by SL Huang
A sound crunched across the desert—wheels, with headlights swooping through the empty darkness. I pushed myself to sit up all the way, and managed it on the third try. Standing seemed like too much to ask, but at least sitting freed up my left hand. I slid it around the back of my waist where I still had the Mob sniper’s sleek little Browning stowed, now with a matching Browning-shaped bruise in the flesh of my back. I eased it out gingerly.
The headlights stopped. “Russell?” called a voice.
The adrenaline poured out of me so fast that I didn’t realize I had fallen down again until my head smacked against the dirt and I had a face full of stars. “Here,” I said weakly.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel and debris, and a penlight sliced through the darkness. It crossed my eyes and I squinted away.
“Russell—oh, God. Russell.” Arthur was next to me, crouching down, hands reaching out. “Where you injured?”
“Everywhere,” I said.
“I can call—a doctor, or—Russell, maybe you need an ambulance—”
“No,” I said. “I’m okay. Just help me up.”
“I ain’t think you should—”
“Arthur,” I said, and something in my tone shut him up. He came around to my left side, and I hitched myself up onto my elbow again as he eased an arm around my back. Half-collapsing into Arthur, I managed to get to my feet, though I was pretty sure my legs were going to liquefy under me at any second.
“Easy,” murmured Arthur, the way one might soothe a startled calf. “Easy…”
He helped me to the car. Helped me in. Another rental, I noticed.
“Sorry about your car,” I said.
“It’s okay. I got the insurance.”
“The police will want to know—”
“Someone involved in this mess keeps stealing my cars,” he said casually. “Not implausible. I am a PI investigating the android situation, after all. I’ll take care of it.” He made sure I was inside and shut the passenger door gently, leaning on the open window. “Lau?” His voice had gone grave.
“He’s dead.” I stared straight ahead, through the windshield, the stars a vast diamond-crusted panoply over the desert.
Because Arthur was Arthur, he went to check. Then he came back and got in, starting the engine without comment.
“I fucked up,” I said.
“I know,” said Arthur, driving us quietly away from the scene.
“Lau’s dead because of me.”
“Yeah,” said Arthur softly. “Maybe.”
I would have preferred it if he’d yelled. Said “I told you so.” Left me injured in the desert.
“Agarwal got Liliana,” I said.
“I figured.”
The car bumped over the rocky terrain, the desert scrub scraping against the sides like bad chalk on a blackboard. Arthur reached the road and eased onto it, picking up speed.
“How did you know to come?” I asked.
“Was going to anyway,” he said. “But Vikash called Denise.” He cleared his throat. “He was…complimentary. Told her to come pick up her tech, in case she ain’t had eyes already.” His voice was very neutral. “Real courteous, he was. She played it, fortunately.”
Courteous. Of course he was. Rayal was one of the few people in the world Agarwal had any respect for. One of the few human beings he saw as on his level.
My mind replayed the ’bot’s demented smile as he’d held the gun in my face and then discarded it. He’d had less compunction about killing human beings than he’d had about destroying what he thought was his fellow scientist’s technology. I wondered briefly why he hadn’t taken me to dissect along with Liliana…but no, I thought, that would be stealing. He regarded Liliana as his own work, at least in large part, but plagiarizing Denise’s personal advancements was apparently a bridge too far.
Arrogance, I thought. I should be able to use that against him.
Against him? He already won.
Agarwal was smart. I had no doubt that if he didn’t want us to find him again, he was long gone. Along with Liliana.
Liliana. I didn’t care what Checker and Rayal said—I’d handed a scared five-year-old girl over to a murderer. A man who probably planned to cut her open and tinker with her brain.
A little girl.
And we still had to deal with the FBI coming after Denise and Pilar, and probably after the rest of us too, eventually. “We need to send Rayal and Pilar into hiding,” I mumbled. “Send their pictures over to Tegan. Tell him it’s a rush job.”
“Will do,” said Arthur.
