by S. L. Huang
Someone shouted. Another rifle report rang out. I ran for the back of the garage.
I tumbled through a back door onto a hill at the rear of the property, one that dropped away to reveal a valley of twinkling yellow spread out below me. White lights shone blandly across tennis courts to my right. I wove left, toward the estate house, skidding down the slope to keep my angle below the view of the far-distant sniper. More gunfire echoed, some nearby. A man screamed. Someone else yelled, commands of some kind.
The alarms at the estate blared out into the night, startling and earsplitting, light flaring suddenly from every corner of the building. I ducked and cursed as the freakin’ alarms muffled the gunfire and interfered with the data my senses could turn into a numerical re-creation of the scene going on above me.
Still, the numbers had teased out one conclusion, one horrifying, inescapable conclusion: only one person was firing on us.
One man.
My mind had been rebelling against what I already knew was true. Irreversible. Uncontainable. The American Mafia had the power of infinite revenge, and no one would be able to hold them back from retribution for an attack at their very heart. Particularly not an attack that assassinated one of their leaders.
If Rio wanted to start a mob war in Los Angeles, Mama Lorenzo was a perfect target. Take her out, and blame someone else—maybe even the militias, or the police, or someone the Lorenzos didn’t have a usual agenda for tangling with, someone they couldn’t just crush into oblivion.
We’ve been getting threats, Malcolm had said. It was a setup. The Family would raze Los Angeles to avenge Mama Lorenzo’s death.
I ran for the house, every thought crystallizing into the brutal, slim hope that I wasn’t going to be too late.
thirty
I DIDN’T know where in the estate Mama Lorenzo was most likely to be, so I beelined for the closest part of the house.
A troop of private security poured out the back, weapons drawn. I belly-flopped into the landscaping, hoping they hadn’t seen me. There was no way they’d let me in, and I had to get to her … and without killing any of her own security on the way.
The troops dashed by with shouts and tromping. I stayed low and sprinted for the door that had disgorged them. Into the estate, slip out of the way of more troops, down a hall—
I skidded into Mama Lorenzo’s study, right into the barrels of a dozen assault rifles.
Thrusting my hands in the air, I yelled, “Friendly!” and turned the skid into a slide, dropping like I was a baseball player just in case. But her troops were good enough that none of them fired. Yet.
“I’m here to help!” I shouted from the floor.
The woman herself rose from behind her polished wooden desk. The head of the Los Angeles Mafia was tall, thin, and perfectly coiffed, and she wore a thousand-dollar cocktail dress like it was armor, but now a gauntness shadowed her elegant maquillage. I fleetingly wondered if she knew about Malcolm yet.
“Miss Russell,” she said. “What is happening?”
“You’ve got one sniper, eight hundred and seventy-six point four meters away at an elevation of eight point four nine degrees. He’s to the southeast, bearing a hundred and thirty-one point zero three. Your people aren’t going to be able to get him without some serious hardware, and maybe not even then.” Almost certainly not even then, but if Rio was watching through the scope and saw someone setting up to fire back, he might abort. “Get everyone behind cover, to the back of the property.”
Mama Lorenzo nodded briskly and turned to the bodyguard by her elbow. “It’s possible Malcolm would be able to make a shot like that. Get him to—”
“Madame Lorenzo—” I started.
I’d cut in before thinking about it.
Her eyes flickered to my face. I didn’t know how to tell her.
But I didn’t need to say anything. She read the news off my expression.
“Oh,” she said, a quiet, defeated sound, and her hand caught on the surface of the desk. Then she said, very quietly, “Torvald, do you have anyone capable of taking that kind of shot?”
I could have done it, but I didn’t volunteer.
“I don’t know, ma’am, but we’ll put out the word,” Torvald answered, talking fast. “We have to get you to the panic room.”
“Which way is that?” I said.
Torvald cast me a black look, his hand on Mama Lorenzo’s elbow.
“He’s trying to flush you toward the front of the house,” I said. “Madame Lorenzo has to be his true target, but he’s on a timeline. He won’t just wait for her to go outside tomorrow. Now which way is the panic room?”
