by SL Huang
“I’m peachy,” I said. “You said you were getting her back here. When?”
“Um, I’d think by Monday at the latest,” he answered. “You made a good point about not antagonizing her aunt further, so I’ve had increasingly hysterical reports of a crazy and aggressive mountain lion auto-posting different places since yesterday. Today her school got flooded with emails worrying about the outdoor club camping trip thingy she’s on, some of which weren’t even faked. She was supposed to be there another week with them, eating mud and team building until the first day of classes, but I’m betting university administrators are getting interrupted at dinner by calls from frantic parents right about now—whether it pushes through on a weekend depends how motivated by potential liability they feel, but they’ll be axing the trip and bringing the students back.”
Slower, but it wouldn’t trace back to us or single out Isabella. In fact, under different circumstances it would have been a good idea, but in this case it left me two or three more days to evade Mama Lorenzo—and make sure she didn’t come after anyone else.
If Isabella wasn’t back by the time I’d squared away Warren and Liliana tomorrow morning, I decided, I’d take her return into my own hands. Which gave me less than twenty-four hours to figure out exactly how I was going to play her kidnapping. I needed to anticipate Mama Lorenzo’s next move, and the move after that…make sure to force her into the endgame…I circled the crayon in my hand, mushing it against the paper.
“Hey,” said Checker from above my left shoulder. “Where is that?”
I looked up. “Huh?”
He pointed. “What you’re drawing. Where is it?”
My drawing had splayed out into overlapping red shapes, circles and rectangles and long straight lines slashing through them. “It’s just a doodle.”
“It looks like a floor plan.”
Walls rising up, extending, dimensionalizing—
“No. It’s just scribbles.” I stood abruptly. “I have to get going.”
As I gathered my things and left, out of the corner of my eye I saw Checker lean down, pick up my drawing, and fold it into a pocket. For some reason, that irritated me. I banged my way out of the apartment.
My first stop was back at the park, where Okuda waited on the same bench, this time with a messenger bag beside her. I unzipped it and peered inside. The setting sun revealed a tumble of mustard-colored currency straps wrapping bundles of hundred-dollar bills. I gave the bag a precise shake to rearrange the contents and checked again—she’d been as good as her word.
“Nice doing business with you,” I said.
“With you as well,” said Okuda, with a slight inclination of her head. She turned and left the park, the package of plutonium batteries tucked under her arm.
I hefted the messenger bag. Christ, it was nice when things went smoothly. I called Harrington on the way out of the park to tell him all was well and the plutonium situation was taken care of—which it was—and set off for Cheryl’s.
I’d thought about doing a dead drop, but this was an awful lot of cash to leave somewhere. At the same time, I wasn’t fond of showing my face around Cheryl’s while I still had a hit out on me, just in case the Mob had connected the dots and figured I’d show up. So I texted Checker for Cheryl’s address and stopped about a block prior, parking crookedly in front of a fire hydrant.
The backseat of the clunky SUV had plenty of clutter from its previous owners, from empty fast food bags to papers and receipts to some ratty sweatshirts. I stuffed some of the clutter into the messenger bag on top of the money so it wasn’t visible anymore and then hopped out, all my senses on alert.
Cheryl’s block was on the rougher side, apartment buildings all mashed up against each other and trash strewn across the sidewalks and into the streets. A homeless guy was snoozing on the sidewalk against a low wall in front of one of the apartment buildings. I went up and crouched down next to him, my nostrils twitching at the odor of stale sweat and staler alcohol. “Hey,” I said.
He blinked awake, his eyes bloodshot in a face greasy and black with grime. “Can’t a man sleep!” he slurred at me aggressively. “Fuck you!”
“Wanna make a hundred dollars?” I asked, undeterred.
“Hundred dollars! What you talking about making a hundred dollars? I look like I have a hundred dollars to you?”
I pulled five twenties out of my pocket. “No, I’m giving you a hundred dollars. Take this bag to number 5208. Give it to a blond woman named Cheryl. You do that, I’ll give you this money. Okay?”
