Into the Fire Read online

  He stared at the passing cars, the work-casual folks on the sidewalk clustered around gourmet-food trucks. The oily taste of car exhaust left a bitterness at the back of his throat.

  “Everything’s a story,” Evan said. “You want that to be the story of you, it can be.”

  Max shifted to look over at him. “What’s the story of you?”

  “That’s not what this is,” Evan said.

  “What what is?”

  “This isn’t a therapy session.”

  “Well,” Max said, “given what you do, it sure as hell seems like you’re working something out.”

  The Nowhere Man didn’t appear to like that answer. “So what happened?” he asked. “To you and Violet?”

  Max closed his eyes, breathed the pollution. The wind poured through the window, cooling the sweat on his face. Evan had refused to answer any of his questions about personal shit. So he figured he was entitled to do the same. Especially about this. But he was already back in it now.

  Awakened by screaming.

  Violet in the bathroom.

  Red drops on white tile. Thin rivulets down the insides of her thighs. She was crying in a way that he’d never seen, sobbing and hyperventilating at once, bent over, one bloodstained hand gripping the lip of the sink. She didn’t seem to register him there at her side, but when he touched her, she crumpled into him, a dead leaf collapsing into a thousand brittle pieces.

  The only thing harder than postpartum depression, they were informed by the well-intentioned ob-gyn, was postpartum depression after a failed pregnancy. And the only thing harder than that was simultaneously grappling with the knowledge that their hope for future children had been excised as surgically as her ruptured fallopian tube.

  Violet was wrecked, relentlessly battered by a confusion of hormones. And he was barely functioning, hollowed out with grief. They started fighting daily. By being born, he’d lost a mother. By losing a child, he feared he’d lose his marriage. He buried himself in work and overtime and night school. Violet grew sluggish, her broken heart a millstone at her core. She said she wanted to die. That she didn’t see the point of going on. How could she go back to work and spend her days surrounded by throngs of adorable kindergartners?

  It was just talk, of course. The kinds of things you say when you’re trying to give shape to god-awful emotions roiling inside you, when you’re trying to process and vent and purge. He thought they’d figure it out. He thought they’d move on. He thought they would be fine right up until he came home from an evening class to find her in the bathtub, the cooling water the color of merlot, her floating arms etched from the razor.

  * * *

  Evan parked several blocks away and scouted Max’s apartment to make sure no one was watching it. Then he went back and retrieved Max, the two of them making a quick approach through the parking lot, skirting the building manager’s trusty Buick in the front spot. On the second floor, they ducked the manager’s window and eased into Max’s place, closing the door silently behind them.

  Standing in the apartment, Evan noted how bare it was. It was a mess now, certainly, after the Terror had taken a tour through all of Max’s belongings and the drywall, but there hadn’t been much to begin with. Sawed-open couch, shattered TV on the floor, toppled coffee table. A few plates—now shattered—and some silverware dashed on the chipped linoleum in what passed for a kitchen nook. A bureau’s worth of clothes hurled around the bedroom. A few empty packing boxes piled in the corner.

  From what Max had told him, it had been about two and a half years since he’d rented this place after Violet, and yet it seemed he’d never really moved in.

  Maybe he didn’t want to.

  Maybe moving in meant acknowledging that she was gone.

  While Evan stood watch at the big front window, Max scurried around his bedroom grabbing personal items—clothes, toothbrush, and whatever else reasonable people considered to be necessities.

  The second-floor corridor was empty, the street quiet. Evan cast another glance across the sparse apartment.

  The habitat of a man who had figured out how to exist but not really live.

  Evan wondered if his own place was merely a dressed-up version of the same. He had the thumb drive out, tapping it against his palm. He was eager to get to a secure location, plug it into his laptop, and see what the hell had started this ball rolling.

  Max finally emerged from the bedroom, a bag slung over his shoulder. “Now what?”

  “Now we tuck you away somewhere safe.”

  “Like where?”

  Evan considered. From what he’d heard of the Terror and seen of the shooter at Grant’s office, he figured these were street-level guys. Dangerous men, sure, but he doubted they had access to classified databases. Even so, he was reluctant to put Max on an airplane or check him in to a hotel.

  Evan kept a number of safe houses scattered around Los Angeles, equipped with load-out gear and alternate vehicles. The locations were, like Evan’s financial holdings, fully off the books, buried beneath an avalanche of shell corps and offshore holding companies. Because all transactions around the safe houses had to be double-blind, they took a hefty investment of resources to acquire and maintain.

  The instant a client entered a safe house, it was blown forever. He’d use one if absolutely necessary but preferred not to.

  “We have a few options,” Evan said. “Number one: I give you a bundle of cash and a burner phone, you get in the Chevy Malibu and drive away. Then you keep on driving. You find a hotel five states away, pay cash for everything, and I contact you when it’s over.”

  Max said, “No.”

  “Why no?”

  “Because,” Max said, “I gave my word.” He looked like he needed to sleep for a month. “I’m not just gonna run away. I may not be much help, but I have to be around in case you need me. Until it’s … you know, settled. And everyone else is safe.”

