Evan was standing in the glass freezer room at the kitchen’s edge contemplating the sparse vodka options when his front door burst open. By the time he caught up to himself, he had cleared the threshold, mist streamers spilling over his shoulders, ARES 1911 drawn from his Kydex holster.
He was aiming at Joey’s center mass.
She smirked at him, sticking her hands above her head. Her Rhodesian ridgeback padded in at her side, then sat, cocked his head, and regarded Evan with a wrinkled brow.
“Hey, X,” Joey said, “Shoot a girl, why dontcha? It’s not like you texted moi.”
He holstered the pistol back in the appendix carry position beneath his shirt. “I’m not used to traffic through here.”
She lowered her hands, heeled the sturdy door shut behind her, and smiled, showing off the hair-thin gap in her front teeth and putting a dimple in her right cheek. A strip of her hair was shaved on the right side above the ear, a subtle undercut that gave a punk flair to her tumbling black-brown waves. She wore a T-shirt that read HACKING IS MY LOVE LANGUAGE and had an army-surplus rucksack slung over her shoulder. One leg was kicked out, the top of her Doc Martens boot rocked away from her shin, her hip shoved to the other side. She was beautiful and abrasive, quintessentially teenage.
The ridgeback, whom Joey had ingeniously named Dog, padded over and nuzzled Evan’s palm.
“Why so jumpy?” Joey asked.
“I had a call.”
“Like a call call?” She affected her pompous Orphan X voice. “‘Do you need my help?’ ‘Are you eating enough fiber?’”
“I’m mostly certain I don’t sound like that.”
“You know how they say you can’t hear what your own voice sounds like?”
Evan scratched Dog behind the left ear, and the boy leaned his big head into the touch. “I told you you can’t bring him here. You know how uptight they are about pets.”
She waved him off. “A new mission, huh? Is that why you’re in there self-medicating and it’s barely six o’clock?”
“Is it still called self-medication if you’re really good at it?”
“Uh, yeah.” She turned the latter word into two syllables. “But you can’t do another mission yet. Don’t we have to find your birth father?”
Evan’s last mission had introduced him to the mother he’d never known and a half brother who he was still figuring out what to do about. He’d discovered that he’d been the product of a brief failed affair and had learned the name of his biological father—Jacob Baridon. Baridon had been a no-shit rodeo cowboy, a hackneyed development that Evan still couldn’t get his head around. The databases had turned up little else about Baridon, and given the fact that Evan’s living quarters had Chernobyl’d, he had turned to more pressing concerns. But Joey wasn’t one to let an uncomfortable matter lie.
“I’ve had enough family reunions for the foreseeable future,” Evan said.
Joey breezed past him, smelling of bubble gum, and dumped her rucksack on the kitchen island. “C’mon, X. What if he’s out there somewhere? Don’t you have to know? What if he’s homeless? Or an oil tycoon? What if he died in, like, a tragic manscaping accident?”
“Manscaping?”
“Gawd. Read a magazine.”
“Why does everything you say sound like an accusation?”
“Why are you so dim-witted and judgmental?” She arched an eyebrow at him. “See what I did there?”
Evan looked at Dog the dog. Dog looked back at him with sympathy.
“Oh—I brought you something.” She stuck her hand in the rucksack. “Wait for it. Waaaait for it. And … wa-la!” She pulled out a crystal dish holding a baby aloe vera plant nestled atop a rainbow assortment of glass pebbles. She stared at him, beaming that high-wattage smile. “Vera III!”
All the colors jumbled together caused discomfort to swell in his chest. “Too many colors,” he said. “I don’t like rainbows.”
“Homophobe.”
“That’s not—”
She thrust the tiny plant at him. “You need someone to look after you. ’Cuz—God knows—no human would take that job.”
He poked at the pebbles and then started sorting them by color. She slapped at his hand. “Stop it. You’re violating her personhood.”
“She’s a plant.” He scowled at her.
Joey was lit up now, really enjoying herself. “Did you just microaggress me?”
“You’re gonna get a macroaggression if you keep this up.”
She ticktocked a finger at him. “Trigger warning.”
“Josephine!”
“Okay, okay. Jeez. Get with the times, X.” She poked her finger into the soil of the living wall, and he clamped his jaws shut to stop from reprimanding her. “Now that you’ve not thanked me for my gift”—she made a kissy face at Vera III—“I’m sorry, pretty girl, that you have to have such a self-absorbed daddy—do you want to not thank me for schlepping over here to fix your hardware?”
“Schlep?”
“L.A.’s a Jewish town, X. A girl’s gotta code-switch.”
“Code-switch?”
“That thing where you just repeat the last thing I said but sound stupid? Not so charming.”
“Noted.”
“Now. Tell me about the phone call and this mission we’re going on.”
“There’s no ‘we.’ I’m not even sure if I’m going on this mission.”
At last her face turned serious. She hopped to sit on the island, and Dog the dog mirrored her, plopping down at Evan’s side. “What? Don’t you have to? Isn’t that, like, unofficial Nowhere Man rules?”
“I don’t know,” Evan said. “I don’t know what to do.”
