Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Her ass alone could do the work of a full team of Agency spooks.

  Draker wore a T-shirt, a wise choice since it showed off the scabs and dark, wilted bruises at the crooks of his elbows. Terrific visuals, likely produced from a mixture of vitamin-C powder, Comet, and Visine shot just beneath the epidermis. Then you wolf down enough poppy seeds and Vicks cough syrup to ding the intake opiate-drug tests. After that it’s just about theatrics. Rub your eyes with soap, slam Red Bull, Vicks, and Sudafed, and you have your basic amped, twitchy, rheumy-eyed, nauseated, sweating addict. Claims of suicidality buy you more time off the streets, out of the system, protected under that umbrella of total patient confidentiality offered by a drug-treatment facility.

  A plan worthy of Jack Johns, Patron Saint of Dispossessed Orphans.

  Van Sciver would never have known.

  But for a single eyelash.

  That had put him on the scent of anonymous treatment facilities. But what a bitch to search them. Had it been anyone but Van Sciver with his MegaBot data-mining lair, it never would’ve happened. Draker would’ve lain low, undergone another three-month fake treatment in another facility, and then skipped off into the wide world once the heat died down.

  Draker sidled up, pretended not to eye her cleavage. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”

  “Oh, my God,” Candy said, all breathy like. “Thank you so much.”

  Draker leaned into the trunk, reaching for the tire, his T-shirt straining across his muscular back. Candy withdrew a syringe from the top of her riding boot, popped the sterile plastic cap, and sank the needle into his neck.

  He went limp immediately.

  She flipped his legs into the trunk after him.

  That was a nice feature of the Audi A6.

  Good trunk space.

  She slammed the trunk shut, got in, and drove away. The snatch-and-grab had taken three seconds, maybe four.

  Men were so easy.

  They had a single lever. You just had to give it a tug.

  * * *

  Van Sciver and Thornhill pulled the armored Chevy Tahoe through the tall chain-link gate and parked alongside the humble single-story house. Weeds had overtaken the backyard, and a BBQ grill had tipped over, rusting into the earth.

  Van Sciver got out, the sun shining through his fine copper hair, and rattled the gate shut on stubborn wheels, sealing them in. Thornhill opened the back door.

  They started to unload the Tahoe.

  Padlocks and plywood.

  Nylon ropes and boards of various lengths.

  A decline bench press and jugs of water.

  Mattresses and drop cloths.

  Rags and a turkey baster.

  Duct tape and a folding metal chair.

  Thornhill whistled a tune the entire time. Van Sciver wondered what it would take to wipe that permanent smile off the guy’s face.

  When they finished, Van Sciver’s cheeks and throat had gone blotchy pink from exertion. His shirt clung to the yoke of his shoulders. He had an Eastern European peasant’s build—arms that barely tapered at the wrists, thighs stretching his cargo pants, a neck too thick to encircle with both hands. In another life he would’ve been a 60 gunner, hauling the massive, belt-fed pig for a platoon, a one-man artillery unit.

  But this life was better.

  He grabbed the last of the supplies, closed up the Chevy, and came inside.

  Thornhill was doing handstand push-ups in what passed for the kitchen, his palms pressed to the peeling linoleum. The forks of his triceps could have cracked walnuts.

  Van Sciver’s phone alerted. He juggled the items he was holding and picked up. “Code.”

  “‘Potluck chiaroscuro,’” Candy said. “They’re getting arty on us.”

  “Is the package in hand?”

  “What do you think?”

  “V.” He packed the syllable with impatience.

  “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

  He walked to the chipped counter. Set down a dog collar next to a galvanized bucket.

  “Good,” he said. “We’re just getting ready.”

  36

  Fresh Air

  Joey answered the front door of the Burbank safe house. She looked like hell—swollen eyes, gray skin, her hair mussed.

  Evan moved past her off the porch, swung the door shut. “Did you check the security screen before opening?”

  “Nah. I figured I’d play door Russian roulette. You know, maybe it’s you, maybe it’s Van Sciver.”

