Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2)

by SL Huang

  “I promise I won’t steal some little elderly grandparents’ heirlooms as my next job,” I recited. “Happy?”

  “Gonna start singing, girl.”

  “You are so bizarre.”

  He huffed a laugh. “Check in with you later?”

  “Hey, wait,” I said, the thought almost slipping my mind. “Quick question. Have you heard of anyone scrounging around for plutonium lately? Or any other nuclear material?”

  This time the pause was weighty. Arthur’s breath had ceased its steady rhythm, as if he had stopped running. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I said hastily. “At least, I think it’s nothing. I just heard something, is all.”

  “If you think someone is building a—”

  Really? Arthur, too? “Nobody is building a nuclear bomb. Forget I said anything.”

  “If you heard something—”

  “The likelihood of terrorism is so remote that it’s downright idiocy even to include it on a risk assessment,” I said. “Be worried about driving on the 101, if you want something genuinely dangerous.”

  “But if you heard something about plutonium…” objected Arthur. “Ain’t there something—I dunno, if you’ve heard of something happening already, don’t that make it more likely?”

  “You’re really trying to use Bayesian reasoning on me?”

  “I’m using what?”

  “Jesus Christ. All I heard was that someone might be looking for plutonium. It could be for anything. Or it could be a rumor.”

  “You want me to ask around?” Arthur was a private investigator, and a damn good one.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Can at least make some calls, see if anything pops.”

  I had promised Harrington I’d look into it. “Only if you feel like it. My source is in the corporate world, if that helps at all.”

  “I’ll give you a buzz later today.”

  “Sounds good. I’d better get to my client meetings.”

  “Should get yourself an office for that.”

  “Why?”

  Arthur let out a long-suffering sigh that told me exactly what he thought about my propensity for exchanging large sums of money in coffee shops and dive bars. “Later, Russell.”

  “Bye, Arthur.”

  I always got the feeling he didn’t know quite what to do with me.

  Of course, I didn’t know what to do with him, either. By early afternoon, I was sitting in a Starbucks sorely regretting having talked to Arthur that morning.

  CHAPTER 3

  “I’M SORRY,” I said to the determinedly stoic man across from me. “I don’t think I can take your case.”

  I winced as I said it. He was my last meeting of the day, and I’d turned everyone else down.

  It was Arthur’s fault, really, because wouldn’t you know it, but the first potential client turned out to be a woman who literally was trying to steal her grandparents’ heirlooms, and I almost took it, except I wouldn’t have been able to look Arthur in the face for a month. After that I had a no-show and a person who was trying to con me—seriously, you don’t pitch a variation on a pyramid scheme to someone who eats exponentiation for breakfast—and that brought me to Noah Warren, my fourth and last potential client scheduled. I had hoped he would be an arms dealer looking to score a case of illegal weapons or something. Those always paid well.

  Instead, he was crazy.

  Warren sat across from me unnaturally straight, as if he had a steel rod rammed up his spine. He was a very dark African-American man who was entering middle age, but in a way that suited him, with a close-trimmed silver beard and a thick build he wore well. He’d ordered a muffin but it sat on a saucer in front of him, untouched.

  “Why not?” he asked in an overly measured tone, his hands rigid on his knees. “Why won’t you help me?”

  Because you either made this up or are insane didn’t sound like a polite answer. “Have you tried going to the police?” I said instead.

  “They think I’ve gone mad,” he answered, in that same measured tone.

  I sat back in my chair. “Mr. Warren, I don’t know how to say this, but have you considered…”

  “That they’re right?” His voice was very deep, and didn’t sound unsure even when asking a question. “They’re not. But even if they were, I don’t care. You hear? She’s my daughter. If she’s not real, life has no more meaning.”

