The rain in Los Angeles didn't fall so much as it hovered, a permanent state of damp that seeped into everything—the buildings, the streets, the people. Jack Mercer sat in his office on the fourteenth floor of the military annex and watched it blur the windows, thinking about the last time he had felt truly clean.

That had been a long time ago. He couldn't remember when.

The phone rang. He let it ring three times before picking it up.

"Mercer."

"Jack, it's Doc. You coming down to the bar tonight?"

"I don't know, Doc."

"Come on, man. Verna's going to be there. And Drake wants to talk to you about the harbor contract."

Jack felt the familiar tightening in his chest. The harbor contract was supposed to be clean—military improvements, public works, the kind of thing that made politicians look good and kept the city from falling apart. But nothing in Los Angeles was ever clean, and Jack knew that as well as he knew his own name.

"Tell Drake I'll think about it," Jack said, and hung up.

He stood up and walked to the window. Below him, the city spread out like a wound—neon lights bleeding into the wet pavement, shadows moving between the buildings, the occasional flash of headlights cutting through the fog. He had been here six months, and in six months he had learned more about corruption than he had known in his entire life before.

It started small. A campaign contribution here, a favor there. He had been a war hero—Medal of Honor, two Purple Hearts, the works—and that gave him a certain amount of leverage. People wanted to be associated with him. People wanted his endorsement, his vote, his silence.

And he had given them all three.

The first time he took a bribe, he told himself it was different. It wasn't really a bribe—it was a contribution to his campaign. And the money wasn't for him—it was for the party. And the party was doing good work. And besides, someone else would have taken it anyway.

By the third time, he didn't even bother with the excuses.

A knock at the door. He didn't say enter. The door opened anyway.

Verna Cross stood in the doorway, and Jack felt something that wasn't quite desire and wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite anything he had a name for. She was beautiful in the way that dangerous things are beautiful—sharp edges and dark eyes and a smile that promised everything and guaranteed nothing.

"Jack," she said. "You look like a man who needs a drink."

"I look like a man who needs to finish these reports."

She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. "Those reports can wait. I can't."

She was right about that, and they both knew it. Verna was a lawyer—a corporate lawyer for the biggest firm in the city—and she was also the woman who had introduced him to Commissioner Drake, the woman who had helped him navigate the first treacherous waters of Los Angeles politics. She was also, he was beginning to understand, the kind of woman who played chess while everyone else was playing checkers.

"What do you want, Verna?" he asked.

She smiled, and it was a smile that had made many men do many things they would later regret. "I want you to come to the bar. I want a drink. And I want to talk to you about the harbor contract."

Jack sat back down. "What about it?"

"About who's going to get it. About who's already promised it. About the man who's going to make sure that when the contracts are signed, nobody asks too many questions about where the money goes."

"And you're telling me this because?"

"Because I want you to know what you're getting into, Jack. Because I think you're smarter than the men who are running this city. And because I think you might be the only one who can stop them."

Jack looked at her—really looked at her—and for a moment he saw something behind the mask of confidence and calculation. Fear. Not for herself, but for something else. For the city, perhaps. For the people who lived in it. For the man he had been before the rain and the corruption and the slow, inexorable slide into moral compromise.

"I don't know if I can stop them," he said quietly.

"You don't have to stop them," Verna said. "You just have to survive them. And if you're smart about it, you might even come out on top."

Jack thought about the reports on his desk, the contracts that needed signing, the men who would kill to keep their power. He thought about Doc's bar, where the drinks were cheap and the conversations were honest and the people who came there were mostly just trying to forget something.

He thought about the last time he had felt clean.

"Tell Doc I'll be there," he said.

Verna smiled again, and this time it was real—brief, genuine, and gone before he could be sure he had seen it. She left the room, and Jack sat alone in the rain and the darkness and the slow accumulation of compromises that had become his life.

Outside, the city continued to bleed light into the wet pavement, and Jack Mercer wondered, not for the first time, whether he would ever be able to look at himself in the mirror again.