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GO LOUD.

It's high summer. There's scarcely time for Agent Francesca Russo to've settled into her grave before she comes around to haunt and harrow me.

Not as a soul-shadowing spectre with a lovely, unmarked face above a gaping hole where the tender skin of her throat should have been. Not as stop-action eyelid replays of her own attack dogs ripping that throat out and leaving her corpse twitching in the dust. Not as nightmares of blurred, bloody fury that yank me awake, sweating with fear and the horror.

I'm immune to—or numbed beyond feeling—that sort of torment.

No, she does it with bureaucracy. From the cold, cold ground she gets payback, using the system she'd been trying her best to subvert in life, relying on rules she'd casually broken or ignored. And I can almost hear her familiar “Luther! You punk!” followed by clear, untroubled laughter.

She's handed me over to Internal Affairs, or IA.

“You're surprised or something?” my partner, Ice Box, says one morning in our usual place of business—the narc squad room at Baltimore County Police Department headquarters in Towson, where for the last four or five years I've been punching the clock before going out undercover, hunting dopers and dealers. It's maybe a week after Internal Affairs started squeezing me—including, besides intense chats, close examinations of my spending patterns, my bank account, and all my financial records.

“Like, this is some mystical event?” IB goes on. “The finger of God pointing down from a dark cloud, big deep voice booming, ‘Luther did it, Luther fucked up again!' Major phenomenon like that?”

He shakes his head. “Man, you begged for it. Did I or did I not advise you to walk away from Russo? Didn't I say be patient, let her own people get wise to her?”

“Yeah, I heard something along those lines.”

“Didn't register, though. Oh no, it did not. Luther Ewing never listens to advice. He never needs to, he's so totally smart.”

“Thanks for the encouragement, IB,” I say. Not fifty feet away, the IA dick is locked in an office with my boss, Captain Dugal, deciding my future. “Appreciate your support.”

“Least I can do, considering all the wonderful law-enforcement adventures I'd have missed without you. Like getting shot at by Russian smack dealers and redneck meth merchants, other thrilling stuff.

“And don't worry, bro,” he says. “I'll be there for you too while the IA rips off all your fingernails one by one with needle-nose pliers. Or whatever really awful, painful punishment they're planning.”

Neither of us wants to mention that the punishment might very well be job chop: instant dismissal from the department.

Nobody's blaming me for Francesca's death. The Maryland state troopers did the usual crime-scene routine, asked me the questions, cop to cop, over crullers and coffee, and finished their investigation rapidly. Russo's employer, the Drug Enforcement Administration, efficiently moved to conclude its own subtler but deeper probe. Deeply ironic, I figure, since it was me who turned those Doberman–pit bull crosses she'd bred and trained herself on her and her best hit man. Which, at a particular and highly lethal moment down on her Eastern Shore farm, was a desperate maneuver to keep myself alive.

But the troopers and the DEA agree: the hitter wasn't Francesca's employee, only a mean ex-con drug dealer who, feeling heat from Russo and me, moved first and fast. Came to the farm to kill us. Got her, but got dead in the process.

And that should have been that—except Francesca, ruthlessly clever, left behind a few notes and one goddamned tape I never knew she'd made. Which the DEA reviewed, adroitly edited, and thoughtfully passed on to the IA chief of my own employer, the Baltimore County Police. The IA dick was delighted, since he'd considered me borderline at best almost since I made my first drug bust.

Nobody—not our IA, certainly not the DEA—wants truth here: that agent Francesca Russo was mad, bad, and as bent as they come. That she was well on her wicked way to creating and ruling a crystal meth empire. At least ten executions behind her, probably more on the agenda, since major drug trafficking isn't a forgiving sort of trade.

The DEA, for all I know, may've already had some suspicions about her when she was killed. But they're revealing nothing. They never will. Fed Rule Number One: do not permit anything—anything—to tarnish your agency's image, no matter how massive the lies that must be told, how broad the deceit that must be sustained. So the DEA very publically lets it be known that Francesca was a stand-up, dedicated drug agent who died tragically in the line of duty.

The local cop who was there and survived? No hard proof he's dirty, but fuck him anyway.

So it's been one grilling after another, getting tighter and meaner with each interrogation. Must be pure sadistic pleasure for the IA dick, because I admit from the first moment that, yes, I did take some crystal meth from the BCPD evidence locker without authorization and plant it in Russo's Corvette. Seems clear enough to me, though, that I had excellent reasons to bend the rules a little. There was some urgency involved. The IA dick doesn't quite see that. His conception of rules is that they're brittle as glass, no pliability at all. He buys the DEA hint of impure motive because it suits his ends.

I'm confined to desk duty until the inquisitors hand down a verdict, which is why I'm sitting around wasting IB's time instead of out chasing drug dealers. Not cool. Not cool at all, the way this Russo matter worked out.

Like so many other things in my very uneven life. “Might as well have ‘Born to Lose' tattooed on my forehead, right, IB?” I say.

“Somebody already did that in invisible ink or something before your mother took you home from the hospital. You got a very special talent for attracting troubles. Troubles love you, man. Any bored trubs just hanging out with nothing to do, they say, ‘Hey, there's always Luther. Let's go see him. Luther digs us.' “

“Probably genetic,” I say.

“I don't care what it is, long as it's not contagious. I wake up with a pain in my gut every morning already, just from knowing I'm going to be spending most of my working hours next to you. It's high-risk even being in your general vicinity, mostly.”

“Worst case, you'll never be in my vicinity again once IA's done with me.”

“Aw, man, don't go there.” IB suddenly looks forlorn, regretful.

