Page 119 of Lone Wolf

Maybe la donna wasn’t so mobile after all.

Evan said, “Okay.”

Melinda killed the connection.

Evan stretched out his arms, his shoulders. He needed a cold shower to wake up. Vera III looked not particularly sympathetic.

He took in the rest of Joey’s work on the walls. Machines pounding away at firewalls, an array of exploits trying to burrow past various routers and servers.

In addition, she had Nathan Friedhoff’s leaked video up, using machine learning and CV algorithms to scan him and everything around him, rendering every contour and line as a digital wireframe. Beside that window was some kind of social-media account for Jayla Hill.

He looked over at Joey. She was eyeing Jayla’s image, chewing on the end of a pen.

“What’s up?” Evan asked.

Joey shook her head. “Was just thinking about her. How much it would suck getting your voice taken away.”

Evan waited.

“I mean, I was sitting here all stupid-nervous about this sorority thing I have tonight—disco bowling, lame, right?—and I kept picturing her alone with a bunch of deputies in some safe house and what she’s feeling like right now about the rest of her life. I have a hard enough time figuring out how to find my voice sometimes out in the world and I have my voice.”

He waited some more.

“Have you heard her voice?”

“No,” he said. “I never did.”

“You know how some people have their personality in their voices? That was her. She had a really cool husky voice. She was a singer. And that bitch took it from her.”

Evan looked at the screen—jaylahillsingergurl at TikTok. Jayla wore braids with a headband, a few decorative beads thrown in the mix. A PLAY icon rested in the middle of her chest.

Evan reached over to the mouse and clicked.

Jayla sang.

An R&B number he didn’t know but her voice had grit and texture and she could reach down for a kind of power that seemed beyond her or anyone’s years. He felt the music through his whole body, and when she finished and the video froze once more, her voice reverberated around the Vault like a memory, which was all it was anymore for Jayla and everyone else.

It seemed a crime against humanity for Karissa Lopatina to have taken it from her so ignobly.

He didn’t feel like talking, and Joey didn’t feel like talking, so at last she said, “C’mon, Dog, let’s go potty,” and the big ridgie heaved himself to his paws and they padded out of the Vault together.

Evan stared at the OLED screens wrapped around him. He had to get to Lopatina again any way he could. The money trail had been run down as far as possible. He’d intersected with her at the only juncture points he could predict. What other angles were open to him?

He thought about her ghostly form behind the billboard, a figure of smoke and stealth, how he’d barely glimpsed the bolt-action and Leupold scope that were a match for his own.

There. He could push harder there.

He brought up the video-call software and dialed Tommy.

Three rings and then the feed blinked on. Tommy at his kitchen table, spooning oatmeal into his face and reading a spec sheet for Black Hills ammunition. He looked more banged up than usual. “Your ugly mug’s about the last thing I need to see first thing in the morning. Better be important.”

“I want you to help track down an assassin I’m circling. She uses top-tier gear you might be able to source to a black-market dealer or something.”

Tommy rubbed his neck, grimaced, then palmed a few Advil into his mouth and washed them down with coffee. “I don’t track down other folks’ deals. I make deals.”

“I know, but my other contacts hit dead ends.”

“What gear we talking?”