Hellbent (Orphan X #3)(14)

The flight from Las Vegas, with a layover in Houston, had taken seven hours and seven minutes. Driving fifty-three miles from Charlotte Douglas International had tacked on another hour and twenty. A long way to come for a whole lot of nothing.

They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, but Evan preferred to serve it piping hot.

He took in a deep breath and a lungful of car exhaust.

The Fourth Commandment: Never make it personal.

He repeated it over and over in his head until he almost believed it.

Then he got into his Impala and drove off. He took a final loop upslope, winding through thickening forest that coaxed a distant memory of the trees surrounding Jack’s farmhouse.

He checked his RoamZone. Even after a long day, the high-power lithium-ion battery kept the phone’s charge nearly full. He wondered briefly what he would do if the next Nowhere Man case rang through—a real Nowhere Man case as opposed to the personal mission he was on now. After he helped his clients, he asked them to find one—and only one—person who needed his help and to pass on his untraceable number.

He had a rule, encoded in the Seventh Commandment: One mission at a time.

For Jack he was willing to make an exception.

He pulled over to get a bottled water at a convenience store. As he headed back to the car, chugging down the water, he caught a chorus of singing voices on the breeze.

Only when he turned and saw the open front door of the Baptist church across the parking lot did he realize that it was an actual choir. Drawn by the music, he walked over, climbed the stone steps, and entered. The pews sat empty, but the singers were in place in the choir stand, decked out in royal-blue gospel gowns. They were working on an a cappella hymn, practicing beneath a stark wooden cross flooded with light from behind. The choir conductor, an older man, directed from a podium. The voices rose pure and true.

Evan’s form in the doorway cut the light, and the director half turned, his hands still keeping time for the singers. He gave a welcoming nod in the direction of the pews.

Evan felt the habitual pull to withdraw, but there was a power in the joined voices that hit him in the spine, made it thrum like a guitar string. He took a seat in the last row and let the hymn wash over him.

With the harmony came memories. Waking up in the dormer bedroom in Jack’s farmhouse that first sun-drenched morning. Walking behind Jack in the forest, filling those boot prints with his own small shoes. The cadence of Jack’s voice, how it never rose above a measured pitch during their nightly study sessions. Jack had taught him everything from Alexander the Great’s battle tactics to basic phrases in the Indo-Iranian languages to toasting etiquette for Scandinavian countries—nothing was too trivial. The smallest detail could save Evan’s life in the field.

Or kill him.

He thought about an Arab financier peering through raccoon eyes, wearing a half-moon laceration from Evan’s garrote like a necklace. A fat man, bald as a baby and clad only in a towel, staring back at him lifelessly through the steam of a bathhouse, blood drooling from a bullet hole over his left eye. A man slumped over a table in a drab Eastern European kitchen, his face in his soup, the back of his head missing.

He thought about what he was going to do to Van Sciver and every one of his men he came across along the way.

The choir finished. Before they could disperse, the director cleared his throat to good dramatic effect and said, “Now, when you get back out there with your car pools and your grocery shopping and your punching the clock, you take a little time to think about the works you do and the life you lead. When you’re back in this here church one day boxed up in a coffin, that’s gonna be all that’s left to speak for you.” With a crinkled hand, he waved them away. “Go on, now.”

The singers filed out, joking and gossiping. A few glanced Evan’s way, and he nodded pleasantly. People forget anything that’s not a threat, and Evan had no intention of being remembered.

He lifted his eyes to the glow behind the altar and wondered at the beliefs men held and what those beliefs drove them to do. In his brief time on the planet, he’d seen so many dead stares, so many visages touched with the gray pallor of death. But he’d never blinded himself to the humanity shining through the cracks of those broken guises. Jack had made sure of that. He’d lodged that paradox in Evan’s mind and in his heart. It had saved him, in a manner of speaking. But it came with a price.

Evan started to rise when the director turned and caught his eye. The old man limped up the aisle toward him. “Our altos are flat and our tenors are sharp. You’d think it’d even us out some.”

“It sounded perfect to me,” Evan said. “But I’ve got an untrained ear.”

“You must.” The man sat heavily in the pew next to him, let out a sigh like air groaning through a bellows.

“I’ll let you get on with your day, sir,” Evan said.

“Minister.”

“Minister. Thank you for letting me listen.”

“A man doesn’t stumble into a church for no reason.”

Out of deference Evan didn’t take issue with him.

The minister sat back, crossed his arms, and gazed at the vaulted ceiling. Evan felt a familiar tug to leave but realized that for the moment he had nowhere to be. The minister scratched at his elbow, clearly in no rush.

Evan considered the man’s words again. Decided to rise to the challenge.