Torvald pointed. “The glass in the front windows is bulletproof—”
“You mean bullet-resistant,” I said. There was no such thing as bulletproof, not with enough force. “And are your walls bulletproof? Because if he sees her, he knows exactly where she’s going to be the next step even if she’s behind a wall. Madame Lorenzo, don’t follow them.”
“Nobody’s that good,” Torvald said.
I was. Rio was.
Mama Lorenzo turned to me. “Miss Russell. What would you suggest?”
“Ma’am—” started Torvald, but at that moment one of the big picture windows at the front of the house went down in a magnificent crash.
“Out the back,” I said. “There’s only one sniper, and he’s almost a kilometer away. Go out the back and get away from here.”
“Ma’am, we don’t know there’s only one—” Torvald tried, but Mama Lorenzo ignored him. She had a little chrome .32 out on her desk already; she tucked it into a purse and strode through her troops toward me, stepping out of her stilettos. “Someone give me your boots. Men’s 8.”
A couple of the men started scrambling, and by the time Mama Lorenzo reached my side, hands were thrusting a pair of combat boots at her. “Someone give me a weapon,” I echoed her, and Torvald glanced at Mama Lorenzo before signaling the now-bootless guy to pass me his PS90. I slung it on and checked the chamber.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Relay the information we got about the sniper,” Torvald told Bootless Guy, and then the rest of the security force crowded around us, making a human shield for Mama Lorenzo and covering ahead and behind as we hustled out the back.
Torvald might be an idiot in some ways, but he was decent at his job.
The drop to the northwest of the house was near-vertical, so we edged east before hustling down the slope at an angle. The gunfire and lights faded behind us.
We made it down into a ravine and hiked along the bottom of it. Despite her high-end black sheath, Mama Lorenzo not only managed to keep up with no trouble, but maintained an air of subtle power even tromping through clumps of grass and branches.
A flurried rush through the dark later, the guy who had point stopped us with a raised fist. He gestured to indicate upward—a house, and the distant zoom of cars passing. Torvald made a few more hand signals, and three of our escort broke off to scale the slope and scout ahead.
While we waited, Torvald stripped his own vest and helmet and helped Mama Lorenzo into them. “Do you think this sniper will be able to come around and cut us off?” he asked in a low voice.
It startled me when I connected he was talking to me. “If he realizes which way we went—yeah, he had the time to make it,” I said, pacing Rio’s ground speed in my head. “And I’m betting he’s good enough. But if he went down to the house first, or looped around to the west instead…” Rio was good, but he wasn’t omniscient. There was no way he’d magically know from the position of his sniper’s nest which way we’d gone, was there?
Was there?
I wondered if he knew I’d been at the estate. Probably not—I’d waited on Malcolm for at least forty minutes after arriving, and if Rio had been in place beforehand, wouldn’t he have shot Malcolm when he crossed in the open before our meeting? And after that I’d stayed well out of sight by reflex.
Crap, I probably should hav
e shown myself. It wasn’t like Rio was going to shoot me, the same way I hadn’t exactly been willing to take up a rifle against his hiding place. And knowing I was moving around in his target zone might have made him a little slower on the trigger.
Malcolm’s still, faceless silhouette danced across my vision again. Rio had targeted him first on purpose. He would’ve had intel to know Malcolm was one of the Lorenzos’ expert snipers—maybe their only expert sniper. And he’d probably known how much he meant to Mama Lorenzo, too, which meant even if he hadn’t nailed the woman herself, he’d probably still accomplished his objective here: inciting revenge.
“I’m sorry about Malcolm,” I said to Mama Lorenzo.
She nodded.
Then, a moment later, she added quietly, “He was my brother.”
Oh. Shit. “I didn’t … he never…”
Of course, why would I have known? Malcolm had never used any form of address for her that implied she was anything other than the leader of his Family.…
I remembered, then, that I’d heard Mama Lorenzo had married in. Perhaps the internal politics of her family were as complicated as the external ones.
