Into the Fire Read online

  Max shoved off the wall and joined Evan in the weak orb of light thrown by the laptop. “It looks like a set of books.”

  “Two sets of books,” Evan said.

  “Why two?”

  “One cooked. And one real. The real one shows the actual money flow.”

  “Laundering,” Max said.

  Evan scrolled through entry after entry of figures in the low thousands. Dozens a day. “See—they’re smurfing it through these entities, breaking it up into amounts small enough not to raise any red flags.”

  The light reflected in Max’s eyes. “That’s gotta be three, four million dollars a month,” he said. “What do you think it’s from?”

  “Could be anything,” Evan said. “Drugs. Foreign money. Gunrunning.”

  “No wonder Grant was digging into it. But who was he working for?”

  “See this client code?” Evan pointed to where “HWDPD” recurred at the top of each page. “That’s Hollywood Community Police Station.”

  “They hired him?”

  “Yes. Seems like a big case for a community station—this sort of stuff usually gets kicked downtown.”

  “Even if the crimes are taking place in their jurisdiction?”

  Evan nodded. “I’m thinking they were piecing it together, prepping it for the handoff to Vice.” With a knuckle he tapped the screen. “This set of spreadsheets tracks the three steps of the process—injection, confusion, and acquisition. You inject the cash into the financial system. Then you camouflage its source through wires between various accounts. Look here. Then it loops through there, see?”

  Max nodded, tracing a figure between documents on the screen. “And then back into this account.”

  “Right. And once it’s been run through the system and cleaned up, the money’s acquired ‘legitimately’ here. See these withdrawals? Grant was still figuring it out, helping Hollywood PD shore up the case.”

  “Against who?” Max said.

  “Doesn’t say. We have the dirty books but not the names attached to them. I’m guessing these codes here are initials. But there are plenty of blanks and question marks. The case was still being built. Grant was in the process of identifying the players. Which explains why the cops couldn’t protect him. They weren’t sure who to protect him from.”

  “So what next?”

  Evan thought of the shooter from Grant’s office, nursing that injured arm. Right now he’d be fighting off the inevitable. Trying to convince himself that it would get better, that he could deal with the pain, that he wouldn’t have to go in and get that dislocated radial head popped back into place.

  Evan said, “Next I take names.”

  He snapped the laptop shut and stood. Max found his feet as well. “Should we turn this over to the cops?”

  “Sure,” Evan said. “They’ll continue the investigation. Send you on your way. And you’ll wind up like your cousin or Lorraine Lennox.”

  Max’s eyes got glassy. “Right. But how are you gonna figure out who’s behind it?”

  “Not being bound by the law enables me to be more … efficient.”

  Max nodded a few times rapidly. “Grant dealt with a lot of criminals. But something about these guys was scary enough for him to decide to put a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option in place. And the guy at my apartment? He makes the dude who shot at us look like a minor-leaguer. These are bad men.”

  Evan handed Max a roll of hundred-dollar bills and a burner cell phone. “I’ve dealt with a lot worse than money launderers and street-level hit men.” Evan started for the door. “Don’t use any credit cards. Don’t contact anyone. Don’t leave this place except to buy food. Use the phone I left you only to reach me. I’ll come back and update you on my progress tomorrow.”

  The air of the entryway was humid and thick, tinged with the soggy reek of mold.

  Evan had his hand on the doorknob when Max said, “Wait.”

  He turned around.

  “I didn’t have a chance to thank you,” Max said. “I don’t know where I’d be if it wasn’t for you. No—scratch that. I’d be dead already. I know that after the stuff with Violet … You may not be glad you’re helping me. But I am.”

  Evan nodded. When he opened the front door, the chill night air blew across him, a refreshing break from the stillness of the house. He stepped out onto the porch.

  “They say being brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared,” Max said. “It means you’re scared and do it anyway.”

  Evan halted. He didn’t answer. But he turned around.

  Max scratched at his neck, his fingernails raising red streaks. He was backlit, the shadows catching on his face, veiling his eyes. “Is that … is that true?”

