by Jackson Ford
“Oh, come on,” Annie says.
“Nah. She’s right,” says Carlos. “If she was gonna kill someone, why do it with her…” He taps his forehead. “You know? Doesn’t make sense.”
“We don’t have all the facts,” Reggie says. “And I agree with Carlos. It wouldn’t have made sense to kill Steven Chase this way if Teagan didn’t wanna get caught. There are things we aren’t seeing here. That makes me nervous.”
“So, what, we just let her go?” Annie jabs a finger at me. “She’ll run. Just take off.”
“You can’t keep me here,” I snarl.
“Annie,” Reggie says. “What do you think happens if China Shop as we know it ceases to exist?”
It’s hard to miss the sudden uncertainty that passes across Annie’s face. Because she and Paul and Carlos must all be thinking the same thing. Without Tanner’s protection, without China Shop, what do they have?
Reggie glances at me. “If Teagan really did do this, then it doesn’t matter. China Shop’s done, and so are we. But what if she didn’t? What if there are things here we aren’t seeing? Are you going to let everything we’ve built come to an end because you weren’t willing to fight for it?”
“She’ll run.” Annie speaks as if she’s amazed she has to explain this.
Reggie gets there before I do. Which is good, because I wouldn’t have been nearly as polite as she is. “Do you seriously believe there is a place Teagan can go where Moira Tanner can’t find her?”
“So what do we do, then?”
“We work the problem.” Reggie lifts her chin. “Teagan included.”
Annie chews on her bottom lip for a long moment. Then her shoulders slump, and she says, “Aight. We’ll do it your way.”
Behind the counter Carlos exhales, long and low. I sit down, burying the heels of my hands in my eyes, rubbing so hard that little sparks dart across the darkness behind my lids.
Again, that thought, something I never believed would be possible: I’m not alone.
Reggie spins her chair, wheels whirring. “Annie, work your contacts. Find out why someone would want Chase dead. We’re pressed for time here, so get Carlos to help you. Teagan, the restaurant you stopped at tonight…”
“Bangkok Central.”
“Bangkok Central. They won’t be open, but perhaps we can talk to them when they are. Paul, you can help me work the databases. We need to see if there’s ever been any mention of a person with Teagan’s abilities.”
“What should I do until the restaurant opens?” I say. But they’re already moving. Paul follows Reggie through to the other room, where she has her Rig. Annie strides past me to the garage.
Carlos pulls on his jacket, getting ready to head out to join Annie. I push myself off the couch, gritting my teeth as my muscles protest, then swing past the counter and wrap my arms around him.
“Thank you,” I say, my voice muffled by his jacket.
He returns the hug. “’S’OK. I know you probably wanted to murder Paul a few times before, but I’m pretty sure you’d never kill someone for real. You know?”
“You scared me. When I came in you looked like… like you thought I…”
“It was too much, man. I had to think it through. But I got your back, Teags, don’t worry about it.”
I hold the hug for a moment longer, then pull apart. My face is wet. Have I been crying? I turn away from him, not wanting him to see, then wondering why I don’t.
My brain is starting to work again. I know who I can talk to. And I know exactly where he’s going to be. If anybody knows about what went down at the Edmonds Building, it’ll be him.
“Want a cup of coffee before you go?” I slide past Carlos. “I’m making. Actually, I may just have to drink the whole jug, so—”
A smile flickers across his face. “No coffee, remember?”
I pause in the middle of filling the machine with water. “Right.”
“Carlos!” Annie shouts from the garage. “Come on.”
“What you gonna do?” he asks.
I can’t just hang around until the restaurant opens. Those are precious hours I could be using. And now that I think about it, there is someone I can talk to.
“Skid Row,” I say. “Maybe someone saw something.”
He frowns. “That a good idea?”
“You got a better one?”
A loud honk of a car horn. “Carlos!”
He gives my shoulder a brief squeeze. “Hasta luego, cabrón.” Then he’s gone.