  Evan gestured at the tufts of stuffing stripped from the gutted couch. “You didn’t give your word for this.”

  “I told Grant I’d take care of it for him. That I’d keep it away from his wife and kids. That I’d see it through for him. So I have to do that.” Max swayed a bit on his feet and then said again, “I gave my word.”

  “You don’t have to prove anything,” Evan said. “Not anymore.”

  Max gave a hoarse laugh edged with self-loathing. His gaze was loose, unfocused.

  “So what?” Evan said. “If you do this thing for Grant, it’ll prove you’re a good person?”

  “No,” Max said. “It’ll prove I’m worth something.” His eyes moistened, and he looked quickly away. “I thought, just one time, it might be nice not to let anyone down, that’s all. It sounds so fucking juvenile, but…”

  “What?” Evan said.

  “I just … I could use a win, you know?”

  His voice had grown husky, and for a moment Evan thought he might actually break down under the strain of it all. But then he seemed to shake off the thoughts and reset himself. “The other options,” he said. “What are they?”

  Evan gave a nod, glad to move on. “You have anywhere you can go? Anywhere safe?”

  “Not really,” Max said. “I mean, my dad’s still around, but my family’s not really … Like I said, we’re not really close.”

  “Family’s not an option,” Evan said. “We can’t put them at risk.”

  “Not that we have to worry about that,” Max said. “Them sticking out their neck for me, I mean.”

  Evan said, “Okay.”

  Max pressed his palm to his forehead. “Shit,” he said. “There is one— No, never mind. Shit. Okay. There might be one option but it’s…”

  “It’s what?”

  “Hard.”

  Evan stepped on a cushion on the floor, the knife slash gaping. “Harder than this?”

  Max swallowed. The last bit of color had drained from his face.

  “Yes,” he said.

  13

&n
bsp; The Badness of My Heart

  The cottage in the gently rolling hills of South Pasadena was tucked behind an ivy-covered brick wall. The streets were wide here, the sunshine plentiful even in the late afternoon, even in November. Polished fenders, moist green lawns, spit-shined windows—it all had a big-ticket gleam.

  Evan had taken every precaution approaching the residence, but it was evident that there was nothing on this patch of neighborhood but an excess of money. Beside him Max shuffled from foot to foot.

  The doorbell gave a resonant chime that belied an interior far deeper than what the cutesy stone-and-stucco façade implied. Evan felt the key chain—and the thumb drive it hid—pressing against his thigh through the tactical-discreet pocket of his cargo pants, right beneath one of his backup magazines.

  Footsteps sounded.

  Max said, “Maybe I should just wait in the—”

  Violet opened the door.

  She was as striking as Max had described. Glossy black hair lay pronounced against her pale skin, a single forties wave peekabooing one eye. Bloody red lipstick. Sharp, intelligent irises the color of espresso.

  She wore leggings and a gauzy loose sweater over a fitted midnight-blue shirt. Instinctively she tugged at her cuffs, covering her wrists with her sleeves, but not before Evan saw the telltale marks. Thin raised scars, white as milk, like the branches of a dead tree.

  Her eyes sharpened further, her brow twisting. For an instant her face wore a bare expression of unadulterated hurt, and then it hardened, locking down the softer emotion.

  “Get him off my property,” she said.

  Evan said, “His life is at risk.”

  “Yeah? So was mine.”

  Max stared at the porch, at the tops of his shoes. Evan could feel the heat from her glare, and he was certain Max could, too.

  “I can’t believe you’d show your face here,” Violet said.

  Max nodded and faded back off the porch, never lifting his gaze. He waited in the grass, a salesman afraid to approach.

  Violet looked at Evan, and he could see the strength in her. She was breathing hard, her neck flushed, her clavicles pronounced on the inhalations.

  Evan said, “He did a favor for someone, and now a crew of hit men are after him.”

  Violet’s focus moved past Evan’s shoulder to Max. Her blink rate had picked up. She pressed her lips together. Unrolled them. “I’ll give you this, Max. At least you don’t make the same mistake twice. You find yourself a whole new one.”

  Her voice now was steady. Not a tremor. This is what pain looks like when stoked to a bright light, Evan thought. It gets cold.

  “If I don’t get him off the street and hide him,” Evan said, “he will be killed. He said your parents are—” He almost said “slumlords,” corrected course. “Real-estate kingpins. With thousands of holdings in questionable neighborhoods. He said you work for them now.”

  “Yes,” she said, each word diamond-hard. “I do. Now. It was the best option, and I took it.” She was going for a wounded kind of pride, but her misery at the admission was evident.

  Evan asked, “Can you find a place that’s between tenants in a”—shitty part of town—“lower-income area?”

  “For what?”

  “To hide him. To save his life.”

  “Why should I put myself at risk for him?”

  “You’re nearly three years divorced. And it wasn’t amicable. It’s incredibly doubtful anyone would think Max would come to you—”

  “You can count me in that group,” she cut in.

  “—and be able to connect the dots from you to the business of your parents—who dislike him—and then to one of countless places they own around Los Angeles.” Evan paused. “Let’s just say it’s beyond a long shot.”

