Page 123 of Lone Wolf

55

Psyops on Hugh

The subterranean parking garage beneath Castle Heights was Evan’s favorite part of the building. Concrete and oil, fat pillars, dim overheads throwing scant light. It felt honest, utilitarian. Plus he always felt at ease moving through terrain with shadows and multiple positions of cover.

He spotted movement inside a white Tesla near the stairs to the lobby.

Lorilee.

She hadn’t noticed him, not yet. Her face was puffier than usual and she held a balled-up tissue in her fist, which she pressed to her mouth.

He was struck immediately by a deeply ingrained instinct to avoid her. If he walked up the ramp, he could circle through the porte cochere and enter the lobby through the front door.

He stood unnoticed in the shadowed space between lights. Fighting with himself. He checked the time. Forty-five minutes until his meeting with Joey.

He could spare a moment.

He didn’t want to.

But he could.

Lorilee tossed aside the tissue and put her hands on the steering wheel. She looked haggard, hollowed out. No theatricality, a rarity for her.

Forty-four minutes now.

Damn it.

He tried to find that part of himself he’d felt on the sidewalk outside Andre’s house, to forge the connection from himself to himself, but the signal kept going out—it was so goddamned temperamental—and he thought what the hell, he’d go over and try his imperfect best.

She was too buried in sadness to notice his approach. With a single knuckle, he tapped. She glanced over, lowered her eyes, and then the automatic doors unlocked with a click. He went around and sat in the passenger seat.

A watermelon air freshener stuck in the vent made the car smell like a cheap cocktail. There was a tissue box on the console and a nylon trash bag mounted behind the headrest and a rubber container at Evan’s feet that held water bottles and protein bars and an assortment of over-the-counter allergy and pain meds. It felt less like a vehicle than a mobile drugstore.

Lorilee patted his knee with the hand that had previously held the tissue, and he noted the spot on his pants for later disinfecting. “Thank you for checking on me, Ev,” she said. “This damn campaign…”

Her Botox had been recently and robustly injected, and her face was stretched out of shape enough to resemble that of a great cat, adding a surreal tinge to his entrapment.

“Do you actually care,” he asked, “about being HOA president?”

She shook her head immediately and then shook it some more.

“Then why are you running?”

Her face pulsed like a fist, a spasm of shame, and she plucked another tissue from the box and held it to her trembling lips. “Do you remember my last boyfriend?”

“No.”

“The juice-bar entrepreneur?”

“No.”

“Built guy in his late forties, wavy black hair?”

“Lorilee,” Evan said. “No.”

“Well, the breakup was hard on me. At my age…”

Her age was a closely guarded secret, preserved by a cadre of plastic surgeons, dermatologists, and dieticians. She might have been late forties or well into Social Security. Evan had of course noted her birthday once in the files he meticulously maintained on all Castle Heights residents, but he’d made a chivalrous effort to forget it.