Page 99 of Lone Wolf

He debated commenting that fruitcakes weren’t paragons of display-worthy objects but calculated the time cost of the disruption and instead said, “Talk faster. And shorter.”

“—and everyone in the restaurant saw. Everyone was laughing at me. Some nice older lady had to come over and tell me.”

He started back up toward the second-floor landing. “What do you want, Joey?”

A bit of heat beneath the words now: “I don’t know what to do.”

Sidling up another step, he breathed out through his teeth, noticed they were clenched again. “Your alias as a sorority girl is blown. Abort mission, commence exfil.”

“I’m serious. I need … I need help, okay? I need help.” The words were hard for her to say. “I ran back to the bathroom. And I don’t want to come out. I can’t go back out there.” Her voice quavered—just barely.

That quaver stopped him from saying everything he wanted to say, everything the Fourth Commandment authorized—that he was occupied with objectively more serious shit helping people with concerns that dwarfed hers. For the first time he could remember he hit the brakes before letting the Orphan programming run.

“What am I supposed to do?” Joey said. “Even the waiter cracked a joke about me. What if he makes another one?”

Almost to the landing, trying to focus, to find a way to giving a shit. “Punch him in the throat and collapse his windpipe.”

“I’m serious. What do I do?”

He inched to the door. It had a narrow vertical window of tempered glass. The guard was walking away, about a third of the way down the corridor. No point chasing after him when Evan could just wait for him to draw back into closer range.

He pulled back slightly to make sure he wasn’t throwing a shadow. “Joey. It’s a bunch of sorority girls. You and I—we don’t care about this shit.”

His tone was harsher and more dismissive than he’d intended, but given the gap he was trying to bridge he didn’t mind.

“What if … what if I do? Care?”

Her tone was raw, confessional even, and the admission held too much vulnerability for him to bulldoze over. He scrunched his eyes shut, took a breath, tried to find the right bearings. It was impossible, his responsibilities crashing into one another, distorting priorities, melding two halves of himself that didn’t want to meld. Meanwhile the guard’s footsteps tapped farther away.

“Diversionary tactics,” he said.

“What?”

“Go back out and make a self-deprecating joke.”

“Like what?”

“You’re the funny one,” he said. “You tell me.”

Off target: index finger straight along the pistol frame, safety back on, thumb on top of the safety. Quick mag check, index finger feeling the nose of the top bullet, confirming rounds left by feel, a tiny, soothing habit. The low capacity 1911 demanded he know precisely how many rounds he had at all times. He reseated the mag with his palm, pulled down on the base plate with the fingertips of his right hand.

“Not right now,” Joey said. “I’m the sweaty-palms one. And how do I explain why I just ran off?”

“Come out with toilet paper hanging from your cleavage and say you had to go back to finish the job.”

High-risk high-reward. He could hear Joey weighing it.

“You have to sell it,” he said. “Live your legend. You’re psyops-trained.”

“Yeah, for missions. Not for real life.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“What is?”

“Everything.” Evan thought about what he’d had to draw from within himself to get through seven and a half minutes in that double-wide in Texas with the man who was his father. “Everything’s the same thing. Now go.”

He hung up.