I stand for a minute in the kitchen, trying to gather my thoughts. According to my phone, it’s 5:13. That should be more than enough time to—
More honking from the garage. “Teagan!” Annie yells. “Move your damn car!”
Shit. I forgot where I parked. I bolt out the kitchen, slamming the door behind me.
Twenty-one hours and fifty-three minutes to go.
FOURTEEN
Jake
When he’d prepped for tonight, Jake had gone above and beyond. There was too much at stake not to.
It was Sun Tzu he turned to, as he usually did. He didn’t have his own copy of The Art of War, sadly, but there were plenty online. It was much a historical document as a set of rules. Business people loved it, a fact that filled Jake with scorn. Sun Tzu hadn’t written his text so that stockbrokers could close a merger.
What he’d taken from it this time round was Attack where your enemy least expects you.
He had had no choice but to hit his first target at work. Steven Chase didn’t come to LA all that often, and his office was where he was going to be, so Jake had made do. But for the second and third targets, he and Chuy had decided to hit them at home. All of them in one night, before they even realised it was happening.
He’s on South Fairfax Avenue in Faircrest Heights, west of downtown. The streets are clean and fresh, there are more than a few BMWs parked in driveways and the neat houses are dark and silent. He’s parked the bike a few blocks away, not wanting any of the neighbours to later identify the distinctive blat of its engine, especially since he’d done a pass-by of the house a day before.
He’s etched the house in his mind: a simple anonymous bungalow, grey with an attached garage. It’s set back a ways from the street, a coil of tangled hosepipe on the browning lawn.
A poor approach would be to sneak through the backyard. All he needed was one insomniac neighbour casually glancing out of his rear-facing window at the wrong moment. Better to walk right up to the front door like he belonged. Housebreakers didn’t come from the front.
Not that he planned on breaking in. Why would he? The bungalow might have burglar bars, but it was a sure bet that in this heat the windows would be wide open. It didn’t look like the kind of place where the owner could afford AC. All he needed to do was find the bedroom and send one of his rebars at the sleeping form in the bed.
He’d been careful to clean the rebars in hot water before the night started, and had yet to handle them. He couldn’t be completely sure he wasn’t leaving trace for the cops to find, but it’d be a lot easier to stay undetected if he didn’t actually have to enter the killing room itself. They’re slotted into an oversized hiking backpack, slung over his shoulders.
He saunters up the walk, hands in his pockets, helmet tucked under one arm. When he reaches the house, he stops for a moment, gazing around him idly as if getting his bearings. Then he heads up the driveway, footsteps muffled on the dirty concrete.
The door has an opaque window set into it at head height. He pretends to ring the doorbell for the benefit of any unseen watchers. Then he strolls around the side of the house as if intending to rap on a window at the back. He knows precisely where the bedroom is; this isn’t his first visit to South Fairfax Avenue or the first time he’d been to the back of the property.
The bedroom is in the north-east corner. Jake slips down the narrow passage separating the garage from the next house along, sidestepping a mower that looks like it hasn’t been used in years
. Above the house the sky is faded very faintly orange from the fires. The street behind him is as still as a church.
The window is open, just as he’d thought it would be. Quietly, without using his hands, he opens the zipper on his backpack, one of the pieces of thick rebar hissing against the fabric as it slides out, hovering beside his head.
The bed is parallel to the window, next to a nightstand cluttered with pill bottles and half-full drinking glasses. He peers inside, eyes adjusting, trying to spot the body under the sheets, only…
Only there isn’t one. The sheets are rucked and folded, recently used, but there’s no one in the bed.
It throws him, but only for a moment. His timing was a little off, that was all. The man might have got up to go to the bathroom, pissing out some water from one of the innumerable glasses on the nightstand. All he has to do is wait.
Which is when the baseball bat nearly takes his head off.
If the rebar hadn’t been hovering where it was, right by his head, it would have. Had it been even a few inches higher or lower, the bat would have split his skull like a rotten fruit. The rebar rebounds, crashing into his head, sending him stumbling. He loses his mental grip on it, the steel whirling down the path behind him.
