Hellbent (Orphan X #3)(40)

She got out, and Evan followed.

She headed for the bench outside while he went in and bought her a ticket, a routine they’d established at the train station in Portland. He tucked a thousand dollars into the ticket sleeve and stepped back outside.

She was sitting on the bench, hugging her rucksack. Her jeans were torn at the knees, ovals of brown skin showing through. He handed her the ticket.

“Where am I going?” she asked.

“Milwaukee.”

She took the bulging ticket. “Thank you,” she said. “For everything. I mean it.”

Evan nodded. He shifted his body weight to walk away, but his legs didn’t listen. He was still standing there.

She said, “What?”

Evan cleared his throat. “I never knew my mom,” he said. “Or my dad. Jack was the first person who ever really saw me.” He swallowed, which was harder than he would have expected. “If no one sees you, how can you know you’re real?” He had Joey’s complete attention. He would have preferred a little less of it. It took him a moment to get out the next words. “Van Sciver took that from me. I need to set it straight. Not just for Jack. But for me. And I can’t have anything or anyone in my way.”

She said, “I get it.”

He nodded and left her on the bench.

He got back into the Civic and drove off.

One distraction down.

If he stopped only for gas, he’d make it home in seventeen hours. Then he could hack into the laptop belonging to Van Sciver’s muscle and follow where it led. Tomorrow at noon he’d see about helping Benito Orellana. He still had plenty to do and an unforgiving timeline.

The Honda’s worn tires thrummed along the road. The windows started to steam up from his body heat. He pictured Jack’s writing scrawled there.

GET PACKAGE.

Jack’s final words.

His dying wish.

Evan cranked on the defroster, watched the air chase the fog from the panes.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

He’s the best part of me.

Again he remembered waking up in that dormer bedroom his first morning in Jack’s house, the crowns of oak trees unfurled beyond his window like some magical cloud cover. He remembered how trepidatious he’d been padding down the stairs, finding Jack in his armchair in his den. And Jack’s gift to him on that first morning of his new life: My wife’s maiden name was Smoak. With an a in the middle and no e on the end. Want that one?

Sure.

Evan screeched the car over onto the shoulder of the road. Gravel dust from the tires blew past the windshield. He looked for patterns in the swirling dust, saw only chaos.

He struck the steering wheel hard with the heels of his hands.

Then he made a U-turn.

He parked in the same spot, climbed out. A bus was pulling in, blocking the bench. For a moment he thought she was already gone.

But then he stepped around the bus, and there she was, sitting in precisely the same position he’d left her in, hugging the rucksack, her feet pressed to the concrete.

She sensed his approach, looked up.

“Let’s go,” he said.

She rose and followed him back to the car.





27

Never Been and Never Was and Never Will Be

The man was ill. That much was easy to see. A tic seized his face every few seconds, making him shake his head as if clearing water from an ear.

He’d once been a paragon of excellence, one of the finest weapons in the government’s arsenal. And now this.

He clutched a rat-chewed sleeping bag. Dirt crusted his earlobe. He wore sweatpants over jeans to ward off the cold.

He jittered from foot to foot, then halted abruptly and screwed the toe of his sneaker into the earth, back and forth, back and forth. He was mumbling to himself, spillage from a brain in tatters. Gray hair, gray stubble, gray skin, a face caving it on itself.

Jack had come to Alabama to find him.

But locating a homeless man was like trying to find a glass cup in a swimming pool. Hard to know where to start and easy to miss even when you’re looking right at it.

Yet Van Sciver had resources that Jack didn’t.

It had taken some time, but now here they were, in the shadow of the freeway overpass. Commuters whizzed by above them, an ordinary Birmingham morning in ordinary motion, but down here among the puddles and heaps of wind-blown trash, they might’ve been the last humans on earth. Nearby a fire guttered in a rusted trash can, the stench of burning plastic singeing the air.

The man convulsed again, one shoulder twisting up, plugging his ear. Van Sciver reached out and clamped the man’s jaw, the hand so big it encircled the lower half of his face.

The man stilled. Van Sciver stared into his mossy brown eyes. Saw nothing but tiny candlelight flickers from the trash-can fire behind him.

Van Sciver said, “Orphan C.”

The man did not reply.

Around the concrete bend, Van Sciver could hear Thornhill shooing away the last of the homeless from the makeshift encampment. They were skittish and tractable and had good reason to be. There’d been a rash of attacks against the community of late, a neo-Nazi group curb-stomping victims in the night, lighting them on fire.

Van Sciver snapped his fingers in front of the man’s nose. The man jerked away. The tic seized him once more, the skin of his cheeks shuddering beneath Van Sciver’s hand. Van Sciver squeezed harder, firming the man’s head.