Page 13 of Antihero

At last Luke Devine paused. His breath whistled across the receiver once, twice, a third time.

When his voice came it was strained and small, an unrecognizable whisper: “I don’t … I don’t know who else to call.”

Evan stared across the street at the memorial. A couple of big guys were laughing hard. He could hear their guffaws from the discarded earpiece. A chunky woman sat on a folding chair in the back, tissue pressed to her nose, mascara streaking into black stalactites. In that easel-mounted photo, Tommy looked young and strong, maybe the age Evan was now. His eyes weren’t baggy or tired as they’d been since Evan had known him, but they still held the same measure of warmth.

Evan looked down at his hands on the wheel, cursed under his breath. His other adversaries came at him with steel or lead. But Luke Devine flipped reality like a Rubik’s Cube, tweaking patterns and perceptions. Within the force field of his influence, he complicated the world, which meant that to contend with him, Evan had to become more complicated himself.

“Are you there?” Devine asked. “Are you still there?”

“I’ll be there in twelve hours.”

Evan slotted the truck into drive and pulled out from the curb.

6Kill the Motherfucker

With Tommy gone, the number of allies Evan trusted implicitly had materially diminished. Humming along the I-15 back to Los Angeles, Evan dialed one of the few others.

“Can you clear a flight plan from Van Nuys to East Hampton Airport?” Evan asked.

“Why?”

“Because Luke Devine’s out of his mind.”

“No mames! That culero is out of his mind when he’s in his mind. What is he capable of now? He pulls one wrong lever and he’ll touch off World War III.”

“That’s why I need to get there.”

“Why do you not just kill the motherfucker?”

Aragón Urrea was not prone to equivocation.

A self-described “unconventional businessman,” Aragón had amassed billions operating outside international law, weaving back and forth across the blurry line between Big Pharma and drug dealing.

Years ago when Aragón had found himself in the grip of a father’s deepest horror, Evan had helped him put his family back together again. To repay the debt, Aragón had vowed to stay on the right side of the law. Mostly. And as a show of gratitude, he’d put his small fleet of private jets at Evan’s disposal, which added remarkable efficiency to Evan’s Nowhere Man expeditions.

Evan gave the question proper consideration. “Devine’s not a nihilist. He’s got a code. If someone has a code, I can engage without having to kill them.” A brief pause. “Usually.”

“Well,” Aragón said, disappointed, “at least consider it.”

“I do,” Evan said. “Then I think about all that horsepower he’s got under the hood. And what he could do with it if it’s channeled in the right direction.”

“If. If! When they are that brilliant, they are all devils.”

“He’s the devil I know.”

A sign flew overhead for the toll road to the 10, and Evan clicked on his signal like the law-abiding citizen he was. The Ford F-150, America’s most common truck, blended in everywhere, just like Evan. Tommy had outfitted it with a beefed-up suspension, run-flat tires, and a custom push-bumper assembly. Anything put together by Tommy was a pleasure to operate. He made things right.

That’s what Evan would’ve said if he’d had the courage to enter that union hall and stride up to the podium: That was Tommy. He made things right.

He thought again of Tommy’s off-the-Vegas-Strip lair, its belly stuffed with explosives, its steel doors locked and alarmed, wind-driven sand already starting to layer it back into the surrounding desert dunes. Enough memories to crack Evan into pieces if he reflected on them too long.

A voice text dinged in from Joey, interrupting his thoughts. Though Josephine Morales was merely seventeen years old, an Orphan Program washout, and prodigiously mouthy, she was by a long shot the finest hacker Evan had encountered. When he’d collided with her on a mission years ago, she’d been the last person he wanted to have in his orbit. But they’d slowly worked their way into each other’s lives more than Evan cared to admit. Joey now referred to him with faux irritation as her “uncle-person.”

He swiped the alert off the screen.

“The devil you know,” Aragón said. “Like me.”

“No,” Evan said. “He’s worse than you.”