Chapter 23: Real Life and the Movies
Chuck was standing at the Nerd Herd desk with the expression of a man who had been wrestling with something since breakfast and was losing.
Simon changed, clocked in, collected his daily XP from the check-in, and walked over.
"You look terrible," Simon said.
"I have a problem," Chuck said.
"I have a firm policy about other people's problems."
"Simon—"
"My policy is that they're other people's problems."
"Please." Chuck said it with the specific desperation of someone who had already exhausted every other option and was now at the bottom of the list. "I can't tell Sarah. I definitely can't tell Casey. You're the only person I can actually talk to."
Simon looked at him.
Chuck looked back with the expression of a man holding on by his fingernails.
"Fine," Simon said. "But if this gets me into something I can't get out of, I'm going to be very annoyed at you for a very long time."
"I'll take that deal."
"Talk."
Chuck glanced around the floor — a reflex, checking for Casey — then leaned slightly forward. "There's a secret. Or there was. Four people knew it. One of them is dead now. And both Sarah and Casey are telling me not to trust the other one. Which means one of them is lying to me, and I don't know which one, and I don't know how to figure it out."
Simon said nothing for a moment.
"How did the fourth person die?" he said.
"I can't tell you that part."
"Is there a body?"
Chuck hesitated. "There were remains. Minimal ones. The circumstances of the death were — extreme. High heat. The working assumption is that there wasn't much left."
"So no body," Simon said. "Just evidence consistent with a death."
Chuck opened his mouth. Closed it. "When you say it like that—"
"Here's my question." Simon kept his voice low and even. "Did anyone in this situation personally confirm the death? Or is everyone operating from evidence that was provided to them?"
Chuck stared at him.
"Because," Simon continued, "evidence can be staged. Remains can be faked. 'High heat' is a very convenient explanation for why the body isn't available for verification." He watched Chuck's face work through the implications. "What I'm saying is — before you spend energy figuring out whether to trust Sarah or Casey, you might want to spend some energy figuring out whether the dead person is actually dead."
"Simon," Chuck said slowly. "This is real life. Not a movie."
Simon looked at him for a long moment.
"Chuck," he said carefully. "You work with two federal intelligence agents. You have a classified government database loaded into your brain. Three weeks ago you defused a bomb in a hotel ballroom using a pornography virus." He spread his hands. "At what point did you decide this was regular real life?"
Chuck opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"The fake-death-villain reveal," Simon continued, "is a well-established move precisely because it works. The whole point is to create a crisis that makes the people around you stop trusting each other, so they're divided and manageable when you come back." He shrugged. "Tell Sarah and Casey to verify the death. Not assume it — verify it. Find out who confirmed the remains and what their chain of custody was."
Chuck was quiet for several seconds.
"That's actually — yeah." He nodded slowly. "Yeah, that's — I'm going to tell them."
"Don't mention me."
"Obviously."
"And Chuck." Simon picked up a tablet from the counter and started moving toward the floor. "Whatever this is — be careful. These situations have a way of accelerating."
"I'm getting that impression," Chuck said, in the voice of a man who had arrived at that impression some time ago and was still processing its full implications.
The afternoon passed the way afternoons did — Simon worked the floor, moved product, talked to customers, let the routine settle over everything else like a light coat of paint that made the surfaces look normal even when the structure underneath was anything but.
Casey drifted through his field of vision twice, moving with the unhurried awareness of a man who was simultaneously doing a retail job and monitoring everyone in his immediate vicinity for threat signatures. Simon gave him nothing to monitor and Casey gave him nothing in return, which was approximately the relationship Simon wanted.
He clocked out at seven, drove to Dom's garage to pick up the Supra.
The garage was running on its usual evening frequency — the specific comfortable noise of people who worked well together doing something they knew how to do. Music from the shop speaker, metal on metal from the back bay, the smell of motor oil that had soaked into the concrete over years.
Simon walked in and stopped.
In the center of the main bay, looking like something that had been found at the bottom of a lake rather than driven under its own power, was a car.
It was — or had been, at some point in its previous life — a Toyota Supra. First generation. The body was rough, the interior was rough, and several components that should have been present were conspicuously absent. However, underneath the hood, sitting in the engine bay with the serene confidence of something that did not belong in a car this old and beaten, was a 2JZ inline-six engine that had clearly been sourced from something significantly younger and more expensive.
"Where," Simon said, "did you find that?"
Dom was wiping his hands on a shop rag nearby and not hiding his amusement. "Salvage yard out past Valencia. Come look at this."
