Hellbent

He’s the best part of me.

Again he remembered waking up in that dormer bedroom his first morning in Jack’s house, the crowns of oak trees unfurled beyond his window like some magical cloud cover. He remembered how trepidatious he’d been padding down the stairs, finding Jack in his armchair in his den. And Jack’s gift to him on that first morning of his new life: My wife’s maiden name was Smoak. With an a in the middle and no e on the end. Want that one?

Sure.

Evan screeched the car over onto the shoulder of the road. Gravel dust from the tires blew past the windshield. He looked for patterns in the swirling dust, saw only chaos.

He struck the steering wheel hard with the heels of his hands.

Then he made a U-turn.

He parked in the same spot, climbed out. A bus was pulling in, blocking the bench. For a moment he thought she was already gone.

But then he stepped around the bus, and there she was, sitting in precisely the same position he’d left her in, hugging the rucksack, her feet pressed to the concrete.

She sensed his approach, looked up.

“Let’s go,” he said.

She rose and followed him back to the car.

27

Never Been and Never Was and Never Will Be

The man was ill. That much was easy to see. A tic seized his face every few seconds, making him shake his head as if clearing water from an ear.

He’d once been a paragon of excellence, one of the finest weapons in the government’s arsenal. And now this.

He clutched a rat-chewed sleeping bag. Dirt crusted his earlobe. He wore sweatpants over jeans to ward off the cold.

He jittered from foot to foot, then halted abruptly and screwed the toe of his sneaker into the earth, back and forth, back and forth. He was mumbling to himself, spillage from a brain in tatters. Gray hair, gray stubble, gray skin, a face caving it on itself.

Jack had come to Alabama to find him.

But locating a homeless man was like trying to find a glass cup in a swimming pool. Hard to know where to start and easy to miss even when you’re looking right at it.

Yet Van Sciver had resources that Jack didn’t.

It had taken some time, but now here they were, in the shadow of the freeway overpass. Commuters whizzed by above them, an ordinary Birmingham morning in ordinary motion, but down here among the puddles and heaps of wind-blown trash, they might’ve been the last humans on earth. Nearby a fire guttered in a rusted trash can, the stench of burning plastic singeing the air.

The man convulsed again, one shoulder twisting up, plugging his ear. Van Sciver reached out and clamped the man’s jaw, the hand so big it encircled the lower half of his face.

The man stilled. Van Sciver stared into his mossy brown eyes. Saw nothing but tiny candlelight flickers from the trash-can fire behind him.

Van Sciver said, “Orphan C.”

The man did not reply.

Around the concrete bend, Van Sciver could hear Thornhill shooing away the last of the homeless from the makeshift encampment. They were skittish and tractable and had good reason to be. There’d been a rash of attacks against the community of late, a neo-Nazi group curb-stomping victims in the night, lighting them on fire.

Van Sciver snapped his fingers in front of the man’s nose. The man jerked away. The tic seized him once more, the skin of his cheeks shuddering beneath Van Sciver’s hand. Van Sciver squeezed harder, firming the man’s head.

“Do you remember Jack Johns?” Van Sciver asked.

“I’m dead Orphan dead man walking never knew never never knew.”

“Back in 1978 Jack Johns conducted your psyops training. Nine sessions at Fort Bragg. Have you been in touch with him since?”

“The woman’s head like an open bowl it was an open bowl and I did it used to kill people for a living you know used to kill them and poof I’d be gone and no one ever knew no one ever knew anything ever knew me I never knew me never did.”

“Did Jack Johns ever mention Orphan X?”

The man’s eyes widened. His tongue bulged his lower lip. “Don’t know don’t never he’s a ghost he’s never been and never was and never will be.”

“Do you know anything about Orphan X?”

The man’s eyes achieved a momentary clarity. “No one does.”

Van Sciver released the man, and he staggered back. Van Sciver knew from Orphan C’s file that he was fifty-seven years old. He could’ve passed for eighty.

The last medical tests before he’d retired and dropped out of sight had shown the beginnings of traumatic brain injury, likely from a rocket-propelled grenade that had nearly gotten him in Brussels. Since then he’d deteriorated further, PTSD accelerating what the physical trauma had begun, taking him apart piece by piece. It made him unsafe, a glitchy hard drive walking around unsecured.

“R!” Van Sciver called out.

Thornhill ducked back through a sagging chain-link fence and jogged over, sinew shifting beneath his T-shirt. He wasn’t wearing his usual shoes today.

He was wearing steel-plated boots.