The figure swings again, grunting, a dark silhouette against the glowing sky. Jake feels the bat pass inches from his face, the tip nearly grazing his nose. It whangs off the burglar bars, and it’s the sound more than anything else that turns Jake’s legs to water.
The target had seen him coming up the walk. Jake had been so focused on appearing casual for any neighbours who might be watching that he didn’t think about the target himself or what he might be doing. He’d thought the first target would be the toughest to get to, but of course footsteps outside an office, even late at night, are no cause for alarm.
The figure lifts the bat high over his head like a man about to split a log. Jake reaches back with his mind, grabs the piece of fallen rebar, and sends it whirring towards the man’s throat.
His aim is off. He’s reacting too fast, or it’s too dark to see, or the adrenaline is making him shaky. The piece of rebar catches the man’s raised arm, bounces off, clanging against the wall of the house.
The man grunts again, and the bat comes whistling down. Jake scuttles backwards, and the wood cracks against the paving stones. This leaves the man’s neck exposed, his arms out of the way.
This time Jake does not miss.
The rebar, still held by his mind, flips off the ground and wraps itself around the man’s neck, metal creaking as it bends. He drops the bat, staggering, clawing at his throat. Somehow he screams. His grunts get faster, each one becoming a high-pitched bellow, too loud, way too loud in the night air.
Jake—furious, terrified—reaches for the bat. He grabs it with his mind, drives it end first into the man’s body.
Solar plexus. The words blare in his mind as he stands, shaking, in the shadows at the edge of the house. A disabling hit, a strike into a bundle of nerves. The man falls to his knees, and Jake drives another piece of rebar into his open mouth and out the back.
The man’s cries cut off, his whole body jerking like a sleeper suddenly woken. The rebar exits through his neck, tunnelling through flesh like a worm, driven by the full force of Jake’s power. Blood falls to the paving stones in a soft rain.
With a thought, Jake pulls the rebar fully out, flips it, aims it and shoves it deep into the man’s left eye socket.
This time the man makes no sound at all.
Jake stumbles away, back towards the street. For a long moment he stands at the end of the driveway, bent over with his hands on his knees. His long blond hair hides his face like a shroud. Distant voices reach him from the far edge of the block, and he instinctively sinks back into the shadows.
Son of a bitch.
Slowly he calms himself down. It doesn’t matter that he messed up. The dude’s dead, isn’t he? Or if he isn’t, he’d like to know his secret. Hey, buddy, I’m impressed. What is it? You work out? Eat your vitamins?
He snickers, then laughs, the sound bursting out of him. He puts a hand over his mouth, his body shaking. For a long moment he believes—really believes—that he’s never going to be able to stop. He’ll just laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
Eventually the laughter fades. The shaking doesn’t. That was close. Way too close.
But it’s all good. The neighbourhood around him is silent—no sirens, not even any lights on in the houses. This heat, the guy’ll start to stink pretty quick, but by the time anyone notices, Jake’ll be long gone.
He half turns, intending to retrieve the rebar, then thinks, Fuck it. What does he care? He left no prints, and if there are any traces—hair, sweat, whatever—it’s not like he’s in a system. He’s been very, very careful about that.
Another quick look around. Then a walk back towards where he parked his bike, sticking to the darkest, most shadowy parts of the sidewalk. Two down, one to go.
A thought crosses his mind, dark and poisonous: Chuy betraying him, vanishing, leaving him with nothing. Nothing to stop him. Hell, maybe he’d even call the cops himself, tell them to look into a drifter with a motorcycle, hangs around the Mission sometimes…
Chuy wouldn’t do that. He didn’t do it before, and he’s not going to do it now.
Are you sure? How sure?
The thought grows like a cancer, a tumour nestled at the centre of his brain. He’s being set up. Chuy’s using him…
He stumbles to a halt. Takes a deep breath, smelling smoke, jasmine, the scent of rotting garbage somewhere. Smoke.
