Into the Fire

by Gregg Hurwitz

  At the last instant, the dogs jerked away from him, flying backward, yelping in pain.

  Each had hit the end of its respective chain.

  Now they turned and tried to attack one another, but the chains had been measured to keep them just out of reach. Another strategy to hold them at the red-hot edge of attack, fired up and ready to go.

  They raged against their choke-chain collars, their snarls amplified off the high ceiling.

  On all fours Evan backed away slowly, rose, and turned to go.

  The cafeteria was largely empty by now, the last of the gamblers making for the exits. But the man who’d injected the dogs remained, bald pate shining, wisps of sweat-darkened hair rimming his shoulders.

  He must have twisted an ankle during the stampede, because he bent one leg back now to hold his foot off the floor. His hands were raised defensively at Evan as he hobbled back another step toward the door.

  “Look, man. I’m sorry. They told me to let them loose. I don’t hurt people, man. I’m just the vet. I just wanna—” He stepped wrong and winced. “Please. I’m just in charge of the fighters.”

  The sirens were louder now, compounding the racket inside the cafeteria. In the arena below, the pit-mastiff was going insane, hurling himself against the wall beneath the rope ladder.

  Evan glared at the vet, his teeth grinding. He felt the weight in his holster, the ARES calling to him.

  But he turned to head for the far exit.

  At the periphery of the chained fighters, just out of reach, another animal lay facing away, a hump of fur matted with blood. At first Evan wasn’t sure what it was. A mammal yes. But it took a moment for him to register that it was a dog.

  He took another step and saw the duct tape wrapped around the dog’s muzzle, depriving him of the use of his mouth. The tape had been in place long enough to start digging through the flesh, the surrounding skin inflamed. Another ring of shiny silver tape bound his hind legs. His chest had been gashed, and a flap of skin hung loose from his cheek.

  A strip of reversed fur down his spine identified him as a Rhodesian ridgeback, like the one Evan had grown up with in Jack’s house. This guy looked to be a puppy around a year old, tall but not yet filled out with muscle. Oversize paws showed that he was going to be a big boy.

  He’d been bound and tossed to the larger animals to rile them up further.

  A bait dog.

  He’d managed to squirm his way barely out of the orbit of the fighters, who snapped at him now from either side. Quivering, he lay on the tiny patch of safety between the snarling mouths.

  His eyes rolled imploringly to Evan.

  Evan’s jaw set. He looked at the bait dog, debilitated and thrown to the others as a living plaything, an appetizer to whet their appetite for blood.

  Evan turned around. Glared at the vet. Dangling from a loop on his tool belt was a roll of duct tape.

  The vet stumbled away from Evan on his twisted ankle, circling the edge of the sunken arena. Below, the pit-mastiff roiled, raging against the walls. “Look,” the vet said. “It’s necessary to rile up the main contenders. It’s just my job.”

  Evan said, “If you ever do anything like this again, I will find you. And I will do to you what you did to that dog.”

  “Okay,” the vet said, holding up his hands, the stink of fear emanating from him. “Oka—”

  The dog nearest him lunged, fully airborne before the chain snapped him back to earth.

  The vet jerked away, stumbling on his injured ankle, and slipped over the edge. He screamed on the way down.

  A clang as he hit the metal crate.

  More screaming. And then the sounds of the pit-mastiff doing what the vet had primed him to do.

  Evan rushed to the edge and peered down, but it was too late, the vet’s screams terminating in a failing gurgle.

  Evan staggered back to the bait dog. The prong collars forked into the flesh of the surrounding fight dogs as they strained to tear the puppy to shreds. Crouching, Evan grasped the ridgeback’s bound rear legs and slid him gently through the narrow safe zone, fishing him free.

  Hoisting him up into his arms, Evan ran for the rear door.

  Outside, the gamblers flooded from the studio lot into the surrounding streets. Sirens chirped, cops on their loudspeakers issuing orders for everyone to freeze.

