At the Fuller Street trailhead of Runyon Canyon, Max Merriweather stitched his hands together behind him and leaned forward to stretch out his lower back, where thirty-three years of wear and tear had taken roost. Hikers were out in force, gay couples and aggressively fit moms, dog walkers and the occasional celebrity in oversize sunglasses and a don’t-notice-me slouch beanie. To the west the sun coasted down behind a bank of clouds, fuchsia embers warming up into a sunset.
The older he got, the more life seemed to present him with puzzles he didn’t know how to solve. Holding down steady work. Stashing away money. And Violet.
Two years and seven months later and he still couldn’t think of Violet without feeling it in his chest, a ping to the soft tissue.
He knew he wore the weight of it in his face, in the knots of his shoulders, in the stiffness of his back. These days people looked at him like they didn’t want him to rub off on them. He couldn’t blame them. He didn’t want to rub off on himself.
Oh, well. As his old man said, A whole lotta folks do better with worse.
The breeze blew sage and chaparral, the dusty scent of the Santa Monica Mountains when you got away from the asphalt and car exhaust. Max started up the trail, nearing a homeless guy five layers deep in rags. The man seemed to grow out from the base of the fence, an organism composed of tattered cardboard, scraps of bedding, and dirt-caked flesh. Swollen legs protruded from a shabby blanket, the skin the same color as the fabric, the dirt. His feet were bare, the soles cracked like shattered plastic. A pit-bull mix was curled up beside him, his snout scarred like the hull of an old ship—probably a dogfight rescue.
The man rattled some coins in a chewed Fatburger cup. “Help a guy out?”
Max said, “We all got it rough, pal.”
The man nodded sagely. “Ain’t that the truth.”
Max jogged up the trail, weaving through the post-workday rush. Designer mini-dogs trotted on bejeweled leashes. Rihanna blared from Beats headphones. A few young guys moved together like a pride of lions, their hair cut in Mad Men parts, negotiating deals too loudly on their phones. A silver-haired husband and wife held hands and looked as content as anyone Max had ever seen outside a TV commercial.
He reached Inspiration Point and took in the downtown skyline miles to the southeast. The scrubby trail brush in the foreground framed the urban sprawl beyond, a snapshot of Los Angeles in all its rangy glory.
Violet had always loved this view. And now this was the closest to her he could get.
A mom nudged up beside him with an off-road stroller rugged enough to have been designed by the United States Army. Behind dark mesh a baby cooed, and Max turned quickly away.
He ran back down even harder.
As he passed through the gate, he heard the homeless guy rattle his few coins and call out to the pride of young men.
The loudest of the bunch muted his phone against his chest. “Quit bugging everyone, dude. You’re a joke.”
The homeless guy said, “Then help me not be a joke.”
The young man laughed, white teeth flashing, and pointed at him. “Nice try, bud. Nice try.”
Max walked up the street to where he’d left his truck, a TrailBlazer with rust patches eating through the wheel wells. He had to climb in across the passenger seat because a tap-and-run months back had dented in the driver’s door.
He sat for a moment, hands on the steering wheel. He thought of the homeless guy back by the fence, those painful deep cracks running through the soles of his blackened feet. Help me not be a joke.
He turned the truck on but couldn’t bring himself to tug the gearshift into drive.
A whole lotta folks do better with worse.
Defeated, he cut the engine and climbed out over the console. He headed back toward the trailhead.
Three minutes later he returned.
Barefoot.
From the truck bed, he pulled out a dirty pair of socks and his work boots, worn from his by-the-day construction gig. When he crawled back behind the wheel, his phone chimed in the glove box.
He popped open the antique clamshell he’d been using ever since he fell behind on the payments for his iPhone.
A text from his father waited: YOUR COUSIN GRANT WAS KILLED LAST NIGHT. FIGURED YOU SHOULD KNOW.
Max lowered his face, took a few deep breaths, his hand clammy around the phone. Then he shoved the truck into gear, the transmission complaining, and headed into whatever the day held.
As Max drove up to his apartment on the last street in Culver City still unclaimed by gentrification, he reminded himself: He didn’t know anything about anything.
