Authors: SL Huang
“No,” Tresting said, overly casually. The word fell between us—soft, final, incriminating. “A busy young woman, our Courtney Polk.”
I’d already known she wasn’t on the level, but I’d been assuming some combination of fear and naïveté. That maybe she hadn’t realized what she’d gotten into, or had been too scared to face it. “She doesn’t seem the type,” I offered, stalling.
“Nah, she doesn’t, does she?” said Tresting. “Was an odd sort of crime. Odd in the same way these lovely motorcycle gents discovered an irredeemable hatred for you. Makes you think it wasn’t their idea.”
“Maybe they thought it was a fun night out,” I said, stubbornly not thinking of the mines in the road or the freaking
grenades,
or the fact that all the biker guys I’d known had a code against baseless killing. Okay, something fishy might be up with the bikers, and it very well might have to do with Courtney Polk, but a mastermind theory that cast her as a hired assassin alongside them? It didn’t wash.
“Might agree with you, if there wasn’t a pattern,” said Tresting.
“A pattern of what?”
“Murders. And other things.”
“I don’t have time for riddles,” I said, my gun hand twitching.
“Well. Hypothetically, let’s say Miss Polk and your new friends here ain’t the only ones acting out of character. Let’s say it’s more. A lot more.” He cleared his throat. “And let’s say it’s senators and grandparents and the folk next door.”
I squinted. “Are you even listening to yourself? What, so every killer who doesn’t fit the profile is part of some shadowy conspiracy? Newsflash, Einstein: sometimes people are violent. A lot of times for no other reason than they want to hurt people.”
“A lot of times.” He gave a non-committal half-shrug. “Maybe not all the time.”
This was far too fantastic for me. “And Pithica?”
“Far as I can tell, it’s them pulling the strings. Can’t pin it any closer than the word, though.” He seemed to make a sudden decision and holstered his gun. “So. What do you say? Can I give you a lift into town? Maybe share some intel?”
My first impression was that the PI was one hundred percent cracked. But whatever else he was, Tresting was a lead, and I needed all the information I could get.
“Fine.” I slid the SIG back into my coat. I could still kill him in a fraction of a second if I needed to, as long as he didn’t have a gun on me.
Tresting jabbed his thumb at the source of the white headlights. “My truck. And I’ll pretend I didn’t see the extended mag.”
“It’s legal two hundred miles east of here. ’Sides, you should talk.”
“Yeah, speaking of, where is it?”
I waved vaguely toward the desert scrub. “Back there somewhere.”
He rolled his eyes and jogged over to where my bike had gone down, flashing around the white beam of a penlight. A few minutes later he returned, banged-up Glock in hand.
“Afraid your bike’s a lost cause,” he told me.
“Wasn’t mine.”
He shot me a look. “Didn’t hear that, either.”
“I thought you weren’t a cop anymore.”
“Old habits, blah-dee-blah.” Examining his jammed handgun, he dropped the mag out and racked the slide a few times, clearing the chamber, then stuck it in the back of his belt without reloading. I watched with some approval—I wouldn’t have trusted a weapon that had nosedived into the desert dust either, not if I had another choice. He patted his Beretta. “Lucky for you, I had another backup.”
“Yeah, nine-mil?” I scoffed. “Did a little girl give that to you as a party favor?”
“Best gun is the one you have with you,” he quoted at me mildly. “And someone stole my .45. Can I get the snubby back too, by the way?”
“Can’t,” I answered breezily. “I gave it to a little girl as a party favor.” Something in me twinged, and the quip felt hollow as I remembered what had happened to both Penny and her new present. “Let’s go.”
We did one last once-over of the bikers to look for anything out of the ordinary, but aside from some frighteningly high-tech night vision gear and more armaments I wouldn’t have expected this kind of gang to have—not that I was an expert or anything, but still, plastic explosives?—we found nothing. No clue indicating what might have brought them here, except that they really, really wanted me dead. Fun.
I snagged a saddlebag off one of the Harleys and loaded up some of the nicer toys. A girl can never have too many grenades, after all. Tresting gave me a severe look, but didn’t say anything, fortunately for him.
Chapter 7
Tresting’s truck
was a beat-up old clunker that looked like it had come out of its share of brawls not only still kicking but bragging about how tough it was. I stowed my bag of toys on the floor of the passenger seat and climbed in.
