Page 10 of Lone Wolf

Around Andre, Evan found himself dropping back into the street patter of their youth. Reminders of the past he’d left behind messed with his mental wiring. They hit his DNA, knocking old sensations back into his body. Taste of mold from the walls. Chafing of ill-fitting clothes. That awful gut-deep emptiness when the check from the state was late and there was nothing to eat for days but generic potato chips, the ones that came in white boxes with black block lettering. Worst of all was the shame burning beneath the skin at the wary looks they drew from clerks when a pack of them chimed a shop door to enter, at the sight of parents driving normal kids by in station wagons, at the chipped plates off which they ate their runny mac and cheese, and the cracked plastic glasses that leaked beads of water over their knuckles. Broke and powerless. Useless, too, except for Evan, who was lucky enough to get chosen for a program that created expendable human weapons no one cared about and no one would miss.

He’d won the lottery in Jack Johns, the handler who’d raised him from the age of twelve. Jack’s philosophy—at turns pragmatic, sagacious, and blue-collar Zen—had been Evan’s touchstone up to the moment of Jack’s death. The toughest and finest man Evan had known, he was the first person to show Evan respect by placing exacting demands on him, by expecting more than Evan thought he had in him, by giving him a place in the world. And as sure as Jack had drilled into his young head marksman skills, hand-to-hand disciplines, and psyops techniques, he’d hammered home the most important lesson of all.

That the hardest part wasn’t teaching Evan to be an assassin. The hardest part was keeping him human.

Every day was a fight between the two warring instincts—the push of perfection and isolation versus the pull of emotional contact with its endlessly confounding shades of gray. Evan felt it now in his repulsion for everything Andre’s appearance had surfaced in him and in the drumbeat of guilt he felt at having pulled himself out when most everyone else from Pride House had wound up dead, or in a cell, or scraping by. His head, muddy from vodka and the aftermath of what he’d encountered in that prefabricated house in Texas, wasn’t making any of this easier.

“Good on you for agreeing to do this,” Andre said.

Evan said, “I didn’t agree.”

“How do you know Dad again?” Sofia asked.

We had the same mom even if we never knew it.

“We knew each other from back when,” Evan said.

“What was Dad like as a kid?”

“He sketched a lot,” Evan said. “And talked even more.”

Andre laughed. “What you know, man? Running your skinny ass around the playground tryin’ to not get it beat.”

Brianna had not risen from her desk. She kept her head down, scribbling away in a checkbook. Andre glanced over at her quickly and then once again.

“How you doing, Bri?” Andre said.

“You know,” she said.

“Nope. Why I’m asking.”

She put her pen down with a sigh. “It was a lotta work when you brought that ratty dog over here—”

Sofia, arms crossed: “He’s not ratty.”

“—and it’s a lot more work comforting this child day and night now that he ran away.”

Andre showed his palms, heeling away. “Hold up, hold up. We’re gonna get this fixed. Ain’t that right, Evan?”

Evan felt his molars grind.

Brianna mm-hmmed and went back to her work as Andre joined Evan and Sofia over at the couch. Sofia had dropped to the carpet in a perfect ballerina split. She was a dancer, always twirling and spinning, her hair fastened at her nape in a frayed bun.

Evan said, “What else can you tell me about Loco?”

Sofia rotated slightly to second-position stretch, rainbowing one arm up and over her torso, an elegant taffy stick of a girl. “He’s allergic to apples, make him throw up—”

Brianna, still not looking up: “On my carpet.”

“—and he’s got this guilty face that’s so cute when he tinkles by mistake —”

“On my carpet.”

“—and he curls his tongue when he yawns like—”

“Stop,” Evan said. “I mean, did he go outside by himself? Did he ever run off? Did he go missing from here?”

“No. No. And no. We went over to Leela’s house ’cuz we was going to the park. She lives in the fancy apartments across from Del Taco ’cuz her momma works at Disney—the studio, not like Space Mountain—and her momma’s allergic to dogs so Loco couldn’t come in so I tied his leash to the fat post thing at the bottom of the stairs and went up to get Leela and when I came out he was gone.”