Critical Point

by S. L. Huang

  I had to get to Arthur’s office and home and check them, but what if those were rigged too? What if the explosion had to do with his disappearance? How likely was that? After all, I had plenty of enemies who’d be more than happy to blow me to kingdom come, and they had nothing to do with Arthur.

  The grasping hands of my past reared up again. Flashes of fragmented memory had given shape to doctors and drugs, training and cruelty. Someone had been honing me—honing a lot of us—but I still didn’t know who or why. Only that they had been frighteningly similar to the people who called themselves Pithica, the mind witches who’d eventually claimed themselves puppet masters of the world until I’d been dumb enough to throw a spanner into their works.

  Or maybe it’s closer to home. Maybe someone in the city found out about you screwing them all in the head.

  That was a troubling thought. As of four months ago, almost all of Los Angeles had owed me a broken skull, but my mistakes had been psychically erased in the most discomfiting way possible, and most of them appeared to have forgotten. I doubted the telepathic sweep had gotten everyone, though. Some people seemed to have dismissed the rumors of my involvement, given the ultimately bizarre and seemingly inconsistent sequence of events, but I suspected there existed others—people who’d recognized a voice on the radio and now nursed perfectly rational grudges even as their cohorts laughed them off.

  Then there were all the people I’d screwed over directly by breaking into their secure lairs and threatening them. I was pretty sure Yamamoto wasn’t the only crime lord still taking my rampage as a personal insult, and I hadn’t even pointed a gun at him.

  But even with all the lurking threats, I still didn’t believe in coincidences, or at least only believed in them when they fit the relevant probability distribution. And for my office to blow up exactly after Arthur had gone missing … especially considering he’d left a message on his voicemail about being connected with me …

  “You’re not supposed to see me,” moaned my passenger.

  I blinked.

  Somehow I’d stopped paying attention to him. Weird. Especially considering he was currently my most likely source of answers. The ringing in my ears had died down enough to hear the very loud rap music in the car next to us; it was past time to run an interrogation.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard blowing people up is great for stealth,” I said back to him. “In fact, we’re going to have a nice little conversation now. Talk and you’ll live.”

  “I don’t know anything,” said the Aussie man. The emphasis on the words was odd, as if he wasn’t used to speaking aloud. “You were supposed to stay. You were supposed to stay and not see.”

  What?

  “Nobody sees,” he continued. “I’m not here.” He started giggling.

  Oh. Oh, shit. This guy was … not all there. Someone else must be taking advantage of him.

  Fuck.

  I thought for a minute and then drove to a four-story apartment building where I kept a one-bedroom place on the top floor. The Aussie man whimpered about hidden secrets and invisible friends all the way up.

  I didn’t want to hurt him again—I wasn’t opposed to hurting people in general, but in this case, it didn’t seem fair—but when he wouldn’t get out of the car, I had to hustle him out with a grip on his jacket. I got him up to the apartment and sat him down in the bedroom. There wasn’t a bed, only a couch with one of its cushions missing, but hey, I didn’t run a Hilton.

  “What’s your name?” I tried.

  “People don’t talk to me,” he said. “And I don’t talk to people.”

  “A man after my own heart.” I sighed. “Who told you to blow up my office?”

  “They told me to do it,” he agreed. “And they were right.”

  “Who told you?”

  “The one who makes the music,” he said. “Playing the songs when you ask.”

  “Does this person have a name?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell anyone. How did you know it was me?”

  “You basically told me,” I said. “I do tend to notice when people try to kill me.”

  “No, you don’t. It wasn’t me. You’re wrong.”

  I gave up.

  He had access to the bathroom, and I opened some cans of overly processed food and left them in the room with a spoon and a few bottles of water. Then I locked the door to the bedroom and shoved a wedge under the outside door to the apartment for good measure. The windows in the place were painted shut and four stories up—the only danger of him getting out was if he started making noise and someone investigated. But this building was mostly empty units or people who spent their entire days high, so I didn’t think it likely.

  Two years ago, I probably would have tied the guy up and gagged him, or at least considered it. “Fuck you, Arthur,” I muttered.

  Are you sure it’s all Arthur?

  I stomped down the stairs. No—Arthur had been trying to convince me to have a conscience long before I’d had a telepath in my head regularly. I wasn’t going to go there.

  Wasn’t going to start second-guessing myself.

  I’d repeated the same words so often over the past four months that I was sick of them.

  Besides, I reminded myself, it was bad enough if it was just Arthur pushing at my morals—pretending to be my friend, trying to fix me up to be a model citizen, and not even telling me the basic facts of his own goddamn life. He knew the most personal details about me, after all. He’d been with me all through fighting a worldwide organization of psychics who were only too ready to kill me if given half a chance, and knew all about Dawna Polk, Pithica’s telepath who’d clawed into my brain and almost destroyed me. He knew about my amnesia—that I was mired without any memory more than five years back, aside from hellish remnants best forgotten. And he knew about Simon, who I had to keep letting erase me once a week or I’d fragment and blow away on the wind … even after I’d found out he was the one who’d obliterated me in the first place. A past I couldn’t look at, the capacity for ruthless mathematical violence with no explanation behind such an abnormal skill set … whispers of words and images and nothing more to tell me who had made me … Arthur knew all of it.