  Cradling the injured dog to his chest, Evan sprinted up the street, losing himself in the fleeing crowd. The missing boot lopsided his gait, a grime-heavy sock flapping from one foot. As he jogged to the car, the dog looked up at him with bulging eyes. He didn’t whimper or whine. He didn’t make a noise.

  At Evan’s back, police units made progress up the packed road, veering through the gamblers. Cops spilled from vehicles, rounding everyone up, closing in.

  Evan reached his car and fumbled at the lock, juggling the injured animal. The old man in the recliner watched him with dark eyes from the porch.

  “Beveria darte vergüenza,” he said angrily, stroking his tiny dog. “Nos deberias hacer a perros pelear.”

  He stood with a groan and set his dog down lovingly on the blanket behind him. Stepping forward, he raised a hand to alert the cops to Evan.

  “Le estoy rescatando,” Evan said. “Tengo que llevarlo al veterinario. ¿Me ayuda?”

  The old man studied him.

  An officer broke through a cluster of handcuffed gamblers. Evan was right in his line of sight, but the cop was focused instead on the old man.

  “Sir?” the cop shouted. “What is it, sir? Did you see someone getting away?”

  The old man hesitated. Then pointed to the alley next to his house, away from Evan. The cop bolted up the alley.

  Evan rested the puppy gingerly in the backseat and pulled out. Driving away, he nodded his thanks at the old man. The old man nodded back.

  21

  I Know What You Did

  “I dunno, man,” the young woman at the animal shelter said. “It looks pretty bad. The vet might be a while.”

  The exam room smelled of ammonia, the linoleum floor showing streaks from a recent cleaning. Evan sat on the floor with the bait dog in his lap, stroking his ears. The dog hadn’t made a sound, his golden-brown eyes still fixed on Evan.

  The duct tape remained dug into his muzzle. His hind legs, wrapped together, twitched.

  “How long?” Evan said.

  “At least a half hour.”

  “Can you at least cut the tape off his mouth?”

  “I’m not messing with that,” she said, tugging at her septum ring. A spiderweb tattoo clutched the back of her neck, and she wore a loosely stitched black sweater and an armful of metal bracelets that jangled when she moved. “Don’t wanna hurt him worse, poor guy.”

  The service bell dinged up front, and she shot the dog an apologetic look and vanished, closing the door behind her.

  Evan checked the Turing Phone, but there’d been no contact from Max. Evan had already assessed the phone to ensure that it was as secure as advertised, with no GPS features or spyware that would allow it to be tracked or monitored.

  In his lap the dog lay heavily, seized up in a freeze response. His nose was sweating, his cheeks filling with the exertion of breathing through bound jaws.

  Evan lifted the pup onto the exam table. Then he searched the cabinet, finding trauma shears in the second drawer down. He returned to the dog.

  “This is gonna hurt, buddy,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  He reached for the swollen muzzle, but the dog pulled his head back, terrified. Evan leaned over him, putting his elbow behind the dog’s neck to trap his head in place. Very carefully, he worked the blunted end of the trauma shears between the tape and the raw skin and sawed through.

  When the tape finally released, the dog panted heavily, pink tongue lolling. The gash on his cheek looked bad, but the flesh was intact and could be sutured back into place.

  Evan stroked his flank a few times. Then got to work on the hind legs.

  He freed th
e limbs, leaving the tape stuck to the fur. Removing it entirely would be a substantial job better left to a professional but at least the boy was no longer bound.

  The door opened, and the vet entered, a curly-haired woman with huge dark eyes and caramel skin. She noted the trauma shears in Evan’s hand. “You’re not supposed to do that,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. He was having trouble breathing.”

  “Jaycee said you found him in an alley?”

  “Yeah. Dogfighting ring, obviously. They used him up and threw him out.”

  She shook her head. “We’ve seen more of it lately,” she said. “Especially around Little Armenia.” She pinched her lip with her teeth. “It’s such a disgrace. There are so many hardworking folks, and then a few bozi tghas give us all a bad name.”

