Downtown Los Angeles stretched skyward around Evan and Max, a huddle of high-rises shot above an apron of urban sprawl, as if a few square blocks had snapped off the slab of Manhattan and floated to the wrong coast. On a clear day, the San Gabriel Mountains loomed with deceptive closeness to the east. Snowcapped Mount Baldy dominated the jagged tear line where earth met sky, and beyond, smothered in an ocean of pines, lay Arrowhead and Big Bear, where Grant Merriweather had been put down with a bullet to the head.
Here on the bustling city sidewalk, a wintry breeze rattled an empty Pressed Juicery bottle over the cracked concrete past Evan’s and Max’s shoes. On the corner a man sold roasted corn out of a food cart, his face weather-battered, his skin a rich shade of umber. The smell reminded Evan that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and he stared longingly as the man rolled an ear through metal troughs of melted butter, Cotija cheese, and powdered chili. Along the cart’s frame, freshly carved mango hung in clear bags, marinating in lime, salt, and sriracha.
Grant Merriweather’s firm, the imaginatively titled Merriweather Accountancy, resided on the seventeenth floor of the black-glass rise before them. This was a convenient part of downtown for a forensic accountant, a few blocks from City Hall, LAPD headquarters, and the Criminal Courts Building.
Evan clenched the Swiss Army knife key chain, the key swaying beneath his fist.
Those oddly symmetrical cuts. The shiny gold finish, unworn by use, not a single scrape from tumbler pins.
“Are we ever actually going to, you know, go inside?” Max asked.
Dragging Max along, Evan had circuited the nearby blocks three times, checking parked cars, passing faces, and searching windows for glints thrown by binoculars or sniper rifles. They’d ridden up the elevators of surrounding buildings and watched the street from various vantages. Sipped espresso in the catty-corner Starbucks and studied the lobby.
The Third Commandment: Master your surroundings.
Evan slid the key chain into his pocket. Then headed for the entrance.
Max followed.
They slid through the weighty revolving doors, delivered onto a white granite floor scuffed from the tread of loafers and high heels. The elevator bank was to the left, set behind a directory shimmering with brass letters. Foot traffic was light. Cutting across the lobby, Evan circled his gaze from faces to hands to faces.
No one reaching. No one sweating. No one with THE TERROR scraped into the flesh of his forearm.
Keeping Max at his side, Evan moved straight past the elevator and a sextet of Le Corbusier lounge chairs scattered like dice cubes. They stepped into the stairwell, the door sucked shut behind them, and they stood a moment in the silence.
No one walks in Los Angeles. And no one takes the stairs.
They started up.
Floor after floor, accompanied only by the tapping of their footsteps. Max seemed to be in good shape. Working construction will do that.
They emerged onto the seventeenth floor, Evan pressing the door open slowly with a flat palm. The empty hall fanned into view and, at the end, the sign for Merriweather Accountancy.
Corner office.
They exited the stairwell, Max picking up the pace.
Evan put the bar of his forearm across Max’s chest, stopping him.
Max said, “What?”
Evan pointed down. White drywall dust sprinkled the carpet fibers by the baseboard, right at the seam where a vacuum couldn’t reach.
Max said, “So?”
Evan pointed up.
Drilled into the ceiling, angled down the hall toward Grant’s door, was a bullet security camera with the sticker still applied to its base: IRONKLAD KAM. Fresh from the company.
Grant had been scared, all right. Scared enough to install a new security system at the office.
“What do we do now?” Max whispered.
Evan reached up and swiveled the camera, moving to keep them both in its blind spot. A red light glowed at the bottom the whole time, the recording uninterrupted. They wound up on its far side, the lens aimed at the stairwell door through which they had just emerged.
They walked down the hall. Evan paused near the thick wooden door, peering around the corner up the intersecting corridor. Aside from a fire-extinguisher cabinet and an anachronistic ashtray stand by the elevator, this hallway was also empty. Evan turned back to the door. Set his ear to the fine grain. No vibrations from within. The knob turned readily in his grip.
Unlocked.
The suction of the opening door pulled a mini flurry of feathers out across the tops of Evan’s boots. The door swung inward a few inches and then caught on a slashed throw pillow. Evan shoved through the wadded-up fabric and peered inside.
The lobby was trashed. Leather couch cushions punctured, framed pictures shattered, a sheepish fern rising naked from a mound of soil and pottery shards.
Behind Evan a strangled noise escaped Max’s throat.
They eased through the reception area. Files strewn across the carpet, reference books torn from shelves, the chairs upended. The desk looked violated, drawers extracted from the slots like teeth pulled from a wooden mouth.
Evan said, “Impressive job.”
Max wiped his forehead. “Can’t quite find it in me to marvel at the professionalism.”
Grant’s office showed more of the same. The cylindrical locks had been popped neatly out of the big file cabinets, the contents rifled through. On the desk an even row of unplugged cords edged the blank rectangle where a computer would go. Evan felt like he was connecting the dots that the Terror had connected days before, walking in his footsteps. He placed his hand on the leather blotter, wondering if the computer had held the address of Grant’s cabin in Big Bear.
The afternoon sun slanted through the blinds, chopping the bare desk into noirish bands of goldenrod. A dedicated monitor on the wall showed a livestream from the bullet camera in the hall. Were it not for the time stamp counting off minutes and seconds, it might have been a still life: Stairwell Door at Rest.
