Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,62
you see them, man. They have knuckles. You put your pinkie finger out and they grip it. And it’s just you, man. It’s just you. And what if you’re not up for it?”
Evan thought about Veronica, buzzed and breezy on the wide Bel Air couch. My circumstances weren’t suited to it. His voice came hard. “You get up for it.”
“I didn’t know how to be a father, man. I kept thinking, ‘What if she winds up like me?’” Andre wiped his mouth. “Shit, maybe the best thing I did was remove myself from the equation.”
Evan pictured Sofia spying on his conversation with Brianna, the worried furrows in her brow, how desperately she wanted to know that her dad was okay.
He said, “I doubt she sees it that way.”
“I want to see her. I do. But I been afraid that I’m not … good enough.”
“If you don’t do it, where will you be in five years?” Evan said. “Where will she be?”
Andre’s eyes moistened. He shook his head. “All this talk ’bout responsibility, and you here running around in the shadows, won’t even say who you are.”
“I didn’t say I was any good at responsibility.”
Andre chuckled, the tension dissolving between them. He palmed the back of Evan’s neck affectionately. Evan had to force himself not to wipe off his skin.
A Ford Explorer turned onto the street, headlights flaring the side mirror, but it lumbered by without incident.
Andre exhaled, his breath fogging. “It’s freezing here. Can’t we turn on the motor, get some heat?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t want to signal that we’re in the truck.”
“Signal to who?”
“The people trying to kill you.”
“Right.” Andre shivered. “’Member that broken window in Papa Z’s laundry room?”
Evan smirked. “How could I forget?”
“We had to get our wet clothes into the dryer fast, or that shit would freeze.”
“That one time Ramón snapped his sock in half—”
“His big-ass feet. Size thirteens.”
Evan said, “At least he got his own gym shoes.”
“Right. We had them two pairs we had to share depending on who had gym that day. Size-eights and size-tens. We’d rotate that shit.”
“Man, those things stank.”
“What are you complaining about? When we were overcrowded, I had to share a bed with Tyrell, and he’d wet the sheets, and I’d smell like piss all the next school day.”
Evan was laughing now. “I remember that.”
“Shower off with that Boraxo powder hand soap Papa Z lifted from the gas-station bathroom, be like scraping my skin off with sandpaper.”
“And what was with that generic mac and cheese?” Evan said. “Yellow box with black lettering. Tasted like cardboard and cheddar.”
“And we couldn’t even eat that when Papa Z would go out ’cuz our dumb asses couldn’t figure out how to turn on the stove.” Andre laughed. “Wait. Van Sciver knew how to turn on the stove.”
“Then he’d eat all the food, though,” Evan said.
“Charles Van Sciver. Shit. ’Member that fool?”
Evan’s smile faded. “I do.”
“He left a bit after you. Same guy came for him. Mystery Man. Van Sciver was all puffed up. Left one day, and we never saw him again, just like you. Wonder what ever happened to him? You ever see him again?”
“We had to work some shit out,” Evan said. “Later.”
“And?”
He hesitated. “It didn’t go well for him.”
“What does that mean?”
Evan could feel the heat of Andre’s stare on the side of his face. He studied the lot across the street, hoping for the line of questioning to die.
“At least tell me what you guys did,” Andre said. “After they took you. Where’d y’all go?”
The kiosk went dark.
Evan held up a hand to silence Andre.
The worker emerged, locked the door behind him, and trudged to the front gate. He slid it shut, looped a chain through the bars several times, and secured it with a heavy-duty padlock. Then he climbed into an ancient BMW 2002 covered with more rust than paint, and the vehicle coughed its way up the street and around the corner.
Evan and Andre sat in the relative quiet for a moment. Then Evan slid a laptop from the backseat and pried the lid open. The impound lot’s Web video server had a serious vulnerability. Its string input parameters hadn’t been type-checked or checked for length, so Joey had crafted an overly long POST request for Evan to deploy when he needed it. It would cause a buffer overflow, escalate privileges using another vulnerability on the system, execute Joey’s shellcode as root, and let Evan intercept and replace the video stream.