Page 50 of Antihero

The police officer jotted more notes for her report, the physician more notes for his chart. Proficiency on display. They’d done this plenty. Words from the discussion flew in at her.

She’d been soaked in hydrogen peroxide to remove traces of DNA. The officer said, not quite sufficiently under her breath, “What kind of fucking brain do you have to have to do that to someone.” A bite mark on Anca’s shoulder was not sufficiently defined to make a dental impression from. Opiates had shown up on the urine tox screen. While the doctor couldn’t say for sure, she’d seen this before and guessed it was something like four to five hundred micrograms of fentanyl. The officer said they’d been seeing lots of overdoses and Anca was lucky it hadn’t been more.

Lucky.

They couldn’t risk stepping on the fentanyl with morphine, so they’d injected her with ketorolac for the pain. Her body, punctured again and again, shot through with things that did not belong inside her. Plus the hours lost to trauma meant she’d missed two doses of meds. Along with stress and sleep deprivation that meant she had an uptick of seizures to look forward to. She crossed herself, wound up with her hands hugging opposite shoulders, hunched. She did not want to be inside her body. It was not safe in here.

“Please excuse me. I need a moment.” Anca slid off the exam table gingerly and walked up the hall. Entering the bathroom, she gathered two hand towels, lowered the toilet seat, and sat. Burying her face in the wad of paper, she wept silently.

Five minutes passed. Perhaps ten.

There came a banging at the door. “C’mon, lady! Hurry up in there!”

She lifted her face. The paper towels were soaked through. Her throat clutched and her mouth gasp-gasp-gasped, still in sobbing rhythm. It took a moment longer but she found her voice: “Yes, yes. I’m sorry. Just a moment.”

“You’re not the only one has to take a shit.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

The orange plastic chair in the waiting room seemed designed for maximum discomfort. Evan wasn’t sure whether Anca would want his help or not after her examination but wanted to be here in the event that she did.

Aside from being maximally gentle, he was unsure how to interact with her.

This was always the hardest part for him, understanding the cryptic give-and-take of human engagement, the strange language of intimacy. For the first time in a while, he thought of Mia Hall, the district attorney who lived downstairs from him at Castle Heights. She always seemed to know what to do in situations like these. A devoted single mother to her ten-year-old boy, Peter, she was warm and tough, maternal and strong, and had an unerring sense of how to provide care and comfort. Evan wasn’t great at care and comfort. He was much better at inflicting retribution.

Through the big window behind the intake desks, he’d seen Anca limp to the bathroom. She’d looked on the verge of crumbling. If she broke down in front of him, was he supposed to hug her? Ask if she wanted to be hugged? Or not intrude on her personal space no matter what? Mia would’ve just gone over and done whatever the right Mia thing was to do. Last month he’d discovered that she’d been temporarily assigned to the San Francisco DA’s office to help them dig out from a heavy workload. Between that and her extended trip back East with Peter, he hadn’t seen her in months. He wished she were here as a resource for Anca.

But.

As great as Mia was, she couldn’t do what Candy McClure could do.

Barring Evan, Candy—aka Orphan V—was the deadliest graduate of the Program. Soon enough, he would go on the hunt for YngTl69 and his associates. When he did, he had to ensure that Anca was protected.

Candy McClure knew how to break any of the 206 bones in the human body. Knew how to dissolve them, too, in concentrated sulfuric acid. She’d once attempted to liquefy Evan, back when he’d first escaped the Orphan Program and she’d been tasked with neutralizing him. Instead she’d fallen atop her plastic jugs herself in the course of a fight between them, turning her back into a topography of scar tissue. Aside from the mottled skin she kept hidden beneath high-backed dresses, she was a flawless physical specimen, able to render men paralyzed through soft power or hard.

He dialed, waiting through several rings.

And then she answered: “X.”

Wind whipped across the receiver. She was driving with her windows rolled down. Or galloping on a horse. Or perhaps riding a precision-guided missile. With Candy, one never quite knew.

“I’m in the Bronx,” Evan said. “I need you here to help watch a woman.”

“Why the hell,” Candy said, “do I have to watch her?”

Evan told her.

“Be there tomorrow,” Candy said.

Bundled in a too-big sweater and a coat, damp hair finger-combed into place, Anca stood before Evan, her arms crossed low over her midsection. The staff had shown her to a care room with a shower, a merciful bit of privacy after all she’d been through. She’d taken nearly a half hour to clean herself.

He’d waited dutifully in the hall.

As he’d advised, she’d requested her ER medical report, and handed it to him wordlessly on her way into the care room. He’d reviewed it, her degradation spelled out in antiseptic clinical phrasing. He’d read plenty of forensic files and after-action reports, seen bodily wreckage reduced to unavoidable data points. These words were particularly difficult to apply to Anca, her delicate body, her gentle, dignified nature.

He offered the report back now and she folded it into a pocket.

The swelling on her eye had come down considerably. She looked like a different person. Faint lettering persisted on her cheek. Her hand floated by it. “It won’t come off. And my back…”