Into the Fire(18)

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.