  “It’s increasingly hard to get a direct answer out of you,” Evan said.

  “Yeah, well, sprinting the marathon means not a lot of sleep.”

  He glanced immediately at the laptops, code streaming across both screens, progress bars filling in. “So nothing yet.” He failed to keep the impatience from his voice.

  “I would’ve called.”

  He took in the bare-bones house, wondering if it felt similar to the hangar in which Van Sciver had kept her. Or the apartment Jack had hidden her in. That familiar feeling compressed his chest again. He thought about her reading that Thanksgiving card last night, her legs tucked beneath her on the couch.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “How do you think I’m doing? I’ve been either running for my life or staring at a screen for longer than I can remember. What kind of bullshit existence is that?”

  She went to the kitchen counter, cracked another Red Bull.

  He had a few hours before his meeting with Benito Orellana in Pico-Union. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  “Great. A walk. Like I’m a dog. You’re gonna take me around the block?” She stopped herself, rubbed her face, heaved an exhale through her fingers. “Fuck. I’m sorry. I’m being a bitch.”

  “You’re not,” Evan said. “Come on. Fresh air.”

  She gave a half smile, swept her hair to one side. “I remember fresh air.”

  She followed him out. The invigorating smell of Blue Point juniper reminded him of the parking lot in Portland. They’d had a lot of close calls already, a lot of hours together in the trenches.

  They turned left and headed up the street, Evan keeping alert, scanning cars, windows, rooftops. Wild parrots chattered overhead, moving from tree to tree. Their calls were loud and strident and somehow lovely, too. As Evan and Joey walked, they watched the birds clustering and bickering and flying free. Evan thought he detected some longing in Joey’s face.

  “You still haven’t told me your full first name,” Evan said.

  “Right. Let me think. Oh, that would be … none of your business.” She gave him a little shove on his shoulder, pushing him into the gutter.

  “I’ll tell you my full first name,” he said. “I’ve never told anyone.”

  “It’s not just Evan?”

  “It’s Evangelique.”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  She laughed a big, wide laugh, covering her mouth.

  A pair of guys came around the corner ahead, one riding on a hoverboard, the other a longboard, the wheels skipping across the cracks in the sidewalk. They wore hoodies with skater logos and throwback checkered Vans.

  The hoverboard hit a concrete bump pushed up by a tree root and the guy fell over, skinning his hands.

  Evan was about to tell Joey to keep walking when she called out, “You okay?”

  The guy picked himself up as they approached. “All good.”

  His friend, a burly kid, stepped on the tail of his longboard and flipped it up, catching it by the front truck. He looked to be in his late teens, maybe twenty. His hair was cropped short on the sides, the top gathered tightly in a man bun.

  Evan didn’t like him.

  And he didn’t like how he was looking at Joey.

  “Hey, I’m Connor. You guys live around here?”

  “No,” Evan said. “Visiting a friend.”

  “Well,” the guy said, directing his attention at Joey, “if you’re around again, we hang at the old zoo most
nights.” He pointed up the street toward Griffith Park. “To chill. You should come.”

  Evan mentally graphed the angle of uppercut that would snap both hinges of his jaw.

  “She’s busy,” he said.

  “When?”

  “Forever.”

  As they passed, Connor said in a low voice, “Dude. Your pops is intense.”

  Joey said, “You have no idea.”

  They left the guys behind, turning the corner for their street.

  “Think he’s a plant?” Joey asked.

  “No. I think he’s a useless reprobate. Loose body language. The stoner nod. He’s not good.”

  “I thought he was kinda cute.”

  Evan said, “You’re grounded.”

  “Like, locked-in-a-safe-house-and-forced-to-hack-an-encrypted-laptop grounded?”

  Evan said, “Yes.”

  A smile seemed to catch her by surprise. She looked away to hide it.

  He gave her a little nudge on the shoulder, tipping her into the gutter.

