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“Forget it?” Paddy held the test tube to the light, grinning up at it. “You have any idea what this’ll fetch on the black market?” He slid the DNA sample into his breast pocket and patted it for good measure. “We won’t interfere with the job. All we have to do is sit on it till the time is right.” He headed for the adjoining room. “Now, let’s fire up the surveillance cameras and give the big bad Orphan some downtime.”
After the adjoining door closed, Evan lay on the carpet for a few minutes, trying to catch his breath. Then he hauled himself up onto the mattress and lay there a few minutes more.
round man slumped into his bowl of soup
Mystery Man staring down at him
a horse, a lion, a zebra
A glint winked from the heating vent overhead, no doubt one of many hidden pinhead surveillance cameras.
When he sat up, he groaned at the ache in his stomach muscles.
Trapped four stories off the ground in a building watched by myriad cops and agents, subject to the finest surveillance at the United States government’s disposal, penned in by an invisible fence that if crossed would leave him an amputee.
He needed help.
He took out his RoamZone and gazed down at it. He could see his reflection in the organic polyether thioureas screen. No point in making a call, because anything he said would be overheard. But he had some other ideas.
He nudged the phone to life.
Considered what he was about to do.
Decided for it. Then against it. Then for it again.
Blocking the screen from the view of any potential cameras, he punched in a series of brief texts. Then he did something he’d never done before.
He unmasked his GPS.
12
Fun Fun Fun
Palm Springs suited Candy McClure to a tee. All that retro-campy Americana, retirement communities clustered around fake lakes with water features, vintage boutiques run by retired gay couples who had the best worst taste. Last week she’d bought a porcelain pelican with its head tilted back, beak agape to accommodate umbrellas.
She didn’t own any umbrellas, but she liked looking at it in the corner of her Airbnb’d room, as if she were a normal person who collected normal-person things.
She loved Palm Canyon Drive with its shaggy palms, dead fronds ruffled beneath the crowns like the throats of bearded dragons. And the people here, straight out of the 1950s. White couples and elderly folks driving Oldsmobiles and a broad spectrum of Polo-shirt colors and fake-tan skin tones.
Near what constituted downtown, she was attending a culinary class to learn how to bake soufflés, because she was bored fuckingsenseless and she figured she should at least try something at which she could fail spectacularly.
The industrial kitchen was filled with earnest housewives, well-mannered retirees who called her “hon,” and a few ambitious students from the community college. She’d lucked into a station next to a duo of asshats from the casino, blackjack dealers with spiky hair and Philly accents who joked self-consciously about wearing aprons and sprinkled flour onto their shirts to make boob outlines. They were in their late twenties, and yet this still constituted humor for them.
She’d once disposed of a diplomat in a Saint-Germain-des-Prés café using a stainless-steel meat fork with tines spaced precisely for eye sockets and was tempted to do the same here. Especially since said asshats kept glancing at her after each lewd joke, checking if their dude-bro roughhousing had drawn blood in a way that might pique her interest.
She was dressed down, but the problem was that even dressed down she was still sexy as fuck. In order to not draw the attention of males, she’d have to get up an hour earlier than an hour early just to knock some of the shine off her pure animal appeal. It was all so aggravating, the Pavlovian slobbering, the jockeying for position, the pickup approaches she’d heard enough times to X-ray any would-be Lothario in the first instant even were she not trained as a virtuoso of psychological observation.
Candy was the type of woman other women complained about to men, claiming that women like her didn’t exist. At least the outside of her. And that was the thing. Maybe if they saw the inside of her—all the broken and dirty bits—they’d realize she wasn’t any different from them. And maybe that would help her realize that she wasn’t either.
But no one saw her that way.
So she’d resigned herself to roaming this earth as a goddess incarnate, capable of opening any door she wanted with a twist of her hip, a dip of her shoulder, or a demure lowering of her eyes. It was so easy it made her sick with ennui. Ever since the Program had blown apart—along with her role in it as Orphan V—she’dbeen unable to find challenges sufficiently treacherous to warm her engine, let alone turn it over. So here she was in Palm Springs baking a fucking soufflé next to the Brothers Dimm. A surreal detour for a girl who’d once been snatched out of foster care at the behest of a black government program and schooled in the arts of liquidation, maiming, and the creative disposal of human remains.
She’d spilled her finger bowl of pepper and had yolk spatter on her chef bib from overly exuberant egg cracking.
Another titter from her side. “This one likes itmessy.”
She did not glance over but felt the heat of the dealers’ eyes crawling over her body.
