Page 75 of Into the Fire

“Oh. I guess I zoned out … I don’t know, contemplating the human condition.”

“In a mud puddle?”

He shrugged. “Where better?”

Evan frowned, conceding the point. His eyes snagged on the wrench. Max followed his gaze to the dripping tool in his hands.

“I figured there was a broken connection down there. Usually the T-joint stubbing up to a sprinkler head.”

“But there are no sprinkler heads.”

“There used to be,” Max said. “See how the ground’s mounded up there?” He pointed with the wrench, but Evan saw only mud and more mud. “So I went in and fixed it.”

“For who?”

Max shrugged again. “I figured for once it might be nice to leave a place better than it was when I got there.” He looked at his hands, the dirt now cracking across the knuckles. “I don’t have a lot of ways to say thanks anymore.”

“To Violet?”

“To anyone.” When his gaze lifted, Evan was surprised by the dread it held. “What happened?”

“I took care of the other thing,” Evan said.

“How?”

Evan pictured Petro lying pinned beneath his bodyguard in the courtyard. That speckling of blood in his silver hair. He hadn’t raised an arm against the bullet like so many did.

Instead he’d smiled.

Evan hadn’t liked that smile. Had it held something knowing? Or was it merely a final show of pride, a refusal to give in to fear? Maybe it was that simple—he hadn’t wanted to give Evan the satisfaction.

Evan said, “They’re all gone.”

Max took a step back, his shoe plunking in the puddle. It pulled free with a sucking noise. Around them mosquitoes whined and swirled. “Am I safe now?”

Evan hesitated, caught a flash of Petro’s dying moment in his mind’s eye. He’d asked about Max. What had Evan said? Now it’s over for him. And then Petro had smiled.

Why the hell had he smiled?

Evan had eliminated Terzian and his crew. Unmasked the laundering ring. Run up the chain of command to the man at the top and left him lifeless on the flagstones of a courtyard beneath a mound of bodyguards.

It was done. Any peripheral players who remained no longer had an operation to plug into. Their leadership was dead, the files blown. They likely had no idea who Max Merriweather was, and even if they did, no incentive remained for them to harm him.

Joey would continue to do her best to match code names from Grant’s books to the bottom feeders in the scheme, but it was time to get the case back into the hands of the authorities, where it belonged.

What was Evan supposed to do? Keep Max holed up in a tear-down house indefinitely? Because of a smile?

“Am I safe now?” Max asked again.

Evan’s head throbbed and then throbbed some more. “Yes,” he said.

“So where … where should I go?”

Evan tossed Max the zip drive onto which Joey had copied all of Grant’s files. “Hollywood Station. Let them finish what your cousin started.”

Max wiped his hands on his jeans and pocketed the zip drive.

Evan said, “You never called me. You never met me. You never saw me. You went to Grant’s office alone, and a guy tried to shoot you. You got scared, went underground. That’s your story. The whole story. Understand?”