This seemed true in general. But specifically it meant that he didn’t—shouldn’t—have to worry about the nonsense that Grant had saddled him with two months ago.
He recalled the scene with the clarity reserved for painful memories. Golden Boy Grant, the pride and joy of the Merriweathers, paying his first visit to Max’s shitty second-floor apartment, standing on the worn carpet in a thousand-dollar suit so he wouldn’t have to sit on the stained couch. Grant, whose exploits and accomplishments Max heard about at every infrequent brush with a family member. Grant, the forensic accountant, certified in internal auditing, business evaluation, fraud examination, financial forensics, and God knew what else, the licensure initials appended to his signature even on the family fucking Christmas card. Grant, caped investigator of misfeasance, who scoured the books at the behest of insurance companies, police departments, attorneys, banks, courts, government regulatory bodies, and the occasional private citizen. Grant of the rugged good looks, the strong chin, of the spit-shined wingtips and high-precision haircut. “Exactitude is my business,” he’d told Max on more than one occasion. And indeed, sprawled on his inferior couch, Max noted that he could probably cut himself on the crease of his cousin’s slacks.
Grant had handed him a canary-yellow envelope and said, “If anything ever happens to me, call the number inside.”
Max said, “You serious with this Hitchcock routine?”
“Dead serious.”
Max swallowed dryly and said, “Whose number is it?”
“A reporter at the L.A. Times. Don’t trust this to anyone but her. Promise me.”
“What’s up with you, Grant?”
Grant laughed. “Nothing. Nothing’s gonna happen to me. Look, I deal with some heavy hitters. And I’ve taken down my share of shady characters. I just want to make sure I have…” He paused, no doubt selecting his next word with that legendary exactitude. “Insurance. In case one day I kick over the wrong rock. It’s not the kind of thing you’d come across in your…” Another exactitudinous pause. “Line of work. But as you said, you’ve seen stuff like this before in the movies.”
In the movies, Max thought, this shit always worked out. The hero prepares his in-the-event-of-my-death file to disincentivize anyone from whacking him in a dark alley. Then he wades brashly into the conspiracy and outs the bad guys, saving the day. And no one has to waste a single thought on the schmuck holding the insurance envelope.
But this wasn’t the movies, and if Max had learned one thing from real life, it was that it didn’t go as well as cinematic bullshit.
He looked down at the holes worn through the knees of his jeans, sawdust still caught in the white harp strings of denim. “I don’t know, man. This cloak-and-dagger stuff isn’t really my thing.”
“Come on, Max,” Grant said, like he was talking to a kid or a dense customer-service specialist. “For once in your life, maybe step up, shoulder some responsibility.”
A stiletto to the gut. It took Max a few seconds to breathe again. He kept his eyes lowered, not wanting to let Grant see how devastatingly effective his neat little salvo had been. He imagined that Grant had rehearsed it a time or two in the mirror at his health club.
Max studied his hands. “What about Jill?”
“My wife’s not exactly a safe distance removed from me. Or my family. The thing with you is, no one will ever know. I mean, no one would ever think of you.”
Max said, “Right.”
“You know what I mean. Now, please, Max.” Grant considered his Breitling. “I have to get back to the office. Can I count on you?”
Max picked at a ragged edge of thumbnail where he’d nicked it in a band saw. Without looking up, he held out his hand. “I promise.”
“Great. Thanks so much.” Grant almost seemed sincere. “Thanks, Mighty Max.”
That brought him back. Five years old at a family picnic at Point Dume, and Max had built the tallest sandcastle. Then he’d Godzilla-stomped his way through it, and everyone had laughed and pointed, even his old man, and Grant had bestowed on him the nickname. A brief, shining moment when he’d been the pride of the Merriweathers.
Grant stepped forward and slapped the stiff canary-yellow envelope into Max’s palm. Something jangled inside, small but solid.
A waft of expensive cologne and Grant was gone.
Nothing’s gonna happen to me.
Parked at the curb now, Max recalled how long he’d sat there holding the envelope. How he’d duct-taped it behind his toilet tank before leaving to line up with the hardworking Hispanic day laborers outside Home Depot, hoping to be picked.
