Null Set

by S. L. Huang

  Arthur kept his gaze on the mirrors. “Good. Someone picked him up.”

  “And here I thought you were watching our six,” I said. “Any sign of them?”

  “Don’t think it matters. Pretty jammed up now, no way they’re getting past that.”

  “LA traffic, better than a roadblock,” I said. The humor fell flat. “How bad are you hit?”

  “Don’t know.” He had both hands pushed up under the top of his leg, and every line of his posture was tight with pain. “Think it’s just the flesh.”

  “On the scale of ‘hospital’ to ‘call your doctor friend’ to ‘I pour whiskey on it and sew you up,’ where are we?”

  “GSW in a hospital means I got a lot of explaining to do to the cops,” Arthur said. “The drivers are gonna remember you. Won’t get away with saying I was on my lonesome.”

  I knew all that. “Whatever. Checker and I can handle it. Now, will you fucking answer me? Do you need an ER?”

  Arthur thought for another minute. “My DNA’s at the scene anyway, and I’m in the system as an exclusionary. Best to report right away on this one. I can tell ’em you were one of the bad guys.”

  “Great.”

  “Or maybe a Good Samaritan. I can come up with something. Lie low for a bit while they poke around.”

  Good Samaritan was probably even less fitting than goon-for-hire. I followed signs for the next exit ramp and twisted off into local streets.

  Pourdry would pay for this.

  Jesus, I hoped Arthur was all right. As complicated as it made things, part of me was glad he’d chosen the hospital.

  Arthur had his phone out, its screen a bright rectangle smeared with red. “Keep going straight. Right in about five blocks.” He nodded at the blood painting the steering wheel. “You okay?”

  “It’s just my hands.” They stung like a motherfucker, but abrasions always looked worse than they were. All the important bits of me were intact—I just wished I knew that were true about him. Anxiety coiled in my throat; I tried to ignore it. “Turn here?”

  I pulled up outside the emergency room’s ambulance loop. Arthur levered himself out with a grunt, hopping a little as he landed on his good leg. I felt like I should say something, but all I could come up with was, “We’ll get him, Arthur.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I waited for him to limp up the sidewalk before speeding off to ditch the truck. God, he’d better be all right. If he wasn’t, I would kill him.

  My current burner phone was in my pocket. I called Checker as I switched cars, my still-bleeding hands making the keys stick.

  “Cas? Is everything okay?” He didn’t sound like I’d woken him.

  “No.” Something shifted behind me, out of place, and I whipped around, the carbine coming up again. But it was only shadows.

  I was going out of my mind.

  “Cas? Cas, what’s going on? Are you guys all right?”

  Goddammit, focus. “I’m coming over,” I said to Checker, crushing the words to diamond hardness. “And I want everything you can give me on Jacob Pourdry.”

  five

  “JACOB POURDRY,” Checker said, fully dressed and alert when I entered the Hole an hour and a half later, “is a piece of trash of the highest order. Law enforcement knows all about him, but hasn’t been able to touch him because he keeps his hands clean on paper. What’s with the gloves?”

  The scrapes weren’t serious enough for me to have burnt time bandaging them yet, but I’d swung through a convenience store to pick up some work gloves so I would stop bleeding on everything. “It’s nothing. They’ll heal. Keep going, but tell me how Arthur is first.”

  “He’ll have trouble sitting down for a few weeks, but if you have to get shot, apparently the gluteus maximus is the place to do it. They left the bullet in and patched him up, and I’m tracking the police investigation. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah. Keep going on Pourdry. I know he’s a scumbag; everyone knows he’s a scumbag. Tell me what I don’t know.” Pourdry’s was a name even I hadn’t been willing to work for, long before I met Arthur and started getting a conscience. But this was becoming a war, and I was going to need more than common knowledge and urban gossip.

  A lot more.

