Orphan X

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Reynolds gestured at the weighty duffel bag. “Give you a hand with that?”

  “Do I look like I’m struggling?”

  At her tone the excited flush crept further up his neck. “Can’t wait to see what you’ve got in there.”

  “You don’t have a choice. But to wait.”

  The color spread to his cheeks, and his breathing quickened. She shoved through the door into the room, which had a nausea-inducing Laura Ashley country-chic vibe, all potpourri and frilly pillows and watercolors of geese. A four-poster bed dominated the space. The sliding door to the bathroom had been rolled back to reveal a copper soaking tub.

  The copper tub was why she had selected the place.

  The duffel clanked on the floorboards when she slid it off her shoulder. She unzipped it and removed a rubber fitted sheet. He tried to peek over her shoulder to see what else was in the bag, but she closed it and slapped him. His fingertips touched the mark on his cheek, and he made a strangled little sound of pleasure.

  She clicked the wooden blinds shut, then yanked off the bedding and laid the rubber sheet over the bare mattress. At last she turned to him. “Strip.”

  He complied. He had the build of a former athlete, soft around the middle. His pants snagged on his heel, and he almost tripped in his eagerness. “We need to specify a safe word. Mine is ‘artichoke.’”

  “Inventive.”

  “Abrasion, fire play, and breath control are off-limits. Pretty much anything else is cool with me.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind. Sit.”

  He lowered himself onto the bed. She secured his wrists and ankles to the four posts.

  “I’m usually down with warm-up—”

  “That’s nice,” she said, and popped a ball gag into his mouth.

  His face seemed to bulge around the red ball, but she noted the gleeful anticipation beneath his straining. She had few skills, but those she did have she’d mastered. One of them was reading men.

  Candy had grown up in Charlotte, North Carolina, under a different name, and her childhood had been a parade of useless males, from the proverbial absent father to the usual handsy dads of friends. She’d pretty much raised herself. At sixteen she’d gotten her driver’s license, and a few weeks later, after a strategic tryst with a zit-faced DMV worker, she’d secured a bus license as well. The money was good, but the training sucked. Mr. Richardson with his stale coffee breath and walrus mustache. Any little mistake she made, he’d announce, “You just killed a kid.” The tires touching the dotted yellow line—“Just killed a kid, sugar britches. Steady on the wheel.” Braking too hard—“Killed another kid, sweet sauce. Easy on the pedal.”

  Men. The pleasure they took in the commands they gave.

  Well, now she gave the commands.

  The oak cheval mirror in the corner threw back her image, her goddesslike stance at the foot of the bed. She reached behind her and slid the zipper down from between her shoulder blades to the base of her back. The dress bowed forward, and she let it fall. On the bed Reynolds responded, mind and body. Who could blame him?

  She squatted to dig through the leather duffel bag, giving him an unabashed view of her backside. A fitness junkie, she knew precisely what she looked like from every angle.

  She came up with a swim cap.

  Around the rubber ball screwed into his pie hole, Reynolds looked puzzled but game.

  She tugged on the cap, then blue surgical gloves. Next she removed an industrial blender and set it on the floor. Given his constraints, Reynolds was tough to read, but he wasn’t standing at attention as he had been earlier.

  From inside the bag, her cell phone erupted with the chorus of “Venus,” the distinctive ringtone she reserved for one thing.

  The sound of the next job zeroing in on her.

  Of course, she preferred Bananarama’s cover: I’m yer Venus … I’m yer fire … At your desire.

  She held up a blue-latex-sheathed finger to Reynolds.

  When the big man called, everything went on hold—no matter how awkward the situation at hand.

  She answered. “Yes?”

