A pistol rode a holster on her right hip, but she hadn’t reached for it; she’d wanted to get it done quietly in the alley.
Sound rushed back into Evan’s head—Andre’s screech of a gasp, the whisper of Queenie’s arm against her ribs as she reached for her gun, the pounding of Evan’s own heartbeat, shocked into high gear by the trauma.
His arm still extended before him, the blade improbably rising straight through his flesh. Blood hadn’t flowed from the wound yet—the white connective tissue of the hypodermis peeled up like a burst seam.
He wouldn’t reach his gun before she reached hers.
So he rotated his arm from the shoulder and swung the bar of his forearm at her neck, leading with the carbon steel point.
He couldn’t manage much force, just a swipe of the impaled blade across the front of her throat.
It was enough.
Blood sheeted from the slit, dousing her neck, the top of her chest.
Her hands rose, fingers splayed against her breastbone as if showing off a necklace. She tried to look down, eyes straining to see the wound.
Her head rotated slowly back up, her mouth parting to release a funnel of bright arterial blood across her lips and down her chin.
She smiled languidly, mysteriously, and then her knees buckled and she slumped to the asphalt.
Evan grabbed Andre and ran.
60
The Other Half
Evan drove several exits along the freeway dripping into his lap before light-headedness caught up to him. He pulled the Ford pickup over onto the shoulder and looked at Andre, who was recoiled in his seat, still coming out of shock.
Evan spoke calmly. “I need you to get the first-aid trauma pack in the backseat.”
It took a moment for the words to register, and then Andre snapped into motion, leaning into the rear of the cab. He unzipped the olive-drab backpack, laying bare the medic supplies. “Should we take the knife out?”
“No.”
“What do you need?”
“Gauze, cohesive bandages.”
“Cohesive…?”
Evan chinned at the rolls of Coban. “There.”
Andre handed them over.
The pain hadn’t announced itself in full, not yet. A thin, high intensity was all Evan felt, paper-cut pain enhanced by several magnitudes, but the adrenaline was holding the deeper aching at bay. The knife had plunged in two-thirds to the hilt; the exposed edge showed the blade to be mercifully unserrated.
He laid gauze around the blade’s entry and exit points and then wrapped his forearm tightly, biting off the bandage and smoothing it down so it clung to itself. The compression felt good. The bandage covered the point of union, turning blade and bone into one thing, a bound cross.
When he bent his elbow, pressure on the nerve sent a white-hot needle up through his shoulder into the side of his neck. Wincing, he reached across himself with his left hand and tried to tug the gearshift back into drive.
Before he could, his RoamZone gave its distinctive ring.
He answered to the sound of sobbing. There was a chilling quality to it, a person cracked open to the marrow, giving vent to more rage than grief. All at once it ended.
And then a voice, masculine but high-pitched, husky from crying. “I will take you apart bone by bone.”
Evan said, “Okay.”
“But I’ll do it to Andre Duran first,” Declan said. “You’ll watch me every inch of the way so you’ll know what’s coming.”
Evan said, “Okay.”
“You have any idea what it’s like? That kind of connection? When you have the same blood rushing through your veins?”
Evan glanced over at Andre, his thoughts flurrying. Eased out a breath through clenched teeth. “No.”
“She was a part of me,” Declan said. “My twin. You understand that? You killed half of me.”
“Don’t worry,” Evan said. “I’ll get to the other half soon enough.”
He hung up. Sucked in a breath. Tried to relax his jaw.
His vision speckled, and he leaned his skull against the headrest and sipped a few breaths.
Andre said, “Need me to drive?”
Evan didn’t want to nod, but he did.
He opened the door and half fell out onto his feet. The foreign object lodged in his arm felt like an insensate part of himself, a limb lost to anesthesia. He had to get it out as soon as possible.
He stumbled to the passenger side, passing Andre, vehicles flashing dangerously by. He heard someone make a quiet grunt, realized it was him.
Andre took the wheel, looked over, said, “Where we going?”
Evan stared at the freeway sign ahead, realizing only now the direction he’d unknowingly steered them, his unconscious pointing the way.
He nodded through the windshield, and Andre stomped the gas, throwing gravel as they merged into traffic.
* * *
Veronica opened the door and gasped. She wore a gauzy white bathrobe over a pair of cream pajamas. The wind caught the fabric, setting her aflutter, more apparition than human.
She ushered them into the Bel Air mansion, the door’s closing taking the life out of her clothing. Looking from Evan to Andre, she fastened a sash around her waist, settled into the calm of a person who’d known trauma well enough to persist lucidly in the face of it.
Evan’s good arm was hooked around Andre’s shoulder, but he was doing his best not to make him bear too much of his weight. Andre’s gaze darted around at the water feature of the foyer floor, the high ceiling, the yippy dogs. Evan could only imagine what the house felt like to him.
Veronica stepped in to help Evan, Andre slumping his shoulder to slide him off for the transfer. The scent of lilac emanated from her. She led them back, vast rooms opening one after another like chambers in a castle. Andre kept the trauma backpack on and his eyes wide.
