“That’s right,” he said, surprised. “That’s me.”
She finished the conversation and rolled back over. “Please have a seat, Mr. Merriweather. The detectives working the case are on their way.”
Max settled in between a dozing homeless man and a young woman with a ragged cable sweater and a black eye. A water stain marred the ceiling. Beyond the security glass, officers shuttled victims, witnesses, and suspects between desks and rooms. The whole place felt drenched in exhaustion and despair, the everyday aftermath of lives that had collided with other lives, or with vehicles, or with bullets. And yet Max felt a swell of gratitude that he was here, another anonymous citizen with a problem that could—at last—be handled by the proper authorities. The Nowhere Man had succeeded in delivering him out of a nightmare scenario.
What had he told Max? Figure out what you want to do with your life when we get it back for you. Max was finally seeing through his promise to Grant, delivering the cooked accounting books that would dismantle the remnants of the money-laundering operation that had cost his cousin his life. He could make this the first step on the long road back.
On the wall above the desk officer’s head, LAPD’s logo was stenciled in dark print: TO PROTECT AND SERVE.
Max leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, the snore of the man beside him as regular as a metronome.
For the first time in five days, he felt his muscles unclench.
* * *
CLIX vodka’s name, derived from Roman numerals, represents the 159 times it has been distilled. The initial batch consisted of only two thousand bottles, each a numbered crystal decanter with a stopper.
Evan had liberated his from the handmade burlwood case so it could take its place in his freezer drawer. He stared down longingly at it now, about to reach for it.
He hesitated, a chill mist gusting up at him.
Again he pictured Petro’s dying moment in the courtyard of the café. Pinned beneath a fallen body, his lips curled faintly with amusement.
What did he know that Evan didn’t?
Sipping a single glass of vodka would barely dull his senses. But still. Once Max was done with the cops, Evan had promised to accompany him to his truck and his apartment to ensure that all was quiet on the Western Front. If he was a half percent loose from alcohol, it was a half percent too much.
The Second Commandment was also the most onerous.
Giving his concussion an alcohol overlay, as tempting as it was, seemed not the wisest choice. Booze would exacerbate the symptoms. So would pretty much everything else. The only thing that had ever helped crisp his focus for a few minutes was an injection of epinephrine, but the synthetic adrenaline would prevent him from resting, so he didn’t want to go that way either.
He sighed, shooting the CLIX decanter a parting look. “It’s not you,” he said. “It’s me.”
Grabbing an ice cube, he padded across the great room, giving the heavy bag a spin kick for good measure. Down the hall, into the bathroom, through the shower wall to the Vault. An aloe vera plant resided atop a bed of cobalt glass pebbles in a bowl by his mouse pad. The size and shape of a pinecone, it—she—was his sole companion. Vera II. He nested the ice cube in her glass bowl and gave her a pat on the spikes.
Back into the bathroom. He peeled off his shirt, stripped off his pants and boxer briefs, and regarded himself in the harsh LED lighting. The claw marks on his chest had reddened, the first flush of an infection. He had a healthy bruise on his left thigh—also from the pit bull–mastiff?—and a splotchy contusion over his right kidney that he couldn’t match to a specific blow. Broken capillaries mottled his collarbone, probably from grappling with Raffi on the floor of the deserted TV station. The back of his head was tender and swollen, and his brain still felt like it had been pressed into a belt sander.
He slid the specialized contact lens out of his right eye and was dismayed to see that the pupil hadn’t constricted in the least. It stared back at him vacantly, a well-placed bullet hole. He flicked the contact into the trash and irrigated with hydrating drops.
From beneath the sink, he retrieved an olive-drab pack designed to SEAL team medic specs and dug through the packages—ACE bandages, field dressing, morphine vials—until he found the alcohol pads. He swabbed at the puffy skin around the claw marks, ignoring the sting. Then he nudged the glass shower door aside once more on its barn-door track and loosed the nozzle until steam filled the stall.
