Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

She lowered her hand all the way. “Evan,” she said.

He nodded.

She removed her hat, and he looked at her.

She was so much more attractive than he was, her age showing only in the textured skin of her neck and hands. She looked keenly vulnerable, almost lost, and he sensed it was not an expression she wore often.

For a moment they regarded each other.

And then the sky above exploded, a police helicopter swooping down and laying a spotlight across them. Even through the glare, Evan could make out the lettering on the side: POLICÍA DE LA PROVINCIA DE BUENOS AIRES. Rotor wash flapped the summer hat in Veronica’s hand as a second helo banked into view to the east, quickly joined by a third. All around the cemetery, he heard tires squealing, sirens blooping, brakes whining.

He glanced back at Veronica. Any trace of seriousness had evaporated from her face. She looked around with cynical amusement, her mouth tugged to one side in what would have been a smirk had she bothered to put more effort behind it.

“Oh, dear,” she said, her voice like a sigh. “I forgot Raúl already called for backup.”

11Just Fucking Perfect

They stood for a moment in the wash from the helos overhead. Veronica had to raise her voice to be heard over the thump-thump-thump. “What happened to my men?”

“They threatened me.”

“I’m sorry about that,” she said, lacing her arm in his and heading calmly for the exit. “Matías is a bit excitable.”

“Matías?”

“The minister of foreign relations.” She seated the hat back on her head. “I’d wager that you’ll meet him in a moment.”

“How do you know the minister of foreign relations?”

“I’m dating him, dear. At least when I’m in this hemisphere.”

Well , Evan thought, that’s just fucking perfect .

Her arm stayed woven around his, their flesh touching. Evan pulled free, rested his hand on her back, and steered her to the neighboring lane to dodge the spotlight and the wreckage of the bodyguards.

Control.

“What’s your last name?” he asked.

“LeGrande.”

“French?”

“Oh, honey, I’m a mutt.” She cast a sideways glance at him. “Though not as much as you.” She pressed her lips together, smoothing the lipstick veneer. “It was an Ellis Island botch job that my grandfather renovated into something swankier than the original. I’m sure it was actually Legonski or something appalling.”

A loudspeaker out front was blasting directives in Spanish, but the crackle of static blurred it to unintelligibility. The gate drew into view up ahead, sets of headlights blaring through the black iron bars, fuzzed by the creeping mist.

He halted. She turned to face him.

“How did you get my number?” he asked.

“Years ago I tried to find you.”

“How did you know where to start?”

“I’d always kept track from afar. Every few years or so. I’d found out belatedly that the arrangements I’d made for you with that couple in Silver Spring had fallen apart. The Krausses. And that you’d been moved from placement to placement, and I used some of my relationships to … intervene. And get you to a more stable environment.”

“The Pride House Group Home,” Evan said, “was certainly a stable environment.”

“One had to consider the alternatives.”

He just looked at her. She looked away.

“So you knew where I was,” he told her. “All those years.”

“No matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t muster the nerve to see you. But two years ago I realized that I wanted to … I suppose I needed to meet you.”

He could smell the perfume of chardonnay on her breath. She laid her hands on his shoulders, feeling his muscles, the mass of him. It was so odd to be touched that way, a sensual experience that wasn’t the least bit sexual. Her face radiated a kind of maternal pride as alien to him as the red dust of Mars.

He shook himself free. She seemed neither wounded nor deterred.

“Then what?” he said.

“I started prying around the foster-care system for records. And someone caught wind of it and called me back. A man. John?”

Heat crawled beneath Evan’s scalp. “Jack.”

She nodded. “That’s it.”

His throat clutched. “When?” he said. “When was this?”

“It was Thanksgiving Day,” she said. “Easy to remember.”

Despite the nighttime chill, a wash of heat moved through Evan. That day was impossible for him to forget as well. The day Jack was killed. Which meant Jack had called her when he knew he was heading to his death.

Minutes left to live and he’d reached out to Veronica. Why? Was Jack—ever the father figure—trying to set things right? Was this setting things right or a colossal mistake?

Overhead the helos darted like hummingbirds, trying to pick them up again.

Veronica was talking. “He told me that you were chosen out of the boys’ home. To do good. Some sort of pilot program. He said you were very successful. I was so proud. He told me you help people. I need you to help someone now.”

Evan almost fed her the rote answer, that he was retired, but he stopped himself, taking a moment to find his bearings. “What else did he tell you?”

“That based on the demands of your job, you prefer to stay off the radar. I wasn’t sure what that meant. Some sort of State Department analyst? A war-crimes attorney who has to keep a low profile? Hostage negotiator?”

She was beaming, and he realized that this was a story she’d carried with her like a precious stone, that she’d polished in her mind’s eye until it gleamed with potential. The promise of her lost boy having turned out to be something so much better than what he was.

It was a kind of discomfort he’d never experienced, a cramping at the base of his skull that reached down through him, pulling strings in his spine, his chest—and perhaps even deeper than that.

She was watching him still, that prideful shimmer in her eyes, and he felt a sudden horrible weight descend on him. He’d never had the experience of having someone else’s hopes wrapped up in him. Of knowing that he’d come up short of the imagined mark. That he’d be found lacking.

Everything was moving so fast—the rattle of SWAT gear beyond the gate, the choppers veering above, the spotlights scanning the tombs, the cascade of unfamiliar sensations setting his nerves on fire.

And the awful responsibility of deflating this woman’s expectations.

The loudspeaker blared again, staticky Spanish demanding that they come out, but they both ignored it.

He wanted so badly to tell her that yes, he was a cyberterrorist analyst, a prosecutor at the Hague, a hostage negotiator capable of defusing situations with a talking cure.

His mouth was dry from the wind hammering down from the rotor blades, or maybe from something else.

“No.” It took a moment for him to work up the words. “I was trained to kill people.”

She recoiled.

Took a halting step back.

Painful as it was, he held eye contact so she could see who he was. He watched revulsion and fear ripple beneath her features, barely visible through the cracks in her tough façade. And then she closed ranks within herself and it was like looking at any other face in the world.

The smell of dust and stone intensified. Lights strobed through the gate, muted by the thickening fog. The loudspeaker commands sharpened, telling them to exit immediately. The choppers swooped above, their beams searching the tombs all around, throwing wild shadows.

They were standing in full view, and yet no spotlight had found them. The gate clanked open, and four men entered, pistols drawn. They spread out, darting up separate lanes, one heading directly for them.