Theaella

46

He took note of his core temperature, a faint rise in heat through his torso. A steady exhale brought it down to normal. He observed her as if she were someone he was seeing for the first time. Nostrils flaring with each inhalation. Faint flush through her cheeks. Leaning forward onto the balls of her feet. An aggressive bearing all around.

To de-escalate, Matthew answered in a dead-calm voice, hoping Melanie would subconsciously match it. “For five hundred dollars, Jerry Zabala put Ida Rosenbaum in the hospital. But the damage was worse than that. She was reduced. Treated as if she were invisible. No feelings of her own. No power over her own body. No dignity. That’s how she feels right now.” He pictured Ida’s frail frame, bones beneath the bedsheets, bolstered by pillows. That age-curled hand rising to cover her bruises, hiding her eyes behind a washcloth. I’m an eighty-seven-year-old widow. That’s about as unspecial as you can be. Matthew met Melanie’s glare. “She deserves to be shown that she matters.”

“A lot of people deserve a lot of things,” Melanie said. “That doesn’t mean you’re allowed to just go out there and get it for them.”

“Maybe if you were in her situation, you’d feel differently.”

“Right. Because when my husband died of pancreatic cancer and I had to pick up the pieces for myself and my three-year-old, I felt empowered as hell.”

“We’re not talking about cancer,” Matthew said. “We’re talking about willful, considered choices that people make to tear others down. And what should be done about it.”

“You mean what you should do about it?”

He shrugged. “Not anymore.”

“What’s that mean?”

He said, “I don’t know.”

They considered each other in the headlight’s glare, the engine growling behind them like something feral.

“How could you? Hold those views? Do those things?”

“You’re a district attorney,” Matthew said. “You don’t know what it feels like. To have no recourse. No power. Nothing.”

“And you do?”

He pictured himself at twelve years old, the scrawniest of the boys at Pride House Group Home. How he’d slept crammed on the floor between bunk beds, every day starting with kids sliding out of the sheets, pounding him into the floor. Charles Van Sciver, two years older and one head taller, used to flick mac and cheese across the table onto Matthew’s shirt, his face, daring him to respond. Even now in the garage, Matthew could feel the heat of the asphalt against his palms and knees that day behind the handball courts. Drooling blood onto the cracked black tar, his head still ringing from a backhand. Squeezing his eyes against the bright-lit pain, blinking himself into a reality that was hardly any better.

He locked down his face, his body. Total control, no nonverbal cues, the perfect stillness of an Orphan. The truck grumbled at his back. He gave Melanie no answer.

“You interfered with a criminal case,” she said. “My case. And you committed criminal actions of your own.” She stepped forward, tilted her head, studied him. The flush on her cheeks remained, her anger on a low boil. “I’ve never seen you before,” she said. “I’ve never seen who you really are.”

He said, “I hope you never have to.”

He’d spoken softly, his words sincere. He had already saved her and Peter once before, but she had no idea how far he would go if he had to. She took his words entirely the wrong way. As a threat.

He saw something in her eyes that horrified him.

Fear.

She drew back her head. The high beams bleached the fringe of her lush, wavy hair. She squinted, collected herself. “You’re a thug,” she said. “If you mess with one of my cases again, I will take you down.”

After her footsteps faded away, he stood for a time there between the pillars. The headlights spilled over his shoulders, silhouetting his shadow on the concrete wall. He stared at it.

It stared back.

Nightmare Scenario

As the taxi pulled away, Jack lumbered toward the police station at the corner of De Longpre and Wilcox. The low-slung building, concrete and brick, suffered from a paucity of windows. Like so much else within the cash-strapped L.A. city borders, it was losing a war of attrition, too many weeks grinding by with not enough funds. Chewing gum spackled the Hollywood stars embedded in the pavement. Sun-baked plants crumbled in the dirt beds lining the entrance. The bricks, faded and chipped.

A bail-bonds shop across the street perkily advertised 2 percent down, the glitzy yellow sign a lighthouse beacon shining through the night, drawing the fallen like moths. This was real Hollywood, the tattered velvet underbelly, a spiderweb stretched wide and hungry to catch overreaching souls in free fall.

Jack’s hand, shoved into his pocket, made a fist around the zip drive loaded with Grant’s files. His palm was sweaty.

Taking a deep breath, he walked up the ramp, yanked open the weighty glass door, and stepped into a trickle of air from a failing fan. Unhappy folks filled the molded plastic seats. The desk officer didn’t look up from her iPhone. She was frowning down at it, tapping away with one finger. “Your complaint?” Her voice emerged tinny from a speak-through grille punched through the bullet-resistant glass screen.

“My cousin, Grant Merriweather, was a forensic accountant working on a case for someone at your station. I have information about the investigation.” Jack’s mouth felt dry, the words rough and raspy on the way out. “He was murdered last week.”

At this she looked up.

She dropped her phone on the blotter and pushed back in her rolling chair, coasting to the left side of the horseshoe desk. Plucking up a landline, she poked at buttons with the end of a pencil and had a brief conversation. Then she called over to him. “Jack Merriweather?”

“That’s right,” he said, surprised. “That’s me.”

She finished the conversation and rolled back over. “Please have a seat, Mr. Merriweather. The detectives working the case are on their way.”