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“But then what the hell is a bear?” she said. “If it was, say, a giant reptile with scales that lived in the jungle, we’d think it was a monster. Then some scientist would name it.Bearius reptilius. Then we’d all be, like, ‘Cool, we named it. Now it’s not a monster.’ But it’sstilla monster. It doesn’t become something less just because we name it.”
She swung her gaze to him, and he could see in her expression the full measure of her shock. The earth had cracked open beneath her feet, and she was in free fall. He knew it, the dizzying aftermath of trauma, where the world and your place in it zoom in andout, when notions of dimensions and scale no longer hold, when you’re reminded that you’re a speck floating through an experiential infinity you cannot possibly comprehend.
“And, well …” She scratched at the side of her nose too hard, raising a welt. “People can be like that, too, even if we give them a name. Monsters.”
Evan leaned on the gas pedal some more. “Yes,” he said.
When Evan entered Mason’s office, the middle-aged woman on the couch started as if zapped with a cattle prod, her profusion of wooden jewelry rattling like a rustic wind chime. A Kleenex box rested near her elbow on a side table, and there was an Arrowhead water cooler and a lonely daisy tilting from a crystal vase on the desk.
Mason stiffened in his Le Corbusier lounge chair. “I’m in session,” he said in a tight voice. “You can’t just come barging in here. This is a safe space.”
“Not anymore,” Evan said.
Evan had two things Devine’s men wouldn’t be expecting.
The element of surprise.
And the ecobee network that gave him surveillance angles around the home’s perimeter.
Joey had arranged a safe house for the Seabrooks in the form of a long-term Airbnb under a false account she’d created; the owner was even a Superhost. She’d done the job as well as she did every job, the instructions texted to Evan with passive-aggressive curtness. He’d tried calling her, but she hadn’t picked up.
After he’d conveyed the Seabrooks to their new location, he had rearranged the camera angles in the Wellesley house to make sure he had maximum visibility before the attack he anticipated to come at nightfall.
He’d pulled the living-room armchair around on the carpet to face the front door. Dusk drained color from the sky, turning the drawn curtains pale yellow and then a ghostly gray. As night came on, he switched off the interior lights. He kept the RoamZone on one knee showing various vantages, his ARES 1911 on the other.
He waited and he breathed, bringing attention first to the bottoms of his feet, his calves, his hip flexors. Then rising up his body, inhaling into each space, directing oxygen, smoothing out knots and discomfort. The fascia of his right cheek remained tense, and he brought a few full breath cycles to it. On the third exhalation, it released, sending a twinge down his neck, through his shoulder, and all the way to the tip of his pinkie. The world slowed down, turning him from matter into focus, connecting him to himself.
Spirit. Derived from Latin and ancient Greek words forbreath.
Without respiration, there was nothing. And with it hebecamenothing. That’s what it all was for—the meditation, the yin yoga he used to pry his body open most nights. Using breath like a bellows to stretch past pain, to yield into new spaces, intercostals bowing outward, the small of his back unstitching itself, his chest cracking open, ribs splayed forward.
He thought about Joey’s and Ruby’s outrage at the world. Unfairness writ large on the streets of Mattapan, across the face of Mack and his crew of lost boys. How there was nothing left of Johnny Seabrook but a stain on a tenement floor and how Angela Buford changed names and aspirations trying to find a better version of herself. Evan didn’t care about the Secret Service or President Donahue-Carr or Luke Devine. They had their own levers to pull, their own untraceable numbers to call.
A figure appeared on the RoamZone on Evan’s knee, snapping him from his trance. It hadn’t been there before, and he hadn’t seen it enter the camera’s purview; it had just appeared at the fringe of the Seabrooks’ front lawn like an apparition.
A slender masculine form standing at the far reach of the streetlight, illuminated sharply from one side, the outer edge of him glowing like a crescent moon.
The Neighborhood Watch sign hovered above him, depicting a menacing form in essential parts—hat, trench coat, eyes.
The figure beneath—hat, trench coat, eyes.
It was as if he’d stepped out of the sign, a living embodiment of ill will.
His hands seemed to glow white. Latex gloves.
Breathless, Evan watched the immobile figure. Whoever it wasemanated calmness. What he was about to do did not frighten him in the least. A moth fluttered near the lens, a frenzy in infrared, and then vanished.
The figure withdrew a phone from a deep pocket and stared at it, the screen uplighting his face for an instant.
Norris Norris. Double N.
An invisible bank of cloud ate the moon, blanketing the neighborhood in dark. Not a sound, not a car, not a movement.
Just a predator outside staring at the house he was about to invade.
And a predator inside awaiting him.
An anticipatory chill moved across Evan’s nape, horripilation presaging the arrival of death once again to the Seabrooks’ front door.
