Authors: SL Huang
“Hey, Russell,” Tresting called.
I carefully avoided the corpses in the outer office and wound my way back to the torture chamber of a conference room. Tresting stood at the far end, examining an empty chair. “Look at this,” he said, and I stepped around to oblige him. Sprays of blood crossed the edges of the chair in multiple places, but the seat and back were clean.
“Someone was sitting here,” I said.
“Haven’t seen Dawna Polk anywhere. Could be her?”
I narrowed my eyes at the chair seat, trying to remember the measurements of Dawna’s hips. I hadn’t been paying too much attention, but I estimated, measuring in my memory. “No. This is too wide. I’m guessing a man. Or a large woman.” I squinted at the blood spatter surrounding the empty chair, the numbers spiraling to find their sources in midair, a person-shaped outline of shimmering red. “Whoever it was got tortured, too.”
“How can you tell?”
“The spray,” I answered, not wanting to go into it.
“Think our perps turned kidnappers,” said Tresting. “They wanted information—forced the vics to talk, most like while their coworkers got tortured or killed.” He reached over to the nearest woman and lifted the side of the cloth gag with a gloved finger. “Take a look.”
He was right. Blood stained the skin underneath the cloth, and nowhere near any of her own wounds. The smearing made it harder to judge, but from the angle I guessed it had come from the man across from her.
Maybe this investigative stuff was worth something after all.
I told Tresting what I’d found in the rest of the office suite. “Unless they have data on an outside server somewhere, it’s cleaned out.”
“Think we better head, then,” he said grimly. “We can keep an eye on the police investigation.”
“When do you think they’ll find it?”
“Right after we leave, when I call in a tip.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Can it, Russell,” Tresting growled. “This is too big.”
He had a point. Of course, considering what we knew of Pithica, this was probably too big for the cops, too.
Chapter 12
We drove
in silence almost all the way back. When Tresting found a space on the street a few blocks away from his office, he yanked the truck over into it, shifting gears so hard my teeth rattled. As he turned off the engine I reached for the door handle, but Tresting’s voice stopped me.
“Russell.”
“Yeah?”
He made no move to get out. “Been thinking. This wasn’t Pithica. Not their style. And they wouldn’t do this to their own.”
“New player, then?” I thought of Anton’s garage, of the men in dark suits at Courtney’s place. I saw the massacre in the office building again, my mind skittering away from the details. Maybe this mess had reached the point where I should throw in with Tresting for real, share everything. I opened my mouth.
Tresting slammed the heels of his hands against the steering wheel. “
Dammit,
Russell!”
I bit back on my other intel. “What?”
The look he shot me was positively poisonous, for no reason I could fathom.
“
What?”
I repeated.
“You told him, didn’t you.”
“Told what to whom?” Where did Tresting get off thinking he had a say in my business? It wasn’t as if I had a whole lot of friends to blab information to anyway; the only person I’d been in touch with at all was—oh.
Oh.
“Wait—you think Rio did this?”
He gave me a long, level stare, his jaw clenched, his eyes mirroring the pain and anger of the victims in the office building.
I swallowed. Had it been Rio?
And so what if it was?
Stumbling upon that kind of…work…I would be lying if I claimed it had been pleasant, but it wasn’t news to me what Rio was capable of. I was well aware of his methods.
And if anyone deserves them, it’s Pithica. Isn’t it?
Tresting was still staring at me as if I’d betrayed him. I tried to ignore the squirming sensation in my stomach that felt remarkably like guilt.
Of course I had to tell Rio we were going in,
I insisted to myself.
He was tracking Dawna; if we ran into each other working at cross purposes…that’s how people get killed!
I started to bridle under Tresting’s judgment. He did not have the high ground here, I told myself. He didn’t. “I told you,” I said. “You work with me, you work with the people I trust. I don’t know if Rio had something to do with this, but—”
“Get out.”
“We can still work toge—”
“Get out of my truck.”
I did. Tresting got down from the other side and slammed his door with much more force than necessary.
I decided to try for professional. “I’ll call him,” I volunteered. “If he did go in, I’ll see if he got any information out of the office. I’ll let you know.”
