Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

Evan turned around to face Andre. They’d opened the window earlier to vent the stale air and tidied the place together. The groceries they’d picked up were stacked along one wall, the mini-fridge stuffed. The taped bedsheet blocked the nighttime lights of neighboring buildings, the only illumination now the sterile glow of a lamp in the corner.

“You need to stay inside,” Evan said. “These next-gen drones can go window to window.”

“I hear that.”

“I’ll come back when it’s over. By Monday morning it’ll be done one way or another. Promise me you won’t leave this room.”

“I promise.”

“Promise me you won’t drink.”

Andre lifted his chin a touch higher. “I promise.”

Evan turned for the door.

“Hey,” Andre said. “We family?”

Evan paused. That sketch of Sofia stared at him from the wall, those beautifully rendered dark eyes. She was what to him? Some kind of niece? That was a question for another day.

He cleared his throat, breathed through the tension Andre’s question brought up in him, tried to relax into it.

“I suppose so,” he said.

“They say families are made,” Andre said.

“I don’t know nothing about that,” Evan said, realizing that the street cadence had crept once more into his voice. “But I’ll be here if you need me.”

“Yeah.” Andre nodded. “Me, too.”

62Your Dirty Parts

Declan studied his naked image in the hotel bathroom. Each stomach muscle a distinct rectangle with four pronounced sides and something approximating right angles at the corners. His chest defined enough to catch shadow. His hair, still glistening from the shower, perfectly in place, not a single stray. Steam thickened the atmosphere of the room, fogging the edges of the mirror.

He walked into the hotel bedroom. The suits hung neatly in the wardrobe, a waterfall of luscious fabrics, some bought on Savile Row, others cut to perfection by a Hong Kong tailor. Everything outside him—flesh and muscle, cloth and leather—was as close to perfection as could be humanly managed.

And even so, all that armor barely held the chaos of his inner self in the shape of a person.

He’d cleaned out Queenie’s room next door, gathered her personals and dragged them in here. Her corpse was with the city coroner, and he would have to think long and hard about how to cut through the red tape without incriminating himself. To get to her body, his female self.

But right now only one reality mattered to him.

Killing the Nowhere Man.

On the mattress his phone rang, vibrating on the Four Seasons comforter.

He walked to it, the air cool against his bare body, and picked up. “She’s dead.”

His voice was low and sonorous, occupying the other space, the space of the him he hid from the world. He was embodied.

Even the doctor seemed to sense it, allowing a rare pause. “What does it feel like?” he asked.

Declan thought about it. “It’s a kind of pain too deep to feel. So there’s just numbness. And nothing left to care about. Which means I can do anything.”

As the doctor’s mouth cracked open, a faint puff of air came over the line, something well shy of a moan. “That’s how I feel,” he said. “All the time.”

His voice was hushed, perhaps with awe. Maybe even something approaching empathy. But when he spoke again, it sounded flat once more, the humanity compressed out of it. “I’m delivering the drones tomorrow at midnight. Skeleton crew at the base means fewer eyes, fewer questions, fewer protocols. I’m using my personal team of contractors for maximum oversight.”

“Because the last team did so well at the impound lot.” Declan’s voice, when deep, carried a different kind of authority. He wasn’t afraid to let out his anger, his judgment, in full. In the fullness there was a sort of calm.

Now he could practically hear the doctor thinking about the slight to his team and deciding not to challenge it.

Instead he said, “That’s why I’d like you there. Keeping an eye on the transport from afar. In case anything unexpected happens.”

“I will be the only unexpected thing from here on out,” Declan said, and hung up.

He got into bed, his exhaustion pasting him to the mattress. He felt all the points of his body where it touched the sheets—heels, calves, lower back, shoulder blades, base of his skull.

Before he could dread the coming darkness, he was asleep.

Three minutes or three hours later, he awoke into half consciousness.

His body locked down, tendons pulled piano-wire taut. Even his Achilles tendon ached, his feet flexed painfully, cramps knotting the arches.

Lungs wouldn’t release. Head couldn’t turn. Just his eyes moving to the door.

Sure enough, there came the scrape against the wood.

Still alive, still alive .

His chest turned concave, unwilling to stretch and afford air.

The clawlike slash of fingernails flaking the paint. The door bowing inward, into his psyche itself. Then the latch released and swung inward to reveal that feminine silhouette. The long, long nails candy-apple red, the light moving through them from behind to put ten glowing points at the ends of her hands.

His heartbeat pounded out a distress signal: Still alive, still alive .

Now she was bedside, transported in the blink of an eye.

He’d kicked down the sheets in his sleep, the pillow cold with dried sweat beneath his neck. He wanted to scream to wake up his sister, but there was no voice.

And there was no sister.

The head cocked, that stylish bob bobbing. I will punish your dirty parts out of you. You will learn .

The quivering flesh of his arms, his neck, his inner thighs bare to the dead of night, bare to her to teach them what she needed to.

His mouth lurched for air, just a sip to get out the word, the tracks in his brain laid down to produce the only two syllables he’d known in his whole miserable life that could bring comfort.

Queenie.

The loss came again, fresh as a slit to the throat.

His mother leaned over his paralyzed body. Those fingernails fluttered, choosing their spot.

He had no one to help him and an eternity to morning.

63The Most Awful Thing

In the not unlikely event that he got killed, Evan hadn’t made a contingency plan for Andre. So—at the end of this never-ending night—he’d reversed course to the one person who would need to step up.

He paused on the footbridge in the front yard, watching the sleeping swans bob on the placid moat. He’d spoken to Joey on the drive back to Bel Air. She was all over mission planning, interfacing with Tommy and Orphan V, laying the groundwork for the plan Evan had hatched. He could see her extraordinariness only when he considered the fullness of who she was, not just the shape of who he wanted her to be.

He wondered if that was what Veronica had arrived at with him, when she’d sat gazing across the kitchen table at his impaled arm, her face evincing total acceptance. When she’d placed her hand on his cheek, looked into him, and released him to do what it was that he did, she’d seen him for the first time, not the image of who she hoped him to be.

Simple as it sounded, perhaps that was what love really was.

What a lacking word, rife with clichés and misconceptions. It was so much more than what people talked about, with a depth that might accommodate even the darkness of his own soul.

There was no answer to his knock, not even from the dogs. He tried the front door and found it unlocked.

Worried, he moved inside. The dogs scampered to him but did not bark. They sniffed at his boots as he crossed the concrete stepping-stones. Seemingly contented, they bunched at his feet as he entered the kitchen, the living room.