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“You can be snide. But you’ve never done it.”
“Neither have you,” Evan said. “You didn’t win it. You were put there.”
The implication of at whose hands hung as heavily between them as a black cloud.
“I thought you were smarter than this. We got you before. We will get you again.” There was a steel in her voice that reminded him that this was a woman who’d gone toe-to-toe with Putin. “You don’t want us after you.”
“True,” Evan said. “But you don’t want to come after me.”
“And why is that?”
“If I can focus on my own missions,” he said, “it means I’m not focusing on you.”
There was a long pause. Or else she’d hung up already.
Either way he cut the line and settled back to enjoy the view.
65
Whatever Passed for Fate
To call Mixed Blessing a dive bar was to insult dive bars.
Evan still didn’t fully register that he’d come here. It hadn’t felt like a conscious decision, more like an inevitability driven by some subconscious urge that refused to poke its head above the surface. After flying back to Aragón’s home in Eden, Texas, he’d noticed that Blessing was a mere four-hour drive away.
This was the town where the man he thought to be his father had used his credit cards as recently as a few months ago.
Evan stood inside the dim bar. The fan, missing one paddle, spun lazily, providing entertainment for a haze of flies. A few good ole boys were shooting pool, a drunk woman in a wheelchair was throwing darts with surprising precision, and Willie was spinning on the jukebox, apologizing that he’d been blind.
Evan walked over to where an ancient barkeep wearing biker leathers mopped at the varnished wood with a rag the color of urine. He looked up from beneath a red bandanna tied around his head, no doubt in keeping with the Shotgun Willie theme.
“I’m looking for Jacob Baridon,” Evan said.
The barkeep bobbed his head. “He in some kinda trouble?”
“No,” Evan said. “It’s personal.”
“You a friend of his?”
“No,” Evan said. “But not an enemy either.”
The man kept mopping, though at what Evan had no idea. Perhaps he was using the bar to clean the rag instead of vice versa.
“Go right outta the lot. First right, second left, ride ’er to the end.”
“Thank you.”
On the crackling jukebox, Willie bemoaned all the things he should’ve said and done.
Evan stood a moment longer and then withdrew.
The long dirt road ended not so much in a cul-de-sac but at an arbitrary spot where the sunbaked terrain reasserted its dominance over civilization. The double-wide manufactured home seemed about six hundred square feet. Foam showed through cracks in the cement boards, the roof was partially caved in at one corner, and the black trash bag covering a broken window snapped angrily in the wind. The house had been pale pink once, though the gritty wind had sandblasted off most of the paint. The mailbox was knocked over.
No one was home.
Evan stood a moment by the Jeep that Aragón had lent him, staring back at the residence.
It made him feel.
