Null Set

by S. L. Huang

  As if to prove my point, a guy from the Grigoryan crime family glared at me from across the room.

  I blithely ignored him. “Hey, Malcolm. Who’s the blonde?” She was one of the few women in the room and also one of the only people I didn’t recognize. She was also sorely out of place here—she wore a navy blue business suit and carried a briefcase, as if she had just stepped out of a boardroom.

  “Lauren Vance,” Malcolm answered me, keeping his voice low. “She works for Pourdry.”

  “Pourdry’s fucking in on this?” The man was gobbling territory every time I turned around.

  “He’s no worse than the 4X8s,” Malcolm said.

  “That’s not a high bar. Come on, you were the one sniping his minions.”

  “I guess we all choose our own code, Russell.”

  Vance sat with her legs crossed and let her blue eyes wander around the room. They didn’t snag on me. Either she had a great poker face, or Pourdry hadn’t made me as the person who’d been with Arthur. After all, they’d tracked him to the hospital via the gunshot wound, but given the darkness, the distance, and the fact that I’d killed most of them, they probably only had the vaguest description of me: short and brown and deadly.

  That would narrow it down pretty drastically, but maybe not enough yet.

  I scooted my center of mass forward so I was on the edge of my seat. I couldn’t be the only one here who had a current tab open with someone else in the room. Making things worse, as I scanned the crowd it occurred to me that almost everyone present was in the secondary ranks—no big bosses had shown up, only their assistants and attack dogs. Smart on the leaders’ parts, but people were a lot more willing to off the cannon fodder. This meeting was a bloodbath waiting to happen.

  I kept my weight even, alert and ready. I couldn’t help feeling like I owed it to Cheryl to do my damnedest to prevent Grealy’s from turning into a crime scene again. If this became a massacre, however, there wasn’t going to be much even I could do to prevent it.

  It’s only a massacre if the news reports say it is, boasted a shadow from my dreams. Otherwise it’s a victory.

  I clenched one hand against my thigh, my fingernails digging in hard. I had to stay ready.

  Yamamoto breezed in. “Cassu-san!”

  “Taku, hey,” I tried to check him, “hang on a second. Look around; are you sure this is such a good ide—”

  “We talk later, yes? So glad you came!” he gushed, before sweeping past to work the room, shaking hands and bowing extravagantly at people. A little, slimy, sleazy fellow who always wore cheap suits that made him look like a used car salesman, Yamamoto had a finger in just about everything and made an appearance of trying to get along with everyone—at least on the surface. His entourage of bodyguards and yes-men crowded into the bar behind him like a huge, silent herd of buffalo, not one of them under six-four.

  For an instant their images crossed each other, reminding me of people I’d never seen.

  “That man is either very savvy or very stupid,” Malcolm murmured beside me.

  “Maybe both,” I answered with an effort. “We did all come, didn’t we?”

  “Which might only mean we’re not any smarter.”

  “Hullo, everybody! Hullo. Hullo!” Yamamoto had finished his rapid and enthusiastic round of the room. Now he waved his arms above his head to get our attention and hopped up on a barstool. “Thank you for coming!”

  A Latino guy who was about nineteen or twenty stood up, hitching his jacket importantly and sneering at the rest of us. “What is this bullshit? I ain’t working with any of these fucks.”

  “Now, now, Miguel,” Yamamoto said. “We have such grave happenings in common at this moment. Someone is acting against us. We must find them, and eliminate.” He clicked his tongue.

  “And how you plan to do that?” shouted a belligerent woman. I vaguely recognized her colors as a crew out of South Vermont Avenue.

  “You’re welcome to leave,” one of the Grigoryans sneered at her. “Take the rest of the street trash with you.”

  The half of the room in colors surged forward simultaneously, somehow all edging away from each other at the same time.

  “Whoa! Whoa!” cried Yamamoto, waving his hands overhead again. “I ask you, peace, please! You would not insult our host this way, would you?” He gestured expansively at Cheryl.