He exhaled deeply and evenly, felt his shoulders sink, his head tug forward with exhaustion.
He was just stepping in when his RoamZone rang.
He hesitated, annoyed.
Then backed out, wormed the phone from his pant pocket, and checked caller ID. He clicked to answer, but before he could speak, Joey’s voice flew at him in an excited rush.
“Guess what?”
Evan said, “You’ve amended your position on the capitalization of ‘kay’ in text messages?”
“No. Lowercase ‘kay’ is still an atrocity. But this is almost as important. Are you ready?”
He stood naked in the bathroom, the blue-purple splotches on his skin drawing his eye in the mirror. “Bated breath.”
“So Grant’s files? I’ve been whaling away at them since, like, forever o’clock, right? And then I noticed something super un-copacetic.”
The shower was still running, the steam beckoning. Evan couldn’t wait to get his battered body to the tiled bench inside and sprawl out as if he were in a Muscovite banya. “Which was?”
“Well, it occurred to me—’cuz I’m a friggin’ genius—to check the memory. It shows four gigs on the thumb drive, but all of Grant’s files only add up to a little more than three gigs.”
This time he failed to keep impatience from his voice. “Which means?”
“Dude! Hidden file! C’mon, X. So I right-clicked and ran as administrator to look for the removable file. Then I typed in ‘attrib-s-h-r /s /d’ and wa-la—the hidden files all came visible.”
Dread flickered to life, augmenting the throbbing at his temples. He sensed that the thread of this discovery would somehow lead back to that mysterious smile Petro had summoned when Evan had told him it was over now for Max.
In killing Petro he thought he’d cut the head off the snake.
Yet what if he wasn’t fighting a snake at all?
But a hydra.
Sever one head and two more grow.
His voice sounded tight even to his own ears. “What’d you find, Joey?”
“More wire transfers, more bank accounts. And a key to the code names for more low-level scumbuckets Petro had in place. The dirty management at his bank and the workers at the front companies—even the bagmen who courier the cash back and forth from the dogfights.”
“Okay,” he said cautiously, still trying to slow the thrum of his heartbeat. “Good work. We can get all that stuff to the cops.”
“Yeah,” she said. “About that…”
He reached into the stall and turned off the shower, a growing void hollowing out his insides. The sudden silence was unsettling. “What, Joey?”
“Two of the names who took payoffs? Ignacio Nuñez and Paul Brust? Are dirty cops. Looks like Petro flipped them nine weeks ago, just before Grant’s investigation started. And guess where they work?”
Already Evan was yanking on his pants, flinging his shirt over his head, his feet slipping on the shower mat, sending the bandage rolls spinning. He fought the phone back to his face in time to hear her say, “Hollywood Station.”
* * *
Max drifted through the Morongo Casino, his head delightfully swimmy from a few beers. An orchestral version of “Bad to the Bone” piped through the speakers, accompanied by the clang and din of slot machines. Carnival chaos reigned all around—spinning cherries, flashing coins dumping into payout trays, balls pinging around roulette wheels.
Max cradled a brimming bucket of quarters to his chest, each step jarring a few free.
Up ah
ead Violet occupied her same mythical stool, but this time she faced away, a strand of silken black hair wound around her finger. Her sandals lay on the floor where she’d kicked free of them, one slender bare foot resting on the base of the stool beside her, the stool that was his to occupy.
He drifted up behind her and said, “Can I sit here?”
She didn’t turn even now, facing rigidly away, and he felt an uptick in his chest, tendrils of fear winding themselves through his ribs.
“If you’re smart,” she said, “you’ll get as far away from me as possible.”
Slowly she turned, bloodred lips pronounced against alabaster skin, her eyes dark and impenetrable. She wore a white blouse, gauzy and loose, and as he looked on in horror, crimson began to seep through the fabric above her wrists, spreading up her arms.
“I’m sorry I disappointed you,” she said.
Max came awake with a jolt at the hand shaking his shoulder. Coiled in the plastic molded chair, he took a moment to get his bearings.
