Page 122 of Lone Wolf

He hoped everything would come to a head before that.

Around 2:00 P.M. he started in on what he’d been putting off. The search for Andre. To begin with, he hit Who’s On 1st, drawing semi-hostile eye contact from the regulars and Jimmy the barkeep.

“Seen Andre?” he asked.

“Not since you bounced him outta here,” Jimmy said.

“Know any other hangouts he likes?”

Nando was there with his gold-rimmed Ray-Bans, hunched over his pint glass. “HMS Bounty on Wilshire.” He kept his back turned, showing that rectangular scar at the base of his skull where hair plugs had been harvested. “The Living Room on Crenshaw.”

Evan started to withdraw.

“I been where he is.” Nando still didn’t turn around. “It’s nowhere anyone wants to be. I hope you find the poor bastard.” The day drinkers looked down into their glasses and waited for Evan to leave.

The other two stops proved equally fruitless.

It was nearly three o’clock by the time he swung by Andre’s little house in El Sereno. It had been destroyed once and rebuilt cheaply but sturdily with insurance money. Evan walked around the xeriscaping, peering in windows. Blinds drawn, house dark.

He tried the front door. Unlocked.

He stepped into the triangle of light thrown through the doorway, his senses assailed by the thickness of unscented air. Trash and old food, the sickly-sweet smell of spilled booze.

A number of empty boxes in the tiny living room bore the Solventry logo, that inanely smiling daisy logo. Liquor boxes broken into bottle-size sections by corrugated-cardboard dividers. Spilled across the couch, a mound of bills and other unopened mail. Evan clicked the light switch, but nothing happened. Electricity turned off. He tried once more, the familiar futility of the gesture bringing him back to his Pride House foster-home days. Darkness then, darkness now.

Pressing on to the bedroom, Evan found Andre passed out on his bed. Jeans and work boots on, a Carhartt jacket, sprawled on his back, snoring. A half dozen empty bottles of rum on the floor and windowsill—no, seven. Among fast-food wrappers on the desk, a sketch pad showed Sofia, beautifully captured in pencil and then scratched out with heavy scribbles.

Evan stood there for a long time.

When he stepped forward, his boot knocked over a handle of Bacardi. A loud clatter, but Andre didn’t stir. Some of the packing material was wadded up on the floor, that grinning daisy patterned across even the Bubble Wrap and carton-sealing tape, the brand omnipresent, tattooed onto the face of the world everywhere he looked.

Evan shook his half brother once and then a few times more.

There would be no waking him.

Evan checked his vitals, thumbed up his eyelids. Steady pulse, pupils dilating. Andre was fine. At least in one regard.

Evan tugged up the blind and cracked the window, a tired breeze displacing some of the staleness. He found an empty McDonald’s soda cup on the floor, rinsed it out in the bathroom, filled it with water, and left it on Andre’s nightstand.

He rolled Andre onto his side in case he threw up, propping him in place with a brace of pillows.

Then he left.

As he neared his pickup, he stopped for a moment, breathing out the despair that had curdled inside him when he’d stood in that unvented bedroom.

A few intrepid weeds had shoved through the sidewalk seams, flowering in yellow, bees lazily browsing their offerings. The sun lay heavy and pleasing across his back, and he felt its warmth as if he were a child again, eleven years old on that ragged East Baltimore park back when there was all the time in the world to do nothing but feel the sun and to watch the bees do their bee business among the flowers, and he was present now, not present strategically and alert to threats, not present as a Zen state of mind for internal hygiene, not because he was living up to Jack’s laws or to anyone or anything else, but he was present because now he couldn’t help but not be, because it was true. And he was there, despite everything, just him in the sunshine.

A rattling announced itself behind him. A FWIP motoring along the sidewalk, delivering its next round of goods. Its six rugged wheels managed the terrain expertly, navigating the delivery robot across a mini sierra of concrete cracked by tree roots. Same aquatic-blue design, same cheery neotenic flower, FreeWillPower! scripted across the side in whimsical white cursive.

Feeling the heat of the sun come up through the soles of his boots, Evan watched it approach. As it passed, he kicked it. Hard.

It tumbled over, falling into the gutter, wiggling helplessly like a beetle flipped on its shell. Evan felt a ping of cheap satisfaction.

Then a prong emerged from the roof, pressing into the ground, forcing the delivery robot up off its back. It righted itself.

The all-terrain wheels rippled as it pushed itself once more up onto the sidewalk.

Undeterred, it continued on its way.