  Cheryl, for her part, had been standing with her arms crossed, but once all eyes were on her she reached forward with great deliberation and drew a Mossberg pump-action from under the bar. She pointed it in the general direction of the room and racked it, the chu-chunk more expressive in the silence than any words would have been.

  “We must all stand together on this,” declared Yamamoto. “We must.”

  “How do we know you ain’t the one screwing all the rest of us?” demanded the combative Miguel.

  “The horror!” cried Yamamoto, putting a hand over his breast. “How could you expect that of me? I! The one warning you all of this threat!”

  “I want to know what you expect to do about it,” said a young East Asian guy with a close-shaved head. I didn’t know him either, but he was sitting with Kevin Fong, and that pegged him as attached to the Chuntianjie bikers.

  One of the Russians at the next table grunted in agreement.

  “Oh!” cried Yamamoto as if he had not expected to be called upon for anything but hosting. “The first thing, I say, is we must find out what is causing this. We all see the effects, but what has happened to deliver us to this malice? We must pool our knowledge.”

  The bar was silent.

  “Nobody has a fucking clue,” the same Grigoryan finally shouted. There was a chorus of agreement.

  “You accusing one of us, man?” Miguel was on his feet again. “You wanna make some accusations, you come right out and say it!”

  “I do not accuse anyone!” Yamamoto raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, but two of his bodyguards inched closer, and a few of the others edged toward Miguel and the Grigoryan. “I want us to find this! Together! It is bad for business, for all of us!”

  “Maybe you’re the one who’s bad for business!” someone in the back called out.

  “Yeah!” cried the woman who had spoken earlier. “How we know you ain’t brung us here to get us in some scheme of yours? We ain’t trust you!”

  More shouts of agreement. Discontented shuffling.

  “I say you tell us what’s happening!” shouted the heckler from the back.

  The bodyguard to Yamamoto’s right moved his hand an inch closer to the edge of his coat.

  “Hey!” shouted Miguel, and tried to go for his piece first.

  I was faster. My Colt thundered in my hand and Miguel shrieked and dropped his cheap-ass pistol. I hopped up onto the chair I’d been sitting on in one move.

  Behind me, one of Yamamoto’s bodyguards—a huge black man named Cesar whom I really liked—pile-drove the Grigoryan into his seat.

  But nobody else twitched.

  My momentum stalled out like I’d tripped over a pile of bricks. I’d expected to be shooting half the room. I’d shot Miguel’s gun instead of him because I’d wanted to keep the peace here for Cheryl’s sake and leaving corpses wasn’t the best way to do that, but I hadn’t expected the luxury to last more than a second and a half. This room, with these people, should have erupted into violence.

  It didn’t. Everyone sort of shuffled their feet and looked at their drinks.

  “I owe Cheryl,” I declared into the silence, totally unnerved and trying not to show it. “Nobody shoots anybody, okay?”

  The Grigoryan spat in my general direction, but he didn’t try to get up again.

  Miguel was shoving the kid next to him in the same colors, reaming him out for not backing him up. The subject of the rant just sort of sat there and let himself get shoved, not looking at his comrade.

  What the fuck.

  And then it hit me, much slower than it should have: I was seeing the brain ent
rainment work in real time.

  I rewound the sequence. The various factions had pushed and shouted and surged, but nowhere near to the degree they should have, and a lot of people hadn’t joined in when I would have expected them to. In a meeting like this, all seconds and stooges, where no one was worried about accidentally executing someone at the top of a crime pyramid—except maybe Yamamoto, whose bodyguards were half the mass in the room anyway—this easily could have erupted into a gang war.

  With my little app, I had just single-handedly prevented one.

  “Everybody go home and cool off,” I said.

  The people who hadn’t moved to violence didn’t need telling twice. They all avoided eye contact with each other as chairs scraped back and the various factions shuffled out, leaving as much air space between themselves as possible.

  “You all think about this!” Yamamoto shouted after them, flapping his hands. “You go home, you think! We come back and talk again, yes? We fix this!”

