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“Isaidokay.”
He glared at her. All the Joeys glared back. One of her death stares was generally scathing; 270 degrees of them felt nuclear.
“How’s your psoas?” he asked.
“Never better. Yours?” She evaporated from the screens, leaving him in her chair. He didn’t have long to drink in the silence.
His RoamZone was going, emitting its distinctive chime.
He extracted it from a cargo pocket, saw the familiar caller ID forwarded around the planet and then from one of his cover numbers. Every time it showed up these past two months, he felt his heart rate tick up.
Steadying himself for the worst, he clicked. Peter’s voice rushed through, loud with emotion. “It’s Mom!”
Evan’s voice stayed as steady as it had ever been. “What happened?”
“She woke up!”
4
More Pressing Objectives
The streets of Beverly Hills don’t mind name-dropping. Evan parked a block away from the intersection of George Burns Road and Gracie Allen Drive, a key juncture of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where Mia had slumbered these past two months. It was a glorious Angeleno day, the kind of golden sun that had once provided the magnetic pull for manifest destiny.
An unfamiliar excitement stirred beneath Evan’s ribs. In a breathless burst, Peter had filled him in over the phone: Mia was awake and intact. That’s all Evan had needed to hear.
A hot breeze carried the scent of gyros from a nearby food truck. A trio of nurses in scrubs walked by slurping frozen Starbucks drinks the size of feed bags. Across the intersection medical workers on break stretched out on the wide concrete steps of Thalians Health Center, checking their phones or tilting their faces to the blue, blue sky. A stooped man rattled over the crosswalk tugging an IV pole, the wind flapping at his hospital gown, threatening a fleshy revelation.
Passing an outdoor lot, Evan scanned the vehicles, noting license plates. A Buick Enclave with tinted windows idled in the front spot. A windowless van with a Red Cross logo pulled past the kiosk. Evan gave it extra notice; driving over, he’d spotted it on the road behind him. A homeless guy sitting on the curb scrutinized an upside-down newspaper. His overcoat was in tatters, his shoes worn but functional. Evan kept his head down, kept moving.
Palm trees lined the center island running between the North and South Towers in case anyone had forgotten that they were in Southern California.
Evan cut beneath the South Tower’s overhang into the parking zone, putting his back to a concrete pillar and peering out. The Red Cross van kept rolling right through the outdoor lot and out again. Moving steadily his way. He watched until it drifted past and hooked left onto San Vicente.
The Buick stayed put.
The homeless guy was on his feet now, scratching repetitively at the back of his head. The caffeinated threesome of nurses disappeared into Thalians. The man with the IV pole made sluggish but steady progress in Evan’s direction.
Were there patterns in the movements? Or was he attributing patterns to movements?
With their security, choke points, and surveillance cameras, large facilities made him nervous. Mia was one of few people worth the risk.
Evan withdrew from the pillar, entered the hospital through the automated glass sliding doors, and rode up to the plaza level. Mia had spent the duration of her coma in the new critical-care building a block north, but Peter had reported that she’d been moved to the South Tower today for imaging.
The plaza, laid like an epidermis atop the parking structure, was bustling. An ambitiously named healing garden, an elevated squiggle of xeriscaping edged with teak benches, broke up the corrugated concrete of the high-rises. The soporific trickle of water features background-scored people conversing around tables and benches and potted plants. A Henry Moore sculpture broke a reclining figure into three cast-bronze lumps that resembleddog turds. Two middle-schoolers with chemo-bald heads sat on a bench near the bridge to employee parking, peering at an iPhone screen and giggling. Eyes dulled with sleeplessness, a father sipped coffee outside the cafeteria and cradled a newborn with hearing aids. A row of sky-blue umbrellas cast soothing shade, their underbellies adorned with cloud patterns.
There were worse places to be sick.
Patients and workers streamed between the buildings. Evan lost himself in the current, taking a meandering path to flush out potential tails.
Coming around a bend in the garden, he spotted the man with the IV pole emerging from a doorway across the plaza. Moving more swiftly than he had before. Less stooped, too.
Evan felt his pulse quicken ever so slightly.
Backing up, he sidled beneath one of the shade umbrellas, sweeping his gaze across the crowd. Pregnant mother shepherding twin toddlers with pigtails and cornrows. The middle-schoolers stayed lost in their iPhones. An exhausted mom tramped by with an infant rigged to her in a BabyBjörn.
Taking another step back, Evan bumped into a burly guy with a mullet, a sleeveless Nike dri-FIT, and a visitor name tag announcing him as Frank B.
“The fuck?” Frank B. barked.
