Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4)

by Huang, SL

  “Cas?” Rio asked, with the moral weight of centuries.

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit.

  I’d been planning to avoid Rio for exactly this fucking reason. Because I was absolutely fucking terrible at keeping my mouth shut.

  Rio considered me. “You.”

  I pointed at Checker and Pilar. “You two. Out.”

  Checker opened his mouth like he was going to try to protest, but Pilar shushed him and hustled them out of the room.

  I turned back to Rio. It was no use trying to lie to him after a slip-up like that; he’d see right through it. “Are you going to try to kill me?” I asked.

  Simon jerked and almost fell off his chair. My gun hand twitched a little, as if I wanted to defend myself, even as another part of me wanted to laugh. The idea of going up against Rio was too absurd.

  “No, Cas,” Rio said. “I would not harm you. But I am going to stop you.”

  Fuck.

  Chapter 18

  Rio didn’t insult me by trying to ask me any questions about how I’d done it. I wasn’t going to answer, and he, apparently, was not willing to attempt the application of his…usual methods.

  I made Simon leave with Rio. He kept swiveling his head back and forth between us as if he wanted to plead with me but was forcing himself not to because he knew it wouldn’t do any good.

  Smart man. Or maybe just telepathic.

  I found Checker and Pilar out in the Hole, watching a feed of the living room from one of Checker’s security cameras.

  “We should abort,” Checker said immediately. “If we reprogram the hack—”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What are you talking about? You’ve seen the statistics! This is working, and nobody is going to stop us—not Rio, not anybody!”

  “I—I think I’m with Cas,” Pilar said. “If we’re making a difference—Cas, as long as you’re sure this guy can’t, um—”

  “He can, that’s the point,” Checker said shortly. “You don’t understand; you haven’t been in this world long enough. There are times you cut your losses and run, and when someone like him targets you…”

  “Since when have you been the cut and run guy?” I said. “You’re only saying that because you were against this from the beginning.”

  “And what, you don’t think he has a point?” said Checker. “Arthur told me what he said. I may not be religious, but I have a moral system, and I can’t believe I’m on his side on anything, but his reasons here make sense. You can’t tell me they don’t!”

  “Why can’t both sides make sense?” Pilar was studying the ground like she wanted to disappear into it. “Why can’t what we’re doing be a little bit wrong but also be right? It’s not like life is black and white. I know you guys think I’m naïve on a lot of this stuff, and I am—I know I am—but you two are trying to draw lines where there just, there aren’t any. You’re so invested in what’s right or wrong always making some sort of nice logical sense, but real life is, it’s messy, and sometimes you can’t draw nice perfect boxes around it and know what to do.” She hunched her shoulders.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “If there’s illogic involved we just haven’t defined enough axioms for the system. Or the proof is fallacious.”

  Checker laughed. It sounded a little hysterical.

  “Cas,” Pilar said. “Your friend, um, this guy—what’s he going to do?”

  That was a very good question.

  Rio didn’t know what our methods were. He did know about Yamamoto’s effort to rally LA’s criminal element, thanks to me—if he wanted to, he could tip them off and slingshot the entirety of Los Angeles’s underground around to land right on top of me.

  But if he did that, there was the very real possibility I’d get killed. Speaking of logic, I didn’t think Rio’s differentiated between hurting me himself and weaponizing all of LA to do it for him.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  “Then why don’t we wait and see?” asked Pilar. “Would it be so bad to—to see how things play out? As long as he’s not, um. Not threatening you?”

  “Or us,” Checker added darkly.

  “I told you, I talked to him about that,” I said. “Yeah, I vote for wait-and-see, too. Whatever he’s planning, I bet I can beat him.”

  Checker mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like, “I didn’t sign up for this” and moved over to one of his computers. “Cas, there’s something else you should hear. It doesn’t sound like this is going to change your mind at all, but Rio and Yamamoto aren’t the only people noticing something. This popped up in my alerts earlier today.”