Veronica deposited them at a kitchen table the size of a barn door, banished the dogs up a hall, and returned. They sat around the table like a normal family were it not for the combat knife rammed through Evan’s forearm.
He unwound the bandages, which peeled free with a wet crackle. When the gauze lifted from the incision, he finally felt the full measure of pain, a deep throbbing in the flesh.
Thanks to the sharpness of the combat knife, the wound was exceedingly neat, two inches on either side with minimal tearing. He set his arm on the table before him, centered like a meal. The intersecting blade looked ridiculous, a comedic prop. If it had split the radius and ulna, there’d be nerve and tendon damage aplenty, so he took a moment to be grateful for small mercies.
The surgical stapler, preloaded with thirty-five staples, came sealed in a plastic pouch. It was office-supply white and looked like a robotic garden-hose nozzle. There was a bottle of alcohol.
This was going to suck.
Before he could brace himself, Andre stood up suddenly, wobbled a bit on his feet. “I don’t … I’m not sure I can watch this.”
“Go into the other room,” Veronica said. “The last thing we need is you fainting and splitting your head open. I can help him.”
Andre hesitated, taking in the sunken living room as if it frightened him. Maybe it did.
Evan looked at Veronica. “If you don’t tell him, I will.”
Her eyes flared, big behind her painted lashes. On the inhale the cords of her neck came clear. But she didn’t flinch. She looked right back at Evan, and he could see in her face that she knew he was right, that it had to be dragged into the open.
“Tell me what?” Andre said.
But Veronica kept her eyes on Evan. For a final instant, they were sharing this, their secret, and something about that felt oddly intimate.
She tipped her head to Evan deferentially.
He cleared his throat. Blinked against the pain. “We’re…” He couldn’t say brothers. “We have the same mom.”
“What?” Andre said lightly. And then, “What? Wait, who?”
No sound
but the hum of electricity feeding the oven.
“Me,” Veronica said.
Andre coughed out a laugh. Eyes rolling and a touch wild. “Ms. Le—Veronica? Veronica is my mother?” A ragged inhalation. “And yours, too?”
Evan couldn’t bring himself to say yes, so he nodded.
“Huh,” Andre said. “Ain’t that some shit. Ain’t that some real…” And then it began to sink in, and he pawed at his mouth, eyes welling, and walked quietly into the next room.
Veronica and Evan sat in the silence, bound by this confusing bit of drama, a shared allegiance of some kind. It felt like closeness. Was this another facet of what it was to be family?
He felt a sudden rush of regard for Veronica. She’d calmly accepted the situation, unrattled and unflappable. She’d asked no questions, focused only on Evan’s well-being. She’d passed no judgment on what had been brought to her door and seemed instead to be receptive, even appreciative for who Evan was in the face of what she’d launched him into. In her composure he felt a sort of acceptance that he hadn’t known himself to crave. But he let her gaze warm him now.
And thought of the man in the other room, his half brother by blood.
Veronica’s gaze moved to the doorway through which Andre had vanished.
He said, “Go.”
“Your arm.”
He looked down at the crosshatched handle scales of the knife. All he had to do was grip and extract. “I’ve managed worse. This is just pain. What he’s feeling is something deeper.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” he said, his voice threatening to crack, “I’ve felt it.”
* * *
A half hour later, Veronica drifted back into the kitchen.
Evan’s right forearm was tightly bound by cohesive bandages, triple-wrapped to form a flexible cast above the stapled incisions. He’d washed the knife and then, unsure what to do with it, placed it in the recycle bin.
The alcohol bottle sat empty on the table before him. He’d used it on the wound and then to wipe down the surface. He’d washed his hands, but still blood remained stuck in the seams of his knuckles.
“He okay?” Evan asked.
“Who the hell knows?” she said. “What a mess I’ve made of us all.”
“Did you tell him the whole truth?”
“So help me God. I figured I owed him at least that.” She adjusted her sash and kept on. “He’s washing his face, and then you’ll drive him back.”
She moved in a daze past him to the countertop, fussed with her pill bottles, then clapped her palm to her mouth and swallowed them dry. She set her hands on the tile facing away, her shoulder blades bunched, her head lowered.
For a time she breathed, emotion seeming to move through her. It was as though Evan could see the events of the evening catch up to her and settle inside.
She finally turned back, her eyes ablaze with an inner light that he mistook for indignation.
She moved closer, and he saw it was something else, something primal, a mama-bear instinct that he’d seen a time or two in mothers he’d helped when their desperation turned to fury.
“He told me what they did,” she said. “How they tracked you there. Tried to stab him in the throat. And that they want to … want to torture you both. There are more of them?”
Evan nodded.
“My son.” She rested a hand on his cheek.
The words arrowed right through the center of him. She meant it now in full, she’d earned it, and in a manner of speaking he had, too. He couldn’t find his voice, so he gave a nod.
“Are you as terrible as you say you are?”
“I can be,” he said. “Yes.”
Her eyes came alive, afire. She bent her head gently to kiss the back of his hand, and her lips came away faintly rouged with blood. She looked into his eyes, into the depths of who he was.
“Good,” she said. “Kill every last one of them.”
