“Do you need my help?” he asks.

That’s how it works.

*   *   *

Fourteen hours later Evan is standing outside Addison’s rented garage. The air tastes of car exhaust. The streetlights are broken, the stars smeared by smog, the night dark as tar. Evan is a wraith.

Addison’s brother, Carl, and his crew of friends are out scoring black tar at a park in Boyle Heights. Evan knows this. Addison is alone. Evan knows this, too.

He has done his research.

The First Commandment—Assume nothing—demands it.

The wraith raises a single knuckle, taps the garage door.

A moment later it creaks upward.

Stooped, Addison emerges from an effluvium of day-old bong water. He rocks on his heels, gauging Evan.

By design, Evan is hard to gauge. Thirty-something. Fit but not muscly. Somewhere around six feet. An average guy, not too handsome.

Addison underestimates him.

This happens a lot, also by design.

The kid’s lips twitch to the side. He jerks his head, flips his hair out of the blue eyes that have landed many a young woman on a container ship heading for uncharted waters.

“The fuck you want?” he says.

“Hector Contrell’s address,” Evan says.

The pretty-boy lashes flare, but Addison covers quickly. “No idea who that is. And no fucking way I’d tell you if I did.”

Evan looks through him. This tends to make people uneasy.

Uncertainty washes across Addison’s face, but he blinks it away. “I know people, you tool,” he says. “People who can make you disappear like that.” The snap of his fingers, sharp in the crisp air. “Who the fuck you think you are anyways?”

“The Nowhere Man,” Evan says.

The kid’s Adam’s apple jerks once. Up. Down.

The moniker is not widely known. But dark rumors have spread through certain streets like trash blown down graffitied alleys.

Addison takes a quick step to the side to stabilize himself. His voice comes out husky, pushed through a constricting throat. “That’s just a bullshit story.”

“Then you don’t have to be scared, do you?”

Addison doesn’t say anything.

“You do know what happens to the girls,” Evan tells him.

It takes a moment for Addison to relocate his voice. “They disappear.”

“To where?”

“I don’t know. Guys.”

“Who use them for…?”

The kid shrugs. Actually muffles a snicker. “Whatever guys do.”

“The address.”

“I can’t tell you. Hector will kill me. Literally kill me.”

Evan’s gaze is steady.

Addison falters. “No,” he says, a new realization dawning. “Oh, no. Look—I’m just a kid, man. I’m seventeen. You’re not gonna kill me, are you?”

There is a punch Evan was taught in his early teens by a gruff marine close-quarter-combat instructor.

It is called the palate breaker.