Page 71 of Into the Fire

He couldn’t risk a fight, not after the concussion. He didn’t want to raise his heart rate. He didn’t even want to break a sweat. Any action he took would have to be efficient and immediately debilitating.

“Okay,” Jerry Z said, leaning in and conveniently bringing his forehead into range. “I been cool about all this. But you’re about to find out who I really am.”

Evan dealt a single quick strike, the edged straw slamming into Jerry Z’s forehead.

At first the big man didn’t move. He stared at Evan, shock enlarging those pebble eyes. His forehead was split neatly in a five-inch line above the brow, a cracked egg that had yet to seep.

Then the blood came.

A controlled rush into both eyes.

Jerry blinked once, twice, sagging forward. Evan palmed the top of his head and slammed his face into his tray. The plastic muffled the noise, but it was enough to put him out.

Evan rose and set his chair back in place. Heading down the stairs, he removed his phone, changed the settings, added a voice filter, and dialed 911.

“You’ll find a man bleeding and unconscious on the second floor of the McDonald’s at Sunset and Crescent. He has thousands of dollars of stolen goods in his possession.”

As he reached the main floor, commotion erupted upstairs. A manager shouldered past Evan, lunging for the stairs.

Unseen and unnoticed, he stepped out into the cool night breeze.

Walking away, he dug the necklace from his pocket. The pendant spun gently beneath his fist, the cursive words coming clear at intervals: I’ll always be here by your heart.

What had Max said? That when you love someone, you never move on. They get into your cells, live inside you even when they’re gone.

Evan had been trained to remain aggressively alone. To never show vulnerability. To ignore pain. To protect the mission at all costs.

Intimacy, it seemed, required the precise opposite. It required baring yourself to the best and worst that the world could generate. It required living alone in a bedroom filled with old photos and memories long after the warmth and light of a relationship had faded to ash. It required giving someone a marcasite necklace to wear after you’re dead.

He thought about Max, broken down by life and the loss of a baby, helpless in the face of his then-wife’s suffering. Everything I tried just made things worse. I would have done anything. You understand? Anything.

Max had reached a breaking point where he couldn’t take any more pain. And Evan had judged him harshly for that. He’d judged him for trying and failing at something that Evan lacked the courage to even attempt.

Closing his hand around the antique necklace, he wondered at the myriad elements that constituted bravery and counted those he was lacking.

The door to 6G floated a half inch above the threshold. Sometime before midnight Evan crouched above the welcome mat and slipped a crisp envelope beneath. The bump within caught a bit of friction, but the package slid through.

He had written nothing on the envelope, and there was no message inside. It was empty save for a piece of jewelry with a lifetime of sentiment attached to it.

He’d cleaned the necklace upstairs with dishwashing liquid and water, removing any oil and sweat residue. The envelope, fresh from the box, contained no fibers or trace DNA. His fingertips were coated with a thin layer of superglue, and he wore latex gloves on top of that. He’d glitched the hallway security camera to ensure that his late-night visit would not be memorialized.

He would have indulged these habits even if he didn’t share a building with a perspicacious district attorney who had her eye on him in mostly unflattering fashion. But knowing that Mia was here six floors up made him pay even more meticulous attention to every last ritual.

He had to be perfect.

Especially in light of the impossible task he was going to undertake tomorrow.

Perfect meant invisible, autonomous, without emotion.

He rose and stood a moment in the empty hall.

He was never here. He wasn’t even here now. He had no fingerprints, no footprints, no image captured by the eye of the lens overhead.

It was a koan worthy of Jack: If a man moves through the night and no one sees him, does he really exist?

Sometimes even he wondered.

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