by S. L. Huang
“Tabitha’ll figure it all out eventually,” Matti put in. “She actually started calling Dad’s old colleagues once. And newspapers. Papá stopped her—”
“Well, not so much stopped her as got all devastated and begged her not to—” Roy added.
“Sorry, this family is like a sappy documentary,” Matti said. “I give you the tragic story of five hard-luck cases, too old and too delinquent for anyone to take pity on—well except Tabitha, she got in as a baby. But the rest of us were all sordid tales of petty larceny, poor choices, jazz, and liquor…”
Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and then another thump. Christ, this family was noisy. I ignored the twins’ continued prattling and scrolled through the handheld again. Then frowned.
The back door was unlocked.
What …
Pilar had just locked it—Willow Grace still paced outside—
Where was Pilar?
I squinted at the screen.
Dread suddenly clogged my senses. No. No.
Verification took only seconds. I made a few precise measurements with my eyes, the rustle of leaves through time, the exact position of the almost motionless clouds, the angle of Willow’s face against the scenery as she paced, and ran the recording backward.
The security footage—Rio’s security system—how—
“Get everybody down here,” I yelled at the twins, dashing back over to Checker. “Everyone, you hear? Where I can have eyes on them!”
They tripped over themselves, scrambling to obey and shouting their siblings’ names.
“What is it?” Checker’s head came up from the computer, his eyes darting everywhere at once.
“Get us into the back end of the security system, now. Someone looped it. I need to get outside.”
“Sure, give me two—”
The screen on his laptop fritzed, brown and green pixelating across it.
Checker yelled and began hitting keys in a frenzy.
“What happened?” I’d drawn my Colt.
“I don’t know yet—”
Diego burst into the room. “Can someone please tell me what’s going on?”
“No time,” I snapped, and pushed past him. He sucked in a hard breath when he saw my gun and fell back out of the way.
I raced to the back door.
Pilar was on her hands and knees in the vestibule, trying to stand.
“Cas,” she gasped. “I’m sorry…”
I stayed low, reached for the doorknob, and in one move pulled it open and twisted through.
The backyard was empty.
I slid through the wild garden and did the quickest perimeter check of my life. No sign of Willow Grace.
But the door had been unlocked … and she’d attacked Pilar …
Could she be in the house somewhere?
I dashed back inside. The twins were falling into the living room, followed by Juwon and Elisa. Diego had sat Pilar down on the couch and was insisting on examining her head.
“Has anyone seen Tabitha?” Matti asked. “She’s not upstairs anymore—”
Diego straightened in alarm.
“Locate her phone now,” I ordered Checker.
“Right, fuck—someone hand me another computer—”
Footsteps hurried through the small house, every voice calling Tabitha’s name. Matti had his cell against his ear and was dialing her repeatedly, but I didn’t hear it ringing anywhere in the house. I started my own quick walkthrough, clearing each room, eyes scanning for either Tabitha or Willow Grace.
Willow Grace would’ve looped the security system for a reason … she’d been here for a reason …
“Cas!” Checker hollered.
His urgency made my throat clench so hard it hurt, and I vaulted across the foyer and pushed past Diego to come to his shoulder. Everyone else crowded in after me.
“What is it?” I said.
“I can’t—” He glanced behind me at all the watching faces—Tabitha’s family, his family. “Tabitha’s cell, it’s not pinging. The only way that’s possible is…”
“The battery’s been taken out,” I said.
“Could it just be off?” Roy asked.
“Most phones I can still get a fix even when they’re off,” Checker said. “And Tabitha just switched to an old TREX phone because hers was waterlogged, which I’d definitely be able to track.”
“Tabitha, she’d know that,” Matti babbled. “She’d pull the battery, then, wouldn’t she, if she was sneaking out and didn’t want us to find her…”
“Ping Willow Grace’s,” I said to Checker.
After a tense and silent few seconds, he said, “Can’t find her either.”