61
Family
Evan finished duct-taping a bedsheet over the sole window in the tiny rented room. Andre sat quietly on his bed, hands folded calmly in his lap, and watched. Since that AA meeting, a peace had descended over him. None of his usual banter or fidgeting was on display, even after the news Veronica had dropped on him. In giving in he seemed to have located a kind of peace inside himself.
Evan thought about when he’d worked on Joey’s shoulder, how it had been tender to the point of intolerability. It struck him that the same law of physics applied to any injury, physical or emotional. If you babied it, it stiffened even more, spreading the pain through you. But if you yielded, if you were willing to endure the white-hot agony of making vulnerable what you sought to protect, you had a shot at releasing it.
Evan turned around to face Andre. They’d opened the window earlier to vent the stale air and tidied the place together. The groceries they’d picked up were stacked along one wall, the mini-fridge stuffed. The taped bedsheet blocked the nighttime lights of neighboring buildings, the only illumination now the sterile glow of a lamp in the corner.
“You need to stay inside,” Evan said. “These next-gen drones can go window to window.”
“I hear that.”
“I’ll come back when it’s over. By Monday morning it’ll be done one way or another. Promise me you won’t leave this room.”
“I promise.”
“Promise me you won’t drink.”
Andre lifted his chin a touch higher. “I promise.”
Evan turned for the door.
“Hey,” Andre said. “We family?”
Evan paused. That sketch of Sofia stared at him from the wall, those beautifully rendered dark eyes. She was what to him? Some kind of niece? That was a question for another day.
He cleared his throat, breathed through the tension Andre’s question brought up in him, tried to relax into it.
“I suppose so,” he said.
“They say families are made,” Andre said.
“I don’t know nothing about that,” Evan said, realizing that the street cadence had crept once more into his voice. “But I’ll be here if you need me.”
“Yeah.” Andre nodded. “Me, too.”
62
Your Dirty Parts
Declan studied his naked image in the hotel bathroom. Each stomach muscle a distinct rectangle with four pronounced sides and something approximating right angles at the corners. His chest defined enough to catch shadow. His hair, still glistening from the shower, perfectly in place, not a single stray. Steam thickened the atmosphere of the room, fogging the edges of the mirror.
He walked into the hotel bedroom. The suits hung neatly in the wardrobe, a waterfall of luscious fabrics, some bought on Savile Row, others cut to perfection by a Hong Kong tailor. Everything outside him—flesh and muscle, cloth and leather—was as close to perfection as could be humanly managed.
And even so, all that armor barely held the chaos of his inner self in the shape of a person.
He’d cleaned out Queenie’s room next door, gathered her personals and dragged them in here. Her corpse was with the city coroner, and he would have to think long and hard about how to cut through the red tape without incriminating himself. To get to her body, his female self.
But right now only one reality mattered to him.
Killing the Nowhere Man.
On the mattress his phone rang, vibrating on the Four Seasons comforter.
He walked to it, the air cool against his bare body, and picked up. “She’s dead.”
His voice was low and sonorous, occupying the other space, the space of the him he hid from the world. He was embodied.
Even the doctor seemed to sense it, allowing a rare pause. “What does it feel like?” he asked.
Declan thought about it. “It’s a kind of pain too deep to feel. So there’s just numbness. And nothing left to care about. Which means I can do anything.”
As the doctor’s mouth cracked open, a faint puff of air came over the
line, something well shy of a moan. “That’s how I feel,” he said. “All the time.”
His voice was hushed, perhaps with awe. Maybe even something approaching empathy. But when he spoke again, it sounded flat once more, the humanity compressed out of it. “I’m delivering the drones tomorrow at midnight. Skeleton crew at the base means fewer eyes, fewer questions, fewer protocols. I’m using my personal team of contractors for maximum oversight.”
“Because the last team did so well at the impound lot.” Declan’s voice, when deep, carried a different kind of authority. He wasn’t afraid to let out his anger, his judgment, in full. In the fullness there was a sort of calm.
Now he could practically hear the doctor thinking about the slight to his team and deciding not to challenge it.
Instead he said, “That’s why I’d like you there. Keeping an eye on the transport from afar. In case anything unexpected happens.”
“I will be the only unexpected thing from here on out,” Declan said, and hung up.
He got into bed, his exhaustion pasting him to the mattress. He felt all the points of his body where it touched the sheets—heels, calves, lower back, shoulder blades, base of his skull.
Before he could dread the coming darkness, he was asleep.
Three minutes or three hours later, he awoke into half consciousness.
His body locked down, tendons pulled piano-wire taut. Even his Achilles tendon ached, his feet flexed painfully, cramps knotting the arches.
Lungs wouldn’t release. Head couldn’t turn. Just his eyes moving to the door.
Sure enough, there came the scrape against the wood.
Still alive, still alive.
His chest turned concave, unwilling to stretch and afford air.
The clawlike slash of fingernails flaking the paint. The door bowing inward, into his psyche itself. Then the latch released and swung inward to reveal that feminine silhouette. The long, long nails candy-apple red, the light moving through them from behind to put ten glowing points at the ends of her hands.
His heartbeat pounded out a distress signal: Still alive, still alive.
Prodigal Son Page 33
