Orphan X by Gregg Andrew Hurwitz

Author:Gregg Andrew Hurwitz [Hurwitz, Gregg Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller
ISBN: 9781466876514
Amazon: B010M4T5C2
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2016-01-19T06:00:00+00:00

28

Unholy Union

Evan walked the L.A. River to clear his head. The unlikeliest-looking waterway in the county, it was a polluted trickle through a wide concrete channel. Shrubs dotted the water’s edge, and graffiti embellished the sloped sides of the basin. The slumbering homeless lay like sacks of grain, dead or drunk or just goddamned exhausted. Downtown was overhead and all around, and yet down here, sunk in a trough beneath the city, it felt like a desolate underworld, isolated from man and God.

The December air whipped at Evan’s neck as he sidestepped overturned shopping carts, loose tires from semis, the occasional mossy hull of a wrecked car left behind by some musclehead who’d tried to play drag-racing Danny Zuko when the water dried up.

Traffic hummed all around, invisible save the lightsaber headlights scanning the darkness above and the soothing white noise that thrummed the basin walls, a primordial murmur of blood rushing through veins. Evan had come to the stretch flowing beneath the East Los Angeles Interchange, the unholy union of Highway 101, Route 60, and Interstates 5 and 10. He’d read somewhere that this was the busiest highway exchange in the world, daily spinning half a million vehicles through its confusion of cloverleafs.

He realized now why he’d come to this place to make the phone call he was about to make: It was a comforting reminder of his anonymity in this great stacked sprawl of a city.

The bullets fired into Lotus Dim Sum had been meant for him. Someone had set Danny Slatcher on his tail, put him in the crosshairs. And Katrin wasn’t the bait. Couldn’t be the bait. Because Evan knew how to read people. Jack had taught him that, as had eight different psyops experts over years of training and countless under-the-gun interactions since then. Her tears had been real—as was her fear. Which meant that he’d dragged her into this. Devastated her life. Gotten her father killed.

Of the myriad questions scratching at the walls of his skull, one rose above the din: Who had hired Danny Slatcher to kill him?

Evan had certainly cultivated plenty of enemies. As a covert operator, he’d put countless notches into his gun belt, and he’d added quite a few more as a freelancer. His would-be murderer could be anyone from a foreign insurgent leader to a vengeance-bent relative of someone Evan had dispatched. Whoever it was had been working a long, smart play. They’d waited and watched, reading patterns and collecting clues, just as Evan himself had been trained to do.

He reached a patch of darker shadow beneath an overpass, the area cleared of homeless encampments, prostitutes, and druggies. A spot of privacy in the beating heart of the city. The water rustled past, its dank scent coating his lungs. He raised his tough rubber phone and dialed the number of the man who’d murdered Sam White.

It rang. And again.

There was a click, but no one spoke.

Evan said, “Which one are you?”

A silence. And then a familiar voice said, “What?”

“Which. Orphan.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.