  “In your dreams, man,” muttered one of the Carrion Boys, but a few of the other folk—especially the older ones, or the ones from the crime families—gave Yamamoto subtle little nods.

  I’d shut down the gang war, but I hadn’t shut down Yamamoto’s little crusade. Well, shit.

  At least I’d ensured I’d be invited next time, I supposed.

  I kept a close eye on Lauren Vance as the last of the invitees filed toward the exit. She stepped over to Yamamoto for a moment and exchanged a few quiet words with him. Then she squeezed his arm, picked up her briefcase, and headed out.

  I wanted to follow her. I hopped down off the chair.

  “Cassu-san!” Yamamoto hailed me.

  Great. I wheeled around. He was talking to Cheryl and waving me over as if he wanted to break his arm with the vigor.

  “An odd sequence of events,” Malcolm said in my ear.

  For a second I thought it was another deviant recollection, and I had to stop myself from reacting. But almost worse that it was reality—it meant Malcolm had noticed something.

  I turned and squinted up at him. Did he mean the way all the mobsters and gangsters had behaved, or the way I had? Or both?

  “What do you mean?” I asked, trying to sound careless about it.

  “Odd all around,” he repeated, almost to himself. “Good day to you, Miss Russell.” He produced a fedora—I almost laughed, but I honestly wasn’t sure whether he was trying to be ironic or not—tipped it onto his head, and stuffed his hands in the pockets of his coat as he left. I had no doubt he was ready to draw down on anyone out there who still felt aggressive.

  I hopped over the intervening chairs to where Yamamoto and Cheryl stood. Cheryl had laid down the shotgun on top of the bar, but Yamamoto’s bodyguards had edged around us in a circle that was either protective or intimidating, depending on your perspective.

  “Congratulations,” I said to Yamamoto. “That was a terrible idea.” Maybe, just maybe, I could get him to keep from repeating it, get him to leave the brain entrainment alone to do its job.

  “I gotta second Russell on this one,” Cheryl said. She sniffed. “Thanks, by the way.”

  She didn’t look my way as she said it, so I had to assume she was talking to me. “You’re welcome. Do I get my ban lifted?”

  She snorted. “Not a chance.”

  It had been worth a try.

  “Come on, you have to admit it,” I said to Yamamoto. “Even if something is going on, there’s no way to get people together on it. We’ll just have to deal. Shit happens.”

  “Since when do you give up, Cassu-san? No, no, I have just gone about my plan wrongly. We will figure out a way. And you are with me, yes? None of this foot-dragging. I do not know where this comes from.”

  Oh, wonderful, at this rate I was going to give away the brain entrainment just by acting out of character. “I gotta go,” I said. “Uh, keep me in the loop, okay? You guys all good?”

  Cheryl nodded, and Yamamoto waved me off with grievous words about how sorrowful it was to part with my company. Jesus Christ.

  I pushed out onto the street, still hopeful I could scan for Vance, but she had rabbited. A minute later I thought to check the cars—this wasn’t exactly a posh area, and Vance seemed the type to drive a BMW to a meth carnival—but I didn’t see any likely vehicle. Chances were she’d been gone before I’d escaped Yamamoto’s clutches.

  My phone rang. Arthur.

  “Hey,” I answered, keeping half an eye out in case Vance strolled back by. “Everything go okay tonight?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t sound entirely happy about it, probably because of the working conditions I’d imposed on him.

  I decided to ignore it. “I’ve got some new intel on Pourdry. There might be somebody else we can track him through.”

  “Later,” Arthur said. “You and me need to talk. ’Bout Rio.”

  “Not again,” I said. “I told you, Rio is not open to discussion. You don’t like him. Fine. End of story.”

  “Not that. Some things he said tonight … Russell, he thinks your brain entrainment’s Pithica. Or something like ’em.”

  “Oh.” I’d forgotten I hadn’t actually told Rio what we’d all been up to lately. “That’s easy to straighten out. I’ll just tell him it’s us, and not to worry.”

  “Russell … I’m not sure you should.”