He reached out a grimy hand to snatch at the bills; I lifted them out of his reach. “No, take the bag first. If she’s not there, just bring it back. I’ll be watching.”
“Fuck you, hundred dollars,” he mumbled at me, but he wobbled upright and reached for the bag.
“Number 5208,” I reminded him. “A woman named Cheryl. Got it?”
“Five-two-oh-eight, fucking Cheryl, not fucking stupid,” he mumbled, and ambled off. I went back to my car and watched. I wasn’t sure my messenger was quite all there, but he would do.
I dialed Cheryl while he ambled down the street.
“Hello?”
“Cheryl? It’s Cas Russell.”
“Russell.” She snorted. “What do you want?”
“Are you at home right now? I’m sending someone to your door with some cash.”
She paused for a minute, as if that wasn’t what she’d been expecting. “Yeah, I’m here. Got no place else to be, you know. Grealy’s is a fucking crime scene, thanks to you.”
“Well, there’s a guy heading up to you with a bag of cash. Ignore the smell. The bag’s from me.”
“I got no idea how much the damage’ll be,” Cheryl said, still belligerent.
“Then you can consider this a down payment, and you can update me,” I said impatiently.
She hesitated again. I realized she hadn’t actually expected me to make good on the other night. Probably with reason, considering I’d been the one to get her bar shot up in the first place.
“Christ, I’m not going to leave you hanging,” I said. “That’s not how I do business.”
“You’d be surprised,” she said. “More and more douchebags out there tryin’ to stiff me on shit. Nobody’s old school anymore.”
By that time my dirty messenger had made it to her doorstep. I watched him ring the bell; Cheryl pulled open the door, nodded to him, took the bag, and shut the door again.
“Got it,” she said in my ear. I heard some rustling, and then Cheryl’s voice took on a very different tone. “Shit. Russell. This is too much.”
I’d been hoping that would be the case. “Then consider it an apology for the inconvenience.”
“You’re still banned. This don’t change nothing.”
“Yeah, fine.” My delivery man was shuffling back toward me; I put down the window and tossed the folded up bundle of twenties out onto his little stack of belongings before starting the car and peeling away from the curb. “If the Lorenzos give you any trouble, call me.”
She didn’t answer.
“Cheryl?”
“I got someone here right now wants to talk to you.” Her tone was back to belligerent. “I’m not taking sides in this, you get me? I don’t want me or my bar in the middle of your goddamned feud. You and me, we’re square, and anything else happens, I’m not a part of it. That fucking clear?”
I opened my mouth to ask her what the hell she was talking about, but before I could, Benito Lorenzo’s voice came loud and obsequious over the line. “Cas! It’s Benito!” He drew his name out like it was a declaration. “You didn’t call me back, man! I’m hurt.”
I almost crashed into the car in front of me. Fuck, they had staked out Cheryl’s—or at least, Benito had. I’d thought I was being paranoid.
“Your family is trying to kill me,” I reminded Benito acidly. “Why on earth would I call you back?”
“It’s a misunderstanding,” he said cheerfull
y. “You and me, we’ll make this right, eh?”
Like I believed that for a second. “Your mother—”
“Stepmother,” he corrected. “My step-mama.”
“Your stepmother doesn’t see it that way.”
“Eh. She’s a woman, you know? They get emotional about these things.”
His dismissal was so far off from reality that I wondered briefly if he’d even met his stepmother. “I’ll tell her you said that,” I said.
“Oh, uh—better not. Don’t want to rock the boat, you know.” He laughed a little too loudly. “How about you and me, we work this out? Huh?”
“How?” I demanded.
“Eh?”
“How do we work it out?”
“Eh, you know. The Madre, she likes me,” he bragged. “I get her to come, I get you to come, we sit down all civilized and talk, right? Everyone’s happy. Worth a try, eh?”
“I tried talking to her,” I said. “It didn’t work.”
