Orphan X: A Novel (34 page)

Expectation of relief from pain would increase the opioids in his brain, an analgesic effect. Mind over reality.

He fought to move his focus away from the pain, to find the anchor of his breathing.

One breath.

There is no more pain to handle beyond this moment. Get through this moment and this moment only.

One breath.

There is only this moment. There is not the next moment or tomorrow.

One breath.

In this moment there is no pain.

Static crowded his vision from the edges, and he blinked against it, the black strip of the freeway fading in and out, a TV show that refused to come into focus.

48

Shot-to-Shit

Slatcher stood in the lobby, sparks from a shot-to-shit overhead light cascading across the yoke of his shoulders. He drew in a deep breath, rising into a rare moment of perfect posture, a grizzly on hind legs.

He moved into the west corridor, knowing already what he’d find.

White walls smeared with dark streaks. Tattered cargo pants. The sticky floor tugging at the soles of his boots.

He stepped across a prone form and then another. Corkscrewing away from a body at an exotic angle, an arm shone fish-white in the guttering glow, the fingers upthrust like some rare underwater creature.

He passed the boarded-up room and saw where the door had been kicked clear off the frame. The White woman stood backed into the corner, trembling violently, gasps escaping her bloodless lips. She held a folding knife in her limp grasp, the blade still wet. Her eyes were blank, holes in a mask with no face behind it. The mask tilted forward and dry-retched a few times without so much as a change of expression. There’d be no answers from her right now.

Slatcher brushed past the doorway, surveying the wreckage. From the meat-and-fabric bulks sprawled beneath the flickering lights to the hinge-blasted rear door lying flat on the floor, the damage was comprehensive.

Slatcher wasn’t wearing a hat, but if he had been, he would have tipped it to Orphan X.

Not the best. But maybe—at last—an equal.

A faint scratching noise reached him. He cocked his head. Pulled his boot free from a black slick and headed for the maintenance closet.

There it came again, a desperate sound, almost plaintive. Fingernails against wood.

He opened the door, the smell hitting him in the face. Looking at the sight within, he felt his dark admiration transform into rage.

49

Scarlet Trail

The static haze lifted, Evan’s vision clarifying in time for him to recognize that he was pulling through the ridiculous porte cochere. Yawning in his director’s-chair perch, the valet started to rise, but Evan dismissed him with a nod. Fighting the wheel, he pulled down to the parking level and into his spot, barely missing a concrete pillar.

The dark stain enveloped the left side of his shirt, saturating the belt line of his cargo pants. He couldn’t afford caution. He was, as the corpsmen were wont to say, bleeding like stink. If he didn’t get upstairs immediately to stop the flow, he’d die. Wobbling toward the stairs, he almost lost his footing on an oil slick.

He didn’t even register them until they were on top of him.

Mia and Peter.

She clutched a pharmacy bag, her son standing glumly beside her wearing a bathrobe over Riddler pajamas. Though she stared at Evan in shock, Peter was focused elsewhere, gazing anxiously up the stairs, tugging at her hand. “C’mon, Mommy. My heart’s still
pounding.
”

Instinctively, Evan turned away, hiding his bloody side from the boy.

Mia’s expression stayed frozen, but somehow she managed to answer her son. “The Ativan should kick in soon, sweetheart. It’ll help you settle down. It’s been a horrible night.”

Peter looked up at her, then across at Evan. His mouth popped open.

Evan white-knuckled the railing, pulling himself up step by step. He tugged the sleeve over his other hand, trying to wipe off the blood as he went, but it was no use.

Mia broke from her trance, moving up the stairs at his side. “Jesus Christ, Evan,” she said. “What happened? Are you okay?”

His head swam from the blood loss, his skin clammy and trembling. His heart redlined, each pulse reverberating through his chest. A dizzy spell staggered him, Mia shouldering some of his weight.

“Yes.” He pulled himself upright. “Good.”

“Is this from Marts and Alonso?”

The pain stole the word from his mouth, so he shook his head no.

Mia tucked Peter behind her, trying to block his view. “You’ve got to get to a hospital.”

