Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2)

by SL Huang

  I didn’t realize that meant the perky receptionist had been intending to follow me down until she scurried out of the elevator next to mine the instant I hit the lobby. She came right up to me, letting the milling employees and tour groups filter around us like we were rocks in a stream.

  “Excuse me, ma’am? You forgot this.” She held out a folded sheet of yellow paper.

  “Uh, no, I didn’t,” I said.

  “Yes, you did.” She thrust the folded paper at me again, squishing her face into an expression that made her look like an over-the-top mime and jerking her head at the people passing by and the security guards back at the metal detectors.

  “Oh,” I said, my voice brittle. “Uh, so I did.” I took the piece of paper from her. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome, ma’am. Have a nice day.” She flashed her bright smile at me and tripped back into one of the elevators.

  I walked out of the building and into the sunny plaza in front of it and sat down on the low wall containing the hedge that hid my weapons. While I waited for a break in foot traffic wide enough for me to retrieve them, I unfolded Pilar’s note.

  Venice Skate Park, 5:30PM, it read.

  Huh.

  I ditched the stolen ID card in the hedge once I took my hardware back and walked briskly to my car. I was just reflecting that this trip might have been more fruitful than expected when someone looped a wire around my neck and yanked it tight.

  CHAPTER 6

  REFLEXES SWALLOWED conscious thought. Before the garrote could close against my throat, I back-stepped, twisted, and dropped like a dead weight. As I slipped out of my attacker’s snare, I grabbed his arm and wrenched it down after me. The numbers sang to me, each motion in perfect harmony as I yanked the guy into an uncontrolled somersault and slammed him onto his back in front of me.

  In one practiced motion, I had my 1911 out of my belt and the muzzle pressed up against his chin. “Hi,” I said.

  My attacker made a squeaking sound.

  I cut my eyes around the street. A breeze rustled the trees marching down the sides of the pavement, and parked cars gleamed in the sun. This neighborhood was residential and wealthy; most of the houses were set back from the road behind fences or hedges, too hidden for watchful neighbors to notice us easily.

  Fuck. I should have been more careful leaving Mama Lorenzo’s place. If she’d sent someone with any competence, I’d be dead.

  I set aside my own stupidity to deal with later and gave my would-be murderer the once-over. He was scrawny, with dark Italian coloring, and young—probably eighteen or so. Young enough to make me feel some repugnant pity for him. Kids shouldn’t be assassins.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Contract killing for your initiation. Someone at the Lorenzo estate must have been tracking my car—not you; that’s too smart for you—and you thought you’d make your name this way. One little girl, should be easy, right?”

  He whimpered.

  “Jesus, Sicily doesn’t make ’em like they used to,” I said. “What’s your name, kid?”

  He made a strangled sort of noise and tried not to answer. I pushed the muzzle of the gun against him harder, and he yelped. “D-D-Dino,” he stammered.

  Straight out of a mobster movie. “Dino what?”

  “P-Palermo.”

  “I’m right, aren’t I? You’re an inductee with the Lorenzos?”

  The poor kid was starting to cry a little. I didn’t have the heart to mock him for it.

  “Oh, stop it. I’m not going to kill you.” He was too pathetic, and besides, it would mess up my streak. I took the gun out of his face, my adrenaline fading. “Look, kid. You could do worse than the Lorenzo family, if you’ve got no options.” Arthur would have had a conniption over me giving that kind of guidance, but it was true. “They’ve got a code, and in their own way, they clean up some of the scummiest crime in this city. But here’s some free advice—know who it is you’re killing, okay?”

  “Uh-huh,” he mumbled from the pavement, eyes still tracking my gun.

  “And if you come after me again, I will kill you. Watch this.” I picked up a leaf off the ground that was about half the size of my hand, stuffed it into his nerveless fingers, and backed up ten paces. “Hold it out.”

  He stumbled to his feet and lifted his hand; it was shaking a little. He had only brought the leaf halfway up when I fired. He shrieked and dropped it. Then he stared down at it, rubbing his fingers unconsciously. I didn’t need to look to know that it had a perfect .45-inch diameter hole in the middle.