  “Is the package neutralized?” Danny Slatcher had the voice of a middle manager, throaty and bland. Aside from his size, bigger than your average bear, he looked boring, too. Button-up shirts, weave belts, dust-colored hair in that white-guy side part, even the start of a spare tire around the midsection—she was never clear if the getup was costume or genuine. The only appealing thing about him was his lethality. When the shit went down, he was transformed, all precision and timing, latent rage, hidden muscles sending bodies and furniture spinning like tops. She’d let him fuck her once, in the adrenalized aftermath of a double hit, and once was enough. They’d been on the rooftop of a resort in Tamarindo, thunder vibrating the adobe tiles, the smell of gunpowder and fresh blood drifting up from the balcony below. But in men’s brains, “once” was an open invitation. She’d given Slatcher a taste, and he’d carried the memory for years, aging it like a wine, fantasizing about popping that cork just one more time.

  Candy began unloading her supplies from the duffel and setting them beside the industrial blender. Hacksaw. Safety goggles. Hand ax.

  Over on the bed, Reynolds made muffled sounds.

  “Just about,” she answered.

  “Good,” Slatcher said. “A bigger job just went sideways.”

  “Clearly you brought in the wrong team, then.” She took out a long roll of black construction sheeting, placed it delicately on the floor, and gave it a nudge with her instep. It rolled smoothly across the floorboards, leaving a wide band of protective cover.

  Slatcher cleared his throat. “I was overseeing them personally.”

  “They’re not me.”

  Carefully, she extracted from the duffel two jugs of concentrated hydrofluoric acid, effective at dissolving bones. It had to be stored in plastic, since it ate through everything from concrete to porcelain—what the majority of American bathtubs are made of. The copper soaking tub would react with the acid, sure, but it would just come out shinier, all the oxide stains eaten away. At the end of the day, Candy McClure would be just another considerate guest leaving a room cleaner than she’d found it.

  The sounds of panicked thrashing carried over from the bed.

  “I have a man down,” Slatcher said.

  “That’s what you get for sending a man to do a woman’s job.”

  A thick vein stood out on Reynolds’s forehead. He was trying to say something through the ball gag, but she’d secured the straps good and tight.

  Candy set down the jugs, then carefully tucked her stray hair beneath the swim cap. She would leave no DNA on the scene. His or hers.

  “Get here,” Slatcher said.

  At his tone her playfulness evaporated. She calculated the naked man’s girth, the size of the tub, traffic conditions down the mountain. Four hours and change. She picked up the hand ax and started for the bed.

  “On my way,” she said.

  13

  Professionals

  Evan chose a midlevel motel in a less-nice part of Santa Monica several miles from the beach. With Katrin clinging to his arm in the role of browbeaten spouse, he checked in using a fake driver’s license and paid with a credit card tied to a cul-de-sac of a bank account. He booked three rooms on the ground floor with connecting doors for their extended family, due any minute now. Then he led Katrin into the middle room and waited patiently in a rickety wooden chair while she cleaned up in the bathroom. The sink water ran for a long time. When she came out, the red rims of her eyes looked pronounced against her alabaster skin.

  She sat on the bed, pressed her hands between her knees. “God,” she said. She glanced over to the little desk, on which Evan had set out a stack of cash and a burner phone, and made a noise deep in her throat.

  “Don’t leave this room. Order in only, have them set the food outside, slide the money under the door. Don’t use the phone unless it’s to call me. Understand?”

/>   “This isn’t real. This can’t be real. We have to call them. We have to find out about my dad, and now they can’t call me since you took my phone and—”

  “Where did Morena approach you?”

  Katrin jogged her head back and forth slightly, as if to clear her thoughts. “I was playing roulette. Shitty odds, I know, but I was down to my last thousand.… It was a Hail Mary. I thought if God or karma or whatever you want to call it was on my side, I could hit ten on the wheel. And then again. And again. Until I had two-point-one million. Until I could save my dad.” She misted up and had to pause. “I didn’t know what to do. I don’t have anything. I don’t have money like that. Look, I really think we need to contact these guys—”

  “How did she pick you out?”

  “How do you think? I must’ve seemed like a fucking mess—because I was a fucking mess. And then this kid comes up. Looked barely old enough to be there. And she said, ‘Are you in trouble?’ Like she was searching for me.”

