Lone Wolf, page 1
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
St. Martin’s Publishing Group ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
To the men and women who operate the printing presses and unstick the machinery. To the crews who mop the floors, clear the clutter, and allow space for productivity and focus. To the workers who keep the warehouses moving, the mail rooms running, and the supplies flowing. To the inventory managers who steward our tomes through the arteries of the industry so they can nourish the culture. To the editors and editorial assistants who are the first to believe and who shepherd the work from rough draft to bookshelf. To the copyeditors and proofreaders who fine-tune and triple-check. To the production editors who set the type and the designers who entice readers to judge our books by their covers. To the technologists who build the networks, debug the systems, and encrypt the ebooks. To the translators and sub-rights coordinators who search out new eyes and ears into which to deliver narratives. To the sales reps who traffic in enthusiasm, the coin of the realm. To the marketers and publicists who communicate the story of our stories so the world might receive them. To the human resourcers who replenish the departments with fresh minds. To the brains in finance and accounting who calculate the royalties, transform red to black, and aim the ship toward prosperity. To the legal counsel who protect the intellectual property and safeguard the copyrights. To the editorial directors, associate publishers, and imprint publishers who hold the infrastructure together. To the C-suite-ers, president, and publisher who keep a roof over the whole enterprise, navigate the rapidly changing landscape, and shine their vision throughout.
For devoting yourselves to this sacred undertaking and for creating the conditions for the word to go forth in all its ambition, imperfection, and occasional glory, you have my admiration and gratitude.
You are singular.
The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.
—Ernest Hemingway
Every man has a secret in him, many die without finding it.
—Stéphane Mallarmé
PROLOGUE
The important thing wasn’t how Evan got here, shirtless and blood-spattered in an underground bar, nor why he had half a human ear in his pocket, nor why the heavily perspiring bald bouncer proportioned like the Farnese Atlas seemed determined to twist Evan’s head off his torso. The important thing, given the size of the manhunt massing for him on the streets outside, was what he did with the precious next few seconds.
1
Pale Nothingness
Evan stood where the long dirt road gave over to the desolate heat-miraged loam, staring at the double-wide manufactured home where the man who was presumably his biological father lived, the man Evan had never laid eyes on, the man he had reason to believe was currently inside those four dilapidated walls.
He had the taste of dirt in his mouth, sunbaked Texas mountain laurel. A taste of land foreign to him, the taste of another kind of life.
The taste of poverty was familiar, despite the fact that his own childhood indigence had been of the urban variety. He recognized something here in the cracking cement boards that spoke to drafts, the dimpled roof that let in rain, the pink paint faded to pale nothingness that no one would ever bother to patch. It was the kind of broke that looked right back into you, into your worst parts, and told you that what you saw around you was a precise reflection of just how worthless you were and would always be.
The mailbox spoke to drunkenness and disregard, its wooden post snapped by a wayward bumper.
Parked just beyond, at an arbitrary slant where in an alternate universe a front lawn might live, was a Ford F-150 not unlike Evan’s, except this one was dark blue, with rusting wheel wells and a dent in the right rear fender.
The front door was shut against the sandpaper wind. A black trash bag that had replaced a windowpane thrashed back and forth and then fell still in the heavy heat.
Blooming in his stomach was a kind of dread he’d nearly forgotten, a dread of private stakes and private consequences, of opening a door that could never again be shut.
He stepped up onto the porch, the sagging boards rasping against the soles of his boots.
Once he knocked on that door, he could never undo it.
He searched for his breath, lost it, found it again.
He knocked.
A few seconds’ delay spoke to surprise that an unannounced visitor would trek to this edge of civilization.
And then footsteps, approaching.
2
Same Old, Same Old
The surprising thing about compiling weapons was how fucking expensive it was. You’d think from the lamestream media that any inbred mouth-breathing reprobate desirous of a good rampage could just go assemble a personal armory.
But you gotta save up.
Five hundred and change for a pump shotgun purchased in Texas to avoid registration. Seventy-five bucks for a box of rifled slug cartridges times ten for a case of 250 if you’re lucky enough to find it. Seven hundo for a semiauto shotgun bought at an Arizona gun show. Six fifty for a pistol, thirty bucks for each mag, and a hundred a pop per box of fifty hollow-point cartridges. Another fifty for a cleaning kit and one twenty-five for a supply of high-quality springs. Seventeen hundred fifty bucks for a box magazine–fed 5.56 mm NATO carbine, which he’d just picked up in Reno to circumvent California’s restrictive gun laws. Fifty dollars for each magazine and a grand for one thousand practice-ball rounds. Another two K for a case of a thousand hollow-points, which were harder to find by the day, so by the time you’re done gearing up to protect yourself you coulda bought a time-share in Palm Springs.