  “Seriously,” I said. “Don’t come after me again. You can make your bones on someone easier. And tell Mama Lorenzo to send the pros after me. I’ll feel less bad about offing them.”

  He nodded very fast, his head bouncing up and down like a bobblehead doll’s.

  “Scram,” I told him.

  He scrammed.

  My senses stayed fired up, scanning for any other movement, but it appeared Dino had been alone. That didn’t mean I was safe, however. And I knew my car was compromised, which made my brain extrapolate to bombs wired up to the ignition and nice vehicular fireballs.

  My mouth tasted sour. Round one, and Mama Lorenzo had already gotten the drop on me. Get with it, Cas.

  First things first: I made tracks off the street before any of the wealthy residents here could stop being complacent and get curious about the gunshot. At the end of the block, I cut through a commercial alleyway and slipped into an underground garage beneath a medical center. It was the work of a moment to jack a minivan with tinted windows. I had to swing by my meet up with the Arkacite receptionist, and then I was going to figure out this Mafia crap.

  I texted Checker as I pulled out. Where’s Venice Skate Park?

  BEACH, he replied after a few seconds. TURN R AHEAD.

  Son of a bitch had a lock on my phone. I turned it off and yanked the battery just to be spiteful.

  Pilar wouldn’t be off work yet anyway, though. I sighed and thought for a minute. Noah Warren’s address wasn’t far from here. While I had a few minutes in Venice, I should really try some of that knocking-on-doors I hated and see if anyone had witnessed a hint of Liliana, try to figure out what the heck was going on with this case and whether I should drop Warren so fast he’d get whiplash. After all, didn’t Checker’s ridiculous Mob problem count as a job? Maybe I didn’t even need Warren anymore.

  Unless I did. It was hard to tell sometimes how my whacked-out brain would interpret things, especially whatever screwiness made me such a mess when I wasn’t focused on work. If I took myself off Warren’s case, there was a chance I’d become worse than useless right when I needed to be dealing with Mama Lorenzo.

  Jesus, I was fucked in the head.

  I reached Warren’s street and double-parked the minivan. The unit was one in a fourplex. I stayed wary as I got out of the car and approached, still on edge from Dino’s attack, but the grassy patch of yard I crossed stayed mercifully assassin-free.

  When I knocked on the door next to Warren’s, a tall, bony Hispanic woman in a tank top yanked it open almost immediately. “Are you the one interested in the unit?” she said, her tone as accusing as if she’d just seen my dog make a mess on her lawn. “I’m Marta. I need a credit check and a—”

  “I’m not here about renting,” I said. “Are you the landlord?”

  “Damn right I am. But if any of my tenants are bugging you, that’s not my problem. Call the cops if you want to.”

  Wow, she was more confrontational than I was, and that was saying something. I forced my tone down to be as pleasant as I knew how, and felt lucky my frayed nerves managed not to snap at her. “Your tenants Noah Warren and Denise Rayal. Did you ever see them with a little girl?”

  “Those good-for-nothing felons? First he tells me his wife’s sick, oh, boo-hoo, but then she’s gone and he can’t pay his rent—it’s like he thinks I’m running a charity here! I got a mortgage to pay; if they want to freeload, they picked the wrong lady to—
”

  “I really don’t care if he’s having trouble paying his rent,” I cut in. Well, I only cared insofar as it might be an indicator of his ability to pay my rather hefty fee—that might be a problem. “Did you. Ever. See. A girl?”

  “Having trouble paying his rent? Ha!” cried Marta, ignoring the second half of what I’d said. “Not anymore! Why do you think I got a unit to show?”

  “Wait, are you saying Warren doesn’t live here anymore?”

  “Evicted ’im, didn’t I? And good riddance, too.”

  “He gave me this as his address,” I protested.

  “I oughta have his ass for that,” said Marta. “Look, lady, if you don’t want to see the unit, I got a lot to do today.”