  I’d saved Arthur’s life so many times now, and he’d saved mine.

  He’d never once mentioned he had a family.

  three

  TELEPATHS. Something sparked in my brain, making me think about Pithica and Dawna Polk and Simon again. Psychic powers—something—I squeezed my eyelids shut, my head aching. I couldn’t help feeling like I’d just missed something important.

  My mind came up a blank. Damn.

  I’d picked up a clean phone in the apartment, and I dialed Checker as I started down again.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “It’s Cas.”

  “Cas, holy shit—are you all right? What do you mean, your office blew up? What happened?”

  “My office blew up.”

  “Cas!”

  “I’m fine. I’m going to head to Arthur’s office now.” Technically the business was half Checker’s, but he telecommuted. “Have you found anything yet?”

  “Yeah. There’s been no activity on Arthur’s cell in the past day and a half, and the GPS copped out not long after that. The last known location is the office. Same for his email accounts—no activity since he was last on his phone. I’m—I’m really worried.”

  “I take it the, uh, the family didn’t know anything.”

  “No. Tabitha was the last one to talk to him.”

  I swallowed back my resentment about Arthur’s secrets again. I’d reached the ground floor, and I headed back to my stolen car, pinching the phone between my shoulder and cheek as I got in.

  “Do you think whoever attacked you—is it related?” Checker asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think Tabitha’s in danger? Or the rest of Arthur’s family?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shit, what if they’re
going to blow up our office too?” His voice rose with alarm. “Maybe you shouldn’t—”

  “Only one way to find out.” I ignored the fact that I’d been thinking the same thing.

  “You know,” Checker said. “There are, um. Private security firms. Who rent. Um. Bomb-sniffing dogs.”

  The traffic flowed around me mathematically, speed and density and flux automatically mapping to a space-time diagram, so fortunately, I didn’t have to concentrate, because Checker had just thrown me for a loop. “How on earth do you know that?”

  “I may have … done some research. A while ago.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea. I couldn’t do math on what I didn’t know existed. “I’m on my way there now. Can you get one fast?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. Let me call at least, okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “In the meantime, I’ll pick up Pilar. She can help me sort through your files. Unless you want to come do it.” I was a shit investigator, and Pilar Velasquez had been Arthur and Checker’s office manager up through a few months ago.

  “No, Pilar’s better,” Checker said. “She knows our files better than we do. But she’s at an event tonight—I’ve been trying to call her, but it keeps going to voicemail—”

  “Where is she?”

  “The W, in Hollywood. Some sort of hoity-toity political fundraiser.”

  I snorted. “It’s not polite to track people’s phones, you know.”

  “Serves her right,” Checker said with no remorse. “We’re lost without that woman. Why we ever let her leave is beyond me.”

  “Didn’t you give her the investment to start her event-thingy business in the first place?”

  “Not the point,” he huffed, then sobered. “Wait for my call, okay?”

  “Whatever,” I said, and hung up, slewing the sedan onto a side street to turn toward downtown. Again, something itched at me, something I’d forgotten to tell him. Something important—

  I didn’t like not being able to trust my own mind. It was bad enough not trusting the person I needed to have rifle through it regularly.

  But whatever I wasn’t remembering, it would have to wait—I didn’t have time to dwell. I parked in a self-pay lot in Hollywood and left without buying the dash ticket from the machine. Pilar had probably driven; we’d just take her car from here.

  Pilar was easily the most organized person I’d ever met, and had worked for Arthur and Checker for a little over a year. She’d continued with them part-time through the early months of starting her own business, but her clientele had taken off so fast, she’d been gone before the two of them could find someone new. Checker had flat-out admitted they liked her so much, they’d been dragging their feet on replacing her.

  I supposed it was difficult to find someone good at spreadsheets who was also comfortable getting shot at occasionally and who wouldn’t call the police on shady sometimes-colleagues like me.

  Colleagues. Even colleagues knew about their coworkers’ families. What the hell did I count as, then?

  When I got to the W Hotel, dolled-up patrons strolled in and out of the twilit evening, all of them constructed to be beautiful and walking to be seen. Women gleamed poreless from their strappy heels to their manicured fingertips. Men sported suits designed to look recklessly casual and hairdos gelled to be artfully messy. A few people of indeterminate gender played up one look or the other with equal flamboyance.

  Hollywood at its finest.

  I crossed the star-inlaid sidewalk and slipped into the glitzy lobby. Some sort of red-carpet event was going on in a courtyard through the back, but I didn’t see Pilar. I started a systematic search of the ground floor for event rooms, keeping an eye out for hotel security. A few of the peacocked patrons graced me with a combat-boots-up stare, but no one tried to stop me.