  “‘Sons of bitches’?”

  “‘Sons of whores,’” she said. “If you wanna get technical.”

  She moved closer to the dog, held her palm out for him to sniff, and started examining him gently.

  Evan said, “Is he gonna be okay?”

  “We’ll get him patched up,” she said. “I just hope we can place him afterward.”

  “And if not?”

  “He’ll have to be put down. We’re overcrowded. As in really overcrowded.”

  Evan said, “Oh.”

  “I can let you know,” she said. “Though we’re not supposed to give dogs to people with … um, housing challenges.”

  Her eyes dropped to Evan’s exposed sock. Suddenly aware of his bloody, mud-streaked shirt and clawed pants, he realized that she thought he was homeless.

  It had been a long two days.

  He grimaced, eager to wrap up the mission and get home to a freezing vodka and a hot shower.

  “I could let you know first, though,” she said. “Unofficially. If you had somewhere I could reach you by phone…?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Evan said.

  He started for the door. With his hand on the doorknob, he hesitated. Turned back. He walked over and rested a palm on the dog’s shoulder above the gash. The dog strained to lick his knuckles, the tape flapping atop his snout.

  Evan thought, Goddamn it.

  He jotted down an ordinary phone number that forwarded to his RoamZone and left it with the vet.

  Stepping outside, he fished the Turing Phone from his pocket and dialed.

  Max’s words came at him in a rush. “What happened?”

  “The Terror is no longer a threat to you. Neither are any of his men.”

  “Seriously?” Max said. “Wow. Just … wow. So it’s over?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Evan cut through a back lot onto the neighboring block, where he’d left the Chevy Malibu behind a life-insurance shop that advertised in three languages. The asphalt of the parking lot felt cool through his ragged sock. He walked to where he’d parked next to a dumpster in the darkness at the far edge. Broken glass crunched under his boot, prompting him to mind where he set down his other foot.

  Max said, “I can go to the cops now, right? Hollywood Station? I can deliver the thumb drive into the right hands like I promised?”

  Evan felt an urge rising in his chest—to wrap this up, put the Nowhere Man to bed, and move on with his life the way he hoped Max would move on with his. But the First Commandment reared into his awareness, casting a shadow over his optimism.

  “It looks like the problem’s been handled,” Evan said. “But I don’t want to assume anything just yet. Give me a day or two to make sure this thing is tied up neatly before you go in and let the cops take over.”

  “Okay,” Max said. “Okay. What do I do then? When this is done?”

  “You can start over,” Evan said.

  It struck him that he was speaking for himself as much as for Max. This was the first time his own freedom had been aligned with a client’s. When this mission ended, they’d each be able to turn a new page. He had to be certain that his keenness to do so didn’t make him careless.

  The insurance shop’s exterior lights were mostly burned out, so Evan had to slow to study the ground for glinting shards.

  “I’ve been so focused on surviving I haven’t given much thought to what I’m going back to,” Max said. “Or what I’m not going back to.”

  Evan remembered his first time on a shooting range. Jack’s callused grip encasing his twelve-year-old hands, shaping them around the pistol stock, showing him how to aim. What would Evan aim at once he left the Nowhere Man behind?

  He kept on across the parking lot, stepping around the shattered brown hull of a forty-ounce. “Maybe it’s time to start.”

  Max said, “I still can’t believe it’s really over.”

  Neither can I.

  Evan signed off and put the phone away. He aimed the key fob at the Chevy Malibu, and the car responded with the double chirp of a mating call. As he reached for the door, the shrill ring of an old-fashioned telephone broke the silence. The sound was so out of place here in the dark parking lot that Evan had to register the vibration in his cargo pocket to realize it was coming from the phone he’d just hung up.

  He took the Turing Phone out again. Caller ID showed: UNIDENTIFIED CALLER.

  Evan clicked to answer and held the slab of rare metal to his cheek.

