Page 14 of Lone Wolf

Evan pressed the flyer to a wooden post on the second floor of the apartment complex and hammered a staple through Loco’s neck like a bowtie. Though far from extravagant, the complex leaned upper-middle-class with a furnished lobby, foreign vehicles in the carports, and smoked glass rimming the outdoor walkways. Packages from Amazon, Walmart, and Solventry were mounded on some of the doormats like Christmas gifts, which spoke to trusted building security. Given the block Sofia lived on, he understood why she’d called these the “fancy apartments.”

Before approaching, he’d done a spot check of the building but hadn’t bothered to memorize all the surrounding streets. It was a tiny erosion in the Third Commandment—Master your surroundings—but the past few days had put him through the spin cycle and a missing dog was hardly a mission requiring maximum vigor.

He moved along the floating walkway, heading back toward the stairs. On the thoroughfare below, a Google Street View vehicle drifted by, its all-seeing 360-degree camera poking up from the roof like a periscope. Evan’s lab-engineered shirt looked as plain as he did, but an adversarial pattern hidden in the design threw off machine-vision algorithms and thwarted facial-recognition software. Despite that, he turned away until the car coasted out of sight.

One of the windows at his side was open, the dinner party inside lubricated with red wine and Miles Davis. Evan reached the next post and stapled Loco’s face to the wood.

A sandpapery voice issued from a dark patch farther down the corridor. “Do you have clearance to post materials on privately owned property?”

Evan peered into the shadows. “What sort of clearance?”

“Supermajority vote by the board.”

He moved close, an ancient woman’s shape resolving from the darkness. She was so old she looked as if she’d never been young. Tight gray curls shellacked into a turtle shell around her face, body hunched into a shape like an inverted U, head floating where her shoulder should be. In one liver-spotted claw, she clutched a combo walking stick–chair contraption that looked like it came out of a Soviet lab in 1982. With a snap of her arm, she flung out the tripod base, and lowered herself onto the sturdy seat. The hem of her housedress fluttered low over swollen ankles, brushing the tops of black orthopedic shoes with Velcro straps.

Jack had instilled in Evan a respect for elders. Due to his distaste for ideology, Jack ensured that each of his lessons combined the strategic with the moral. Preceding generations bequeathed you the world, despite all its imperfections and shortcomings, he’d told twelve-year-old Evan. For that they deserve an assurance that you won’t make them irrelevant. If you do, you wind up fighting the past and destabilizing the present.

“No, ma’am,” he answered. “I don’t have that clearance.”

“Who will clean them up?” She gestured at the flyers fluttering along the second floor and the visible posts downstairs. “Who will repair the damage to the building edifice? And moreover, do you even live here?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t.”

“Did you know that property crime has been precipitously on the rise in Los Angeles?”

“I did not, ma’am.”

“Did you know that vandalism causing property damage in excess of four hundred dollars is classified as a felony rather than a misdemeanor?”

“You seem to know a lot more than I do, ma’am.”

“I am a ninety-seven-year-old woman with her faculties intact. I basically know everything.”

He was uncertain of a reply that she might find suitable.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to,” she said. “I know how these robbery crews work. You come by under some pretense.” She gave a disdainful sneer at the stack of flyers in his hands. “A missing puppy. But you’re really sneaking around here casing these condos.”

“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” Evan said. The stairs were a few paces beyond her provisional perch, so he started toward them.

She stiffened. “I know your type, too, with your army boots and all. If you think you can intimidate me, you’re sorely mistaken. I grew up in Brooklyn back when it was still Brooklyn, young man. I want you to look at me. Look me in the face and ask yourself…” She rose with more haste than seemed probable. “Do I look scared?”

He never imagined that a version of his own words rendered through a nonagenarian could contain such menace. Giving her a wide berth, he slid past her en route to the stairs. “You certainly do not.”

With crossed arms, she observed his descent before disappearing back inside.

Reaching ground level, Evan drew in a breath of night air. A breeze wafted over the scent of the deep fryer from the taco joint across the street. He looked at the line of telephone poles stretching up the block, flyers waggling on all of them like Most Wanted posters with countless renegade Locos staring out.

Orphan X and the Case of the Missing Dog.

What idiocy.

As he turned to leave, he caught a glint from beneath the second-floor walkway. Tucked beneath the overhang and nestled beside a swallows’ nest was the black lens of a surveillance camera. It aimed directly down at the base of the stairs, capturing the newel-post onto which Sofia had hooked Loco’s leash.

If he could identify the camera model, Joey should be able to hack the system remotely.

Tucking the remaining flyers beneath his arm, he started up the stairs once more. The wrought-iron railing had plenty of space between the bars. Nearing the top of the stairs, he stooped to peer through the rails. The camera was just out of reach, smudged from the mud pellets of the swallows’ nest. He dropped to all fours on the second-to-top step and shoved his arm through to the shoulder, straining until his fingertips wiped off the offending mud.

Reverse white lettering caught the ambient light: IRONKLAD KAM.