  Evan said, “I’m not scared yet.”

  15

  Predacious Douchenozzle

  Westwood Village hugged the south edge of UCLA, a jumble of restaurants, movie theaters, bars, and shops hawking college gear. As was the case in the rest of West L.A., the real-estate market had blown sky-high, but the students streaming through left the neighborhood pleasingly shabby in places. Frat-house lawns littered with beer bottles, pizza by the slice, sublet condos losing a war of attrition.

  In the warren of streets east of Veteran Avenue, Evan approached a three-story apartment complex, assessing the security measures. The windows were single-pane, flimsy in their frames, easily breakable. The mounted light by the call box was broken, casting the entrance in shadow. The guard plate on the door had come loose enough to be pried free with a screwdriver. He raked the dead bolt in all of ten seconds with a half-diamond pick and took the stairs to the second floor.

  Midway down the hall, he paused outside an apartment door backlit with a bluish electronic glow. In the thin gap by the frame, he could see that the three dead bolts had been left unlocked.

  Lazy.

  The doorknob lock looked to be as old as the building itself. Evan flicked open his Strider folding knife, slipped it into the doorjamb, and angled it to catch the ramped latch. Before he slid it back into its housing to free the door, he hesitated.

  With his free hand, he took out his RoamZone and texted: YOU FAILED YOUR SECURITY ASSESSMENT. I’M COMING IN NOW. DON’T JUMP ME.

  A moment later the reply hummed in: THEN DON’T GIVE ME A GOOD REASON 2 JUMP U.

  He thumbed in: KAY.

  With a tilt of the blade, he opened the door.

  A workstation pod consumed the entire front room, towers and servers stacked atop a circular desk. Monitors were mounted three high on metal racks, hiding the chair from view. The sound of furious clacking echoed off the walls and cottage-cheese ceiling, low-level violence being visited upon a keyboard.

  As Evan closed the door behind him, a feminine voice said, “Hang on,” and then a teenage girl emerged from the circular desk through a missing slice.

  A too-big flannel hung unbuttoned from her lithe, muscular frame. The red T-shirt beneath boasted an image of Hello Kitty brandishing an AK-47. Lush brown-black hair tumbled past the girl’s shoulders and mostly covered the shaved strip above her ear on the right side.

  Joey Morales was the finest hacker Evan had ever encountered.

  She was also a washout from the Orphan Program. She’d once had a target on her head, but Evan had saved her, and in a manner of speaking she’d saved him, too. She’d been the last of the Orphans whom Jack had trained. His dying wish was that Evan look after her, a burden that had become a responsibility that had in turn morphed into something deeply meaningful to him in ways he could neither understand nor express.

  Evan had cleared her out of the country, parking her in a Swiss boarding school until he could eliminate those who wanted to eradicate her and anyone else with Orphan training. Once the threats had been neutralized, he’d relocated her here. Or, more precisely, she’d relocated herself.

  He’d come home one night to find his unpickable front door unlocked and his impenetrable alarm system incapacitated. He’d drawn his ARES 1911 and made an a
drenalized tactical approach across the great room only to find Joey sitting barefoot on the couch eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

  Napkinless.

  Though she never admitted as much, she wanted to live close to him. And though he never admitted as much, the feeling was mutual. So after he didn’t shoot her on his couch, he oversaw her move to the apartment a few miles away. He’d already set her up with some money stashed in a trust and with fake documents making her a legal adult, so she’d rented the place herself and furnished it with hardware befitting her genius hacker brain. As part of his ongoing attempt to mainstream her into normal civilian life, he insisted that she enroll in courses at UCLA in the coming semester, an arrangement she wasn’t happy with and was already no doubt scheming to undermine.

  He’d spent the past few months doing his best to keep track of her.

  Keeping track of a sixteen-year-old girl, he’d learned, was more challenging than neutralizing a high-value target inside a guarded desert training camp.

  She currently held a Big Gulp, which she waved in his direction. “What’s with the ‘kay’?”

  She seemed indignant.

  Evan said, “What?”