  “Okay, well, do you want his history?” As usual, Checker worked as he talked, scrolling through documents I didn’t recognize as he recited the litany from memory. “This is stuff I’ve already run through with Arthur, so stop me if you’ve heard it. Pourdry is a privileged sociopath who got bored making millions on Wall Street. I’m not kidding. He was born vanilla and middle-class in Toronto, blew his peers out of the water academically, and ended up at Harvard Business School, where he was apparently so bored he started running a drug ring for all the jacked-up over-pressured grad students. Allegedly. He dropped out halfway through to go be an asshole in the financial sector, wrung what he could out of New York, then decided that wasn’t enough of a playground and expanded his business into one of the most sprawling criminal enterprises in the southwestern United States.”

  “This is all public knowledge?”

  “If you know where to look. I’m telling you, this guy is like Al Capone: the only way they’re going to get him is if they find a misplaced decimal on his taxes. Everybody knows what he does but no one can charge him.”

  “That’s okay; I’m going to put a bullet in his brain.”

  The skin around Checker’s eyes tightened, and he swallowed, still studying his screen.

  “Come on,” I said. “This guy traffics in children. He doesn’t get second chances.”

  “Yeah, just— I’m helping, but give my conscience some plausible deniability, please.”

  I didn’t have the patience for his squeamishness. “His guys shot Arthur tonight. They could’ve killed us both. I need to know where I can find him and what’ll happen to his network if there’s a sudden power vacuum.” If only Pourdry had the charm and skill to keep the ranks following him, maybe beheading the snake would be all I’d need.

  Checker blew out a breath. “I can’t help you with those. They don’t write that sort of thing down on paper, or, you know, in digital files. But I can tell you he runs things through a bunch of fronts and shell corporations—Arthur’s had me trawling his financials for a while, and I’m kicking it into high gear for you. Would a list of addresses for the front companies help to start with? I want to make sure the police investigation isn’t snapping back on you and Arthur first, but I can email it.”

  “Do that. And remember, you still owe me statistical data.”

  “I’m working on it. You didn’t give me much to go on. What’s your plan?”

  “Remember Pilar’s old employer?” I said. “They were developing some sort of frequency generator that would disrupt people’s brains so they wouldn’t succumb to peer pressure or go all mob-like. I want to finish it and then distribute them around LA.” Hopefully their problem had only been the mathematics. “It won’t solve everything, but I’m hoping to filter out at least some of the mindless violence.”

  Checker froze. “That’s how you’re planning to fight crime?”

  “Yup. With math and tech. Smart, huh?”

  Checker spoke like he was choosing his words very carefully. “You want to mess with people’s heads?”

  “Only when they’re getting sucked into groupthink,” I said. “Think how much violence goes on because of gangs, or because of people following along and getting their pleasure centers activated by joining the herd. I’m hoping to counter that.” Checker didn’t look as excited as I expected. “What?”

  “Changing people’s brain chemistry that way, without them knowing—it’s, it’s not right. Please don’t get mad at me for saying this, but—isn’t what you’re proposing exactly what Dawna Polk was doing, with all her ‘fixing’ people into world peace? And we decided she didn’t have the right.”

  And had we really made the correct choice?

  I pushed the thought aw
ay. “Dawna was killing or brainwashing innocent people. The whole chaos effect thing. She didn’t care if they were being violent, as long as their deaths flapped enough butterfly wings to make the world her version of a better place. I only want to affect people when they are becoming dangerous.”

  “But it’s still not—”

  “We caused this situation!” I cried. “We have to do something about it. We took down widespread influence with Pithica—picking off these assholes one at a time is never going to match that!”

  Checker folded his lips together.

  “Come on,” I said. “Arthur just got shot and you still don’t want to help me? What will it take? Will you help after I get shot? After you do? After Pilar is walking down the street by the office and gets mugged?”

  “That’s not fair—”

  “Of course it’s not fair! That’s the whole reason we need to do this!” Of course it’s not fair, mimicked a voice in my head that wasn’t mine. We were born to it. I squashed the phantom and spoke over it. “I’m trying to make it fair. And you won’t help me.”