  Bizarrely, and despite my better judgment, something in me wanted to help him. I have a weakness for children in trouble. Even ones who were probably hallucinations. I tried one more time. “You’re talking about spending a lot of money to hire me for…well, potentially for nothing. Is there any chance that—”

  “Please,” he said. He dug into a pocket of his jeans and pulled out a creased printout. “Please. Your ad.”

  Mystified, I took the piece of paper from him and unfolded it. It was a printed-out listing from an online classifieds site. “Retrieval Expert,” it read. “Will retrieve valuables, information, people. Investigator is a mutant with superpowers. Will not let you down.” My current mobile number was underneath.

  “Oh,” I said. “That. I was drunk. And someone else thought it would be funny. What about it?”

  “I thought maybe you’re like her. Special. Can you get her back for me?”

  Jesus Christ. The probability his daughter was anything like me was so low as to be trivial. Chances were, she was a figment of his imagination.

  Another possibility poked nauseating tendrils at me, a dark shadow hanging over my consciousness, reminding me I’d encountered the impossible before, during the very case I’d met Arthur on. People who were special. Events that didn’t line up with reality.

  No. We’d stayed well away from Pithica, all of us—we’d had to—and they’d been forced to stay well away from us. It didn’t make sense for them to pop up here in such a roundabout and messy way. Besides, this didn’t sound like them at all. They wouldn’t leave a loose end like Warren wandering around where he could hire a seedy retrieval specialist, especially one they’d tangled with before.

  Occam’s razor: Warren was a crazy man, and this disappeared daughter he kept insisting was “special” was either dead or invented.

  But Warren was also my last potential client today. If I didn’t take his commission, I was out of work, and that was not a thought I liked to entertain. Besides, the version of Arthur in my head couldn’t complain about me trying to rescue a man’s daughter…unless, of course, I was only doing it to get his money when I knew he had gone off the deep end.

  I sighed. “How about this. For now, you pay me for expenses. I’ll look into it. If I find out I can get her back, then you pay my fee. Deal?”

  He nodded, the movement tightly-held enough for it to seem like a salute. “Thank you.”

  “No promises,” I said grumpily. I shoved back my chair and left him rigidly overseeing his uneaten muffin.

  Well, at least I was on the job again.

  I stood on the sidewalk for a minute, but I didn’t need to think about where my first stop on my impossible case was going to be: Checker’s Hole. I’d swapped my dirt bike for a car that morning, and since the coffee shop I’d chosen this time was already in the Valley, I decided on hitting him up in person instead of calling.

  Besides, I wasn’t ever going to admit it, but I sort of liked seeing him.

  Checker was Arthur’s business partner and the king of investigative fact-finding. A hacker and information broker, he was masterful at ferreting out any piece of data that had ever been encoded in digital form, which was impressive or frightening depending on what he chose to focus on. Fortunately for me, he had also become…well, something of a friend, though not in the same always-checking-up-on-me way Arthur was, which was confusing. I wasn’t used to having friends, so I wasn’t sure if that’s what Checker and I were or if he just found it horrendously amusing to have someone he could drink tequila with and force-feed bad science fic
tion television to.

  The Hole was Checker’s name for his hacker cave, and was a converted garage behind his house in Van Nuys. Not that his house didn’t have a computer on almost every surface, but the Hole was something different.

  I pulled into the driveway behind Checker’s car, a black two-door sedan with a wheelchair license plate and a blue bumper sticker that read, “I’m only in it for the parking.” When I’d gotten nosy about Checker’s paraplegia one drunken night, he’d claimed it had been a raptor attack. When I didn’t get it, he’d insisted on showing me Jurassic Park at that very moment—complete with a mind-boggling amount of trivia commentary—and then emailed me a dozen comic strips filled with stick figures I still wasn’t sure I fully understood the humor of.

  I bypassed the house and went to the back door of the Hole, knocking as I opened it. As expected, Checker was sitting like a magpie in a nest in the middle of at least thirty different computer monitors. Machines and wires surrounded him on all sides, some screens racked far above his head, a jumble I was certain only he could make sense of. Most of the monitors showed screensavers, but some were scrolling code, at least one was logged into some video game, and he was ignoring all of those to type madly into another one with images flashing by that looked suspiciously like security camera footage.