  “‘Kay’ is angry in textspeak. Like, passive-aggressive pissed off, you know?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And the worst? Is the lowercase-k ‘kay.’ ’Cuz you know the person put effort into taking off the caps lock. Lowercase k is a declaration of war.” To punctuate the point, she raised the Big Gulp to her mouth and slurped a hit of soda through the wide red straw.

  “There are words coming out of your face,” Evan said. “But they don’t make any sense in the actual world out here.”

  “Come on, X. Get with the times.”

  He pointed back at the door. “You have to throw the dead bolts. Every time. How you do anything is how you—”

  She was mouthing the Second Commandment along with him, her eyes rolled to white. She stopped when he stopped, a thumbprint dimple marking her right cheek as she grinned. She had a radiant smile that got her out of trouble more often than it should have.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Anyone breaks in here, you know I’ll beat his ass silly.”

  Evan circled the massive workstation and checked the broken latch on the window. It was the second floor, but still. “They haven’t fixed this yet?”

  “Could you puh-lease get a hobby?” Joey said.

  The windowsill was covered with all order of elaborate Rubik’s Cubes—magic cubes and speed cubes and shape-shifters blown out in all dimensions. Some kids played video games to pass the time; Joey did cubes thirteen rows deep and high that would’ve knotted Evan’s brain into a pretzel.

  He almost knocked over a giant Megaminx twist puzzle as he fussed with the faulty window latch. “You need a dog,” he said. “A guard dog.”

  “I don’t need a dog. I need more money. Like, an allowance.”

  “An allowance? I gave you a trust fund that pays a monthly dividend of—”

  “Do you know how expensive hardware is?” She disappeared back into the workstation and collapsed into a rolling gamer chair. Leaning over, she petted a rackmount Brutalis box. “This eight-GPU password-cracking monster was over twenty g’s.”

  “I’d rather you spent your money on a safer apartment.”

  “If I paid for a safer apartment, I couldn’t afford all this hardware. Which—I seem to recall—you make regular use of. So it’s not really an allowance I’m asking for. It’s more like a raise.”

  Evan came into the pod and leaned against the inside curve of the desk. The temperature here in the inner sanctum was at least ten degrees hotter, and the air carried a whiff of burning rubber.

  He crossed his arms. “A raise.”

  “That’s how I like to think of it, yeah.” Another slurp of Dr Pepper. “Do you have any idea what my mad skills would go for if I turned black hat?”

  Evan sank his face into his palm.

  Joey grinned at his feigned bemusement. “Didn’t anyone tell you how hard it is to raise assassin children in Los Angeles?”

  “I’m not raising you,” Evan said. “And you’re not an assassin.”

  “Yeah, ’cuz you wouldn’t let me.”

  “You’re grounded.”

  She snickered. Then she spun around in her chair. Her hands played across one of a succession of keyboards, Beethoven pounding out a concerto.

  In his pocket his RoamZone made a woeful noise. He sighed. Then he tugged it out and looked at it. Red bars had appeared across the screen. She’d locked him out.

  In the event of an emergency, he’d given Joey partial access to the back end of his digital operations. Which in her hands had quickly turned into full access. That was the thing with kids. Give ’em an inch.

  “Very funny, Joey.”

  “I think so.” She really seemed to be enjoying herself now. “Oh, wait. I forgot the best part.” She spun back to the keyboard. More frenzied typing.

  A message materialized on his RoamZone: FOR USE OF THIS DEVICE, PLEASE WIRE $250,000 TO ACCOUNT NUMBER—

  He lifted his eyes. “You can’t blackmail me for use of my own phone.”

  “Pretty sure I just did.” She was all but glowing. He had to admit, it was a pretty charming little routine. Charming and infuriating. “Could be worse,” she said. “I could change your ringtone to something, like, really embarrassing.”

  “Unlock my phone. Now.”

  She bounced a bit in the chair. “Sure you don’t need a sweater?”

  Wearily, Evan took the bait. “Why?”

  “’Cuz of all this shade I’m throwing your way?”

  “Josephine.”

  “Okay, okay.” Back to the keyboard. The red bars and the joke ransom note vanished from the RoamZone. “Happy?”

