Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,37

face. She hoisted the basket onto a hip the way Bri always did and vanished through the front door into the hall.

Duran had forgotten to breathe.

Eleven years old and still a kid. A few inches taller, sure, but her face had barely changed. Her features hadn’t yet started to shift with the run-up to the teen years. Beautiful round cheeks still padded with baby fat. Those long eyelashes. That awkward child’s grace as she danced, fluid and unbalanced all at once, a glorious spinning top that could capsize at any second.

Still his little girl.

For a moment he forgot himself, taking a step away from the tree toward the apartment building. And then he halted, the circumstances crushing in on him.

What was he thinking? If he had any contact with Bri and Sofia, that would put the fake deputy marshals on their tail. The same people who’d used dark magic to open up Jake Hargreave’s carotid and bleed him dry.

All these long, lonely months, Duran could have swallowed his shame and shown up, could’ve given Sofia a Daddy Hug, the one where he picked her up and swung her around till her Crocs flew off. And now when every last instinct tugged at him to cross the dark alley and knock on that door, he couldn’t.

Not without putting her at risk. Her mother, too.

He started to turn away when a flicker of movement caught his eye. A man melting from the shadows along the front of the building. He stood before the very window Duran had been watching, his hands in his pockets, staring into the living room through the security screen.

The man was perfectly still. Thirty yards away beneath the ancient oak, Duran stayed perfectly still, too.

Then the man headed for the apartment’s entrance.

Duran stepped forward, plucked the rusty knife from the gutter, and started after him.

21

Busted Creatures

Evan kept his hat off and wore short sleeves, the better to distinguish himself from Andrew Duran in the event that a guided missile was watching from ten thousand feet above.

How odd that after so many years spent flying below the radar, he now had to make himself visible for his own safety.

The hardware-store Schlage on the apartment building’s front door yielded to a rake pick and a tension wrench, the pins popping into alignment with a readiness that suggested they’d been compromised enough times to know the drill. A rectangle of unpainted wood delineated where the latch-guard plate had been snapped off with a crowbar.

The hall smelled of onions and garlic, someone’s dinner hanging heavy in the unventilated air. Laughing and gossiping issued from a lit room with a wide doorless entry up the hall—a lounge? a communal kitchen? As Evan neared, he heard the thump of machines, the scent of laundry detergent cutting through the stale air.

The conversation became audible. “What’s Jimmy up to?”

“Twenty-five to life.”

Laughter. “You know how to pick ’em, girl!”

“Don’t I, though?”

“Lemme guess. Armed robbery.”

“Nothing so glam. Check kiting. Seventh offense. Se-vunth. Got him on RICO or some shit ’cuz of his dumb-ass cousin Renny.”

“Renny? He the peach who said LuLu’s diapered baby had ‘junk in her trunk’?”

“The very one.”

Evan reached the doorway and peered inside at four women and a girl sorting their laundry from various mismatched machines. Brianna stood at the end, thumping a shuddering dryer with the heel of her hand; he recognized her from the DMV photo he’d pulled up. At her side Sofia held a basket brimming with more clothes.

“Thing’s been broke two weeks now,” Brianna lamented.

A woman with copper skin and well-kept hair the color of snow mm-mm-mm-ed her agreement. “Busted lock on the front door, gang tags spray-painted above the garage.”

Another woman in an ill-fitting spandex dress chimed in. “Yeah, well, the squeaky wheel don’t get shit if it ain’t in a zip code where rich folk hear it.”

“Language, ladies,” Brianna said, giving up on the dryer. “Can’t you see this innocent child here?”

Sofia had secured one of her mother’s bras over her head, the cups rising on either side like mouse ears. “Who, moi?”

As the other ladies laughed, Brianna tugged the bra free and flopped it back into the basket. “See what I deal with?” As Brianna spoke, Sofia mouthed her mom’s words, engendering more laughter.

Brianna swatted her daughter on the arm, then planted a kiss on her forehead.

Evan stepped forward into a rush of warm air. Specks of lint snowflaked over the dryers, and a softener sheet remained impossibly airborne above a leaky vent, a feather riding a cartoon