined, had witnessed some odd displays like this. The attendees moved on without ceremony, grabbing their belongings and rising. Evan headed quickly to Andre, took him by the biceps, and pivoted to the front stairs.

  Declan “the Gentleman” Gentner stood in the doorway, wearing a blue herringbone suit and a satisfied grin.

  59

  A Burst Seam

  As the others milled about in the wake of the meeting, they blocked Declan Gentner momentarily from view. Everyone oblivious, clustering in smaller groups, putting away the chairs or going for the exits.

  Holding tight to Andre, Evan didn’t want to draw his pistol and cause a stampede.

  Keeping the crowd between them and Declan, Evan pivoted to the rear stairs—no sign of Queenie—and hustled Andre toward them.

  Declan started forward, nodding a few hellos and slicing through the herd.

  Evan reached the back stairwell, slung Andre behind him, and flung the door open hard enough to strike whoever might be lying in wait.

  Empty.

 
Tugging Andre up the stairs, he let his other hand ride his holstered gun. Andre stumbled, caught his footing. “Is that … that’s them, right?”

  Evan didn’t answer.

  They reached the top landing. Shoving Andre to the side, Evan shouldered through the door into the rear lobby.

  A few after-hours workers lingered at the reception desk, Evan nearly drawing at the sight of them. Instead he turned back and beckoned Andre forward. He rushed out, panic-breathing, shallow jerks of the chest.

  They jogged across to the rear door, ignoring the workers’ greetings.

  As they neared, the stairwell door behind them clicked open again, and Evan 180ed, expecting to see Declan emerging.

  Instead an older guy with baggy eyes trickled out into sight, leading a stream of attendees.

  Evan swung back around just as Andre, fueled by fear, pushed out through the back door. “No—wait!”

  But Andre cleared the threshold into the alley before he registered Evan’s voice and froze, framed for an instant just beyond the doorway.

  A shape materialized at his side, an arm swinging upward at his chin, a fist topped with nine inches of carbon steel.

  Evan lunged forward, the fingers of his right hand splayed, his arm supinated to guard Andre’s face.

  His forearm caught the fixed combat blade.

  It impaled him, rising straight through the meat to the side of his radius, flesh and skin bowed off the bone like slit neoprene.

  He’d stopped the tip of the blade inches from Andre’s chin.

  Queenie had released the knife in her surprise, and they stood there for a suspended moment, a trio just beyond the doorway.

  She wore a red cold-shoulder shirt, circles of pale flesh showing at her deltoids. Aggressive scarlet lipstick, fitted jeans, red Converse shoes—like a vampire glowing in the semidarkness.