Page 17 of Lone Wolf

That meant it was time to turn around and look it in the teeth.

Evan waited on the porch in the fifty-grit wind as a man’s weight creaked the floorboards inside, approaching the closed front door.

Evan’s shoulders were already squared, his spine erect, arms and hands loose at his sides. No nonverbal tells, no expectations, nothing he’d dare to call hope.

When the door opened and Evan laid eyes on Jacob Baridon, the first thing he registered was how little he felt. No flare of recognition, no spark, no surge of emotion.

He might have been looking at any other stranger in the front half of his sixties. Baridon was handsome gone to seed, salt-and-pepper stubble, tousle of hair showing beneath the brim of a beat-to-shit straw Stetson Gunfighter. The cowboy hat, cocked back on his head, looked a part of the man himself, as if he’d been designed for that very thing, molded into the most complementary form to fill it. Lanky and fit, he wore a denim shirt with pearl-colored buttons, dark blue 501s, and full-quill ostrich boots in a pecan brown that had been sun-beaten to a tawny shine at the toes. He smelled of cigarette smoke, dried sweat, and earth.

At six foot and a bit he was taller than Evan, but he hung his head in a loose-and-easy way that spoke to good-natured endurance in the face of all the shit life can throw at you. A closer look showed a touch of rot—skin sallowed on incipient jowls, smoker-yellow stalagmites climbing his incisors, a two-inch gap between the welt and the outsole of the left boot that could be fixed for five bucks or with a needle and thread and a modicum of care.

Average of build, not too handsome, Evan stared up at him. He did not feel defensive.

He did not feel defensive.

He did not feel defensive at all.

The man didn’t speak first, that would have been too much of a concession, but his face was open and without anger.

“My name’s Evan. I might be your son.”

He said it without need and with a touch of annoyance, as if he was just as put out to have arrived here at the edge of a state that was not his own as this guy might be from having someone drive up and pound on his door.

“Huh,” Baridon said with a lack of alacrity that seemed to suggest he’d acted his role in this script a time or two before. “Okay. Well, come on in.”

He pulled the door further ajar and heeled back out of the way in a single smooth gesture that held a kind of masculine elegance.

Evan entered.

The double-wide was dilapidated but impeccably clean, a bizarre combination. Shoes lined neatly on a patch of torn-up carpet, chipped counter wiped clean, each threadbare pillow perfectly straight on the lopsided couch.

Jacob turned around to face a mirror hung haphazardly in the middle of one paneled wall, pulled off his hat, and ran his fingers through his hair, examining his scalp.

Evan stood facing his back. “This your place?”

“This? Nah. A lady I was knockin’ boots with let me crash here when she moved back in with her old man. Lucky stuff—she inherited it after her mom had one of them strokes turns you into a vegetable.”

Baridon kept at his hair in the mirror and Evan realized: He was checking for thinning.

“Well?” Baridon said to his reflection.

Evan was silent.

“This is where you tell me who your mom is,” Baridon continued, not unkindly. He turned around briefly to favor Evan with eye contact. “There was a lotta ass back then.” A bonding snap of the head. “You been there.”

When Evan spoke his voice was perfectly steady. “Veronica LeGrande.”

“Redhead?”

Evan’s heart rate was nice and steady, he’d guess a tick above sixty. His pulse was normal. He was fully inside his body.

He said, “No.”

Baridon settled the hat back on his head, lumbered over to the couch, and flung himself down in a Huckleberry sprawl. “Come on then,” he said. “Have a seat.”

Evan stared at him for maybe three full seconds. Then he walked over and sat in a ripped armchair opposite the couch. “College girl,” he said. “Went to Vassar. Bit of money.”

Now Baridon had his phone out and he was scrolling through messages. “Don’t really remember.” Now and then he flashed his eyes up at Evan. His attention was 80 percent on the phone, 20 percent on Evan. “Wait. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Vassar girl. Okay. How’s she doing?”