  I took a deep breath and reminded myself that knocking her block off wasn’t my best solution here. Or rather, the Arthur-conscience in the corner of my brain smacked me and reminded me, and I stroppily conceded. “Marta. All I want to know is whether you ever saw a little girl with either Warren or his wife.”

  She looked down her nose at me, face pinching suspiciously. “Why?”

  “Because they’re trying to scam the welfare system,” I said, inventing rapidly. “Ma’am. They, uh, they may have kidnapped a foster child. I’m with, uh, the Federal Bureau of—Social Services.”

  She sniffed. “Stole a kid, did they? Wouldn’t put it past them. They didn’t bring the brat here, though.”

  “You wouldn’t be in trouble, ma’am,” I tried, in my best professional Agent of an Imaginary Federal Bureau voice. “In fact, it would be a big help to us if—”

  She held up a hand to forestall me. “Trust me, lady, I am not protecting ’em. I’d love to see those slackers in jail. If they stole a kid, they didn’t do it here. And I would know, wouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Would you?”

  “Well, of course I would! I’m only the goddamn owner here!”

  Jesus. “All right,” I said. “I get it.”

  Marta sniffed again and shut the door in my face.

  I tried the other two units in the fourplex. One tenant wasn’t home; the other was a timid woman who’d thought Noah was very nice and it was such a shame he’d been evicted, but it wasn’t Marta’s fault because she was nice, too, only she had to because of paying the mortgage, you see, and no, no little girls, but she’d always thought Noah and Denise would have been such nice parents—

  I walked off while she was in midstream.

  I tried some of the neighbors in the adjacent houses; the only person home was a hipster filmmaker wearing plastic-framed glasses and a suit vest over a T-shirt. He didn’t even know who Noah Warren was and admitted he couldn’t have put a face to a single one of the neighbors in the next building. I gave up and headed back to the minivan.

  Shit, I’d barely learned anything. Warren’s address wasn’t his address anymore, and nobody had seen any sign of a girl named Liliana. It was beginning to look confirmed that Warren had invented her, maybe as the result of some nervous breakdown after his wife’s death. The only contradiction to that theory was Albert Lau’s strange reaction to my questions, but I wasn’t great at reading people, so maybe I’d gotten it wrong. Having one’s company sued would make anyone act weird.

  I clenched my teeth and yanked my stolen van around to point back at the Pacific.

  Rush hour had begun packing the streets. I fought the inching traffic back to Venice Beach, where, predictably, not a sliver of parking was available. I left the minivan in a red zone—the owner could pick it up out of impound or whatever—and pushed my way through the busy boardwalk scene. Even on a weekday the stalls and shops were crowded with cheerful activity, tourists in shorts and bikini tops shouting and laughing as they bought cheesy souvenirs or gathered around buskers and street artists.

  My mouth pinched as I squeezed through the crowds. This wasn’t the type of place I would have chosen for a meeting, especially not while I was a target for some very dangerous people. I tried to keep my eyes everywhere at once.

  After some hiking through the paths and shops I found the skate park. Boarders rolled and skidded up and down the cement slopes, and a good number of spectators packed the rails watching them. I found my way to an empty bench behind the rows of people and sat down to wait, scanning the milling pedestrians with hooded eyes.

  I caught sight of Pilar tripping down from the direction of the street a little after five-thirty, munching some dinner out of a fast food bag. She proffered it as she came up.

  “Fries?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  She made a move to sit down, but I got up instead. “Let’s walk.” The crowds were making me nervous. Too many people to watch.

  We headed down the paths of the beach recreation area until we found a bench that was more secluded, the beach on one side and the buzz of the tourists and shops a distant murmur from the other. Pilar sat down next to me and drew her feet up to sit cross-legged, fast food bag in her lap.

  “So. Who are you, really?” she asked. “And what do you want with Denise’s daughter?”

  “I really do work for Noah Warren,” I said. “What do you know about their daughter?”

  She cocked her head at me, screwing up her face in the slightly over-the-top manner she applied to all of her expressions. “I believe you,” she declared after a few seconds. “You pretty much suck at lying, anyhow.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Now, what do you know about the daughter?”