The tension in Tresting’s posture cracked, and he whipped his arm around, bringing a fist down on the hood of his truck so hard he dented it. “How can you stand there and say—after what we saw—” He shook his head over and over, as if warding off the devil. “No. No. Don’t call me, Russell. Just don’t. We’ll solve this without you or not at all.” He cleared his throat. “It ain’t worth it.”
Something stung inside my chest, a sharp and unfamiliar pain. It wasn’t only Rio he thought a monster. “I understand,” I said. My lips felt strangely stiff. “I won’t bother you again.”
Tresting’s condemnation washed over me as he turned away, disgust and contempt and horror simmering in his wake. He strode off.
The stinging feeling got worse. I took a deep breath and told myself it didn’t matter.
I waited for Tresting to disappear down the street and then followed in the direction of his office, looking for the sports car I had driven here the night before, but someone had jacked it. Not surprising, considering it was way too nice a car for the area and I had already done half the job for any aspiring car thief, but still, talk about an annoying end to a rotten morning. I briefly and pettily considered taking Tresting’s truck, but that was beneath even me.
A group of teenagers was using the street I had originally parked on for skateboarding practice. I sighed and started back along the sidewalk, looking for a nice witness-free place to steal a ride home.
A shot rang out, followed closely by several more.
My mind triangulated in less than half a second. Tresting’s office.
I flew back the way I had come. The gunfire beat out an irregular tattoo—one fully automatic weapon, and three, no, four semiautomatics or revolvers. People on the street cried out to each other and rushed to get indoors, grabbing out mobile phones—the cops would be on their way, then, but I added response times and travel times in my head—too long, too slow.
My boots pounded the cement in time with the staccato gunfire as I dashed around the corner to Tresting’s alleyway, my brain bursting into echoes and trajectories and telling me exactly where the shooters were: one, two, three, four, five. Two gunmen against the near wall of the upstairs office, three more ranged out toward the other side of the room. One could be Tresting, but with the blinds still closed I had no way of figuring out which. I had to get inside.
Second-floor office. Cinderblock walls, locked and reinforced door, barred window. With a little time and the right leverage I could blast through any of the three, but which was fastest? Which?
The window, it had to be the window. Estimates of bolt depth and wall strength ricocheted through my head. Tear the bars off. Crash through.
Yes.
Instead of racing for the outside stairway up to the door, I veered for the opposite side of the alleyway and turned my mad bound into a leap, catching the bottom rung of the fire escape there with one reaching hand. The iron bit into my palm as my body weight jerked against it, and then I was swarming up the metal.
I drew my SIG as I flew across the first landing and tore up the next flight of stairs. Across the alleyway, Tresting’s window was inset in the wall past where his stairway ended at his office door, a sheer two-story drop below it. As I blew past the same height, I fired at the window without slowing.
Bang-bang-bang-bang.
I hit the next landing up, vaulted over the rail, and jumped.
My leap took me high in an arc above the grimy pavement twenty feet below, a long moment of weightlessness before my shoulder slammed into the concrete wall above Tresting’s window. Time seemed to slow. In hundredths of a second I was going to fall; my margin for error was almost nonexistent. I looked down at the two-story drop below me, equations unspooling in my head, the acceleration of gravity tumbling through every incarnation of every possible assignment of variables, and I flattened my arm against the cinderblocks, forcing friction to delay me the slightest touch. Vector diagrams of normal force and gravitational pull and kinetic friction roared through my senses. Just before gravity won and sucked me into a two-story plunge to the alleyway below, I dropped the SIG.
It outstripped me by the smallest fraction of a second, and as it fell between the bars and the top lip of the wall above the window, I shot out my left foot and came down on it with my entire body weight. The frame of the handgun slammed against the bars on one side and the top lip of the window on the other with all the force a simple machine could harness, and became my very own makeshift crowbar.
When I’d fired from across the alleyway, I’d been aiming at the four bolts fixing the bars to the wall. A handgun round wasn’t strong enough to break them, but it made a heck of a drill. With the drilled bolts and the massive leverage, the bars scraped in their sockets and then shrieked out of the wall.