  “The Merriweather job isn’t done.” The accent was hard to place. Maybe Armenian, maybe Georgian, the consonants slow and the vowels deep, forced through gravel.

  Evan paused with his hand hooked under the cold metal of the door handle. He felt his flesh sitting heavy on his bones, the weight of exhaustion. He’d been awake for two days, shot at and chased, tackled and punched, bitten and clawed. He’d wanted the mission to be over, and that wanting had obscured his clarity.

  Unidentified Caller was an unknown threat. A moving target. Another mask sliding forward to front a faceless enterprise.

  “No,” Evan agreed. “I thought it was. But I guess not yet.”

  He could hear the man breathing across the line. “I know what you did, boy. You interceded on his behalf. You put down Terzian and his men.” He sounded older, into his fifties at least. The words held the dead calm of a man accustomed to dealing with challenging circumstances.

  Evan did not like the sensation spreading like acid in his stomach. That he’d underestimated the situation. That he was up against something more complex and dangerous than he’d anticipated. That things were about to get a whole lot worse.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Evan said. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Sooner than you think,” the man said.

  Evan pulled the door open slightly, but something in the man’s voice made him hesitate. Picking his way across the glass-strewn lot with his eyes on the ground, Evan had neglected the Third Commandment. He shot a glance over his shoulder, but the dull yellow glow of the shop windows illuminated only a flurry of moths beating themselves against the glass.

  “I don’t know,” Evan said, tugging the car door handle. “I might be harder to track down than you think.”

  “Oh,” the man said, “I don’t need to track you. I just need to track the dog you rescued.”

  A snap of breaking glass announced itself from the darkness by the dumpster. Evan just had time to look up over the top of the open car door when a form melted from the pitch-black, arm raised, aiming at Evan’s stomach.

  So, he thought. This is it, then.

  Muzzle flash strobed, a trio of gut shots slamming into Evan, and he sensed himself suddenly weightless. The asphalt reared up, smacking the back of his head and filling him with blackness.

  22

  Not Yet

  He was dead.

  Of that much he was sure.

  What he was less sure of was why he still felt a throbbing between the temples, his head pulsing as if preparing to explode.

  His eyes were open, but he wasn’t seeing right. The stars were wobbly streaks, and the outline of his car,
visible over the tips of his boot and his sock, was fuzzy and indistinct. His shirt had tugged up, night air cool against his ribs. One arm was flung overhead as if he were plummeting into the underworld, but his other hand had landed on his belly, which felt smooth and seemingly intact.

  Not dead, then.

  When he tried to lift his head, a wave of nausea swept through him so intense that it washed the pain away. He lowered his head, blinked through the haze. The stars streaked even more, slashes of blinding light. A tuning-fork ringing warbled in his ears.

  Concussion.

  From his head slamming into the ground.

  He reassembled the previous minute. Walking to his car, his attention on the ground. Unidentified Caller. Shooter by the dumpster.

  Stupid, he thought.

  The door of his Chevy Malibu stood open before him, the plastic interior shattered by the force of the shots. He’d hung Kevlar armor inside the panels, as he did on all his vehicles, and it had absorbed the shots, slamming the door into him.

  Again he tried to get up, and again nausea enveloped him.

  The door pulled itself closed, seemingly of its own volition. But then he realized that the shooter had approached from behind it and kicked it shut. Now the man stood in its place, revealed. His arm was still raised, the gun pointed down at Evan, and this time there was no convenient armored door between them.

  The head cocked. “Damn, you’re tough,” the man said.

  Evan’s hand slid off his stomach.

  And caught on the edge of his Kydex holster.

  His pistol wasn’t visible in the darkness, but there was no way he’d be able to draw it unnoticed. When he tried to say something, his voice squeezed out of his throat as an unintelligible croak.

  The man said, “Say what?”

  Evan let his hand slip around the grip of the ARES. He could barely move, but he did his best to flatten his thigh and his knee, clearing the way. The highly molded Kydex would retard the full cycling of the slide, so he’d get off only a single round with the pistol in the holster.