The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(59)

“Where is he now?” Larison said.

“Dead.”

“That why you became a prosecutor? Because you couldn’t punish him?”

“What are you, my therapist? Anyway, what makes you think I didn’t punish him?”

Larison doubted it, but he said, “I hope you did.”

There was a pause. She said, “Well, I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What about you? How did you get into . . . whatever it is you do?”

He swallowed a mouthful of chicken and rice. “Long story.”

“Are we going someplace?”

He smiled. He liked Diaz. She wasn’t as tough as she thought she was, but with a little luck, she would be.

“It started with the rah-rah stuff,” he said. “Flag and country and all that. But really, I just didn’t want anyone to ever be able to fuck with me. You know. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, ’cause I’m the baddest motherfucker in the valley.’ But it didn’t take long to figure out the rah-rah was just bullshit and marketing. A racket.”

“Well, at least you got the baddest motherfucker part, right?”

He laughed. “I don’t know about that. But yeah, people tend to leave me alone if I want them to. And if they don’t, I can make them.”

For a moment, her eyes were far away. “I wish I could have done that,” she said, and he knew she was remembering the stepfather.

He nodded. “There’s a cost, though.”

“What?”

He shrugged. “Parts of you wind up . . . cauterized.”

He stopped, amazed he had said so much. Well, the hitchhiker principle worked both ways.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be. These people have been good for me. That fucking Dox . . . He can wear you down. Anyway, what about you? What are you going to do when this is over?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you going to be able to go back to the law, and the rules, and all the sanctimonious bullshit and pretend it’s not all just, you know, a racket?”

“It’s not all a racket,” she said.

He liked her enough not to want to disabuse her.

“Anyway,” she said after a moment. “I knew Schrader had allies. Livia warned me about what I’d be facing with an indictment. But even she didn’t see . . . how far they’d go. Although maybe she did. She kept trying to get me to be more careful. I thought she was being alarmist. God.”

“There’s a saying I like. ‘Denial has no survival value.’ If you’re going to play, you have to at least recognize what the game is.”

She nodded. “Well, now I know.”

“And on the bright side, there’s a good chance Schrader spent the last hours of his life screaming for it to stop. And who knows? Maybe they’re not done with him. Maybe he’s screaming right now.”

“Somehow that doesn’t feel like justice.”

“It beats someone killing you, and Schrader walking free.”

She smiled. “Well, when you put it like that.”

He smiled back. Yeah, she was all right.

“This whole thing,” he said. “It’s about the videos, right?”

“It seems that way.”

“That’s what all the bigshots are playing for. But maybe the videos will wind up with you. Who’ll be the baddest motherfucker then?”

“That’s not what I would do with them. Those videos are evidence of crimes. I’d use them for new prosecutions.”

“Well, that’s one way. But you want to hear another expression I like?”

She didn’t answer, and he went on.

“‘Don’t bring a lawbook to a gunfight.’”





chapter

forty-four





EVIE


Evie was at the checkout desk in the library. Other than the flicker of the computer screen and the ambient glow from the parking lot lights outside the windows, the cavernous space was dark. It was so quiet she could hear the hum of the computer, and the air had a trace of must—that unmistakable book smell, which she had always found comforting but that now felt surreal and discordant.

Dash had passed out on a couch, under the multicolored afghan Ms. Symons typically kept folded across her lap and that, along with her overlarge glasses, had become her trademark as the school librarian. Evie was relieved he was sleeping. He’d reacted better than she had feared: if Marvin said they shouldn’t go home until he could make sure the house was safe, they shouldn’t go home. Evie couldn’t answer his questions beyond that, so he would save them for Marvin, who he trusted so completely.

But the first questions would be only the beginning, and when the answers proved unsatisfactory, the questions, and the doubts, would grow. Dash wasn’t a little boy anymore, to be bought off with stories about scavenger hunts and games as the reasons they had been on the run, or vague explanations that Delgado was a bad man who had been trying to hurt them because he thought Evie had information Delgado wanted, and that Marvin had made Delgado go away. Dash had always believed Marvin’s vague assurance that he had been one kind of contractor, for the government, and now had become another, the kind that builds houses. And while she knew Dash wouldn’t indulge those fictions forever, she had always hoped he would hold on to them for longer.