Hellbent

“X?”

“How are you doing?”

She glanced at the laptops. “Making headway.”

She’d misunderstood what he was asking about. It seemed awkward to backtrack now.

He said, “Good.”

She went into the kitchen and slid a pack of ramen noodles into a bowl.

“Do we have an ETA?” he asked.

“We’re dealing with ten thousand virtual machines,” she said, filling the bowl with water and shoving it into the microwave. “There are a lot of variables.”

“We need to—”

“Sprint the marathon,” she said. “Right. Consider me chained to the laptop. When I’m done with this, maybe I could stitch some wallets for you.”

An unfamiliar ring sounded deep in the penthouse, and Evan stood up abruptly. It had been so long since he’d heard it that it took a moment for him to place what it was.

The home line.

When he’d moved in, he’d had it installed so he could have a number to list in the HOA directory. Aside from a telemarketer three months ago, no one had called it in years.

“I’ll check in on you in the morning,” he said to Joey, and hung up.

He raced out of the Vault, through his bedroom, down the hall to the kitchen, and snatched up the cordless phone. “Hello?”

“Hi.”

Hearing her voice caught him completely off guard.

34

The Job to End All Jobs

“I know we decided not to be in touch,” Mia said, her voice light and nervous over the phone. “But, I don’t know, you seemed messed up when I saw you in the parking garage last week.”

Evan cleared his throat.

“And…” she said. “I know you were gone for a while. I saw your truck back in your spot tonight and figured… I guess I figured maybe you could use a home-cooked meal.”

In the background he could make out some Peter-related commotion. She muffled the receiver. “Put the lid back on that!” she shouted. Then she was back. “Anyway, it was just a thought.”

He heard himself say, “I’d like that.”

“Really?”

He was asking himself the same thing. He’d responded before thinking. What part of him had that answer teed up, ready to deploy?

“Yes,” he said.

“Okay. Well, come down in twenty?”

“Okay.” He was, he realized, pacing nervously. There was something else he was supposed to say here, something he’d heard people say on movies and TV shows. The words sounded clunky and robotic in his mouth, but he forced them out. “Can I bring anything?”

“Just yourself.”

That was how the script went. He’d watched it dozens of times but now he was inside it, saying the lines.

There was some other rule, too. Her job was to say no, but his job was to bring something anyway. Except what did he have to bring? Cocktail olives? An energy bar? A Strider folding knife with a tanto tip for punching through Kevlar vests?

Ordinary life was stressful.

He said, “Okay,” and hung up.

Jack had trained him for so many contingencies, had made him lethal and worldly and cultured.

But not domestic.

Checking the adjustment of his nose, he padded back to shower.

* * *

Mia yanked open the door, a blast of too-loud TV cartoons hitting Evan in the face along with the smell of cooking garlic and onion. “Hi, welcome. Wow — vodka.”

He stood nervously, holding a frost-clouded bottle of Nemiroff Lex, which was neither too expensive nor too cheap, not too showy nor too understated, not too spicy nor too citrusy.

There had been deliberations over the freezer drawer.

Feeling decidedly unmasculine, he’d also touched up his makeup on the bruises beneath his eyes. The discoloration was nearly gone; he hoped he could forgo the concealer come morning.

He hoisted the bottle. “It’s Ukrainian,” he said, sounding disconcertingly rehearsed. “Wheat-based and aged in wood for six—”

“Hi, Evan Smoak!” Peter blurred by, juggling oranges, which seemed mostly to involve dropping them.

Mia whipped around. “I am taking this house back! That’s what I’m doing! So help me—”

A crunch punctuated a sudden pause in Peter’s movement. He looked down at his feet. Remorse flickered across his face. “The remote got broken,” he announced in his raspy voice, and then he bolted over the back of the couch and resumed his not-juggling.

Mia seemed to register the afterimpression of her son. “‘Got broken,’” she said. “That’s what we call a strategically passive sentence construction.”

She turned and hurried back into the kitchen, Evan following. With a pasta ladle, she scooped out a piece of linguine and tossed it against the cabinet. It stuck beside various strands that had previously dried and adhered to the wood. She caught Evan’s expression and held up a hand, swollen by an oven mitt to inhuman proportions. “That means it’s ready,” she said, raising her voice over the blaring TV. As she dumped the pot’s contents into a colander, rising steam flushed her cheeks.

The smoke alarm began bleating, and Mia snatched up a dish towel and fanned the air beneath it. “It’s fine. It’ll just…”

The rest of her statement was lost beneath an orchestral change in the intensity of Bugs Bunny’s adventure.