I had no time to gather myself. My left foot leveraging against the falling bars was the only thing keeping me from tumbling twenty feet and splatting on the pavement. I kicked away from them and smashed my upper body into the naked window.
No chance I’d keep from getting cut; I needed all the math I had to generate enough force to break the glass from this direction. I crashed into the room shoulders-first, the blinds coming down with me in a shower of broken shards. As I fell, I windmilled my legs to catch the shooter who’d been standing closest to the window—she wasn’t Tresting—I scissored my legs with a snap and took her out before I hit the floor.
I had no weapon anymore, but I scooped up a piece of broken window pane in each hand, spinning as I came up.
Not Arthur
—the glass left my hand,
not Arthur
again and the other piece of window pane found its mark, the boy dropping his gun and clutching at his throat as he fell. I glimpsed Tresting across the room taking cover behind his gun safe and whirled to face the last hostile, who screamed inarticulately as he brought his Glock around. I dove and rolled over the desk, grabbing at one of the tall, tree-like houseplants as I did—my roll translated into centripetal acceleration as I spun the plant with me and let fly like it was a slingshot. Heavy clay pot hit face before he had time to get a shot off. Heavy clay pot won.
I let my body complete its roll over the desk and landed on my feet.
“Tresting?”
He emerged shakily from behind the safe and stared at me with wide, unblinking eyes, his Beretta twitching in his hand.
“You all right?” I asked.
He kept staring.
“Are. You. Hit?” I enunciated. Is this what they called shock? I wouldn’t have thought Tresting would go in for shock, being an ex-cop and all.
“That window’s two stories up,” he said.
“That’s right,” I agreed. “Good job, I guess that’s why they call you a private eye. Now, seriously, are you okay?”
He touched his right bicep; blood glistened on his fingertips. “Graze. Lucky, I guess.” His eyes flickered over the scene. Four bodies. Broken glass and dirt everywhere. “It had
bars
on it,” he whispered.
I’m not going to lie: I like impressing people. Especially people who’ve just walked away from me in the street and told me they never want to speak to me again.
“Yup,” I said. “I’m just that good.”
Chapter 13
“You’re bleeding,”
Tresting managed, once he had found his voice again.
“So I am,” I said. I have a hyper-awareness of my own body; all the math in the world won’t help me if I can’t match calculation with reality. I can make estimates about other people’s anatomies, but mine I know every detail of at any time, and I knew I’d sustained five shallow cuts on my face, neck, and hands, and that none of them were worth worrying about. “So are you,” I added.
Tresting half-shrugged and kept his left hand pressed against the graze as he crunched across the glass-strewn floor to crouch by the nearest of the corpses. He reached out to place his fingers against the boy’s wrist.
“They’re dead,” I informed him. I wasn’t entirely happy about that. I was only now registering just how young they were—four teenagers, a girl and three boys, probably around fifteen or sixteen. Kids.
I hate it when bad things happen to kids. Especially when I’m the bad thing.
I also noticed something else. “They’re all Asian.” It seemed strange. “Did you rob a Chinese restaurant or something?”
“They’re Korean,” corrected Tresting. I made a face; I couldn’t tell the difference. “And gang members.” He pointed to a blood-smeared tattoo on the hand of the boy next to him as he stood.
I almost said, “So?” but something pinged in my memory about Koreans and African-Americans and race riots. I made a mental note to ask the Internet at some point. “Oh,” I said instead.
Tresting moved over to the window. I didn’t miss how he glanced out through the shattered panes and then at me, disbelief still sketching his features. I felt rather smug.
He crouched down again to touch the girl’s wrist, checking for a pulse I knew wouldn’t be there. I looked away.
The sounds of the street filtered up through the broken window, traffic noise and horns and people going about their days. A light breeze accompanied them, stirring the air in the office and making the cuts on my face start to sting.
“Thanks,” said Tresting suddenly.
The word parsed oddly, as if I were listening to a foreign language speaker say something and knew it wasn’t coming out the way he intended. “Sure,” I said.