The Survivor

same model he’d toted around the Sandbox. Chewing his lip, he considered. What was he gonna do, gun down mafiya in the street? If it came to it. But not today. Today he had to go through a metal detector at LAPD headquarters. He kicked the door closed.

The suit still fit well, a pleasant surprise. Sitting on the bed, he leaned over to lace up his shoes, but his left hand had gone weak again, and he stared at it, willing it to clench, to obey. If it couldn’t do this, how the hell could it grip a gun, pull a trigger, protect his family? His fingertips chased the laces around until he sat back up, winded with exasperation. He sat for a time, breathing.

Then he got up and retrieved his loafers from the closet.

* * *

When Nate stepped off the elevator at the Police Administration Building and entered the bull pen, the detectives and clerks rose and clapped-a tradition to recognize officers who’d closed tough cases. He literally stepped aside and glanced behind him, not getting it until Ken Nowak shouted out, “Look at Hero Boy all dolled up. You goin’ on Oprah today?”

Nate moved into a sea of handshakes and backslaps, noting how odd-and enjoyable-it was to be recognized as an equal here on this floor, where, by dint of his unusual job, he’d never quite fit in. The only person seemingly unimpressed was Jen Brown, who remained hunched over her desk in her private office. Her center-part haircut had not been updated since he’d known her-nor, he suspected, for sometime before that. When he darkened her doorway, she did not look up from her paperwork. As a sergeant, she was tasked with overseeing the ever- diminishing Crisis-Response Unit, an added responsibility which bore little upside for her.

“So,” she eventually said, not yet giving Nate the benefit of her gaze, “you shot a bunch of thugs. Good work, Overbay. And here I thought you only did touchy-feely.”

“Look at you, getting all emotional.”

She looked up finally, trying to stop a smile from forming. She liked him, he knew, no matter how much she tried not to, and he felt the same way about her. “Why are you here?” she asked. “No one died today. Yet.”

“I wanted to do some more follow-up for the O’Doherty family. From yesterday.” Telling a lie here, in the heart of LAPD headquarters, felt perilous. The first step onto a slippery slope. Jen was staring at him blankly. Or was that suspicion? “Remember?” he added. “Nineteen-year-old? Car crash?”

“Right. I forgot. Mr. Research. If my detectives did half the legwork you put into holding people’s hands, we’d have a ninety-percent close rate.” She pulled off her eyeglasses, ducked out of the chain, and set them on her desk. Shoving back in her chair, she pinched the bridge of her nose. Her white blouse, as close to feminine as her wardrobe allowed, was tucked into severe wool pants. “Parents take it all right?”

“About as expected.”

“Nineteen years old. What a thing.” She sighed. Then her sergeant face snapped back on, and she waved him out. “Whatever you need for them. Just keep out of my hair. Oh-and, Nate?”

He leaned back through the doorway.

“The bank. Seriously. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

Nate went to his desk, a ledge of pressed wood floating above a swivel chair. If the half-partition walls hemming him in were more ambitious, he could call it a cubicle. Despite the cramped quarters, he couldn’t complain about the work space or the building.

LAPD had finally upgraded its HQ after nearly sixty years, leaving behind Parker Center with all its scandals and transgressions. Two intersecting planes of mirrorlike glass, ten stories high, formed the new building. The city had gone to great lengths to have LAPD’s kinder, gentler image reflected in the environmentally friendly building- plenty of glass to evince transparency, a cafe called LA Reflection, and a rooftop garden that the media releases referred to as “contemplative.” Headquarters might have traveled merely the distance of two downtown blocks, but the move had allowed LAPD to enter the new millennium.

Nate sat at his desk and gave a nervous glance around. Across the aisle in his chair, Ken arched his back in a lazy stretch while one meaty hand scrabbled across the keyboard to refresh baseball scores. A Detective II, he was wide-shouldered, sloppy in demeanor but neat in appearance. Though disastrous when filling in to serve death notifications, he had proved to be a capable, even sharp detective-a fact that Nate found continually surprising.

He hunkered down, tucking into his computer and logging on to the databases. His job granted him low-level clearances-enough to pull up crime reports and case files, to check rap sheets and addresses. First he keyed in “Pavlo Maksimovich Shevchenko.” A decades-old picture of the man came up, perhaps from when he first immigrated, along with minimal information. No driver’s license. No gun license. Expensive address in the Hollywood Hills. Substantial taxes paid in California for a little more than a decade. He’d had surveillance placed on him by various detectives and the FBI, which at multiple points had tried to build a continuing-criminal-enterprise case. He was suspected of having served time throughout Ukraine and Russia, but his crimes were unknown, the files from Eastern Europe either lost, scrubbed, or made purposefully opaque by a bureaucracy eager to encourage his emigration. However, one detail had made the journey with him. His nickname, listed as Psyk, Russian for “psycho.” Nate scrolled down to a series of surveillance shots, that predatory gleam in the eyes cutting right through the blurry photography.

His mouth, he realized, had gone dry.

A few drops of blood tapped the mouse pad, and he looked up sharply to see Charles there, his skin as gray as death. “Way to go, dipshit,” Charles said. “You broke fortune-cookie rule number thirty-seven: Don’t make enemies with a dude nicknamed Psycho.”

“Not here, Charles. Not at work. Can’t you just … I don’t know, go back to being dead?”

But Charles was already leaning over him, staring at the screen. “Let’s look up that hot girl with the huge rack from English 101. What was her name?”

Nate ignored him, checking the address of the warehouse in which he’d regained consciousness. The deed was held by a company that owned twenty-seven more properties in the Greater Los Angeles Area and Brighton Beach, New York. Slum apartments, a textile factory, scattered storage facilities. The company resided within a shell corp within a shell corp, and that was how many shell corps deep Nate was able to dig before his clearance hit a wall.

Charles had turned to sit on the desk next to him, resting an elbow atop the monitor. He snapped his fingers. “Mindy Scardina.”

“Do you mind?”

Nate must have been making faces, because Ken glanced across, then turned back slowly to his desk, wearing a look of puzzled annoyance. He unclipped from his belt a cluster of keys the size of a hockey puck and tossed them on his desk, the gesture somehow conveying disgust with the state of his surroundings.

“Oh, what, your advanced Google search is more interesting than Mindy Scardina’s tits?” Charles slid over in front of the monitor and squirmed back and forth, making Nate try to read the screen through the hole in his torso.

“Move. Charles-move. You’re disgusting. Would you grow up?”

“No can do. I’m frozen in time.” He made spooky ghost fingers. “Stuck at twenty-seven years old. Like most men. ’Cept I have an excuse.”

“If I don’t figure out how to break into that safe-deposit box, they’re gonna kill Cielle.”

Charles’s brow furrowed, a few grains of sand cascading down his face. “Maybe you can look up the bank?”

“That’s what I’m trying to do.” But Nate couldn’t access any bank information whatsoever, let alone obtain a listing of safe-deposit boxes at First Union.

Charles’s shoulders sagged. “Now what?”

Pavlo’s dry voice ran in Nate’s head: I had an acquaintance, Danny Urban, who is no longer with us, God rest his soul.

Already Nate was typing. “Let’s start with the owner of the safe-deposit box.”

Urban’s digital file loaded, and they stared together at the text, mouths slightly ajar.

“You’re kidding me,” Charles finally said. “The guy’s a fucking hit man. What next?”

Nate clicked a link. A file loaded, and then a crime-scene photo jumped out at them-Urban sprawled across a