Into the Fire(16)
The brakes ground, a metal-on-metal screech Evan could feel in his teeth.
“Look,” Max said. “I don’t want to drag Grant’s family into this. They’re going through it bad right now. And his oldest kid, she’s pregnant. I don’t really have … I don’t have a lot to lose, you know? So I need your help, yeah. But it’s more important that we keep them out of this.” He leaned back in his seat and exhaled, puffing out his cheeks. “Why’d you make me run around like that? The tram stop to the bus to the Metro?”
Evan said, “I was deciding if you’re worth saving.”
“Am I worth saving?”
The doors hissed open at Union Station. Evan plucked the phone from Max’s hand, snapped it in half, and slid the pieces across the floor. They disappeared through the gap, falling onto the tracks.
Before Max could react, Evan grabbed his arm, tugged him off the train, and hustled him across the platform and up the stairs. They blinked in the sudden light of day.
Evan steered him across the parking lot and dumped him into the passenger seat of a white Chevy Malibu, a backup vehicle he’d picked up at one of his safe houses.
Evan accelerated out of the parking lot, pressing Max back in the cloth seat, and shot north up Alameda.
Max said, “Things go pretty fast around you, huh?”
Evan zigzagged across the 110, and then they were forging upslope, weaving between parked cars on increasingly cramped streets. He stopped next to a construction dumpster brimming with detritus.
Evan pulled a tube of superglue from the glove box and used it to coat his fingertips.
Max said, “Mind if I ask…?”
“Fingerprints.”
Max craned to look through his window at the crumbling dirt rise of the hillside. “Why are we here?”
But Evan was already out of the car, digging in the trunk. He produced an eight-ounce bottle of Marianna Super Star Cream Peroxide Developer.
Max was next to him now, gawking. “So we’re gonna dye my hair? Disguise me?”
Instead of answering, Evan hiked up the steep slope, boots slipping, releasing tumbles of dirt. Max made his way up behind him. They waded through knee-high weeds and came to the back of a fence.
Max said, “Would you mind just telling me—”
Evan vaulted the fence.
He waited. A moment later Max pulled himself over as well.
Max took in the postage-stamp backyard, his mouth popping open at the sight of Lorraine Lennox’s house. A dry breeze wafted the heat of the fire pit across their faces, and a faint smell from the house. Something fetid. The flat-screen TV emitted steady pulses of canned laughter.
Evan cranked off the gas to the fire pit, the flames drowning in the lava stones.
He said, “Don’t move.”
He breezed into the house, weathering the smell, and did a quick spin through, safing each room and checking the front yard. He ignored the armchair and what it held.
When he returned to the backyard, Max remained rooted in place, his feet staked to the dead grass. His mouth pulsed a few times, as if he were holding his gorge in place. “Look,” he said. “I appreciate this a ton, but your bedside manner isn’t exactly—”
“What did you touch?” Evan said. “Start here.”
Max blinked twice.
Evan said, “Focus. Every single thing you touched.”
Max pointed. “Side gate.”
Evan jogged over, removing a rag from one of his cargo pockets and dousing it with the hair product. He wiped down both sides of the gate.
From behind him, Max said, “It has bleach in it?”
“Bleach is overrated. A lot of them are reducing agents that leave behind intact hemoglobin,” Evan said, giving extra attention to the handle. “Whereas hydrogen peroxide is an oxidizing agent—generates bubbles that degrade DNA.” He headed back to wipe off the rear fence where Max had jumped over and then considered the dilapidated lawn furniture. “Where else did you touch? Or even go near?”
They worked their way inside, Max averting his eyes from Lorraine Lennox’s body. The smell was thick all around them, pressing into their pores.
Evan said, “Don’t touch anything.”
He lathered down the counter and then poured the solution into the sink, running the water and the garbage disposal for a solid two minutes. When he shut it off, Max was standing over by a bookshelf, staring at photographs.
“Let’s go,” Evan said.
“We can’t just leave her,” Max said.
Evan paused halfway through the open sliding door. “She won’t know the difference.”
Max pointed at the framed pictures. “She has a brother. And looks like her parents are still alive.” He wiped his mouth. “Her people deserve to know.”
Evan’s own mouth tensed. He leaned to look down the brief hall through the front window. No one visible on the street. Yet.
Then he strode inside, plucked the phone from the base station, and tapped out three digits with a superglue-tipped finger. He rested the cordless on the counter and ushered Max outside.
Behind them he could make out a tinny voice asking, “What’s your emergency?”
10
Area of Expertise
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.