Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “Eighteen.”

  “No.”

  She squirmed a bit more. “Sixteen.”

  He started up again, and she hurried to stay at his side. The only colors were shades of gray and sepia. The moonlight ripened the green squash to a pale yellow.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “When you lie, your blink rate picks up. You’ve also got a one-shouldered shrug that’s a tell. And your hands—just keep your hands at your sides. Your body language talks more than you do, and that’s saying something.”

  “God,” she said. “You sound just like Jack.”

  He took a moment with that one.

  They cleared the squash and came onto a stretch where something—pumpkins?—had been recently harvested. Hacked vines populated the barren patch, pushing up from the earth like gnarled limbs. An aftermath scent lingered, fecund and autumnal, the smell of life and death.

  “It doesn’t matter how old I am,” she said. “I can help.”

  “How? Do you have locations, addresses for Van Sciver?”

  “Of course not. You know how he is. Everything’s end-stopped six different ways. I didn’t even know where I was most of the time.”

  “Do you have any actionable intel on him?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you know why Jack was in Alabama?”

  She colored slightly. “Is that where he died?”

  “Joey, listen. You’re raw, totally unbroken—”

  “I’m not a horse.”

  “No. You’re a mustang. You fight well. You have extraordinary coordination. But you’re not finished, let alone operational.”

  “Jack sent you to me.”

  “To protect you. Not get you killed.”

  “I have training.” She was angry now, punching every word. “I knocked you on your ass, didn’t I?”

  “You can’t imagine the kind of violence that’s coming.”

  “Did Jack advise you to just ship me off somewhere to hide for the rest of my life?”

  The shed loomed ahead, a dark mass rising from the earth, the outline of the beater truck beside it. Evan quickened his pace.

  “Jack died before he knew how this would all unfold. I have only one concern now, and that is finding Van Sciver and every person who had a hand in Jack’s death and killing them.” Evan pulled open the creaky truck door and flipped down the visor. The keys landed in his palm. He looked back at Joey. “What am I supposed to do with you?”

  “I’m not useless.”

  “I never said that.”

  She came around the passenger side, got in, slammed the door. “Yeah,” she said. “You did.”

  15

  Just Geometry

  The neon sign announcing the motel in Cornelius had lost its M and L, blaring a woeful orange OTE into the night. The place was rickety despite being single-story, tucked beneath a freeway ramp, the pitted check-in desk manned by a woman who smacked watermelon gum vigorously to cover the scent of schnapps.

  It was perfect.

  Evan checked in solo, prepaid in cash, and didn’t have to produce any details of the alias he had at the ready. Not the kind of establishment that made inquiries of its patrons. The woman never looked him in the face, her attention captured by a hangnail she was working to limited success with her front teeth. The security camera was a fake, a dusty plastic decoy drilled into the wall for show.

  He signed the book “Pierre Picaud,” took the key that was inexplicably attached to a duct-taped water bottle, and trudged like a road-weary salesman to Room 6.

  As he opened the door, Joey materialized from the shadows and slipped inside with him.

  She dumped her rucksack on the ratty carpet, regarded a crooked watercolor of hummingbirds at play. “Look,” she said. “Art.”

  “Really spruces up the place.”

  She gestured to a corner. “I can sleep there.”

  “I’ll take the floor.”

  “I’m younger. The bed looks shitty anyways.”

  “I want to be right by the door,” Evan said.

  She shrugged. “Fine.” She fell back stiffly onto the mattress, a trust fall with no one there to catch her. There was a great creaking of coils. “I think you got the better deal.”

  “That bad?”

  “It feels like lying on a bag of wrenches. No—not quite that bad. Maybe, like, rubber-handled wrenches.”

  “Well, then.”

  “And I’m used to some shitty places,” she said.

  “That’s the biggest thing the Program has on foster-home kids,” he said. “We think wherever we’re going isn’t as bad as where we’ve been.”

