When Evan rambled up to the ostensible auto-repair shop at the edge of a desolate desert road on the outskirts of Vegas, he was greeted with the sound of gunfire.
That was generally the sound around here, though Evan had never shown up at six in the morning before.
He parked his third rental car of the week in front of the low-slung building and climbed out. Aragón’s pilot was standing by back at the Henderson Executive Airport; Evan knew to show up here alone. Wheeling his carry-ons on either side of him, he picked his way through the engine blocks, tires, and car bodies that formed an automotive garden of sorts in the scrubby brush that passed for a front yard. The gunfire was coming from the rear, so he moved past the heavy metal door, dodging the sight lines of the surveillance cameras and easing along the side of the building.
Behind the auto-repair shop façade, there were no lifts or oil pans or vehicles requiring new brake pads. Instead there were crates of mortars and select-fires. Specialized drill presses, lathes, mills, Dremels, welders, CNC machines, and threading dies to make customized weaponry. And all stripes of ammunition, from armor-piercing to wad-cutters. It was an old-fashioned armorer’s lair, part lab, part dungeon, where one of Evan’s most trusted contacts developed ghost weapons for numerous sanctioned black-ops groups and for one unsanctioned individual known by code and letter.
As Evan neared the corner, he caught a whiff of cigarette smoke, then heard a few more snaps of gunfire, the sound of shattering glass, and a three-pack-a-day voice singing surprisingly on key, “‘Stand, Navy, out to sea, fight our battle cry! We’ll never change our course, so vicious foe steer shy-y-y-y!’”
Tommy Stojack reclined in a retro aluminum lawn chair with fraying multicolored straps sun-faded to varying shades of bleached yellow. Roaring the navy’s march song, he used what looked like a ray gun from a 1950s science-fiction movie to fire at a half dozen empty Jack Daniel’s bottles lined on a flat rock about fifteen yards away.
“Roll out the TNT, anchors aweigh!”
Six bottles of the Tennessee sour mash had already met their maker, reduced to puddles of glass. A nearly empty bottle rested at Tommy’s side, and he picked it up, snugging it beneath his bulbous nose to lips framed with a biker’s horseshoe mustache. The movement brought Evan into his peripheral vision, and Tommy lowered the bottle, grinning wetly.
“Tommy,” Evan said. “Got started early this morning?”
“It ain’t early, brother. It’s just past late.” When Tommy spoke, the Camel Wide bobbed in his mouth as if stapled to his lower lip.
“Been a while.”
“Yeah, well, time flies when you’re in a coma.”
Evan drew nearer. “Is that a … Borchardt C-93?”
“Look at you, knowing a thing or two. Not bad for a mouth-breathing trigger puller.” Tommy raised the pistol to the incipient sunlight, admiring it. “First commercially successful nine-mil semiauto, saw light of day in 1893. Every last one hand-built and hand-fitted. Rough as a corncob but, hell, if you know what you’re doing, you can make it go bang. Took me all day to refurb this pea-shooter for a fancy-pants collector who needs every piece in his collection to be functional ’cuz: Rich People. That’s why I figured me and Mr. Daniel here would have a celebration. Suck down a coupla bottles of loudmouth and see what shakes loose.”
Visibility was low, daybreak threatening, but Tommy lifted the bizarre gun, sighted, and knocked off the next bottle. The two-piece arm of the toggle lock flexed on the recoil, flinging an empty cartridge from the breech. The pistol—and ammo—were not made for accuracy, but no one had told Tommy Stojack that.
“Been shooting all night?” Evan asked.
“Yup. Had a lady drop by in the wee hours, needed a tire changed, found me out here. Poor gal looked like she’d stumbled in on Caligula in the boudoir.”
“It would be shocking, finding a Roman emperor in an eighteenth-century French bedroom.”
“Don’t annoy me with your book learning.”
“What’d you do?”
“Changed her damn tire. I ain’t gonna leave no damsel in distress.”
Evan lowered himself into the rusting lawn chair beside Tommy. The webbing had frayed, vinyl points poking into him like needles. Tommy slung the bottle Evan’s way, brown liquid sloshing inside. “Want a nip?”
“No, thanks.”
“Lemme guess. Nothing but that fancy fruity vodka can touch your pristine lips.”
“Yup. Fancy fruity vodka.”
“What is it you drink again?”
“I’m tired of talking about alcohol this week.”
“Ain’t that a first.” Tommy sucked another lungful of smoke, shot it out through the gap in his front teeth, and then spit tobacco juice between his boots. He had a nicotine patch on his neck, two on his arm, and one on the back of his shooting hand. His other hand, the left, was missing a finger—or, more precisely, half a finger—one of many arcane injuries he’d accrued sometime in his early spec-ops days.
