Into the Fire

by Gregg Hurwitz

  This was far from the worse part. But it would still be awful.

  He scrunched his eyes shut and drank a third of the pint in a series of long pulls, spilling a bit on his shirt for good measure. It burned down his throat, coated his stomach. He listed like a hobo there on the grimy sidewalk, praying his concussion symptoms wouldn’t come roaring back to life. Then he stumbled for the police officer.

  As he crossed North Vignes Street, he took another healthy swig, let tequila dribble through his lips and down his chin. Headlights bored into him, an oncoming rush from a just-changed traffic signal. A Subaru veered to miss him, the driver laying on the horn, a sharp blare in the thickening night.

  That drew the cop’s attention.

  Evan passed right before him, swinging the open container at his side, letting the tequila slosh over and douse his fist.

  “Christ on a stick,” the cop muttered. And then, “Sir? Sir.”

  Evan wheeled around drunkenly, one shoulder lowered, the bottle dangling. The front edge of the booze was hitting, making the colors jump, cramping his vision at the sides. His throat felt raw, the air pleasingly cool on the inhale. The booze roiled in his gut, a molten slosh. The symptoms were just starting to return, light-headedness and nausea urged back to life by the booze. If they held here, he could manage them. The streetlamps started to bleed into streaks of yellow, the glare assailing his eyes.

  “Come here please, sir.”

  Evan staggered up to him. The cop was handsome, fresh-faced, spots of color dotting his smooth cheeks. Uniform pressed and starched, duty boots buffed to a reflective shine. He stayed tilted back against the driver’s door, one thumb hooked through his belt. It was affected and vaguely endearing, as if he’d studied what pose a cop should strike in this situation and was doing his best to measure up.

  “You have an open container.”

  Evan looked at the bottle of Cuervo, feigned surprise at seeing it there on the end of his arm. “Guess so.”

  “Listen, it’s a Saturday night.” The cop barely bothered with eye contact, speaking at Evan while looking around, as if reserving his focus for more important matters. “You look like you’ve had a tough day. Maybe things aren’t going so well for you right now. What do you say you just toss the bottle there in the trash and we call it even?”

  Just his luck. A kindhearted officer.

  Evan pretended to register the offer on a tape delay. Then he rocked forward onto the balls of his feet. “Don’ tell me wha’ ta do.”

  Finally the cop broke from the cool act, coming up off the car. “Look, man, I’m really trying to help you out here.”

  Evan had to figure some way to break the guy out of his hearts-and-minds campaign. As the cop came forward, Evan set his feet clumsily and swung at his face. The officer leaned back, and Evan missed by two feet. He pretended to lose his balance on the follow-through, letting the bottle slip from his booze-greased palm and shatter on the sidewalk. He wound up doubled over, breathing hard, fists on his knees, doing his best to signal that he was too compromised for the cop to bother restraining. The last thing he needed was for Officer Friendly to choke-hold his concussion back into high gear.

  “Hey,” Evan said. “You made me spill my drink.”

  The officer’s voice washed down at him. “Whoa, pal. Settle. Let’s pretend you didn’t do that. That’s a whole other kind of trouble, and you look like you don’t need any more.”

  Evan blinked hard at the pavement and grimaced. Wondered what the hell he had to do to get arrested.

  The cop was still talking to the top of his head. “I’m gonna give you a final warning. You do one more thing, I’m gonna have to take you in.”

  He’d arrived at the point of no return. This was it. The last hurdle and the highest. If he wanted to save Max. If he wanted to put down the RoamZone for once and for all and ride off into the sunset.

  Bent low to keep his face out of view, Evan jammed his finger down his throat and vomited onto the cop’s shiny boots.

  43

  Arrangements of a Muscular Nature

  A conference room.

  Bad things never happened in conference rooms. They smelled of dark roast and Pledge wood cleaner. The happenings within were illuminated by fluorescent overheads and the clear light of reason.

  The Steel Woman was nothing if not aboveboard.