“Seatbelt,” said Tresting, as he coaxed the ignition to a shuddering rumble.
I didn’t explain that I could buckle up plenty fast enough if I calculated it would help with anything. Tresting had seen too much of my skills already. I fastened my seatbelt, muttering, “Yes, Mom,” under my breath.
Tresting revved the engine, the tires spinning against the sandy ground before they found enough purchase to rocket the truck forward with an almighty lurch. We bounced back onto the dusty highway, the headlights sluicing through the empty darkness.
“So,” I said. “GPS tracker?”
Tresting’s eyebrows jumped in surprise, and his teeth flashed in a sheepish grin. He put one hand in a jacket pocket and held up the tiny device between two fingers. “Smart gal.”
“On the bike,” I guessed, sure I was figuring this right. “You retrieved it when you got the Glock. And you knew to trace the bike because…you had another tracker on Courtney.”
He looked surprised again. “Quick study, too.”
“Which is how you found us at the motel. And you must have been watching where Polk is in LA. When I came back on the bike before leaving, you slapped another GPS on that. Smart.”
“Thanks.”
“Unless your clumsy surveillance gets my client killed, in which case I will not be amused. In fact, I’ll be so unamused I’ll put a bullet in you.”
“Ouch. And we was just getting to know each other.”
“I’m serious. If someone else figured out you’re tracking her, all they have to do is follow the same signal.”
He was silent for a moment. “She’s your client,” he said finally. “I only want to see where she leads.”
I scowled. “Compassionate man.” Pot, kettle, it was true, but he wouldn’t know me well enough to point it out.
Tresting’s knuckles tightened against the steering wheel. “Rather she don’t end up dead. But she murdered
my
client’s husband, and I’m gonna find who put her up to it.”
In fairness, he had a far guiltier conscience about putting Courtney in danger than I would have, had our positions been reversed. “One thing I don’t understand. If you got close enough to plant the tracker, why not interrogate her then? Why wave a gun at me so unsuccessfully at the motel?”
He didn’t rise to the bait, only let a frustrated breath hiss out through his teeth. “Didn’t get close enough. Got the opportunity to slip one into her food when the drug runners had her.”
And he’d figured a GPS would cover all bases in case he had to follow Courtney back to…well, to her masters, if Tresting was to be believed.
“Your turn,” Tresting said. “Who are you?”
I’d forgotten I hadn’t introduced myself. “Tell me more about Pithica.”
“Hey, I told you about the GPS.”
“You didn’t tell me; I guessed. And considering you were using it to track
me,
I think it was about time I knew.”
“Whatever,” he muttered. “In for a penny, I guess. Pithica’s some government project or other.”
“I know that. What else?”
He cut his eyes at me suspiciously.
“I did some digging after you mentioned it while pointing a gun barrel at my face,” I explained impatiently. “What else?”
“It’s buried deep. I got a tech guy. He can only find bits and pieces. But it’s far-reaching. My client’s husband, he was a journalist. Started digging into some things. Political decisions, that sort of stuff, ones that didn’t make sense. Nutso crime spikes. Chances are they could’ve left him alive; I don’t think he ever saw the connection.”
“What connection?”
“Pithica. Just the word. Buried deep. Didn’t find it linked up to all the things he been looking at, but it was enough to be, uh, a ‘statistically significant correlation.’ Or so say my tech guy.”
His tech guy must be good. Anton had been able to find almost nothing. “And you think Pithica killed him. The journalist.”
“Sounds crazy, but yeah. Some of what we found, it was a pattern—it’s too similar, the MO of his murder. Can’t prove it, not yet, but his death’s got Pithica all over it.”
“So Courtney Polk is, what, some sort of secret government agent?”
“Always the ones you least suspect, right? She’s the only one who could have done it. We managed to figure out she saw my guy day-of.”
“Wait. So you don’t have any hard evidence?” I narrowed my eyes at him. “If you can prove Polk committed cold-blooded murder, why aren’t the cops investigating her for it?” I’d seen her police record. Nothing about being a person of interest in a prior crime.
Tresting kept his eyes on the empty highway. “There was a suicide note.”
I almost laughed. Or screamed. One of the two. “Great. Just great. You’ve got quite the case there. You ever hear of something called Occam’s Razor?”
