As the taxi pulled away, Max lumbered toward the police station at the corner of De Longpre and Wilcox. The low-slung building, concrete and brick, suffered from a paucity of windows. Like so much else within the cash-strapped L.A. city borders, it was losing a war of attrition, too many weeks grinding by with not enough funds. Chewing gum spackled the Hollywood stars embedded in the pavement. Sun-baked plants crumbled in the dirt beds lining the entrance. The bricks, faded and chipped.
A bail-bonds shop across the street perkily advertised 2 percent down, the glitzy yellow sign a lighthouse beacon shining through the night, drawing the fallen like moths. This was real Hollywood, the tattered velvet underbelly, a spiderweb stretched wide and hungry to catch overreaching souls in free fall.
Max’s hand, shoved into his pocket, made a fist around the zip drive loaded with Grant’s files. His palm was sweaty.
Taking a deep breath, he walked up the ramp, yanked open the weighty glass door, and stepped into a trickle of air from a failing fan. Unhappy folks filled the molded plastic seats. The desk officer didn’t look up from her iPhone. She was frowning down at it, tapping away with one finger. “Your complaint?” Her voice emerged tinny from a speak-through grille punched through the bullet-resistant glass screen.
“My cousin, Grant Merriweather, was a forensic accountant working on a case for someone at your station. I have information about the investigation.” Max’s mouth felt dry, the words rough and raspy on the way out. “He was murdered last week.”
At this she looked up.
She dropped her phone on the blotter and pushed back in her rolling chair, coasting to the left side of the horseshoe desk. Plucking up a landline, she poked at buttons with the end of a pencil and had a brief conversation. Then she called over to him. “Max Merriweather?”
“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 ahead 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?”