Into the Fire Read online

  Keeping Max at his side, Evan moved straight past the elevator and a sextet of Le Corbusier lounge chairs scattered like dice cubes. They stepped into the stairwell, the door sucked shut behind them, and they stood a moment in the silence.

  No one walks in Los Angeles. And no one takes the stairs.

  They started up.

  Floor after floor, accompanied only by the tapping of their footsteps. Max seemed to be in good shape. Working construction will do that.

  They emerged onto the seventeenth floor, Evan pressing the door open slowly with a flat palm. The empty hall fanned into view and, at the end, the sign for Merriweather Accountancy.

  Corner office.

  They exited the stairwell, Max picking up the pace.

  Evan put the bar of his forearm across Max’s chest, stopping him.

  Max said, “What?”

  Evan pointed down. White drywall dust sprinkled the carpet fibers by the baseboard, right at the seam where a vacuum couldn’t reach.

  Max said, “So?”

  Evan pointed up.

  Drilled into the ceiling, angled down the hall toward Grant’s door, was a bullet security camera with the sticker still applied to its base: IRONKLAD KAM. Fresh from the company.

  Grant had been scared, all right. Scared enough to install a new security system at the office.

  “What do we do now?” Max whispered.

  Evan reached up and swiveled the camera, moving to keep them both in its blind spot. A red light glowed at the bottom the whole time, the recording uninterrupted. They wound up on its far side, the lens aimed at the stairwell door through which they had just emerged.

  They walked down the hall. Evan paused near the thick wooden door, peering around the corner up the intersecting corridor. Aside from a fire-extinguisher cabinet and an anachronistic ashtray stand by the elevator, this hallway was also empty. Evan turned back to the door. Set his ear to the fine grain. No vibrations from within. The knob turned readily in his grip.

  Unlocked.

  The suction of the opening door pulled a mini flurry of feathers out across the tops of Evan’s boots. The door swung inward a few inches and then caught on a slashed throw pillow. Evan shoved through the wadded-up fabric and peered inside.

  The lobby was trashed. Leather couch cushions punctured, framed pictures shattered, a sheepish fern rising naked from a mound of soil and pottery shards.

  Behind Evan a strangled noise escaped Max’s throat.

  They eased through the reception area. Files strewn across the carpet, reference books torn from shelves, the chairs upended. The desk looked violated, drawers extracted from the slots like teeth pulled from a wooden mouth.

  Evan said, “Impressive job.”

  Max wiped his forehead. “Can’t quite find it in me to marvel at the professionalism.”

  Grant’s office showed more of the same. The cylindrical locks had been popped neatly out of the big file cabinets, the contents rifled through. On the desk an even row of unplugged cords edged the blank rectangle where a computer would go. Evan felt like he was connecting the dots that the Terror had connected days before, walking in his footsteps. He placed his hand on the leather blotter, wondering if the computer had held the address of Grant’s cabin in Big Bear.

  The afternoon sun slanted through the blinds, chopping the bare desk into noirish bands of goldenrod. A dedicated monitor on the wall showed a livestream from the bullet camera in the hall. Were it not for the time stamp counting off minutes and seconds, it might have been a still life: Stairwell Door at Rest.

  Awards had been raked from the dark walnut cabinets and flipped from the walls, rubbling the base of the old-timey wainscoting. KIWANIS CLUB COURAGEOUS CITIZEN AWARD. FRIEND OF LAPD. KEY TO THE COMMUNITY OF LA CRESCENTA. Plaques praising Grant’s work heading up ethics oversight and peer review for the California Board of Accountancy had been snapped in two, the splintered edges rearing from the heap.

  Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

  Evan’s eye caught on a photograph near the tip of his boot. It showed a family reunion, a raft of Merriweathers crowded together with smiling faces and matching T-shirts naming kin and year. Family reunions were yet another American custom that Evan viewed with an anthropologist’s remove: Decennially, relatives of the species homo sapiens gathered to wear coordinated garb, swap origin tales, and compare like-expressed genetic traits.

  Pillar-of-the-community Grant was front and center in the picture, surrounded by a subcluster of his immediate family. Evan searched for Max’s face but didn’t see it.