She stared at him, dumbfounded. “Say more.”
He told her about the phone call, giving her what sparse information Aragón Urrea had offered. When he finished, she sat quietly, nibbling the inside of her cheek, her face suddenly full and youthful. He imagined what he might feel if she were in the hands of La Familia León. What he might do.
The thought was too much to bear, and he pushed it away before it had fastened onto his mind with specifics. It was the first time he could recall having to terminate an imagined scenario.
She was watching his face, watching him closely.
“Once you fix the gear in the Vault, can you do a deep dive on him?” Evan asked. “I need to know everything.”
The doorbell rang. Evan and Joey stared at the door, and Dog the dog emitted a low growl. Evan said, “Hush, boy,” and Dog silenced.
Walking to the door, Evan glanced at the security monitor embedded in the wall. Hugh Walters, HOA president, stood outside, arms crossed so his navy-blue blazer pinched at the shoulders, fingers drumming briskly on opposite triceps. Peeved body posture.
Evan gestured for Joey to hide Dog in the back, but before she could move, Hugh called through the door, “I know you’re in there, Mr. Smoak. And I’m quite certain you’re aware that HOA regs expressly forbid any pets on premises.”
Evan scrunched his face up, set his hand on the door handle, and summoned fortitude. He could deal with kidnapped girls and homicidal cartel kingpins, but interfacing with Hugh Walters over HOA “regs” made him want to put his face through the Sheetrock.
He pulled open the door and Hugh leaned in, wagging a finger imperiously. “We’ve discussed this before, and—”
Joey piped up from behind Evan. “My bad, Hugh. It is okay that I call you Hugh?”
As Hugh walked in, Evan lowered his forehead to the heel of his hand and closed his eyes, praying for forbearance.
“I prefer Dr. Walters,” Hugh said. “I have a Ph.D. in city planning—”
“My dog here is actually a service animal.”
Joey’s tone, curt and professional, was like none Evan had heard her employ. He looked up to see that somehow in the intervening seconds she had produced a red SERVICE DOG vest and wrapped it around Dog the dog.
Were he not so dumbfounded, he might have grinned.
Hugh hesitated a few steps into the penthouse. “I wasn’t aware that … er, that Mr. Smoak required…”
Joey continued with her simulation of a prissy yet pleasant boss. “Oh, yes, Dr. Walters. Evan has special needs”—she lowered her voice to a stage whisper, and Evan’s notion of grinning evaporated. “He’s easily traumatized by small things you and I might not understand.”
As Hugh swung his head to take in Evan, Joey smirked behind Hugh’s back and pointed theatrically to the rainbow-color pebbles in Vera III’s dish. Evan was trapped, unable to glare at her, a calm expression frozen on his face for Hugh’s sake.
“He suffers from nighttime enuresis,” Joey said, pressing her advantage. “You know, bed-wetting.”
Hugh’s bird’s-nest eyebrows hoisted. “Bed-wetting?”
Evan felt his face reddening, perhaps from embarrassment. It was hard to tell given his rising aggravation.
“Oh, that’s only one of the symptoms,” Joey continued. “Really, anxiety. Crushing anxiety. Panic attacks sometimes. He requires a special-needs dog to settle his nerves.”
Hugh looked skeptically at Dog the dog, who licked himself, lost balance, and fell over. Still licking himself.
Joey nudged him with her foot. “Gross,” she whispered at him. “Put the lipstick away.”
Dog lifted his large head sheepishly.
Hugh composed himself, squaring his shoulders. “Even so,” he said, “all service dogs must be preregistered with the HOA—”
“I’ll take care of that ASAP,” Joey said. Even her posture was pantsuit-crisp all of a sudden, indicative of the social-engineering training she’d received during her Orphan days. “In the meantime we must ensure that there’s no interruption in care. There are vigorous laws for the disabled.”
“Indeed there are,” Hugh Walters conceded.
Dog stood up, his back arching like a Halloween cat’s. His head lurched forward twice, telescoping his neck, and then he vomited a Frisbee-size disk of puke on the floor, dotted with tree bark.
Evan stared at the mess, his OCD redlining.
“Oh,” Joey said. “That’s unfortunate.”
Hugh had withdrawn across the threshold, looking intimidated and mildly disgusted. “Mia has asked for your presence downstairs at Lorilee’s place,” he said to Evan. “She said it was an emergency.”
Evan felt an uptick in concern. “An emergency?”
“That’s what she texted.” Hugh held up his phone, bolstering his case. “If you can pause your … therapy, perhaps you could run down and check on her?”
“That’s okay,” Joey said. “I can approve that.”
Hugh gave an unsettled nod, adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses, and vanished up the hall.
“Well,” Joey said with a self-satisfied grin, “you can thank me later.”
Evan heard his teeth grinding and suspected that she could, too. “Disabled?”
“Let me just … uh”—her hands made humorous pointing gestures in all directions—“clean this up, fix the gear in the Vault, and get on that research for you.” She backpedaled dramatically. “Bu-bye, now.”
Against his better judgment, he left the penthouse at her mercy.