“Because I wasn’t there. I told you, I’m her favorite.”
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. “Good-bye.”
“Wait wait wait wait! You owe me one, remember? For the introduction? You said. Hear me out.”
“I’m not going to repay a favor by walking into an ambush—”
“No, no—just listen, okay? You let me finish.”
I wondered how long it would take someone to trace this call. If Benito himself was tracing me. How long had I been talking to Cheryl? The SUV had no pickup, but I flattened the accelerator, speeding toward the freeway. “You have one minute,” I said. “And that makes us square.”
“You drive a hard bargain, man! Okay. My stepmama—she maybe isn’t the best person to run things, you know?”
What the fuck? “What are you saying?”
His voice got lower, fast and cagey. “All I’m saying is, maybe I tell you where she is, is all. Maybe if she’s not running things no more, maybe there’s a new person in power. And maybe he’s got no problem with you and your friend. You know?”
I almost laughed. The idea that Benito Lorenzo would be the preferred person to step into a power vacuum was ridiculous, no matter what his family connections. But if he could at least leverage those connections to get the sword lifted off Checker and me once Mama Lorenzo was out of the picture…well, I couldn’t say I cared one way or another about what happened with the Mob’s power hierarchy, as long as Benito could make sure we were forgotten.
Still, it felt like a long shot. A very long and dangerous shot, with a high probability that he was only drawing me in to try to double-cross me. And even if he wasn’t, I’d be ensnarling myself in a Mafia coup as a hired assassin, which did not sound like a position with a lot of longevity.
But considering my other options, or lack thereof…
“Hypothetically,” I said, “you have someone in mind you’d want to blame for this? I’m not going to take out Mama Lorenzo for you if it means this target on my back is going to become permanent.”
“Right! Of course!” Benito said, way too fast. Paragon of competence and forethought, this one. Fuck me. “Of course. Uh—the Madre, she has enemies. Many enemies.”
And fuck me twice. This was ridiculous. If there was one person I didn’t want to depend on in a plot against one of the most powerful women on the West Coast, that person was Benito Lorenzo. “Come up with a plan,” I said shortly. “I like it, I’ll think about it.”
“But this would solve all of our problems, for both of us—”
“I said I’d think about it. Come up with a plan that has a chance of working.”
I hung up on him and texted Cheryl’s phone the number for my permanent voicemail box, just in case Benito later had something worth saying to me. Then I popped the battery out of the phone in my hand in case he was already double-crossing me and swerved down the next off ramp. I needed to switch cars. And phones—I’d left the spares at Miri’s.
Shit. Was there a way I could use Benito’s hunger for power? A way that kept my back covered in case he was about to stab me in it?
I’d have to think about it while getting ready for the Arkacite meeting. Checker hadn’t been mistaken when he’d asked whether it was a good idea to be meeting Grant on her own turf—we needed to be prepared. Not that I was expecting anything to go wrong; Grant might have a hell of a lot of private security, but at the end of the day, Arkacite was a corporation. They lived in the civilized world, a place where people didn’t shoot each other on a regular basis. If she turned on us, her game plan would be getting us handed to the police.
Which we didn’t want to happen, obviously, but I didn’t think it was much of a concern. Grant would go a long way to protect Arkacite’s secrets, and she seemed as loathe to let the authorities in on this matter as we were. Compared to my other problems, the Arkacite meeting felt about as dangerous as going up against an aggressive flatworm.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t need a backup plan.
I thought about the Arkacite building schematics I had swallowed the night before. I had until nine a.m.
CHAPTER 21
I ARRIVED at Arkacite at 9:12 the next morning and recognized Checker, Warren, and Pilar waiting for me outside in the plaza. As I approached, Checker detached himself from the group and came over. “Everything good?”
“What’s Pilar doing here?” I said.
He shrugged. “Eh, she wanted to come. They treated her like crap here; I figured she deserved to see them taken down a few pegs. Besides, you never know when it might be useful to have someone on our side who can call them out if they try to bullshit us.”
