Theaella

53

“Something or someone?”

Matthew said, “Both.”

“How are you gonna handle it?” Jack asked.

The headache had resumed, a vise clamping Matthew’s brain. “I don’t know yet.”

Jack rasped a hand across his stubble, peppered with gray. “I thought they were gonna kill me,” he said. “Two detectives. In a police station. And then … and then you busted in there with your head all wrapped like some kind of deranged King Tut.…” At this, the first sign of amusement teased his lips. But just as quickly it was gone. “Did you see Brust’s head? I’ve never … never seen anything like that.”

He blinked hard a few times as if clearing his mind and then walked over to the mud-caked wrench on the counter. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands. Only a few hours had passed since he’d used it to repair the pipe outside, but to Matthew it felt like weeks. He figured that for Jack it felt even longer.

“Why did they want to kill me?” Jack said. “I mean … they’re cops.”

“They worked for Petro. He managed to flip them before Grant was hired.”

“But those guys are the detectives running the investigation against Petro. Why would they have opened the case to begin with? Why hire Grant to start digging?”

The sound of a car engine rose on the street outside, and Matthew and Jack tensed. But it kept on, motoring into the dead of night.

“I’m guessing Petro knew that an investigation was coming,” Matthew said. “The dogfighting arena and a number of the smaller businesses used to launder his cash are in Hollywood. So he paid off two detectives in the local station to take point on the case, contain it at a smaller level, and bury it before it got kicked to Vice downtown.”

Jack said, “So Brust and Nu?ez were making sure the investigation went nowhere.”

“That’s right. They needed to hire a forensic accountant to cover their bases, figuring he wouldn’t get very far. They could check the right boxes, steer the case from the inside, then drop it for insufficient evidence. But it looks like Grant uncovered more than they were bargaining for.”

“Grant was too good.” It seemed the words were weighed down, hard for Jack to say. He let the wrench slip from his hand onto the counter. “I thought I’d hit bottom. Now I’m implicated in the murder of two cops. What the hell’s next?”

Before he’d died, Petro had faced down Matthew, smiling into the bullet that would end him. Matthew sensed in his bones now that whatever Petro had been smiling about was more dangerous than a pair of dirty cops.

The First Commandment: Assume nothing.

Or in the case of this mission: Assume it can always get worse.

“One of my associates uncovered new files,” Matthew said. “We’re going to go through them entry by entry and make sure there are no more surprises.”

Jack said, “You have associates?”

It was, to be fair, an inflated term for a sixteen-year-old and an injured rescue dog in a Westwood one-room apartment. But Matthew would take Theaella over an NSA cyberwarfare group any day of the week.

Matthew moved on. “When this is over, you’ll say that an assassin in Petro’s operation carried out the assault on the police station, that he killed Nu?ez and Brust as part of the cover-up. He took you to force you to give up the thumb drive’s hiding place. But you managed to escape.”

“No one’ll believe that.”

“When we hand over files tracing all the payments to Nu?ez and Brust, they will.”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “Every time you put down a threat, another pops up. And this thing, it keeps getting bigger and bigger.” His face, sallow in the ambient light, held a worn-through dread. “Imagine if Grant had never given me that thumb drive. Hour after hour I replay that scene in my head, and I think what if I’d just stood up for myself? What if I’d just said no? Was I that desperate for his approval? That desperate to show everyone that I wasn’t … I don’t know, useless? ‘Come on, Mighty Jack. For once in your life, maybe step up, shoulder some responsibility.’” A bitter laugh escaped him. “And now I dragged Violet into it—Christ, just seeing me she has to relive it all, and I swore I’d never put that woman through anything ever again.” His voice quavered, his eyes brimming. “Now everywhere I look, someone’s trying to kill me, and I can’t do anything but hide in this f*****g house.”

His voice rang off the walls. He lowered his head, eyes on the floor, his face coloring. Water dripped somewhere, an unnerving plink-plink-plink. The lights were off, the walls receding into dark ness, so it seemed the space stretched out forever, a dank underworld.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “You don’t need this.”

“Pick your head up,” Matthew said sharply.

Jack wiped at his eyes roughly.

And then he lifted his gaze.

“You had my back in that interrogation room,” Matthew said. “Show yourself the same respect.”

“What’s that mean?” Jack asked.

“‘Act like the person you want to be.’” It was one of Jack’s favorite quotations; just thinking of him put a rasp in Matthew’s voice. “If we want to get through whatever’s coming, we’re gonna have to face it head-on.”

The protracted silence was broken only by more drops against the subfloor. When Jack spoke again, his words were little more than a whisper. “I can’t see a way out anymore.”

Matthew said, “Then I’ll find it for us.”