“She took her.” I felt numb.
Diego cursed in Spanish.
“I’ll go wake Dad,” Roy said, and slipped out of the room.
“What do we do?” Juwon asked. “The police won’t help; we know the police won’t help—”
“We’re better than the police,” I said. I tried to straighten my thoughts, to concentrate. “We will find Tabitha. She told me…” She’d told me she was suspicious. Said she had a gut feeling, that she wanted to look for evidence. “Something was making Tabitha suspect Willow Grace. Maybe she was digging into her on her own, and she found something the rest of us missed.”
Matti let out a strangled laugh. “She said she suspected something? Duh, man, then of course she was still digging. She’s Tabitha.”
“I’ll search her room,” Juwon declared. “Maybe she left notes, or there’ll be something on her computer.” He disappeared.
“Hey. Talk to me.” Arthur’s voice.
I froze. I couldn’t bear to look at him.
I’d been the one here watching, I’d thought I was as good as Rio—my fault, and his daughter—
“I’m going to finish clearing the house,” I said. “Everyone stay here while I secure it.” And then we’d find her. We would …
Something tickled my skin, tugging at my thermoreceptors.
“Wait,” Diego said. “I don’t understand. Please—you’re saying this woman—”
“Stop talking,” I said.
Diego stopped.
I lifted a hand, brushing it through the air. A temperature differential lined up for me, isoclines climbing and ever so slightly warming the side of my body closest to the stairs, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach.
“Everyone out of the house,” I cried. “Now!”
thirty
THE FAMILY began scrambling in confusion. I pushed past them and raced through the foyer, swinging around to a door that had to be a closet beneath the stairs. It was a lot hotter here. A lot hotter. And I could smell something—
I pulled a sleeve over my hand and wrenched the door open.
The heat bowled me backward. A red nest of flames had already subsumed the closet, making the door a portal to a hell dimension, one that must have been devoured by some sort of chemical fuel. And in the middle of it all, its pill-shaped silhouette seeming to writhe in the heat, was …
A tank.
I knew what it was without knowing. Liquid to gas expansion—radius of destruction, devastation, scorched earth, nothing left—
Gallons per minute from the kitchen faucet versus volume and BTUs, upper bound on capacity of indoor fire extinguishers, there was no way to put this out, no way to prevent—
“Go!” I screamed, dashing back into the foyer. “Get to a vehicle, go!”
Checker and Pilar and Arthur were already doing a good job at hustling everyone, but Diego tried to push back toward the stairs. “Juwon—”
“I’ll get him! Go!”
I vaguely heard Arthur reassuring Diego as they went, as I flew up the stairs. I shouted Juwon’s name and some combination of the ruckus caused him to come hurrying out of Tabitha’s room to freeze at the top of the stairs. I barreled up at him, swung an arm around his body, and vaulted over the railing. He yelled and flailed, but there was no time to explain.
We landed hard in the foyer. My bad ankle shrieked as the compression maxed out my torn ligaments, and I nearly fell against Juwon as I took us diving toward the door.
Everyone else had cleared. I hauled a quieting Juwon to the driveway, where, thank Christ, the Rosales minivan was already running. They’d squeezed into two rows of back seats that didn’t fit nearly everybody, and left the driver’s seat for me.
I practically threw Arthur’s son into the back and pressed the gas before I was sure they’d all gotten the door shut. The van shot forward, and someone behind me squealed as I slewed it onto the street.
“D.J.?” Arthur asked faintly. He was in the front passenger seat, crutch leaning across him, and his face was sweaty and gray.
I knew what he was asking. What kind of threat is this?
“I think so.” But Willow Grace must have been the one to sneak the materials in.
After Rio had left. When no one had been keeping a sharp enough eye on her.
“The neighbors…” Arthur whispered.
“Maybe,” I said. Bounds for the released energy, shock front, blast wave, all folded through my head—this was going to be big. “Call it in if you want to.”