Hard to plan for when the only gig you can find is working minimum wage in a fucking warehouse twenty-nine hours a week, one shy of what you need to get health and benefits. The working conditions were for shit, too. Last week a foreman literally suggested they wear adult diapers on shift so they wouldn’t waste time taking bathroom breaks.
American born, raised in the prosperous nineties, now forty-three years old, and this was what Martin Quinn had—twenty-nine hours of work a week and Depends. With no prospect to ever get anything more.
The world had stopped making sense to him.
It used to be that if you busted your hump and kept your head down you could make enough to cover rent and the cable bill and maybe take a girl out for dinner and a movie on the weekend. Used to be that a high-school graduate with some credits at community college could land a job that’d keep him above the poverty line. Used to be employers valued folks who spoke English and bothered to pay for car insurance. Used to be an American could keep his head above water even if he wasn’t trained in the latest computing-whatever or hadn’t inherited Daddy’s business or couldn’t cut the line because of what kind of anatomy he came packaged with or how much pigment he had in his skin. Not that it was a right, but it was a way of life the world he’d been raised in had taught him to expect.
He didn’t have that anymore.
Now he just had resentment.
And fear.
It felt like he couldn’t trust anything anymore. The news was all fucked up and screamy, and the internet was driving everyone insane, and as far as Martin was concerned both political parties could go suck a bag of dicks. Everything felt like guilt, guilt, guilt rammed in his face 24/7. When he was younger and dumber he’d done shit he’d never do now—pinched an ass or used a slur—but that wasn’t who he was now and it felt like the world was just waiting to root out an old grudge and flatten him into all the worst parts of himself he’d ever been. When he turned on the TV, he didn’t recognize any of the actors no more, and the movies were all about lecturing people, and it seemed like every last fool in the world was trying to be an influencer, which as far as he understood meant they had good abs or tits and could make arty-farty photos of themselves with kombucha balanced on their heads while doing yoga poses or fronting like a gangsta. Then there were the other types, the freaks demanding to be celebrated for being fat or having some mental illness or coming from a country somewhere no one had ever heard of. And you couldn’t say what you thought anymore in public, and you weren’t allowed to disagree with people, and you couldn’t use words you’d used your whole life, and even the new words got updated every three minutes. The whole thing was confusing as hell, like walking barefoot through a maze of mousetraps, and if he was honest it made him feel like one of those old-ass Eskimos the tribe just shoves off on an ice floe because they’re useless. Part of him deep down suspected that was the whole point. To show him that his time was over.
When the world shifted this far upside down, it meant it was about to break.
And he was gonna be ready for it.
If anyone came for him or pushed him too far, he’d be ready.
He arriv
Martin nestled the new 5.56 mm NATO carbine between the shotguns in the rack he kept in the closet. The big gun made him feel safe, protected, like he was still worth something after all.
Even if the world didn’t have plans for him, he had plans for the world.
When he stood up to admire his weapons cache, he didn’t see the feminine figure standing behind him, gripping a belt looped into the shape of a noose.
* * *
Martin Quinn dangled from the convenient pull-up bar, the tips of his Carhartt boots stretching to graze the ground. The stool had already been neatly placed, toppled just out of reach beneath him to the side. For the first few seconds he’d tried to hoist himself up to shake his head loose, but she’d greased the metal pole with petroleum jelly, so it hadn’t been long before his arm muscles gave out. Now his weight sagged, the belt torquing his head to the left.
That always interested Karissa, which way the head tilted in a hanging. It abided by some weird natural law like wishbones and that groundhog in Punxsutawney. Her scorecard showed Left 6, Right 7, so she was pleased to even up the score.
Quinn gurgled a bit, his lower lip wet with drool. His face hadn’t purpled yet but the blood was building up, like he was embarrassed, which he should be since she’d loosed his trousers and tugged them down to his shins.
Karissa preferred not to use guns, because guns could be traced, and she liked to choose different methods to obscure the connection between jobs. Just last month, she’d crossed “fell asleep with a lit cigarette and died in a house fire” off her bingo card when dispensing with a perky accountant with a proclivity for embezzlement. This morning’s gig, autoerotic asphyxiation gone awry, would likewise leave no fingerprints.
Especially once she disposed of Quinn’s arsenal and plugged her USB Rubber Ducky drive into his antique laptop, where it would purge his search memory of anything to do with weapon acquisitions and implant a history of perusing vibrant S&M vids.