“The people who did this will pay,” Mama Lorenzo said. She said it simply, factually. Her eyes were dry.
I wondered if Rio had known about the personal connection. Maybe he figured Malcolm was as good a target as Mama Lorenzo, given how it would spur her to bloody vigilantism.
“Madame Lorenzo,” I tried. “I have to warn you. Whoever you think did this—whoever, um, the evidence points to, or whoever claims responsibility—I guarantee you it’s the wrong target. It’s going to be a frame-up.”
Her eyes pinned me, a hawk’s gaze in the dark. “How could you know this?”
“Please,” I said. “Don’t go after someone just because…” An even more awful thought struck me. Mama Lorenzo was all about appearances—she was the type to go through with crushing someone even if she knew they were innocent, just to maintain the appearance of strength. Rio couldn’t have chosen a better criminal organization for his scheme. “Give me a day,” I said. “Give me a day before you take any action. Before you go for, um. For justice.” I would be able to reach Rio in that time, I hoped, and get him to pick apart whatever trail of evidence he’d left to provoke the Lorenzos into firing the next shot.
“And what’s your interest in this?”
“I’m trying to stop the, um. What’s in the water,” I said lamely, falling back on McCabe’s assumptions again. “It’s bigger than you know. That’s what I was talking to Malcolm about; we had worked out a deal. I need airtime from Reuben McCabe, today, and I need you to hold off on vengeance for—for your people. I can stop this. Please.”
Before she could reply, a shuffle reached our ears from the top of the ridge, and one of Torvald’s guys waved us up the slope. The path up was more a climb than a hike, and a couple of the guards helped their boss keep her balance as we scaled the incline.
I slipped in front of them as we reached the top, just in case Rio was watching through a scope from somewhere nearby. But the night was quiet.
An SUV and a sedan hummed in the driveway, the engines already started. I had no idea if they’d been bought, extorted, or hotwired, but whatever family lived here, there was no evidence of them.
I was pretty sure the residents of the house were physically all right. Mama Lorenzo didn’t tend to condone her people hurting bystanders. Usually.
Mama Lorenzo and I piled into the SUV among her men, who had her stay curled low on the floor while they covered her. Torvald had taken the driver’s seat; he swung us down the sloped driveway at a good clip. “Where to, ma’am?”
“Do you have a safe house?” I asked.
Mama Lorenzo’s eyes flickered up to me. “I believe you requested a meeting.” She raised her voice. “Make sure we’re not being followed, and then drive to the KHBP radio station. In the meantime, Miss Russell, I would like a full accounting of exactly what situation has befallen us here.”
Right.
Torvald acknowledged her and took a right, whisking us into late-night traffic at exactly the speed limit. I swallowed. If I didn’t tell Mama Lorenzo everything, she might refuse to help … but if she blamed me for Malcolm …
Flat-out lying to the head of the Los Angeles Family was not an activity with a lot of longevity. Especially considering elaborate lies were not in my skill set.
But even though Malcolm’s death may have screwed me with Mama Lorenzo if I ended up on the wrong side of this in her eyes, Rio’s attack had also bought me urgency. It could be all I needed to do was convince Mama Lorenzo I’d be helping her get justice for her brother—even though that was about the farthest thing from the truth, considering the people responsible for it were Rio and, well, me.
And now I was going to pretend to be working to avenge Malcolm just to get what I wanted? Maybe because I’d liked him, but that thought made me feel shittier than anything else I’d done that night.
But as I’d told Checker earlier … what else could I do?
“I’ll give you what I can,” I said to Mama Lorenzo, hating myself. “I, um. I owe discretion to some people. But I’m trying to stop exactly the people who killed Malcolm.”
That much, at least, was precisely true.
thirty-one
I SENT Arthur a text to get him to meet us at the radio station, along with a terse update, including the attack and what parts of the situation I’d divulged. And then, there in the SUV with drops of Malcolm’s blood still on my clothes and Mama Lorenzo crouched between the seats plotting vengeance, I finally got a call from Rio.
