Page 137 of Into the Fire

He sucked a good half inch off his Camel Wide with a single inhale, shot the smoke up at the underpass, walked back to his dually, and got in. The passenger side.

“Uh,” Max said. “You sure about this?”

Evan said, “No,” and got out.

He walked over and hoisted himself up into Tommy’s driver’s seat. The two men sat side by side a moment. Evan lifted his boots, sunk to the ankles in discarded Starbucks cups, Red Bull cans, and empty ammunition boxes that clustered around the base of the seat.

“Sorry ’bout the truck mulch,” Tommy said. “But that’s how you get a vehicle, you know. You grow it from the ground up.”

“I’ll take good care of it,” Evan said.

Tommy flicked his chin at the lead-bitten Ford F-150. “Yeah, you seem to really baby your gear.”

“Look, with my truck, I need you to—”

“I know. I’ll deliver it back to you good as new. With all the fixings.” Tommy winked, the crinkle at the edge of his eye fanning down across his cheek. “It’ll cost you.”

“How much?”

“An arm. A leg.”

Evan nodded at Tommy’s tattered Strider Knives T-shirt, the breast pocket torn clean off. “Get you some new duds.”

“Shit,” Tommy said. “My version of dress for success is two extra mags.” He jerked a thumb to the backseat. “Your FN Ballista’s back there in the Hardigg Storm Case. Take good care of her. She’s a Tommy special. The mall warriors ain’t getting their mitts on a beauty like that.”

Evan started to protest again that he didn’t need a rifle, but then he recalled the dozen men he’d seen spill out of that van, SWAT-ready and armed to the teeth, and kept his mouth shut.

Tommy flicked his cigarette out the window, sucked a stray bit of tobacco through the gap in his front teeth. “You put metal on meat with that baby, fuckers’ll be DRT.” A wicked grin. “Dead Right There.” He reached for the door. “All right, get your boy outta your truck and we’ll be on our respective ways.”

“He’s gotta go with the truck, Tommy.”

Tommy did a pronounced double take that for anyone else would have seemed theatrical. “I know my ears are shot to shit, but I could swear you just said you want me to take that Strange Ranger over there with me.”

“The group that’s after him, they’ve got their tentacles sunk deep throughout the city. I need you to stash him somewhere out in the desert.”

Given the reach of Stella Hardwick’s group, the last thing Evan could afford was having Max near anybody who could be connected to him—especially after his contact with Violet and Clark. He needed to clear out way beyond city limits and let Evan do what had to be done.

The Ninth Commandment: Always play offense.

“I hope you have a lotta money,” Tommy said, “’cuz babysitting’s not on the list of services any more than mascara delivery is.”

“I do have a lot of money,” Evan said.

He thought of the meeting minutes from Stella Hardwick’s power summits in her conference room on the seventh floor. And then of Tommy tripping over gear and ordnance in his lair.

“I need one more thing,” he said.

“Shocking,” Tommy said.

Evan told him the last item he required.

“Fine,” Tommy said. “Let me get less fucking annoyed before I draw you up an invoice. If I did it now, you wouldn’t like what you’d be looking at.”

He shouldered the door open, braced his ankles and knees for the slide out, and hit the dirt with a grunt.

“Tommy,” Evan said. “I knew I could count on you.”

“Well, shit,” Tommy said. “It’s getting so saccharine in here I might hafta self-administer insulin.”