Hellbent

On the directory, number 202 was blank. Evan scanned the other names. Given the security concerns of the residents, a button-pushing deliveryman ruse wouldn’t likely get him far.

He’d bought a rake pick and a tension wrench at a hardware store and was about to get busy when a guy yammering into a Bluetooth headset clanged out of the stairwell gate. As the man strode up the corridor toward the front, Evan pretended to punch a code into the callbox’s keypad.

“I heard this new ramen place is sick,” the guy told his interlocutor and anyone else in the vicinity who might have been interested. “They have, like, a hundred flavors of shōchū.”

He shoved his way out the front gate, ignoring Evan and the rest of the world, and Evan slipped through. In case he had to beat a hasty retreat, he wedged a quarter between the latch and the frame so the gate wouldn’t autolock.

At the stairwell he finally got to use his pick set. He engaged a second quarter to keep that gate from locking also.

A fine fifty-cent investment.

He crept up to the second floor and down the corridor. Apartment 202 had a peephole. He ducked beneath it, put his ear to the door. Heard nothing inside.

Though the building was late-afternoon quiet, he couldn’t risk creeping around the corridor for long.

The apartment lock was also double-keyed. With the rake and wrench, he jogged the pins into proper alignment and eased the door silently open.

The place was dimly lit and smelled of carpet dust and greasy food. A brief foyer led to a single big studio room. No furniture.

He made out a faint scraping sound.

Pistol drawn, Evan eased through the foyer, heel to toe, minding the floorboards. More of the studio came into view. A bare mattress. A mound of fast-food wrappers. A geometric screen saver casting a striated glow from an open laptop. Then an overstuffed rucksack.

The scraping grew louder.

He eased out a breath, peered around the corner.

A girl crouched, facing away, her forehead nearly touching the far wall. She had a mane of dark wavy hair, torn jeans, a form-fitting tank top. It was hard to gauge from behind, but he guessed she was a teenager. She was bent over something, and her shoulders shook slightly. Crying?

The closet and bathroom doors were laid open, and there was no furniture for anyone to hide behind. Just her.

He thought about the double-keyed locks and wondered — was she being held captive?

He aimed the ARES at the floor but didn’t holster it. Stepping clear of the foyer, he lowered his voice so as not to startle her. “Are you okay?”

She jumped at the sound, then glanced tentatively over her shoulder. Her back curled with fear, her expression vulnerable. She looked Hispanic, but he couldn’t be sure in the dim light.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I’m not gonna hurt you.”

“Why are you here?”

He drew closer slowly, not wanting to scare her. “It’s a long story.”

“Can… can you help me?”

He holstered the pistol but stayed alert. “Who put you here?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember. I… I…”

Her posture suddenly snapped into shape, a bundle of coiled muscle. She pivoted into a vicious leg sweep, leading with the hard edge of her heel, sweeping both of his boots out from under him.

As he accelerated into weightlessness, he saw the glint in her eye matched by the glint of the fixed-blade combat knife in her right hand. A sharpening stone lay on the carpet, the stone she’d been crouching over, scraping away when he’d walked in. Already she’d rotated, spinning up onto her feet, readying to drive the blade through his sternum.

He struck the floor, the wind knocking from his lungs in a single clump, and it occurred to him just how badly he had misjudged the situation.

11

Enemy of My Enemy

Evan’s first focus was the knife.

Darting down at him like a shiv stab, all blade, nothing to grab.

Laid out on the carpet as if he were a corpse, he swept the bar of his forearm protectively across his chest, hammering the girl’s slender wrist and knocking the knife off course just before it broke skin. The tip skimmed his shirt above the ribs, slicing fabric.

His second focus was her fist.

Which she’d cocked and deployed even while her knife hand had still been in motion. He had a split-second to admire the technique — knuckles following blade with double-tap timing — before she broke his nose.

He rolled his head with the punch, tumbled gracelessly up onto his feet. She grabbed the back of his shirt, but the magnetic buttons gave way—click-click-click—and he spun right out of it. His eyes watered from the blow to the nose, but the escape bought him a much-needed second to blink his way back to some version of clarity. She flung the shirt aside and launched a barrage of kicks.

He parried, parried, parried, bruising his forearms and knuckles, holding his attention mostly on the knife.