Into the Fire(4)

“Great. Thanks so much.” Grant almost seemed sincere. “Thanks, Mighty Max.”

That brought him back. Five years old at a family picnic at Point Dume, and Max had built the tallest sandcastle. Then he’d Godzilla-stomped his way through it, and everyone had laughed and pointed, even his old man, and Grant had bestowed on him the nickname. A brief, shining moment when he’d been the pride of the Merriweathers.

Grant stepped forward and slapped the stiff canary-yellow envelope into Max’s palm. Something jangled inside, small but solid.

A waft of expensive cologne and Grant was gone.

Nothing’s gonna happen to me.

Parked at the curb now, Max recalled how long he’d sat there holding the envelope. How he’d duct-taped it behind his toilet tank before leaving to line up with the hardworking Hispanic day laborers outside Home Depot, hoping to be picked.

He pulled out his clamshell phone and read the last text exchange once again in case it had magically rewritten itself in the past fifteen minutes.

ME: HOW’D HE DIE?

DAD: GUESS HE WAS SHOT. PROB’LY ONE OF THE BAD GUYS HE HAD UNDER THE MAGNIFYING GLASS. A DAMN SHAME. ALWAYS THE GOOD ONES WHO GO YOUNG.



Pocketing the phone, Max started to climb out of his truck, but then he looked up and halted on all fours on the passenger seat. Up on the second floor of his building, the perennially unshaven and surnameless Mr. Omar had just emerged from his apartment to head to Max’s place next door. He shuffled through the jaundiced beams thrown from the outdoor hallway’s overhead lights. When he reached Max’s door, he knocked with considerable force.

“Max, Max, Max. You’re late again. Max? I can hear you in there. Don’t make me keep being a bother, my friend. I have more important matters to handle, believe me.”

Mr. Omar rapped a few more times, sighed audibly, and returned to his apartment. Through the big front window, Max watched him settle back into his Barcalounger, bathed in the aquarium light of his television.

Tomorrow’s shift would put Max over the top for this month’s rent—he’d beeline straight from work to Mr. Omar and settle up then.

Crawling from the truck, he closed the door as quietly as he could manage. Rather than risk the stairs and walk past Mr. Omar’s window, he headed for the telephone pole at the edge of the building. Convenient U-shaped steps studded the pole.

Up he went, getting one foot on the convenient gutter ledge, and then in through the bathroom window he kept unlocked for moments like this.

He stepped down off the closed toilet lid and reached for the door when he heard it in the bedroom.

A tearing sound.

Shush shush shush.

He paused, not trusting his ears.

There it was again, a trio of unsettling rasps.

His lips felt suddenly dry. When he reached for the doorknob, his hand trembled ever so slightly.

He turned the doorknob slowly. The hinges were mercifully silent. The apartment lights were turned off, but a two-inch strip of pale yellow from the outside hall fell across his eye when he put it to the crack.

A man.

In his bedroom.

Working in the dark.

Wife-beater T-shirt. Prominent arm muscles oiled with sweat and marked with something else: Tattoos? Henna ink? Scars? One of them at the triceps was swirled like a pinwheel. The man’s back was turned, his shoulders rippling, his hands set to some unseen task. The smell of him hung heavily in the unvented air, a pungent musk like meat on the verge of turning.

Max’s drawers had been emptied, his few possessions strewn across the floor, the bureau tipped away from the wall. The TV was upended, holes punched in the drywall.

The man straightened up and armed his brow, his fist coming clear, clenched around a combat knife with a serrated edge.

Letters on his forearm resolved from the shadows sufficiently for Max to piece them together: THE TERROR. Visible past the man’s thighs, beneath the stripped-aside sheets, the mattress had been sawed open at intervals, the ticking bulged out intestinally.

The man spun the knife in his hand with a skilled proficiency, bent over the mattress once more, and punched the blade into a virgin spot. It made a thwack as if puncturing flesh.

And then the nightmare grating came once again: shush shush shush.

A thought blinked through Max’s brain. If he hadn’t walked back to the homeless guy at the trail, he would’ve been three minutes earlier, which meant he wouldn’t have seen Mr. Omar, which meant he would have strolled right through his front door into the teeth of this nightmare.

The rising burn in his chest demanded he ease out a breath. Painstakingly, he inched the door back into the frame and rotated the doorknob to its resting place. The click when he released it might as well have been a clap of thunder.

He backed to the toilet, crinkling his eyes as the blistered linoleum compressed with a click. One room over he heard a throat-muffled grunt, another thwack, and then the shush shush shush of the blade.

Max couldn’t help but imagine the knife working its way through sinew and tendons. His vision speckled, and a wave of light-headedness swept through him. He firmed his legs, blinked himself back from the edge.

Move, he told himself. Quick and quiet. You can do this.

He patted blindly behind the toilet tank, tore free the canary-yellow envelope, and wormed back out through the window.





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