The desert night sped past.
“I’ve got a hole in the wall in Sylmar,” I said. “You can drop me there.” I’d have medical supplies stashed there. And I couldn’t face Checker, Pilar, and Denise right now.
“Then you gotta let me stay with you,” said Arthur, in his I’m-trying-to-be-reasonable voice. “Help patch you up. Ain’t gonna leave you alone.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “You need to watch everyone else’s backs.”
He hesitated.
“Arthur,” I said, and my voice sounded brittle in my ears. “Please.”
A few more miles of empty highway went by, the breeze from the open windows soothing my rioting equilibrium.
“Swear to me you’ll be okay without seeing a doc tonight,” said Arthur.
“For sufficiently broad values of ‘okay,’” I said tiredly. “Yes.”
Arthur had a vague idea of how well I knew my own body, and trusted me on it, thank God. “All right,” he said. He pulled out another burner phone and passed it to me. “You call me if you need anything though, right? Anything at all.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
By the time we pulled up at my bolt hole in Sylmar, my equilibrium had stabilized enough for me to get out of the car on my own. I only wobbled a little. “Take care of them,” I told Arthur through the still-open passenger window. I tried to be subtle about leaning heavily on the car as I did so.
“That sounded too dramatic for my taste,” said Arthur. “Promise me all you’re going to do tonight is patch yourself up and get some sleep.”
“I promise,” I said. “No suicide runs in the offing. Just rest and meds. I’ll come by Miri’s in the morning.”
“I’ll pick you up,” he corrected.
“Okay,” I said.
“Russell…”
I turned back.
“You was trying to do a good thing tonight.”
“Does it matter?” Something in my throat made the words scratch.
He didn’t have a ready answer. I turned and went inside.
I sat on the floor of the kitchenette area, the cheap linoleum blessedly cool, and swallowed a fistful of painkillers and another one of antibiotics. The wound in my arm was already getting infected; I could tell. The pain had become a constant beat against my senses, an ugly rawness clawing at me until I couldn’t ignore it.
I picked up the phone Arthur had given me and texted everyone relevant the new number. Maybe that would help keep Arthur from thinking I was about to go on some revenge crusade.
Not that I wouldn’t have, if I’d known where to go.
A vivid image unfolded in my imagination, Liliana on a table in a lab, her skull cracked open, Agarwal giggling as he manipulated the wires inside—
I tried to remind myself that I’d seen her code. That I knew she wasn’t conscious. Wasn’t a person.
I tried to reassure myself that Agarwal had seemed to care about her, in his own twisted way. That it was possible he would treat her well. She was his work, after all.
I tried to force my attention back to the problems I could still deal with. The people who were still alive.
Agarwal would disappear with Liliana, maybe to Japan. He’d live out his sociopathic tendencies and probably commit a few more murders before he finally met someone smarter than he was. I didn’t think him likely to come back and bother us. He’d gotten what he wanted.
De
nise and Pilar I’d send out of the country. They could find new lives for themselves outside the reach of US authorities. Since nobody had ID’d Checker and me yet, maybe he could squash that side of the FBI investigation.
The lynch mob would find something new to focus on within the next few days, as the twenty-four hour news cycle steamrolled forward. The government would probably do as Checker feared and cripple AI research in the United States, just as Okuda and Ally Eight had wanted, but that was out of my hands, and to be honest, I couldn’t bring myself to care very much.
Both the government and the public would probably scapegoat Denise for all the murders, and everything would go away.
It would be over.
I’d move on to the next contract. Write this one off.
My stomach curdled, and my throat closed without warning—I swallowed against it, fighting back the nausea, trying to breathe.
Fuck.
I had never screwed up a job so monumentally in my life. Every single person who’d come to me on this case, every single person I’d tried to protect, was either dead, comatose, a prisoner, or a fugitive.
Liliana’s cheerful face rose in my memory. Petting the cats. Playing with oobleck. Drawing her picture. Holding my hand like she fucking trusted me.