Evan moved hand over hand along the wall toward the service elevator, leaving bloody prints. No time to clean, to cover his tracks. “No. No.”

“This isn’t a choice.”

“I’ll be killed.” One breath. “Men after me.” One breath. “Go.” Breath. “Away.”

The car arrived, and he tilted into it. Blood dripped off the hem of his shirt, tapping the floor.

Leaning heavily on the elevator rail, he looked back at her. Her forehead furled with concern. One tooth pinched her bottom lip. She looked like she might cry.

“Please,”
he said.

The doors wiped her face from view.

Moving on autopilot, he let his breathing blot out everything. Muscle memory guided him to his front door.

A cold gust rolled up his torso, cooling his sweat-drenched face, and he realized he was inside his condo now, standing at the open refrigerator.

He pulled a saline IV bag out of the fruit drawer. From the butter shelf, he grabbed a bottle of Epogen, nearly dropping it. He battled his legs to get him across the poured-concrete expanse, down the hall. His sock squished inside his boot.

At last he spilled onto the bathroom floor. Flinging open the cabinet beneath the sink, he yanked out the First Responder kit. The magnetized buttons on his shirt gave way readily beneath his weak tug, an ancillary benefit. He doused a washcloth and wiped at his stomach, getting his first clear look at the wound.

The knife had penetrated his stomach two inches left of the midline, level with his rib cage, slicing the superior epigastric artery. The artery was just shallower than the abdominal wall muscles, which looked to be unscathed. A centimeter or two deeper would have added a host of untenable complications, puncturing his stomach, intestines, or diaphragm. Through the gash he watched blood spurt finely from the artery at intervals.

Doing his best not to anticipate what was coming, he pulled out the suture kit and readied the needle. One breath. One breath. One breath.

He entered a tunnel of torment, lost to time. Electricity jolting up nerve lines. Sweat tickling his jawline. Fingertips pulsing like crimson slugs.

And then it was done, or had been for some span of time, an ugly stitched seam of skin staring up at him. Somehow he’d thrown silk whipstitches around the bleeder and sutured off the slice above.

He breathed for a few moments, wanting to give himself a break, but then he started to drift off and knew he had to snap to. One-handed, he started an IV in the bend of his elbow. He spiked the bag of saline and started it feeding into his arm to up the fluid volume in his circulatory system until he could replenish his blood. Grabbing a syringe, he drew up a dose of Epogen from the bottle and sank the needle into his thigh, the injection burning as he depressed the plunger. An anemia med, Epo stimulated the marrow to produce more red blood cells, something he sorely needed given the quantity he’d left behind on the floor of the office building, in the footwell of his truck, on the walls of Castle Heights.

He stared longingly over at the hidden door in the open shower enclosure, but he knew he’d never make it into the Vault to scrub the surveillance footage. Even if he did, there was no way he could clean up the blood in the parking level, the rear hall, the service elevator.

The scarlet trail led right to his door, but he could do nothing about it right now. He’d have to add Castle Heights to his long list of burned locations and move on as soon as he was able. The pain in his chest at the thought of this wasn’t physical; it was something deeper, buried close to his heart. Unable to base-jump, to abseil, even to drive away, he found himself in that rarest of places—at the mercy of chance, powerless to help himself.

He dragged himself to the floating platform of his bed. With a final effort, he hung the IV bag from his reading lamp. Then he collapsed into blackness.

50

The Ghost of Her Lips

In the cold, pale light of morning, Evan rides in the passenger seat of the dark sedan. He is a boy, early in his training with Jack, and they are headed to another surprise session. Acclimated to the vicissitudes of stress and adrenaline, Evan has learned not to brace himself. There is no point. In twenty minutes he might be shoved off a bridge onto a landing pad (
fun
), drownproofed in cold water with his hands and feet bound (
not fun
), or shot full of sodium pentothal (
disorienting but ineffective
).

A Volvo pulls up alongside them, and as he is prone to do, Evan watches the family inside. The kids are three across in the back, quarreling and coloring and pigging their noses against the windows. The car falls behind them.

