Page 5 of Into the Fire

He stepped down off the closed toilet lid and reached for the door when he heard it in the bedroom.

A tearing sound.

Shush shush shush.

He paused, not trusting his ears.

There it was again, a trio of unsettling rasps.

His lips felt suddenly dry. When he reached for the doorknob, his hand trembled ever so slightly.

He turned the doorknob slowly. The hinges were mercifully silent. The apartment lights were turned off, but a two-inch strip of pale yellow from the outside hall fell across his eye when he put it to the crack.

A man.

In his bedroom.

Working in the dark.

Wife-beater T-shirt. Prominent arm muscles oiled with sweat and marked with something else: Tattoos? Henna ink? Scars? One of them at the triceps was swirled like a pinwheel. The man’s back was turned, his shoulders rippling, his hands set to some unseen task. The smell of him hung heavily in the unvented air, a pungent musk like meat on the verge of turning.

Max’s drawers had been emptied, his few possessions strewn across the floor, the bureau tipped away from the wall. The TV was upended, holes punched in the drywall.

The man straightened up and armed his brow, his fist coming clear, clenched around a combat knife with a serrated edge.

Letters on his forearm resolved from the shadows sufficiently for Max to piece them together: THE TERROR. Visible past the man’s thighs, beneath the stripped-aside sheets, the mattress had been sawed open at intervals, the ticking bulged out intestinally.

The man spun the knife in his hand with a skilled proficiency, bent over the mattress once more, and punched the blade into a virgin spot. It made a thwack as if puncturing flesh.

And then the nightmare grating came once again: shush shush shush.

A thought blinked through Max’s brain. If he hadn’t walked back to the homeless guy at the trail, he would’ve been three minutes earlier, which meant he wouldn’t have seen Mr. Omar, which meant he would have strolled right through his front door into the teeth of this nightmare.

The rising burn in his chest demanded he ease out a breath. Painstakingly, he inched the door back into the frame and rotated the doorknob to its resting place. The click when he released it might as well have been a clap of thunder.

He backed to the toilet, crinkling his eyes as the blistered linoleum compressed with a click. One room over he heard a throat-muffled grunt, another thwack, and then the shush shush shush of the blade.

Max couldn’t help but imagine the knife working its way through sinew and tendons. His vision speckled, and a wave of light-headedness swept through him. He firmed his legs, blinked himself back from the edge.

Move, he told himself. Quick and quiet. You can do this.

He patted blindly behind the toilet tank, tore free the canary-yellow envelope, and wormed back out through the window.

3

Ordinary

On the twenty-first floor of the high-end but somewhat dated Castle Heights Residential Tower, there is a door.

It looks like an ordinary door, but it is not.

The thin wood façade, which resembles every other residential door in the building, disguises a steel interior, which in turn houses an elaborate network of security bars. The core is filled with water, a new measure designed to disperse heat from a battering ram. A ram will buckle before it will breach.

On the other side of the door is a penthouse.

It looks like an ordinary penthouse, but it is not.

If you wander the seven thousand square feet of gunmetal-gray floor, you will see a variety of workout pods, from heavy bags to racked kettlebells. You will see a freestanding fireplace, a few rarely used couches, a spiral staircase winding up to a reading loft. The open design gives you a clear view into the kitchen with its poured-concrete countertops and brushed-nickel fixtures. You will encounter a living wall from which sprout mint, chamomile, and a potpourri of other culinary herbs. What you won’t notice is that the panoramic glass walls that gaze east to downtown Los Angeles and south to Century City are composed of bullet-resistant polycarbonate thermoplastic resin. Or that the retractable sunscreens, shaded an innocuous periwinkle, are made of an exotic titanium composite woven tightly enough to stop any sniper rounds that might penetrate the bullet-resistant panes.