Bedrosov’s soft, plump hands were folded loosely between his knees. He looked at ease, a man without a care in the world. His voice was soft, that familiar pragmatic purr. “Paytsar Hovsepian?”
Evan said, “You know my name.”
“You broke Casper’s arm,” Bedrosov said.
“Why do you care?”
“There’s an order. When that order is disrupted, business is disrupted.”
And to you, Evan thought, there’s nothing worse than business getting disrupted.
Bedrosov’s face smeared into a mocha streak atop a shirt. Evan blinked several times hard, and it reassembled itself.
“I didn’t mean to mess with your gang,” Evan said.
“Oh, I’m not one of these animals,” Bedrosov said.
If Teardrop or the lieutenants were insulted, they gave no sign of it.
“I don’t belong here,” Bedrosov continued. “I’m only a part of this temporarily. But while I’m here, I like to ensure that things go as smoothly as possible for me.”
“If Casper hadn’t attacked me,” Evan said, “things would still be going smoothly for him.”
Bedrosov tilted his head back and examined Evan. He was an extremely still man, so every move seemed freighted with significance. “If that’s the case, if Casper attacked you, I will let it slide. Be sure not to initiate any violence on your own during your stay.”
Evan nodded, but Bedrosov remained motionless, the picture of control. His eyes were unblinking, reptilian. Evan had read once that there were more psychopaths in business than in any other field. The man before him seemed a perfect case study.
Evan started to back out.
“You seem vaguely familiar,” Bedrosov said. “Have I seen you somewhere?”
A tingle of heat moved through Evan, dampening his undershirt with sweat, the electronic wristband sticking to his skin. “Not unless you service your car at the AutoZone at Washington and Hoover.”
Bedrosov said nothing. He just stared.
Evan lowered his gaze as if intimidated and backed the rest of the way out.
47
Kill You Tonight
The next hour was like the one before and every one before and every one to come, stretched out in front of Evan like the horizon. He’d been in a few holding cells and interrogation rooms, even done a short stint in a Moroccan prison. He understood jail time. Institutional life was not unlike his early childhood. Warehoused like wine in a barrel, overheated and overripened, drying out or filling with acid.
He stayed in his cell, adding layer after layer to his brittle newspaper cone and trying not to think about just how thin the needle was that he had to thread to pull this all off.
Lunch was bologna with a green tinge, greasy french fries, and an orange sugar drink he couldn’t make himself finish. He sat at the same table with the same outsiders, trying to stop his vision from rolling like an old-fashioned TV. His head felt full of soup.
As they streamed back to their cells afterward, he noticed several inmates stuffing crumpled newspapers down their collars.
Evan said to the gray-haired inmate at his side, “What are they doing?”
“Padding they undershirts against stickings,” the man said. “Shit’s going down. Soon.”
“What shit?”
The man cocked his head, looked at Evan sideways. “Son, don’t you know?”
Before Evan could respond, the man peeled off toward his cell.
* * *
Screened rec areas formed the backside of the top floors. As the inmates were let out from the stairwell into the semi-open zones, Evan realized that he’d forgotten what real air tasted like. He sucked in a few lungfuls, hoping it would help clear his head. The men spread out among the basketball courts and the weight-lifting turf. Industrial screen rimmed the building’s edge. There was no good sniper vantage from any of the surrounding buildings.
He’d checked.
Bedrosov sat on a weight bench until a runner brought him a cell phone. Then he made call after call, and the deputies either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
Evan walked carefully around the screened perimeter, eyes on the ground, searching for anything useful. Balled up by the trash can was a foil pea of a chewing-gum wrapper. He crouched to pick it up, and the change in elevation brought the pain between his temples to a high hum. He squatted there a moment, catching his breath.
A skeletal crackhead leaned against the trash can, hugging his knees, pant cuffs tugged up to show what looked like a staph infection in the open wound on his shin.
Evan said, “You need to get to the medical bay.”
