Page 19 of Into the Fire

“The first part of helping you is making you face reality.”

Max lowered his hand from his eyes. Then he looked at the key resting on Evan’s palm.

“What—” Max’s voice cracked. “What reality?”

“Your fingerprints and DNA put you at Lorraine Lennox’s house. With her corpse. Earlier in the evening, you showed up at Grant’s place in Beverly Hills behaving erratically, got into a confrontation with his wife. Your apartment is torn up, which would lead any reasonable detective to conclude that you’re into illicit business with bad people.”

Max’s lips looked cracked. His eyes were wide, bloodshot. “Well,” he said. “If you frame it that way…”

The brakes ground, a metal-on-metal screech Evan could feel in his teeth.

“Look,” Max said. “I don’t want to drag Grant’s family into this. They’re going through it bad right now. And his oldest kid, she’s pregnant. I don’t really have … I don’t have a lot to lose, you know? So I need your help, yeah. But it’s more important that we keep them out of this.” He leaned back in his seat and exhaled, puffing out his cheeks. “Why’d you make me run around like that? The tram stop to the bus to the Metro?”

Evan said, “I was deciding if you’re worth saving.”

“Am I worth saving?”

The doors hissed open at Union Station. Evan plucked the phone from Max’s hand, snapped it in half, and slid the pieces across the floor. They disappeared through the gap, falling onto the tracks.

Before Max could react, Evan grabbed his arm, tugged him off the train, and hustled him across the platform and up the stairs. They blinked in the sudden light of day.

Evan steered him across the parking lot and dumped him into the passenger seat of a white Chevy Malibu, a backup vehicle he’d picked up at one of his safe houses.

Evan accelerated out of the parking lot, pressing Max back in the cloth seat, and shot north up Alameda.

Max said, “Things go pretty fast around you, huh?”

Evan zigzagged across the 110, and then they were forging upslope, weaving between parked cars on increasingly cramped streets. He stopped next to a construction dumpster brimming with detritus.

Evan pulled a tube of superglue from the glove box and used it to coat his fingertips.

Max said, “Mind if I ask…?”

“Fingerprints.”

Max craned to look through his window at the crumbling dirt rise of the hillside. “Why are we here?”

But Evan was already out of the car, digging in the trunk. He produced an eight-ounce bottle of Marianna Super Star Cream Peroxide Developer.

Max was next to him now, gawking. “So we’re gonna dye my hair? Disguise me?”

Instead of answering, Evan hiked up the steep slope, boots slipping, releasing tumbles of dirt. Max made his way up behind him. They waded through knee-high weeds and came to the back of a fence.

Max said, “Would you mind just telling me—”

Evan vaulted the fence.

He waited. A moment later Max pulled himself over as well.

Max took in the postage-stamp backyard, his mouth popping open at the sight of Lorraine Lennox’s house. A dry breeze wafted the heat of the fire pit across their faces, and a faint smell from the house. Something fetid. The flat-screen TV emitted steady pulses of canned laughter.

Evan cranked off the gas to the fire pit, the flames drowning in the lava stones.

He said, “Don’t move.”

He breezed into the house, weathering the smell, and did a quick spin through, safing each room and checking the front yard. He ignored the armchair and what it held.

When he returned to the backyard, Max remained rooted in place, his feet staked to the dead grass. His mouth pulsed a few times, as if he were holding his gorge in place. “Look,” he said. “I appreciate this a ton, but your bedside manner isn’t exactly—”