Not Petro, since Petro was dead.
But another shot caller, even further up the food chain.
Nuñez and Brust had gotten their marching orders. And then headed to the Hollywood Station to murder Max.
The Turing Phones were links in a chain stretching up. How high that chain went remained to be seen.
Evan slid the shiny slab of Liquidmorphium back into his pocket.
“What’s that?” Max asked.
“Something else I have to handle.”
“Something or someone?”
Evan said, “Both.”
“How are you gonna handle it?” Max asked.
The headache had resumed, a vise clamping Evan’s brain. “I don’t know yet.”
Max rasped a hand across his stubble, peppered with gray. “I thought they were gonna kill me,” he said. “Two detectives. In a police station. And then … and then you busted in there with your head all wrapped like some kind of deranged King Tut.…” At this, the first sign of amusement teased his lips. But just as quickly it was gone. “Did you see Brust’s head? I’ve never … never seen anything like that.”
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 Nuñez 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 Nuñez 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 Nuñez 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 darkness, 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.
Joey kept on at the keyboard resting in her lap, her shoulders rippling beneath a wife-beater tank top. “God, you two,” she said. “Get a room.”
Evan returned his attention to the monitors rising three high around the circular pod. Joey had hacked into reverse directories to source the 213 phone number Detective Nuñez had dialed. It belonged to a preloaded SIM card that had been bundled with a batch bulk-sold to an LAX shop three months prior. Now she was backtracking to see which cell towers had been pinged during the call, hoping to approximate a location for the recipient.
Petting the dog, Evan did his best to quell his impatience. The mission had turned into a game of Follow the Turing Phones. Terzian’s had led to Petro’s had led to Nuñez’s, each electronic slab a nerve-racking blank slate that held the promise of worse to come. Bathed in the unstirred heat of the apartment and the steady clacking of Joey’s progress, Evan felt a familiar unease. Like they were reeling up a lure from the shadowy depths, unsure of what was tugging on the line.
The slats of the vertical blinds were angled skinny. Wee-hours blackness blanketed the panes, pinpricked by a few streetlamps. The room had the sticky-sweet smell of convenience-store food—candy bars, Red Vines, Dr Pepper—with an overlay of canine funk. Evan was debating how to extract himself from Dog to open a window when Joey said, “I can’t believe you busted into a police station.” She shook her head and grinned, that hair-thin gap in her front teeth making her look once again like a goofy kid instead of the young woman she was slowly, relentlessly be
coming. “Damn, you a maniac, X.”
“That’s the job,” he said.
“To boldly go where no man has gone.” Joey looked at him over a shoulder sculpted with muscle, still typing away. He wondered how she ate the way she did and maintained her rock-solid form, and then he remembered she was sixteen. The rat-a-tat-tat of the keys took on an aggressive edge. “To do anything for your clients. To go anywhere.”
The caustic note caught Evan off guard. “Sure,” he said.
Her left cheek tightened, a lopsided scowl. “And if you die?”
Joey armored over her vulnerability with anger. He knew this. And yet the quickness of it surprised him every time.
“If I die,” he said, “take care of Dog.”
Joey turned away from him. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
But this earned no response. She was lost again to the myriad screens, leaning forward, chewing her lip. And then she stiffened. “Goddamn it.” She flopped the keyboard onto the stretch of curved desk before her. At the clatter, Dog the dog tucked his tail and scurried out of the pod. She glared after him. “Some lion hunter you turned out to be.”
Evan gestured at the inscrutable wall of code on the monitor. “What’s wrong?”
“First of all, you’re pointing at the wrong monitor.” She grabbed his wrist and swung his finger to the adjacent screen, which contained an equally inscrutable wall of code.
Feigning forbearance, he waited for her to explain.
She didn’t disappoint. “The shitty SIM outfit leases their cell towers from real companies. Which means they can’t keep location logs—no access. So I can’t pin down where the caller is.” She rocked back in her gamer chair so far that he thought she might topple over. “Incompetence can be an infuriatingly effective defense.”
Sometimes she was almost as quotable as Jack.
He could sense her magnificent brain powering away, could practically feel the heat rising from her head. He knew to keep his mouth shut and let the engines churn.
Scrunching her eyes tight, she flipped her mane of brown-black hair to one side, revealing the shaved strip above her right ear. Ten seconds passed, and then ten more. He was about to clear his throat pointedly when she said, “Unless.”
“Unless what?”
She bounced forward, her hands locking back onto the keyboard as if magnetized. “We do it in real time.”
“Track the call.”
“Yeah,” she said. “If you make a live call, I can capture the IMEI with my Stingray.”
“And triangulate the cell towers.”
“More like advanced forward link trilateration,” she said. “But we can’t expect the mouth breathers to grasp the difference.” She held up her fist.
He bumped it. “Indeed not.”
“If it’s an urban area with denser cell towers, I can pin him within fifty meters. Rural could be a miles-wide zone, which is tougher. But also easier ’cuz, like, fewer buildings.”
“I know, Joey. Even the mouth breathers can grasp—”
She plucked the Turing off the desktop, a cord swaying beneath like the tail of a kite. She shoved it at Evan. “Go. Talk.”
“Do I have to keep him on the line for a certain amount of time?”
“Yeah,” she said, “especially if you teleport into a movie from 1987.” She spun around on the chair, and Evan had to lean back to avoid getting kneecapped by the armrest. Tucking into another section of her circular desk, she cluttered the screens with windows that, he gleaned, showed the inner workings of several telephone networks. “Just do your whole Nowhere Man thing. You know”—now a self-important frownie face with a husky voice—“‘Do you need my help?’ ‘How did you get this number?’ ‘Hold on, I have to crack some walnuts between my buttocks.’”