  “Because I’m against this. I wouldn’t want my brain messed with, and I’m not going to help you do it to anyone else.”

  “Oh, you think you’re likely to get caught up in a mob, do you?”

  “Not the point.”

  “It fucking well is the point,” I said. “Because if you were, and you temporarily lost your ability to reason, I guarantee the thing you’d want most in the world would be for something else to beat that feeling back.” I knew the argument was going to work as soon as I started it, and I tried to keep the egotistical triumph off my face. “Crowd psychology is like a drug. This is going to help people not be affected by something that would otherwise make them feral and amoral against their will.”

  He hesitated.

  “It’s not a pacifier, and it’s not messing with people’s brains,” I insisted. “It’s preventing the deindividuation from doing it.”

  Checker leaned his elbows on his desktop and dropped his face against his hands. “Screw you, Cas.”

  “You should know by now. I’m always right.”

  “That is not even close to being true.” He sat back up, taking off his glasses to rub his eyes. “Dammit, I’ll think about it, okay? But I want you to leave out the Hole. I don’t care what you say; I don’t want my brain affected by this.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Your delicate little neurons will be spared.”

  “And if this thing starts making people so peaceful they want to lie down and die, I’m holding you personally responsible—”

  “You watch too many movies,” I said tiredly. Suddenly feeling every inch of the bruising from tonight, I hitched myself stiffly up to sit on Checker’s desktop between monitors and leaned back against a computer tower.

  I felt Checker move closer to me. He picked up a keyboard off the desktop and slid it on top of one of the towers so he could prop his elbows next to me. “Cas. Hey.”

  I curled my gloved hands loosely against my knees. Blood was starting to seep through along the seams.

  Checker nudged my legs with his shoulder. “You know, only you would assign yourself the problem ‘fight crime’ and then try to come up with a general solution.”

  “General solutions are the only ones worth anything,” I said.

  “Nah,” he answered. “For instance, I think we’re going to find a kickass particular solution to the Cas Russell recombination problem.”

  I huffed out a breath of air that was something like a laugh.

  “I’m working on tracking you back,” he said softly. “Talk to me about some of your clients. The regular ones, or the older ones.”

  “Don’t you have a police investigation to follow?”

  “I’m waiting on CSU. We have a minute.”

  God, everything hurt. I wanted to go and sleep, but moving would hurt, too. “I can’t tell you what I do for them,” I said to Checker. “Discretion is part of the job.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t need that.”

  I sighed. “There’s Tegan. Yamamoto. Dolzhikov. The Lorenzos, before I pissed them off.” I’d done a few jobs for a few Mafia members back in the day, before I’d tangled opposite them a time too many and Mama Lorenzo had started giving me the evil eye. I had to admit, not wanting them to take over LA notwithstanding, I did miss working for them—they’d paid well. And I got along with people like Malcolm, at least most of the time. “What do you want, the whole list? How does this help?”

  “Just tell me about meeting them. Whatever you remember.”

  “Yamamoto got my name from Anton, I think. I don’t know what Anton told him, but he put together a ridiculous display the first time he met with me. Huge array of power, lots of guards with guns, a spread that was practically a banquet. I’ve never met someone who tried so hard to impress me.”

  “From what I hear of Yamamoto, that doesn’t surprise me,” said Checker, the ghost of a smile in his voice. “How did you meet Anton?”

  “Anton was—he and I went back pretty far.” I swallowed. Anton’s death still stabbed. I hadn’t known him all that well on a personal level, but the big, gruff man had left more of a hole than I had expected. And his death had been my fault—his and his daughter’s deaths both. “I needed an information guy, and Rio told me—no, that’s not right. I asked. Rio gave me his name but he couldn’t exactly give me a referral.” Not many people worked with Rio willingly. Anton had been too good of a man to have considered it.

  “How long ago was that?” asked Checker.

  “Oh, uh … five years, or thereabouts? Maybe a little less.”

