Page 65 of Lone Wolf

“I, uh…” He was at a total fucking loss.

Her lips pressed together with what he hoped was amusement. “Yes?”

“I have money for you. For the job. But…”

“You feel weird about paying me now?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Because it’d make me feel like a whore?”

He held a cautious silence.

Melinda said, “Does it make you feel like a john?”

“No.”

She extended an arm, hand out, palm up, and beckoned with two flicks of her fingers.

He handed her the roll of cash.

She smirked at him. As he turned to go, she gave him a smack on the ass.

Loco looked fucking crazy.

Evan knew that was the likely provenance of his name, but, still, he was tired of staring at the snaggletoothed grimace, the way his ears stuck out at different angles, the cartoon bite taken out of the left one near the tip. The flyers Joey had made up showed off his damp eyes, wiry hair, and aura of psychotic jitteriness.

Evan had scouted the blocks, checking alleys and dumpsters, stoops and storm drains.

No sign of the ugly little creature.

Plenty of homeless people, though, crammed into doorways and camped out on bus stops. The pandemic seemed to have created even more, flushing them out onto the streets. He remembered reading somewhere that during the shutdown twenty million people had lost their jobs while America’s billionaires had made another trillion dollars. Devine’s unwelcome voice came to him: When we monetize bad shit, we get more bad shit.

Evan stapled the last few flyers to telephone poles and trudged back to the dark street where he’d left his pickup. As he approached, something stirred in the bed of his truck, a human form rising in the morning shadows.

Evan had his hand through his shirt, finger on the frame of his replacement ARES 1911. But the scarecrow silhouette that rose crookedly emanated no threat.

A young man stumbled out of the truck, holding a wool blanket that Evan kept in the back and used from time to time to wrap his long guns. “Hey, man, don’t—don’t hurt me. I was just—just having a rest.”

He had a mop of dirty-blond hair, loose curls that wouldn’t have been out of place on a surfer. Sweat shimmered on his sallow skin, pooled at the hollow of his throat, and yet he was trembling in the shade. His chest heaved with shallow breaths. He looked to be in his late teens, but he’d worn the tread of his life down hard, black bags cupping his eyes, fingernail marks clawing up his arms, grit at his hairline. One foot was bare; the other sported a dirt-caked sneaker split horizontally at the front, his bare toes lolling forth like a split tongue. Cracked lips, pinprick pupils, and suppurating gums told the tale of opioid addiction.

Beneath the parched skin, Evan could make out his bone structure, the shape of what his features had been. Once he would’ve been a beautiful kid. Someone’s baby boy.

Evan stepped forward and the kid winced, chin tilting down to one side, shoulder rising to block the ear, the instinctive bearing of someone accustomed to being beaten.

After all that had happened in the course of the past days, this small reaction broke something inside Evan.

The kid shuffled back a few steps. One foot was turned inward and dragged when he moved, a lame leg. The busted sneaker scraped the ground, flapping like a half sandwich. “I just wanted to rest. I didn’t— didn’t take anything.”

He followed Evan’s gaze to the wool blanket in his hands. When he looked up, his eyes were filled with terror. He held the blanket out. He was shuddering. “Sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “Please.”

The tremor in the kid’s voice brought Evan back to cold winter nights in the foster home when they used to crack the oven after it was used to try to heat the house some. Two-minute showers, the shampoo watery with dilution, a few ragged shared towels among the whole pack of them. A temptation around every corner—a cash register left unattended, a colorful pill in the palm of a hand, a purse left on a front seat. Most of the kids he’d come up with were dead before twenty, warehoused behind bars, or rotting inside their own bodies, needle stabs between their toes.

What was it he felt now burning through his gut? Guilt?

Guilt was useless and did nothing for anyone, but he couldn’t shake the kid’s eyes, the way they sagged with defeat, red enough to make the whole world feel like an itch.

Keeping his fearful gaze locked on Evan, the boy turned sideways, bringing visible the patch of dried brown at the seat of his pants. From a five-meter distance, Evan could smell him. His OCD grabbed hold of him before he could tell it not to, urging him to scrub out the truck bed with bleach. He knew he’d do it and he hated himself for it.