Page 149 of Into the Fire

They drank.

Clark McKenna couldn’t doze off.

He hadn’t slept for shit since his run-in with Max Merriweather at the house. Or—to put a finer point on it—his run-in with Max Merriweather’s friend. A holier-than-thou roughneck brimming with swagger and moral sanctimony.

Who was that guy to question Clark’s choices?

Clark shifted around in bed until Gwendolyn gave a rumble of displeasure, and then he slid from the sheets, wrapped a bathrobe around himself, and headed into the kitchen. It was a cavernous affair, with vaulted ceilings and oversize doorways. The counter space alone was sufficient to seat a basketball team.

The help wasn’t around and the night was past the tipping point to morning, so he brewed up a pot of coffee and sat alone at the island. The room seemed to dwarf him even more than usual. The under-cabinet lights were on, the windows throwing back his reflection.

If there was one thing he didn’t want to look at right now, it was himself.

He’d raised the issue to Gwendolyn already twice, and twice she’d shot it down.

She was a stubborn woman, and that had made him a stubborn man. He supposed she would have argued the reverse.

He sipped his coffee and glared at himself.

For nearly three years he and Gwenny had clutched the secret close to their chests, content in the knowledge that they’d saved their daughter’s life. After the miscarriage he’d gone over to that hovel of an apartment and found his girl curled up on the kitchen linoleum, shuddering. Though it was nearly noon, she was still in her nightshirt and a pair of boxer shorts, her flesh as pale and cold as marble.

His paternal instincts had risen up, fierce as a cornered beast, and he’d vowed then that he would do anything to save her. Gwendolyn had found the treatment home. And later that night, privately in their bedroom, Gwendolyn had set the terms.

Violet was alive. But over these past years when Clark caught her in an unguarded moment gazing blankly out a window or drifting off in a meeting, he understood that a part of her was still lying on that kitchen floor, shuddering and alone, trapped in the knowledge that her husband had left her there.

That he’d found her no longer worth being with.

That was the kind of thing that could kill someone even if they were still breathing.

The coffee was cold now, the mug cool within his hands.

He’d known what he was going to do all along. He’d just been pretending that he didn’t. And he knew he had to do it before Gwenny’s alarm roused her for her morning yoga in the back garden.

He picked up the phone and dialed. It wasn’t as hard as he thought it might be. After all, he’d practiced countless times over the past two years and seven months.

When Violet picked up, her voice hoarse with sleep, a surge of emotion ambushed him. “Hullo?” she said.

“Sweet girl.” He had to fight out the words. “I have to tell you something.”

And then he’d lowered his eyes into his hand and wept.

Parking tickets sheeted the windshield of Max’s TrailBlazer. It felt like a lifetime ago when Evan had directed him to meet here in the lot by Universal Studios.

One problem had led to the second, the third to a fourth and then a fifth. When Evan had blown out Stella Hardwick’s conference room and everyone inside, he’d put down the sixth and final problem.

Now there was nothing left to do but watch the shrapnel settle.

Evan had given Max a thousand dollars to get back on his feet, along with Grant’s thumb drive and a cover story that they’d worked and reworked until it was more real to Max than what had really gone down.

Max was ready to walk into a police station and lay out a version of events that protected him fully and disclosed nothing about his relationship with Evan. Max had simply been a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like most successful fabrications, this was an extension of the truth. The criminal networks Stella Hardwick had assembled around her scheme had collapsed due to internecine warfare, or so the story would go. Greed and turf disputes had turned the parties against one another until they’d brought themselves down, sinking into a morass of blood.

Max hesitated by his TrailBlazer, keys in hand, and looked back at Evan. There was always this moment when they tried to say the unsayable. The bond forged over the course of a mission was unlike anything else.

Evan wondered how much he’d miss it.

This was the part where Evan empowered them to find the next client. To pass on his phone number and, in doing so, to help them move from victim to savior.

Evan cleared his throat. “Good-bye, then.”