Page 10 of The Damage Man

“Dunno. Drive to Mexico.” Blake presses his palms together, smashes his hands between his knees. “Cyrus is the least of it. These guys, they’re bad news.”

“Why’d you take a loan from them?” Rusty asks.

“Like your judgment is so fucking great,” Blake says.

“Not when I was using.”

“Which was always.”

“It’s a disease.”

“I don’t give a shit what excuses you tell yourself.”

A few patrons turn at the sharpness of Blake’s tone.

Evan’s discomfort ticks up into the red zone. Steel and lead do not faze him. He can take a punch and deliver much worse. But this sort of domestic intimacy, the pain on Blake’s face, Rusty’s torn-open vulnerability, it strikes chords in him he does not understand. His OCD flares, hitting on imperfections. There’s a drip of maple syrup on the counter by his wrist. He glares at it with enmity.

With seeming great effort, Blake lowers his voice. “No wonder I wound up here. How’m I supposed to know how to do anything right? Couldn’t get it from you. Not from Mom.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Rusty says, “your mom was there. When you were sick with croup, she’s the one who got up with you in the middle of the night. Slept in the hospital for two nights when you had your appendix out freshman year—”

“How would you know?”

“Because I heard about it every time we got in a fight,” Rusty says, without edge.

Blake thinks about smiling, decides against it.

“I guess you’re right,” he says. “Mom’s crazy but at least she stayed.”

“Give me your phones,” Evan says.

They blink at him.

“Now.”

They set their phones on the table. Evan powers them both off, stuffs them in his pocket, and hands Rusty a burner phone. “I will handle this but you need to stay off the radar until it’s done.”

Blake says, “You can’t handle these guys.”

Evan smiles patiently.

Blake looks away, chews his cheek. “What’s ‘stay off the radar’ mean?”

“Don’t go home. Or to your mom’s. Or anywhere else they might find you.”

“Where’m I supposed to go?”

“I took over a friend’s sublease on a place in Rancho Park,” Rusty says. “No bills there or anything. You can stay with me.”

“I’d rather have bamboo shoots hammered beneath my fingernails.”

“Judging from what Cyrus had to say,” Evan tells him, “that might be on the menu.”

Blake’s forehead creases and the gray pouches beneath his eyes contract ever so slightly.

“Look, son, I can’t imagine what I put you through,” Rusty says. There’s a slightly rehearsed cadence to the words. Evan wonders if he ran through them just now with his sponsor.

“No. You can’t.”