Theaella

47

Jack settled in between a dozing homeless man and a young woman with a ragged cable sweater and a black eye. A water stain marred the ceiling. Beyond the security glass, officers shuttled victims, witnesses, and suspects between desks and rooms. The whole place felt drenched in exhaustion and despair, the everyday aftermath of lives that had collided with other lives, or with vehicles, or with bullets. And yet Jack felt a swell of gratitude that he was here, another anonymous citizen with a problem that could—at last—be handled by the proper authorities. The Nowhere Man had succeeded in delivering him out of a nightmare scenario.

What had he told Jack? Figure out what you want to do with your life when we get it back for you. Jack was finally seeing through his promise to Grant, delivering the cooked accounting books that would dismantle the remnants of the money-laundering operation that had cost his cousin his life. He could make this the first step on the long road back.

On the wall above the desk officer’s head, LAPD’s logo was stenciled in dark print: TO PROTECT AND SERVE.

Jack leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, the snore of the man beside him as regular as a metronome.

For the first time in five days, he felt his muscles unclench.

* * *

CLIX vodka’s name, derived from Roman numerals, represents the 159 times it has been distilled. The initial batch consisted of only two thousand bottles, each a numbered crystal decanter with a stopper.

Matthew had liberated his from the handmade burlwood case so it could take its place in his freezer drawer. He stared down longingly at it now, about to reach for it.

He hesitated, a chill mist gusting up at him.

Again he pictured Petro’s dying moment in the courtyard of the café. Pinned beneath a fallen body, his lips curled faintly with amusement.

What did he know that Matthew didn’t?

Sipping a single glass of vodka would barely dull his senses. But still. Once Jack was done with the cops, Matthew had promised to accompany him to his truck and his apartment to ensure that all was quiet on the Western Front. If he was a half percent loose from alcohol, it was a half percent too much.

The Second Commandment was also the most onerous.

Giving his concussion an alcohol overlay, as tempting as it was, seemed not the wisest choice. Booze would exacerbate the symptoms. So would pretty much everything else. The only thing that had ever helped crisp his focus for a few minutes was an injection of epinephrine, but the synthetic adrenaline would prevent him from resting, so he didn’t want to go that way either.

He sighed, shooting the CLIX decanter a parting look. “It’s not you,” he said. “It’s me.”

Grabbing an ice cube, he padded across the great room, giving the heavy bag a spin kick for good measure. Down the hall, into the bathroom, through the shower wall to the Vault. An aloe vera plant resided atop a bed of cobalt glass pebbles in a bowl by his mouse pad. The size and shape of a pinecone, it—she—was his sole companion. Vera II. He nested the ice cube in her glass bowl and gave her a pat on the spikes.

Back into the bathroom. He peeled off his shirt, stripped off his pants and boxer briefs, and regarded himself in the harsh LED lighting. The claw marks on his chest had reddened, the first flush of an infection. He had a healthy bruise on his left thigh—also from the pit bull–mastiff?—and a splotchy contusion over his right kidney that he couldn’t match to a specific blow. Broken capillaries mottled his collarbone, probably from grappling with Raffi on the floor of the deserted TV station. The back of his head was tender and swollen, and his brain still felt like it had been pressed into a belt sander.

He slid the specialized contact lens out of his right eye and was dismayed to see that the pupil hadn’t constricted in the least. It stared back at him vacantly, a well-placed bullet hole. He flicked the contact into the trash and irrigated with hydrating drops.

From beneath the sink, he retrieved an olive-drab pack designed to SEAL team medic specs and dug through the packages—ACE bandages, field dressing, morphine vials—until he found the alcohol pads. He swabbed at the puffy skin around the claw marks, ignoring the sting. Then he nudged the glass shower door aside once more on its barn-door track and loosed the nozzle until steam filled the stall.

He exhaled deeply and evenly, felt his shoulders sink, his head tug forward with exhaustion.

He was just stepping in when his RoamZone rang.

He hesitated, annoyed.

Then backed out, wormed the phone from his pant pocket, and checked caller ID. He clicked to answer, but before he could speak, Theaella’s voice flew at him in an excited rush.

“Guess what?”

Matthew said, “You’ve amended your position on the capitalization of ‘kay’ in text messages?”

“No. Lowercase ‘kay’ is still an atrocity. But this is almost as important. Are you ready?”

He stood naked in the bathroom, the blue-purple splotches on his skin drawing his eye in the mirror. “Bated breath.”

“So Grant’s files? I’ve been whaling away at them since, like, forever o’clock, right? And then I noticed something super un-copacetic.”

The shower was still running, the steam beckoning. Matthew couldn’t wait to get his battered body to the tiled bench inside and sprawl out as if he were in a Muscovite banya. “Which was?”

“Well, it occurred to me—’cuz I’m a friggin’ genius—to check the memory. It shows four gigs on the thumb drive, but all of Grant’s files only add up to a little more than three gigs.”

This time he failed to keep impatience from his voice. “Which means?”

“Dude! Hidden file! C’mon, X. So I right-clicked and ran as administrator to look for the removable file. Then I typed in ‘attrib-s-h-r s d’ and wa-la—the hidden files all came visible.”

Dread flickered to life, augmenting the throbbing at his temples. He sensed that the thread of this discovery would somehow lead back to that mysterious smile Petro had summoned when Matthew had told him it was over now for Jack.