  She lifted her head, putting chin to chest, the diffuse neon glow of the sign turning her eyes feral. “Yeah, well, foster homes are different for girls.”

  “Like how?”

  “Like none of your fucking business.”

  “Okay.”

  “I never talk about it. Never.”

  “Okay.”

  She let her head fall back again. Evan followed her gaze. The water-stained ceiling looked like a topographical map. He wondered if anyone ever knew what went on inside the mind of a teenage girl.

  “Do you have a legend?” Evan asked her.

  “Jack was getting me a passport, driver’s license. It was still in process when…”

  “Airport’s out in that case. That’s okay. They’re expecting it anyway.”

  “What’s the plan, then?”

  “First train departs Portland at eight A.M.”

  “Okay. So a train. To where?” She waved a hand dismissively. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “We’ll make arrangements, make sure you’re taken care of.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything I need to know about Van Sciver, now’s the time to tell me.”

  She sat up, crossed her legs. “I didn’t interact with him privately much, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Anything.”

  “He took me when I was fourteen.”

  “He’s the one who found you?”

  “No. It was a guy. Old as death. Gold watch, always smoking, wears Ray-Bans all the time, even at night.”

  Something crept back to life inside Evan’s chest. Something he’d thought long dead.

  Boys mass in a bedroom doorway at Pride House Group Home, Evan at the bottom, always the smallest. They peer down the hall at a man but can see only a partial profile. He is extending a solid black business card to Papa Z between two slender fingers. A gold wristwatch glints, dangling from a thin wrist.

  “Mystery Man,” Evan said.

  She cocked her head.

  Most of all he remembered the helplessness. Twelve years old, his fate in the control of forces so large and unseen they might as well have been ancient gods. Being asked to jump and jump again, never knowing if there’d be earth underfoot, if he’d ever land.

  Until there was Jack, the bedrock to his life.

  When Joey had landed, it was with Van Sciver.

  Her upturned face waited for him to say something. He wondered how she had scraped her way through her sixteen years. That pang knifed through him again, but he ignored it, turned his thoughts to business.

  “How did he choose you?” Evan asked. “The Mystery Man?”

  “He watched us all at first, playing in the yard. Just … observing. For some reason he picked me out one day, drove me a good ways to a marine base. I don’t remember which one, but I was in Phoenix, so I’d guess now it was Yuma? He walked me into a giant training facility. The whole inside of the building had been converted to an indoor obstacle course. It had everything—barbed-wire crawl, mud pits, rope climbs, tire pulls, traverse walls. The most stuff I’d ever seen, the place just crammed with it. At the end of the course, there was a bell, and when you finish, you know, you ring it. The old guy had a stopwatch. He said, ‘The sole aim is to get from Point A to Point B in the fastest time possible.’ I was wearing a dress and sandals. I said, ‘The sole
aim?’ and he said, ‘That’s right.’”

  She paused and again bit her plush lower lip. Her front teeth were slightly too big, spaced with a hair-thin gap. The imperfection was endearing. Without it her features would’ve been too smooth, too perfect.

  “What’d you do?” Evan asked.

  “I turned around and walked out,” she said. “Then I circled the building from the outside, went through a service door by the end of the course, and rang the bell. I looked across at him, and he was still standing there, hadn’t even started the stopwatch yet.”

  “Smart.”

  She shrugged. “It’s just geometry.”

  “And then?”

  “Two seconds later the old guy’s cell phone rings. There must’ve been cameras there. By the time I’d walked back around, he had a syringe in his hand. I don’t remember him sticking me or anything else.” She paused. “I never saw anyone again.”

  “Where’d you wake up?”

  “Maryland. But I didn’t find that out until eleven months later when I escaped.”

  “Van Sciver kept you in a house for an entire year?”

  “A house?” She coughed out a laugh. “I lived on an abandoned air-force installation. My bed was a mattress in a hangar. I ate, slept, trained. That’s it. Usually with other instructors. Van Sciver only dropped by now and then to gauge my progress.”