Hollywood Community Police Station. Lobby. Two faces leaning in over him, one white, one brown—officers wearing slacks and white button-ups with suspenders, badges dangling around their necks.
Max pressed himself upright and ground at his eye with the heel of his hand. “Sorry,” he said. “Must’ve drifted off.”
The homeless man and the young woman with the black eye were gone, replaced by a few other ragged folks spread among the chairs, looking at him.
The taller of the two men straightened up, firming his LAPD baseball cap on his head. “Max Merriweather? I’m Detective Nuñez, and this is Detective Brust. You said you had some evidence in your cousin’s case?”
“Yeah, I do.” Max dug the zip drive from his pocket and wagged it proudly between thumb and forefinger.
Their smiles flashed in concert, as if someone had flipped a switch. Brust turned and nodded at the desk officer, who hit the button to buzz open the security door.
“Excellent, Mr. Merriweather,” Detective Nuñez said. “Why don’t you follow us back right this way?”
35
Into the Lion’s Mouth
Evan rocketed up Sunset Boulevard in his reinforced Ford F-150, bulling sports cars out of his way. His latex-gloved hands alternated between gripping the steering wheel and wiring an electric cap and detonator into the Nokia in his lap. Because they published their circuits in their manuals, Nokias made for quick and easy receiver phones.
Miraculously, he managed to prep the bang while not T-boning any Porsches—and he got across the city in nineteen minutes flat.
Despite all that, he feared he was already too late.
Having crushed Max’s last burner phone and ordered him to preserve the new one until after his meeting with the cops, he had no way to warn Max that he’d delivered him into the lion’s mouth.
Which meant he had to intercept him.
He was going to raid a police station.
He’d have none of the benefits that generally gave him an operational advantage—no advance scouting of the target location, no analysis of the building’s blueprints, no disabling of security equipment.
He’d like his odds a lot better if he wasn’t largely making up the plan as he went along.
He’d been caught flat-footed when the second problem, Petro, had led to a third problem.
It was becoming a pattern.
Evan whipped into a parking space a block away and jogged for the police station, winding an ACE bandage around his head. Feigning injury was the only way he could thwart surveillance and mask himself without drawing suspicion—or drawing fire.
Once his face was sufficiently mummified, he tucked the wrap in the back and affected a fragile, stumbling walk. He peered out through the slit in the bandages, noting the security cameras positioned at intervals around the building. Then he hovered his hands over his cheeks as if he were in great pain. Given his perennial headache, it wasn’t a terrible stretch.
He hesitated at the side of the station.
He’d carried out his share of improbable missions. But even for the Nowhere Man, this was a bit much.
He ran through the few contingencies he’d anticipated, the few supplies he’d brought. He didn’t have a gun because he’d be unable to smuggle it past the metal detectors. He’d have to get it done with the hastily rigged flashbang in his pocket, a wad of medical gauze pads in a Baggie, and more luck than he liked to count on. A wing and a prayer and not much more.
Last chance to back out.
His own words from the garage echoed in his head like a bad memory: I protect them.
Without limitation? Mia had asked. You’ll go anywhere? Do anything?
Yes, he’d replied, like a virtue-drunk imbecile.
He’d made his pledge—to Max, to Mia, to himself. Now he had to back it up.
If he still had time.
Staggering forward, he leaned against a dumpster and doubled over in ostensible agony. He used the pretense of gripping the side to drop the flashbang in. The duct-taped package—Nokia and grenade—struck the inside of the metal box with a hollow clang, signaling that the dumpster was empty. When the time came, that would help the amplification.
Nearing the entrance, he took a series of rapid breaths, his best impromptu simulation of hyperventilating. He wanted his breathing to sound fast and panicked when he entered. It sent his light-headedness into overdrive, and he pulled back a bit, careful not to overdo it and trigger his other symptoms.
He moved through the door, shuffled to the desk officer. “Officer, I’m … I’m—” He cut off, bending at the waist, floating his palms trembling again above his bandage-wrapped face.
