Page 84 of Hellbent

Evan didn’t like him.

And he didn’t like how he was looking at Joey.

“Hey, I’m Connor. You guys live around here?”

“No,” Evan said. “Visiting a friend.”

“Well,” the guy said, directing his attention at Joey, “if you’re around again, we hang at the old zoo most nights.” He pointed up the street toward Griffith Park. “To chill. You should come.”

Evan mentally graphed the angle of uppercut that would snap both hinges of his jaw.

“She’s busy,” he said.

“When?”

“Forever.”

As they passed, Connor said in a low voice, “Dude. Your pops is intense.”

Joey said, “You have no idea.”

They left the guys behind, turning the corner for their street.

“Think he’s a plant?” Joey asked.

“No. I think he’s a useless reprobate. Loose body language. The stoner nod. He’s not good.”

“I thought he was kinda cute.”

Evan said, “You’re grounded.”

“Like, locked-in-a-safe-house-and-forced-to-hack-an-encrypted-laptop grounded?”

Evan said, “Yes.”

A smile seemed to catch her by surprise. She looked away to hide it.

He gave her a little nudge on the shoulder, tipping her into the gutter.

37

Blood In, Blood Out

Benito Orellana twisted his hands together, shifting his weight back and forth, anguish throttling through him. He wasn’t crying, but Evan could see that it was taking most everything he had not to. His stained dishwasher’s apron was slung over a chair back; before Evan’s arrival he had changed into an ironed white T-shirt. No money, but proud.

“A parent, they are only as happy as their least happy child,” Benito said. “Mi mamá used to tell me this. You understand?”

Not at all, Evan thought. He said, “Tell me what happened to Xavier.”

In the square front room of the tiny house in Central L.A., Evan stood across from Benito, facing the picture window. The view looked out onto a massive empty lot razed by bulldozers and the top floors of a tall building being constructed beyond. Workers were visible clinging to the steel skeleton, steering in I-beams as if they were planes on the tarmac.

In Pico-Union any direction you went, you hit a thoroughfare—the 110 Freeway to the east, Normandie Avenue to the west, Olympic Boulevard up top, and the Santa Monica Freeway below.

A lot of getaway routes. Which meant a lot of crime.

Evan had safed the block, the surrounding blocks, and the blocks surrounding those. A three-hour undertaking, wholly necessary before the approach in case Benito was the bait in a trap.

On these initial forays, Evan used to bring a briefcase embedded with all sorts of operational trickery, including signal jamming if digital transmitters happened to be in play. But the briefcase had been unwieldy.