Awards had been raked from the dark walnut cabinets and flipped from the walls, rubbling the base of the old-timey wainscoting. KIWANIS CLUB COURAGEOUS CITIZEN AWARD. FRIEND OF LAPD. KEY TO THE COMMUNITY OF LA CRESCENTA. Plaques praising Grant’s work heading up ethics oversight and peer review for the California Board of Accountancy had been snapped in two, the splintered edges rearing from the heap.
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Evan’s eye caught on a photograph near the tip of his boot. It showed a family reunion, a raft of Merriweathers crowded together with smiling faces and matching T-shirts naming kin and year. Family reunions were yet another American custom that Evan viewed with an anthropologist’s remove: Decennially, relatives of the species homo sapiens gathered to wear coordinated garb, swap origin tales, and compare like-expressed genetic traits.
Pillar-of-the-community Grant was front and center in the picture, surrounded by a subcluster of his immediate family. Evan searched for Max’s face but didn’t see it.
Max followed Evan’s gaze, said, “Yeah, I didn’t get invited to stuff like that. Especially after Violet.”
“Your ex,” Evan said.
Emotion bloomed behind Max’s face, glassing his pupils, weighing on his cheeks. He nodded. Cleared his throat.
“When I saw that guy—the Terror—with the knife, I thought…” Max paused. “They say your life flashes before your eyes. But it doesn’t. Just your biggest regret. Just one.” He wet his lips. “I was never good enough for her. I just wanted to pretend I was.”
Evan studied him. He was unsure why Max was telling him this, what would drive a man to share such a thing in the midst of this wreckage.
Max fixed him with a questioning gaze. “You’ve never met someone who makes you want to be … I don’t know. More?”
“Than what?”
“Than what you are,” Max said. “A different person, even?”
Evan thought of his last dinner at Mia’s house. She’d cooked linguini with red sauce, a combination he’d never encountered. They’d sipped wheat-based Ukrainian vodka aged in wood for six months. Afterward they’d kissed in the doorway like a couple from a movie, from TV. Her mouth had been soft and promising. A domestic scene unlike anything he’d experienced before and would likely experience again.
He said, “No.”
He moved on, picking through some of the mess on the floor.
Max watched him for a time. Then said, “Come on, man.”
Evan looked at him.
“You’re telling me you’re never up at night reviewing everything you’ve ever done wrong?” Max said. “Overwhelmed by the whole … I don’t know … fuck, fragility of the universe?” He looked exasperated, raw with exhaustion and stress. “Late at night I can tell you every last thing I’ve ever screwed up. Every time I hurt someone’s feelings. Every faux pas. Every dumb thing. In junior high I was the second-smallest kid in my class. So I held Ryan Steck underwater in the pool during PE. He was the smallest kid. I thought it would make me feel better.” He took a breath. “When I think about it, I still feel it. Like an ache in my chest.”
Evan thought of a round man with a bullet hole in the back of his head, slumped forward, his face in his soup. All these years later, he could still hear the rattle of the hanging curtain beads, the static-tinged foreign words spilling from the old radio. He still felt the Makarov pistol, warm in his hand.
“Do you think he still remembers?” Max said. “That he’s up somewhere late at night thinking about what a dick I was?”
Evan said, “If he’s still alive and that’s what tops his list of concerns, I’d say Ryan Steck has it pretty good.”
Max looked unsatisfied with that, but Evan wasn’t here to provide satisfaction. He stepped behind the desk once more, turned over the extricated drawers, checked the bottoms.
“They got through every lock in this office,” Max said. “Whatever that key leads to is long gone.”
“If the lock was in this office,” Evan said. “This is the most logical place someone would look. Which means Grant probably wouldn’t stash anything here.”
“So why are we here?”
“To see what we can find that might point us to another location.”
The First Commandment: Assume nothing.
Crouched above a shard of coffee mug, the echo of the Commandment in his head, Evan froze.
He said, “What if the key isn’t a key?”
Max said, “If the key isn’t a key, then what is it?”
Evan dug it out of his pocket again, stared at it on his palm. Shiny gold. Pristine. Slightly too big.
Like a prop.
He crossed to the rubble at the wainscoting, picked out a fallen shadow box, brushed away the shards. KEY TO THE COMMUNITY OF LA CRESCENTA. An indentation in the foam backing cast a familiar shape in negative relief.
Evan slipped the key off the chain connecting it to the Swiss Army knife and thumbed it into place.
A perfect fit.
“Wait—what?” Max said. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he give me a fake key?”
Evan said, “He wasn’t giving you a key. He was giving you a key chain.”
With the edge of his nail, he pried open the attachments from the red casing. The key chain was diminutive, the attachments few. Penknife, scissors, file.
Max crouched opposite him, their eyes level. Evan pressed the edge of the penknife into the pad of his index finger. It didn’t cut.
A dummy blade.
He pinched it between thumb and forefinger. Sure enough, it slid off its casing, revealing the metal head of a USB plug concealed beneath.
A thumb drive.
Max blew out a breath. “Grant was clever. I’ll give him that.”
Etched into the metal stub of the USB connector, visible only if tilted to the light, was a logo formed of the union of two letters, the right slant of the M forming the first rise of the A. A nifty little piece of branding for Merriweather Accountancy.
Over Max’s shoulder Evan registered movement on the wall monitor. A slender man emerging from the stairwell, turning his shoulders to slip through the barely cracked door. A black wool balaclava covered his face, save for two almond-shaped eyeholes. He looked too skinny to be the Terror, at least based on Max’s description, but the exposed forearms were also ridged with carefully inflicted scar patterns.
His hands turned ghostly white by latex gloves.
One held a pistol, the barrel stretched wickedly long by a suppressor.