  Max followed Evan’s gaze, said, “Yeah, I didn’t get invited to stuff like that. Especially after Violet.”

  “Your ex,” Evan said.

  Emotion bloomed behind Max’s face, glassing his pupils, weighing on his cheeks. He nodded. Cleared his throat.

  “When I saw that guy—the Terror—with the knife, I thought…” Max paused. “They say your life flashes before your eyes. But it doesn’t. Just your biggest regret. Just one.” He wet his lips. “I was never good enough for her. I just wanted to pretend I was.”

  Evan studied him. He was unsure why Max was telling him this, what would drive a man to share such a thing in the midst of this wreckage.

  Max fixed him with a questioning gaze. “You’ve never met someone who makes you want to be … I don’t know. More?”

  “Than what?”

  “Than what you are,” Max said. “A different person, even?”

  Evan thought of his last dinner at Mia’s house. She’d cooked linguini with red sauce, a combination he’d never encountered. They’d sipped wheat-based Ukrainian vodka aged in wood for six months. Afterward they’d kissed in the doorway like a couple from a movie, from TV. Her mouth had been soft and promising. A domestic scene unlike anything he’d experienced before and would likely experience again.

  He said, “No.”

  He moved on, picking through some of the mess on the floor.

  Max watched him for a time. Then said, “Come on, man.”

  Evan looked at him.

  “You’re telling me you’re never up at night reviewing everything you’ve ever done wrong?” Max said. “Overwhelmed by the whole … I don’t know … fuck, fragility of the universe?” He looked exasperated, raw with exhaustion and stress. “Late at night I can tell you every last thing I’ve ever screwed up. Every time I hurt someone’s feelings. Every faux pas. Every dumb thing. In junior high I was the second-smallest kid in my class. So I held Ryan Steck underwater in the pool during PE. He was the smallest kid. I thought it would make me feel better.” He took a breath. “When I think about it, I still feel it. Like an ache in my chest.”

  Evan thought of a round man with a bullet hole in the back of his head, slumped forward, his face in his soup. All these years later, he could still hear the rattle of the hanging curtain beads, the static-tinged foreign words spilling from the old radio. He still felt the Makarov pistol, warm in his hand.

  “Do you think he still remembers?” Max said. “That he’s up somewhere late at night thinking about what a dick I was?”

  Evan said, “If he’s still alive and that’s what tops his list of concerns, I’d say Ryan Steck has it pretty good.”

  Max looked unsatisfied with that, but Evan wasn’t here to provide satisfaction. He stepped behind the desk once more, turned over the extricated drawers, checked the bottoms.

  “They got through every lock in this office,” Max said. “Whatever that key leads to is long gone.”

  “If the lock was in this office,” Evan said. “This is the most logical place someone would look. Which means Grant probably wouldn’t stash anything here.”

  “So why are we here?”

  “To see what we can find that might point us to another location.”

  The First Commandment: Assume nothing.

  Crouched above a shard of coffee mug, the echo of the Commandment in his head, Evan froze.

  He said, “What if the key
isn’t a key?”

  Max said, “If the key isn’t a key, then what is it?”

  Evan dug it out of his pocket again, stared at it on his palm. Shiny gold. Pristine. Slightly too big.

  Like a prop.

  He crossed to the rubble at the wainscoting, picked out a fallen shadow box, brushed away the shards. KEY TO THE COMMUNITY OF LA CRESCENTA. An indentation in the foam backing cast a familiar shape in negative relief.

  Evan slipped the key off the chain connecting it to the Swiss Army knife and thumbed it into place.

  A perfect fit.

  “Wait—what?” Max said. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he give me a fake key?”

  Evan said, “He wasn’t giving you a key. He was giving you a key chain.”

  With the edge of his nail, he pried open the attachments from the red casing. The key chain was diminutive, the attachments few. Penknife, scissors, file.

  Max crouched opposite him, their eyes level. Evan pressed the edge of the penknife into the pad of his index finger. It didn’t cut.

  A dummy blade.

