Zero Sum Game

by SL Huang

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.” Tresting leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “She’s a trip. Can’t even say she’s the craziest client I ever had, neither, though this is by far the craziest case. Glamorous life of a private eye, huh?”

  “Speaking of, what does a PI license let you do?” I asked, curious.

  “Huh? Well…loiter.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  I felt a strong urge to snicker.

  “Though sometimes people see the license and think they have to answer questions,” Tresting amended. “Authority figure and all that.”

  “That’s why I have a fake one,” I said.

  “I didn’t hear that.”

  I went to use the washroom, and took the time to splash water on my face and rinse out my mouth. When I returned, Tresting’s monitors were back on and he was talking to Checker. “Good timing, Russell,” he said.

  “I think I’ve narrowed down your search,” Checker told me. “It fronts as a travel agency, which makes a good cover for tons of international calls. But the security on their intranets is ridiculously intense. It’s—”

  “Did you crack it?” I interrupted.

  He twitched. “I will. A little more time—”

  “We know it’s the right office, though?”

  “Statistically, the suspicious activity—”

  “Yes,” said Tresting, over Checker’s annoyed squawk at being interrupted again. “That’s his way of saying yes.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “I feel appreciated,” grumped Checker.

  “Thank you,” I said to him with sweet sarcasm, and turned back to Tresting. “Now let’s go.”

  Checker gave us a hearty middle finger and cut the connection.

  “He’ll be standing by for when we get in,” Tresting assured me. “In case we can get him remote access. Shall we?”

  “Can you get him to cut the security cameras for us first?” I wasn’t likely to forget how easily Checker had been able to find Dawna and me on the Santa Monica footage.

  “Asked already. For some reason the building security system is down today. Been down for the last few hours.”

  I studied his grim face. “You think they have something going down?”

  “Only one way to find out. Mind giving me my gun back?”

  Tresting drove; I sat in the passenger seat and tried to keep from fidgeting. I’d never gone into a place with someone else. It felt odd, itchy, like a variable I had no control over. I tamped down both that and my headache, which had reappeared with a dull throb as we drove—this wasn’t the time to be distracted. Fortunately, I’d had enough practice with hangovers to ignore headaches pretty easily.

  Once we hit the right block, Tresting parked his badass truck on the street in favor of not being locked in a nine-dollar-per-hour garage, and we walked in the front door of the office building. An attendant in the lobby nodded at us with a mild frown—probably because we both looked like we either belonged to the same fight club or made a habit of walking into doors together—but Tresting nodded back in a friendly sort of way and went up to the directory as if he belonged there, and the attendant went back to his crossword.

  We took the elevator up to the third floor, neither of us speaking, and found our way down a carpeted hallway of anonymous doors to suite 3B. I raised my eyebrows at Tresting and put a hand under my coat. We split to either side of the door and he reached out to open it.

  The door handle refused to yield under his fingers. Locked.

  We looked at each other. Clearly the travel agency wasn’t an active front, if potential clients couldn’t walk in. Tresting gestured for me to stay on my side of the doorway and raised a fist to knock loudly. “Building maintenance,” he called.

  Nothing.

  He tried again. Still nothing. I didn’t hear even a rustle of movement from inside.

  I mimed kicking in the door. I’m excellent at kicking in doors. Tresting, however, held up a hand to stop me and pulled out a set of lockpicks. His way was less conspicuous, I’d give him that.

  I stayed ready in case the occupants of the office could hear us and were quietly preparing. Tresting picked the lock with astonishing speed, almost as if he were inserting a key instead of some squiggly pieces of metal, and raised his eyes to nod at me. I nodded back, and he twisted the handle and pushed the door open.

  My gun leapt into my hand, but I had nothing to aim it at. We stared numbly.

  Someone who looked like she’d played the role of receptionist was sprawled just inside the door, her throat slit so deeply she was almost decapitated. Blood saturated the carpet in a massive, soggy pool around her.

