Into the Fire(71)
He blinked hard a few times as if clearing his mind and then walked over to the mud-caked wrench on the counter. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands. Only a few hours had passed since he’d used it to repair the pipe outside, but to Evan it felt like weeks. He figured that for Max it felt even longer.
“Why did they want to kill me?” Max said. “I mean … they’re cops.”
“They worked for Petro. He managed to flip them before Grant was hired.”
“But those guys are the detectives running the investigation against Petro. Why would they have opened the case to begin with? Why hire Grant to start digging?”
The sound of a car engine rose on the street outside, and Evan and Max tensed. But it kept on, motoring into the dead of night.
“I’m guessing Petro knew that an investigation was coming,” Evan said. “The dogfighting arena and a number of the smaller businesses used to launder his cash are in Hollywood. So he paid off two detectives in the local station to take point on the case, contain it at a smaller level, and bury it before it got kicked to Vice downtown.”
Max said, “So Brust and Nu?ez were making sure the investigation went nowhere.”
“That’s right. They needed to hire a forensic accountant to cover their bases, figuring he wouldn’t get very far. They could check the right boxes, steer the case from the inside, then drop it for insufficient evidence. But it looks like Grant uncovered more than they were bargaining for.”
“Grant was too good.” It seemed the words were weighed down, hard for Max to say. He let the wrench slip from his hand onto the counter. “I thought I’d hit bottom. Now I’m implicated in the murder of two cops. What the hell’s next?”
Before he’d died, Petro had faced down Evan, smiling into the bullet that would end him. Evan sensed in his bones now that whatever Petro had been smiling about was more dangerous than a pair of dirty cops.
The First Commandment: Assume nothing.
Or in the case of this mission: Assume it can always get worse.
“One of my associates uncovered new files,” Evan said. “We’re going to go through them entry by entry and make sure there are no more surprises.”
Max said, “You have associates?”
It was, to be fair, an inflated term for a sixteen-year-old and an injured rescue dog in a Westwood one-room apartment. But Evan would take Joey over an NSA cyberwarfare group any day of the week.
Evan moved on. “When this is over, you’ll say that an assassin in Petro’s operation carried out the assault on the police station, that he killed Nu?ez and Brust as part of the cover-up. He took you to force you to give up the thumb drive’s hiding place. But you managed to escape.”
“No one’ll believe that.”
“When we hand over files tracing all the payments to Nu?ez and Brust, they will.”
“I don’t know,” Max said. “Every time you put down a threat, another pops up. And this thing, it keeps getting bigger and bigger.” His face, sallow in the ambient light, held a worn-through dread. “Imagine if Grant had never given me that thumb drive. Hour after hour I replay that scene in my head, and I think what if I’d just stood up for myself? What if I’d just said no? Was I that desperate for his approval? That desperate to show everyone that I wasn’t … I don’t know, useless? ‘Come on, Mighty Max. For once in your life, maybe step up, shoulder some responsibility.’” A bitter laugh escaped him. “And now I dragged Violet into it—Christ, just seeing me she has to relive it all, and I swore I’d never put that woman through anything ever again.” His voice quavered, his eyes brimming. “Now everywhere I look, someone’s trying to kill me, and I can’t do anything but hide in this fucking house.”
His voice rang off the walls. He lowered his head, eyes on the floor, his face coloring. Water dripped somewhere, an unnerving plink-plink-plink. The lights were off, the walls receding into dark ness, so it seemed the space stretched out forever, a dank underworld.
“I’m sorry,” Max said. “You don’t need this.”
“Pick your head up,” Evan said sharply.
Max wiped at his eyes roughly.
And then he lifted his gaze.
“You had my back in that interrogation room,” Evan said. “Show yourself the same respect.”
“What’s that mean?” Max asked.
“‘Act like the person you want to be.’” It was one of Jack’s favorite quotations; just thinking of him put a rasp in Evan’s voice. “If we want to get through whatever’s coming, we’re gonna have to face it head-on.”
The protracted silence was broken only by more drops against the subfloor. When Max spoke again, his words were little more than a whisper. “I can’t see a way out anymore.”
Evan said, “Then I’ll find it for us.”
38
Worse to Come
Dog the dog backed into Evan, shoving his rear end into his thigh, demanding to be petted. It was crowded enough inside Joey’s workstation without a Rhodesian ridgeback wedged in along with them.
Evan scratched just below the ridge, and the dog curled his back with pleasure, his mouth wrinkling into a smile. His wounds looked to be healing nicely, the stitches almost ready to come out. A tube of Neosporin and a scattering of Q-tips lay on the floor in the corner; despite her objections Joey was taking good care of him.