  “You misunderstood my question,” she said. “I didn’t ask if I’d be at risk for him. I asked why I should put myself at risk for him.”

  A patch of roses breathed a lovely scent that seemed out of place amid all the bitterness.

  Evan said, “I can’t answer that.”

  She said, “Who are you?”

  “Someone who’s helping him?”

  “Out of the goodness of your heart?”

  Evan considered this. “Out of the badness of my heart, I suppose.”

  She seemed to appreciate his candor. “It’s really life-or-death?”

  “It is.”

  “Fine. I’ll find somewhere. Somewhere really crappy. On one condition. Ask him what he did to me. You make him tell you. You should know who you’re helping.”

  The breeze from the rose garden now smelled saccharine, a sickly indulgence.

  Evan said, “I will.”

  “I’ll give you three addresses,” she said. “Unrented places. Pick whichever you like. Do not lose the keys. Return them when you’re done. And then I never want to hear from you—or him—again. Also? I don’t know anything about this.”

  Evan said, “Copy that.”

  “And tell him…”

  “What?”

  “Tell him I’m sorry about Grant.” Her scowl returned. “Wait out here.”

  The door closed abruptly. The footsteps padded away, more sharply than before.

  Evan exhaled through his teeth and eased back until he came level with Max on the front lawn.

  Max said, “Look, after she … after she tried to commit suicide, I was lost. I remember going to the drugstore one day to buy shampoo and just standing there, paralyzed, because I couldn’t decide what to get. Like for twenty minutes, just frozen.” He wet his lips, swallowed. “We were gonna be parents. And then, all at once, we weren’t.”

  “What did you do to her?” Evan asked.

  “I felt so fucking helpless,” Max said. “Just … at a total loss, you know? She didn’t want to go on, and I didn’t know when she’d do it again. She was sick with grief. She was sleeping all day and throwing up when she ate, and I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t do anything but hold her hair, and she looked … she looked like she had nothing inside her anymore. Like she’d already gone and left a husk behind. I would’ve done whatever I could to help her, but I didn’t have the answers. I didn’t have any of the answers. Everything I tried just made things worse. I would have done anything. You understand? Anything.”

  “You couldn’t handle it anymore,” Evan said.

  Max took in a breath. “I guess not.”

  “So you left.”

  Max plucked a glossy rose petal from the bush, ground it between his thumb and forefinger. “Sure,” he said. “I left.”

  A silence ensued, nothing but the cheery chirps of songbirds on the scented breeze. The closed door confronted them like a moral rebuke.

  Evan felt Max’s eyes on the side of his face.

  “Lemme guess.” Max’s tone was sharp, but it was clear that just served to hide the shame. “That makes you not like me.”

  Evan said, “I don’t have to like you to protect you.”

  14

  Take Names

  Violet had seen through her promise to find a supremely crappy place for Max.

  The ramshackle house was bedded into the side of a hill, the crumbling rear wall patched with fiberglass siding. A trash bag duct-taped over a smashed window fluttered with sporadic violence, a bat trying to tear free of a trapped wing. The plumbing appeared to be intact, the pipes visible at intervals in the decaying drywall. The few overhead lights hummed with exertion. A cracked sliding glass door let onto a narrow bog of long-sitting water in the backyard, the rotted fence spitting distance from the threshold.

  A Best Buy box under one arm, Evan paused in the main room and took in the place. It was unclear whether it was in the process of being torn down or rebuilt.

  He supposed he could say the same for Max.

  Lincoln Heights wasn’t as bad as it used to be, fair-trade coffeehouses staking a tentative hold on corners that used to be gang-held. But it was still the Eastside.

  Over where the kitchen used to
be, a pair of work boots, a loaded tool belt, and a McKenna Properties baseball cap lay where they had fallen, as if the worker who’d owned them had ascended to heaven, leaving his earthly belongings behind.

  As Max poked his head into the dorm-size bedroom, Evan tugged the Dell laptop out of the box, shedding the Styrofoam bookends. It had cost a little over two hundred dollars, money well spent for a clean device on which to test Grant’s thumb drive. When Evan dropped the box, it stuck to the floor with a thud, impaled on an exposed length of tack strip where the carpet had been ripped up.

  A new tile floor had been laid in anticipation of a kitchen so Evan sat there cross-legged, resting the laptop on the shelf of his knees.

  As it booted up, he pulled the Swiss Army knife key chain from his pocket and flicked up the thumb drive. Max returned from the bedroom, leaned against the wall, and looked at Evan.

  Evan plugged in the thumb drive.

  A series of files populated the screen. He frowned at the confusion of numbers.

  Max cleared his throat. “What is it?”

  Evan said, “Spreadsheets.”

  “Of what?”

  Evan didn’t answer. He clicked. And he read.

  For a long time, there was no sound save Max’s breathing and the occasional tap of water dripping from a sweating pipe. The glow from the dim can lighting was as faint as the laptop screen, a chiaroscuro contrast of shadows and silhouettes.

  Max said, again, “What is it?”

  “Gimme a sec,” Evan said.

  “It’s been forty minutes, man.”

  Evan checked the Victorinox fob watch clipped to his belt loop, the time surprising him. “Come over here,” he said.