  “No,” he said. “But I’m less unhappy.”

  “Now, what brings you here in the middle of the night?” she asked. “Girl trouble?” She finished her drink and tossed it into a trash can filled with three other empty Big Gulps, which went some way toward explaining her caffeinated patter at this hour. “What’s going on with that DA lady? Mia?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But you guys would be so good together. You get all flirty and nervous around her. It’s cute. I mean, in an old-person way. Why aren’t you guys at least dating?”

  “Because if she finds out who I really am, she’d have to prosecute me.”

  Joey pulled her mouth to one side. A pensive pause. “That is complicating. But we can find you someone else. You should date some … I dunno, athleisure-wear model.”

  Evan forged onward. “I need you to check all emergency-room records in the area.”

  “For what?”

  Evan explained. Joey listened intently, for once not running her mouth. He was a reasonably skilled hacker, but she was an Olympian. She’d have the hit man tracked down in a fraction of the time it would take him.

  When he’d finally finished his account of what had happened at Grant’s office, she was perfectly still with focus, her emerald eyes large. “So you fucked up his arm in a specific way just so you could track the injury?”

  “Language. But yes.”

  She shook her head slowly. “That’s pretty badass, X.” She swiveled back around, fingers flying across her keyboard. “Bet you’re glad I bought this Brutalis box now,” she said over her shoulder. “Here’s what I’m gonna do. Correction: Here’s what I’m doing. I’m hacking into the two electronic medical-record systems used in these here parts—Epic and Cerner. For research purposes the records can be searched by patient, diagnosis, billing codes, everything else. So we hit the central research databases for both EMRs, check patient visits from the past twenty-four hours.…” Windows flashed open on multiple monitors, overlaid by others before Evan could even register them. “Diagnosis of nursemaid’s elbow in the right arm. Search parameters: men between twenty and forty, ERs within a fifty-mile radius, and … Wa-la!”

&n
bsp; Evan leaned forward, reading the case record. At 11:37 P.M. a twenty-eight-year-old man was discharged from the Palmdale Regional Medical Center’s emergency room with a diagnosis of radial-head dislocation of his right arm. Right on schedule. The patient had provided no ID, given his name as “Frank Jones,” and left against physician advice without paying.

  Evan said, “Let’s get into the security cameras in the waiting room and…”

  Joey was pointing at the monitor beside his head.

  He turned.

  A freeze-frame image from the ER lobby at 10:34 had captured the man squared to the camera. Evan didn’t recognize his face, of course, given that he’d worn a balaclava during their run-in, but the tapestry of patterned scars sleeving his bare arms was familiar. One of the markings, riding the outer ledge of his triceps, looked like a meringue cookie smashed flat. The Armenian eternity sign.

  “Okay,” Evan said. “Now you should grab facial recognition and—”

  Joey pointed at another monitor behind him.

  He turned further.

  Panasonic FacePRO was already churning through the Internet, searching for matches of the captured image. It chimed twice, hitting on an Instagram profile.

  BigggPapa69.

  There Big Papa was, taking a selfie with two Budweiser girls at an Irish pub.

  Next a posed shot in the gym as he dead-lifted eight plates.

  Now behind the wheel of a Maserati, wearing reflective aviator sunglasses.

  Evan said, “Can you slip into the profile to get us a real name?”

  “Hang on.” Her hands were a blur. “He’s got double authentication, which is a pain. But wait—wait. Check this out.”

  She’d cyberstalked backward in his profile, finding a post from last year. Big Papa on an airplane with a friend, flashing a boarding pass and the hang-ten sign. The caption: HEADING TO MAUI TO SLAY SOME FRESH YOUNG HAWAII ASS!! His tongue was sticking out, his mouth framed with a pencil-thin goatee.

  “Look at his dumb sexist face,” Joey said. “I mean, what the actual fuck.”

  She clicked the mouse angrily, grabbing the image and whipping it across an arc of monitors until it rested on the screen in front of her. She zoomed in on the boarding pass name: Michael Papazian.