Hellbent (Orphan X #3)(80)

She wasn’t at the minivan.

She wasn’t visible from the next intersection or the one after that.

He checked the RoamZone. She hadn’t called. Nor had Xavier. His worry compounded when he considered what he’d do if Xavier decided to contact him now. Sorry about your gang situation, but I’m busy running around Virginia trying to prevent a boy’s execution, chess-matching with the world’s most lethal assassins, and my sidekick just went missing.

Sidekick.

The word had tumbled naturally into his thoughts.

He cut over one block, walked back across cracked sidewalks, pit bulls gnashing at him from behind fences. Activity swirled inside an abandoned house, unsavory customers visible through the missing windows and front door. Evan strode across the gone-to-seed front lawn and through the rectangular hole where the front door used to reside. His boot crushed the shards of a dropped crack pipe. Half the back wall was missing, bodies milling ten deep in the packed living room. A couple was having sex on a couch shoved against one wall, their pale skin nearly glowing in the darkness.

Evan shoved through toward the backyard.

“Hey, fucker, you’d best watch where you’re—”

Palm—jaw—floor. The guy dropped as if brought down with a lasso, and Evan broke through the remaining fringe of bodies. More faces, more hands clutching crinkled brown paper bags, more glass pipes. A fire leapt inside an enormous clay pot, casting irregular light across bare midriffs, shaved skulls, a guy with glasses missing one lens.

No Joey.

Evan cut up the side yard, jogged back to the apartment complex, his stress quickening. The guys remained on the lawn chairs, the smell of weed contact-high thick in the corridor.

The door to the rented room was open.

Evan jogged forward, hand resting on the grip of the skinny ARES shoved into his waistband. He came around the doorway, stepping inside, ready to draw.

Joey stood in the middle of the room, shoulders hunched, her face in her hands. Her back shuddered.

He heeled the door shut behind him. “Joey?”

She wheeled on him. “Where were you?” She came at him, striking blindly. “Why’d you leave me here? I got back, and you … you weren’t here. Why weren’t you here?”

He retreated, but she launched at him again, pounded with her fists, not like a trained operator but like an angry sixteen-year-old. “You left me. I thought … I thought…”

He tried to gather her in, but she shoved him away. She slammed the closet door off its tracks, kicked the chair across the room, threw the lamp against the wall, knocking a divot through the paint.

He moved to get out of her way, sat on the floor, and put his back to the door.

She ripped the hanger pole off its mounts in the closet, kicked the bed hard enough that the metal feet gouged marks in the carpet, drove her hand through the drywall.

Finally she finished.

She was facing away from him, her body coiled, her hands in loose fists at her sides. Blood dripped from a split knuckle.

She walked over. She sat across from him, facing away from his bed. Her huge eyes were wet, her shoulders still heaving.

“Where were you?” she said.

“I went to look for you.”

“You weren’t here.”

He swallowed. “Tiene dos trabajos. Enojarse y contentarse.”

She pressed both hands over her mouth. Tears ran over her knuckles, but she did not make a sound.

They sat on the floor together for a very long time.





53

My Breath on Your Neck

The next morning Evan and Joey sat on their respective beds spooning gas-station-bought oatmeal into their mouths from Styrofoam cups. He’d told Joey to put the room back together, and she’d done her best, but still the closet door was knocked off its tracks, the lamp shattered, the walls battered. The wreckage of the chair was neatly stacked in the corner, a pyre of kindling. It was a foregone conclusion that Suzi Orton, cheery Airbnb patron, was going to have to retire her profile after they cleared out.

“Look,” Joey said. “Sorry I kinda freaked out last night. It’s just … I was—”

Her phone gave a three-note alert, a bugle announcing the king.

She thumped her Styrofoam cup down on the nightstand, oatmeal sludge slopping over the brim, and swung off the bed into a kneeling position before her laptop at the desk.

“A police cruiser hit on the plate,” she said, her voice tight with excitement.

He leaned over her shoulder, saw a screen grab of the black Suburban captured by the light bar of a passing cop car. The SUV was parked in a crowded Food Lion grocery-store lot, the GPS specifics spelled out below.

“Damn it.” Joey nibbled the edge of her thumbnail. “By the time we get there, they’ll be gone.”

“No,” he said. “This is good. No one drives across town to get groceries.”

She caught his meaning, nodded, and snapped her laptop shut. They threw their stuff together in less than a minute.

Before heading out, Evan left ten crisp hundred-dollar bills on the floor beneath a fist-size hole punched through the drywall.

*

He started at Food Lion and drove in an expanding spiral, creeping through increasingly rough neighborhoods. A few miles along their winding path, he pulled abruptly to the curb.

Joey said, “What?”