  He pinched it between thumb and forefinger. Sure enough, it slid off its casing, revealing the metal head of a USB plug concealed beneath.

  A thumb drive.

  Max blew out a breath. “Grant was clever. I’ll give him that.”

  Etched into the metal stub of the USB connector, visible only if tilted to the light, was a logo formed of the union of two letters, the right slant of the M forming the first rise of the A. A nifty little piece of branding for Merriweather Accountancy.

  Over Max’s shoulder Evan registered movement on the wall monitor. A slender man emerging from the stairwell, turning his shoulders to slip through the barely cracked door. A black wool balaclava covered his face, save for two almond-shaped eyeholes. He looked too skinny to be the Terror, at least based on Max’s description, but the exposed forearms were also ridged with carefully inflicted scar patterns.

  His hands turned ghostly white by latex gloves.

  One held a pistol, the barrel stretched wickedly long by a suppressor.

  11

  Much More Force, Very Specifically Directed

  Evan hustled Max out of Grant’s office and into the lobby, careful not to slip on the scattered files.

  Already he was running scenarios. Grant’s killers had hacked the new security feed to monitor the office. When the bullet camera had mysteriously swiveled, they’d sent a man to investigate.

  A man with a suppressed pistol.

  Evan and Max neared the front door, and Max balked, jerking back.

  “Wait a sec,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Shouldn’t we hide? Or run the other way?” His jaw was clenched, veins standing out in his neck. “Do you even have a gun?”

  “We don’t want him dead,” Evan said.

  “I don’t want anyone dead,” Max whispered. “Especially me.”

  Evan grabbed his collar and shoved him through the door, staying at his back.

  Up the length of the hall, the masked man stood beneath the swiveled bullet camera, staring directly up. Under the hem of black wool, his Adam’s apple floated between the flexed pillars of his neck muscles.

  The almond-shaped eye cutouts snapped down at Evan and Max, standing in full view before the door.

  The man’s shoulder tensed, the pistol starting to rise.

  Evan propelled Max up the intersecting corridor toward the elevator doors.

  A muffled pop sounded behind them, and a puff of plaster dust lifted from the wall.

  Evan shoved Max toward the elevator. “Push the DOWN button. Go.”

  Max ran.

  Evan swung open the wall-mount cabinet, freed the fire extinguisher, and unleashed a cloud of carbon dioxide behind him. Particulates filled the hall, visibility instantly reaching blizzard conditions. The man would be cautious turning the corner; now he’d be doubly so.

  Evan backed up, swinging the nozzle, storm-making. He could hear Max jabbing at the DOWN button over and over. At last the elevator doors opened.

  Dumping the extinguisher, Evan turned and swept Max into the waiting car, shoving him into the protected front corner. He spun into the opposite pocket, jamming his thumb into the OPEN DOORS button.

  “What the holy fuck?” Max said, sliding to the floor. “Let’s go!”

  But Evan kept the button depressed. His body was clear of the line of fire. Only a sliver of his face was exposed as he peered through the swirling particulates, waiting for a human form to take shape.

  Another two pops. A pair of rounds embedded in the back of the elevator.

  Max’s knees were tucked under his chin, his arms covering his head. He stared up at Evan. “What the hell are you doing?”

  The next shot blew out the light casing above them.

  At last Evan sensed a change in the textured air, a billow of white preceding the man’s approach.

  Evan released the OPEN DOORS button.

  Flattened to the wall.

  The bumpers started to shut.

  The man’s gun hand shot forward between the closing doors, the long barrel bucking once, twice.

  Evan caught the arm at the wrist, jerking it forward, locking the elbow. The elevator doors bump-bump-bumped against the limb but did not retract.

  Through the cage of his arms, Max’s eyes looked huge.

  Evan said, “You might want to look away.”

  Max complied.

  Hyperextending the arm, Evan dealt a sharp hand-heel blow to the forearm on the thumb side near the crook of the elbow.

  The radial head gave a wet pop as it dislocated.

  The man screamed.

  The pistol dropped to the floor, bounced once on the threshold, rattled through the gap, and vanished.

  Evan let go, the limb slithering back into the thickening whiteness.

