Page 12 of Lone Wolf

“I don’t do flyers,” he said. “You put them up.”

Brianna’s voice floated over: “She has a dance recital.”

Evan glared at Andre. Andre waved his hands. “Hail no. I’m driving Lyft tonight. They got streak bonuses starting at ten so I’m gonna be carting drunk white girls around hipster-ass Echo Park all night.”

Sofia kept her radiant focus on Evan. The smile she had screwed onto her face looked rehearsed. She had dimples. The proffered flyers hung there between them.

Evan said, “I’ll need the address of the place he went missing from.”

She tapped the stack. “On the flyer.”

He looked down. There it was.

“Please, Evan?” she said. “You said you’re going there anyways.”

She worried her bottom lip with her teeth. There was an instant of pure vulnerability in her face. Evan caught a flicker of his own features in her expression and felt his heart stop.

My niece.

I have a niece.

He took the goddamned stack of flyers and walked out.

6

An Elegant Picture of Accidental Death

Anwuli Okonkwo was stressed the hell out.

When she’d been promoted to senior software engineering manager last year, her parents had thrown a party for her, though she suspected the motivation was less to celebrate her and more to showcase her promotion to various aunties and cousins. The old joke was that an Okonkwo had four career choices: lawyer, doctor, engineer, or don’t show up at the family reunion.

To speed up existing big-data-analysis techniques, Anwuli had two spike teams pursuing approaches to building a revolutionary measurement engine at petabyte-per-minute scale to optimize predictive analytics for e-commerce consumer behavior. The new job meant interfacing with a lot of Chads in engineering and Chelseas in marketing, most of whom elaborately complimented her hair until she’d done the big chop to save time in the morning and to remove her head from contention as a conversation starter for overly exuberant “allies.”

The work was challenging in all good ways, Anwuli’s rise meteoric. Recently she’d been cleared to attend strategy meetings at the VP level, which meant elbow-to-elbowing with the best and brightest behind closed doors. Being invited to brainstorm over confidential company matters felt like finally being handed the keys to the kingdom, so there was no way she could say no, despite the untenable workload she was already carrying.

This all would’ve been manageable because she was an Okonkwo and her parents didn’t raise no olodo, but then Dad’s Alzheimer’s had kicked into high gear and then Mom had fallen and broken her hip. The next week her brother’s shipping company in Lagos had gone under, putting him in hock to the wrong people. Now everyone was short on time and money and resources, and it felt like it was up to her to come up with more of all three.

Which is why she’d carved out forty minutes of Me Time after work today before Amar from accounting emailed over the capital expenditures report for her to review. Stone-resin bathtub filled to the brim, Butterball bath bomb from Lush, ERIMAJ’s “Conflict of a Man” bumping from her Samsung Edge. Relaxing into the soapy water, she took a single healthy hit of OG Kush from her vape pen just to loosen the screws a touch and nestled into her inflatable neck pillow. She’d lit a few chill-out candles on the counter, but her thoughts kept drifting back to the sheer volume of cash required to take care of both parents and bail her brother out. Her brain scrambled to hatch ideas for how she could generate a next-level payday.

Deciding she needed to go lights-out to give her overburdened brain a rest, she pulled a silk sleep mask over her eyes and sank into the bathtub until the warm water slid up to her chin.

That’s when Karissa stepped into the bathroom holding a frayed extension cord.

She’d taken her shoes off in the foyer, her socks silent on the tile, an added precaution in case the music thumping from the Samsung Edge stopped. The bathroom smelled delicious—cocoa-butter bubble bath, and mint-vanilla wafting from the candles. Easing forward, she halted over the freestanding bathtub, her reflection drawing into rippling view in the lightly foamed surface of the water.

Okonkwo was rocking her head from side to side, lips moving with the lyrics. Her cropped haircut had taken both a hair dryer and curling iron out of contention, though Karissa probably wouldn’t have gone for either these days; appliances had gotten trickier with their ground-fault interrupters. The most dependable objet d’électrocution was a toaster oven, but acute midbath Pop-Tart cravings weren’t common enough for a coroner to buy the notion of a tubside toaster.

So here she was wielding a frayed extension cord. After the fact she’d plug the Samsung charging cord into the power strip, which would paint an elegant picture of accidental death: Mildly Stoned Soaking Executive Charges Phone, Disaster Ensues.

Karissa loved these moments. This proximity to another soul about to be extinguished. Watching the flare of the nostrils, the faintly heaving chest, each precious breath transformed into something momentous. The kind of concentrated power she felt inside, God trapped like a genie in her chest.

Okonkwo was humming a bit now, one set of toes emerging from the water to drum against the rim of the tub. Beneath the cloudy water, her clavicles and the tops of her arms were visible but the rest of her naked body faded away like a magic trick.

Karissa leaned over her. Closer, closer, until their noses almost touched. She felt Okonkwo’s breath against her chin, tasted her mint toothpaste.

An adrenalized tickle came on deep in her stomach, in her loins. She could do anything. She could be anything. She was everything.

Slowly she straightened back up. Extended her fist, clenching the power strip, over the water.