Orphan X

by Gregg Hurwitz

  He walked back to the futon and stood over her, staring down. She moaned lightly and rolled over, one arm flung across her forehead, a Roy Lichtenstein maiden in distress. Her closed eyelids fluttered.

  Guillermo Vasquez.

  Katrin White.

  One of them was lying.

  Squatting a few feet away, he confronted her. Bringing up the camera feature on his phone, he clicked the night-vision option, squared up her face, and snapped a picture.

  At the kitchen counter, he jotted a quick note: “Running down some angles. Stay put. Contact me if emergency.—E”

  He took the stairs down, pausing at each landing to listen for footsteps. The garage was clear. He got into the Taurus and drove out of the parking level without incident. He drove circles around Downtown, his eyes on the rearview mirror, until he was certain he was alone. Then he got onto the freeway and headed for Vegas.

  He pictured Morena Aguilar on the day he met her. Wearing her stiff Benny’s Burgers work shirt, coiled on her chair like a fierce animal, trapped but unbroken, ready to go to any lengths to protect her sister. That kid? She never done a wrong thing in her life. He thought about the flash of optimism in her eyes when she talked about her aunt’s place, the fresh start, and then he pictured Danny Slatcher’s big fist knocking on that front door.

  He’d never contacted a client after a mission was complete. With Morena, as with the others he’d helped over the years, he’d had an understanding—that she wouldn’t contact him and he wouldn’t contact her. But the Tenth Commandment loomed above all else.

  Never let an innocent die.

  30

  The Calling Song

  Morena’s aunt, a block of a woman ensconced in multiple layers of nightwear, opened the door but addressed Evan through a locked security screen. Fair enough, given that it was just past six in the morning, the stars holding their radiance even through the lightening sky.

  She lived not in Vegas proper but in a cluster of trailer homes in a low-end district of Henderson, the neighboring city. Fastening the sash on her bathrobe, she drew her head back even farther behind the ledge of her bosom. “Morena? She is not here.”

  “I know that you want to protect her, ma’am,” Evan said. “But she’s not safe right now. I’m—”

  “I understand who you are.”

  “Do you?”

  Her impassive eyes gave off only an obsidian gleam. “Perhaps. But that doesn’t change the fact that I know nothing.”

  “Can you at least tell me if they arrived here safely?” Evan asked. “Her and Carmen?”

  One lonely cricket was at it in the cluster of dead shrubs at the property line, shrilling its calling song at the dead desert air.

  Evan’s gaze lowered to a battered trumpet case lying beside a pile of footwear. Noting his stare, Morena’s aunt cinched the door shut another few inches, restricting his line of sight, her bulk filling the gap. Thin blue veins streaked her pronounced upper eyelids. Her mouth, frozen in a downturned expression, seemed at once maternal and stern, the combat mask of a roused mama bear.

  “Wherever she is, she is safe,” she said.

  “Ask her to call me. She knows my number. Please.”

  “She is safer not being found.”

  “I don’t believe that’s so,” Evan said.

  “You are entitled to your opinion,” she said, and closed the door gently in his face.

  He stood in the morning chill, him and the mateless cricket beneath the wide-open vault of the Nevada sky. He had a laptop in the trunk and could access the databases remotely, maybe pull phone records from the house and go from there. It would be a long investigative slog, running down leads and hitting dead ends.

  Time he did not have right now, given the threat to Morena.

  He started to walk away when he heard a child’s whistle—not a whistle at all, in fact, but a whooshing of air through pursed lips. A side window rattled open, and a small form tumbled out, landing gracefully in a manner that suggested that the move had been tested a time or two.

  The little girl straightened up and dusted off her knees. Carmen, Morena’s eleven-year-old sister. Over her jeans she wore a dirty Disney nightgown with what looked like a blue Popsicle stain down Minnie’s face.

  “I know you,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “You’re the one who helped us. Mr. No-Place Guy.”

  Evan came around the side of the house, the baked lawn hard underfoot. Though out of view from the front door, he lowered his voice. “Morena’s gone?”