  He tapped the button for the lobby.

  It was unlikely that Max’s pursuers would have sent more than one man to deal with a security-camera irregularity and more unlikely still that they’d want to have a shoot-out in a public lobby. But if they did, Evan was game.

  The elevator doors eased shut, a gentle whir announcing their descent. The air was clear, but a chemical taint lingered, the smell of an aggressively treated Jacuzzi.

  The speakers piped in a flute rendition of Christopher Cross, perennially stuck between the moon and New York City.

  Evan’s ARES remained holstered, invisible beneath his shirt.

  The injury he’d inflicted was a precise one. And rare.

  Nursemaid’s elbow is generally seen in children because their bones are more cartilaginous than those of adults, which means that the radial head pops in and out more easily. It requires much more force, very specifically directed, to dislocate the bone in adults.

  Evan had very specifically directed much more force.

  Their would-be assassin would have trouble turning his wrist in either direction. His forearm would be locked in a midrange position. Grasping would be difficult.

  It’s hard to be an assassin if you can’t grasp.

  So he’d require medical attention.

  Rare injuries are easier to track.

  Which can prove useful when you’re dealing with a professional killer wearing a balaclava and latex gloves.

  Max gulped a few breaths. Then stood up. He shuddered off a chill and shifted his weight, pulling up the lank hair falling across his eyes. His gaze darted over to Evan, and then he shuddered again less violently and cracked a wry almost-smile.

  “Okay,” he said. “So that just happened.”

  12

  A Thousand Brittle Pieces

  Riding across town to his apartment, Max stuck his arm out the passenger window and let his hand skim across the passing air.

  The Nowhere Man—who’d given only a first name of Evan—drove the Chevy Malibu at a steady pace, the needle pointed at the speed limit. He kept his gaze ahead, but his eyes stayed on constant rotation around the rear- and sidev
iew mirrors. The guy seemed pensive, chewing on his thoughts.

  Max’s heartbeat had slowed at last, but he still sensed the afterwash of adrenaline in his veins. His skin felt dead; it felt like the color gray. He wondered if he’d ever sleep again.

  Evan finally broke the silence. “What did you mean?” he said. “That Violet made you want to be more than you were?”

  The cool wind buffeted Max’s arm, whipped his hair around his eyes. He realized he was using it to jar himself out of numbness.

  He thought for a beat, cleared his throat. “I was from the wrong side of the tracks,” he said. “I mean, only by comparison, but still. Her parents basically disowned her. I was trying to support her on a construction worker’s salary, going to night school to finish my degree. You know the kind of pressure that puts on you?”

  Evan said, “No.”

  Max laughed. “Well, if you ever have a shot with someone who’s worth it, try not to fuck it up.” He looked at Evan ruefully. “Man, did I try not to fuck it up. Me, in night school.” His chuckle, even to his own ears, held no amusement. “Pulling double shifts. And then when she got—” His breath snagged. “When she got pregnant.” He shook his head. “But I wasn’t. More. I was still just me.”

  They coasted along the blacktop, sliding between cars, the city flowing by indifferently.

  Max said, “When I first saw her, I knew, right? I know that sounds lame, but right away, she just … She hit me in the spinal cord. She was gambling. Slots. And the seat next to her was empty.”

  The scene played in his head now, polished to jewel-like clarity by a million viewings. Sensation started to prickle his skin again, warmth spreading beneath the surface.

  “I sat down and hit a jackpot with my first pull.” Max smiled. “And you feel like a hero, right? Like you’re in the movie and someone’s writing your lines for you?” He paused. “You ever have that?”

  Evan said, “No.”

  “Well, I guess you don’t need it. I mean, with what you do, you’re already there. But for me? In that moment? All of a sudden, it was like the whole world was open to me. If you could’ve seen how she looked just sitting there, doing nothing. And I remember thinking, If I can get this right, this one thing, all the other pieces will fall into place. And I got it. But they didn’t.” Max felt the loss now—a pressure at the backs of the eyes, his throat pressing upward. “Because I’m a fuckup. Who was I kidding that one thing could make everything fall into place?”