The Last Orphan
Chapter 15

Keeping the Ralph Lauren cap snugged low over his eyes, Evan stalked through nightfall toward Castle Heights. He held focus as best he could, averting his face from store security cams, ATMs, and traffic lights rigged to photograph speeders. The Third Commandment demanded that he master his surroundings but he felt his focus blurring the outside world with the rocky terrain of his internal landscape.

needle punching through his shirt

Crushing his RoamZone underfoot, he kicked it down a sewer drain. Clusters of students were out in front of the movie theaters, laughing and taking selfies. He drifted past a café wafting scents of shisha and barbecued meat, a busker playing a battered guitar down two strings, a green-cross dispensary leaking the earthy reek of pot.

windshield spiderwebbing

He’d held it together while in captivity, but feeling the pavement jarring his heels, breathing the candied smell of vape pens and the waft of grease and potato from the In-N-Out a block over, he sensed the pieces of his capture shifting inside him, sharp bits with jagged edges.

man slumped forward, face in his bowl of soup

He neared the lobby now, images and sensations churning, the barrier between past and present as thin as a film of ice laid atop a well-shaken martini. Screwing his thoughts together, he entered through the glass front doors, Joaquin greeting him from behind the security desk.

“Hello, Mr. Smoak.”

other boys’ feet pounding him awake

Evan tried to focus on Joaquin’s words, lost them, identified what he was saying by tone and cadence: “Small talk small talk small talk.” Joaquin gave him a grin, reaching to summon the elevator. “Small talk?”

Evan nodded, guessed at the meaning, forced an answer up through the constricted channel of his throat. “Small talk.”

fat-barreled grenade launcher

On numb legs he moved to the elevator door. A flurry of movement from the sofa facing the tall windows looking out at Wilshire Boulevard. And then Lorilee Smithson, 3F, beelining for him.

He turned away as he entered the elevator, but she boarded with him, chirping into his shoulder. “Small talk small talk small talk small talk.”

He said, “Uh-huh.”

“Small talk small talk.”She was looking at him now, her Botox-enhanced face shifting into its best approximation of kindly concern. The moment demanded that he meet her gaze. He stared at her, straining to focus.

She rested a manicured hand on his shoulder—

palm against his cheek

—and leaned in, her face spackled with foundation. Her perfume was sickly-sweet, heavy with orchid. A rare crease marked the space between her eyebrows. He forced himself back to the present to take in her words. “Looks like someone’s got a bad case of the crummies.”

He initiated the muscles on his cheeks, pulled his mouth into something resembling a pleasant resting shape. “Small,” he said, “talk.” His eyes stabbed past her luxuriant blowout at the elevator numbers. A ding for the third floor, Lorilee’s floor, and then he armed the doors as if to hasten their parting and ushered her out.

She stared back at him, blinking, until the car stitched itself shut once more, wiping her from view.

He blew out a breath, sagged against the wall, buttressing himself with a h*p jammed into the thick metal rail.

symphony of paranoia

Now stepping out of the elevator.

gripping a Makarov pistol

Now walking down the hallway.

bright orange stripe around the muzzle

Now opening his door.

his flesh and fiber no longer obeying him

Now stripping off his clothes, boots, socks, boxer briefs, shoving the bundle into the fireplace, stoking up two cedar logs, incinerating all evidence of the outside world that had stained him.

sweat cooling at his hairline

Now into the shower, hot enough to raise welts, scrubbing at his arms, legs, chest with peppermint soap that made his skin burn clean.

drooling b***d onto the asphalt

Now leaning over the sink, trimming his fingernails, compulsively running his thumb pad over the sharp spots and edging them with the clippers more and more until he was down to the quick.

shard-sharp glint of sunlight

Now sweeping up the clippings, washing and scrubbing the surfaces they’d touched, washing and scrubbing his hands, forcing himself from the bathroom.