  Morena’s aunt lived in Vegas, and she’d made it clear that she and Carmen were heading there. What better place than a casino to search out someone in desperate shape?

  Katrin continued, “And you know how sometimes someone asks you the wrong question at the wrong time? I just started crying. And then we sat down, and she told me her story. And I told her mine. Well, part of it. But enough. And she gave me your number. I didn’t know what to think, whether I should trust her. I drove back to L.A., mulling it over. Then I gave in and called.”

  “You told her your story? Even though you’d just met her?”

  “A version of it, like I said.” Katrin’s neck firmed, and he saw a trace of steel beneath the green eyes. “Wait a minute. Is this some sort of test? After what you just saw? Like I made up almost getting shot? You seriously don’t trust me?”

  “If I didn’t trust you, you wouldn’t be here.”

  Her throat clicked as she swallowed.

  “There’s no question they’re trying to kill you,” Evan said. “I just need to understand precisely what happened.”

  She stood up, and he followed suit. “What about my dad?”

  “We’ll get to that.”

  “They said. They said I couldn’t tell anyone. Me calling you? That could’ve killed my father.” She twisted a hand hard in the hem of her shirt, as if working out a violent impulse. “We have to call. We have to—”

  He took her arms gently and moved her back a step. “The first thing we do is nothing. If we do nothing, nothing can happen. Adrenaline is up right now, everyone will be amped, excitable, prone to making mistakes. Let them calm down. We want nerves to settle. We’ll call tomorrow, negotiate your father’s release.”

  “There’s no negotiating with them. There’s no moving them.” She scanned the room, as if noticing for the first time the print bedspread, the shitty pastel art. “This was all a mistake,” she said. “I have to go. I have to get my car and … and—”

  “You’re not getting your car. It’s not safe to leave. The sniper is still out there. He was working with at least one other person. There might be others.”

  “The guy. The one you killed. Did you see him? One eye was still open.…” Her bloodred lips pressed together to keep from trembling. “And you think there might be others?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Because a sniper isn’t enough?”

  “I won’t let them lay a finger on you.”

  “I’m not worried about a finger.” Then she did something completely unexpected. She laughed. A real laugh, too, that beautiful mouth even wider, half hidden behind a raised hand. A few strands of jet-black hair had fallen across her eyes, and she left them there. As quickly as her dark amusement had bubbled to the surface, it departed.

  She sat again on the bed, and he settled back into the wooden chair.

  “It broke my dad’s heart when I married that asshole,” she said. “He warned me that nothing good would come of it. Though I can’t say he expected this.”

  “Your husband’s involved in this somehow?”

  “My ex. And no.” She took a breath, held it a moment. “We were married five months. If it wasn’t so typical, I’d have the sense to be embarrassed. Adam Hamuel, a real-estate tycoon. Planned communities in Boca Raton, that kind of stuff. It kept him busy. The land deals, the building permits, the other women.” She ran her hand along the chintz bedspread. “So when he’d travel, I’d gamble. My dad taught me to play poker.” She wet her lips. “My mom died young, so dad taught me pretty much everything. How to throw a baseball. Drive stick. But cards, Dad was great at cards.”

  “What’s his name?” Evan asked. “Your father.”

  “Sam. Sam White.” She blinked back emotion. “Right before I got married, Dad moved to Vegas, so I’d visit him and I’d play and play. And for a brief time—five months—I had money. A different level of money, I mean. Adam always told me not to worry, that I couldn’t spend enough to make a dent in what he earned. And so I didn’t worry. I played in those backroom games, and I drank the free booze and pushed the markers. Stupid, right?”

  “Not given what you knew at the time.”

  She breathed for a bit. “One day at home, I found a leopard-print thong between the couch cushions, and then I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know anymore. I called him on it, and he left and filed the next day. I’d signed a big prenup, and he just turned off the tap. Everything’s tied up in family trusts, offshore accounts, all that kind of stuff. People can hide money where you’d never find it.”

  Evan gave a little nod.