Crouched between seats behind us, Diego had his phone out before I’d finished the sentence. I hadn’t realized he could hear us.
“911, what is your emergency?” I heard from his phone, and the house blew up.
We were only halfway down the block. Debris slammed into the van like they had been fired from a cannon. One of the back tires blew amid screams and yells from the back. I wrestled with the steering wheel to keep us upright.
“Oh, Lord,” moaned Arthur.
Someone in the back seat started sobbing.
The operator on the other side of Diego’s call was talking urgently. “There was a bomb in my house,” Diego said into the phone, with remarkable articulateness. “3191 McFadden Hill. I think you will need to send the fire department.”
“You’re sure … Tabitha…?” Arthur wheezed at me.
“I’m sure,” I said quickly, even though—how could we be? We hadn’t finished checking every closet, under every bed. But it was unlikely she had been hiding somewhere in the house, and I pushed the possibility out of my head. “We have to get you all somewhere Willow Grace and D.J. can’t find you,” I said. “I have—”
A car cut me off, an unmarked one but with red flashing from its roof. I locked up the wheels into a sideways skid to avoid broadsiding it. The rim from the blown tire dragged against the asphalt in a thumping staccato, catching the back end of the van and almost tipping us again.
“Go or stay!” I yelled. “Talk to me!”
“Go,” said Arthur.
“What? No, no!” cried Diego. “That will only lead to more trouble—”
“Someone’s trying to kill us. Go,” Arthur said.
The wheels spun and then caught, lurching back into static friction. I rocketed us forward to swerve around the cop car. As we hauled past, I glimpsed Sikorsky’s face scowling behind the glass.
He’d been staking out the house. Jesus.
Sikorsky tried to pull around to pursue us just as two black-and-whites came around the corner. I accelerated toward them, the van kicking back at me.
“Stop!” yelled Diego. “You’re going to get us killed!”
“Arthur!” I barked. The variables in a car chase branched and compared in my head. Too many people who weren’t me who didn’t have seat belts. A minivan with an awful center of gravity that was already severely damaged. The last time I’d been in a car chase, I’d ended it with a nasty concussion, even without all those other variables—
“Stop,” Arthur mumbled, and I took the van half into another skid, bleeding momentum until we jolted to a halt between the three police vehicles.
Fuck.
If I was fast, I could probably disappear—slip to the side, roll under one of the cop cars. But I was one hundred percent sure Sikorsky had seen me driving.
There was no crime here. We were victims. Victims. Right?
Officers leapt out behind open doors, aiming handguns, yelling, screaming so they overlapped each other with no clear meaning. Arthur immediately lowered the window and thrust his hands out, yelling back about children, there were children here.
A jumble of chaos followed. Even if I couldn’t take advantage of it to escape, once out of the van, I was close enough to the edge of the road that I used the bedlam to cover me as I kicked both my sidearm and my long knife into a sewer before straightening with my hands raised.
Ordinarily I would have winced over willfully damaging my Colt. Today, right now, it barely registered.
The police swarmed us and patted us down. Pilar was carrying legally, though her gun did make the cops jump and yell and keep the business ends of their service weapons on us for an unsettlingly long time. Sikorsky patted me down more roughly than necessary, sneering, his breath hot on my face.
I clenched my teeth and let him paw at me. We had to get through this, get out of here, find Tabitha …
Elisa was pale and shaking, but she was also trying to speak reasonably to the police. The other three kids were in hysterics. Sikorsky’s partner kept trying to interview them, but all she was getting was that there had been a bomb in their house, which everybody already knew.
Down the block, flames leapt merrily from the remains of the Rosales yard. The blaze had begun spreading to the lots next door, and neighbors wailed and cried and ran and milled on the street. Fire sirens wailed closer.
“Where’s the youngest hooligan?” Sikorsky demanded, swiveling his head across us. “The girl. Where is she?”