After Evan’s penthouse had blown up, he’d stayed with Tommy for a few nights as they arranged the early stages of the rebuild. They’d been the oddest of odd couples, the worst of roommates. Tommy washed dishes only before using them, stored clean laundry in the dryer, and used the bathtub for making moonshine. By the third night, Evan was sleeping outside, where at least the dirt was where it was supposed to be. By the fourth his OCD drove him to a hotel on the Strip.
“How’s sugarbritches doing?” Tommy said. “That girl. Frankie?”
Tommy knew her name. He was immensely fond of Joey but refused to admit it.
“Joey,” Evan said. “She wants to go on a road trip. By herself.”
“Dangerous world out there.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell her.”
“I mean, dangerous world for everyone else if a girl like her gets turned loose. Gimme a heads-up if that one makes it out in the wild.” Tommy smirked. “I’ll retreat to my bomb shelter.” He raised the gun once more and knocked off the next bottle. “So I assume you didn’t swing by for parental advice or whatever the hell you’d call it.”
“No.”
“Drove down from L.A.?”
“Private jet.”
“Whose?”
“Cartel guy.”
“Oh,” Tommy said. “Mission?”
“To knock off a different cartel guy.”
“You are one complicated former whatever-the-fuck.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“What’s the drill?”
“Gear for an exfil. I’m undercover. With the different cartel guy.”
“Which cartel?”
“Leones.”
“Undercover in the Leones?” Tommy whistled. “Could you be more eager to punch yourself in the dick?”
“After this mission I’m swearing off self-dick-punching.”
“Tell me some about this Mongolian clusterfornication you’ve got yourself up into.”
Evan sketched the details of the mission, leaving out particulars.
When he finished, Tommy scowled, mustache bristling. “I hate those cartel sadists with their thug armies and private castles. All flash and bling and crybully cruelty. Uday Hussein gold-plated toilets, holding their chrome-plated guns sideways like kids in one-a them rap videos.”
“A rap video, huh?”
“You know what I mean. So yeah, I’ll help you give that motherfucker a habanero enema.”
“That’s touching in a racist kind of way.”
“What do you need?”
“Tunnel security. The good shit.”
Tommy looked offended. “I only deal in the good shit. This look like a Radio Shack?”
“No. It looks like a junkyard for disused Radio Shack gear.”
“Well, hell. You want a pretty face, talk to an L.A. waiter.”
Tommy aimed and squeezed, and another Jack Daniel’s bit the dust. An alertness had returned to his hound-dog eyes. Over the years Evan had learned that no matter how much Tommy drank, he was always one serious conversation away from sober.
“Now,” Tommy said, “I got me some microsurveillance tech outta Haifa. Waterproof, high-res, impossible to spot, lens the size a the head of a pin. Hide ’em in a real pebble, hollowed out. Salesguy paraded out a sample at Shot Show, buried one in a real quarter, sliced in half and put back together. The camera was George Washington’s eye. Dude was so excited to show it off he shoulda been tripod-mounted.”
“Vivid imagery.”
“We aim to please. I also got fusion sensors with traditional IR night vision and thermal, both technologies in the same tube. Cool thing about those puppies is they can scan a pitch-black area with zero ambient IR, let you see inside the devil’s asshole. Small, too—four inches by an inch and a half.”
“Weight?”
“Real light. About the same as one and a half loaded 1911 magazines.” Tommy measured most items in munition units.
“Okay. But all that stuff? It’s a ploy. For what I really need to smuggle in.”
“Which is?”
Evan pulled a crumpled cocktail napkin from a cargo pocket. On the flight in, he’d jotted down his wish list and then taken a quick nap.
“I need these delivered in a utility van to this address.” Evan tapped the napkin, where he’d written the location of the Hertz rental lot in Guaridón. “Stored beneath a false bottom in the cargo hold. All the tunnel tech goes above on full display. They’re just props.”
Tommy reviewed the list of weaponry, tugging at his mustache, a devious smile edging his lips. “Now you’re lighting candles in my church.”
“Van’s gotta be lifted, but not so much to be noticeable. Oversize tires will be less obvious than giant shock absorbers.”
“When do you need to get your dickskinners on all this gear?”
“Tomorrow noon.”
Tommy laughed. He finger-scooped the wedge of tobacco from his lower lip and flung it into the dirt. “That’s a hard no fucking way. I can’t lasso all that gear, custom up the van, and have it waiting in the dead center of Cartelsville in”—he shot his wrist clear of a nonexistent cuff, glanced at a nonexistent watch—“thirty hours.”
