Hellbent

Lyle’s brain couldn’t process the rope’s sudden appearance. He looked back at the screen. The dot was no longer way above them. It was on the fifth level. Now the fourth.

Pellegrini was slowing the truck, reaching for his handgun.

Lyle looked back at the thick nylon cord dangling ten feet away from them.

A rappelling rope.

As they curved around onto the third floor, Orphan X zippered down the rope, a pistol steady in his gloved hand.

The driver’s window blew out as he shot Pellegrini through the temple.

Even after the spatter hit Lyle, he hadn’t caught up to what was happening. Orphan X rappelled down as the unmanned truck banged up the ramp to the third level, their fall and rise coordinated like the two sides of a pulley.

There was a suspended moment as the two men drew eye level, Lyle catching a perfect view of X’s face over the top of the aligned sights.

He saw the muzzle flare and nothing else.

* * *

Evan hit the ground floor, coming off the fast rope and crouching to break his fall. He threw his gloves off with a flick of his wrists and they dangled from clips connecting them to his sleeves, the full-grain leather steaming with friction heat.

Seventeen men down.

Eight left.

Joey stepped out from the stairwell and ran across to meet Evan at the Nissan Altima. As he tore off the detachable spoiler and ran it over to a Dumpster, she stripped carbon-fiber wrap from the Altima, revealing the car’s original white coat. Evan unscrewed the Arizona license plates, exposing the California plates beneath.

A few puzzled pedestrians gawked up the ramp at the rappelling rope. Near the third level by the smashed truck, horns blared. There was enough confusion that Evan and Joey went largely unnoticed. They stuffed the Arizona plates and fiber wrap in the trash container near the elevator, climbed into the now-white Nissan, and pulled out into the flow of traffic.

67 The Pretty One

As Orphan X, Evan had left behind a spaghetti snarl of associations, connections, and misery. Every high-value target he neutralized anywhere on the globe was a stress point in a vast web. The Secret Service’s involvement meant that somewhere in his dark past a silken thread trembled, leading back to the heart of the District.

As he neared the freeway exit, Joey said, “Hang on.”

Pulled from his thoughts, he glanced over the console at her. “We’ve gotta get back to L.A.”

“There’s something I want to do first.”

The set of her face made him nod.

He followed her directions, winding into an increasingly shabby part of east Phoenix. Joey studied the passing scenery with an expression that Evan knew all too well.

“They call this area the Rock Block,” she said. “Can’t walk down the sidewalk without tripping over a baggie of crack.”

Evan kept on until she gestured ahead. “Up here,” she said.

He got out and stood by the driver’s door, unsure in which direction she wanted to go. She came around the car and brushed against him, crossing the street. He followed.

Behind a junkyard of a front lawn sat a house that used to be yellow. Most of the cheap vinyl cladding had peeled up, curling at the edges like dried paint. An obese woman filled a reinforced swing on one corner of the front porch.

Joey stepped through a hinge-challenged knee-high front gate, and Evan kept pace with her through the yard. They passed an armless doll, a rusting baby stroller, a sodden mattress. Joey stepped up onto the porch, the old planks complaining.

Despite the cool breeze, sweat beaded the woman’s skin. She wore a Navajo-print dress. Beneath the hem Evan could see that half of one foot had been amputated, the nub swaying above the porch. The other leg looked swollen, marbled with broken blood vessels. Evan could smell the sweet, turbid smell of infection. A tube snaked up from an oxygen tank to the woman’s nose. The swing creaked and creaked.

The woman didn’t bother to look at them, though they were standing right before her.

Joey said, “’Member me, Nemma?”

Fanning herself with a TV Guide, the woman moved her gaze lazily over to take Joey in.

“Maybe I do,” the woman said. “You were the pretty one. Little bit dykey.”

Joey said, “I wonder why.”

Air rattled through the woman’s throat, an elongated process that sounded thick and wet. “There’s nuthin’ you can do to me the diabetes ain’t done already. And that’s just the start. They cut out the upper left lobe of my lung. Five, six times a day, I get the coughs where I can’t even clear my own throat. I have to double over, give myself the Heimlich just so’s to breathe. Bastards took away my foster-care license and everything.”

Joey eased apart from Evan, putting a decaying wicker coffee table between them. She said, “You want me to feel sorry for you?”

The woman made a sound like a laugh. “I don’t want anything anymore.”