Authors: SL Huang
“What happened to quid pro quo?” demanded Tresting.
“I’m young and sassy,” I shot back. “This is all just a game to me.”
“Come on, I didn’t mean—”
“Hey look, we’re here.” The dirty handful of buildings comprising Camarito slumped jumbled around us in the darkness. “This is where I was going. You can drop me anywhere.”
Tresting stepped on the brake a trifle harder than he had to, and we jerked to a halt. “You owe me,” he said tightly. I’d forgotten how dangerous his tone could get. It was edging back toward that now.
“I told you,” I said. I wondered if I had let myself get needled into being ornery, and whether that was wise, but it was too late to second-guess myself now. “I want to see your data. Prove to me that what you told me wasn’t the ravings of some crackpot, and I’ll share what I know.”
I unbuckled the ridiculous seat belt, collected my saddlebag full of toys, and swung down from the truck. Tresting got out as well, apparently deciding for annoying. He came around the hood to face me.
“You can find me here.” He flicked a business card at me, probably intending for it to flutter to the pavement, but I caught it out of the air without thinking about it—projectile motion with a nice muddle of air resistance mixed in; please, challenge me. “I think you still need what I got on this. And you owe me. I saved your ass today.”
I offered him a one-shoulder shrug. “Maybe.”
“We ain’t gotta end up enemies. Don’t think neither of us wants that.” He brushed back his leather jacket to lay a hand not-quite-on his holster.
He wasn’t going to draw. The movement was all wrong. It was the posturing of the street, an unsubtle reminder that he was smart enough and good enough to be a threat to me if he wanted to be. Besides, if he had been intending to pull his weapon, I would have had him dead or incapacitated before his gun cleared. He was far too close to get away with trying. I lounged, leaning my weight back, content to let him posture.
Someone else wasn’t.
A step crunched on the gravel behind Tresting, and Rio’s voice said, “Hand away from the gun, nice and slow.”
The PI didn’t need to see Rio’s sawed-off pointed at the back of his head from five feet away. He knew danger when he heard it. Especially when it was behind him. Very slowly, making no other movement, he lifted his hand away from his gun.
“All right?” Rio asked me, not taking his eyes from Tresting.
“Sweet of you,” I said, “but I’ve got it covered.”
Rio nodded. He didn’t lower the shotgun, though.
Tresting was looking at me, his eyes unreadable, and I relented slightly. “Besides, he wasn’t drawing on me. It’s okay.”
Rio hesitated a moment longer, and then the sawed-off disappeared whisper quickly into his duster. He stepped carefully around Tresting, still keeping half an eye on him. “You’re late,” he said to me.
“Ran into some complications.”
Rio twitched his head at Tresting. “He one of them?”
“Sort of.”
“I think the motorcycle gang hit squad I helped
run off you
has me beat,” Tresting said. I could tell he was trying for lightness, but his tone was strained, and a muscle in his cheek twitched as his eyes flicked back and forth between me and Rio. Rio—you don’t have to know what Rio’s capable of to realize how dangerous he is. People underestimate me sometimes. Rio, on the other hand—the only reason people ever underestimate Rio is a lack of imagination.
“This is Arthur Tresting, PI,” I said. “He was following me.”
“And he’s still alive?” asked Rio mildly.
Tresting swallowed.
“Didn’t seem worth it,” I admitted. “Plus, I think he has information.”
“What kind of information?”
I opened my mouth.
“Hey,” cut in Tresting. “I shared my intel with
you,
Russell. You.” His eyes flickered to me and then to Rio and back again. “You ain’t gotta believe me, but I’m telling you, if you spread it around it’ll get us both killed.”
“I trust this man,” I answered, adding a trifle flippantly, “but you should know, it’s not the best way to keep something secret, telling a girl you only just met all about it.”
He glanced at Rio again. “Maybe not.”
“Besides, you’re the one who wanted to work together. You work with me, you work with my—the people I trust.”
Tresting hesitated.
“You’re the one who keeps telling me we might all be on the same side here.”