  The office building in which she presided, an unassuming ten-story rise wedged into the skyscape at the north edge of downtown, housed midlevel hedge-fund firms, mortgage lenders, and limited-liability partnerships like the one she ran.

  Well, perhaps not just like it.

  Stella Hardwick was a businesswoman by trade. She’d aged into being something more than that, and she wore the signs of her experience proudly. Her face heavily lined, features accented with ellipses and underscores. She wore the gunmetal-gray hair from which her nickname derived in a bun that was so tightly wound it resembled a stone.

  The boys had arrived a few moments prior, shuffling in with their dark suits and briefcases like escapees from the 1950s.

  But if this were the fifties, she wouldn’t have been running the show. She’d have been taking dictation.

  They sat in the aforementioned conference room on the seventh floor, the picture windows offering a mediocre glimpse of the city. She could afford richer views, but she’d learned that ostentation carried risks, and if the Steel Woman believed in anything beyond profit, it was risk reduction.

  She occupied her seat at the table’s head and observed them. A group of men with similar proclivities. She’d painstakingly assembled them through a byzantine process heavy on allusions and reliant on introductions made by like-minded souls. The departments and agencies in which they operated were by and large clean. In each one she required only a single well-placed worker with flexible standards. They were the clockwork to her grand design, able to operate the levers of power without leaving any fingerprints. Investigations were steered, cases misfiled, dockets shuffled.

  Their role was simply to stay out of her way and reap the benefits.

  But tonight she required something more. That was the reason for the late-night confabulation.

  She cleared her throat.

  The boys fell silent.

  She rested her elbows on the walnut slab of the conference table, the chill rising through the Armani featherweight virgin wool of her thin sleeves. The air conditioner, pegged at a steady sixty-five, kept the room pleasingly refrigerated. She found that the cold generally clarified her thinking.

  “Whoever this man is,” she said, “it’s clear by now that he’s a friend to Grant Merriweather’s cousin. Which makes him an enemy to us.”

  “Grant didn’t have everything,” one of the men said.

  “No,” Stella said. “But what he did have could lead to everything.”

  Another chimed in, “From what we know, it seems highly unlikely anything can be traced to us.”

  “I’m rarely content with what I know,” she said. “I prefer to know what I don’t know.”

  She let them grapple with that for a moment.

  “We’ve insulated ourselves rather magnificently,” she said. Even though she’d been the one to arrange all the insulating, she flattered them with the first-person plural because: men. “But our buffer is growing thinner.”

  The first speaker waved her off. “Hiccups,” he said. “Nothing more than a few hiccups.”

  “The good thing about working with low-level scumbags,” another weighed in, “is how replaceable they are.”

  Several chuckles picked up steam, confidence growing.

  Stella spread a smile across her face. “And the two LAPD detectives?” she said. “Are they readily replaceable as well?”

  This was greeted by silence and throat clearing as they waited for the heavyset gentleman on the left side of the table to chime in.

  “Well, yes,” Fitz said carefully. “But it’ll take some time.”

  “And in that tim
e, as we function without the benefit of their assistance, would you consider us stronger or weaker?” she asked.

  She preferred not to dominate the committee members but to wear them out. They were strong. But they were men. They didn’t have a woman’s endurance. They’d rehash their arguments again and again and finally fold.

  Fitz mumbled the appropriate response.

  “But we have Bedrosov,” another said. “As long as we have Bedrosov, everything stays intact. And there’s no way in hell anyone’s getting to him.”

  “One thing you’ve all been masterful at,” she told the circle of men, “has been arranging for the unexpected.”

  A soothing current circled the table, the faces changing from sheepish to proud.

  Until now she’d resisted making any arrangements of a muscular nature from inside the conference room of the climate-controlled seventh floor. However, circumstances had changed, and it was time to take a more active role in the steering.

  Desperate times and whatnot.

  “As long as we have inconvenient material floating around out there…” She waved a manicured hand to the glass wall, the city beyond. “We need to continue to arrange for the unexpected. Since the unexpected seems to keep coming for us, we require contingency plans—”

  “Those are in place,” Fitz said.

