Out of the Dark

37 My Business

Crouching outside the 24 Hour Fitness at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, Evan unscrewed the impostor outlet he’d installed three days prior. Though he’d flown a circuitous route home, he’d driven here straight from the airport in the inconspicuous Ford Taurus he used as one of his many backup vehicles.

He popped off the outlet’s cover plate to access the microSD slot. After withdrawing the card, he sat on a metal bench by the elevator and accessed the footage on his laptop. He played it on 5x fast-forward, slowing down to look at particularly hulking men, of which there were quite a few. He focused on patrons only as they exited the gym, since that provided the best view of their forearms.

He was looking for those half-skull tattoos that Trevon had described.

It took him three-quarters of an hour to get a hit. A man pushed out through the gym’s glass front doors wearing a deep-collar tank top torn down the sides to show off bulging lats. The shoulder straps were thin, stretched up over his traps, giving the shirt an oddly feminine vibe, like a bikini top designed to expose maximum flesh.

As the man lowered his arms and headed for the elevator, walking directly toward the hidden lens, the half-skull tattoos came clear.

Evan rewound until he spotted the man on his way into the gym and then checked the time stamp of his arrival: 3:57 P.M.

On a hunch he zipped the footage forward to 3:50 the next afternoon. Sure enough, at 3:59 the same man appeared.

You don’t build muscle like that without committing to a routine.

Evan pulled out his RoamZone and called Trevon Gaines.

He answered right away. “Hello?”

“Trevon. It’s me. How are you doing?”

“I’m okay, thank you. How are you?”

Goal for the Day #3: Ask a personal question when someone asks you one.

“No,” Evan said. “I actually mean how are you doing?”

“Oh. I’m awful. They made me take bereavement leave from work, but I don’t like … um, I don’t like when I can’t go to work. And now I’m just sitting here at home trying not to think certain thoughts in my head. And I didn’t get to fill out my shift reports and they’re just sitting there at work all not-filled-out and we always do our job and do it well, but they won’t let me come back for two whole weeks.”

“Did the cops talk to you?”

“Yeah. I did like you said. I didn’t even have to act.”

“Okay. I’m going to text you a picture of a man.” Evan took a screen shot of the man and sent it. Over the line he heard the ding of the arriving text. “I want you to tell me if he’s Muscley One.”

“I don’t … I don’t want to look.”

“Trevon. I need you to look.”

“I’m too scared.”

Evan took a breath, held it. “We don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself.”

He could hear Trevon breathing across the receiver. Then some rustling came over the line. “That’s—” His voice cracked. “That’s him.”

His terror was undeniable. What did it feel like to behold the face of a man who’d slaughtered every single person you cared about?

“Thank you, Trevon.”

“What are you gonna do to him?”

“You don’t want to know that.”

Trevon said, “Okay.”

Evan cut the connection.

It was a bit past two o’clock now, which gave him some time before Muscley One appeared.

At an athletics shop downstairs, Evan bought some workout gear. He went out to his car and changed.

In the privacy of the driver’s seat, he took stock of his injuries. His cheek stung beneath his left eye, where he’d picked out a half dozen splinters that had embedded themselves there when he’d blasted through the floor of the Watergate room. The superficial cuts on his elbows had mostly healed, but one laceration hurt every time he bent his arm. He made a mental note to dig in it more later in case he’d missed a sliver of glass. After the firefight, he’d detoured on his way out of D.C., executing a break-in at a key location. He was getting his pieces into position on the chessboard, one painstaking move at a time.

Refocusing, he fished in his backpack and came out with a metal case the size of a deck of playing cards. Inside were two dozen ovals of silicon composite film, each vacuum-sealed inside a glass tab that resembled a microscope slide.

The fingerprint adhesives.

He removed one.

He caught himself rubbing his eyes and realized how exhausted he was. Setting his internal alarm, he napped deeply for an hour and fifteen minutes and awoke refreshed.

Leaving the ARES 1911 behind in the glove box, he rode the escalators back up and picked the lock of a service door on the gym’s lower level. Coming up the stairs, he pretended to stretch on the mats behind the check-in desk, giving him a clear view of the elevators through the glass front doors.

3:50.

Customers trickled in at intervals, pressing their index fingers to the print reader on the front counter. When the sensor blinked green, they passed inside.

After an eight-minute wait, the elevator doors parted, revealing Muscley One.

Evan walked briskly to the check-in desk. “Hey, man,” he said to the sales associate. “Someone just puked in the Jacuzzi in the locker room. It’s a mess, and it looks like a fight might break out.”

“Shit.” The guy snatched up the phone, his voice issuing over the PA system. “All personnel to the locker room.”

He hung up and hustled to the back.

Alone at the check-in counter, Evan pulled the glass slide from where he’d tucked it into his waistband. He cracked the seal, carefully removed the transparent fifty-micron film, and laid it across the fingerprint reader. Once exposed to air, the adhesive acted like candle wax; it had a thirty-second window to receive an impression before it hardened.

He sensed a big form looming behind him.

“C’mon, dude. Move it. You’re taking all day.”

“Sorry,” Evan said, and stepped aside.

He pretended to tie his shoelaces while Muscley One pressed his finger to the sensor. The laser read his print through the transparent film, the green light clearing him to enter.

