Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

The woman who’d given birth to him. Winging to L.A.

Andre Duran. In the wind.

Danny Gallo. Locked in a box.

How would these threads knit together?

Evan shoved off the wall and resumed his course, cutting between two banged-up lowriders onto the side street.

As he neared his truck, he spotted the bearded meth head and his crew from the house neighboring Brianna and Sofia’s apartment complex. They’d circled the F-150, peering in the windows hungrily. The bearded man bent over, plumber’s crack on full display above filthy sagging jeans, and pried a loose cinder block from a low barrier blocking in a dirt yard.

He held it overhead, staggering back toward Evan’s truck.

Evan stepped into sight. “I wouldn’t do that.”

The man sneered, yellow teeth seeming to spring from the beard itself. Most of them had caved inward, but his incisors remained in place, pronounced and tusklike. His crew tittered, rippling around him.

“You gonna stop us?” he asked.

Evan paused, hands still in his pockets. He tilted his forehead to the truck. An invitation to proceed.

The man smiled again, eyes glistening. Then he let the cinder block’s weight tug him toward the passenger window. He let go at the last moment. The cinder block struck the polycarbonate thermoplastic resin glass with an impotent thud, bounced back, and knocked him square in the forehead. He tripped over the curb and lay sprawled on the sidewalk, unconscious.

Evan removed his key fob from his pocket and gave it the chirp-chirp.

The others stood frozen, a statue garden of zombies, unblinking eyes and crooked shoulders.

“Excuse me,” Evan said.

He threaded delicately through them, stepped over the unconscious man, got into his truck, and drove away.

24An Unusual Relationship

Evan watched the peephole for a shadow, but Joey opened the door of her apartment without checking.

He said, “How many times have I told you to look who’s at the door before you open it?”

“How many times have I told you I have pinhole cameras installed in all the heating vents so I can watch you shuffle up here all unannounced like you own the place?” She waved her Big Gulp at him. “Oh, wait, that’s right. You do own the place.”

After Joey had washed out from the Orphan Program, a series of unlikely circumstances had landed her in Evan’s charge. Eventually he’d gotten her to California and set her up in a Westwood apartment building that had failed to meet his standards for security. So—through an array of shell corporations—he’d bought the place to make improvements and keep her safe, an arrangement he believed he could hide from her. But outwitting Joey was a virtual impossibility; she’d not only deduced the chain of ownership but hacked into the legal records, intent on reassigning ownership to herself.

He’d found out and threatened to ground her.

She’d relented.

It was an unusual relationship.

She was wearing eyeliner for the first time, just a hint that made her emerald eyes pop even more. Curious. Her hair was styled with a more severe undercut than usual, shaved tight on the right side, a black-brown wave waterfalling across her cheek in an uncharacteristically styled fashion. She’d traded in her wife-beater undershirt and baggy flannel for something resembling an actual blouse. And a scent wafted off her, different from her usual fragrance of Dr Pepper and Red Vines.

He said, “Why do you smell like orange blossom?”

“What?” Her blink rate picked up, a nonverbal tell. “It’s nothing. Probably just soda.”

“It’s not soda. More … flowery.”

“There’s nothing flowery. You’re hallucinating. C’mon, X. Hugs not drugs.”

A Rhodesian ridgeback snout shoved between Joey’s thigh and the doorframe, the dog whimpering to get at Evan. Evan had placed the dog in Joey’s care thinking the companionship would be good for them both, and Joey feigned resentment at the responsibility. It was one of many dances she and Evan did around unspoken emotions and unacknowledged stakes.

“Can I come in?” Evan asked.

“I’m kinda busy,” she said. “Plans.”

“Since when do you have plans?”

“Since I’m an independent young woman who doesn’t have to answer to a controlling uncle-person type.”

“Josephine,” he said.

She returned his glare. Then sighed, her shoulders rolling forward. “Fii-nuh.” She drew the word into two syllables. “But it better be quick.”

She stepped back, retreating to her workstation, a pod of monitors and computers that served as her hacking nerve center. The ridgeback went crazy, wiggling against Evan, shoving into his thighs, demanding to be petted. The pup had bulked up to at least a hundred pounds, his coat looked shiny and healthy, and the scars from his bait-dog days had healed nicely. An expensive-looking fabric collar, candy-cane-striped for the holidays, gleamed against his russet-tan fur. Contented with Evan’s affection, he trotted away and plopped down on his plush bolster bed.

He hoisted his hound eyes at Joey, who was already typing away at her station, and gave a gentle whine for her attention.

“Quiet, Dog,” she said. She’d refused to name the dog because she didn’t want to grow attached to him.

Which she definitely wasn’t. Attached to him. Not at all.

“Fancy new collar,” Evan observed.

Joey kept her gaze unbroken on the monitors. “It was on sale.”

“And the bed. Is that a pillowtop?”

“It’s just what some website recommended for big dogs. ’Cuz their joints or something. I don’t know.”

She looked up finally to scowl at Evan.

At her shift in focus, Dog the dog’s tail went thump-thump-thump against the bolster bed.

She went back to work. Snuck another look at the dog.

Thump-thump-thump .

Joey’s face softened with affection.

Evan pretended not to notice the lovefest. One of the many arcane rules he’d learned when it came to dealing with a sixteen-year-old girl was to let her express herself in her own time.

“How are your courses going?” he asked.

One of the conditions of her living in here under his unofficial supervision was that she stay enrolled at UCLA. She’d chosen a computer-science major, promptly tested out of a raft of classes, and was struggling to slow her brain down enough to tolerate the remaining ones.

She guffawed. “Dull and last-gen theoretical. They’re way outta date on machine learning, neural networks, and neuromorphic computing. The other day in lecture, the prof was going on— incorrectly —about PyTorch with some boring-ass PowerPoint, and I was, like, dying of tedium, so I thought I’d, ya know, crack the staff-only Wi-Fi. I did a quick deauth attack to force a reconnect and then sent the captured key hashes to the CrackStation critters, and next thing you know I’m inside the network and then into his laptop using a handy Metasploit payload, so I replaced one of his PowerPoint slides with a pic I found in his Photos of him and his wife in puppy-play sex outfits at the Folsom Street Fair. And it came up, and everyone was all like, ‘Ah, kill that shit with fire,’ and then he knocked over the laptop and it broke, and then lecture got canceled.”

Evan cleared his throat. Staved off the ice-pick headache threatening to bore through his frontal lobe. “Let’s just pretend I didn’t ask.”

“Or…” Fingers templed like a Bond villain’s, she swiveled magisterially in her gamer chair to face him. “We could sit here and bask in your discomfort until the heat death of the universe.”

“You need to stay in school.”

“Even though I could, like, teach the professors?”