The next block accommodates an elementary school. Parents are dropping off kids with backpacks and crumpled bag lunches and bright-colored thermoses. The students run to and fro and talk in animated cliques.

Evan wonders what they talk about.

After the day’s session (mace-spray training—
not fun
), they return home. Bleary-eyed, Evan stacks firewood by the side of the house, the rough bark scraping his forearms. He hears no rustle behind him, but when he turns, Jack is there in his 501s and flannel shirt with each sleeve cuffed twice, neatly.

“You need to talk,” Jack tells him.

Evan thrusts the logs atop the stack, scratches at his arms. “Just me, huh? Alone? Always? That’s how it’ll be?”

The setting Virginia sun frames Jack’s broad form, bestowing on him a celestial grandeur. “That’s right,” he says.

“Who said that thing about one twig can break? But a bundle is strong?”

“It’s attributed to Tecumseh,” Jack says. “But who the hell knows.” He studies Evan, his lips twitching. Evan has come to know that this means he is processing, rooting out the situation beneath the situation. Jack gestures to the brush along the side of the house. “Gather a bunch of twigs.”

Evan does.

Jack crouches, unties his shoe, yanks the lace free, and uses it to fasten the bundle. Then he unfolds his pocketknife, thumbs up the blade, and hammers it through the twigs. They crack uniformly at the midpoint. Jack grabs a single twig, lays it on the ground by itself, hands Evan the knife. “Have at it.”

Evan tries, but the solitary twig pops free from the steel point, scarred yet intact. He stabs and stabs but the twig keeps skittering away, unwilling to be pinned down. Evan finally looks up, defeated. “Okay,” he says. “I get it. But…”

“Talk.”

“Won’t it be lonely?”

“Yes.”

In his head Evan grasps for something to hold on to, a brass ring he can carry out of today’s journey past the Volvo and the school, through the clouds of mace, into the promise of solitude. In the face of the unknown, as always, he tries to be game. He polishes off one of Papa Z’s old chestnuts: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I guess,” he says.

Jack’s eyes are as doleful as Evan has ever seen them. “Sometimes,” he says. “But the rest of the time, it just makes you weaker.”

*   *   *

The knocking inside Evan’s head became a knocking in the outside world.

Someone at the penthouse door.

Palming sleep from his eyes, he swung his legs over the side of the bed with less effort than he anticipated. Scattered on the floor, various syringes, depleted saline bags, wads of gauze. A glance at the clock showed that it had been two and a half days since he’d stumbled home. Ample time for his spilled blood to be discovered, surveillance footage reviewed, officials alerted.

He’d healed up quickly, the Epo working its modern medical magic. The shiny skin at the wound’s edge remained tender, and he still felt a nasty sting in his gut when he bent over, but the pain had mostly lifted. He wouldn’t be doing sit-ups anytime soon, but as of this morning he was generally mobile.

He pulled on a loose T-shirt and a pair of jeans, picked up his Wilson Combat pistol, and trudged up the hall. If it was the cops, he’d keep the front door bolted and rappel gingerly out the window.

The time had come, perhaps, to leave everything behind.

The inset surveillance screen showed Hugh Walters bristling in a Fila tracksuit. Evan tucked his pistol into the back of his jeans and opened the door.

“You have some explaining to do,” Hugh said.

“I understand,” Evan replied. “Before you do anything, can you just give me—”

“You precipitously left the HOA meeting before voting was completed. As a result I reviewed your attendance record, and do you know what I found?”

Midsentence, Evan froze. Poleaxed, he managed to shake his head.

“Your attendance record falls below the requirements—
requirements,
not
suggestions
—of the HOA guidebook.”

Evan stepped out into the corridor. No blood drops on the carpet, nor finger streaks along the walls. It had been cleaned already? Without Hugh’s finding out?

“As such,” Hugh said, “you’ll be assessed a fine, per the regs, of six hundred dollars.”

“A fine,” Evan repeated.

Their amateur-scientist rapport had clearly evaporated, but that was the least of Evan’s concerns. He needed to find out if he’d been compromised—and by whom.