I was a royal fuck-up.
My phone rang. I pawed around on the linoleum for it with my left hand. “Hello?”
“Russell?” A woman’s voice.
“Who’s this?”
“It’s Cheryl Maddox.”
Adrenaline flooded me. “Are you okay? The Lorenzos didn’t—”
“No. I’m tight. Mama Lorenzo’s been chill.”
I deciphered the slang to mean she was both unharmed and unendangered, and slowly let my bruised body relax back against the wall. “Uh. Good.”
“Yeah.”
Dead air swallowed the connection.
“Was there some reason you called me?” I struggled to keep the impatience out of my tone.
She hesitated. “Word on the street. The Lorenzos have a price out on you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.” I supposed Mama Lorenzo had gotten sick of me beating up her family and decided to go out-of-house. Chalk up one more problem to the list.
Cheryl didn’t say anything.
“What else?”
“It’s high,” she said. “Real high. They want you bad, hon. Pro killers’ll be flying in from other continents for this one.”
I tried to feel flattered by that, but it didn’t come. Shit. “Thanks,” I said again, with more sincerity. “Really. Thanks, Cheryl.”
“Well, I gotta admit, I thought about collecting myself, but I’m still so fucking pissed at them. You watch your back, okay? Hate to give up all that money for nothing.”
“I owe you,” I said, and meant it.
“No, you don’t. I told you, I ain’t taking sides here. You didn’t hear this from me. I’m out.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Right. Of course.”
She hesitated, then added a gruff, “Good luck” and hung up.
I sat with the phone in my lap and my eyes closed. Cheryl had warned me, but empty pessimism had hollowed every word. She didn’t expect me to last a day. Maybe two if I was very, very lucky.
And once I was taken care of, Mama Lorenzo’s enforcers would come after Checker and break his fingers—or possibly just kill him at this point, if I’d gotten her pissed enough—and drive Arthur’s business into the ground and generally ruin their lives as thoroughly as she knew how. Of course, I wouldn’t care, because I’d be dead.
The floor felt very comfortable right now. I didn’t want to get up.
God, the Los Angeles Mafia’s assassination resources might be bad enough on their own, but with that many pros looking for me…I’d had the luck of the devil to dodge one sniper shot. I wouldn’t be able to dodge them all. The probabilities multiplied and dwindled…disjunction, multiplication, trending toward zero.
“I just want to go to sleep,” I said forlornly to the ceiling, leaning my head back against the wall. “I’ve had a really bad day.”
Zero. And then on to Checker and Arthur. Unless I did something.
I’d fucked up everything else. Maybe, just maybe, I could take care of this one thing. Save the only two people in my life who weren’t yet dead or on the run.
Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Cas. Get a hold of yourself.
No maneuvering room left anymore to implement any of my half-started plans, to try to beat Mama Lorenzo at her own game. She’d ratcheted up too fast, escalating while I was distracted by Arkacite and the ’bots, changing tactics before I could catch up with her. In retrospect…well. I’d underestimated her.
Time to go all in.
I picked up my phone. If I fucked this up too, at least I’d go out swinging. The thought gave me a small spark of satisfaction, in a grim sort of way.
First I texted Arthur and told him I’d be out of touch because I was going to sleep. No reason to make him worried when he couldn’t reach me, and I was about to burn this phone.
I dialed Benito Lorenzo.
“Hullo!” Club music reverberated through the connection, louder than the first time I’d called him. I winced away from it.
“Benito? Benito!”
“Yes? This is Benito! Come on down!” He drew out the last word like a game show host and capped it with a whoop. A woman shrieked happily in the background.
“Benito, it’s Cas Russell!”
“Ca—oh!” He exchanged quick words with someone else that I didn’t catch, and after a rustling and several bangs and one more satisfied whoop from the woman, the music and loudness cut off, leaving only a dull thump of bass vibrating the cell phone. My ear rang.
