Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

Candy McClure leaned back in the seat of the King Air plane, listening to the dipshit jumpmaster drone on.

It was an affront to her training even to be here, on a commercial skydiving jaunt in the skies above Flagstaff, Arizona. She was surrounded by overly zealous thrill seekers who were pumped up on adrenaline and their own inflated self-images. The twenty-something women next to her—Madison (“call me Maddy”!) and McKenzie (“Me and Maddy are, like, sisters but not sisters”)—wore tight-fitting jumpsuits that still bore the fold marks from the store. The dude-bros wore similarly unnecessary suits with scuba-yellow sleeves, cone collars, and tight legs, patches adorning the synthetic nylon like military ribbons.

Candy wore jeans and a T-shirt, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. The more disinterest she showed, the more the men showed interest in her, sneaking nervous glances, eyes dropping to her not insubstantial breasts, visible between the vertical straps of the harness belt.

Her back and shoulders, covered with rippled scar tissue from a chemical burn, felt feverish against the seat. The twin propellers roared. They were nearing ten thousand feet, at least by the look of the earth below.

Over the headsets, Jumpmaster Steve kept on. “I repeat: I own the rear of the plane. Every thousand feet is six seconds. You’re gonna pull at three thousand feet when you start to see ground rush.” A condescending wink at Candy, Call Me Maddy, and Sister McKenzie. “Don’t worry, ladies, if you pass out, an automatic activation device will make the chute deploy anyway.”

One of the guys pried his gaze off Candy’s superior tits to look at Jumpmaster Steve. “At what altitude is that?”

“Don’t be a nervous Nellie,” the jumpmaster said.

Dude-bro’s friend shouldered his bud, keyed to talk over the channel. “Just remember, man. Fat chicks and fags do this all the time.”

Candy set her jaw, stared out the window. Ever since she’d left the Orphan Program, she spent her time trying to find a charge. Anything to make her feel something besides the discomfort of her back, an itch that went beneath the skin all the way to the bone. At times it felt like she was composed of discomfort.

As Orphan V she’d been arguably the finest black-ops assassin at the DoD’s disposal, worthy of being mentioned in a breath with Orphan X. She and X had a colorful and complex history, taking opposite paths to wind up in a version of the same place.

Out in the cold.

She’d briefly hooked up with an old associate in Frankfurt who was running skin-care products in spas that surreptitiously extracted DNA from potential targets, but an Interpol raid had netted the associate, leaving Candy with too much time on her hands and little to do.

So she was here, chasing some kind of thrill, anything to throw a spark back into the dry tinder of her life.

“And make sure you’re cautious jumping out,” Jumpmaster Steve continued. “Fall flat, dumb, and happy, careful feet control, no backsliding. Got it, ladies? We don’t want any midair tinkling.”

The guys laughed, and Call Me Maddy and Sister McKenzie obliged with a titter, but Candy could see in their eyes that they felt demeaned.

Her phone hummed in her pocket. She pulled it out.

A text from 1-855-2-NOWHERE .

It read, WANNA COME PLAY?

For the first time in a long time, she smiled. She unhooked her harness seat belt, flung the vinyl straps aside.

“Whoa, whoa, little lady,” Jumpmaster Steve said, leaping up. “I haven’t cleared us to—”

Candy flipped off her headset, strode over, and struck the red control button embedded in the skin of the craft. The side door started to open.

Wind whipped at them. Jumpmaster Steve was screaming at her, but mercifully his voice couldn’t be heard. He moved to grab her, and she caught his arm, pronated the elbow, turned him around, and dumped him face-first back into his seat.

She stepped past the guys and young women ensconced in their designer jumpsuits and walked out the door, giving a little hop to launch her into a front flip. She corkscrewed twice for good measure and then caught the wind, rotating into a head-to-earth body position to speed her descent, arms at her sides, a rocket launched at the rising ground.

What a delightful feeling to have someplace to be.

58A Whole Other Kind of Loneliness

After Evan knocked, he heard no noise inside the rented room at the top of the stairs and worried that Andre had split. Or worse. Evan had left Joey to coordinate with Orphan V for the time being while he locked down this side of the mission.

He knocked again, and then there was a shuffling noise within, the sound of a limb banging into something, a muffled expletive, and then Andre’s wan face at the door, leached of human color. Charcoal-hued bags under his eyes, puffy with toxicity. His hair hangover-ruffled. His stubble had seemingly gained another full day’s growth in the few hours since Evan had left him.

He had a potato chip stuck to his cheek, which he now groped for, peeled off, regarded, and then flicked away. He stank of rum and body odor, and Evan felt a vestigial flutter of repulsion, an old familiar urge to back away down the stairs and leave him to his lair.

But he ignored it.

And held steady, staring into the face of his half brother. He searched for any sign of himself in Andre’s features, any hint of their shared blood, but Andre looked no more like Evan than any other boy from the Pride House Group Home. What a surreal twist of fate that bound them together in their DNA. Any thought of sharing this secret with Andre evaporated at the sight of him; some arcane rule Evan hadn’t known to abide by prevented him from sharing what Veronica had not yet decided to share herself. Which was fine—it was all too much for Evan to comprehend right now, let alone convey.

“Why the hell are you back?” Andre said, snapping Evan from his trance. “I told you I—”

“You’re right,” Evan said. “I don’t care about you like this. I care about who you could be. That’s respect.”

Andre’s expression loosened, head lolling back on his neck, his eyes suddenly suffused with sadness. “I think I just need to sleep it off, be alone for a while.”

“Your best thinking got you here,” Evan said. “Time to try something else.”

Andre thumbed crust from his eye. Stared back through the doorway, leaning heavily on the knob, like it was holding him upright.

He staggered away from the door. He didn’t get far before the metal bed frame hit him behind the thighs, forcing him to sit abruptly. He pinched at the bridge of his nose, literally hung his head.

When Andre spoke, his voice was cracked from dehydration. “I was good at drawing. ’Member that?” He looked up, his eyes bloodshot, weary. “Thought I could grow up, draw comics one day. Batman, right?”

“You were,” Evan said. “You were good.”

“I coulda been something, dunno … worthwhile.”

“You still can be,” Evan said. “Best two words in the English language: ‘next time.’”

“If I figure it out. If I live that long. I been under the heel of this thing weeks now. All I feel is fear. At what it’ll be like when they catch me.”

“Fear needs a future,” Evan said. “Let’s focus on the present.”

Andre spoke now in little more than a whisper. “Don’t you feel it, too?”

“No,” Evan said. “I just feel dread. I’ve been there enough times, at the point when it catches up. I’ve learned what it is.”

“It worse than fear? Dread?”

“Not worse. But it’s more awful. Because it’s my job to meet what’s coming. Which means it’s on me if I fail.”