  “She left the third day we was here. We went out to get groceries, and I noticed a man noticing us. I’m good at that.”

  Evan remembered Carmen with her crayons in the corner booth at Benny’s Burgers, watching him through the window. “I know you are,” he said. “Can you tell me where she went?”

  “She got scared. She said if someone was watching, it had to do with whatever let us leave L.A. That she had to go into hiding ’cuz if she stayed with me, it wouldn’t be safe for me. When we got back from the grocery store that night, she snuck out the window.” Carmen rested her hand on the base of the open frame she’d just jumped through, her face lost to thought.

  “Do you have a number I can reach her at?”

  “She’s freaked out. Too scared to use a phone, anything. She thinks that’s how they followed her, by her phone. Like how the bad man in L.A. used to keep track of her. She said she won’t use one no more. No matter what.”

  “So you’ve seen her since?”

  “Two times.” Carmen held up two fingers. “She came to see me at the school playground.” She gestured up the dark block. “You can see it from far away, so if I sit on the swings at recess she can tell if it’s safe to come up to me or not. There’re lotsa kids around and stuff.”

  Her aunt’s voice wafted out the open window, calling her to breakfast. Carmen glanced nervously at the sill behind her. “I gotta go.”

  “Did she tell you if she found someone else? She was looking for someone else. For me.”

  “No. She didn’t say anything about that.” Carmen chewed her lower lip. “If you saved us, then how come I can’t be with her?”

  Again the aunt’s voice floated through the window. “¡Carmen! Ven aquí. Tu desayuno está listo.”

  Evan crouched, bringing himself to her eye level. “Listen to me. I have to see her. Her life depends on it. Go to your swings at morning recess and wait for her. Tell her to meet me in the Bellagio Casino at the restaurant overlooking the dancing fountains. I will be there at noon today. I’ll stay there all day, tonight, however long it takes for her to get there.”

  Carmen rocked back on her heels, literally taken aback by his intensity. “Okay. Okay. But I don’t know if she’ll come today. Or tomorrow. Or when.”

  “I’ll wait. Tell her it’s safe there. Lots of people, cameras everywhere. Can you remember this?”

  Already Carmen was scrambling for the window. “I’ll wait for her at recess, lunch, after school. I’ll remember. I swear.”

  She landed inside and shoved down the pane just as her aunt opened the bedroom door and began chiding her for not listening. Evan hustled back to his car, parked up the street.

  He had a lot to do before noon.

  31

  More Truth than Lies

  “What the holy hell is going on with you?” Tommy Stojack asked, conveying himself about his dungeon-lit armorer shop on his rolling chair, shoving himself off workbenches and desks, plucking up a sticky cup of coffee, a wayward screwdriver, a stray round. Beyond the missing finger, he had all sorts of warhorse injuries—titanium pins in various bones, hearing loss, bad knees from too many hard parachute landings. Though he still got around well enough on his own two feet, he could work his black Aeron like a wheelchair.

  Evan sometimes wondered if this was practice for later, when his joints gave out entirely.

  Tommy scratched at his arms, which were covered with flesh-colored square Band-Aids. “You look like someone
pissed in your cockpit.”

  Evan took a breath, lowered his shoulders, smoothed out his expression. He was unaccustomed to letting stress show in his face and was glad he’d done so only in front of Tommy. After making arrangements at the Bellagio, Evan had embarked on a flurry of research on his laptop. The address that the second caller, Memo Vasquez, had given traced to a slumlord who owned properties all over California and Arizona, seemingly renting them to illegal immigrants. The number Vasquez had called from belonged to a crappy Radio Shack prepaid cell phone. Good if you were broke.

  Or an impostor.

  Being illegal was a superb pretext for having no personal information in the system. For now Evan would have to work off Katrin White.

  He said to Tommy, “I need to confirm someone’s identity.”

  “In the system?”

  “She checks out in the system,” Evan said. “I want it from another angle.”

  Tommy scratched at his arms again.

  “What the hell are those things all over your arms?” Evan finally asked.

  “Nicotine patches.” Tommy slurped coffee over a lower lip pouched out with dipping tobacco. “I’m trying to get off the smokes.”