The man stared at him with sunken eyes, his gaze dizzyingly vacant.
That’s what time on the inside could do to you.
The possibility of failure curled around Evan’s brain stem, and he shook it off. Defeat was too awful to even contemplate.
He rose and glanced over at Bedrosov on the bench making phone calls, running his empire with impunity. Evan wondered if he was putting out another contract on Max Merriweather. If so, the only way to void the contract was to make sure there’d be no one around to pay it.
The whistle blew to signal the end of rec time, and Evan turned to go, nearly bumping into a huge inmate he didn’t recognize. A ruinous mountain in jailhouse blues, acne scars so severe they looked like burn marks. “You the boy who hurt Casper.” The man smiled, revealing a gleaming gold incisor. “We gonna kill you tonight.”
A wave of light-headedness swept through Evan, and he had to step to the side to right his balance.
“Okay,” he said.
* * *
At four o’clock sharp, Evan returned to his meet spot with Joey at the base of the stairs. He was en route to the shower, his towel and chunk of soap in hand. He paused a moment beneath the camera and ran his hand across the back of his neck, a subtle gesture that would go unnoticed by any current or future observer. He rubbed his neck five times, calling for her to glitch the surveillance system in five hours.
The newspaper cone, drying upstairs under his sheet, had been growing steadily throughout the day. He hoped it would be ready by nine.
He hoped everything else would be ready, too. Including his concussed brain.
Walking away, he stumbled a bit. He hoped Joey wouldn’t notice. Continuing on into the showers, he stripped with a few other inmates and stepped under the lukewarm drizzle. His scruff had grown longer, approximating a beard, and he longed for a shave. He didn’t duck his head beneath the stream, staying alert. Even the moderate heat of the water brought his temperature up, the symptoms simmering back to life. The room tilted one way and then the other, a slow-motion seesaw. He sagged into the wall, willing the static to clear from his brain.
That’s when he noticed the other inmates trickling out.
No, no, no, he thought. Not now.
He stepped out of the stream, his body still slick with soapy water, staggered over to the benches, and hurriedly dressed. He’d managed to get into his boxers and pants when the lights went out.
Three elongated shadows fell through the wide doorway, stretching across the tile. When the men stepped into view, they were perfectly backlit, black outlines that looked like holes cut into the air itself. Casper’s friends coming to settle the debt.
They advanced on Evan.
Evan didn’t wait.
He charged.
Drawing first blood was the only chance he had.
The three men were counting on the intimidation factor and the element of surprise. All the set decoration—killed lights and long shadows in the proverbial shower—didn’t buy them what they’d hoped.
The darkness meant he wouldn’t see them coming.
But it also meant they couldn’t see him coming.
The floor was slick with water, which would help.
In a three-man assault, the guy in the middle was usually the alpha, so Evan singled him out first, jabbing two fingers into the jugular notch at the base
of his throat. The soft flesh in the U-shaped dent beneath the Adam’s apple had plenty of give. The man fell away, hands wrapped around his thick neck, gagging and screeching for air.
The ringing in Evan’s ears rose to a high-pitched whine, but he ignored it, ignored the nausea and the pain and the way the men’s outlines were indistinct, like ghosts bleeding into the air. If he held it together, he could get it mostly right, and mostly right might just be good enough.
The other two came at Evan simultaneously, unsteady on the wet tile, but they were clearly spooked at having lost the drop. Slipping between them, Evan chambered his leg and pistoned his heel into the outside back of the smaller man’s thigh, aiming four inches above the knee to target the spot where the peroneal nerve branches off from the sciatic. The pressure-point pain was profound and immobilizing and set off a sympathetic reflex in the other leg. The man tumbled to the floor, doubled over in an improvised fetal position so he could clutch his throbbing limb. His lips gaped, and even in the dim light Evan could make out the glisten of drool.