He pulled out his clamshell phone and read the last text exchange once again in case it had magically rewritten itself in the past fifteen minutes.
ME: HOW’D HE DIE?
DAD: GUESS HE WAS SHOT. PROB’LY ONE OF THE BAD GUYS HE HAD UNDER THE MAGNIFYING GLASS. A DAMN SHAME. ALWAYS THE GOOD ONES WHO GO YOUNG.
Pocketing the phone, Max started to climb out of his truck, but then he looked up and halted on all fours on the passenger seat. Up on the second floor of his building, the perennially unshaven and surnameless Mr. Omar had just emerged from his apartment to head to Max’s place next door. He shuffled through the jaundiced beams thrown from the outdoor hallway’s overhead lights. When he reached Max’s door, he knocked with considerable force.
“Max, Max, Max. You’re late again. Max? I can hear you in there. Don’t make me keep being a bother, my friend. I have more important matters to handle, believe me.”
Mr. Omar rapped a few more times, sighed audibly, and returned to his apartment. Through the big front window, Max watched him settle back into his Barcalounger, bathed in the aquarium light of his television.
Tomorrow’s shift would put Max over the top for this month’s rent—he’d beeline straight from work to Mr. Omar and settle up then.
Crawling from the truck, he closed the door as quietly as he could manage. Rather than risk the stairs and walk past Mr. Omar’s window, he headed for the telephone pole at the edge of the building. Convenient U-shaped steps studded the pole.
Up he went, getting one foot on the convenient gutter ledge, and then in through the bathroom window he kept unlocked for moments like this.
He stepped down off the closed toilet lid and reached for the door when he heard it in the bedroom.
A tearing sound.
Shush shush shush.
He paused, not trusting his ears.
There it was again, a trio of unsettling rasps.
His lips felt suddenly dry. When he reached for the doorknob, his hand trembled ever so slightly.
He turned the doorknob slowly. The hinges were mercifully silent. The apartment lights were turned off, but a two-inch strip of pale yellow from the outside hall fell across his eye when he put it to the crack.
A man.
In his bedroom.
Working in the dark.
Wife-beater T-shirt. Prominent arm muscles oiled with sweat and marked with something else: Tattoos? Henna ink? Scars? One of them at the triceps was swirled like a pinwheel. The man’s back was turned, his shoulders rippling, his hands set to some unseen task. The smell of him hung heavily in the unvented air, a pungent musk like meat on the verge of turning.
Max’s drawers had been emptied, his few possessions strewn across the floor, the bureau tipped away from the wall. The TV was upended, holes punched in the drywall.
The man straightened up and armed his brow, his fist coming clear, clenched around a combat knife with a serrated edge.
Letters on his forearm resolved from the shadows sufficiently for Max to piece them together: THE TERROR. Visible past the man’s thighs, beneath the stripped-aside sheets, the mattress had been sawed open at intervals, the ticking bulged out intestinally.
The man spun the knife in his hand with a skilled proficiency, bent over the mattress once more, and punched the blade into a virgin spot. It made a thwack as if puncturing flesh.
And then the nightmare grating came once again: shush shush shush.
A thought blinked through Max’s brain. If he hadn’t walked back to the homeless guy at the trail, he would’ve been three minutes earlier, which meant he wouldn’t have seen Mr. Omar, which meant he would have strolled right through his front door into the teeth of this nightmare.
The rising burn in his chest demanded he ease out a breath. Painstakingly, he inched the door back into the frame and rotated the doorknob to its resting place. The click when he released it might as well have been a clap of thunder.
He backed to the toilet, crinkling his eyes as the blistered linoleum compressed with a click. One room over he heard a throat-muffled grunt, another thwack, and then the shush shush shush of the blade.
Max couldn’t help but imagine the knife working its way through sinew and tendons. His vision speckled, and a wave of light-headedness swept through him. He firmed his legs, blinked himself back from the edge.
Move, he told himself. Quick and quiet. You can do this.
He patted blindly behind the toilet tank, tore free the canary-yellow envelope, and wormed back out through the window.