Into the Fire(23)



A patch of roses breathed a lovely scent that seemed out of place amid all the bitterness.

Evan said, “I can’t answer that.”

She said, “Who are you?”

“Someone who’s helping him?”

“Out of the goodness of your heart?”

Evan considered this. “Out of the badness of my heart, I suppose.”

She seemed to appreciate his candor. “It’s really life-or-death?”

“It is.”

“Fine. I’ll find somewhere. Somewhere really crappy. On one condition. Ask him what he did to me. You make him tell you. You should know who you’re helping.”

The breeze from the rose garden now smelled saccharine, a sickly indulgence.

Evan said, “I will.”

“I’ll give you three addresses,” she said. “Unrented places. Pick whichever you like. Do not lose the keys. Return them when you’re done. And then I never want to hear from you—or him—again. Also? I don’t know anything about this.”

Evan said, “Copy that.”

“And tell him…”

“What?”

“Tell him I’m sorry about Grant.” Her scowl returned. “Wait out here.”

The door closed abruptly. The footsteps padded away, more sharply than before.

Evan exhaled through his teeth and eased back until he came level with Max on the front lawn.

Max said, “Look, after she … after she tried to commit suicide, I was lost. I remember going to the drugstore one day to buy shampoo and just standing there, paralyzed, because I couldn’t decide what to get. Like for twenty minutes, just frozen.” He wet his lips, swallowed. “We were gonna be parents. And then, all at once, we weren’t.”

“What did you do to her?” Evan asked.

“I felt so fucking helpless,” Max said. “Just … at a total loss, you know? She didn’t want to go on, and I didn’t know when she’d do it again. She was sick with grief. She was sleeping all day and throwing up when she ate, and I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t do anything but hold her hair, and she looked … she looked like she had nothing inside her anymore. Like she’d already gone and left a husk behind. I would’ve done whatever I could to help her, but I didn’t have the answers. I didn’t have any of the answers. Everything I tried just made things worse. I would have done anything. You understand? Anything.”

“You couldn’t handle it anymore,” Evan said.

Max took in a breath. “I guess not.”

“So you left.”

Max plucked a glossy rose petal from the bush, ground it between his thumb and forefinger. “Sure,” he said. “I left.”

A silence ensued, nothing but the cheery chirps of songbirds on the scented breeze. The closed door confronted them like a moral rebuke.

Evan felt Max’s eyes on the side of his face.

“Lemme guess.” Max’s tone was sharp, but it was clear that just served to hide the shame. “That makes you not like me.”

Evan said, “I don’t have to like you to protect you.”





14



Take Names





Violet had seen through her promise to find a supremely crappy place for Max.

The ramshackle house was bedded into the side of a hill, the crumbling rear wall patched with fiberglass siding. A trash bag duct-taped over a smashed window fluttered with sporadic violence, a bat trying to tear free of a trapped wing. The plumbing appeared to be intact, the pipes visible at intervals in the decaying drywall. The few overhead lights hummed with exertion. A cracked sliding glass door let onto a narrow bog of long-sitting water in the backyard, the rotted fence spitting distance from the threshold.

A Best Buy box under one arm, Evan paused in the main room and took in the place. It was unclear whether it was in the process of being torn down or rebuilt.

He supposed he could say the same for Max.

Lincoln Heights wasn’t as bad as it used to be, fair-trade coffeehouses staking a tentative hold on corners that used to be gang-held. But it was still the Eastside.

Over where the kitchen used to be, a pair of work boots, a loaded tool belt, and a McKenna Properties baseball cap lay where they had fallen, as if the worker who’d owned them had ascended to heaven, leaving his earthly belongings behind.

As Max poked his head into the dorm-size bedroom, Evan tugged the Dell laptop out of the box, shedding the Styrofoam bookends. It had cost a little over two hundred dollars, money well spent for a clean device on which to test Grant’s thumb drive. When Evan dropped the box, it stuck to the floor with a thud, impaled on an exposed length of tack strip where the carpet had been ripped up.

A new tile floor had been laid in anticipation of a kitchen so Evan sat there cross-legged, resting the laptop on the shelf of his knees.

As it booted up, he pulled the Swiss Army knife key chain from his pocket and flicked up the thumb drive. Max returned from the bedroom, leaned against the wall, and looked at Evan.

Evan plugged in the thumb drive.

A series of files populated the screen. He frowned at the confusion of numbers.

Max cleared his throat. “What is it?”

Evan said, “Spreadsheets.”

“Of what?”

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