  “Cas Russell,” he scolded, without looking up. “Way to barge in. I might not have been wearing pants.”

  I looked at him pointedly. His skinny frame was fully clothed in jeans and a T-shirt that had a picture of a sheep plugged into an outlet on it. Besides, both of us knew his absurd security system had told him I was here long before I came in.

  Checker grinned. “It’s like Schrödinger’s pants. You didn’t know for sure till you opened the door.” He hit a key and then pushed his wheelchair back from the keyboard, the monitor continuing to flash through footage faster than the human eye could detect. “What’s up?”

  “You put an ad on Craigslist about me,” I accused, tossing the offending piece of paper at him.

  He cackled. “I told you I was going to! Did it get you work?”

  “If you count a crazy man as work.”

  “Hey, don’t hate on crazy people; sometimes they need badass retrieval specialists, too. And besides, you didn’t tell me not to do it.”

  “Because I was drunk.”

  “Really? I’d bet fifty bucks you still could’ve walked a straight line.”

  I scowled. “Not fair. I can always walk a straight line.”

  “Ah, but then the ‘superpower’ moniker isn’t inaccurate, is it?” He waggled his eyebrows at me.

  Arthur and Checker had both been prying about my slightly abnormal set of abilities since I’d known them, though Arthur was way more subtle about it, and also—admittedly—more concerned with my moral compass than with my skill at instantaneous vector calculus.

  “So I can do math,” I said. “Just because I can do it really fast doesn’t mean I’m some sort of superhero.”

  “I didn’t say superhero,” Checker argued. “You’d have to be heroic for that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Superpowers do not imply superhero. The converse isn’t true either, y’know. That would preclude Batman.”

  “Batman is fictional.”

  Checker threw his arms wide. “And yet he still saves Gotham City every week! Think how much more you could do being real!”

  I leaned a hip against the nearest rack of computers. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “The way you chatter reminds me of a squirrel.”

  “Such persecution! What have I ever done to deserve this?”

  “You made me watch that horrible movie where the Wookies growl at each other for twenty minutes.”

  He winced. “Er, yes. Sorry about that. I don’t suppose you’d buy ‘rite of passage,’ would you?”

  “Not in a thousand years. Hey, I’m here on business.”

  “Your crazy man?”

  “Yeah. He says his daughter’s missing. I told him I’d look into it.” I was already regretting accepting the case, but I grabbed a pad of paper and scribbled Noah Warren’s name and contact information on it. “I need as much as you can give me on him. And I need to know whether he actually has a daughter.” I added the address for the Southern California headquarters of Arkacite Technologies that Warren had given me. “And anything suspicious about his wife’s colleagues. According to him, they’re the ones who have his kid.”

  Checker crossed his arms. “How rude. What am I, your trained monkey?”

  I stopped writing, puzzled. He had never given me the runaround before. “That’s why I’m paying you.”

  “And I’m not selling today. Not even to good friends with superpowers.” He shrugged apologetically. “Sorry. Um, seriously, I’ve got this—thing I have to deal with today; I’m not—” He cocked his head at me, cutting himself off. “Unless…”

  “You want more than your usual rate?”

  “You’re so mercenary-minded! No, I said I’m not selling. But now that I’m thinking about it, I might be open to a trade. A, uh, a barter, if you will. It’s remotely possible you might be able to do me a wee little favor—”

  “What kind of a favor?” I asked.

  “Just a small one.” He picked up a pencil from the detritus among his keyboards and started fiddling with it. “I, ah…well, I may have…angered some people.”

  “You? Really?”

  His jaw dropped open in mock offense. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m a very genial person!”

  “Wookies. Growling. For twenty minutes,” I reminded him. “So who else did you piss off?”