Simon came and looked. The engine was in better shape than the car surrounding it — clean, solid, the kind of core that justified everything else being secondary.
"You're going to spend more building around this than it cost you to buy it," Simon said.
"That's the point," Dom said.
Simon looked at Brian, who was on a creeper under the adjacent lift doing something mechanical to the undercarriage in what appeared to be partial payment of his debt from the night before.
"He's helping?" Simon asked.
"He offered," Dom said, which was its own kind of answer.
Simon crouched down and looked under the lift. Brian had the exhaust headers off and was cleaning the mounting surfaces with the focused attention of someone who knew what they were doing even if they couldn't always do it at a hundred miles an hour.
"Not bad," Simon said.
"Don't sound surprised," Brian said from underneath.
"Where's my car?"
"Far bay." Dom nodded toward the back. "Brian."
Brian rolled out, stood up, and went to get it.
The Supra came out of the far bay sounding the way it was supposed to sound — clean and purposeful, no rattles, the bodywork from last night invisible unless you knew exactly where to look.
Simon walked around it once. Ran his hand along the quarter panel where the contact had been. Nothing.
"Good work," he said.
Letty emerged from the second bay wiping her hands. "You don't have to sound like you're surprised every time we fix something."
"I'm not surprised. I'm appreciative. There's a difference."
"The tone was surprise."
"The tone was gratitude."
"Keys." Dom tossed them.
Simon caught them and tossed Mia's borrowed keys back in return. "Thanks for the loaner."
"Anytime." Mia appeared from the direction of the grocery side, carrying two sodas. "You staying for dinner?"
"Can't." Simon opened the Supra's door. "Taking Meg out tonight. She's had a rough week — she needs to see something different."
"Where are you taking her?" Letty asked. "It's Tuesday."
"Somewhere with a better view," Simon said.
Letty looked at him.
"I have my commercial helicopter license," Simon said. "Have had it for two years. Night views of the city are considerably better from three thousand feet."
A beat of silence.
"Are you serious right now?" Letty said.
"I rented time at a helipad in Burbank. Forty-five minutes of flight time. It's already booked."
Another beat.
Dom made a sound that was either approval or disbelief — with Dom the distinction was sometimes academic.
"You know," Letty said, pointing at him, "you should not be eighteen. Something has gone wrong with the system."
"He's been like this since we met him," Mia said, with the fond exasperation of someone who had watched this pattern develop over years. "You just stop being surprised eventually."
"I'm choosing not to stop being surprised," Letty said. "It keeps me engaged."
Vince, who had appeared from somewhere in the back without anyone noticing, leaned against the bay door. "Kid should be working for the government, not in high school."
"I keep telling myself college first," Simon said. He got in the car. "I'll consider the government after."
"You're already doing the government's work for free," Letty said. "Might as well get paid."
Simon gave her a look that declined to engage with that observation, then started the engine.
Several middle fingers appeared from various directions as he pulled out of the garage. He raised one hand in a wave that acknowledged all of them equally and drove away.
He picked up Meg at seven thirty.
She came out the front door again — not the window, not the tree. Her eyes were clearer than yesterday, which told him Veronica's visit had done what it was supposed to do.
She looked at the Supra. Then at him.
"Where are we going?" she said.
"Somewhere with a better view." He opened the passenger door. "You'll see."
She got in.
Twenty minutes later, Simon pulled into a small private helipad facility in Burbank — three pads, a small operations building, the particular smell of aviation fuel that meant something was about to happen.
Meg looked at the helicopter sitting on the nearest pad. Then at Simon.
"Simon."
"We have forty-five minutes of flight time booked." He turned off the engine. "Night views. Los Angeles from above. Nothing to think about except how big it all is and how small the things that have been bothering you are from up there."
Meg looked at the helicopter. Then at him. Then back.
"You can fly that," she said.
"I have a commercial license. Yes."
"You have a commercial helicopter license."
"Obtained it at sixteen. The written exam is surprisingly manageable if you're motivated."
A long pause.
"Simon Lewis," Meg said, "you are the strangest and most unexpectedly thoughtful person I have ever met."
"I prefer comprehensive," he said. "Come on. We're burning our window."
She got out of the car and walked toward the helipad with her hand finding his, and Simon thought that some problems were worth having if the person next to you was worth having them with.
The helicopter lifted off at eight fifteen.
Los Angeles spread out below them like a circuit board lit from inside, orange and white and endless in every direction, and for forty-five minutes neither of them thought about rumors or fathers or the future or any of the other things that had been sitting on Meg's shoulders all week.
Just the city. Just the lights. Just this.
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