  He clicked at the mouse a few times and then held down a key to turn the volume all the way up. A blustering man’s voice filled the room from the computer speakers.

  “…and something’s going on in this city. You can feel it. Something is wrong here in Los Angeles, and I promise you, patriots, I will get to the bottom of it. Bombs aren’t the only way for the terrorists to strike against this greatest of nations. We’ve long known how vulnerable we are to a biochemical attack, but did our mewling, terrorist-appeasing President take even one step to prevent it? No, of course not. And now you and me are the ones paying for it. Let’s talk the water supply here in Los Angeles, for starters. Do you know how easy it would be for someone to…”

  Checker dialed the volume down again until it was muted.

  “I’ve heard that guy before,” I said. “Who is he?”

  “Reuben McCabe,” Pilar answered. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yup,” Checker said. “Radio host, political shit-stirrer, and professional troll. Cas, you probably remember him from the Arkacite mess.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Him. Likes to inflame people or something, right?”

  “Understatement of the year. But this time he’s onto something. He’s always been on about suspected conspiracies, but now he’s revving it up, and he’s got specifics. He knows there’s been a change.”

  “Does anybody actually listen to him?” I said. “He sounds like an idiot.”

  “He’s a charismatic idiot, and yes, people listen—” started Checker.

  “My dad loves him,” put in Pilar. “I mean, he says he could do without some of the, um, inflammatory tone and stuff, and he doesn’t always agree with everything, but he says McCabe is the only news person willing to say what he thinks.”

  “The important point,” Checker said loudly, “is that in this case McCabe is right. Nobody in the mainstream is reporting on the drop in crime, other than mentioning it in passing and praising the mayor’s policies, because anything else would sound like a conspiracy theory. But McCabe doesn’t care, and he’s going whole hog on it. People are starting to pay attention.”

  “So what?” I said. “What can they do? Complain about it on the radio? Let them.”

  “Not just complain. I was listening earlier, and there are some militia groups who’ve been calling into his show and making noises about coming to town. Setting things right, that kind of talk. These are the type of people who take it upon themselves to patrol the border like it’s a video game, or stand their ground to Feds armed to the teeth. They’re dangerous.”

  “Okay,” I said. “They still won’t know where to point their guns. If they come to LA and start making trouble, I’ll deal with them. Heck, the brain entrainment will probably neuter them for me.”

  “Take this seriously!” Checker said. “People are getting mad about this, and I can’t say I blame them! Can you please hit pause for a minute and consider there might be a good reason they want to stop you? Stop us?”

  “So you’re saying you think Rio and McCabe are the good guys here?” I scoffed. “You?”

  “And you’re trying to tell me I should think they’re wrong because, why, because I think one’s a destructive moron with too much power and the other legitimately scares me shitless? That’s a logical fallacy and you know it!”

  We glared at
each other.

  “This is what I was talking about,” Pilar said into the silence. “It’s messy. I don’t think the right solution is to try to make it not-messy, because it isn’t.”

  What makes this so charming is that we all get to pass responsibility up the food chain, someone said, someone I knew. Nobody has to take the blame for anything.

  “Where’s my info on Vance?” I said. That was at least one fucking thing that was cleanly black and white.

  “It’s done, but I thought you were waiting for Arthur,” Checker said.

  “Arthur’s got other priorities, apparently.” And the mood I was in, Arthur probably wouldn’t approve of how I wanted to play things. “Did you figure out how I can find her?”

  Checker heaved a sigh. “Yeah. She doesn’t stay in the shadows like Pourdry does. In fact, she’s pretty easy to track; she pops up on the grid regularly.”