  He fidgeted in his chair. “It’s possible…the Mob.”

  “What?”

  “By accident!” he squawked.

  “I hope so!”

  “I didn’t mean to! But I thought, well, maybe you could do that thing where you, you know, threaten people, and they go away—”

  “You want me to be your goon squad?” I cried.

  “Uh—maybe? I hear you’re very good at it.”

  “Goddammit, Checker. I work for the Mob.”

  “You do?” His eyebrows shot up. “Definitely not heroic.”

  “Well, it’s not like they have me on retainer or anything, but I’ve done the odd job for the odd Mafia member,” I said. “And let me tell you something. Unlike some of my other clients, they always paid me on time.”

  “Did I say, ‘not heroic?’ I think I meant ‘anti-hero,’ bordering on ‘villainous’—”

  “You’re asking me to piss where I work,” I told him severely. Not to mention that I didn’t want to make enemies of a very, very powerful organization with whom I currently had a good working relationship.

  Checker raised his hands placatingly. “Okay, okay. Geez. We all know how important your money is to you. Forget I said anything.” He levered one of the wheels on his chair to spin himself toward his monitors, saying forlornly, “What did you say you need? Hopefully I can find it for you before the Hole burns to a crisp with me inside. Probably even odds there, so you only need to give me half up front.”

  I groaned. Very loudly. “Fine. Stop whining; I’ll help you. Under duress.” That last was a little bit of a lie. I still wasn’t sure how this whole “friends” thing was supposed to work, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to let a friend get a hit put out on him. It didn’t mean I couldn’t be annoyed about it, though. “Give me the details, then. Who’d you cross?”

  “Gabrielle Lorenzo,” he answered, cringing a little.

  “Wait, seriously? Mama Lorenzo?” The Los Angeles Family had been fading into impotence before Gabrielle Lorenzo had married in and dragged the whole operation up by its bootstraps. She had reorganized organized crime until it reached a might that steamrolled any police effort to make the slightest dent. She ran a tight, clean operation, inspired devout loyalty, and came down with the wrath of God on anyone who put a toe on her turf.


  You did not cross the Lorenzo family. Not if you valued your physical well-being. Checker hadn’t just poked the Mob, he’d pissed off the Mob’s supreme deity.

  “What on earth did you do?” I demanded.

  Checker twitched. “I, uh, may have, uh…she may have a favored niece, who, I hasten to point out, I did not know was her niece at the time, and the young lady and I may have…enjoyed a night of pleasurable activities together,” he finished very fast, mumbling to the side.

  Of course. If there was one thing Checker could be counted on to do, it was flirt with any attractive young woman who crossed his path. The man was a menace. But I didn’t see why that would mean he was in hot water with the Lorenzos.

  “But why would—I mean, it was consensual, right?”

  Checker choked. “Cas! Honestly! What do you think of me?”

  “But then why’s Mama Lorenzo so bent out of shape?”

  “Uh, you may not have noticed, being the complete social recluse that you are, but the world is not always entirely logical when it comes to sex.”

  “Hey! This isn’t about me.” I snapped my fingers at him. “Back to your screw-up, Romeo.”

  “Well, her aunt objected to our, uh, liaison, and things may have escalated. Badly,” Checker admitted. “I was just contemplating the dilemma when fortune brought you to my humble abode. You see, it turns out that Gabrielle Lorenzo has people.”

  Saying Mama Lorenzo had “people” was like saying the Dirichlet function had a few discontinuities. The Lorenzo family had access to an army if they chose to use it. Great. “Fine, I’ll see if I can resolve this. Where is she right now?”

  He punched a key and one of his many screens unblanked itself to show a program running. “Their estate in the Hollywood Hills. The address is hitting your phone.”

  I stared at the screen over his shoulder. “You are downright creepy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Okay, I’ll take care of this. In the meantime, you shouldn’t be alone, just in case. I’ll ring Arthur.”