Into the Fire(55)

Evan imagined Jerry Z sidling up behind a woman and tearing her earrings straight through the lobes. He pictured Ida Rosenbaum in her bed, one hand raised self-consciously to block the bruising that had turned the right side of her face into a mottled mess. I’m an eighty-seven-year-old widow. That’s about as unspecial as you can be. And that young man today proved it. Compared to Ida, Jerry seemed like a different species. A man of his size hitting a woman of hers. Closed-handed. In the face.

Evan set his jaw, reached for the First Commandment: Assume nothing.

“Whoa,” he said, in his best Jean Pate–from–San Bernardino impersonation. “You’re not a fence, are you?”

“What? No.” Jerry Z’s stubby fingers picked through the jewelry and plucked out Ida’s necklace. “I get all my shit legally. Trust me. I procured this particular item myself.”

“Where’d you get it?”

Jerry’s smile conveyed more menace than joy. “My granny.”

Evan reached across the table and lifted the necklace from Jerry’s hands.

“Your grandmother was into Victorian marcasite, was she?”

“Yeah, you fucking racist. Or classist. Or whatever the fuck.”

Evan turned the glinting amethyst pendant around. An inscription on the back, worn from a thousand touches. TO IDA, I’LL ALWAYS BE HERE BY YOUR HEART.–H.

“And she was named Ida?” Evan said. “Your grandmother?”

Jerry flattened his hands on the table. His face tensed, a fan of crow’s-feet bunching his left eye. Trying to figure out how to play it. He swung his Oakley shades from the back of his head to the bridge of his nose. Crossed his arms. Leaned back.

“Fine. Tell me what you wanna hear. My cousin runs a pawnshop?”

The group of students headed out, two of them arguing vehemently, a girlfriend on tilt. “Well, maybe if you stopped dating your phone…” The others weighed in, offering support, stoking the fire. The attractive couple by the stairs were tucked into their Quarter Pounders, occupied with chewing. In the reflection of the Oakleys, Evan could see the elderly women behind him lost in conversation.

He pooled Ida’s necklace in the palm of his hand. Pocketed it.

“The money,” Jerry Z said.

Evan held up a wait-a-sec finger. Then he plucked the straw out of Jerry’s orange soda.

“The fuck you think you’re doing, bitch?”

Evan folded the straw twice, gripped it so the triangle of bent plastic protruded a quarter inch from between his index and middle fingers.

A makeshift push dagger.

He couldn’t risk a fight, not after the concussion. He didn’t want to raise his heart rate. He didn’t even want to break a sweat. Any action he took would have to be efficient and immediately debilitating.

“Okay,” Jerry Z said, leaning in and conveniently bringing his forehead into range. “I been cool about all this. But you’re about to find out who I really am.”

Evan dealt a single quick strike, the edged straw slamming into Jerry Z’s forehead.

At first the big man didn’t move. He stared at Evan, shock enlarging those pebble eyes. His forehead was split neatly in a five-inch line above the brow, a cracked egg that had yet to seep.

Then the blood came.

A controlled rush into both eyes.

Jerry blinked once, twice, sagging forward. Evan palmed the top of his head and slammed his face into his tray. The plastic muffled the noise, but it was enough to put him out.

Evan rose and set his chair back in place. Heading down the stairs, he removed his phone, changed the settings, added a voice filter, and dialed 911.

“You’ll find a man bleeding and unconscious on the second floor of the McDonald’s at Sunset and Crescent. He has thousands of dollars of stolen goods in his possession.”

As he reached the main floor, commotion erupted upstairs. A manager shouldered past Evan, lunging for the stairs.

Unseen and unnoticed, he stepped out into the cool night breeze.

Walking away, he dug the necklace from his pocket. The pendant spun gently beneath his fist, the cursive words coming clear at intervals: I’ll always be here by your heart.

What had Max said? That when you love someone, you never move on. They get into your cells, live inside you even when they’re gone.

Evan had been trained to remain aggressively alone. To never show vulnerability. To ignore pain. To protect the mission at all costs.

Intimacy, it seemed, required the precise opposite. It required baring yourself to the best and worst that the world could generate. It required living alone in a bedroom filled with old photos and memories long after the warmth and light of a relationship had faded to ash. It required giving someone a marcasite necklace to wear after you’re dead.

He thought about Max, broken down by life and the loss of a baby, helpless in the face of his then-wife’s suffering. Everything I tried just made things worse. I would have done anything. You understand? Anything.

Max had reached a breaking point where he couldn’t take any more pain. And Evan had judged him harshly for that. He’d judged him for trying and failing at something that Evan lacked the courage to even attempt.

Closing his hand around the antique necklace, he wondered at the myriad elements that constituted bravery and counted those he was lacking.



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