Evan faced the last man. He still couldn’t see him clearly, but the guy was enormous, his shoulders rising and falling. Panicked breathing. His mouth was spread, a gold incisor glinting in the dim light.
The man from the rec area, then.
Not one of Bedrosov’s lieutenants. That made the situation less complicated but still plenty dangerous.
Evan’s two strikes had cost him. His muscles were spent, his head screaming. The tile rolled like a boat beneath his feet, threatening to dump him over.
Evan and the big man circled each other.
The others flopped on the tile, fighting for air, making animal noises.
Evan’s view got swimmy and wouldn’t come back. He could barely discern his opponent; he looked like a collection of ripples that made up a man.
There was no way Evan could fight him. Not right now.
He had to bluff his way out.
It took everything he had to produce the words without slurring. “If I’d kicked him four inches lower, I would’ve struck the knee joint. That would have produced permanent damage—cartilage tearing, tendons stripped from the bone, maybe a shattered patella. That’s what I’ll do to you. Unless.”
They kept circling, sizing each other up. Evan’s bare feet made slapping noises against the tile.
“Unless what?” the big man finally said.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone too badly,” Evan said. “And I don’t think any of you want to get hurt too badly.”
“Like you hurt Casper?”
“Yeah,” Evan said. “Like that.”
They shuffled around and around, the men’s gasps and moans echoing in the darkness. Evan stopped, and the man matched him. The room, however, kept moving.
Evan summoned his toughest voice. “We good?” It sounded husky rather than weak, a stroke of luck.
The man hesitated. Then gave a nod. “We’re good.”
“Why don’t you help your friends out,” Evan said.
The man shouldered his cohorts and stumbled away. Evan stood in the darkness until the sounds of their labored retreat faded.
Then he sat on the bench, gripped it at either side, and did his best to figure out how to breathe again.
48
I Saw What You Did
After prepping the cell, Evan rested on his bunk, visualizing his brain as healthy and unimpaired. He thought about all his symptoms—the nausea and light-headedness, the headaches and blurred vision, the light streaks and dizziness, the ringing in his ears and trouble with his balance—and he willed each one slowly away.
If he guarded his head at all costs, he just might make it through intact.
When the time was near, Evan hopped down and eased onto the catwalk to check the clock—8:57 P.M.
Three minutes to go time.
He went back into his cell.
“Monkey Mouth,” he said. “You should go to the dayroom.”
Monkey Mouth paused his oblivious yammering. “Why?”
“It’ll be safer there.”
Monkey Mouth scurried off the bunk and hustled out.
Evan closed his eyes. In two minutes Joey would black out the cameras. That would give him a limited window in which to get it all done.
He took a few deep breaths.
Either it would work.
Or any recognizable version of his life would be over.
One minute.
Keeping his eyes shut, he felt the firmness of the concrete underfoot, the pressure of the soles in his shoes, the weight of the air. A coolness at his nostrils with each inhalation. The rise of his chest, his stomach moving as well, every breath expanding ribs and belly, reminding him that right now he was alive and safe, standing on a planet with seven and a half billion souls, many of whom had bigger challenges even than what he was about to face.
He keyed to the snow-globe swirl of his thoughts and emotions and waited for the sediment to settle.
Once the water cleared, he opened his eyes.
He felt neither stress nor trepidation. Neither weakness nor concussion symptoms. He’d consigned all emotion to the future. Right now he was a pulse and a weapon heated to 98.6 degrees. He was muscle and bone that if deployed properly would produce predictable results.
And he was moving.
A broken third of his soap bar rested atop his sheet. The staple he’d smuggled in was embedded in the chunk, curved out like a horseshoe and padded with the foil gum wrapper.
Plucking it up, he crouched by the electrical outlet. Careful to grip only the soap, he jammed the small piece of curved metal into the outlet. An arc ran through the center of the horseshoe.
He’d placed the dead plant, dried further by the day’s relentless sunlight, on the floor beside his knee. He plucked up a stick of it now and touched it to the arc.
