Hellbent

They cut through a side yard next to a partially burned house. The frame of an Eldorado rested on blocks in a carport that sagged dangerously on heat-buckled steel beams. They stepped carefully, moving into the backyard. A rear patio had served as a firebreak, preserving a yard filled with dead, waist-high foxtails. Evan and Joey waded into the weeds, their shoes crunching as they headed for the rotting wood of the rear fence. Though the fire looked to be a few days old, ash still scented the air, the smell just shy of pleasing.

The warped fence had plenty of cracks and crevices that provided a ready vantage across the target house’s backyard. On what was left of the lawn, an old-fashioned round barbecue grill melted into a puddle of rust. The reddish tinge on the earth brought a host of associations to Evan, which he pushed aside, focusing instead on the house beyond.

Plywood covered two of the living room’s three windows. One sheet had been removed and set to the side, presumably to let in light. The high kitchen window over the sink had been left exposed, and the rear door was laid open.

Paul Delmonico and Shane Shea, Van Sciver’s freelancers, stood at semi-attention, focused on someone in one of the blind spots. Evan assumed the other two freelancers were holding down the front of the house. In the kitchen window, Thornhill’s head was visible. A moment later a woman stepped beside him, facing mostly away from Evan.

Midlength hair, confident posture, athletic shoulders that tapered to a slender but not-too-slender waist — Evan would recognize her bearing anywhere.

Orphan V turned around.

In the shaft of light falling through the kitchen window, she looked quite striking. As she murmured something to Thornhill, she reached over her shoulder and scratched at a spot on her back. Evan thought of the burned flesh beneath her shirt and felt a jagged edge twist inside him.

Palms pressed to the splintering fence, he breathed the rot of the wood and watched the freelancers watching whoever was in that blind spot, two attack dogs waiting for a command. Beside him Joey shifted her weight uncomfortably, rolling one sneaker onto its outer edge. She was humming with nervousness.

The person in the blind spot stepped out of the blind spot and into view.

That broad form, the thin copper hair, the muscular forearms and blocky wrists. But it wasn’t just Van Sciver who made Joey’s breath hitch audibly in her throat; it was what he was carrying.

David Smith’s frail form draped across his arms.

Van Sciver dumped the body onto a tarp on the floor. His arms were swollen with exertion, bowed at his sides. The lines on the right side of his face caught the shadows differently — perhaps scarring, perhaps a trick of the light. Evan hadn’t laid eyes on him, not directly, since they’d shared a tense drink in Oslo nearly a decade ago.

Seeing him now in the stark light of day, Evan felt emotions shifting along old fault lines. They’d spent so many years circling each other from the shadows that some small piece of Evan wondered from time to time if he’d conjured Charles Van Sciver entirely.

But there he was, in the flesh.

And the body of the boy who used to be David Smith.

“He’s dead,” Joey said. Despite the cool December air, sweat sparkled across her temple, emotion flushing her cheeks.

Staring at the motionless, slender form on the tarp, Evan felt heat pulse in his windpipe, fired by a red-hot coal lodged in his chest.

He pushed away from the fence, looked down at the tips of his boots. He pictured the crowded bunks of Room 14 at McClair Children’s Mental Health Center. A Lego rebel riding a Snowspeeder across a rusting radiator. Jorell, too smart for his own good. In another life Jorell would be a lawyer, a philosophy professor, a stand-up comedian. In another life David Smith would be sitting down to dinner with a real family. In another life Jack was still alive and he and Evan had plans on the books to share a meal in a two-story farmhouse in Arlington.

“Wait,” Joey said. “Evan — he’s breathing.”

Evan’s head snapped back up. He watched as the boy stirred and rolled onto his side.

Evan’s jaw had tightened. That red-hot coal singed the inside of his throat, fanned with each breath. “We have to get him.”

“There are three Orphans and four muscleheads in that house,” Joey said. “Armed to the teeth. And we’re out here in the weeds with your girly gun.”

“Yes.”

“So how do you plan on getting to him?”

Evan fished the Samsung Galaxy from his pocket. “By telling Van Sciver where we are.”

He thumbed the Signal application.

A moment later a xylophone chime of a ringtone carried to them on the breeze. Evan put his eye to a knothole and peered into the house.

Van Sciver lifted the phone from his pocket and looked down at the screen. Candy and Thornhill alerted to his expression and went to him, the three of them standing in a loose huddle by the kid’s body.

They were in close enough proximity that a tight grouping of nine-millimeter rounds could take them down.