Apprehension somersaulted into my throat, but Diego answered without missing a beat. “At her friend’s,” he said immediately, at the same time Arthur said, “Friend’s house.”
They glanced at each other.
“What friend?” Sikorsky was poised with his pen over his pad.
Diego shook his head. “No. We’ll go. My children just lost their home. I will not stand for them being subject to any more of your harassment.”
Sikorsky and his partner both stopped dead. Sikorsky began to swell like a reddening balloon.
Diego’s face flickered in fearful recognition. “Please,” he backtracked. “I didn’t mean—”
“Are you accusing an officer of the law, sir?” the partner demanded.
Diego tried to raise his hands in a gesture of surrender, but she got in his face and shoved him in the chest, and Roy broke ranks to surge forward yelling. His twin and Elisa both tried to grab at him, but not fast enough to stop two of the uniforms from pushing in and shoving Roy against the side of the van.
Diego dove to try to put himself between the cops and his son.
I wanted to scream at him—if we wanted to run we should have run. The heavy inevitability of police meant we knew exactly how stupid it was to challenge them, and now all I could do, the only thing I could do, was keep my hands in the fucking air and my eyes in all directions to make sure none of the cops went for their guns again. I flashed on nightmare images of trigger-happy officers gunning down Diego or Arthur—of course, Arthur had tried to lunge forward too, with Pilar only just holding him back, because apparently it was a paternal axiom to be stupid when a cop went at one of your sons.
The scuffle lasted less than thirty brutal seconds. And ended exactly as predicted, with the younger three kids backed against the van crying, Elisa trying to argue loudly and fruitlessly, and Diego facedown on the hood with Sikorsky cuffing his wrists.
“That’s it, Rosales. You are under arrest.”
The kids screamed at him. I thought I heard something about due process from Juwon. But Sikorsky cut it all off by giving Diego’s head a vicious shove.
His face hit metal hard. The kids went as silent as if their throats had been cut.
Down the street, the fire trucks had arrived. Firefighters unreeled hose and barked orders. Neighbors moaned and cried. A
hellish backdrop to our little drama.
“What charge, Detective?” Elisa asked coldly.
“What charge?” Sikorsky snarled at her. “Pick one. Child endangerment, resisting arrest, assault on a police officer, terrorism—even a dressed-up mouthpiece like you won’t be able to pry him out of this one.”
“Frank,” Arthur called to Sikorsky. Checker had joined Pilar in holding him back, though Arthur wasn’t really trying anymore. It was probably a good thing he was still too injured to walk. “Frank, if this is about you and me, don’t go taking it out on them—take me in if you want to; don’t—”
Sikorsky drilled Arthur with a stare and started reading Diego his rights while manhandling him toward one of the black-and-whites.
The partner tried to get statements from the rest of us, then. Juwon and the twins were distraught on the level of incoherence. Elisa made a clipped, contentless response and then immediately called a car to take her down to the station to meet Diego. Arthur, Pilar, Checker, and I managed to give brief, consistent accounts that implied we knew nothing and had only spotted something suspicious, prompting our run for safety, and then had missed the police lights at first in our panic. The partner let us go with stern warnings to stay where we could be contacted easily.
I used the Cassie Wells IDs with her again. She looked at the two halves of the PI license and then back up at me, unamused.
“Your partner objected to it being in one piece,” I said, as neutrally as I knew how, and she handed it back to me without changing her expression.
By the time they let us leave, a lot more cop cars jigsawed the street. The firefighters had mostly put out the blaze, and were now hiking through a street flooded with water and crisscrossed with hoses.
The barest black bones of the Rosales house stuck up from the ruins.
thirty-one
WE PILED into the van and lurched past the roadblocks being set up on the corner. “I’ll give you an address to go to ground at. Try to lose any tails,” I said to Arthur. If Pithica was behind this, it wouldn’t be enough. Everything was triage right now, fractured and bleeding. “Checker and I will work on getting you all IDs out of the country—you take the van—”