“I mean I'll probably be back in uniform, instead of undercover with you,” I say, for his sake. Knowing I'll do the job chop myself before I'll accept that. “Down in the cage on graveyard shift, booking recovered stolen property. High-end mountain bikes, DVD players, super laptops, all that good loot.”

“Yeah, it'd have to be that,” he says, brightening back up. “They definitely ain't going to let you anywhere near evidence. Especially seized-drug-type evidence.”

Just then Dugal's office door opens, the IA dick and his two senior acolytes exit. So stiff with rectitude their knees don't bend when they walk. All three wear identical dark gray suits and white button-down shirts (the acolytes do risk differently striped ties, though), and their usual ecclesiastical faces. But the IA head doesn't look as righteously satisfied as I imagined he might. I'm expecting at least a sneer of muted jubilation from him. He doesn't even glance my way.

I don't want to read too much into impressions like that, though.

“Feels like lunchtime, IB,” I say. “I'm booking.”

“Right, man. Best to leave a decent interval for Dugal's blood pressure to drop forty or fifty points, so his brain's not swelling so much against his skull. Vanish for a while.”

The sun's blazing, it's humid as the Panamanian jungle where I trained back in my army special-ops days, but the sprinklers are whirling on the County Courthouse's green manicured lawns, creating split-second rainbows, once each revolution. My shirt's sticking to my skin by the time I make the hundred meters or so over to Flannery's, a pub I favor because almost no other cops ever go there. The blast of super-cooled air that hits me as I walk inside tightens the muscles in the back of my neck. A headache's likely to follow, but I figure that's a reasonable price of admission. I take a seat at the end of the bar, well away from anyone else.

“Hey, Luther, what's going down?” Frank the bartender says when he wanders over.

“Steak sandwich, bloody. If that retarded quadriplegic you got in the kitchen can manage it. And two Cokes. Cans, not from the taps. If you can manage that.”

“Hoo-ah,” Frank says softly, holding my eyes a little longer than usual. Former Marine lifer, like my father. He's never said how or why he came here. Probably just wise enough to know anything's better than joining the creaky legion of Corps retirees bunched on the drinking side of cheap bars in cheap towns around Camp Lejeune, boring themselves and each other with bitter bullshit about how exciting life used to be, before that thirty-year clock stopped. “HOO-ah.”

“One of those days, Frank. Sorry.”

“Sorry-ass excuse. So instead of letting that steak even touch the grill, how about I have the quad give it to you raw?”

“I'm good with that.”

“He'll be pleased. Hates that grill, since he has to flip everything with his teeth.” Frank goes off laughing. He reaches into a cooler, slides two cans of chilled Coke down the bar. Little bit after that, he puts a thick white plate before me. The steak's perfect, charred outside and nicely red and juicy in. “Chow down, hog,” he says.

I do. For two or three savory bites. But then I can't help it, I start thinking options, outcomes. No matter how I try to twist and turn and rearrange them, they still form up as poor to truly shitty. My lunch starts heading in that direction, too. It was a certifiably insane move, trying to burn Russo the way I did. I knew it, did it anyway, so what's that make me? Now I'm facing double trouble. No matter what the IA rules, I know I'm going to be on the DEA's radar for the rest of my life. No way to get under it, no way to slip off their screen. Goddamn Francesca. I never wanted her in my life, never wanted her working my case, and I absolutely never wanted her dead. Just wanted her gone. Away from me. Someplace far away.

But not the place she wound up.

I'd had enough of putting people there, well before she came along.

It seems like I spent most of my adult life doing it, first as a special-ops soldier and then as a narc. No regrets and no guilt. At least none my conscious mind will admit to, since most of the fucks deserved it and I was only doing my job. I'd got trained for it and I'd got paid for it. A profession, and me an enthusiastic practitioner. But sooner or later—unless you're a homicidal psycho, a personal possibility that haunts me worse than Russo or anyone ever will—you hit the wall. You do not want to do that kind of work anymore. You begin to feel you cannot.

You tell yourself to get out, get into something fresh, clean. Wipe the past.

Easy to say. Much harder to do. All sorts of complications, some real-world, some purely mental. Memory's a major player. Memory has its ways of evading all orders. Soon I'm spiraling deep into dark regions I'd really rather not revisit. Soon I'm so far away on that joyless tour I'm oblivious to my surroundings. For God knows how long I'm not even aware someone's slipped onto the stool right next to mine. Some instinct finally clicks, much later than it should have. Bad lapse. A quick peripheral check then: just another suit on that stool. Okay, I decide. Ignorable. Flannery's is always full of suits—lawyers and civil servants from the courthouse. They never bother anyone, they're too concentrated on selling whatever they've got to whoever they're lunching with.

So I fall right back in. My spiral tightens. I'm no longer eating that sandwich, just staring at it. But seeing something else entirely. Scenes appear, play out, others start. With no regard for the real chronology in which I lived them.

Then the suit speaks.

“Word is you may have some time on your hands. We have an opening that should match your skill set. Discuss?”

A flat, perfectly anonymous voice. The forgettable voice of a man with a forgettable face, the kind who moves through the world leaving little or no impression on anyone. But I snap to full alert, tensed about as tight as I get.

Anonymous. Forgettable. Yeah. Except I'd heard those exact words, in that exact voice, seven or eight years ago. I was underemployed at the time, restless, edgy, unhappy. He seemed to know that when he approached me. Just like he seems to know something now even I'm not sure of yet.

I had discussed, then. Not very much, either. Just enough. I had accepted the offer: independent contractor for a heavy outfit with major international interests.

And then I'd done a year in the worst place on earth.