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Kevin locked the office door behind him and checked the handle twice out of habit. The parking lot behind him was empty except for his car and a shopping cart someone had abandoned by the dumpster three weeks ago and no one had bothered to move since. Everyone else has already gone home hours ago.
The late-afternoon light lay flat and orange across the asphalt, and as he walked to his car, Kevin found himself wishing that he'd made a cup of coffee before he left. It had been a long day, but he wasn't done yet - he had one last meeting on the books, a consultation with a new client. The client had been nervous when they called in, requesting a meeting somewhere quieter and more private than the firm's usual board room. While it wasn't a common request, it also wasn't exactly rare either. Kevin had heard that careful tone on the phone before - the sound of a cartoon who still flinched at sudden noises, who preferred open spaces where they could see anyone coming. A lot of their ACME clients had similar anxieties, and Kevin didn't mind going out of his way to accommodate that.
He pulled out of the lot and headed toward the edge of town, turning on the radio as he went. The city thinned gradually, dense blocks of buildings giving way to longer stretches of road, then to open ground that carried the familiar dry scent of the desert. Kevin kept the windows cracked - the AC had been broken for weeks, and they were still waiting on the settlements to start coming in after everything they'd poured into the Coyote vs. Acme case.
The setting sun turned everything it touched gold. After a full day under fluorescent lights, Kevin found the sight almost peaceful.
The meeting place was barely a street: cracked asphalt, no proper curb, just low scrub and the long pale dirt that eventually became desert. It looked like an abandoned development that hadn't seen activity in years. No other cars, barely a tumbleweed in sight - it was clear he'd beaten his client to the meeting spot.
Kevin parked, killed the engine, and sat for a moment listening to the tick of cooling metal. He checked his phone. No service. He put it back in his pocket and stepped out.
He waited the way he always did for cautious clients: keeping his hands visible, his posture open as he leaned back against the hood of his car. The sun sat low enough to throw everything into long shadows. Dust moved in small currents across the road. He felt a little bit uneasy, but he told himself the unease was ordinary. Remote locations made everyone feel exposed. The consultation sounded like it would be pretty quick, anyways. A routine repeat user of ACME products, those cases were a dime a dozen for the firm nowadays - so much so that Kevin could probably process them in his sleep.
As he waited, Kevin thought, distantly, about how many of these consultations had happened exactly like this ever since the case in D.C. - meeting on a stretch of empty road, a cartoon too frightened to say why over the phone - and what it said about the company that so many of its victims needed to go to such lengths in order to feel safe enough to talk about it. All the settlement money in the world would never be enough to make up for what ACME had been, and was still, doing.
After a few minutes, a dark sedan appeared at the far end of the road. It came on without hurry. When it stopped and the doors opened, the person who stepped out was almost blocked by the setting sun. Kevin had to raise a hand and squint to make them out as they approached.
They were not cartoons - they were human. Three of them.
...this wasn't right.
The muscles along Kevin's spine tightened. His mouth went dry. He kept his hands at his sides, one of them twitching towards his phone before he remembered that he didn't have service.
"Mr. Avery," the lead man said as he approached, looking at Kevin over his sunglasses. "Glad you could make it."
Kevin looked at the empty road behind them, then at the three men, and felt the last pieces of the client story fall away. The careful phone call, the request for this remote meeting place. All of it arranged, waiting for him to drive out here alone.
He'd been tricked.
"...you're not a client," he said.
"No." The man stepped closer. The other two stayed slightly behind him, unhurried, their hands in their pockets. "We're here on behalf of people who would prefer you stop being so... enthusiastic about certain cases. ACME has been very patient with you, Mr. Avery, but I'm afraid that patience is running out. So you have a choice here. Walk away from the remaining suits. Quietly. Or things will get very complicated."
Kevin's hands had begun to shake, and he pressed them flat against his thighs so it would show less. He thought of the ethics lectures he'd sat through back in law school, of the countless stories he'd heard from desperate clients over the years, of a certain coyote sitting across from him with a sign that simply read Thank you in the aftermath of what happened in D.C. He thought of every open file on his desk, every cartoon waiting for justice.
"...I'm not walking away," he said. His voice only shook a little, which he thought was pretty reasonable under the circumstances. "You don't get to threaten me into dropping my cases. That's not how this works. You can go back and tell your boss he can fuck right off."
The man's expression didn't change, as if he'd been expecting that answer.
The first punch caught Kevin across the jaw hard enough to snap his head sideways. Pain exploded behind his teeth. He staggered, collapsing back against his car's hood.
A second blow drove into his ribs and forced the air out of him in a broken sound as he heard himself make a sound he didn't recognize as his own.
He tried to bring his arms up, but a third strike landed against the side of his head and the world tilted and spun. Warmth slid down from his hairline and dripped into his eye - bright red. The copper taste of blood filled his mouth.
Three against one, Kevin had already lost before the fight even got started.
They didn't rush. There was a rhythm to it, unhurried, almost bored, the same unhurried pace as the car pulling up, as the sun going down, as everything else out here that had all the time in the world. A kick to the side when he went down. Another to the stomach that folded him further into the dust. Someone grabbed the front of his suit and hauled him partway up so the next punch could land cleaner across his face, and Kevin thought, with the small clear part of his mind that hadn't gone dark yet, that there was something obscene about how procedural it all was. Like a deposition or a settlement conference. Except it was him getting beat up by ACME goons.
Kevin's vision swam and he could hear his own breathing, ragged and wet, his heartbeat thundering in his ears. Grit from the road scraped against one cheek when they let him drop again.
"Last chance," the lead man said. The voice seemed farther away than it should have, the man wavering into black spots as he stood over Kevin. "Drop the cases. Or else."
Kevin spat red onto the asphalt. His whole body shook from fear and pain, but his answer hadn't changed. He thought about his mother telling him, more than once, that he'd been born stubborn and would probably die that way. He'd always assumed she meant it as a joke.
"No."
The man sighed, then motioned towards one of his buddies. Something heavier than a fist struck the back of his head. The ground rushed up and dust filled Kevin's nose and mouth. He tried to push himself onto his elbows and failed.
As his head lolled to the side, Kevin could see that the sky above him had gone a deep, bruised purple. Every breath scraped. His pulse thudded in his ears and in the open cut at his hairline.
He thought, distantly, of the fact that no one knew exactly where he had gone - no one would no where to look.
Then the edges of the world softened and went dark, and Kevin stopped thinking at all.