I turned away as much as I dared and made sure the volume was turned all the way down. Fortunately, I could measure sound waves accurately enough to deduce the road noise would cover Rio’s side of the conversation. “Hello.”
“Cas,” Rio said, his tone perfectly ordinary. “I apologize for missing your earlier calls. I was in the Hills.”
Killing Malcolm. “I know.”
“Ah. So you have heard.”
In a manner of speaking.
“Your friends just informed me of your decision to dismantle your plan here,” Rio continued. “Did they speak truthfully?”
“Yeah.” I stared out the window of the SUV, into the dark scenery speeding by.
“Good. I hoped you would return to the way of the Lord, Cas,” Rio said.
I wanted to curse him out, but then Mama Lorenzo would wonder. “It’ll take a few days, logistically,” I said instead, with enforced calm. “Will you…”
“I will discontinue the remainder of my activities tonight. I regret the situation came to this.”
Yeah, me too. “Take apart whatever … anything … you’ve been leaving,” I said. Any evidence, any false trails that would put people at each other’s throats and make the ensuing violence worse than it was already going to be. “This ends here.”
“If I have your promise, consider it done. Although that, too, will take some small time.”
“How long?”
“A day. Perhaps two. It will be done as quickly as possible.”
He didn’t apologize. Probably because he wasn’t sorry.
Hopefully I could hold Mama Lorenzo off until then. Her, and the militias, and everyone else Rio had incited tonight.
“One more thing,” I said. “I need Simon, or…” I had the excuse prepared; otherwise Rio would have suspected my real intent. But the lie stuck in my throat, too close to the truth for comfort. A whisper skittered through my head—the first echoes of Valarmathi waking back up? Or my own paranoia? “I need Simon, or I won’t make it to—um, to finish the logistics,” I made myself say.
“Understood,” Rio answered. “Where shall we meet you?”
I glanced sideways at the other silhouettes in the car. I was sure they were all listening closely. “The same place you met me when you came to town. As soon as possible. I can be there within a couple hours.”
�
��Then we will be, as well,” Rio said.
“Good.” I hung up.
“Developments?” Mama Lorenzo asked.
“Yes.” I scrambled for something to tell her. “That was, um. Someone who’s been helping me end this.”
“A name you feel you cannot divulge.” Her disapproval was severe.
“I’m sorry,” I said, a little desperately. “You know if I’d promised not to reveal your part in something—”
She held up a hand. “No need to explain again. I’ve decided to accept your justifications. For now.”
God, this was going to be a tightrope.
Arthur was waiting in the shadows outside the radio station. He greeted Mama Lorenzo deferentially, and she responded with equal respect. It occurred to me to worry about her seeing him working with me—if this went south and she wanted to scorch the particular patch of earth home to Cas Russell …
Or whatever your name is.
One of Mama Lorenzo’s men had been making calls from the car, and a night janitor was already on standby to let us in. McCabe had been woken at home and was on his way.
“Are your restroom facilities unlocked?” Mama Lorenzo asked the janitor, who fumbled with her keys and led the way to a hallway at the back of the darkened lobby. Mama Lorenzo sailed after her, the armed escort in their wake.
“Let’s get away from the windows,” I said to Arthur, gesturing at the glass front wall of the lobby. I led the way toward a door to the back.
Arthur cast a glance after Mama Lorenzo and her men before leaning in close to me as he hustled after. “He’s called off, right?”
“Yeah. But…” Rio was called off, but I didn’t know all the ramifications of what he’d done. McCabe’s show wasn’t exactly on the sidelines—there was the possibility someone would target this place.
Fuck, what a mess.
We flicked on lights in the back and found a small conference room to wait in. I slumped in an office chair with the PS90 across my lap. “I should probably just have you talk to McCabe alone and stay out of it,” I said to Arthur. I’d fucked up enough tonight. Navigating another negotiation … and then the upcoming one with Simon, with my sanity ready to tip again at any time … “It’s not like civilized meetings have ever been in my wheelhouse. If I try to punch anyone, stop me.”