  “One step at a time.”

  “What I’m sayin’.” Tommy creakingly found his feet, his unoccupied chair rolling back into the shadowed recesses of the shop. “Okay. Who’s this broad you’re trying to confirm?”

  Evan called up the photo he’d snapped of Katrin on the futon, the close-up of her sleeping face, and held it for Tommy to see.

  Tommy made a gruff sound of approval. “Intimate.”

  “I’m trying to help her.”

  “Looks like it.” His hand tugged at the scraggly ends of his horseshoe mustache. “Helping women who ain’t who they say they are seems like a fool’s venture to me.”

  “A woman who may not be who she says she is.”

  “Ah.” The stub of a forefinger circled the air, pointing at Evan in warning. “Tryin’ to play hero, huh?” Tommy’s laugh came out as a half cough. “You wanna be a real hero? Get old. Peel yourself outta bed every morning with your back like this and your knee like that.”

  “Okay. But first let’s confirm this ID.”

  “That ain’t my bailiwick.”

  “She’s a big-time gambler,” Evan said. “Which means she’s done it before. A lot. At a lot of places. I was thinking, you’re a Vegas guy—”

  “That I am.”

  “—maybe you have a hook at one of the casinos could run some facial-recognition software off this photo. Some places store footage from the floor going back years. See if she’s opened a line of credit, what name that line of credit was under. Like that.”

  “If she’s not who she says she is, why do you believe her if she tells you she’s a gambler?”

  “The best cover’s composed of more truth than lies.”

  “That it is.” Tommy gave a terse little nod. “I know a guy, got a bit of horsepower over at Harrah’s. Let’s see what rocks we can kick over.”

  “I’d appreciate it. Want me to text you the picture?”

  Tommy’s face wrinkled up in disgust. “I don’t fucking text. E-mail that shit. You know the account to use.” His broad, rough hands restacked a scattering of bullet-mold blocks on the bench between them. “Need anything else? Some Chuck Four?” He reached under the bench, came up with a brick of C4. “The most effective way to turn money into noise.”

  “I’m good on explosives.” Evan turned for the door, double-checking, as always, that the security camera was unplugged. “Thank you, Tommy.”

  “Hey, man. I’ll call the guy, that’s all. There are no guarantees.” Tommy dug the wedge of tobacco out from his lip and thunked it into a dusty Carl’s Jr. cup. “Only guarantee is we ain’t gettin’ outta this incarnation alive.”

  32

  Nowhere to Go

  A five-figure cash tip to the manager of the Hyde lounge procured for Evan the premiere table for as long as he needed it. The booth stuck out from the base of the vast Bellagio Hotel over the eight-acre lake like the glass-walled prow of a ship. From his position in the cushioned seats, he could take in the majority of the nightclub, a sliver of the casino floor, and the walkway along the water’s brink. He assumed his post at noon.

  Right away he noticed a problem. Past a curved stretch of the lake, maybe a quarter mile away, a Chinese restaurant called Jasmine jutted out onto the water. It was new since he’d last been here. His instructions to Morena’s sister had been imprecise—Tell her to meet me in the Bellagio Casino at the restaurant overlooking the dancing fountains. Now he had two venues to cover. The miscalculation ate at him, a gnawing little worm near the base of his brain that kept him on edge. At least he had a clear view through Jasmine’s floor-to-ceiling windows.

  He sat for six unbroken hours, keeping watch for Morena even as his hopes for her appearance diminished. He wore jeans, a black jacket, and a baseball cap to shield his features from myriad eye-in-the-sky cameras. For Morena to feel safe, he’d chosen a casino as a meeting spot—the only place with more security cams than an airport.

  On occasion women dropped by the table to ask if he wanted to buy them a drink. He certainly looked like a man seeking company, and the professionals took notice. He declined politely. His high-profile position here ran against every instinct in his body, but given how fearful Morena seemed to be, he wanted to be front and center so she could spot him before making her approach. Based on what Carmen had told him about her meetings with her sister, this was Morena’s preferred method of making contact.