Still he hesitated, and it occurred to me—Tresting might be an excellent PI, but when it came to this case…I remembered him saying he’d been on it for months, and I realized that despite all his bravado, he was desperate. Desperate enough to go out on a limb and try to ally himself with someone he only had the most tenuous of reasons to believe might not sell him out to the highest bidder. He probably didn’t trust me to offer him a drink of water in a rainstorm, but he was taking a risk to break whatever deadlock he had found himself in.
Which put me at a definite advantage here. Excellent.
Tresting wet his lips and stepped forward, holding out a hand toward Rio. “Arthur Tresting. Sorry we got off on the wrong foot, brother. From what Ms. Russell says, I think we might have some similar goals.” His voice was tense, but civil.
Rio stared at the hand, and then looked askance at me. I couldn’t tell whether he was calling me an idiot or calling Tresting one. He looked back at the PI, not taking his hand. “Rio,” he said. “I work alone, though Cas keeps what company she likes.”
At least, that’s what he started to say. As soon as he said his name, Tresting’s face twisted, and before Rio was halfway through his next sentence the other man had gone for his gun.
I was faster, but Rio was closer. Tresting might be a ridiculously quick draw, but his gun hadn’t even cleared when he cried out, and the gun was suddenly in Rio’s right hand while the left whipped forward into Tresting’s face. I heard a sickening crunch as Tresting staggered back, but I was already diving in; I came up alongside Rio and twisted with his movement as he brought the Beretta up—the vectors of force and motion lined up and clicked into place and then the nine-mil was in my hand instead of his. I raised it and pointed it at Tresting myself.
Not that I truly thought Rio would have fired—at least, not without getting all the information we could first. But just because I didn’t think he would have pulled the trigger yet…well, you know, I would have felt bad if he had.
Rio had let me take the weapon as soon as he realized I was going for it—which, truth be told, wasn’t until after I already had it off him, but the whole thing happened so fast it made little difference. He relaxed and stood looking at me calmly, which was pretty much what I had expected him to do. Rio and I had never gone head-to-head, and I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which we would. I wasn’t sure what would happen if we did. I was better than he was, but Rio was…more willing.
“Okay,” I said, pointing Tresting’s own gun at him as he hunched against the side of his truck. He had his hands to his face, blood streaming freely through his fingers. I hoped Rio had pulled the blow enough that he hadn’t, well, killed him with it. I knew he could hit hard enough to do it. “Talk, Tresting. What was that all about?”
He tried to focus streaming eyes on Rio. “I know who you are,” he croaked thickly, through the blood. “Heard of you, too.”
“Have you now,” said Rio.
“I know
what
you are,” spat Tresting. “Would’ve done the world a favor to blow your goddamn head off.”
“I would prefer it,” said Rio, “if you did not take the Lord’s name in vain. Particularly when speaking of blowing off heads. It seems a poor choice for your soul.”
Tresting stared at him. It wasn’t, generally speaking, the kind of thing people expected Rio to say, unless they knew him.
“And
I
would prefer it,” I said, with all the menace of someone holding a gun in another person’s face, “if you not insult people I like.”
“Chivalrous, but unnecessary,” Rio said to me in an aside.
“Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s just necessary enough.” I raised my eyebrows at Tresting over the gun. “You meet a guy, you pull a gun on him—or, well, try—and then you insult him…Mr. Tresting, that’s just rude.”
“Russell,” Tresting managed, and his voice was thready and desperate. “Russell. You don’t know what he is. Get away from him. Please.”
“I know him,” I said, “and I trust him. If you want me on your side, deal with it.”
He stared at me, long and hard, blood still streaming from his face. Then he straightened up with an obvious effort, mopping a handful of the blood off in a fruitless effort at cleanup. The man had steel in him, I’d give him that.
“I will never,” he said, “be on the same side as someone like that.” He spat on the ground, the expectorant a bloody mess but the message clear, and, still using his truck for support, got around to the driver’s side, levered himself in, and roared away.
“It occurs to me,” said Rio, “that being acquainted with me is not the best decision for your social network.”
“Screw my social network,” I said.
Chapter 8
Camarito was
barely more than a truck stop, a ramshackle collection of buildings pretending to be a town. The gas station lighting up Main Street tried very hard to be a travel center and almost made it before giving up. A couple of truckers hunched over coffee at the mostly-deserted tables outside; Rio and I took one far away from everyone else. I sat back and watched the night while Rio went inside to pick up some coffees.