  Tresting had his weapon out, too, and we stepped into the room, covering every angle and carefully avoiding the soaked carpeting. Tresting elbowed the door shut behind him, and we crept into the office suite.

  My stomach folded in on itself as we passed down the row of desks. A young, sandy-haired man at a computer had been disemboweled. The women in the next two cubicles looked like they’d tried to run. One had fallen on her front, but her head was twisted all the way around so her sightless eyes stared up at the ceiling in frozen horror.

  We turned the corner and found the conference room. The blood had turned it into a grotesque modern art painting.

  The men and women seated around the conference table had been older, well-dressed corporate types. All except one were tied to their chairs, cloth gags choking their corpses, the lone exception a middle-aged man with a .22-inch diameter hole in his forehead. He’d had a better fate than the rest. The mathematics arranged itself in brilliant arcing lines of red, the spatter patterns showing me exactly how they had all suffered.

  I’m not squeamish, but I closed my eyes briefly.

  “Here,” said Tresting’s voice, and he handed me a pair of latex gloves he pulled from a pocket. He’d found some plastic bags in a bin somewhere, too; he shook bits of shredded paper off them and put them over his boots, handing two more to me. “Forensics are good. Rather not go down for this.”

  I tucked the plastic mechanically into the tops of my boots, and we cautiously approached the scene. I tried to deduce something useful from the carnage, but my mind drew a blank; I could only see parabolas of blood fountaining to end in gruesome trigonometry, infinite repetition from too many points of convergence—angles of impact, speed of slashes, over and over and over again…

  I could see everything. It meant nothing.

  Tresting hooked a Bluetooth over his ear. It wasn’t hard to figure out whom he was calling. He succinctly described the scene and started carefully pulling wallets from those around the conference table, reading off their IDs.

  I forced myself to detach, to observe, running my eyes over the unhappy victims and trying like hell to ignore the mathematical replay, but nothing could make this scene better. I saw limbs bent in unholy directions, shallow cuts carving lurid designs in skin…one woman had been partially flayed. The stench in the heavy air clogged my nostrils, gagging me.

  The brute horror here wouldn’t tell me anything useful. I escaped back into the outer offices, doing my best to avoid looking at the bodies, and attacked the cubicles, dragging open desk drawers and filing cabinets.

  I needn’t have bothered. Cabinet after cabinet revealed rows of hanging file folders, telling me some paper trail had been here, but every one of them swung empty—even the paper tabs labeling the folders had been pulled. The desk drawers mocked me with more of the same. I tried the computers next—when the first one refused to start, I crawled around to the back to find the hard drive missing, the connectors still dangling. I took the time to check around the back of every computer in the place, but they were all gutted. The private offices showed much the same story except sans corpses; apparently everyone important had been in the conference room.

  Bits of paper from a shredder littered the floor here and there as I moved through the suite. I eventua
lly found the shredder in question, an industrial-strength behemoth, but the bin beneath it had been cleared out. I figured out why when I found the office kitchen.

  A large metal filing cabinet had been turned on its side against the doorway, with plastic garbage bags duct taped across it to create a seal, and the impromptu levee held back a pulpy white goop that drowned the entire kitchenette to the level of my waist. The caustic odor of chemicals assaulted my senses, and I coughed and hugged one arm across my nose, blinking watering eyes. Though the tap was no longer running, rags in the sink drain showed how the place had been so easily flooded, and then some sort of mad chemical mixture had been thrown in along with…shredded paper.

  Someone had wanted to be very, very, very sure no one reconstituted the data from this office. Hell, it wasn’t like most people could piece back together shredded documents in the first place; certainly no one could do it easily—except me, that is, but it seemed both egotistical and too coincidental to assume this destruction was for my benefit. Why would anyone go to so much extra trouble?

  “Hey, Russell,” Tresting called.