  He finally got up to use the restroom, then returned and sat alertly as the sun finished its brilliant chariot arc across the sky, finally dipping behind the Strip. When lavender dusk at last faded into full dark, the world’s greatest night-light display morphed into splendid existence, the Paris Hotel’s faux Eiffel Tower igniting into a spire of neon gold, overpowering the moon. The dancing fountains exploded into color on the lake surface laid out before Evan, misting the glass around him, a bizarre choreography timed to an Andrea Bocelli–Sarah Brightman duet. Evan eyed the doors, the flurry of activity by the casino entrance, the hall to the bathrooms. The music wailed—Con te partirò—as the fountains shattered the still of the lake. Soon enough a deejay with a sideways Celtics cap took up the turntables in his booth inside, remixed and mashed-up Rihanna competing with the pop-opera duet. The dance floor filled up, sauced bachelorettes and boisterous frat boys, cut-loose businessmen and drag queens in heeled thigh-highs, a jam of fluid limbs strobe-cutting the disco beams—I love the way you lie.

  Evan pictured Carmen sitting on the swings, isolated on the crowded playground, praying for her big sister’s appearance. The school day was long gone. Perhaps Morena had decided to wait for cover of night to make her way to the Strip. Or perhaps she hadn’t come to the playground at all and Evan would stay here, pinned to this spot tomorrow and the day after that. He searched the crowd again, everyone in full-blown what-happens-in-Vegas mode, talking too loud and too close or snapping duck-faced selfies. Slot-machine payouts ring-ding-dinged over Eminem’s rap interlude. Across the street fake Europe glowed. Everyone here was chasing a different dream, an alternate version of their same self, freshened-up identities as fake and real as Evan’s own, dropped into this fantasy wonderland only to be left behind at the airport departure counter like abandoned baggage.

  Amid the masquerade a few simple realities burned through. He needed to find a scared seventeen-year-old girl. He needed to protect her. And he needed to learn whether she’d given his phone number to Katrin White or to Memo Vasquez.

  Evan sipped water, craved vodka, scanned the dance floor, the neighboring restaurant, and then scanned them again. He settled back against the upholstery, stretching his neck. When he next looked through the window up along the curve of the lake, a movement inside Jasmine caught his eye.

  Through the glittering wall of glass, he watched a feminine figure edge between
white-linen tables. Her back was turned, but he read the posture immediately—shoulders lifted in a half shrug, chin tucked, hands lost to long sleeves, the wrists goosenecked in.

  Fear.

  She turned partway, and he caught her profile.

  Morena.

  He checked out the restaurant interior around her. It looked clear. He’d just risen to start toward her when his gaze swept the length of four windows, freezing him where he stood.

  Danny Slatcher eased into view around a column, moving slowly toward Morena. He wore roomy acid-washed jeans and a Bubba Gump T-shirt, the perfect underdressed Vegas partaker.

  Morena kept on, threading between tables, oblivious to the man behind her.

  All around them diners chatted and ate, their mouths moving soundlessly as music crashed in on Evan from the lake—time to say goodbye—and the deejay—just gonna staaand there and watch me burn—the slot machines chiming, coins crashing, the bass speakers on the dance floor thump-thump-thumping. He was standing, hands on the glass, watching the tableau unfold across a stretch of sparkling water.

  Slatcher kept on toward Morena. Clearly he had no idea Evan was within eyeshot, watching everything unfold.

  Morena moved deeper into the restaurant, Slatcher matching her step for step. Though they remained thirty meters apart, the difference in size between them was astonishing, a grizzly stalking a fawn.

  There was no noise Evan could make that would rise above the din of Las Vegas at night, and so he stood on the table and flagged one arm wide, a stab of movement to catch her peripheral vision. It did not, but one of the diners near her looked over, and then another, setting off a flurry of turning heads. Smiles gleamed, and then someone pointed—check out the drunk Vegas idiot standing on a table across the way. Morena picked up on either the diners’ movement or the chatter, because she finally turned, her head swiveling, then fixing on him. Even from this distance, he could see the recognition in her eyes. She raised a hand in shy acknowledgment.