Returning to the Lincoln Heights house felt like defeat.
And yet here Evan and Max were, standing on the splintered floor of the living room, a grim silence filling the darkness between them. They’d barely spoken on the drive here, staring through the windshield, lost in separate thoughts.
“I thought it was over,” Evan said. “I was wrong.”
Max’s posture was clamped down, his arms half crossed, one straight, the other gripping the opposite biceps. His knuckles were bloodless, his hand shaking down by his thigh. It looked like if he let go, he’d fly to pieces.
“Max. Max.”
A focus came back into his eyes.
“You’re safe now,” Evan said. “Right now, in this moment, you’re safe.”
He took out Nuñez’s Turing Phone and thumbed through recent calls. The directory had been completely wiped.
Except for one outgoing call.
He felt a tickle at the back of his skull, the next threat worming its way to the surface. Three problems had arisen. And he’d dispatched all three.
But if this mission had taught him anything, it was that the next problem was waiting just around the corner, blade in hand. And if his concussion had taught him anything, it was that he was playing Russian roulette. There were only so many dry clicks he’d get before the hammer dropped on a live round. It seemed cruelly fitting that his final outing as the Nowhere Man refused to end, as if the universe itself would not allow him to let go.
The time stamp on the Turing showed that the number had been dialed shortly after Max entered the Hollywood Station and turned himself in. The call had lasted twenty-seven seconds.
As the lead officers on the case, Nuñez and Brust had been alerted to Max’s presence by the desk cop. And then Nuñez had immediately contacted whoever was at the other end of that phone number.
Not Petro, since Petro was dead.
But another shot caller, even further up the food chain.
Nuñez and Brust had gotten their marching orders. And then headed to the Hollywood Station to murder Max.
The Turing Phones were links in a chain stretching up. How high that chain went remained to be seen.
Evan slid the shiny slab of Liquidmorphium back into his pocket.
“What’s that?” Max asked.
“Something else I have to handle.”
“Something or someone?”
Evan said, “Both.”
“How are you gonna handle it?” Max asked.
The headache had resumed, a vise clamping Evan’s brain. “I don’t know yet.”
Max rasped a hand across his stubble, peppered with gray. “I thought they were gonna kill me,” he said. “Two detectives. In a police station. And then … and then you busted in there with your head all wrapped like some kind of deranged King Tut.…” At this, the first sign of amusement teased his lips. But just as quickly it was gone. “Did you see Brust’s head? I’ve never … never seen anything like that.”
He blinked hard a few times as if clearing his mind and then walked over to the mud-caked wrench on the counter. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands. Only a few hours had passed since he’d used it to repair the pipe outside, but to Evan it felt like weeks. He figured that for Max it felt even longer.
“Why did they want to kill me?” Max said. “I mean … they’re cops.”
“They worked for Petro. He managed to flip them before Grant was hired.”
“But those guys are the detectives running the investigation against Petro. Why would they have opened the case to begin with? Why hire Grant to start digging?”
The sound of a car engine rose on the street outside, and Evan and Max tensed. But it kept on, motoring into the dead of night.
“I’m guessing Petro knew that an investigation was coming,” Evan said. “The dogfighting arena and a number of the smaller businesses used to launder his cash are in Hollywood. So he paid off two detectives in the local station to take point on the case, contain it at a smaller level, and bury it before it got kicked to Vice downtown.”
Max said, “So Brust and Nuñez were making sure the investigation went nowhere.”
“That’s right. They needed to hire a forensic accountant to cover their bases, figuring he wouldn’t get very far. They could check the right boxes, steer the case from the inside, then drop it for insufficient evidence. But it looks like Grant uncovered more than they were bargaining for.”
“Grant was too good.” It seemed the words were weighed down, hard for Max to say. He let the wrench slip from his hand onto the counter. “I thought I’d hit bottom. Now I’m implicated in the murder of two cops. What the hell’s next?”
Before he’d died, Petro had faced down Evan, smiling into the bullet that would end him. Evan sensed in his bones now that whatever Petro had been smiling about was more dangerous than a pair of dirty cops.
The First Commandment: Assume nothing.
Or in the case of this mission: Assume it can always get worse.
“One of my associates uncovered new files,” Evan said. “We’re going to go through them entry by entry and make sure there are no more surprises.”
Max said, “You have associates?”
It was, to be fair, an inflated term for a sixteen-year-old and an injured rescue dog in a Westwood one-room apartment. But Evan would take Joey over an NSA cyberwarfare group any day of the week.
Evan moved on. “When this is over, you’ll say that an assassin in Petro’s operation carried out the assault on the police station, that he killed Nuñez and Brust as part of the cover-up. He took you to force you to give up the thumb drive’s hiding place. But you managed to escape.”
“No one’ll believe that.”
“When we hand over files tracing all the payments to Nuñez and Brust, they will.”
“I don’t know,” Max said. “Every time you put down a threat, another pops up. And this thing, it keeps getting bigger and bigger.” His face, sallow in the ambient light, held a worn-through dread. “Imagine if Grant had never given me that thumb drive. Hour after hour I replay that scene in my head, and I think what if I’d just stood up for myself? What if I’d just said no? Was I that desperate for his approval? That desperate to show everyone that I wasn’t … I don’t know, useless? ‘Come on, Mighty Max. For once in your life, maybe step up, shoulder some responsibility.’” A bitter laugh escaped him. “And now I dragged Violet into it—Christ, just seeing me she has to relive it all, and I swore I’d never put that woman through anything ever again.” His voice quavered, his eyes brimming. “Now everywhere I look, someone’s trying to kill me, and I can’t do anything but hide in this fucking house.”
His voice rang off the walls. He lowered his head, eyes on the floor, his face coloring. Water dripped somewhere, an unnerving plink-plink-plink. The lights were off, the walls receding into darkness, so it seemed the space stretched out forever, a dank underworld.
“I’m sorry,” Max said. “You don’t need this.”
“Pick your head up,” Evan said sharply.
Max wiped at his eyes roughly.
And then he lifted his gaze.
“You had my back in that interrogation room,” Evan said. “Show yourself the same respect.”
“What’s that mean?” Max asked.
“‘Act like the person you want to be.’” It was one of Jack’s favorite quotations; just thinking of him put a rasp in Evan’s voice. “If we want to get through whatever’s coming, we’re gonna have to face it head-on.”
The protracted silence was broken only by more drops against the subfloor. When Max spoke again, his words were little more than a whisper. “I can’t see a way out anymore.”
Evan said, “Then I’ll find it for us.”