“I’ll give you until end of day.”
“Another five whole hours? You’re the picture of charity.” Tommy cocked his head, chewed a lip, considering. “Friday five o’clock, Guaridón. That’s a big ask on top of a big ask. How you gonna pay for it?”
“I’m not.” Evan nodded at the two carry-ons. “He is.”
Tommy sucked down another half inch of cigarette and flicked it into the sand. “Making a man pay for his own execution. Tell ya what, I’ll make that cargo van black, match the color of your heart.”
“Thanks, Tommy.”
“Hell, there’s a pregnant broad riding on it. Who am I to stand in the way of your redemption story?”
Evan let that one go.
“Can you trust him?” Tommy asked. “Her old man? The first cartel guy?”
“Not really a cartel guy,” Evan said. “More like an unconventional businessman.”
“Well, doesn’t that sound like a load of shit.” Tommy shrugged. “Answers the question, though.”
“He’s not all the way right,” Evan said. “But he’s right in the right ways.”
Tommy nodded soberly. “Ain’t that all of us. Tuned to different frequencies. This one’s gotta have two-point-three drinks a night to get right, and that one’s gonna heist an armored car ’cuz he needs to learn or die from the punishment. He works a hundred twenty hours a week on the stock exchange, she takes meds, pumps out crumbsnatchers, and waits for that five-o’clock chardonnay. Whether we shoot up or fuck up, we’re all in the same bathtub. But it’s nice now and again when you find someone hums the same tune as you and rows the same direction.” He hoisted the bottle and tipped it to Evan in a toast. “That’s the only shelter in this wondrous, nasty world. The only thing that matters. Everything else is just wainscoting.”
Evan made a noise of affirmation in his throat.
Tommy offered him the gun. “Wanna take a shot?”
“I’m good.”
“Look at that. There. See that sun coming up? Is there anything makes your heart ache more than a desert sunrise?”
Evan took in the sight. Glorious purples and oranges shaded with pastels. The kinds of hues he forgot nature could make until he remembered that nature made everything. It called to mind Peter’s crayon colors, Atomic Tangerine and Wild Blue Wonder, all the everything. Which led to thoughts of Mia and her neurosurgery consult, mere hours away. Another outcome that could turn a family’s world upside down in a hot second.
So much beauty out there. And so much pain.
The two men soaked it in, each with his private thoughts.
“Man,” Tommy said, “what I’d give to be sitting here with a chunky round-faced brunette with bangs right now instead of your skinny ass.”
“Skinny? And here I’ve been doing power squats and everything.”
Tommy admired the slender barrel of the pistol, that cerebellum bulge of the recoil spring housing. “Know what ‘sin’ means? I mean, the root or etymology or whateverthefuck?”
Evan thought back to his lessons with Jack in the study, flickering orange light from the fireplace, smell of peat wafting off Jack’s old-fashioned glass. “It’s Greek, isn’t it? Hamartia.”
“That’s the one. From hamartanō. Now, why would a knuckle-dragger like me know a ten-dollar word like that?”
“Because it’s an archery term.”
“That’s right.” Tommy smiled big. “Means, ‘to miss the mark.’ That’s what we do when we sin. We miss the mark. And I been thinking out here alone these past few nights, just me and the mosquitoes, that maybe that’s why I do what I do all these years. Why I became a marksman. To aim right. Aim true. And maybe that’s why you do what you do. These bleeding-heart missions of yours. Trying to hit the mark. Trying to get one goddamned thing right for once. It may all be FUBAR’d out there, but a bullet? A bullet flies straight if you treat it right. And with all the mess and mayhem in this goddamned world, even you, Orphan X, can fly straight once in a blood moon.”
It was the first time Tommy had ever used Evan’s code name. They’d always dodged direct questions about their respective pasts, Tommy allowing Evan the fiction that he didn’t know—really know—who he was. But something about the early-morning light and the sour mash allowed a loosening of the screws, a sense that what was spoken here, in the pale blue glow of real Vegas, would stay in Vegas.
Tommy brought the Borchardt up and squeezed off three quick shots, all of them bull’s-eyes. He eyed the last bottle standing, then let his gaze lift to the horizon.
Then he tapped the barrel against Evan’s forearm. “When’s the last time you held history in your hands? Come on. Give it a go.”
Evan took the Borchardt C-93 and lined the iron sights at the lonely bottle of Jack. He eased out an exhale. Waited for the space between heartbeats. Fired.
And missed.
Tommy took another glug from the bottle, patted Evan’s knee. “Maybe next time instead of power squats, young Padawan, you should get your damn eyes checked.”