As Muscley One ambled away, Evan peeled the print from the reader, reversing it onto his own finger pad, where it clung and hardened. He circled the counter quickly so that he was standing before the computer monitor.

Over the tops of the exercise machines, Evan sensed movement — the sales associate emerging from the rear hall, returning to his post.

Swinging the reader around, Evan pressed his appareled fingertip to the glass window. The green light came on again, the member identity popping up on the screen.

Bo Clague.

Beneath the photo, an address in Panorama City.

Bo Clague entered his house, stripping off his weight-lifting belt and hanging it on the coat hook by the front door. Shaking out his arms, he stepped through the foyer into the kitchen.

Evan sat at the breakfast table.

Bo halted, surprise flaring his wide-set eyes and then giving way to anger.

Evan said, “Sit down.”

“Don’t you fucking tell me what to do in my own house. You’d better have a gun. You’d better pray you have a gun.”

Bo’s upper body was swollen from the workout, protruding muscle tapering in a V. Like most muscleheads, he favored vanity over fitness. Contrasted with the bulk of his torso, his slender legs looked like they belonged on another body.

That would prove useful.

Evan nudged a two-pound jug of whey protein aside with his knuckles. “Do you know why people hit the floor when they’re in pain?”

Bo’s body stayed tense, but his head cocked. “Motherfucker, what?”

“The vasovagal response. Strong emotional or physical distress activates the vagus nerve, which in turn widens blood vessels. That reduces blood flow to the heart, which slows down the heart rate and impedes circulation to the head. Which in turn causes light-headedness and — that’s right — fainting. You’re probably wondering what evolutionary purpose is served by our bodies’ having such an odd response.”

Bo blinked at him.

It did not look like that was what he was wondering at all.

“When you hit the floor, you’re horizontal,” Evan said. “So that increases blood flow to the brain again. Which in turn restores consciousness. Permit me to demonstrate.”

He stood and lobbed the jug of protein powder at Bo’s face. When Bo reflexively caught it, Evan skip-stepped forward, chambering his right knee high to the side like a piston, and hammered his heel down and forward through Bo’s woefully overloaded knee. The dum tek oblique kick blew the joint straight back, Bo’s body crumbling.

The oversize torso slapped the linoleum, Bo momentarily unconscious.

Evan walked back to the table, pulled out the nearest chair, and took his seat again.

A few seconds later, Bo blinked back to life. He looked down at his ruined leg and gagged a little. Above the damage, his big hands encircled the thigh as if to choke it. His mouth was open, and he didn’t seem capable of closing it.

Evan nodded at the chair he’d pulled out. “Sit down.”

Bo dragged himself across the linoleum and pulled himself up onto the chair. He’d gone red, veins standing out in his forehead and throat. “Who are you?”

“I’m a representative.”

“Okay.” Bo spread his hands on the surface of the table, grabbing maximum surface area as if he were concerned about slipping off. “Okay, my employer and I can work with that. We know there have been some irregularities. It can be worked out. Which supplier do you represent?”

“Trevon Gaines.”

Evan watched the flush drain slowly from Bo’s face, leaving his lips with a bluish tinge.

“I want your employer’s name. And I want the name of the other man, too. The one who helped you kill Trevon Gaines’s family.”

“I can’t…” Bo clung to the life raft of the table.”You don’t understand. You don’t know what he’ll do to me.”

“Will it be worse than what I’ll do to you?”

“Yes.”

They sat a moment, two friends at a breakfast table.

“I understand you’re scared,” Evan said. “Let me fast-forward to one hour from now. Your other knee will be shattered. Both elbows. Your wrists. Every finger. Your jaw, broken so badly you’ll be gagging on your own blood. Which will make it that much harder for you to choke out the names that you’re going to give me anyway.” He leaned forward. “I will get my answers. And you will die. The only question is, how do you want to spend the next hour?”

Bo bent his head down, nostrils flaring as he drew breath. “Why do I have to die?”

“How many people did you kill at Trevon’s mother’s house?”

He closed his eyes. “That was different.”

“Not to me.”

“That was business.”

“And this is my business.”

“Please, God.” Reality was dawning now. Bo palmed his forehead, which had gone shiny with sweat. “There’s gotta be another way. Money. Something. I can set it right.”

“Seventeen dead. You ruined Trevon Gaines’s life. You terrorized that young man.”

“It was my orders.”

Evan thought about Trevon’s notepad with his goals for the day. The stuffed frog tucked in up to its chin. It’s all my fault.

He stood. “I’m done talking now.”

Bo bolted back in his chair, held up his hand. “Okay. Okay.”

He told Evan what he needed to know.

Afterward Evan walked over to the gas stove, flopped down the door, and turned it on high. He found a matchbook in one of the drawers, bent a matchstick around the front flap, and thumb-flicked it against the striker.

“Wait. Jesus Christ … you can’t just— Motherfucker, wait!”

On his way to the door, Evan left the matchbook on the end of the counter, the stick burning down toward the rest of the pack, a makeshift fuse. Already the smell of gas laced the air.

Bo fell out of the chair and struck the floor with a yelp. Gritting his teeth, he started pulling himself arm over arm across the kitchen toward the matchbook.

Evan adjusted the pistol in his hip holster and walked out.

He crossed the street, got into his Taurus, and pulled away from the curb.

He’d gone half a block when he heard the boom.