  “So I have a big house in Brentwood that I can’t pay the heating bill on, let alone the mortgage, a shiny leased Jag that they’re gonna repossess any day, and a marker for two-point-one million I owe to some guy on the other end of a phone number or he’ll kill my dad.”

  “What’s the phone number?” Evan asked.

  She recited a direct-inward-dial number, like his, which he committed to memory.

  “I don’t have anything,” she said. “I told them, but they don’t believe me. Look at my zip code. I wouldn’t believe me either.” She sank to the bed, blew the hair from her eyes. “It’s my fault. I made a stupid fucking mistake, and my dad’s paying for it. Maybe right now. Do you have any idea how that feels?”

  The red glow of an elevator sign. Jack’s callused hand against Evan’s cheek. The sweet smell of sawdust cut with something else.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I wish you hadn’t yanked me out of the way at the restaurant. I wish they’d just shot me and let my dad go.”

  “Who’s to say they wouldn’t have shot you and then your dad?”

  “Oh, just let me be a martyr for a second.”

  “Tell me when you’re done.”

  The faintest hint of amusement firmed those lips. “I’m done.”

  “What can you tell me about this gambling circuit?”

  “Like I said, not much. Texas Hold’em in basements of restaurants, rented suites, like that. There was security and dealers, but I never saw the face of anyone behind it all. Even the players, we used fake names. It was impossible to tell who was the house. They were smart enough not to leave a trail.”

  “How’d they find you?”

  “People find you in Vegas. I was at a table. They approached.”

  “Just like that.”

  “I make an impression when I play.”

  He asked her to walk him through whatever specifics about locations she could remember. Then he asked, “How did you find out about the Japanese businessman they killed?”

  “They sent a picture to my phone. It autodeleted a few seconds after I saw it.” She smoothed an invisible wrinkle from the bedspread next to her. “A few seconds was enough.”

  “You said they skinned him. But we’re dealing with a sniper, maybe a team. Why the change in approach?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “It’s not exactly my field.”

  Rising to go, he realized
that he knew the answer to his question already. Given the size of Katrin’s loan and her failure to deliver the money promptly, they’d gone to the next level.

  They’d brought in professionals.

  14

  Dream Come True

  In a form-fitting dress, Candy McClure waited at the bus stop on Ventura Boulevard, duffel bag resting near the pointed toes of her thigh-high vinyl boots. Passing cars brought wolf calls, which she basked in along with the morning sun. A bus hissed to the curb, and a group of would-be gangstas unpacked from it. They shuffled past, all lowered trousers and top-buttoned flannel shirts. The leader, not unreasonably taking her for a hooker, pivoted to shake his hips in her direction. “Hey, Catwoman, wanna play with this?”

  “Love to.” She reached out, grabbing his crotch through a baggy expanse of denim and squeezing. He made a noise like a whinny as she steered him around, depositing him on the bench next to her. She played him like an instrument, crushing at will, bringing forth various sounds as his friends circled in a sort of animal panic. When she released him, he rolled onto the sidewalk. She’d managed to squeeze out a few real tears to go with the inked ones tattooed at the corner of his eye.

  Boys.

  He struggled to his knees and then to a hunched approximation of standing.

  “Thanks,” Candy said, checking that her press-on nails remained intact. “Good session.”

  His friends conveyed him up the street.

  A few minutes later, a rented Scion sedan pulled up, the window lowering. Crammed into the driver’s seat, Danny Slatcher hid behind mirrored aviators and a mustache imported from 1980. A larger vehicle would have suited him.

  “’Bout time,” she said.

  With a long arm, he reached across and flung open the passenger door. “Get in. And change. You look like a whore.”

  And he looked like an insurance salesman. Which she supposed was the point.

  “Wow,” she said, climbing in. “A crappy purple Scion. Like in the song.”

  “What song?”

  “Train,” she said. “‘50 Ways to Say Goodbye.’” A brown grocery bag in the footwell contained her cover outfit. As he drove, she pulled on the new clothes. “It’s about a guy making up outlandish ways his girlfriend died so he doesn’t have to—”