Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,42
salvaged from a wishing fountain in a strip-mall pupusa joint. With crystalline clarity Evan remembered the coolness of the bottle, the intoxicating fizz, how it had offered a few moments’ respite from the baking Baltimore sun. It had been a small act of kindness, delivered with no pomp and circumstance, but small acts of kindness were all they had to give or receive in that summer heat. A few sips of Coke might as well have been a king’s ransom.
The past could be so fickle, a moment boomeranging home twenty-seven years later with a palpability greater than the concrete beneath his boots.
The woman who’d given birth to him. Winging to L.A.
Andre Duran. In the wind.
Danny Gallo. Locked in a box.
How would these threads knit together?
Evan shoved off the wall and resumed his course, cutting between two banged-up lowriders onto the side street.
As he neared his truck, he spotted the bearded meth head and his crew from the house neighboring Brianna and Sofia’s apartment complex. They’d circled the F-150, peering in the windows hungrily. The bearded man bent over, plumber’s crack on full display above filthy sagging jeans, and pried a loose cinder block from a low barrier blocking in a dirt yard.
He held it overhead, staggering back toward Evan’s truck.
Evan stepped into sight. “I wouldn’t do that.”
The man sneered, yellow teeth seeming to spring from the beard itself. Most of them had caved inward, but his incisors remained in place, pronounced and tusklike. His crew tittered, rippling around him.
“You gonna stop us?” he asked.
Evan paused, hands still in his pockets. He tilted his forehead to the truck. An invitation to proceed.
The man smiled again, eyes glistening. Then he let the cinder block’s weight tug him toward the passenger window. He let go at the last moment. The cinder block struck the polycarbonate thermoplastic resin glass with an impotent thud, bounced back, and knocked him square in the forehead. He tripped over the curb and lay sprawled on the sidewalk, unconscious.
Evan removed his key fob from his pocket and gave it the chirp-chirp.
The others stood frozen, a statue garden of zombies, unblinking eyes and crooked shoulders.
“Excuse me,” Evan said.
He threaded delicately through them, stepped over the unconscious man, got into his truck, and drove away.
24
An Unusual Relationship
Evan watched the peephole for a shadow, but Joey opened the door of her apartment without checking.
He said, “How many times have I told you to look who’s at the door before you open it?”
“How many times have I told you I have pinhole cameras installed in all the heating vents so I can watch you shuffle up here all unannounced like you own the place?” She waved her Big Gulp at him. “Oh, wait, that’s right. You do own the place.”
After Joey had washed out from the Orphan Program, a series of unlikely circumstances had landed her in Evan’s charge. Eventually he’d gotten her to California and set her up in a Westwood apartment building that had failed to meet his standards for security. So—through an array of shell corporations—he’d bought the place to make improvements and keep her safe, an arrangement he believed he could hide from her. But outwitting Joey was a virtual impossibility; she’d not only deduced the chain of ownership but hacked into the legal records, intent on reassigning ownership to herself.
He’d found out and threatened to ground her.
She’d relented.
It was an unusual relationship.
She was wearing eyeliner for the first time, just a hint that made her emerald eyes pop even more. Curious. Her hair was styled with a more severe undercut than usual, shaved tight on the right side, a black-brown wave waterfalling across her cheek in an uncharacteristically styled fashion. She’d traded in her wife-beater undershirt and baggy flannel for something resembling an actual blouse. And a scent wafted off her, different from her usual fragrance of Dr Pepper and Red Vines.
He said, “Why do you smell like orange blossom?”
“What?” Her blink rate picked up, a nonverbal tell. “It’s nothing. Probably just soda.”
“It’s not soda. More … flowery.”
“There’s nothing flowery. You’re hallucinating. C’mon, X. Hugs not drugs.”
A Rhodesian ridgeback snout shoved between Joey’s thigh and the doorframe, the dog whimpering to get at Evan. Evan had placed the dog in Joey’s care thinking the companionship would be good for them both, and Joey feigned resentment at the responsibility. It was one of many dances she and Evan did around unspoken emotions and unacknowledged stakes.