Page 5 of Lone Wolf

“I don’t know where he is,” Joey told Vera.

Vera converted carbon dioxide to malic acid with seeming concern.

“Fine,” Joey said. “I’ll call Tommy.”

Tommy Stojack, a nine-fingered armorer with a workshop off the Strip in real Las Vegas, was Evan’s most trusted contact. Tommy not only conducted R&D for government-sanctioned black groups but also machined ghost weapons for a few unsanctioned individuals, X included. Over the years, he and Evan had fallen into a cadence where they relied on each other.

Calling up videotelephony software she’d personally encrypted, she pinged Tommy.

Three rings, five, seven.

Then he answered, that bulbous nose looming large as he squinted at the screen like a Boomer. He was driving somewhere, his phone resting on one knee, jouncing around. A biker’s mustache framed his upper lip, the bottom one pooched out with Skoal. “Roadkill Spreads and Delicacies. Taking out or dining in?”

“Gross.”

He gave a double take, noted that it was Joey. His baggy hound-dog eyes looked happy to see her, even if his mouth didn’t follow suit. “What do you want?” he said, over a wash of engine noise from his rig.

“Evan’s missing,” Joey told him. “Three days.”

“How do you know he’s missing? Insteada off being himself somewhere?”

“He left his RoamZone here at—” She caught herself. Evan’s operational security protocols meant that not even Tommy could know where he lived. “Left it behind.”

“What? He left the RoamZone? That thing’s always stuck to him like shit on a shovel.”

“Thus my call.”

“And you think what?”

“I don’t know,” Joey said. “What if he needs our help? What if he’s in trouble? What if he was killed in an extreme gender-reveal mishap?”

“Then at least we’d have something to laugh about.”

“Tommy!”

“C’mon, girlie girl. Tell me you wouldn’t love to chisel that shit on his tombstone.”

“I think … I think he went to find his father.”

“Why do you think that?”

Guilt permeated her hesitation. “I mighta dug up a location for him. Maybe whatever happened set him off.”

“You’re so worried, why don’t you just find him?”

“Oh, sure. Tracking down the Nowhere Man. That should be a snap.”

“You know him pretty good. Ask yourself what he’d get up to if he left his phone behind.”

“‘What Would Evan Smoak Do?’ Said: No one ever.”

“You check his safe houses?”

Joey hesitated a split second too long. “… Yeah.”

Why hadn’t she thought of that? Her fingers were moving already, pulling up the internal surveillance feeds from the dozen or so safe houses Evan kept scattered around the greater Los Angeles area.

East L.A.: empty.