  She took the time to munch a few more French fries. “Not much. I didn’t even know it was her daughter at the time.”

  “Who was?” Could it be that someone was admitting to having glimpsed Liliana? Only a few minutes ago I’d been resigning myself to her nonexistence.

  “Denise brought her in.” Pilar licked her fingers, sucking the salt from the fries off them. “I was working late. I don’t think they knew I was going to be there.”

  “They?”

  “Denise and Ms. Grant.”

  Grant, Grant, where had I heard that name? “Imogene Grant? The CEO?”

  “Yup. I’d never even seen her up close before. They were real surprised to see me, too. Ms. Grant asked what I was doing there, and I said, well, I work here, and she asked why I was there that late, and I said I was finishing the phone accounts, because Mr. Lau would yell at me if I didn’t—only I didn’t tell her that last part—and she got all snappy and told me to go home.”

  “And did you?”

  She did her squished-in-face expression again. “The CEO told me to leave. What do you think I did?” The come on, duh, was unspoken.

  “Tell me about the girl,” I said.

  “She was real cute. Like, five years old, maybe? With ringlets—I was so jealous; I always wanted ringlets when I was little—it’s hair that boings! Anyway, she was all dressed up, like she’d just come from a party, but she looked awful scared for some reason. And she asked me what my name was.”

  “She did?”

  “Yeah, it was so cute. She was the kind of adorable that makes me want to have kids, like, right now. Anyway, she kind of pulled away from Denise and came up and said, ‘Hi, what’s your name?’ formal as you like. And I said, ‘My name’s Pilar, what’s your name?’ and she said, ‘My name is Liliana’—so cute it killed me—and then Denise pulled her back and kind of herded her away from me.”

  Liliana. Noah Warren’s daughter. Well, I’ll be damned. She did exist. “Did you notice where they took her?”

  “I was busy packing up and leaving, but it looked like they were going back to Denise’s office. And the next day was when Denise was gone and they were cleaning out her things.”

  The next day? I didn’t believe in coincidences. “And they said it was medical leave?”

  “‘They?’ No, uh-uh, there was a resignation letter from Denise. I filed it. It had her signature.”

  Which could have been faked. “Did you know her well?”

  Pilar wrinkled her nose though
tfully. “Uh, not real well. I mean, we didn’t go out for drinks together or anything, if that’s what you mean. But we were friendly and stuff at work. She was just nice, you know? More than anyone else in the department, anyway; most of ’em are these frigid engineer types.”

  How Checker would have squawked if he’d heard her stereotype his people that way. “Wasn’t Denise an engineer, too?”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. But a lot friendlier of one. She would actually stop and talk to me at the office, that kind of thing. I really liked having her around.”

  “What did you talk about? Did she confide in you?”

  “No, you know, it was more like, ‘the weather’s hot today isn’t it’ and ‘did you see the Kings game last night’ and ‘thank goodness the weather’s cooled down this week.’ Small talk sort of stuff.”

  “Did she ever mention her daughter?”

  “Not that I remember. Or her husband—I didn’t even know she was married until everything went down at Arkacite, with the lawsuit and everything. I mean, I guess she probably had a ring, I didn’t really look, but she didn’t talk about her family.”

  “How did she die?”

  Pilar’s eyes popped wide, making her look startlingly like a character from one of Checker’s animes. “She’s dead?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No, I—her letter said she left for health reasons, but…” She slumped, letting her head hang, her hands lying still in her lap. “I’m real sorry to hear that. I liked her.”

  I never knew what to say in this sort of situation. “Was she sick before she left the company?” I asked, for lack of a better question.

  “No, not at all,” answered Pilar, subdued. “At least, not that I ever saw, but I guess she might’ve been and I didn’t know…she’s really dead? I wish I’d known. I would have gone to the funeral.”

  We sat in awkward silence. An ocean breeze stirred the air, and shouts and laughter of the beachgoing crowds reached us faintly from the boardwalk.