It had to go slowly, the strangulation, for the forensics to add up. Karissa needed everything to add up, because when the forensics added up that meant that she had never been here.
She stood before him, arms clasped at the small of her back, observing. It was a rarity in the human experience to watch someone die up close, and for her it held endless anthropological interest, like seeing peregrine falcons mate or an octopus crack a crab apart to get at the meat.
Quinn’s bladder released, sheeting yellow down his bare inner thigh. To no avail his fingernails scrabbled at the edge of the leather band, gouging his throat. He strained to thrust his toes into the carpet and pull another sip of air through his constricted windpipe. His eyes pleaded with her. He made squeaking noises.
People said the weirdest shit before they died. Karissa collected dying words. Mostly folks were scared or regretful. Few were angry or defiant; almost everyone begged. The most common refrain was “Wait.” That always amused her. Wait for what?
Quinn choked some more, his bluing lips trying to shape themselves to say something.
She was curious.
She heeled one of the ten-pound dumbbells off the baseboard and rolled it over toward him. His boots scrabbled for purchase and then found it, buying him a few inches’ lift.
The words came so soft she had to step right up to him. At five foot four, she had to tilt her face up near his, close enough that she could feel his breath against her cheeks. She was flat-chested and tapered, gymnast-strong, and her power caught most everyone, Martin Quinn included, off guard.
He wobbled on his precarious perch, the dumbbell rolling beneath his toes. “… Joshy … tell … wish I … more time with … made it … right … him…”
More of the usual.
Karissa sidled a half step in, catching waves of heat from Quinn’s body and the smell of urine. Their lips, almost close enough to kiss.
She placed the ball of her foot on the dumbbell, rolling it slowly out from under Quinn’s toes. His eyes bulged. A blood vessel had given way, a lightning strike bleeding through the sclera. “… wait,” he creaked, his legs straining to hold the dumbbell underfoot. “… wait…”
Same old, same old, and besides, she had another stop today.
With a brisk nudge of her toe, she pushed the dumbbell free.
3
A Once-Brutal Man
Orphan X was missing.
It had been three days since Evan Smoak had blinked off the radar—or blinked further off the off-the-radar realm he inhabited—and Joey had kept herself busy being furious with him so she didn’t have to be worried.
He wasn’t answering his RoamZone phone, which had happened precisely never in all the time she’d known him, not once since he’d slammed into her on a mission way back and they’d gotten stuck with each other. X kinda sorta looked after her and she looked after him, too, because if left to his own devices, he would’ve fallen desperately behind when it came to digital intrusion (and, like, interpersonal skills). And besides, someone had to make sure the world’s most dangerous assassin didn’t embarrass himself.
Even though she was seventeen and he was, like, late-thirties old, they had some stuff in common, her and Evan, like that they were both recruited out of broke-ass foster homes into the full-black Orphan Program by three-letter-agency types intent on turning them into disposable weapons. Joey had washed out early on ’cuz turned out that while hacking was her love language, killing enemies of the state in violation of international law wasn’t so much her jam. And X—after neutralizing boo-koo targets in boo-koo time zones—had proven to be not so disposable once he’d parted ways with the Program, so the joke was on the government asshats who thought they could take him down.
Not that they’d stopped trying.
Since Evan had been on his own, he took pro bono missions under the guise of the Nowhere Man, who (Movie Trailer Voice:) Helped the Powerless and Downtrodden Who Had Nowhere Left to Turn.
A secret phone number passed from one client to the next: 1-855-2-NOWHERE. When someone in the seriously worst moment of their life dialed the line, the call got split into digital packets and filtered through a host of encrypted virtual-private-network tunnels on various continents before it rang through to the RoamZone.
The one thing you could count on in this screwed-up world?
The Nowhere Man would answer.
Which is why, after seventy-two hours of him not picking up, Joey had finally caved in to her mounting concerns and broken into his place to see what the hell was going on. The front door, with its labyrinth of internal security bars, water core to deter battering rams, and murderers’ row of next-level dead bolts, was a pretty good disincentive for mortals who were not her. She’d gotten through it before, though it had taken a half hour, two sizes of bump keys, a Dangerfield Z-wrench, a .023-inch-gauge half-diamond pick, and a copious serving of light-viscosity spray lubricant (insert gross dude joke here). So the next time she’d been over and Evan had retreated to meditate on his floating bed, she’d taken an impression of his key to save time in the future.
Now here she was, alone in the deserted penthouse.
She’d been standing frozen on the poured-concrete floor for maybe ten minutes trying to make her brain believe what her eyes were feeding her.
The RoamZone.
Sitting on the kitchen island.
