Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,51

Internet in their pockets now. Little phones smarter than I am. Don’t make no sense.”

Evan nodded, lowered his eyes. Heat in his fingertips, his neck. It took a moment for him to identify the sensation.

Grief.

For what? For the wasted life sitting before him? Or for the fact that it could just as easily have been him on the other side of the table? If Jack hadn’t shown up. If Evan hadn’t gotten himself chosen. If he’d been found lacking.

He pictured the polished shine of his seven-thousand-square-foot penthouse. The freezer room containing tens of thousands of dollars of vodka. Stocked bank accounts in nonreporting territories. Safe houses and vehicles. The floating bed.

“I put in forty hours a week,” Danny continued, a hint of boastfulness creeping in. “Prison furniture. I spray the polyurethane and shit. Sometimes I sew mailbags, too. Puts seventeen cents a hour toward my commissary account.” He caught himself, seeming to realize that seventeen cents wasn’t worth bragging about. A quiet cough shuddered his shoulders, a loose, wet rattle like a car engine that refused to turn over. He finished and lifted his eyebrows, his ears shifting back, the left lobe lost to a smear of burn tissue. “You heard about Ramón?”

Evan nodded. “Overdose.”

“And Tyrell? Finally got his dumb ass in the army, shot to shit over in Buttfuckistan somewhere, poor fool. Served him right.” Danny’s face loosened with emotion. “May he rest in peace.”

So many lost boys.

Evan said, “Yeah.”

“We used to ride him hard about his sister being a whore.” Danny cocked his head a bit too severely, a med-induced twitch. “You think she was a pro or we just liked to give him shit?”

“Probably the latter,” Evan said.

The old camaraderie felt good, a comfort he had never known to seek. The fact that his life shared a common stream of history with someone, anyone.

“Man, she was fine, wasn’t she?” Danny said. “That caboose.”

“She was. More woman than any of us could handle. Easier to call her a whore than admit she scared the shit out of us.”

Danny’s head jerked a few more times. He scratched at his hair. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe she was just hot and that showed us for the weak-ass little boys we were.”

Evan felt a smile coming up beneath the surface. “Remember when Papa Z went to the hospital that time with gastritis?”

“That fat motherfucker always had gastritis.”

“He was gone for—what?—two weeks?”

“And he didn’t want to tell nobody ’cuz the state’d cut off the checks. So there we were, a buncha savages in the house—”

“Inmates running the asylum.”

“Shit, brother, that whole month we had sleep for dinner.” With a flick of his head, Danny cleared his hair from his eyes. “And ’member we used to steal plums off Old Man Pinkerton’s tree?”

Evan smiled, gave his best Ewelius Pinkerton voice. “‘You motherless bastards get offa my lot ’fore I give you the whupping your long-gone daddies never did.’”

Danny rocked a bit and laughed. “Those plums, shit they was good.” The grin faded. “Till they weren’t,” he said. “It’s like that in here. It was like that for Tyrell and Ramón and the rest of us, too. There’s a season fruit is ripe, right? But if you miss it, it goes all rotten. We didn’t get picked. So we went rotten.” He cleared his throat. “You got picked, though, didn’t you?”

A coughing fit seized him. He tried to raise a fist to his mouth, but a metallic clank stopped it at his sternum.

Evan leaned back, away, picturing a mist of germs settling across the table between them. His OCD revved up, that internal scanning software that assessed infection, contamination, decay. He tried to keep the disgust from his face, but Danny locked onto it.

“You ain’t no better’n me.”

“No,” Evan said. “I’m not.”

Danny drew back his head haughtily. “Okay. So long as we have that shit straight.”

“We have it straight.”

“So why are you here?”

“Andre. He’s in trouble.”

“What’s it to you?”

The explanation came haltingly, the words jumbling up at Evan’s mouth. “I … used to help people—”

“Help people how?”

“—but I’m retired.”

“Then why are you—”

“Because Andre…” Evan couldn’t grab hold of the thought to finish it.

“That’s what they took you to go do?” Danny asked. “Help people?”

An Estonian arms dealer sprawled on the floor, chest sucking blood, a mist of blood speckling his lips. An NGO worker garroted in a public bathroom in Cairo, slumped beneath a shattered urinal. A drug lord sitting lifelike in a São Paulo steam room, terry towel twisted around his neck, marbled white