Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

“What are you doing?” he said. “I was just about to come up.”

“I know. Being Mr. Punctual-to-the-Second makes you predictable. Which is another improvement I’ll put in place when I take over as—dun-dun- dunnn —Orphana X.”

“I don’t think there’s a feminine form.”

“There is now.”

“And when you assume my role, you’ll save the day with tactical lateness?”

“I shall do precisely that.”

“Why are you in my passenger seat?”

“’Cuz you told me to handle everything. And I have. You said you needed to see Hargreave’s sensor operator, one Senior Airman Rafael Gomez, which means you have to get into Das Veterans Reintegration Ministry for Better Zociety und Citizenry.”

“Impressive German or Russian accent, I think.”

“Eet vas both.” She dropped the Eastern European guise. “As I said, security’s intense, so there’s no way you’re getting in alone. Too suspicious. I mean, look at you. Military-age man, beady eyes, overcompensatory truck—you just scream shady.”

“I do not have beady—”

“Whereas with your daughter, Almudena”—she hit the accent hard and in this case correctly—“who is also conveniently Rafael’s seventeen-year-old niece, you are a far less suspicious presence to visit the facility on—wait for it—Family Friday!” She threw jazz hands, mouth ajar, eyebrows hoisted.

“My daughter,” Evan said. “Have you seen us?”

“Yes. You married Consuelo née Gomez, Rafael’s older sister, in 1998. Congratulations. Wishing you a lifetime of love and happiness. Oh, by the way, your name is Harold Blasely.”

“Harold Blasely? Sounds like a traveling brush salesman.”

“A fine option for your imminent re-retirement.”

He gritted his teeth. He was due to meet his armorer en route to the Fresno veterans’ compound, but his inimitable and tenacious forger was over in Northridge. Bruising had come up overnight around his right eye, and his lower back ached from the confrontation in the impound lot. The last thing he was in the mood for was Joey and her three-hundred-mile-per-hour mouth.

“Joey,” he said, mustering as much forbearance as he could, “we don’t have ID to pull this off. You said so yourself.”

“I figured we don’t have time to see your badass Paper Dragon Lady—see what I did there?—to get the real deal, so I made us virtual ones, which is, like, way easier. I uploaded scans of doctored passports and licenses and stuff when I put us on the visitor’s log. They’re all in the system.”

“We’ll still have to show ID at the gate.”

“It’s a new preclearance process. They’ll just smile and wave.”

“And what’s Rafael gonna say if he’s expecting his niece and brother-in-law?”

“Oh, you’re right.” She shook her head with mock consternation. “That’s way too daunting a situation for you to socially engineer in your fragile sunset years. Want me to get you back to the home for pinochle?”

“If it gets me out of this conversation, yes.”

“Come on, X. It’s a Harry and Almu Blasely road trip!”

“You can’t come,” Evan said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“One: Then you won’t get in. Two: It’s not dangerous. It’s a military facility. The worst that’ll happen is you’ll get arrested and renditioned somewhere, and I’ll just cry and make sad-girl eyes, and they’ll feel sorry for me for being drawn under the spell of your bad influence—”

“ My bad influence—”

“Three.” She was bending back her fingers, the nails painted a vivacious pink, no doubt due to Bicks’s arrival on the scene. “If we don’t do this, then your boy Andre’s gonna get killed, and so you’re literally choosing being uptight over saving his life.”

The muscles of his neck had tightened up. He let his head sag, feeling a sudden kinship with Mia. “I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

“Clearly,” she said. “You just got out negotiated by a terrorist.” She snapped her fingers and pointed through the windshield. “Drive or we’ll be late.”

He looked over at her. She smiled that winning smile, flipped her hair to the left to show off that shaved strip over her right ear, her thumbprint dimple indenting one cheek. She was irresistible. And entirely infuriating.

He drove.

“Can we listen to music?”

“No.”

“Can we stop for road snacks?”

“No.”

“Ug. You’re so … uuuug .” Joey slouched in the passenger seat, dirty boot resting against the glove box. She chewed the side of her thumbnail.

With her molars.

Evan glanced over. “You need help with that? I could get you gardening shears.”

She removed her thumb from her mouth and glowered at him. Then she contorted herself in the seat, trying to dig her thumb into her shoulder blade.

“You should get that looked at,” Evan said. “Too much keyboard time.”

“Yeah, well my uncle-dad-boss-person is super demanding so I’m not sure I can get time off for, like, a massage.”

“It’s okay. Boss-person provides medical.”

Her face sagged with an inadvertent pout, and she crossed her arms and slumped down, suddenly looking five years younger. He wondered how old she’d be when he’d no longer be able to see the kid in her. What would that feel like? It was relentless, time stretching out ahead, full of loss and opportunity. Every step left behind a world of options but set you on new ground. He pictured Mia leaning on her door, letting her body sway with the hinges, one foot raised behind her as if for a cinema kiss. To be continued .

The truck wound across the Tejon Pass, a five-mile ascent up the Tehachapi Mountains and across the San Emigdios. Finally they eased down into the vast bowl of the Central Valley. Fresno and Rafael Gomez waited a hundred and fifty miles to the north, but Evan had set a truck-stop meet with Tommy Stojack at the base of the Grapevine. Winter rain had greened the hillside in patches, but browns and yellows predominated, chaparral and weedy grasslands. A scorched rise darkened a hillock to the left where a fire had taken the earth down to the dermis. The air leaking through the vents smelled of diesel and sagebrush.

“How was your date with…” Evan couldn’t bring himself to say “Bicks” in nonmocking fashion.

“Fun,” Joey said. “Till it got annoying.”

His heart lifted. “Annoying?”

“Well, he and I are, like, solid, you know? But we went to a club after dinner with some of his girl- space -friends and they were so annoying. Like a different species.”

“How so?”

“Like the kind of girls who talk in baby voices and ugly cry at Hallmark movies.”

“What’s a Hallmark movie?”

“Right. I forgot you’re frozen in time like Captain America.”

“Who’s Captain America?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Right.”

“Thank bejesus. So anyway, this one girl named—of course— Sloane totally karaoke-filibustered with Diana Ross. And she was ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’–ing Bicks, all leaning over him, and I was all like, ‘I’m right here, bitch.’”

Evan tried to shape the words Joey was saying into some sort of meaning that he could comprehend but came up short.

Fortunately, she was on a roll, undeterred by his silence. “So I’m realizing that Sloane doesn’t just want to be Bicks’s girl- space -friend, so I finally grabbed the mic and had them cue up ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart,’ and I was like, ‘I got this,’ but—”

“You didn’t get this.”

She sighed. “I didn’t get this.”