Page 80 of Into the Fire

Reduced

By the time Evan went to his safe house, traded out the Chevy Malibu for his Ford F-150, fought through clotted traffic on the 405, and reached Castle Heights, he was fit only for sleep and vodka.

He turned in to the porte cochere more briskly than usual and waved off the valet, who feigned annoyance as usual. It occurred to Evan that this was the closest thing to a domestic ritual he had.

The run-flat self-sealing tires screeched on the ramp as he veered down, powerful headlights raking the subterranean parking lot before landing on Mia Hall standing directly between the concrete pillars that defined his spot. Her glare was unrelenting, her arms crossed.

He was bent into the wheel from hitting the brakes abruptly, the grille steaming five feet from her, but she hadn’t budged an inch. She hadn’t even flinched. Leaving the truck running, he climbed out. Walked around. Stood in front of her. The dank space smelled acrid from the brake pads. Her mouth was set, her full lips compressed into a thin line of displeasure.

“Something on your mind?” he asked.

“His head was split open,” Mia said.

“Who?”

“Don’t fuck with me, Evan.” She jutted her jaw forward, stared over his shoulder at nothing, took a deep breath. “The guy who robbed Ida. He was terrified, confessed to everything. His forehead, split like a melon. He had bruises all down one cheek.”

“As I recall, so did Ida.”

“Eye for an eye? The law doesn’t work that way.”

“No,” Evan said. “The law shouldn’t. It can’t.”

She was radiating more than anger, something like thundering moral authority, and he understood how defendants must feel in the face of her righteousness—undressed, despite their courthouse suits. “I told you I was handling this,” she said. “I told you to stay away from it. And you lied to me.”

Her expression loosened for only a split second, but he saw what was beneath, how badly he’d hurt her. The betrayal she felt.

He wanted to tell her that he hadn’t lied, not precisely, but he couldn’t assemble the words. He didn’t have the faintest notion how to navigate a situation like this, but he did know that a semantic argument right now would be a colossal misfire.

And besides, he’d missed his opening.

“What is it you do, exactly?” What Mia’s voice lost in volume, it gained in sharpness.

“I help people,” Evan said. Or at least I used to.

“What does that mean?”

“I protect them.”

“Without limitation?” She grew frustrated at his silence. “You’ll go anywhere? Do anything?”

The garage whirled a little, and he rocked to regain his balance but recovered before she noticed. “Yes.”

“When you split Jerry Zabala’s head open, how were you protecting Ida Rosenbaum?”

“Allegedly.”

In the headlights her eyes had turned impenetrable, wishing-fountain dimes throwing back a midday glare. “Excuse me?”

“When I allegedly split Jerry Zabala’s head open.”

“Answer the fucking question, Evan.”

He took note of his core temperature, a faint rise in heat through his torso. A steady exhale brought it down to normal. He observed her as if she were someone he was seeing for the first time. Nostrils flaring with each inhalation. Faint flush through her cheeks. Leaning forward onto the balls of her feet. An aggressive bearing all around.

To de-escalate, Evan answered in a dead-calm voice, hoping Mia would subconsciously match it. “For five hundred dollars, Jerry Zabala put Ida Rosenbaum in the hospital. But the damage was worse than that. She was reduced. Treated as if she were invisible. No feelings of her own. No power over her own body. No dignity. That’s how she feels right now.” He pictured Ida’s frail frame, bones beneath the bedsheets, bolstered by pillows. That age-curled hand rising to cover her bruises, hiding her eyes behind a washcloth. I’m an eighty-seven-year-old widow. That’s about as unspecial as you can be. Evan met Mia’s glare. “She deserves to be shown that she matters.”

“A lot of people deserve a lot of things,” Mia said. “That doesn’t mean you’re allowed to just go out there and get it for them.”