  37

  Blood In, Blood Out

  Benito Orellana twisted his hands together, shifting his weight back and forth, anguish throttling through him. He wasn’t crying, but Evan could see that it was taking most everything he had not to. His stained dishwasher’s apron was slung over a chair back; before Evan’s arrival he had changed into an ironed white T-shirt. No money, but proud.

  “A parent, they are only as happy as their least happy child,” Benito said. “Mi mamá used to tell me this. You understand?”

  Not at all, Evan thought. He said, “Tell me what happened to Xavier.”

  In the square front room of the tiny house in Central L.A., Evan stood across from Benito, facing the picture window. The view looked out onto a massive empty lot razed by bulldozers and the top floors of a tall building being constructed beyond. Workers were visible clinging to the steel skeleton, steering in I-beams as if they were planes on the tarmac.

  In Pico-Union any direction you went, you hit a thoroughfare—the 110 Freeway to the east, Normandie Avenue to the west, Olympic Boulevard up top, and the Santa Monica Freeway below.

  A lot of getaway routes. Which meant a lot of crime.

  Evan had safed the block, the surrounding blocks, and the blocks surrounding those. A three-hour undertaking, wholly necessary before the approach in case Benito was the bait in a trap.

  On these initial forays, Evan used to bring a briefcase embedded with all sorts of operational trickery, including signal jamming if digital transmitters happened to be in play. But the briefcase had been unwieldy.

  Also, he’d had to detonate it.

  Now he used a simple portable RF jammer in his back pocket, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes.

  Within minutes he believed that Benito was not an undercover agent for Van Sciver and that his plight was real.

  Benito swallowed. “When my wife pass, I don’t know how to cook, how to do anything.”

  “Mr. Orellana. I’m here about Xavier.”

  “She would have known how to talk to him. But I am working so hard. Even right now my friend, he cover for me at the restaurant. I have too much month at the end of the paycheck. I am working three jobs, trying to provide for Xavier. But I lose track of him. There just wasn’t the time to earn and to also … also…”

  He was at risk of breaking down.

  “Mr. Orellana,” Evan said. “What did Xavier do?”

  Benito swayed on his feet, his eyes glazed, far away. “There is a gang where I come from. They kill anyone. Women, children. They are so bad that the government, they make a prison just for them in San Salvador. The police do not even go in. Instead they keep an army outside. The gang, they run this prison on their own. They are…” He searched for the right words. “They are the people you would least want to anger in the entire world.”

  “MS-13,” Evan said. “Mara Salvatrucha.”

  Benito closed his eyes against the words, as if they held an evil spell.

  “It is the most dangerous country in the world,” Benito said. “For a young man, there is nothing but gangs and violence. A hand grenade, it sells for one dollar there. When Xavier was born, we came here for a better life.” Now tears fell, cutting tracks down his textured cheeks. “But it turn out they came, too.”

  “And Xavier joined them?”

  “He hasn’t been initiated yet,” Benito said. “I know this from my friend. His son, he is one of them. There is still hope.”

  “Initiated?”

  “Blood in, blood out. You kill to get in. They kill you before they will ever let you leave.” Benito wiped at his cheeks. “I am running out of time.”

  “Where is the gang’s headquarters?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where do I find Xavier?”

  “I don’t know. We fought last week. He run away. I haven’t seen him since. I lost my wife, and now I can’t lose him. I promised her. When she was dying, I promised her I would take care of him. I did my best. I did my best.”

  “I don’t understand,” Evan said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Don’t let them make my boy a killer.”

  “No one can make someone a killer.” The words were out of Evan’s mouth before he saw the irony in them.

  “Yes,” Benito said. “They can. They will.”

  The philosophical point was lost on Benito and not worth arguing.

  “I promised I would meet with you,” Evan said. “But there’s nothing I can do here.”

  “Please,” Benito said. “He is a good boy. Help him.”

  “I’m not a social worker.”

  “You can convince him.”

  “Convincing people isn’t part of my skill set.”

