Page 92 of Lone Wolf

custody.

Simple enough. Drawing in a breath, Evan punched the button by the call box. Across the front yard on the porch, the massive guard paused from his ministrations with the knife, the tip floating just above his thumbnail, and locked on to Evan. The streetlight turned his eyes into flattened pennies. Even at this distance Evan could see the veins squiggling through the sunburned skin of his throat. His shoulders were bunched high around his neck, but he didn’t move.

On the call box, an illuminated blue ring encircled the pupil of the surveillance camera. It flickered once and a voice emerged: “What?”

“I’m the Wolf’s rep,” Evan said.

“Who?”

“The Wolf. You’ve made use of her services.”

“Maybe we have. Maybe we haven’t. Maybe we still are.” The present tense was interesting, but before Evan could dwell on grammar clues, the voice asked, “The fuck are you doing here?”

“She wishes to amend the deal.”

A cough of a laugh. “Amend the deal? Any deal we do or don’t have with her is the arrangement we have. There’s no amending a deal.”

“You know who she is. You know what she does. I suggest you let me in to discuss this matter before you decide to make an enemy of her.”

A long silence, just the rush of wind through the half-burned house across the street. The razor teeth atop the fence glittered like icicles. From up close he could see that the crumbled stucco of the house was in fact deliberate, accommodating a pair of sawed slits through the cinder block, each just wide enough to fit a muzzle through.

Evan clasped his hands behind him, did his best to look unthreatening. It wasn’t hard.

The gate buzzed open.

As he tugged it to enter, the big man on the porch rose. The chair gave a creak of relief. A gold-colored belt buckle spelled JACKO in case he forgot his name while he was taking a leak. The folding knife twirled once around the back of Jacko’s hand, and he caught it upside down angled parallel to his forearm, a proper edge-out reverse grip.

He watched Evan’s quiet approach, then held up a hand. “Stop.”

Men like Jacko even smelled like alphas. A distinctive musk came off them. Skin of sun-battered leather, stubble coarse as wire. He looked like he subsisted on dried meat and chewing tobacco, like he’d rip your head off and chug mead from your skull.

Evan halted.

They were eye to eye, though Evan had to tilt his head back to meet the man’s gaze. A slight twitch of the left eye and the cant of the shoulders gave away the man’s favored side.

Keeping the knife, Jacko patted Evan down extensively with his other massive hand, taking care to administer a urology-worthy crotch grope. Then he removed what looked like a fat walkie-talkie from a bag beneath his chair—a professional-grade RF detector. He wanded Evan down head to toe, checking for any wireless surveillance tech.

When Jacko was done, he stepped back without turning around and knocked twice on the door behind him. A heavy clank announced a security bar retracting, and then the door opened with a foomp worthy of a submarine hatch.

A fist reached through the gap, grabbed Evan’s shirt, yanked him in, and slammed him against the wall.

43

The Holding Pen

A Benelli M1 combat shotgun rose and jammed its muzzle into the soft skin beneath Evan’s chin.

Lucky day—M1s were Evan’s favorite.

Behind the Benelli, a guy with ice-gray eyes patted Evan down once more and then returned to his gun station at the side of the front door. A matching guard, similarly armed, was posted at the second of the muzzle slits carved through the front wall of the house, the ones Evan had spotted from the call box. A half dozen other men lounged in folding chairs around a pool table, exuding an aura of stageworthy calm. A few had their guns drawn, resting on their knees. The lineup of briefcases atop the green felt were all closed, but a digital currency counter near a corner pocket gave away the game.

Sitting in their midst was the blonde Evan had spotted before, a full-figured woman barely contained by a half shirt and tight black jeans. She wore a vacant, drugged expression and had bruises on her wrists, red spots on her arms, and a raspberry on her chin. A heap of locks pushed high on her head, pouty lips glossed with wet pink lipstick, high-end perfume applied liberally enough that it reached Evan from across the room. He could picture her getting off a bus from Des Moines or Nashville with a suitcase and a proverbial spring in her step. In some other distant context, she would have been sexually attractive, a reality Evan noted and then dispensed with. Something in her bearing, the birdlike perch at the edge of her chair, one shoulder shrugged up as if to defend against a blow, suggested she’d been brought here to be disciplined. Her blasted-wide pupils focused on nothing; she’d gone somewhere else, leaving her body behind to endure whatever it had to endure.

Metal sheets sufficient to deter a volley of RPGs covered the rear door and reinforced the interior walls.

A desk in the back held a flat computer monitor that showed rotating angles of an off-site structure that looked like a repurposed apartment building. The interior cameras showed various hallways, men patrolling them with batons like night watchmen. But that wasn’t what was chilling about the hallway feeds.

The doors along the halls had been taken off and replaced with prison bars. Beyond the bars was nothing but blackness. The entire building had been retrofitted.