IV pole starting to topple

Now dressing in the closet but there was lint on his shirt and he picked it free and walked it to the trash can in the bedroom but there was a tiny ball of dust on the poured-concrete floor and he crouched to press his thumb to it but saw that there were more specks by the baseboard and they were everywhere and how was he supposed to determine the acceptable size of dust to leave on the floor instead of convey to the trash because how you do anything is how you do everything.

patterns on the ceiling way up above

It was his OCD screaming at him, running him, and he tried to grab hold of the errant operating system, but all he could see was dust and lint, and all he could feel were the minuscule jags on his fingernails, and he closed his eyes and tried to replace his breath.

swinging his sights to the metal links of a dangling cafeteria sign, the kind of wide-open shot he never missed

The Second Commandment—How you do anything is how you do everything—warred with reality, paring him down to nothing but behavioral loops. He knew he had to put the OCD into a drawer in his mind and close it, but everything was spinning too fast for him to grab hold of.

heartbeat fluttering in the side of his throat

He reached to replace his breathing, the floor beneath his bare feet, and pushing out thoughts of lint and dust sticking to his soles, he walked back into the closet and closed the door behind him.

It was dark inside—white hospital walls—save for the seam of light at the edges—Mystery Man’s eyes hidden behind Ray-Bans—so he couldn’t see all the clutter and imperfections—he doesn’t talk much—and he racked aside the Woolrich shirts on their hangers—tiny hand gripping a smooth white rail—to clear a space and lowered himself down—cuffed and barred and chained—toppling the stack of brand-new Original S.W.A.T. shoe boxes—a lion, a zebra—and an image of Joey flickered across the screen of his mind—fifty thousand volts—and he realized he’d kept her furthest away from all this in his thoughts, his Achilles’ heel, his biggest weakness, and—no brisk wind, no shadows—he hadn’t let himself entertain for a single instant—you know what it’s like to be powerless—what it would do to her if he were gone.

He put his back to the wall and tucked his knees into his chest.

He dug in a drawer to his side, and then a replacement RoamZone was in his hand, and he’d dialed before he realized who he was calling.

Tommy Stojack picked up after the fourth ring. “Yallo.”

The pop of lips around an inhale. Evan could picture the Camel Wide nested beneath Tommy’s biker mustache, could hear the echo of his voice off the hard surfaces of his armorer’s lair, a rusty topography of mills and lathes, munitions crates and test-firing tubes.

Evan’s voice sounded as though it belonged to someone else. “Tommy.”

“What?”

“I’m there.”

“Where?”

“In the hurt.”

A long pause. Another inhalation, the white noise purr of smoke exhaled. “Need me to come?”

“No.”

“All right.” More silence. In the background, water dripped and a machine hummed. “Be humble as f**k,” Tommy said. “And keep gratitude.”

“Okay.” Evan pictured the twenty feet between him and the dangling cafeteria sign. No brisk wind, no shadows, no distracting reflections. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again. “I missed the shot, Tommy.”

“What’d it cost you?”

“An eighth of a second.” Evan’s lips felt dry, chapped. “You know how much that is?”

“It is,” Tommy said, “a lifetime.”

More silence. Evan reminded himself to keep breathing.

“Age comes for us all.” A squeak and a faint hiss, no doubt Tommy grinding out his cigarette in that salvaged ship’s porthole he used as an ashtray. “So you learn.”

“Learn what?” Evan asked.

“To use different muscles.”

Evan couldn’t wrap his head around that right now.

“The missed shot,” Tommy said. “Is that what put you in the hurt?”

“No.”

“What did, then?”

“Huh. Three Black Hawks, five Counter Assault Teams, a few dozen LAPD, a convoy of uparmored SUVs, and a mess of Secret Service agents.”

Tommy gave that a few seconds’ respect. “And yet here you are.”

“That doesn’t matter. They got me. They had me.”

“And now they don’t,” Tommy said. “So you got two choices. Indulge yourself and lick your wounds. Or. Go all the way down inside yourself. Find the leaks. And plug ’em.”

Evan said, “Right.”

The snap of a Zippo, the crackle of a new stick. “You got this,” Tommy said, and cut the line.

Evan sat with his knees pulled to his chest and for a long time did nothing but breathe in the darkness.

“You’re okay,” he told himself. His voice was deep, strong, gravelly like Jack’s. “You’re okay.”