“He didn’t kill himself,” Tresting ground out. “His wife—”
“Is probably in denial,” I interrupted. “It sounds to me like you’ve invented a conspiracy—”
“He didn’t kill himself,” Tresting repeated, louder. “And Polk’s the only one who could have. Besides, why was she there otherwise? The kid was a trailer park migrant who ended up smuggling coke. Why was she there?”
“Maybe your guy was interviewing her for some other story,” I pointed out sarcastically. “Since he was, you know, a
journalist.”
“Yeah, you spend the few hours before you dose yourself to death trying to meet a deadline. That makes sense.”
“Murder’s still a stretch. Like, a bungee-level stretch. I’m not buying it.”
“’Cause I’m giving you the short version. Lot of other details didn’t add up. The whole scene was fishy. Best part is, I don’t think this is the first time Polk’s done it.”
This was too unbelievable. “Wait, so now you think she’s a
serial killer?”
Jesus. I knew some serial killers. Courtney wasn’t one of them.
“Maybe,” said Tresting doggedly. “Or maybe she’s someone’s patsy. I’m telling you, I spent months building up this case. Didn’t start out trying to make it nutso, I promise you.”
“You just happened to see the bright light in the sky and realized your client had been abducted by aliens.”
“You don’t gotta believe me,” he said. “Whatever, sweetheart. But that’s the lowdown of what I got.”
“Mysterious crimes you say form a pattern.”
“Yeah.”
“Does this phantom Pithica group have a motive? Or do they just go around convincing biker gangs and driftless twenty-three-year-olds to kill random people?”
“Right now they’re protecting themselves, obviously,” Tresting said. “And I got no idea what they’re trying to do. All I know is there’s too much evidence, spread over the last dozen years or so. This is real.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Like I said, sister. You don’t gotta believe me.” He ground the truck’s gears as we jounced around a curve. The pickup bitch-slapped him with a hard jolt in response. “Your turn.”
I debated. Tresting’s summary was far too outlandish to be useful, but he did have one thing I didn’t: data, and a lot of it, though right now he was using it to wallpaper his fantasy with completely fallacious “patterns.”
Humans, we like to see patterns. We see them all the time, even when they don’t exist.
I wasn’t sure whether I was repeating what someone had told me once, or if it was an observation.
I couldn’t work from Tresting’s fanciful conclusions; I needed the raw data. I tried to come up with an angle from which a minimal dialogue with a loony PI might endanger either my case or my client, and decided a few cautious words were safe enough. Besides, the underground had a gossip chain with the efficacy of the Internet. He could probably ask around about a brown-skinned, curly-haired, angry-looking chick who could kick his ass, and he would find out who I was soon enough.
I sighed internally. I don’t like giving up information. Ever. “My name is Cas Russell.”
“Hey,” said Tresting. “Heard of you. You do retrieval stuff.”
Oh. I had a reputation?
“And good at it,” he acknowledged. “Word is you get things done.”
Well, that was nice to know.
“Nobody mentioned putting up with the sass, though. That new?”
I stared at him incredulously. “Sass? You want to see sass? I’m still armed, you know!” I sputtered to a stop. Tresting was laughing.
“Ain’t expect you to be so young, neither.”
“I’m older than I look,” I bit out. I hate being patronized.
“So how’d you get shanghaied into bodyguarding, then? Ain’t your usual shtick, is it?”
“I was hired to get Polk back from the cartel,” I explained stiffly. “I admit it was a guess, but I figured ‘alive and unharmed’ was implied in the contract.”
“See? Sass.” When I shot him a look that could have splintered his skull, he took one hand off the steering wheel and raised it in mock surrender. “Sorry, girl, sorry! I mock because I, uh, because I have respect. For your badass retrieval skills. Happy?”
“Only because from here I could kill you in less than half a second.”
Okay, maybe it wasn’t the smartest boast to make. But it was worth it to see that glib look in his eyes stutter into discomfort, and for the truck to fall into blessed silence. When Tresting spoke again, his tone was back to businesslike. “So, who hired you?”
I wasn’t in the mood to cooperate. “Client privilege.”
Anger clouded his features. “Hey, I told you—”
“A whole big sack of nonsense,” I cut in. “Here’s the deal. You show me all your precious data. If I agree there’s something there, then we can work together, and
then
you get to know everything I know. Not before.”