“Hi, Benito,” I said. “I want to take you up on your offer.”
“My offer? Oh, right, my, uh, my offer!” he stuttered. “You asked, uh—you asked me about those details; I still need to—”
“Too late,” I said. “We’re just going to have to go with what we’ve got. I need you to set up your mother somewhere where she doesn’t want anyone to know where she’s going, okay? I want as few witnesses as possible, and nobody in your family.” Of course, he would know, and he’d probably blab the first time he was drunk. I’d deal with that later.
“I’ll, uh, I’ll work on it—”
“No. I need you to figure this out now. Tonight. Or the deal’s off.”
“Tonight? The timing, it’s not so good, you see—”
“You can get high and laid another night. Did you hear your mother is sending bounty hunters after me?”
“My stepmama…and, eh, I might’ve heard something, but it’s not—”
“These aren’t the dregs of society kind of bounty hunters, and let me speak plainly: I am going to take her out before they can start looking for me. If you don’t help me, I’ll shoot her in her bed, witnesses be damned, because at this point even having the Mafia after me for revenge will buy me time if it shakes people’s faith in the bounty. But I’d much rather you set her up in a nice witness-free way that’ll allow you to step into the power vacuum. Do you hear me? Can you handle that?” I didn’t have much hope. But I also had nothing to lose.
“Aw, Cas,” drawled Benito, his slick confidence back in place, “I can do it. You don’t trust me, do you? The Madre likes me. Wrapped around my pinky fi—”
“You have until seven a.m.,” I said. “If you don’t have it set up by then, I’m going after her anyway, but I’ll come visit you first.”
“Cas! Why do you say such things? We are friends!”
“For now,” I said. “Until seven a.m., at least. And once it’s done, I expect the hits on us to be called off immediately, or I’ll tell the rest of your family who set up their Godmother.”
“You hurt me. In my heart. So scary, all the time—”
I hung up on him.
Then I popped the battery out of the phone and dragged myself over to the bed. I flopped down ha
lf on my left side and half on my stomach, the parts of my body that hurt the least. If I didn’t get some sleep, it really would be the death of me.
CHAPTER 32
I WOKE a little before six, and everything hurt.
My muscles had stiffened into one position like they’d been poured into a cake tin and overcooked. I slowly unkinked my joints and unsnarled myself into a sitting position, each movement hitching and stabbing like someone was hacking me up with a rusty meat cleaver. My right arm burned, and the rest of me was being very insistent about the fact that I’d recently gone toe-to-toe with a mountain, a sniper, thirty-six guided missiles, and a vehicle explosion, and been thoroughly owned by all of them.
I don’t like lessons in humility. I try very hard not to experience them.
I’d never had one of my failures cost so many other people’s lives, though.
I stretched the sticky muscles until I could move in something other than a hunching limp, and at six-thirty I put my phone back together and called Benito.
“Cas! Good morning!”
“I hope so,” I said, trying for ominous. Unfortunately it just came out tired.
“You, ah…what we spoke of last night, eh…”
Like he was such a delicate flower. What an ass. “Don’t tell me. You couldn’t manage it.”
“What? No, no, we’re, uh—we’re good to go!”
Until that moment, I honestly hadn’t thought he’d had the balls. “Really?”
“Yes, yes! The Madre, she is having a…very important…uh, appointment, she thinks, with perhaps a member of the police department—”
“I didn’t think Mama Lorenzo would be one to hop when the police said—” My brain caught up. “Oh. They’re all in her pocket, aren’t they.”
“She’ll be at La Café Bijet, for a breakfast meet, she thinks. Very important things happening. The FBI is in town, did you know?”
“I did know,” I said, only a little ironically.
Benito breezed on blithely. “Eight o’clock sharp, so she thinks. The restaurant will be empty for the meeting, no customers, orders for no disturbances. The Madre, she can do that. You make it look like an accident, yes? I take care of the rest. Bzzt! No more bounty.”
