Page 21 of The Damage Man

“I’m sorry, okay?”

Evan is driving back to Rancho Park. Due to the Kevlar armor hidden in his door panels, the windows do not roll down, which means that he cannot clear the scent of Peking duck from his vehicle. The thought of it seeping into the upholstery grinds at the base of his brain. Despite the latex gloves, he is sure that the smell has also roosted beneath his fingernails and he cannot wait to get home, burn his mission clothes, and take a scouring shower. But first he has to deal with Rusty and Blake. And whatever Joey is calling him about.

“For what?”

“I shouldn’t have done that search for your father.”

“He’s not my father. And I asked you to.”

“But I should’ve known you’d get all … dysregulated.”

“I don’t get dysregulated. And it’s not your responsibility.”

“I know, X. But it feels like it is. Don’t you feel bad when I get upset?”

Evan says, “No.”

She laughs. “Okay, okay. But look. I mean, he did try’n find you.”

“A Google search.”

“It’s not nothing. I mean, he thought of you, right? At least he thought of you.”

He takes in the helplessness in Joey’s voice, her eagerness to bring him some salve for whatever he is experiencing right now, and a ray of love for this seventeen-year-old girl shines through him, so powerful he can scarcely believe it. He cannot comprehend what he has ever done that makes him deserve her devotion.

For most of his life, Evan has persevered in the unbridgeable chasm between being a killer and staying human. More than anyone else, Joey has been his bridge across the abyss. This girl who came up in the foster system, caught the worst end of the Orphan Program, who had no one and nothing when Evan met her.

The crack she’s put through his armor has opened him up to boundless vulnerability. And suddenly he hates the world for what it has done to her and still will do to her, hates it for the chain around the refrigerator in her foster home that guarded the food from the kids, for the death of the mom-aunt she so dearly loved. He mourns for the grief she’ll feel when her dog is gone, when Evan himself dies by steel, lead, or the inevitable failing of his own body, for the age that will someday pain her own joints and creak her bones.

This mission has broken some part of him open. He doesn’t understand what it is that he is feeling beyond a surfeit of maudlin emotion.

All of a sudden his OCD is standing at full attention. A dry splotch of espresso mars the plastic cupholder in the center console. Deltas of road dust film the windshield beyond the compass sweep of the wipers. His window is pebbled with water spots. His skin itches. He can feel where his hair brushes the top of his forehead unevenly.

He scrapes the dried spot on the cupholder hard enough to bend back his thumbnail.

What is it he tells Joey? If you feel more, you have to feel more.

He can feel the gunk beneath his thumbnail now, the pressure of it. He needs to clip the keratin to the quick and soak his digits in hot water.

“Are you gonna go see him, X? Before he dies?”

Reaching Rusty’s bungalow, he drifts to the curb.

“No chance in hell,” he says, and hangs up.

Rusty and Blake perch rigidly on opposite ends of the sloppy futon mattress. If they created any more space between them, they’d fall off the sides.

There is nowhere else to sit in the room, so Evan is standing before them like a divorce attorney spelling out the finer points of asset division.

In a state of shock and awe, they’ve listened to his recap of events. Now a thundering silence stretches out and out.

“I can’t believe it,” Rusty finally says. “So it’s all just … done?”

“Yes,” Evan says.

“What am I supposed to do now?” Blake asks.

“I don’t—” Evan catches himself before the last word, “care,” can escape. “… know,” he says.