Chuy could have betrayed him a hundred times already. He hasn’t. He’s not going to do it tonight. “Relax, compadre,” Jake mutters to himself.
But he’s still shaking. To calm himself down, he recites his favourite quotes. Sun Tzu: Know thyself, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories. Churchill: The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. They are less quotes than mantras, the words as close and familiar as a favourite shirt. As always, he comes to the one mantra that calms him most of all: an ancient one, written on the Temple of Apollo on Mount Parnassus two and a half thousand years before Christ. If you ignore the excellences of your own house, how do you pretend to find other excellences? Within you is hidden the treasure of treasures! Know thyself and you will know the Universe and the Gods.
Chuy won’t betray him. Hell, Chuy could have blown the whistle on the very first day they met.
He, Jake, had come in from Vegas, where he’d been working construction. A guy on the road team—a big tattooed dude named DeSoto (“Like the old cars,” he’d said when he introduced himself, flashing a mouthful of tarnished silver) had said he had a cuz in LA, Eddie, a guy who could hook Jake up with some work.
Only the cuz wasn’t there. Jake got to what was supposed to be his apartment in Inglewood, and the woman who’d answered the door looked at him like he was crazy. “Ain’t no Eddie here,” she’d said, a squalling baby bouncing on her arm.
Jake had looked around the festering building hallway, looked at the plaster already coming out of the wall in chunks, the silhouetted figure at the far end with a joint glowing like a dying star, heard the deep bass from a dozen competing sources rattling the flimsy doors in their frames and decided not to push the issue.
He had nothing against any of it—he’d spent plenty of time in spots just like it—but the only work he was likely to find here was the kind that might get him killed. Either that, or caught, and he had no desire to plunge back into the system.
Once he’d aged out of the last foster place, the one with the cats—or was it the one with the old stereo?—the people who ran the country’s databases had conveniently forgotten he existed. You’d think they’d keep an eye out, purely on the basis of how long he’d been in their care. (Fifteen years. As if he needs reminding.)
He’d kept his power to himself. He was proud of that. Even when he was young,
he had a sense that it was a secret, that the people who ran the homes—grey, blurred faces whose treatment ranged from indifferent to actually abusive—would use it against him. And really, back then, what good was it? The most he could do was levitate a book across a room, which was a neat trick likely to bring a world of shit down on him if anybody ever saw him doing it.
He hadn’t worried about the kids in care with him. He was big enough, even early on, that nobody hassled him. They were ghosts, moving through darkened hallways, nodding to each other in passing. Some were OK, some weren’t, but sooner or later they all faded back into nothingness.
So he acted normal, hid what he could do. He bided his time, and when he finally aged out, he’d taken off. First in a stolen Nova, then, when that died on him, a bike he’d taken from outside a sawmill in Minnesota. He’d thrown himself into trying to find out about who his mother was, and how she’d given him this strange, miraculous Gift. He’d started at the first home he could remember and worked his way back, cajoling and pleading and wheedling information out of reluctant foster parents who only vaguely remembered him.
The state hadn’t helped. The state—states plural, actually—simply didn’t care. He was bounced from office to office, and the trail ran cold within weeks. Frustrated, he’d started looking himself, hitting the road, running jobs here and there to keep food in his stomach.
Drugs and booze were never an issue—he’d tried both exactly once, making sure he was alone while he did it, and all they’d given him was a crushing hangover both times—but God, he could have used some once in a while. Because he got nothing.
It had been 987 days since he’d left Ohio, and the last nugget of information about his past—a possible relative of his mother in Bucktail, Nebraska—had gone nowhere. As useless as the missing Eddie. It left him in a deep depression, and he barely remembers the days that followed it. Lacking anything better to do, he rolled through Fort Collins, then Provo, heading out to Vegas as the weather got cooler. The winter with the road crew is a blank space in his mind, save for DeSoto’s flashing teeth.