  “I don’t care about the rest of the intel,” I said. “Just get me a location. I’ll take it from there.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I followed Lauren Vance for the rest of the day. Checker was right—she moved around in a surprisingly ordinary manner, using ATMs and stopping to buy overpriced coffee. She also walked into meetings in some of the seediest areas of Los Angeles as if they were glass and steel corporations, always standing with perfect posture and carrying her briefcase. I didn’t know if she was depending on Pourdry’s reputation to protect her or if she was capable of protecting herself. Either way, she was making a statement by going alone, especially dressed like a New York banker—a statement about either her own power or Pourdry’s.

  She didn’t go to reconvene with her boss in person at all, and after watching how openly she moved around, I was starting to suspect she never would. I’d have to grab her and convince her.

  That was okay. I’d almost been hoping I’d have the chance to beat the shit out of someone.

  I waited until after the sun set and I had followed Vance’s fashionable little convertible—I’d been right about her car choice—into the type of area you had to pay off the local gangs to spend any significant time in. Then, on a nice deserted street, I rammed the accelerator into the floor and ran her off the road.

  She must have seen the headlights grow huge in her mirrors, because she tried to swerve and speed away, but I was ready. I pulled the e-brake, juked the wheel, and countersteered to slam into her back rear panel at over fifty miles per hour. The crash was deafening, and her car imploded with a shattering of glass and polymer. I kept my foot on the gas, spinning us out of the skid and against a closed medical marijuana shop so the back of Vance’s car was crushed between mine and the storefront.

  I’d purposely been driving a tank of a sedan, and it hadn’t suffered more than a little hood crumpling. Perfect. I got out, my gun drawn.

  Lauren Vance got out, too, clawing the airbag out of the way and pulling her briefcase with her as if it was attached to her hand. Her face was scraped and burned from the airbag, but she still held herself with that rigorously straight posture and seemed rather too collected for someone who had just been run off the road and was facing an attacker with a gun.

  She raised her free hand slightly. “What do you want?”

  “You,” I said. “Hands on your head and get over here.”

  Very slowly, she bent her knees to set her briefcase on the ground.

  And closed her eyes.

  The world flashed pure white fire and my vision went blank. I reacted before registering what had happened, calculating distances instantly and lowering my gun to fire blind. Vance screamed.

  “I want you alive,” I said, blinking rapidly. Nothing but blackness—she must have used some sort of flash grenade. I stretched out my other senses—scuffling noises against the ground, ragged breathing—she probably hadn’t expected me to shoot. I let my mathematical senses lean on what my ears and memory told me, let the numbers draw my surroundings. “But believe me when I say I can kill you without being able to see you, and if you do not—”

  The sound thundered into me like a herd of rampaging bison, trampling my eardrums, clobbering me in the sternum and putting me on my ass. I managed to hang onto my Colt, and I twisted against the maelstrom, unable to see or hear or sense a goddamn thing but depending on the lines of sight and minutes of angle I’d already spun out to guide me—and I put five rounds straight into her fucking briefcase. The Colt twitched in my hand as I pulled the trigger, but with the world taken over by Vance’s sonic weapon it was as if the gunfire was silent, only the sting of the recoil telling me I’d fired.

  I could tell I’d disabled the weapon because I was able to move again, but my senses were a dark and echoing box, and any equilibrium provided by my inner ear was dead gone. I leaned into my proprioception instead and put my faith in the mathematics, flipping up to my feet even as the rest of my brain was convinced I was falling sideways off the planet.

  Vance only had one smart play to make, assuming she hadn’t been knocked out by her own weapon. I pivoted through the correct angle and fired again to take out the front tire of my own car and then bulldogged straight toward where I knew the driver’s side was.

  Metal slugged me two feet before I got there—Vance had swung the car door out to bodyslam me. I shot out one hand and grabbed the top of the door as I ricocheted, the new data giving me enough points to extrapolate a partial picture. I used my grip on the door to rebound my momentum and swung around it to smash the side of my gun into Lauren Vance’s face.

  I pushed her head down in the street and straddled her, my gun barrel against the back of her skull. The car engine vibrated next to me. She’d been so close to getting away.

