Two weeks later, Max was sweating through a shirt that was two sizes too big for him. He was behind the wheel of a souped-up Honda Civic, the engine idling with a nervous purr in an alleyway behind a jewelry exchange.
"Thirty seconds!" screamed a voice from the backseat. It was a kid named Jinx, barely older than Max, clutching a shotgun that looked like a toy in his shaking hands.
Max gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. This was his third job. The first two had been courier runs—drugs, cash, nothing heavy. This was a smash-and-grab. The Iron Dogs were getting desperate. The Vittorio Syndicate was squeezing them out of the drug trade, so Kaelen had ordered hits on Vittorio-protected businesses to recoup losses.
The back door of the jewelry store burst open. Two men in ski masks tumbled out, carrying duffel bags that jingled with gold and diamonds. They dove into the car.
"Go! Go! Go!"
Max stomped on the gas. The Civic screeched, tires smoking as they tore out of the alley and onto the main avenue.
Almost immediately, blue and red lights exploded in the rearview mirror.
"Cops!" Jinx yelled.
"I see them!" Max shouted back. He weaved through traffic, cutting off a taxi and mounting the sidewalk to bypass a red light. He knew these streets. He knew the potholes, the shortcuts, the places where the streetlights were broken.
"Take the bridge!" one of the masked men ordered.
"No," Max said, his voice surprisingly steady. "Bridge is a chokepoint. Vittorios own the bridge cops. We go through the sewers."
"The what?"
Max swung the wheel hard to the left, drifting the car into the entrance of the storm drain maintenance tunnels. The police cruisers skidded to a halt at the entrance, unable to follow the low clearance.
Max drove into the darkness, the sound of the engine echoing off the concrete walls. For a moment, in the dark, he felt a strange surge of adrenaline. He was good at this. He was alive.
But as he looked in the rearview mirror at the masked men counting the stolen gold, the feeling vanished. He wasn't free. He was just a rat running through a different kind of maze.