Her impression of him was accompanied with more head wagging than seemed fair. But then again: artistic license.
“That’s totally off the mark,” Evan said. “I usually crack the walnuts in my chin cleft.”
But she was dialed in to the monitors now, the scroll reflecting like rainfall in her deep green eyes.
The heat thrown off by all the hardware was starting to get to him. Gripping the phone, he pushed up from his lean against the inner desk and a surge of unsteadiness hit him. He staggered to right his balance and put his hand down hard on Joey’s keyboard.
Her head snapped over. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Bullshit. Why are you dizzy?” She was on her feet. “Wait a minute. Your right pupil looks like a fucking shark eye.”
The contact had been drying his eye, so he’d left it out to take a break, a choice he now regretted. “Language.”
“Do you have a concussion? How long have you had this?”
“I don’t know. A couple days.”
“A couple days?” She appeared to be livid, though he had no idea why. “Do you have any idea what Jack would say? ‘Take care of your equipment.’ Now, I know your brain’s your least valuable piece of gear, but still. I mean, look at that thing.” She grabbed both of his cheeks and angled his head down, but he pulled away. “You know the cure for a concussion? Rest. Do the last coupla days look like rest to you?”
“I’ve been fine. I’ve been feeling steadily better. Plus, I haven’t hit my head again—”
“Well, bravo, X. That gets you a bronze in the Dipshit Olympics. You know what you’re supposed to do. And what you’re supposed to not do. You and I both had the same lectures from Jack. No stress, no exertion. Avoid shit that’s physically and emotionally demanding. Like, you know, every single thing you’ve been doing.”
He lifted the Turing Phone. “Are you going to help me do this or not?”
She glared at him, her jaw sawing back and forth. She looked like she wanted to give him a secondary concussion herself.
“Fine.” She plopped down in her chair. “But when you do get your head bonked, don’t except me to be a pallbearer at the funeral.”
“I’m not planning on having a—”
“It’s a figure of speech!”
She stayed facing away, focused on the monitor, hands on the keyboard. Ignoring him.
He thumbed the Turing to that sole outgoing call. Stared at the 213 number. Somewhere—nestled in a pocket, resting on a nightstand, plugged into a dashboard—a phone waited.
And a shot caller sufficiently powerful to order two LAPD detectives to execute an innocent man inside a police station.
Evan pictured Max, his head lowered in that hangdog manner of his, wiping at his cheeks. I can’t see a way out anymore.
He tapped the number.
It was the dead of night, but the man answered after the first ring. “Nuñez?” He sounded wide awake.
Evan said, “Nuñez can’t come to the phone right now.”
The puff of an exhalation fuzzed the line. And then another. In the background Evan heard a metallic clang.
“And why is that?”
“Because I killed him.”
“Ah,” the man said. “May I ask who you are?”
The voice carried the hint of an accent like the others’. But the man—the shot caller—projected utter placidity. There was none of Terzian’s rage, none of Petro’s slickness or theatrical arrogance. He seemed not merely composed but unflappable, a man burnished by tough negotiations and tougher choices. A man too self-assured to raise his voice or resort to rudeness.
Each rung of the operation Evan scaled seemed to bring with it an upgrade in professionalism. Under different circumstances, he might even have admired a man like this.
Another clang came audible, one heavy object striking another, perhaps, or machinery flexing its muscle. Was the man in a factory? A plant? A junkyard?
Evan said, “The Nowhere Man.”
“I see,” the man said. “It had occurred to me when I heard the manner in which my efforts were being interfered with. Can I inquire after Detective Brust?
”
“I killed him, too. And I’ll kill anyone else you send after Max Merriweather.”
“Hmm.” The syllable conveyed a moment of genuine reflection. And then, “You can keep killing them. But I can keep sending them.”
“I’ve dealt with mob bosses before.”
“A mob boss? No, nothing so glamorous. I’m just a businessman.”
“For a businessman you have an appetite for assassinations.”
“I suppose,” he said, sounding rueful. “Or maybe I’m just honest. I’ve distilled business down to its essential elements. Profit. And loss. I have responsibilities. I protect my bottom line.”
“Then it looks like you and I will have to have a face-to-face,” Evan said. “Like I did with Nuñez. And with Brust.”
“Good luck with that,” the man said.
“Don’t worry,” Evan said. “I’m sure I can arrange it.”
“No, Mr. Nowhere Man. Even you can’t arrange this.”
The line went dead.
Evan’s mouth had gone sour, sweat cooling across the back of his neck. He’d nearly forgotten he was in the room with Joey.
She was facing away, but he could see her hand pulsing around the elaborate mouse, rolling the sensor ball and clicking. “Good news,” she said. “We’re downtown. Close cell towers, so I should be able to peg him pretty closely, and—”
She froze, as still as death in her chair, her hands floating above the keys. The abrupt cessation of noise was unsettling. Across the room in his nest of dirty laundry, Dog raised his head, sniffing the shift in the air.
Joey laughed a hard, ugly laugh. “Oh, boy,” she said.
“What?” Evan said. “Where is he?”
At last she turned to look at him, and her face was more serious than he’d ever seen it. “Twin Towers Jail.”
Evan rubbed his eyes.
He said, “Fuck.”
39
No Margin for Error
Evan blew through the lobby of Castle Heights, Joey hustling to keep up, Dog the dog prancing along beside her, his collar jangling against the leash. The empty expanse had an early-morning sheen, pink light spilling across the dated marble, the smell of coffee emanating from a stately silver urn on a side table. The mission loomed large in his mind, impassable and impossible, a towering wall of stone. He had only the roughest shape of a plan, just a few handholds he hoped might get him up the cliff face.
Into the Fire Page 22
