Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,79
bad influence—”
“Three.” She was bending back her fingers, the nails painted a vivacious pink, no doubt due to Bicks’s arrival on the scene. “If we don’t do this, then your boy Andre’s gonna get killed, and so you’re literally choosing being uptight over saving his life.”
The muscles of his neck had tightened up. He let his head sag, feeling a sudden kinship with Mia. “I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”
“Clearly,” she said. “You just got outnegotiated by a terrorist.” She snapped her fingers and pointed through the windshield. “Drive or we’ll be late.”
He looked over at her. She smiled that winning smile, flipped her hair to the left to show off that shaved strip over her right ear, her thumbprint dimple indenting one cheek. She was irresistible. And entirely infuriating.
He drove.
* * *
“Can we listen to music?”
“No.”
“Can we stop for road snacks?”
“No.”
“Ug. You’re so … uuuug.” Joey slouched in the passenger seat, dirty boot resting against the glove box. She chewed the side of her thumbnail.
With her molars.
Evan glanced over. “You need help with that? I could get you gardening shears.”
She removed her thumb from her mouth and glowered at him. Then she contorted herself in the seat, trying to dig her thumb into her shoulder blade.
“You should get that looked at,” Evan said. “Too much keyboard time.”
“Yeah, well my uncle-dad-boss-person is super demanding so I’m not sure I can get time off for, like, a massage.”
“It’s okay. Boss-person provides medical.”
Her face sagged with an inadvertent pout, and she crossed her arms and slumped down, suddenly looking five years younger. He wondered how old she’d be when he’d no longer be able to see the kid in her. What would that feel like? It was relentless, time stretching out ahead, full of loss and opportunity. Every step left behind a world of options but set you on new ground. He pictured Mia leaning on her door, letting her body sway with the hinges, one foot raised behind her as if for a cinema kiss. To be continued.
The truck wound across the Tejon Pass, a five-mile ascent up the Tehachapi Mountains and across the San Emigdios. Finally they eased down into the vast bowl of the Central Valley. Fresno and Rafael Gomez waited a hundred and fifty miles to the north, but Evan had set a truck-stop meet with Tommy Stojack at the base of the Grapevine. Winter rain had greened the hillside in patches, but browns and yellows predominated, chaparral and weedy grasslands. A scorched rise darkened a hillock to the left where a fire had taken the earth down to the dermis. The air leaking through the vents smelled of diesel and sagebrush.
“How was your date with…” Evan couldn’t bring himself to say “Bicks” in nonmocking fashion.
“Fun,” Joey said. “Till it got annoying.”
His heart lifted. “Annoying?”
“Well, he and I are, like, solid, you know? But we went to a club after dinner with some of his girl-space-friends and they were so annoying. Like a different species.”
“How so?”
“Like the kind of girls who talk in baby voices and ugly cry at Hallmark movies.”
“What’s a Hallmark movie?”
“Right. I forgot you’re frozen in time like Captain America.”
“Who’s Captain America?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Right.”
“Thank bejesus. So anyway, this one girl named—of course—Sloane totally karaoke-filibustered with Diana Ross. And she was ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’–ing Bicks, all leaning over him, and I was all like, ‘I’m right here, bitch.’”
Evan tried to shape the words Joey was saying into some sort of meaning that he could comprehend but came up short.
Fortunately, she was on a roll, undeterred by his silence. “So I’m realizing that Sloane doesn’t just want to be Bicks’s girl-space-friend, so I finally grabbed the mic and had them cue up ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart,’ and I was like, ‘I got this,’ but—”
“You didn’t get this.”
She sighed. “I didn’t get this.”
“You have many talents,” Evan said. “Singing is not one of them.”
“In my haste to show up Sloane, I might have forgotten that. And she was all like, ‘What?’—acting like she didn’t know what she was doing, which she totally did. And her friends all rallied around her, playing the victim. And then she got all in my face and I told her to back off and she didn’t so I moved her away. And I barely even used an elbow lock—”
“You used an elbow lock on a girl named Sloane?”
“Not really. More like a gesture. Certainly not enough to ‘trigger’ her or whatever she said. So then it was the crybully Olympics all