  “Why not? If he thinks it’s someone like Pithica, he might start working against us—”

  “’Cause I don’t think that’s gonna change if he finds out it’s you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t pretend to understand this weird … thing you got going on with him. But he’s dead bent on slamming down whoever’s responsible for messing with the people in LA. He doesn’t talk much, but he sounded—he’s got a crusade. He says it’s all wrong and ungodly. Russell, he’s gonna try to stop you.”

  Oh.

  Shit.

  sixteen

  RIO HELD me to our Monday talk.

  I felt awkward around him. First of all, I was hiding something from him—which I didn’t do, as a matter of course—and second, Simon loomed between us like an enormous telepathic elephant.

  Halfway through our meetup, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Where is he?” I asked, as I pushed around my steak and eggs in the diner we’d met at.

  He arched an eyebrow in a distinctly Rio-esque fashion. “You are referring to Simon.”

  “Yes, duh. I left him with you and Arthur and Checker and Pilar. What happened after I left?”

  “Your friends attempted to interrogate us.”

  “Did you answer them?”

  “No.” Rio was blessedly predictable, at least.

  “And then what?”

  “I recommended to Simon in the strongest possible terms that he cease to bother you, and I sent him on his way.”

  “You did?” I sat up. “I thought you wanted me to bend over for him.”

  “I would not put it in precisely those terms.”

  “Rio.”

  He considered. “I judged his methods to be counterproductive. If you are to be convinced, it will not be the way he was attempting.”

  “I’ll say,” I said. “Are you some sort of psychic now?”

  “No, Cas. But I have known you for quite some time.”

  How long?

  I picked more at the eggs. “I might be going insane,” I said. “But it’s still my mind that’s going insane, you get it?”

  Rio cocked his head at me.

  “I let Simon start pawing around in there—he’s going to change me. Remake my brain. I’ll be a different person.”

  “I don’t believe that will be the case.”

  “What, you’re denying he’ll alter me? Wipe clean the person I am right now, pervert me into something else?”

  “I would not put it in precisely those terms,” Rio said again.

  I threw down my fork with more force than necessary. “Then what ter
ms would you put it in?”

  “When a surgeon knits flesh together, to cause it to heal in the correct pattern, it is not a perversion.”

  I barked a laugh. “You’re calling this guy a surgeon?”

  “He could be considered similarly, yes. In … certain circumstances. I believe this to be one of them.”

  “The answer’s no, Rio.”

  “It is your decision.” He sipped from a paper cup of tea.

  “But, what? You’re going to keep trying to convince me?”

  “Yes.”

  “The answer’s still going to be no.”

  “As you wish.”

  A flat in an infinitely tall apartment building, one that reached for the sky. “I can’t keep doing this,” someone said in my voice. “I don’t care if it’s the safe thing.”

  Rio’s profile against the light. “As you wish.”

  I lashed out against the versions of us in my head. When I spoke again it came out forced and brittle. “What, are you just waiting until I start to go off the deep end? Going to stand back until I’m a babbling idiot, and then you’ll shove my addled brain in Simon’s direction?”

  “I hope there will be no need for that, Cas.”

  I stared at the remains of my meal.

  I wasn’t hungry anymore.

  “I have business to occupy me in LA anyway,” Rio said.

  It took me a second for my brain to settle and catch up. When it did, I tried to stop the self-conscious hitch to my posture—because I knew what Rio was talking about. Crap.

  “Oh,” I said aloud, and tried to moderate my tone so I wouldn’t sound so goddamn obvious. “What’s that?”

  “Doubtless you have noticed there is some new power in the city.”

  Playing dumb would probably be too dumb. “A lot of people are pretty unhappy. I met with some of them last night.”

  “They will not be able to counter this,” Rio said. “This is a force of widespread strength.”

  “And you think it should be countered? The people it’s affecting aren’t ones I’d consider saints.”

  “It is wrong regardless, Cas,” Rio answered, perfectly serene. “Just as Pithica was wrong. The ability to make our own choices is God-given. No man can be judged a sinner or saint without his free will intact.”