  Benito walked over into the kitchen and pulled a photograph off the refrigerator, the magnet skittering across the floor. He returned to Evan, held up the picture in both hands.

  Evan looked at it.

  It had been taken at a backyard barbecue, Xavier in a wife-beater undershirt and too-big olive-green cargo shorts, a tilted beer raised nearly to his mouth. Raw-boned but handsome, clear brown eyes, carrying a trace of baby fat in his cheeks despite the fact that he was twenty-four. His smile made him look like a kid, and Evan wondered what it felt like for Benito to watch this human he raised transform into a confusion of opposing parts, menacing and sweet, tough and youthful.

  Had Jack felt that way about Evan?

  He’s the best part of me.

  “When he lose his mother,” Benito said, his hands trembling, “he lose his way. Grief makes us do terrible things.”

  Evan saw himself in the pest-control shop in Portland, his foot pinning a man’s chest, shotgun raised, the wreckage of a hand painting the floor red.

  He gritted his teeth and took the photo.

  38

  Steel Bones

  The construction workers drifted away from the site, heading upslope where an old-fashioned roach coach competed with an upscale food truck featuring Korean tacos. Three vast parking lots had been torn up to make way for a low-rent retirement community, which was portrayed in idyllic watercolors on the massive signage. Pinning down the southern end of the six-acre drop of cleared land were the steel bones of a five-story building, the first to go vertical in the new development. It backed on the high wall of the 10 Freeway, making it an oddly private spot in the heart of the city.

  Which made it useful for Evan’s purposes now.

  A yellow tower crane was parked haphazardly among piles of equipment and supplies. Cement mixers and steel pedestals, hydraulic torque wrenches and bolts the size of human arms.

  Way up above, the workers reached the trucks, their laughter swept away by the wind. And then there was only stillness and the white-noise rush of unseen cars flying by on the other side of the freeway wall.

  A wiry man with orange hair darted into sight, shoving a wheelbarrow before him, his muscular arms shiny with sweat. He reached a mound of copper plumbing pi
pes and started loading them into the wheelbarrow, shooting nervous glances at the workers upslope.

  Evan stepped out from between two Porta-Potties and came up behind him.

  “Excuse me,” Evan said.

  The man started and whirled around, a length of pipe gripped in one fist. He looked street-strong, his muscles twitching from uppers, which would make him stronger yet. He had a face like a pug’s—underbite, bulging eyes—and his complexion was pale and sickly.

  “The fuck you want?”

  “A couple of answers.”

  They were in the shadow of the freeway wall, and not a soul was in view all the way up to the trucks above. No one could see them down here.

  A fine place to steal copper.

  “You’re local,” Evan told the man. “Clearly you’ve cased the place, timed the workers. I have a few questions I need answered by someone who lives here.”

  “I’m gonna give you two seconds to walk away. Then I’m gonna cave in your fucking head.”

  The man inched forward. Evan did not move.

  “Your first instinct is to escalate,” Evan said. “That shows me you’re a punk.”

  The man ran his tongue across jagged, rotting teeth. “Why’s that?”

  “Because you’ve spent your life around people it’s feasible to escalate against.”

  “I’m not some West Coast pussy, okay? I’m from Lowell, Mass, bitch. I grew up street-fighting with boxers who—”

  Evan daggered his hand, a basic bil jee finger jab, and poked him in the larynx.

  The man’s windpipe spasmed. His mouth gaped.

  The man dropped the pipe, took a step back, sat down, and leaned over. Then he lay flat on his back. Then he sat back up. His mouth gaped some more. Then he managed to suck some oxygen in with a gasp. He coughed and then dry-heaved a little.

  Evan waited, staring up the erector-set rise of the structure. From the fourth floor, you could see Benito Orellana’s house. From the fifth you’d be able to see most of Pico-Union. For all the crime, this was a small neighborhood. Intimate. People who lived on these streets would know things.

  The man finished hacking and drew in a few deep lungfuls of air. “Fuck, man,” he said, his voice little more than a croak. “What’d you do that for?”