  She pressed her crimson lips together in something like a grin. “And contingency plans to our contingency plans.”

  The man beside her folded his hands on the table and frowned ponderously. “What—” His voice went dry, and he coughed into a fist and started again. “What did you have in mind?”

  She told them.

  The silence afterward hummed with discomfort. The men had blanched. Their gazes remained on the table, on their hangnails, on the seam where the wall met ceiling. Eye contact was too threatening. Too human.

  “But, Stella.” Fitz fiddled with his wedding ring. “That’s a whole other thing.”

  The Steel Woman smiled. “So are we, dear.”

  44

  Mantrap

  The Inmate Reception Center smelled overwhelmingly of industrial disinfectant and body odor. The ducts were working overtime, doing their best to diffuse a lingering trace of spent pepper spray. Beneath a splotch of blood where someone had tried to put a fist through the cold concrete, Evan sat on a bright orange chair seemingly molded for maximum discomfort. The aftermath of the booze, soaking into his addled brain, made his head feel as though it had been molded for maximum discomfort, too. He’d been waiting for nearly forty-five minutes while sheriff’s deputies shuffled other arrestees through the system.

  Happy hour was crowded at Twin Towers Booking.

  In fact, every hour was crowded at Twin Towers, the world’s largest jail.

  There were forty-five hundred inmates jammed into a space running at 150-percent capacity.

  Evan closed his eyes, breathed the stale scent of riled men, felt the heat from countless trapped bodies. Someone was sobbing and someone was screaming and someone was singing. Singing badly.

  He’d already been processed by the baggy-eyed civilian employee with caked-on foundation. He’d stood at the counter hiccupping while she reviewed the probable-cause statement. It had been sent through the bulletproof glass in a transaction drawer along with a time-delay, self-destroying license with his face and Paytsar Hovsepian’s information, ingeniously engineered by Melinda Truong. “Open container, drunk in public.” She glanced up at the young cop by Evan’s side, chewed the inside of her cheek. “Barfed on your boots?”

  The cop said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Sounds like a charmer.”

  Evan had given her a loose-handed salute, and she’d smiled wryly in response.

  His training had taught him to find quiet where he could, even in the most stressful of circumstances. He kept his eyes closed and breathed. His task right now, in this moment, was to do nothing but occupy his body. The charcoal pills had done their job, ameliorating the effects of the tequila, but the acrid taste of eighty-proof bile remained in his mouth. The light-headedness held on, wobbly shapes floating behind his eyelids.

  A beefy deputy rapped him gently on the shoulder, and he opened his eyes. “Patser Hovsepian?”

  Evan corrected him with a crisp accent. “Paytsar.”

  “Great,” the deputy said, “okay. We’ll be sure to get it perfect before you take the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.” He flicked two fingers the size of breakfast sausages. “Come with me.”

  Evan followed him into the booking room. Stations were set up three deep, sullen men being shuttled through like cattle. A jocker inked with the Aryan Brotherhood clover and trip sixes caught Evan’s eye and flicked his tongue at him lewdly. Ignoring him, Evan looked around, assessing any loose items he might be able to palm and sneak in. A stapler on a desk in the corner. Pen tucked into a clipboard. A computer mouse.

  His plan only covered getting in and—ideally—getting back out. He couldn’t know in advance what the precise conditions in the jail would be. When it came to protecting himself and eliminating Benjamin Bedrosov, he had to improvise.

  Predictably, any obvious tools or weapons were well out of reach.

  The deputy gave Evan a prod, reminding him that he no longer controlled where his body went and what it was allowed to do. He complied readily, not willing to escalate to a situation that increased the odds of a blow to the head.

  “Stand over here. Back up. Smile for the birdie.”

  Above the stalk of a skinny tripod, a tiny digital camera peered at him like the head of an exotic insect. Evan flashed A-OK signs against his chest, one circle up and one upside down. Armenian Power.