  “Did you have an information guy before Anton?”

  “No, I did most of the looking up myself before that. But I was sorely in need of someone—I can’t do much beyond basic search engines.”

  “Trust me, I know,” Checker said.

  “Shut up.”

  “And how about, uh, Rio?” Checker asked. “How long have you known him?”

  “Oh, forever,” I said. “We go way back.”

  “How far is way back?”

  “I don’t know; years. Forever.”

  He paused for a moment. “Will you tell me how you met?”

  He sounded surprisingly neutral, and I wondered if the hesitation had been to make sure he’d leached the judgment out of his voice. Checker felt the same way about Rio that Arthur did.

  I couldn’t say I blamed them.

  They have sinned in the eyes of God. The echo was spattered with blood and death. “He saved my life.”

  “From what?”

  “From…” I squeezed my eyes shut, my brain crackling behind my eyelids. “I don’t want to talk about it.” I swallowed. “Jesus, I was shot at and almost run over tonight, in case you don’t remember. Can we not do this now?”

  Checker paused for just long enough that I could tell he wanted to say no. “Of course. We’ll pick it up later. Thanks, Cas, this helps.”

  “Helps whom?”

  He ignored me. “Get some sleep, okay? I promise I’ll think about the data thing. You’re right, it might save people in a way that they’d want, I just— I have to think about it.”

  “Think fast,” I grunted, not entirely graciously.

  But he was right about one thing. I did need sleep. My body had stiffened enough that I briefly considered asking Checker if I could kip on his couch, but I figured I should go to my apartment and peel off the work gloves before they started sticking so I could properly dress my stupid hands. I levered myself out of Checker’s workspace and left the Hole.

  On the sidewalk in front of his house, I stopped. The night snapped into numbers and data structures. I breathed them in, slowly.

  Something was wrong.

  I’d left my carbine in the car, but my Colt still rested against the small of my back, edges and vertices of the metal frame forming my awareness of its precise, deadly shape. I’d checked it over after delivering Arthur, and the dr
op had banged up the finish in a way that pained me more than my hands, but all the tolerances were still tight and solid. My brain and muscles teetered on the edge of pulling it, of drawing and firing at the threat I knew was out there, if only I could pinpoint it—

  “Please,” said a voice. “Don’t.”

  I spun and dove, conjecture becoming reality as the Colt swooped out of my belt and into my gloved fingers.

  “Please!” cried the man, the bronze-skinned man with the dark curly hair, the one I’d seen lurking outside Arthur’s office and hadn’t even noticed, the man who’d been following me—me—for most of the day. The man I’d seen even before now … over and over, haunting my dreams. He raised his empty hands, palms out, and stepped back. “I’m not going to hurt you, Cassandra.”

  I kept my gun trained right between his eyes. “Who the fuck are you?”

  six

  “CASSANDRA, PLEASE,” he said. “Put the gun down.”

  “You’ve been following me.” Nobody was able to follow me. Not like that. “And what did you just call me?”

  The dark-haired man took a slow, cautious step forward, but not as if he was afraid—more like one might approach a frightened puppy. I felt like I was seeing his outlines properly for the first time: a handsome face with well-defined features, a medium build in nondescript casual clothes, a little taller than average but not enough to be remarkable.

  “Cassandra,” he said. “It’s your name, remember?”

  What the hell? “I know that,” I said. “I want to know how you know it.”

  He let out a breath that sounded like relief. “It’s okay. We knew each other a long time ago. You wouldn’t remember.”

  I scrabbled at the disordered mess of my mind, at every memory I could muster up. Every time I’d felt like I was being watched, seeing his blurred shape out of the corner of my eye … the impressions crossed with my dreams until I didn’t know which had actually happened. The dark man running with me through a forest, crouching together in a hidden place, afraid …

  “Cassandra, what’s wrong?”

  I tried to reach back, strained for something solid, and suddenly he seemed horribly familiar, like someone I’d known in another life. But I still couldn’t remember him—