Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

“Maybe happiness is overrated,” Evan said. “Freedom, too. Maybe the only way to get anywhere worth being is to pick up the heaviest thing you can carry. And carry it.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Is it?”

“The heaviest thing to carry is family. A marriage. A kid. You ever try?” Andre glared at Evan, reading his silence. “What I thought. You don’t know how hard it is.”

An edge of resentment rose inside Evan. It felt unfamiliar, toxic. “I know it was too hard for you.”

“Hell, man. You think it’ll be different, you’ll be different, but you’re not. Our honeymoon we went camping, up the hill, just me and Bri and her PMS. We fought from the beginning. Had fun, too. Then it was all one and not the other. Women all wind up the same.”

“You mean the piece of them you know how to interact with is the same.”

But Andre didn’t even hear him. “And you got no idea what it means to make a baby. People say it’s a miracle. Sure. But you see them, man. They have knuckles. You put your pinkie finger out and they grip it. And it’s just you, man. It’s just you. And what if you’re not up for it?”

Evan thought about Veronica, buzzed and breezy on the wide Bel Air couch. My circumstances weren’t suited to it . His voice came hard. “You get up for it.”

“I didn’t know how to be a father, man. I kept thinking, ‘What if she winds up like me?’” Andre wiped his mouth. “Shit, maybe the best thing I did was remove myself from the equation.”

Evan pictured Sofia spying on his conversation with Brianna, the worried furrows in her brow, how desperately she wanted to know that her dad was okay.

He said, “I doubt she sees it that way.”

“I want to see her. I do. But I been afraid that I’m not … good enough.”

“If you don’t do it, where will you be in five years?” Evan said. “Where will she be?”

Andre’s eyes moistened. He shook his head. “All this talk ’bout responsibility, and you here running around in the shadows, won’t even say who you are.”

“I didn’t say I was any good at responsibility.”

Andre chuckled, the tension dissolving between them. He palmed the back of Evan’s neck affectionately. Evan had to force himself not to wipe off his skin.

A Ford Explorer turned onto the street, headlights flaring the side mirror, but it lumbered by without incident.

Andre exhaled, his breath fogging. “It’s freezing here. Can’t we turn on the motor, get some heat?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t want to signal that we’re in the truck.”

“Signal to who?”

“The people trying to kill you.”

“Right.” Andre shivered. “’Member that broken window in Papa Z’s laundry room?”

Evan smirked. “How could I forget?”

“We had to get our wet clothes into the dryer fast , or that shit would freeze.”

“That one time Ramón snapped his sock in half—”

“His big-ass feet. Size thirteens.”

Evan said, “At least he got his own gym shoes.”

“Right. We had them two pairs we had to share depending on who had gym that day. Size-eights and size-tens. We’d rotate that shit.”

“Man, those things stank.”

“What are you complaining about? When we were overcrowded, I had to share a bed with Tyrell, and he’d wet the sheets, and I’d smell like piss all the next school day.”

Evan was laughing now. “I remember that.”

“Shower off with that Boraxo powder hand soap Papa Z lifted from the gas-station bathroom, be like scraping my skin off with sandpaper.”

“And what was with that generic mac and cheese?” Evan said. “Yellow box with black lettering. Tasted like cardboard and cheddar.”

“And we couldn’t even eat that when Papa Z would go out ’cuz our dumb asses couldn’t figure out how to turn on the stove.” Andre laughed. “Wait. Van Sciver knew how to turn on the stove.”

“Then he’d eat all the food, though,” Evan said.

“Charles Van Sciver. Shit. ’Member that fool?”

Evan’s smile faded. “I do.”

“He left a bit after you. Same guy came for him. Mystery Man. Van Sciver was all puffed up. Left one day, and we never saw him again, just like you. Wonder what ever happened to him? You ever see him again?”

“We had to work some shit out,” Evan said. “Later.”

“And?”

He hesitated. “It didn’t go well for him.”

“What does that mean?”

Evan could feel the heat of Andre’s stare on the side of his face. He studied the lot across the street, hoping for the line of questioning to die.

“At least tell me what you guys did,” Andre said. “After they took you. Where’d y’all go?”

The kiosk went dark.

Evan held up a hand to silence Andre.

The worker emerged, locked the door behind him, and trudged to the front gate. He slid it shut, looped a chain through the bars several times, and secured it with a heavy-duty padlock. Then he climbed into an ancient BMW 2002 covered with more rust than paint, and the vehicle coughed its way up the street and around the corner.

Evan and Andre sat in the relative quiet for a moment. Then Evan slid a laptop from the backseat and pried the lid open. The impound lot’s Web video server had a serious vulnerability. Its string input parameters hadn’t been type-checked or checked for length, so Joey had crafted an overly long POST request for Evan to deploy when he needed it. It would cause a buffer overflow, escalate privileges using another vulnerability on the system, execute Joey’s shellcode as root, and let Evan intercept and replace the video stream.

With a few clicks, he did that, and the footage showed the empty impound lot on a perennial loop. He could lead a marching band up the main aisle of wrecked cars and the stream would show nothing but a deserted tract of vehicles.

Andre watched, his mouth ajar.

Evan exited the truck. Andre trailed him to the gate, fumbling with his keys. They got through the padlock and entered. Evan paused, sensing a note of danger vibrating the night air.

He went back and left the gate open in case they needed to beat a quick retreat.

32Lifelike

Andre stood at the spot where Hargreave had bled out, staring at the dark blotch on the asphalt. His cheeks looked heavy, shiny with sweat. “He died right here,” he said, his voice strangled, like he had to push out the words. “And it was my fault.”

But Evan had no interest in Andre’s guilt. He scanned the street once more and then moved cautiously to the kiosk. A shiny new lock assembly secured the door. As Andre came up behind him, Evan lifted the tiny rake pick and tension wrench from his back pocket.

“Don’t have that key,” Andre said. “I broke off the old key in the lock, so they replaced—”

Evan twisted, and the lock released with a click.

Andre said, “Dayum.”

They entered the tight space, the motion-activated light clicking on overhead. Triangle desk in one corner. Tall file cabinet. Security monitors showing hacked surveillance footage—an abandoned lot, a locked front gate, and a dark, empty kiosk. The room hadn’t been cleaned anytime recently, which was good given what Evan was looking for. The scent of musky cologne lingered.

Andre waved a hand in front of his nose. “That’d be Juan. Motherfucker smell like he bathed in Old Spice.”

Evan crouched by the crappy rolling chair and searched the linoleum, running his fingers along the seams where floor met wall. He assumed the cops would have missed it, because they wouldn’t have known to look for it. And he figured the Gentners wouldn’t risk returning to a crime scene to get rid of a dispensable item. Even so, it could’ve been thrown out or stepped on.