Page 44 of Lone Wolf

“You don’t need lidocaine for two tiny stitches. When did you turn into such a wuss?” The needle popped the surface tension of his skin and then he felt a burn and a tugging as she threaded it expertly up and out the other side.

“Josephine! What are you using, a knitting needle?”

“Quit squirming. Sit still.” More poking and pulling and surface pain. The emerald glittered in her nose, the diamond pendant at her throat. She smelled like vanilla and Red Vines. “Dayum, X. You’re hella bruised like everywhere. What happened to you anyways?”

He winced as the needle dipped once more. “I escaped a manhunt blockading ten square miles of downtown L.A.,” he repeated.

“Huh,” she said again, absently. “And at first I was all like, ‘I don’t need to be your token brown girl for your stupid sorority, right? If all you Mary-Kate and Ashleys are really oh so politically conscious go down to East Los and help the real Raza.” She busted out the pristine accent. “Not Silvia from the fucking Palisades.”

“Or you,” Evan said.

“Me?” Joey yanked the needle, the wound cinched shut, and she bit off the thread and tied it off with a few expert flicks of her fingers. She had on her lopsided smirk now. “I am real Raza. The Man’s been keeping me down my whole life.”

“You’re a supervillain hacker with a trust fund,” Evan said. “The Man wishes he could keep you down.”

She slapped a Band-Aid over the stitches with more emphasis than the occasion called for, and Evan took care not to give her the satisfaction of seeing him wince.

Evan gazed glumly at legion shed dog hairs on his sheets. He nudged Dog in the ribs, and Dog flew up with a yowl and hopped off the bed. “Can I get dressed?”

Joey said, “Not in front of me, you can’t.”

“I wasn’t implying—”

She was up once more, heading back to the Vault with the medic kit. “Hurry up already. We got work to do.”

Once she entered the bathroom, he started throwing on clothes. Her voice boomed out through the secret door to the Vault, which she’d left hinged open. “But it’s kinda fun. This sorority stuff. And I sorta want to belong. But does that make me self-loathing?”

Evan yanked on cargo pants, nearly tripping, feeling a fresh ache in his hip flexors. “There are lots of reasons for you to be self-loathing,” he said. “But I don’t think this is one of them.”

“Or,” Joey’s disembodied voice continued, “should I get in and do a takeover from within? Turn it into, dunno, a façade for a white-hat hacktivist group. We’d be sinking foreign governments from behind the ivy walls of Slamma Whamma Girlchik!”

He brushed his teeth and hurried into the Vault. Joey finished relacing her Doc Martens and then tossed the medic kit over by the weapon lockers, where it landed in a slump against the wall. He picked it up, zipped it properly, and put it in its place.

Heading back out, she peeled the Milky Way bar and dropped the wrapper somewhere in the air space above the trash can. As it floated wide, he caught it, crumpled it up, and made sure it hit its target.

Grabbing a tissue to wipe chocolate from his hands, he said, “You would’ve made a shitty bomber pilot.”

“I looked at all the police reports on Doc Hill,” she continued, logjamming with Dog at the door to the shower before popping through. “First up, no dog found at the scene. So if Doc Hill had Loco at one point, he’s missing now.”

“I need to fill you in on—”

She darted through the bedroom, down the hall, popping open a bag of Lay’s Limón chips on her way through the great room. Evan stayed at her heels.

Her words jumbled through loud munching: “Gun found at the scene was a shit .22, a ghost weapon just like one a yours. Oh—and Hill had a brand-new alarm. But guess what? The panel wasn’t connected yet! Dude’s the principal deep-learning scientist at Solventry and he didn’t hook up the panel!”

As she conveyed another vigorous helping of Lay’s to her mouth, a dusting of chips struck the poured-concrete floor. Dog the dog lapped them up vigorously, leaving a mucus smear from his nose. Evan crouched, mopping the slime with the tissue.

“So I’m thinking the killer had no idea the alarm wasn’t live and unhooked it for obvious reasons.” In the kitchen, Joey plopped down the sweating can of Red Bull onto the island and herself onto a stool before it.

Evan grabbed a coaster, waited for Joey to take a sip, and hockey-pucked the coaster the length of the island to stop beneath her can as she set it down.

She didn’t notice, having moved on to the unwrapping of her brownie. “I looked into Doc Hill some. Aside from the fact that he was, like, one of the world’s leading experts in AI, he seems cool ay eff and from what I can tell he’s squeaky clean. Been at Solventry only three months—FreeWillPower, the AI division. What he does there’s all secretive and stuff ’cuz Big tech, but it seems to involve bioinformatics. He played with that at his last gig doing medical research at Carnegie Mellon in the throat-cancer ward. That’s how his wife died. I guess she grew up in a house with asbestos, hypopharyngeal cancer spread to laryngeal cancer, and—” She performed a sliced-throat, cocked-head gesture, her tongue protruding to complete the Q sign.

Her next brownie chomp freed crumbs across her shirt and the counter, and Evan wondered, not for the first time, if Joey actually had an esophagus or if she just nom-nom-nommed like the Cookie Monster, sending foodstuffs outward. He circled her with a wet paper towel, capturing the crumbs and the splash of Red Bull liberated when she slammed the can down, of course to the side of the coaster. It was probably her second Red Bull of the morning. Or third. Or maybe Red Bull ran through her veins and she was merely topping off her bloodstream.

“There was this interview with him in Carnegie Mellon Today and he said when she lost her voice he wanted to give it back to her,” Joey continued. “AI modeling for vocal restoration. But he didn’t get the tech there until after she passed away. It was, like, super emotional to read.”

She finally halted to swallow or draw breath.