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The Seabrooks’ safe house that Joey had arranged was a historic brownstone in Jamaica Plain. Evan stood in full view of the call-box camera, Candy behind him. They were buzzed in from a room to the interior, the three Seabrooks staying out of the foyer as instructed. Candy held back, assessing the locks on the front windows.
Evan came around the corner to find Ruby, Mason, and Deborah perched nervously on stools around a breakfast-bar extension of the ugly tiled kitchen counter. Mason was dressed for the day, but Deborah still wore her bathrobe and slippers and Ruby had on a too-big Wellesley High Baseball sweatshirt. Since Evan had instructed them to leave their phones at their house, he’d provided them a burner, which rested on the counter before them. The shelves were bare, the place spartan, utilitarian, ready for quick turnovers. A fine enough space, but certainly not a home. The Seabrooks looked as temporary as the decorative glass flour and sugar canisters sitting empty beneath a built-in microwave.
“Is everything all right?” Deborah asked.
“Yes,” Evan said. “I’m still looking into things. I’m going to have someone watch over you until it’s done.”
Candy stepped into view, hips on tilt, left leg knee-locked and kicked to the side. At the sight of her, all three Seabrooks rose, their faces frozen in something like astonishment.
Candy surveyed the windows and rear door, barely taking note of the family.
Striding past them, she tapped at Deborah’s bathrobe pocket, withdrew the hidden pack of Glamour Super Slim Amber 100s, and snicked up a single stick with a flick of her wrist. She tweaked a knob on the stovetop, bent to the flame, and lit up. As she straightened back up, she checked the cam lock on the window over the sink, her expression making clear it was not to her liking. She swiped an index finger across her front teeth to check for smeared lipstick, then turned to face the Seabrooks, one arm crossed at her hourglass waist, the opposing elbow resting upon it, cigarette hand flared to the side of her cheek.
The Seabrooks still had not moved. Or spoken.
“You’ll be fine,” Evan said. “Feed her red meat and stay out of her way.”
“I love her,” Ruby said breathlessly. “I want tobeher.”
“Oh, honey …” Candy blew a smoke ring, shot another smaller one through it. With a slender cardinal-red fingernail, she dimpled the top of the second ring as it floated forward, turning it into a heart an instant before it dissipated gracefully on the space between Ruby’s eyes.
Ruby looked like she might die in a stroke of ecstatic rapture.
Candy smiled. “Don’t even try.”
51
Can’t Take the Mythology Outta Man
When Evan pulled up to Tommy Stojack’s armorer shop, a new Ford F-150 was waiting in the dirt strip that passed for a driveway. A rusting auto-repair sign, freshly peppered with buckshot, swung creakily on its chains above the metal front door. One of the neon tubes was blown out. In the apron of land fronting the shop, car hoods, doors, and engine blocks had rusted into the desert sand, adding fresh orange to the reds and burnt siennas of the Las Vegas landscape. The auto parts had become one with the brush and cacti much as Tommy had become one with the secret lair they disguised.
Unlisted in any directory, this was where Tommy did his work for various government-sanctioned groups, everything from weapons procurement to prototyping to proof-of-concept.
Evan circled his replacement truck. The long-standing top-selling vehicle in the country, the F-150 was—like Tommy’s shop and Evan himself—hardly deserving of a second glance. And yet it housed countless hidden tactical features—laminated armorglass, Kevlar inside the door panels, self-sealing run-flat tires. A custom push bumper in the front protected the radiator from explosions or incoming rounds. Rectangular vaults in the bed could store plentiful ordnance. Tommy would have beefed up the suspension, removed the air bags, and disabled the inertia-sensing switches in the bumpers that shut off power to the fuel pump in the event of a crash.
The machine was designed to keep functioning no matter the beating it took.
Evan admired it for that.
He heard ashuck-shuckbehind him and boots crunching gravel.
“In Buddha we trust,” Tommy growled. “Everyone else, show me empty hands.”
Evan held his arms wide and turned around. Tommy kept the Benelli M1 combat shotgun angled to the side, but his base was set and ready, knees bent to absorb recoil, boots shoulder-width apart with one slightly forward, weight on the balls of his feet.
Seeing Evan, he lowered the shotgun, smiled wide, and shot a stream of tobacco juice through the gap in his front teeth. A few drops lingered on his biker’s mustache, so he swiped at them with the back of his sleeve and spit once more into the dirt. “Like the warrior-monk says, ‘Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.’”
“Good to see you, Tommy.”
Tommy shuffled a few steps forward gingerly on his warhorse joints. His boots dragged slightly, kicking up dust. He squinted at Evan. “You dig yerself outta that S3?”
“S3?”
“Shit show supreme.”
“Mostly.”
Tommy nodded pensively, those hound-dog eyes taking Evan’s measure. Then he chinned at the truck. “She’s ready.” Another flash of teeth beneath that horseshoe mustache. “I take cash, Bitcoin, or squirrel pelts.”