  “Hey, dipshit. You sure you want that to be the look the judge sees at arraignment?”

  Evan winked at him. There would be no judge, no arraignment. And Joey would have the digital photo wiped from the system within minutes of Evan’s departure. Or—if things went badly—he’d be dead and none of this would matter.

  The deputy sighed. “Your funeral.”

  The flash hit Evan, burning his eyes. He cringed away drunkenly. The alcohol leaching through the charcoal and the light sensitivity from his concussion made it easy to play the role.

  “Hey,” the deputy said. “You okay?”

  Evan nodded. The deputy moved him to a bench bolted to the concrete floor. Before him was an electronic fingerprint scanner. The deputy collapsed into a computer station on the far side with an arthritic groan and said, “All ten on the glass.”

  Evan pressed his hands onto the wide plate, felt the heat rising through the fingertip adhesives as the light-emitting diodes rolled underneath. The deputy’s monitor was tilted, granting Evan a slanted view of the CLETS database, waiting to spit out Paytsar Hovsepian’s criminal history once the scan results registered.

  Evan waited for the impressions laid into the fingerprint films to work.

  But the onscreen timer kept spinning. The deputy knocked the side of the monitor in frustration. The false prints wouldn’t register.

  A sense of genuine dread descended on Evan, tightening his jaw. All it would take was a momentary computer glitch. The deputy would wipe down his fingerprints, discover the adhesives. And Orphan X, the country’s most wanted former government asset, would no longer have to be hunted and taken down. He’d already have put himself behind bars, delivered himself with a bow. Right on the eve of his retirement.

  The deputy tugged a few tissues from a box and swiveled his chair toward Evan.

  The computer dinged, accepting the scan.

  The deputy turned away and stuffed the tissues back into the box.

  Evan eased out a breath through his locked teeth.

  The CLETS interface brought up Hovsepian’s prior conviction from high school. The decades-old booking photo showed a dull-eyed kid washed pale from adrenaline, a tangle of hair falling over his stoned eyes.

  Evan’s appearance was close enough, especially given that it had b
een nineteen years since the picture was taken.

  The deputy didn’t even bother looking. “You can take your hands off the scanner already.”

  Evan had been so tense he’d frozen in place. As he withdrew his fingers, he felt the film on his left pinkie tug.

  The adhesive peeled free and clung to the glass plate.

  Transparent yet in full sight, it remained curled up from the scanner like a contact lens.

  Evan forced himself not to look at it. He set his hands on the table casually. The deputy turned and rested his elbows on either side of the scanner. His breath fluttered the pinkie adhesive.

  “All your possessions on the table,” he said.

  Evan took out his driver’s license, a few crumpled singles, and some coins. He dropped the change about six inches above the table, trying to make it look unintentional. A nickel rolled off the edge, and the deputy leaned to catch it.

  As he dipped to the side, Evan swept his hand across the fingerprint scanner, the gummy adhesive clinging to his knuckle and peeling free. Annoyed, the deputy set the nickel back down atop the sad pile of cash. “Okay. So. Two dollars and seventeen cents. Gearing up for a big night on the town, were you?”

  Pretending to cough, Evan brought his fist to his mouth. Slipped the film inside. Swallowed.

  Only a momentary relief. If he wanted to leave no trace behind, he’d lost the use of his pinkie finger for the duration.

  He wasn’t sure what the optimal conditions were to enter jail but he imagined that they didn’t involve a concussion and a nonoperational finger.

  The deputy swiveled back to the computer, logging the few items into the property-management system. He shoved a clipboard at Evan. “Review that this is all your stuff and sign.”

  Evan unclipped the two-page form and took his time reading it, scrutinizing each line of text, rubbing his eyes as if hungover. He flipped back to the first page again. Then back. The whole time he was careful to hold out his pinkie like a Jane Austen heroine.

  “It ain’t signing away your firstborn, high roller,” the deputy finally said. “It’s less than three bucks.”