The desk officer found her feet, leaning toward the bullet-resistant screen. “What? What happened?”
“My girlfriend threw burning water on my face. She lost her … fuck … lost her fucking mind—”
“Have you sought medical attention?”
“Not yet. Her daughter’s still in the house with her—and fuck, ow, ow…”
“Sir. Sir! I need you to calm down.”
He shuddered and straightened up, leaning against the screen. The bandages shielded his eyes, which let him peer around her without seeming too obvious. He was hoping for an open record log or a whiteboard showing which cops were occupying which interrogation rooms. But there was nothing in plain sight. The information probably resided on her computer, and there’d be no getting in there.
Evan said, “I’m scared for her daughter, and before I go to the ER, I have to—”
“I understand. I’ll have someone speak to you immediately.”
“Thank you.” He let his shoulders tremble as if he were fighting off sobs. “Thank God.”
The desk officer called across into the bullpen, and a weary-looking detective rose, his rumpled shirt spotted with a coffee stain. He slapped down a file on his desk and blew out a breath that lifted his scraggly bangs. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll take it.”
A grating buzz sounded, and the security door clicked open. Evan placed his RoamZone in a red plastic basket and stepped through the metal detector.
It did not alert.
Gathering his phone, he entered the inner sanctum.
* * *
Max sat down at the table and folded his hands on the surface. Brust and Nuñez kept their feet. Nuñez crossed his arms and shouldered against the rear wall while Brust set his knuckles on the table and leaned in. The thumb drive rested between him and Max like an avant-garde centerpiece.
“We’re so glad you came in,” Brust said.
Nuñez chimed in from the back. “Really happy to see you.”
“You’re a solid citizen—”
“—who was put in a terrible position. We understand that.”
Max cleared his throat. “You were working with my cousin?”
“Yes,” Nuñez said. “Very smart guy. Very capable.” He scratched his cheek. His fingernail was polished, his cheeks shiny from a close shave. He g
rinned, but the skin around his eyes did not wrinkle in the least.
Max shifted in the chair. Cleared his throat. “Yeah, he was. Grant was good.”
Brust placed his forefinger on the thumb drive as if it were a poker chip he was considering adding to the pot. “Do you know what this is? I mean, have you looked at what’s on here?”
“Yeah.” Max’s unease grew, but he heard himself still talking. “They look like spreadsheets. Real and fake.” He suddenly felt detached from the situation, as if he were floating above the table looking down at himself answering the questions like a good little boy. “Some kind of money-laundering operation, from what I could tell.”
“Ah,” Brust said, the single note holding disappointment.
“That’s too bad,” Nuñez agreed.
“Has anyone else seen this?” Brust asked. “I mean, did you share your cousin’s work with anyone?”
“No,” Max said, shaking his head. “Just me. I went to Grant’s office, and some guy shot at me, so I got scared and I went into hiding.” Sweat trickled down his neck, burrowed beneath his collar. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. And yet the conversation kept proceeding, and he felt bizarrely incapable of stopping it. “Look, is there…? I mean, is something wrong?”
Those automated smiles once more. “No,” Brust said. “Everything’s finally right. You did great. You did great bringing this here to us.”
He slid the thumb drive off the table and tossed it to his partner.
“Where did you say you went?” Nuñez asked, coming off the wall to pocket the drive. “When you were hiding?”
Max looked over at the bullet security camera wired into the corner of the ceiling. In the curved black lens, he caught a distorted fish-eye reflection of the room—Nuñez’s broad shoulders stretched to Olympian proportions; Brust looming over the desk, his torso swirled; and Max in the center, shrunken and diminutive.
His gaze caught on the sticker adhered to the camera’s side: IRONKLAD KAM. The same equipment had been installed in the hall outside Grant’s office, an unsettling coincidence. And something was different. When he noticed what, he felt the awareness as a chill tightening his flesh, making his scalp crawl.
Into the Fire Page 20