The childish part of my brain wanted to write Arthur Tresting off entirely. Nobody who threatened and belittled my friends—or my not-friends, whatever—deserved my help, or even my acquaintanceship. But a small, insistent voice pointed out that Tresting’s distrust of Rio was not outrageously unreasonable, and was maybe even an indication Tresting might be a good guy, or something. I was never quite clear on where the gray ended and the black and white began, but it wasn’t a stretch to put both Rio and me among the condemned, whereas Tresting—I wasn’t sure. I didn’t like him, but much as I wanted to, I couldn’t dismiss him or the information he might have just because of what he’d said about Rio.
After all, he wasn’t wrong.
Rio…Rio came into this world not quite right. He doesn’t feel emotion the way other people do. Doesn’t empathize. He honestly does not care about other people.
The one thing that drives him is inflicting pain. He craves it. He
needs
it. Some people are born for certain careers in this world; Rio’s talents mold him to excel at the worst of them all, the man with his tray of silver instruments whose mere presence in a room will cause people to scream and confess, the man who will smile through the spray of blood and revel in how much he loves his work.
I have no illusions about Rio.
In some strange joke of the universe’s, however, he was raised with religion. Lacking his own internal moral compass, he substituted Christianity’s, and became an instrument of God.
It’s twisted, of course. I freely admit it. Any Christian you stop on the street would pale with horror at the way Rio follows the Bible, because it doesn’t stop him from hurting people. Only as a Christian, he seeks out the people he judges deserve God’s vengeance, and he doesn’t bother with the little sins, the unfaithful husbands or petty thieves. Rio searches for people like himself. Or worse.
And then he introduces them to God.
Rio doesn’t have friends. It’s not part of his makeup. Some people hire him, usually people who aren’t very nice and can live with themselves after hiring someone like Rio. He’s choosy about the jobs he takes, and in between times, he freelances. For him, the payoff is never about the money anyway.
Rio and I had known each other a long time. As far as I could tell, he put up with me because I didn’t actively annoy him, and as for me, well…I understood him. Hell, he was a lot easier to understand than most of humanity. He practically had axioms. And because I understood him, I could trust him.
He was the only person I did trust.
And though I might not delude myself about the type of person Rio was, that trust had bred loyalty. Even if it didn’t bother the man himself, other people talking smack about Rio made my trigger finger real itchy, and I didn’t care who knew it. You didn’t knock my not-friends in front of me and expect to walk away unscathed.
Rio came back outside and set two paper cups on the table, taking one of the metal chairs for himself that allowed him to see almost every angle. Usually I would have taken that seat, but I always felt Rio outranked me in the paranoia hierarchy, so I ceded him the vantage point.
“What was Tresting’s information?” he asked as he sat.
I passed on everything the PI had told me, from the methods he’d used to track Polk and me to his nebulous theories about Pithica, not reserving judgment on the latter’s credibility. Rio listened silently.
“So, what’s the deal, then?” I demanded. “You’ve heard of whatever this Pithica thing is.”
“I told you not to get involved,” said Rio.
“Exactly,” I agreed. “Which means you know something.”
He sipped his drink. “On the whole, I know very little. Far less than I would like. What I do know suggests Arthur Tresting is more correct than not.”
“
What?”
“I, too, have followed some unusual patterns. What interests me more,” he continued, “is who made such a concerted effort to draw you into this. That, I think, is a question worth answering.”
I was still trying to take in the fact that he didn’t think Tresting was a raving lunatic. “I take it you didn’t call Dawna Polk ever,” I said slowly.
“No. In fact, I have no idea who that is.”
“Courtney Polk,” I explained. “The girl I mentioned before, the one I got out. Kid who says she ‘accidentally’ became a drug mule for the Colombians. She got caught, the Colombians threw her in a basement, and then her sister Dawna contacted me and said that you called her and told her to hire me.”
“Yet I never made such a call. Interesting.”
“Did you see Courtney in there?”
“I remember thinking her rather stupid.” His voice was matter-of-fact. “It did not occur to me that she would be worth risking my other goals for.”