Page 58 of Antihero

“Of that,” Evan said, “I’m sure.”

It was nearly eleven o’clock by the time he took up his post in the Mercedes outside Anca’s apartment. The leather-upholstered driver’s seat with its adjustable lumbar and bolsters, heater, and ten variations of massage beat his usual lookout posts and sniper hides on tree branches, attics, and heaps of rubble.

A silhouette drifted into view up at Anca’s window. She lifted a hand in a plaintive wave.

He waved back.

The bedroom light clicked off.

He reclined the seat. The wave massage vibrated his lower back. The plush pillow fronting the headrest cradled his neck. Through the windshield he had a perfect vantage to the entrance of Anca’s building across the street. Settling back, he let himself drift into a state of low-alertness that nearly qualified as dozing.

Shortly after two in the morning, he came alert at a form beelining across the road at him. Anca, wrapped to the neck in a bathrobe, feet stomped into boots, her cheeks flushed with barely restrained anger. She rapped hard on the window, though he was already reaching to lower it.

“Hypocrisy,” she said. “You said you dismiss religion because of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy isn’t in religion. It’s in being human!” She was standing on the sidewalk, shouting at him, wind whipping her bathrobe around her calves. “Just because someone tries to follow His way doesn’t mean that they can act perfectly. That’s like saying that having laws is hypocritical because there are criminals who break them.”

Her hair was shoved to one side from sleep, her hands clenched, and she canted forward on her toes as if barely holding herself back from getting angrier. Her glare held tangible rage, pain, and utter fucking helplessness.

Evan said, “Amen.”

She stood a moment longer, her face pale in the night wind. A strand of hair had blown across her eyes and she trapped it with cupped fingers and fixed it behind an ear. She blinked a few times, disoriented, as if suddenly finding herself back in her body. All the heat had washed out of her.

She moved backward a few steps, then turned, scurried across the street, and disappeared once again into her building.

Evan surfaced from the hinterland between sleep and waking at Anca’s form once more moving toward his car, this time less aggressively and in the gray light of morning. She was dressed in jeans and a bulky cable sweater, a knit hat pushing a jagged fray of bangs across her forehead.

He got the window down before she had an opportunity for more vehement knocking, though she seemed in a civil mood.

She ducked down to peek at him. “Devoted,” she observed.

He gave a reassuring shrug, if shrugs could be reassuring.

“You have behaved honorably.”

He wasn’t sure what to say, and another communicative shrug would have been overkill, so he said nothing.

Anca jerked her head toward the backseat. “Who’s that?”

Evan turned.

Candy was sitting behind him, fresh faced and beaming, one elbow slung across the armrest, the other hooked on the windowsill.

She smiled that wide smile. “His better half,” she said.

25Crazy Beasts

These days you didn’t even need a tracking device or anything. They posted their fucking locations for you. Blanca from Beauty and the Beast had checked in at a Joe & the Juice in SoHo. Bridge-and-tunnel girl movin’ on up!

They’d split up in twos ’cuz that made for better hunting, and Taz was with B-Roll, a way stronger team than Finn-Finn and Big Mikey. B-Roll had the look, the swagger, and the sweet rap.

By the time they got to SoHo, Blanca was gone but they just waited and watched her Insta story and sure enough she pinged a manicure selfie from a nail place around the corner: Rhinestone flowers, y’all!

Taz and B-Roll chilled outside till Blanca and her friend rolled out of the place, did a wide-arm singy hug thing, and split in opposite directions. Blanca was super cute IRL, high cheekbones, them big dark eyes, wearing a crop top even in cold-ass February with baggy pants rolled twice at the waistband, showing off that tan flat belly. Dayum.

B-Roll lit up a pre-roll from the stash Mikey’s cousin had boosted last month in a home invasion, toked deep, and started over to Blanca. Taz gave him the usual lead, a ten-foot standoff, holding back to see how the sitch developed.

B-Roll sidled up next to her, joint dangling in the corner of his mouth the way he could do, like it was stapled to his bottom lip. “Hey, li’l girl.”

Her mouth got all pert and she looked up through curled lashes. “Who’s little?”