He did have a point. But…“Wait. Who’s watching Liliana?” I’d tried to get Arthur back, but he was still at Tegan’s.
“Nobody needs to watch her,” scoffed Checker. “I just disabled her movement capabilities for the moment.”
“You what?”
“I’m joking! I’m joking. Calm down. Miri’s looking after her. She’s home for the weekend.”
I took a breath, unsettled by how strong my response had been.
“I made some noise about an abusive stalker parent and warned her not to leave the apartment or open the door, which she was frighteningly blasé about, by the way. My phone will get a ping if the security system detects anything.” He waggled the smartphone at me.
And thanks to Checker, Miri’s security was about as good as it was possible for a civilian apartment to have. Still, I would have felt a hell of a lot more comfortable with Arthur. Given Checker’s talents, I was less worried about the efficacy of Miri’s security system than I was about trusting Miri or Pilar, but it wasn’t like I had a lot of people on call to babysit a five-year-old girl.
Or something that looked like one. What I should have done was turn her off and lock her in a vault.
“In a few hours it won’t matter, anyway,” I said, more to convince myself than Checker. “We’re going to hash this out right now.”
“We hope,” said Checker.
“Yeah.” I fished into my pocket and pulled out a compact shape of rubber and metal about the size of my hand. “Speaking of, stick this in a pocket.”
“What is it?”
“A gas mask.”
“A what?” he yelped.
“It’s a contingency plan, genius. Next time tell me if you’re bringing an extra person.” I relented at the horrified look on his face. “We’re not going to need it. They’re a corporation, not a crime syndicate—the worst we have to worry about is them calling the police, and they won’t. They want to deal.”
He took the mask, fingering it nervously. “I hope you’re right.”
We all walked into the broad lobby together. It was remarkably quiet, with only the security guards at their posts and nobody else. Come to think of it, the plaza outside had been empty, too.
“Did they send everyone home just to meet with us?” I wondered aloud.
Pilar gave me a funny look. “It�
�s Saturday. I mean, some of the hardcore engineers still come in on weekends, but not many other folks.”
Oh. Right.
Three people waited by the elevators. One was Lau, wearing an exceedingly sour expression and a surgical dressing over the gash on his face. The other two were women. One was a heavy white woman with a drab fashion sense and the type of fluffy haircut only older women seemed to get; I guessed she was Grant. The other woman was much younger, had longer hair, and was far too thin, as if someone had wrapped a business suit around a pencil.
The security guard at the desk made an abortive movement as we walked by. Pilar’s stride hitched a bit, but the rest of us kept going and she hurried to keep up.
I led the way through the accessibility gate. When I went through the metal detector it went off spectacularly; I ignored it and marched up to the group by the elevators. “Grant?”
The older woman stepped forward. “Are you the person I spoke to on the phone?” She didn’t offer a hand, and her tone was not quite hostile.
I matched it. “Yes, I am. You already know Noah Warren. These are my associates.” I waved at Checker and Pilar.
Grant nodded at her people. “You and Mr. Lau have…met. Clarise Hryshchuk is the head of our legal team.”
“Good,” I said, “since I intend you and Mr. Warren to sign something by the end of this meeting.”
Grant’s face twitched.
“Shall we?” said the lawyer, looking back and forth between Grant and me. When neither of us answered, she stepped over and swiped a guest pass to call the elevator, her heels clicking on the lobby floor. “We have a conference room prepared,” she announced to us as we followed them in. Grant and Lau seemed disinclined to be civil; the lawyer glanced at them and shifted uncomfortably, transferring her briefcase from one hand to the other. I didn’t blame her. The tension was palpable.
As the elevator slid smoothly upward, Lau sidestepped closer to Pilar. “I knew you were up to something, you little sneak,” he said snidely, talking down his nose at her.
Pilar scooted backward so he was no longer in her personal space and turned to me. “Can I kick him in the balls, or will that mess everything up?”