  I carefully avoided the corpses in the outer office and wound my way back to the torture chamber of a conference room. Tresting stood at the far end, examining an empty chair. “Look at this,” he said, and I stepped around to oblige him. Sprays of blood crossed the edges of the chair in multiple places, but the seat and back were clean.

  “Someone was sitting here,” I said.

  “Haven’t seen Dawna Polk anywhere. Could be her?”

  I narrowed my eyes at the chair seat, trying to remember the measurements of Dawna’s hips. I hadn’t been paying too much attention, but I estimated, measuring in my memory. “No. This is too wide. I’m guessing a man. Or a large woman.” I squinted at the blood spatter surrounding the empty chair, the numbers spiraling to find their sources in midair, a person-shaped outline of shimmering red. “Whoever it was got tortured, too.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The spray,” I answered, not wanting to go into it.

  “Think our perps turned kidnappers,” said Tresting. “They wanted information—forced the vics to talk, most like while their coworkers got tortured or killed.” He reached over to the nearest woman and lifted the side of the cloth gag with a gloved finger. “Take a look.”

  He was right. Blood stained the skin underneath the cloth, and nowhere near any of her own wounds. The smearing made it harder to judge, but from the angle I guessed it had come from the man across from her.

  Maybe this investigative stuff was worth something after all.

  I told Tresting what I’d found in the rest of the office suite. “Unless they have data on an outside server somewhere, it’s cleaned out.”

  “Think we better head, then,” he said grimly. “We can keep an eye on the police investigation.”

  “When do you think they’ll find it?”

  “Right after we leave, when I call in a tip.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Can it, Russell,” Tresting growled. “This is too big.”

  He had a point. Of course, considering what we knew of Pithica, this was probably too big for the cops, too.

  Chapter 12

  We drove in silence almost all the way back. When Tresting found a space on the street a few blocks away from his office, he yanked the truck over into it, shifting gears so hard my teeth rattled. As he turned off the engine I reached for the door handle, but Tresting’s voice stopped me.

  “Russell.”

  “Yeah?”

  He made no move to get out. “Been thinking. This wasn’t Pithica. Not their style. And they wouldn’t do this to their own.”

  “New player, then?” I thought of Anton’s garage, of the men in dark suits at Courtney’s place. I saw the massacre in the office building again, my mind skittering away from the details. Maybe this mess had reached the point where I should throw in with Tresting for real, share everything. I opened my mouth.

  Tresting slammed the heels of his hands against the steering wheel. “Dammit, Russell!”

  I bit back on my other intel. “What?”

  The look he shot me was positively poisonous, for no reason I could fathom.

  “What?” I repeated.

  “You told him, didn’t you.”

  “Told what to whom?” Where did Tresting get off thinking he had a say in my business? It wasn’t as if I had a whole lot of friends to blab information to anyway; the only person I’d been in touch with at all was—oh. Oh. “Wait—you think Rio did this?”

  He gave me a long, level stare, his jaw clenched, his eyes mirroring the pain and anger of the victims in the office building.

  I swallowed. Had it been Rio? And so what if it was? Stumbling upon that kind of…work…I would be lying if I claimed it had been pleasant, but it wasn’t news to me what Rio was capable of. I was well aware of his methods. And if anyone deserves them, it’s Pithica. Isn’t it?

  Tresting was still staring at me as if I’d betrayed him. I tried to ignore the squirming sensation in my stomach that felt remarkably like guilt.

  Of course I had to tell Rio we were going in, I insisted to myself. He was tracking Dawna; if we ran into each other working at cross purposes…that’s how people get killed! I started to bridle under Tresting’s judgment. He did not have the high ground here, I told myself. He didn’t. “I told you,” I said. “You work with me, you work with the people I trust. I don’t know if Rio had something to do with this, but—”

  “Get out.”

  “We can still work toge—”

  “Get out of my truck.”

  I did. Tresting got down from the other side and slammed his door with much more force than necessary.

  I decided to try for professional. “I’ll call him,” I volunteered. “If he did go in, I’ll see if he got any information out of the office. I’ll let you know.”

