Page 117 of Lone Wolf

His daughters lay side by side on June’s bed, head to feet. London’s legs stretched up the headboard, June’s bare feet nestled into the fluffy duvet by her sister’s head. They held their phones up above their faces, watching blankly, and he could see the reflection of the screens in their pupils.

“Girls,” he said. And then: “Girls.”

“Uh-huh?”

They were nested together as if in a pod, plugged into different existences, the phones leeching their attention. He wondered how long it would take for the leaked video to penetrate their virtual realities.

“Don’t believe … whatever you’re gonna hear.” His voice: wobbly, thin. “There’s just, some work stuff, a work matter, and I want you to know … just don’t believe everything.”

“Okay,” June said.

London: “Mmm-hmm, Dad.”

Shouldered into the doorway, he looked at them. They did not look at him. He’d never felt so disconnected from his life. It was as if he’d been unplugged from the world.

“I … I love you girls.”

“Me, too,” June said, her voice on autopilot.

London’s thumbs clicked and clicked, her tongue testing the point of an incisor.

There was nothing more to get here, and it was his fault both intimately and karmically.

It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. Anything was what anyone could make of it.

He withdrew quietly.

The living room was dark and empty, the bar shelves unlit, staff gone for the night.

The sliding glass doors to the narrow balcony were open. When he’d bought the house he’d felt a rush of power at the view he would own. Out across Cahuenga Boulevard, the 101, and Universal Studios, above and beyond the concerns of all those stars-to-be, just him in the rarefied air, an overlord to an unattainable city.

Now it all looked tawdry and polluted. He wondered at another life on a farm somewhere, a speck-on-a-map town where folks left their doors unlocked and rose with the sunrise for real work that put dirt under their nails.

A string of flashing lights beelined up Cahuenga.

Red and blue.

The police cars turned off, heading up the canyon.

To him.

He was standing on the rail now. If he kept his arms wide, it was surprisingly easy to balance on his bare feet. The drop was severe, seventy-five or so feet to a stretch of sandstone and shale.

He’d read about people who’d wound up quadriplegics after failing to calculate properly. But he was an engineer at heart, driven by numbers and angles.

If he led with his head it would definitely get the job done. He just had to hold his nerve for two, three seconds.

The red and blue lights tilted up the hill toward him, vanishing behind a fold in the canyon. For a moment there was just the silence of the night and the whistle of the wind.

He steeled himself.

And let his weight pull him forward into the waiting nothingness.

Evan neared the turnoff to Friedhoff’s place, but cop cars barred the street. News helicopters circled overhead, spotlights stabbing the hillside. He slowed down, prepared a U-turn at the sawhorses, a tired-looking cop waving him to move it along.

He slowed by the dirt shoulder where a collection of lookie-loos had gathered, their cars slanted this way and that. They looked young, fingernails on the cutting edge of Hollywood, primed for gossip and insider knowledge. They were on their phones, comparing notes, watching footage.

Evan rolled down his window. “What happened?”