  “Was he pleased with it?”

  “Yeah. Until.” She pulled in a deep breath. “One night I woke up. Heard noises. A man crying. I don’t why it’s worse than when a woman does, but it was. I crept over to the raised office area, you know, up a short set of stairs. It had the only window. I looked out and saw Van Sciver stuffing an unconscious guy into a duffel bag. Then they carried the duffel toward the hangar. I ran back, pretended to be asleep. Van Sciver came in, woke me. He handed me a Glock 21, you know—the Gen4?”

  Evan was suddenly aware of how cool the room was.

  She said, “I asked what we were doing and he said—”

  “‘It is what it is, and that’s all that it is,’” Evan said.

  She stared at him.

  “Cognitive closure,” Evan said. “Van Sciver’s mode of thinking. A strong preference for order which, okay, a lot of us have. But it’s paired with a distaste for ambiguity. That’s why Jack cultivated it in us. Ambiguity. That’s the part that keeps you human.”

  “Question orders,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper. “The Sixth Commandment.“

  He nodded.

  She swallowed, was silent a moment, then continued. “So I took the gun. I didn’t feel like I had a choice. Van Sciver walked me over to the duffel, told me to shoot it. I asked why. He said it was an order and orders don’t come with whys. I could see the guy’s outline there inside the duffel.”

  In the neon glow, Evan caught a sheen on her forehead. Sweat.

  She shook her head, breaking off the story. “We’ve all done shit we regret. I regret every day of my life what I did.”

  Sliding off the bed, she dug in her rucksack. She pulled out a few toiletries, which she shelved to her chest with an arm, and disappeared into the bathroom. A moment later the shower turned on.

  Evan looked at the open mouth of her rucksack. A piece of paper had fallen out. He picked it up to put it away for her when he saw that it was a birthday card. Tattered envelope, no address.

  The front of the card featured a colorful YOU’RE 16!, though much of the glitter had been worn off from handling. A well-loved card.

  Evan opened it.

  A pressed iris had been preserved inside, already brittle.

  Know that I am proud of you, sweet girl. That I see the beautiful woman you have grown into.

  Xoxo, M.

  Evan stared at the scrawled feminine hand for a time, felt a stirring inside him. Was “M” the mom who had lost Joey into the foster system?

  It certainly wasn’t Orphan M; Evan had left his pieces scattered on a roadway in Zagreb.

  But how would “M” have been in touch with Joey? Joey would have been taken off the grid when she was tapped for the Orphan Program. Jack must have arranged some way to reestablish contact between daughter and mother—mailbox forwarding or a dead drop. It would’ve been a lot of trouble to get done correctly, and Jack only did things correctly. Which meant that whoever “M” was, she meant a lot to Joey.

  Evan put the card away, careful not to fragment the dried flower further, and found a plug to charge his RoamZone.

  Crouched over the faint green glow, he pondered what he would do if a Nowhere Man call rang through right now. The missions formed an endless chain, each client passing on his untraceable number to the next. That was the only fee he charged for his services. He’d found that this simple act was also part of the healing process for clients, a first step on the road to putting their lives back together. What was more empowering than helping to rescue another person?

  For the first time since he’d become the Nowhere Man, he felt unready to answer if the black phone rang. Holed up in a motel in Cornelius, Jack’s death still unavenged, stuck with a sixteen-year-old who was at her best difficult to manage—he was in no state to handle a mission.

  He reminded himself that six hours from now things would get drastically simpler. He just had to hold out until that first train pulled into Union Station. He’d have Joey off his plate.

  Then he’d run Van Sciver to ground and put a bullet through his skull.

  The shower turned off, and a few minutes later Joey emerged, towel wrapped around her. She gestured at the rucksack. “Do you mind if I, uh…”

  “You change out here. I’ll clean up.”