  The tension in Tresting’s posture cracked, and he whipped his arm around, bringing a fist down on the hood of his truck so hard he dented it. “How can you stand there and say—after what we saw—” He shook his head over and over, as if warding off the devil. “No. No. Don’t call me, Russell. Just don’t. We’ll solve this without you or not at all.” He cleared his throat. “It ain’t worth it.”

  Something stung inside my chest, a sharp and unfamiliar pain. It wasn’t only Rio he thought a monster. “I understand,” I said. My lips felt strangely stiff. “I won’t bother you again.”

  Tresting’s condemnation washed over me as he turned away, disgust and contempt and horror simmering in his wake. He strode off.

  The stinging feeling got worse. I took a deep breath and told myself it didn’t matter.

  I waited for Tresting to disappear down the street and then followed in the direction of his office, looking for the sports car I had driven here the night before, but someone had jacked it. Not surprising, considering it was way too nice a car for the area and I had already done half the job for any aspiring car thief, but still, talk about an annoying end to a rotten morning. I briefly and pettily considered taking Tresting’s truck, but that was beneath even me.

  A group of teenagers was using the street I had originally parked on for skateboarding practice. I sighed and started back along the sidewalk, looking for a nice witness-free place to steal a ride home.

  A shot rang out, followed closely by several more.

  My mind triangulated in less than half a second. Tresting’s office.

  I flew back the way I had come. The gunfire beat out an irregular tattoo—one fully automatic weapon, and three, no, four semiautomatics or revolvers. People on the street cried out to each other and rushed to get indoors, grabbing out mobile phones—the cops would be on their way, then, but I added response times and travel times in my head—too long, too slow.

  My boots pounded the cement in time with the staccato gunfire as I dashed around the corner to Tresting’s alleyway, my brain bursting into echoes and trajectories
and telling me exactly where the shooters were: one, two, three, four, five. Two gunmen against the near wall of the upstairs office, three more ranged out toward the other side of the room. One could be Tresting, but with the blinds still closed I had no way of figuring out which. I had to get inside.

  Second-floor office. Cinderblock walls, locked and reinforced door, barred window. With a little time and the right leverage I could blast through any of the three, but which was fastest? Which?

  The window, it had to be the window. Estimates of bolt depth and wall strength ricocheted through my head. Tear the bars off. Crash through. Yes.

  Instead of racing for the outside stairway up to the door, I veered for the opposite side of the alleyway and turned my mad bound into a leap, catching the bottom rung of the fire escape there with one reaching hand. The iron bit into my palm as my body weight jerked against it, and then I was swarming up the metal.

  I drew my SIG as I flew across the first landing and tore up the next flight of stairs. Across the alleyway, Tresting’s window was inset in the wall past where his stairway ended at his office door, a sheer two-story drop below it. As I blew past the same height, I fired at the window without slowing.

  Bang-bang-bang-bang.

  I hit the next landing up, vaulted over the rail, and jumped.

  My leap took me high in an arc above the grimy pavement twenty feet below, a long moment of weightlessness before my shoulder slammed into the concrete wall above Tresting’s window. Time seemed to slow. In hundredths of a second I was going to fall; my margin for error was almost nonexistent. I looked down at the two-story drop below me, equations unspooling in my head, the acceleration of gravity tumbling through every incarnation of every possible assignment of variables, and I flattened my arm against the cinderblocks, forcing friction to delay me the slightest touch. Vector diagrams of normal force and gravitational pull and kinetic friction roared through my senses. Just before gravity won and sucked me into a two-story plunge to the alleyway below, I dropped the SIG.

  It outstripped me by the smallest fraction of a second, and as it fell between the bars and the top lip of the wall above the window, I shot out my left foot and came down on it with my entire body weight. The frame of the handgun slammed against the bars on one side and the top lip of the window on the other with all the force a simple machine could harness, and became my very own makeshift crowbar.