Read the Excerpt: Lone Wolf by Gregg Hurwitz
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.
Chapter 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.
Chapter 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.
Excerpted from Lone Wolf by Gregg Hurwitz. Published by Minotaur Books.
About the Book
Once a black ops government assassin known as Orphan X, Evan Smoak left the Program, went deep underground, and reinvented himself as someone who will go anywhere and risk everything to help the truly desperate who have nowhere else to turn. Since then, Evan has fought international crime syndicates and drug cartels, faced down the most powerful people in the world and even brought down a President. Now struggling with an unexpected personal crisis, Evan goes back to the very basics of his mission—and this time, the truly desperate is a little girl who wants him to find her missing dog.
Not his usual mission, and not one Evan embraces with enthusiasm, but this unlikely, tiny job quickly explodes into his biggest mission yet, one that finds him battered between twisted AI technocrat billionaires, a mysterious female assassin who seems a mirror of himself, and personal stakes so gut-wrenching he can scarcely make sense of them.
Evan’s mission pushes him to his limit—he must find and take down the assassin known only as the Wolf, before she succeeds in completing her mission and killing the people who can identify her—a teenaged daughter of her last target, and Evan himself. Matched skill for skill, instinct for instinct, Evan must outwit an opponent who will literally stop at nothing if he is to survive.
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