Page 21 of Antihero

“Copy that.”

The engines whined, the jet pitched, and the world went weightless. They began their descent into the Hamptons. She’d grabbed for the armrests but Evan hadn’t moved at all.

He leaned forward, their knees almost touching, and now his eyes—what color were they? they always changed—had more in them than there was before, and he said, “See you on the other side, J.”

“I look forward to it, X.”

10Fuck-Around-and-Find-Out

It was a pocket of heaven.

Devine’s was the grandest of the grand estates lining Meadow Lane, a slender spit of sand dunes and hardscaping dropped like God’s dock between the Atlantic and Shinnecock Bay. The water was New Englandy slate leavened with tropical aqua, shockingly clear for this splintery stretch of coastline. The breeze held salt and the air held the cries of seagulls and the tremulous bass of the ocean washing itself against rich, powdery sand. The house sign staked in the earth, letters patterned like a kilt, spelled out TARTARUS, named by a Scotsman in the schmatta trade with a Miltonian sense of humor. The quartz stone of the circular driveway glinted like crusted diamond. Robins warbled unseen in the poinsettia sway of red maples. In the front gardens bursting through stretches of lush lawn, bees bustled and butterflies docked on moonflowers despite the fact that it was February in New York, which made the invertebrate pageant technically impossible. The front door rose before them like a portcullis made solid just for spite. Devine’s mansion alone had no guard shack, no smart-doorbell technology. If you dared to confront him, you rapped for entry.

Heels to the edge of the porch, Joey breathed through her teeth, her gaze pulled north and north up the towering rise of the mansion. “It’s so … peaceful.”

“Just wait,” Evan said. He squared his shoulders and knocked.

The boom boom boom reverberated through unseen chambers.

The door’s opening was an enormous slab hinging out from a cliff face.

One armed guard answering, three armed guards behind her at the ready. Sounds of mayhem rolled over their shoulders—a crash, a roar, a shattered bottle.

Given the size of the door and the interior, Evan caught not a glimpse but a gape at the cathedral-size foyer, the octopus head to the tentacles of the compound. A multistory water feature hurled down a tidal wave manicured into a liquid Zen sheet. The snaking halls seemed to have been rearranged, and he could have sworn the last time he was here the grand sweep of the antebellum staircase curved in the other direction.

The guards recognized Evan and snapped back, tense, arms positioned for the draw but not overtly so. They looked like they were cringing more than anything else. They stood like former soldiers but wore matching jackets and had name tags, a concession to the corporate.

Evan said, “May I come in?”

The guards moved five steps backward in unison.

Evan crossed the threshold, Joey at his back.

A spell of dizziness washed through him, the needle point of his compass spinning, pulled by a polar confusion of magnetism. He saw now that there was a slender gap in the waterfall from a failed nozzle, a glitch like a smear of lipstick across an incisor, revealing a view of the rusted pipeworks beneath. And then his perception warped into clarity and he saw it all, saw through the mansion’s backdrop to the levers and pulleys, and felt not grandeur but an awareness that the whole wild illusion was designed to inspire grandeur.

Suddenly he felt steady, legs firm once again beneath him.

“You know who I am.”

At the spearhead of the guards, the woman, KESHISHIAN from her name tag, said, “No.”

Upstairs came a string of bellowed Latin in the rough cadence of ancient poetry. Joey eased slightly behind Evan’s shoulder, and he sensed her breathing quicken.

The guard closest to Evan had his hand in an old-timey hover over his hip holster. His fingers wobbled and fear crept into his eyes and kept creeping, the situation suddenly unstable.

He drew.

Evan lunged sideways, caught the hand as it rose from the holster, fired down through the top of the guard’s boot, then broke the scaphoid and triquetrum with a precise twist of the shooting wrist.

The guard gave a warbling scream, a perversion of the birdsong outside, and canted sideways.

Keeping a one-armed embrace across his collarbones, Evan moved him like a shield as he skipped into a stomping side kick that shattered the ankle of the guard to their right. As he toppled on the caved leg, Evan stripped the Glock from the hip holster, rotated fifteen degrees, and shot the third man in the wrist of his right hand. His pistol rattled off across the forever marble.

Still clamping the first guard like a chest shield, Evan had Keshishian in the sights now and she hadn’t even managed to clear leather. Her hands were up, painted but short-cut fingernails flared, and her face held the stunned awareness that this was what true terror felt like.

The full choreography passed through Evan’s mind in the time that he blinked.

But none of it had actually happened.