Into the Fire(2)
They heard the rasp of the door, and then Sheila breezed in. “The medevac’s en route from—” She read Patel’s face, went up on tiptoes to peer at the patient, the words sucked from her mouth.
“This man wasn’t in a car crash,” Patel said slowly. “He was tortured.”
“Please,” Grant mumbled again. “M-make it stop.”
The door rasped again.
A shadow darkened the air at Sheila’s shoulder.
For a split second, the women remained frozen, afraid to move. Then they turned in concert.
Terzian’s suppressed pistol pipped three times.
A hat trick of head shots.
The women collapsed, jerked down as if pulled by unseen hands. They hit the floor at once, clearing Terzian’s view to Grant Merriweather.
Terzian’s affect had changed entirely. Not a ripple of distress stirred the surface of his face. He held the barrel steady, sighted now at Grant’s groin. Half-moons of sweat darkened his shirt beneath either arm; controlling a grown man while wrangling electrical cables and clamps required a fair amount of exertion.
Terzian’s cuffs had ridden up past the bulges of his forearms, revealing where he’d carved patterns into his skin, the scarification process leaving his flesh textured elaborately. Rose-colored divots scalloped the rich brown skin where Old English lettering spelled out his nickname: THE TERROR.
He spoke now with his true voice, the accent seeping through, rounding the vowels, rolling the r’s.
“Give me the name,” he said calmly. “Or it begins all over again. But worse.”
Grant cupped his hand to the side of his head with disbelief. He looked at his palm, sticky and dark.
“The name,” Terzian said once more.
Grant blinked against watering eyes. A shuddering breath left him, the sound of defeat. “My cousin,” he said. “Max Merriweather.”
Terzian put a round through the hole Dr. Patel had conveniently drilled for him.
Unscrewing the suppressor from the threaded barrel, he pocketed it. Then he stooped to pick his jacket off the floor. In the far distance, the sound of the medevac came barely audible over the moan of the wind.
Pulling on his jacket, he stepped over the bodies and shouldered out through the swinging door.
2
Puzzles He Didn’t Know How to Solve
At the Fuller Street trailhead of Runyon Canyon, Max Merriweather stitched his hands together behind him and leaned forward to stretch out his lower back, where thirty-three years of wear and tear had taken roost. Hikers were out in force, gay couples and aggressively fit moms, dog walkers and the occasional celebrity in oversize sunglasses and a don’t-notice-me slouch beanie. To the west the sun coasted down behind a bank of clouds, fuchsia embers warming up into a sunset.
The older he got, the more life seemed to present him with puzzles he didn’t know how to solve. Holding down steady work. Stashing away money. And Violet.
Two years and seven months later and he still couldn’t think of Violet without feeling it in his chest, a ping to the soft tissue.
He knew he wore the weight of it in his face, in the knots of his shoulders, in the stiffness of his back. These days people looked at him like they didn’t want him to rub off on them. He couldn’t blame them. He didn’t want to rub off on himself.
Oh, well. As his old man said, A whole lotta folks do better with worse.
The breeze blew sage and chaparral, the dusty scent of the Santa Monica Mountains when you got away from the asphalt and car exhaust. Max started up the trail, nearing a homeless guy five layers deep in rags. The man seemed to grow out from the base of the fence, an organism composed of tattered cardboard, scraps of bedding, and dirt-caked flesh. Swollen legs protruded from a shabby blanket, the skin the same color as the fabric, the dirt. His feet were bare, the soles cracked like shattered plastic. A pit-bull mix was curled up beside him, his snout scarred like the hull of an old ship—probably a dogfight rescue.
The man rattled some coins in a chewed Fatburger cup. “Help a guy out?”
Max said, “We all got it rough, pal.”
The man nodded sagely. “Ain’t that the truth.”
Max jogged up the trail, weaving through the post-workday rush. Designer mini-dogs trotted on bejeweled leashes. Rihanna blared from Beats headphones. A few young guys moved together like a pride of lions, their hair cut in Mad Men parts, negotiating deals too loudly on their phones. A silver-haired husband and wife held hands and looked as content as anyone Max had ever seen outside a TV commercial.
He reached Inspiration Point and took in the downtown skyline miles to the southeast. The scrubby trail brush in the foreground framed the urban sprawl beyond, a snapshot of Los Angeles in all its rangy glory.
Violet had always loved this view. And now this was the closest to her he could get.
A mom nudged up beside him with an off-road stroller rugged enough to have been designed by the United States Army. Behind dark mesh a baby cooed, and Max turned quickly away.
He ran back down even harder.
As he passed through the gate, he heard the homeless guy rattle his few coins and call out to the pride of young men.
The loudest of the bunch muted his phone against his chest. “Quit bugging everyone, dude. You’re a joke.”
The homeless guy said, “Then help me not be a joke.”