Page 151 of Antihero

Anca would be safe here with Candy. Of course—anyone would be safe with Candy. But it was more than just that. They were together and that meant something more than safe.

Anca would be okay here.

She would be okay.

He let go. A conscious effort to release, to drop into operational mode, to allow his blood to run cold.

Anca was looking at him, puzzled. “What?” she asked.

But he was gone.

Evan stood outside the diner, hands in his pockets, a point of stillness among the rush of pedestrians. It was the kind of archetypal diner found only in New York City and small American towns. Behind a massive plate-glass window, Finn-Finn and Big Mikey sat in a booth, torpidly thumbing at their phones. Mikey slurped at the last of a strawberry milkshake.

If they looked up, they would see Evan standing right there at the window.

But they did not look up.

He’d scouted the area physically and virtually, knew which of the neighboring stores had rear exits, the blueprints of the floors above, the sprint time to the closest subway stops in case he didn’t have the luxury of returning to his car. The diner was packed.

Evan entered to a jingle from the belled front door. An old-fashioned jukebox glowed red and gold, humming with doo-wop harmonization. Meat sizzled on an unseen grill. The place smelled deliciously of root beer and burger grease.

“Help you?” The hostess wore a jaunty paper diner hat that looked like a battleship turned upside down.

“My party is already here,” Evan said.

He threaded through the tables and sat down next to Big Mikey, scooting him in so he was trapped against the window. The booth was padded vinyl, cherry red, the cracks spot-patched with duct tape.

“Hey, man. What the fuck?”

Big Mikey looked like the genetic runoff from Goliath, huge but not colossal, ugly but not troll-like, menacing but not intimidating. He was brutish, big features, girthy at the chest, stomach, and thighs. At first Evan thought there was crusted blood in his scraggly facial hair, but a closer look showed it to be a port-wine stain that he’d tried to hide with his beard.

Across the table, chewed grilled-cheese crusts remained on Finn-Finn’s plate, and his lips were greasy like a little kid’s. The men were younger than Evan had anticipated. They looked like boys still catching up to adult bodies.

He recognized their carriage and bearing from the video, images strobing in his mind. A goat-skull tattoo on sweaty flesh. Drawn-out moans. Anca’s sluggish body adjusted this way and that, her limbs flung aside to grant access.

The two young men looked disappointingly ordinary here in the midday light of a bustling diner, a world apart from that subterranean apartment where they’d done things that men in ski masks did.

In person they looked like nothing at all. Even if he hadn’t made a promise to Anca, Evan wondered if he would have had the heart to kill them. Sitting with them now looking into their faces was anticlimactic. His fury wasn’t lost—it was still in the bucking chute waiting for the gate to lift—but in this moment he felt nothing so much as worn out.

“Finley Jacowski,” Evan said. “Michael Macmanus.”

“Are you a cop?” Finn-Finn said. “Because you haveta tell us if you’re a cop. You haveta.”

That voice. It summoned a haunted echo from the footage: My turn! My turn!

Evan said, “No.”

Big Mikey said, “The fuck you want then?”

Evan pivoted his head. Looked at him.

“Oh,” Big Mikey said. “Oh, shit. You’re him. The scary fucking friend.”

“Yes,” Evan said.

“You don’t look scary.”

Finn-Finn glanced over his shoulder, gauging a route to the door. Evan watched to see if he’d make a run for it. Evan was looking for an excuse, just like when he’d baited Tyler Russell into taking a swing at him with the baseball bat so he could kick him through his house and a chicken coop to shove his face into the aboveground pool.