It caught, a makeshift match.
Scattered around him lay tufts of stuffing from his mattress.
Kindling.
He lit a tuft on fire. And then another. And then another. And then one more.
When the flames reached a sufficient pitch, he dropped one tuft atop each of the four mattresses in the cell, mini bonfires with fresh fuel.
Fire burned down into the heart of each mattress.
He picked one up by the edge, ran to the cell door to get up his momentum, and flung it over the edge of the catwalk. The inmates below scattered a moment before it struck a table, spraying sparks.
He hurled another mattress to a different part of the bay, spreading out the diversions so they’d be harder to source. Confusion reigned, inmates hollering, running to their cells, toward the sealed exit. He spotted Teardrop below, bolting from the dayroom, grabbing fleeing inmates and shouting questions at them. Across at Cell 37, Bedrosov’s lieutenants leaned over the catwalk, staring down, also trying to assemble the picture.
Evan dragged a third mattress around into the neighboring cell. Four sets of eyes stared at him in alarm. He stood, wielding a raft of flame.
“Excuse me,” he said, and they bolted.
He slung the sheet of fire into the center of that cell and pulled the other mattresses down around it.
As he reemerged onto the catwalk, mayhem spread below, brawls breaking out. Evan ran back into his cell, the heat as thick as paste. Safe from the flames, tilted in the corner near the door, was the result of his toil.
The papier-mâché newspaper, ten pages meticulously rolled, dried, and hardened into a single solid object.
A spear.
Not only was it too brittle to be used as a bat, it wouldn’t survive a stabbing intact. It was designed for onetime use. He had to protect it until he got to Bedrosov. And he had to hit the mark on the first try.
Evan grabbed it, careful to keep his unsheathed pinkie lifted from the surface, and turned to go.
One of Bedrosov’s lieutenants filled the doorway. “I saw what you did, you stupid—”
A single thought loomed, lit in neon on
the inside of Evan’s mind: Protect your head.
Curling the spear defensively to his chest, Evan whipped around in a spin kick, striking the guy with the edge of his foot, hitting him on the rise just beneath the sternum. The man flew up across the catwalk, landing on the rail with a backbreaking crunch. He slid forward onto his knees, puddling onto the mesh metal as Evan passed.
The other lieutenant remained in guard position in front of 37, fists raised, eyes darting from the floor to the various cells. He spotted Evan when Evan was twenty yards out, sprinting up the catwalk at him.
The man squared to fight, his left foot sliding back, which meant either a jab would come from the right or a cross from the left. His eyes bulged, veins squiggling in his neck. An overadrenalized fighter tended to lead with a power cross, and sure enough, as Evan closed in, the guy wound up for a haymaker.
Hurtling forward, Evan hugged the spear and ducked the powerful swing, his speed carrying him inside the man’s span. The punch whistled past Evan’s ear, missing by inches. A half squat set Evan’s base, and then he erupted up into the man, crushing his ribs with his shoulder and lifting him up, up, and over the rail.
Given all the commotion, Evan didn’t hear him hit the floor below.
His shoulder had done all the heavy lifting, his head keeping clear of the impact, his hair not so much as ruffled.
He turned.
Bedrosov had backed to the rear of his cell. Even from there he would have clearly seen Evan put his man over the railing. He was on his feet, the characteristic calmness washed from his face along with all color. His gaze dropped to the spear in Evan’s hand.
“You’re the one who phoned me,” he said. “About Grant Merriweather’s cousin. The Nowhere Man.” He looked at Evan and did not seem to like what he saw. One hand lifted, patting the air, a we’re-all-adults-here gesture betrayed by a tremor. “Let’s be reasonable.”
Evan crossed the cell in three strides, rotating the spear around his hand in an iaido-sword spin to draw Bedrosov’s eye. Sure enough, the man staggered back, hands flailing. His head oriented to the spinning cone, leaving his neck exposed.
Into the Fire Page 28