  They passed awkwardly, giving each other a wide berth. In the bathroom he leaned close to the mirror and studied his face, nicked in several places from the shattered windshield. The sterile light caught a dab of dried blood at the corner of his mouth. Only then did he become aware of a throbbing above his right incisor. He lifted his upper lip, saw that the tooth was outlined in crimson. Above it a dot of safety glass speckled in his gum line. He worked it free with his fingers, dropped it in the trash.

  Then he rinsed out his mouth and nose, brushed his teeth using Joey’s toothpaste and his finger, and went back into the room.

  She was in bed, facing away, her breathing already slow and steady. She’d left a pillow on the floor for him.

  He lay down on the carpet near the door and closed his eyes.

  * * *

  He awoke to movement in the room. Stayed perfectly still. Kept his eyes veiled, mostly closed.

  Joey continued to ease out of bed, moving so slowly she didn’t even creak the hair-trigger coils.

  Two silent steps, and then she hunched over her rucksack, reaching for something. She rose, turned. He watched her approach. Her hand passed through a fall of light from the window.

  She was holding her fixed-blade combat knife.

  She moved well, floating on bare feet. He read her posture. Her shoulders were hunched, her head lowered on her neck.

  Nothing in it registered aggression.

  Just fear.

  She leaned over him.

  He made the call to let her.

  He felt the carbon-steel blade press against his throat.

  He opened his eyes all the way.

  Her own eyes were so large, the light coming through them from the side turning the irises transparent. The vivid green of them jumped out of the dark, the eyes of a great cat that no longer knew itself to be great.

  “Don’t hurt me ever,” she said. “Please.”

  “Okay.” He felt the word grind against the knife edge.

  She nodded and then nodded again, as if to herself.

  The pressure eased.

  She withdrew as silently as she’d approached.

  He lay there and stared at the water-stained map of the ceiling, the whole world laid out in its darkness and complexity.

  16

  The Turn to Freedom

  A four-sided Ro
manesque Revival clock tower adorned with lit signage staked Portland Union Station to the west shore of the Willamette River. Evan hustled Joey beneath the GO BY TRAIN flashing sign and into the glossy Italian-marble waiting room, where he bought her a ticket under an alias on a train heading for Ashland, Kentucky, because the choice struck him as sufficiently random. The route ran through Sacramento and Chicago. Between travel time and layovers, that would keep her on the move for nearly three days.

  He steered her out onto the chill of the platform, handed her the Amtrak tickets and a wad of cash.

  “My email address is the.nwhr.man@gmail.com,” he told her. “Say it back to me.”

  She did, her first words in nearly twenty minutes.

  He took her gently by the arm, hustled her down to the far end of the platform. “When you get to Ashland, log into my account.” He told her the password. “Type a message to me in the Drafts folder. Do not send it. I will log in, leave you instructions in the same unsent email. If it doesn’t ever travel over the internet—”

  “I know the protocols,” she said.

  She turned and waited for the train. A limp wind fluttered her hair, and she hooked it behind an ear, exposing a swath of the shaved area.

  Frustratingly, his feet kept him rooted there.

  “Watch your back better,” he said. “Use windows as mirrors—like there or there. The reflections off passing trains. Watch your visibility, too. You should be noting where surveillance cameras are, minding their sight lines, head down.”

  Her lower jaw moved forward, and he heard a clicking of teeth. “I know the protocols.”

  “Then move four inches back behind this post,” he said.

  She stepped beneath the metal overhang and shot him a glare.

  He said, “If you don’t know what you don’t know—”

  “‘—how can I know what to learn?’” she said. “Jack told me that one, too. Like I said. The protocols? I know them.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He left her on the platform. Staying alert, he carved his way back through the waiting room, scanning the crowd. His nose looked okay, but the break had left thumbprint bruises beneath his eyes, so he preferred to avoid looking anyone directly in the face. With each step he sensed the distance widening between him and Joey, between him and Jack’s final, ill-considered wish. His boots tapped the cold, shiny marble. It felt like walking through a tomb.