  My vision was starting to clear, fuzzy shapes oozing through the dimness, and my hearing had gone from an empty void to a rising, high-pitched ringing. Interpolation filled in enough blanks that I estimated I could still drive like this. I’d limp out of here on the rim of my wheel and then tie Lauren Vance up somewhere until I could recover and interrogate her.

  I felt in my pocket for a ziptie and trussed up Vance’s wrists behind her, and then tugged off my belt to tourniquet her leg above where I’d shot her. I started out doing it mostly by feel, but my vision had mostly returned by the time I finished, albeit with fuzziness around every outline.

  Vance stirred weakly against me.

  I belatedly noticed she had some kind of fancy ear plugs in. That accounted for the delay in her briefcase flashbang bomb—she closed her eyes for the flash, stuck in the plugs, and then escaped while everyone else was incapacitated. I ripped the earplugs out.

  “Hi,” I said. My ears still rang, painfully enough that it stabbed all the way to the back of my throat and made me want to throw up, but I could hear myself in a muffled, tinny way. “You’re coming with me.”

  And better to skedaddle sooner than later, just in case we’d attracted any cops.

  Or this neighborhood’s version of the cops.

  I realized my peripheral vision was still compromised when dark shapes solidified out of it to show us surrounded. Dark shapes in colors.

  Shit, whose colors? Which neighborhood was this?

  The lead silhouette detached himself from the rest and approached us with a swinging, loping gait, full of ego and scorn, and cemented into none other than my rowdy friend Miguel from Yamamoto’s meeting.

  He said something.

  “You’re going to have to speak up,” I called back.

  He came closer and raised his voice. “You on our turf, lady.” The words were still wrapped in muffling layers of sensory loss, but I could understand them. “And this here’s our prize, we been looking for her all night. Hey, you that chick from the bar!”

  Shit.

  “The one that shot me! I gonna learn you real good, woman.”

  I tensed my muscles. If I could delay a little, till my inner ear wasn’t trying to bowl me over at every step…“What do you want with Vance?” I said. “Maybe we’re on the same side here.�
�

  Miguel howled with laughter. “Same side? Woman, you on drugs? You fucking shot me!”

  “Only your gun,” I said. “I’ve got money. Let’s talk about a deal. I get what I want out of Vance, and then you can have her.”

  “And then you get the credit? Nuh-uh. The Blood Skulls are the ones taking her down, and all those fancy gangsters the little Chinaman got together, they gonna be eating out of our hand.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about until Vance shifted below me. “It’s not us,” she called. “You’ve been misinformed.”

  “You shut your pretty mouth,” Miguel said, and turned back to me. “And you, why don’t you put that piece down nice and slow.”

  “Wait.” My brain felt like it was working only in skips and halts. “You think Vance and Pourdry are the ones who’ve been shutting down LA?”

  “It’s not us,” Vance repeated, more urgently. “Whoever told you that lied. They’re trying to start something. We got word today the responsible party is the Grigoryan brothers.”

  What?

  “Piece on the ground, sister,” Miguel repeated. “No sudden moves, neither.”

  I had one round left before I needed to reload. My vision had recovered enough to count: Miguel plus six other guys, most of whom had guns out already.

  But Miguel had gotten closer so I could hear him, confident his boys were backing him up, and there was no doubt he was carrying as well, which gave me potential to gain another weapon. Of course, just to make my life difficult, he hadn’t drawn yet. And I couldn’t see well enough yet to figure out where he might be concealing.

  “What happened to your gun?” I taunted. “What, did I scratch the finish on it? Afraid you’ll get it messed up again?”

  It worked. It fucking worked.

  Miguel went for his piece and I rocketed up from the ground right into him. His boys all hesitated, not wanting to shoot their boss, and by the time they started to react I’d brought my hand up past his shoulder wielding Miguel’s own pistol. With my Colt jammed up under Miguel’s chin, I shot all six of his guys in less than a second and a half.