  I caught sight of Pilar’s energetic posture and stride flitting between name-tagged hotel staff in a grand, long ballroom filled with round tables draped in tablecloths so snowy, they were blinding. Caterers bustled about setting wineglasses and flatware.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, can I help you?” A very large member of the hotel security staff had appeared by my elbow while I was distracted. The subtext of his baritone request was, If you don’t have a good reason to be here, allow me to escort you out. Immediately.

  “I just have to grab my friend,” I said, and sidestepped around him.

  “Ma’am—”

  He reached out a beefy hand to block me.

  I didn’t hurt him, but I grabbed his wrist and pushed at exactly the angle lacking an equal-and-opposite normal force. The security guard lost his balance, half-pirouetted, and landed on his ass. His face clouded.

  “He tripped,” I announced to the suddenly staring hotel staff.

  “Cas!” Pilar rushed toward me with wide eyes. She had put on some weight since I’d seen her last, and she wore it well, with an air of authority. She also wore a deep purple cocktail dress that was turning heads, and her makeup and hair were a few orders of magnitude sharper than usual. “Cas, honey, I love you, but—what are you doing? And I’m sorry, you really can’t be here dressed like that—”

  I glanced down at my usual cargo-pants-and-boots ensemble. There was also some broken glass and blood on it I hadn’t noticed. “Sorry,” I said, not meaning it. “Pilar, Arthur’s missing. Checker’s been trying to get in touch with you—we need your help with his office. His files—”

  Pilar looked stricken. “Arthur’s missing? What happened?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. He just disappeared. Now come on.”

  “I can’t—” Her head swiveled from side to side, and she flailed her hands miserably. “I can’t just leave—I’m in charge here! Our client is—”

  “Pilar,” I said. “It’s Arthur.”

  “Ma’am, do you know this woman?” asked the security guard, who had regained his feet.

  “Yes, I do. It’s all right. Um.” Pilar cast me an agonized expression and then reached out to snag a black-and-white-clad server by the elbow. “Get Catherine for me, now,” she said, before turning back. “Give me five minutes to square things here. And can you please wait outside? People are staring.”

  Ten minutes later, I was zipping Pilar’s car onto the freeway while reading a series of texts from Checker, the long and short of which was that he hadn’t been able to get us canine help on such short notice, but he was still trying, and would I please be careful and possibly consider waiting even though he knew I wasn’t going to.

  “Can you please not do that while you’re driving?” Pilar said, while tapping out texts and emails a mile a minute herself. I gathered she’d screwed her staff over by leaving.

  I ignored her. “Talk to me about Arthur. Was he doing anything off the books? Anything that might have been making him enemies recently?”

  “You mean, anything Checker wouldn’t know about?” she said.

  I hadn’t been thinking that, but now I was.

  “I mean, I haven’t been around in a while,” she stammered. “I don’t know what would be recent.”

  “Anything unrecent?” I said.

  She worried her lower lip with her teeth. “I’ll look when we get there.”

  “Goddammit,” I said. “All you fucking people and your fucking secrets. This is not the time.”

  Her eyes went all huge and wounded.

  “Don’t give me that look. Because guess who I met today?” I whipped the words at her. “Tabitha.”

  “What? O—oh.”

  “‘Oh’ is right,” I said. “How long have you known?”

  “Known what?” Pilar asked miserably.

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “What was it like?” I tried to make the question snide, but for some reason it sounded hurt. “Did he introduce you and say, ‘Oh, hey, meet my family, and by the way, tell anyone but Cas’?”

  “No, it—it wasn’t like that—”

  “Forget it,” I sai
d. “But you hide anything that could help us find him, and I will burn down your nice new event business.”

  “Cas,” she sighed. I’d apparently ceased to be able to shock her properly. “Okay. Okay. There was this one thing he had me working on, setting up web alerts and stuff, that he wasn’t telling Checker about, but I don’t know if it’s relevant at all, and he started it like a year ago, and I don’t think he got anywhere really, but I don’t know if recently—”

  “Spill.”

  “Well, it was about—there was that person Checker has a history with, who kept, um, blowing things up.”

  That definitely seemed to fit. “Which person who kept blowing stuff up?”

  “Seriously? How many people have tried to blow up you or your friends?”

  “More than one,” I said. “I can’t be expected to keep track of them all.”

  “Well, but Checker has talked about—do you ever even listen to people? Anyway, I don’t know what all their history was, I just know Arthur was trying to find any information he could on D.J., so he had me keep on it and, um—he didn’t want me to tell anyone.”

  “D.J.?” I vaguely remembered who she meant now. “Oh, yeah, we’ve run across each other a few times. Freelance bomber, utterly batshit, mouth like a filthy sewer.” D.J. was like me—a contractor who didn’t seem to care mightily how many people died as long as payment came on time. Actually, I was pretty sure D.J. was more amoral than I was, which said a lot. On the other hand, even though we’d run into each other on opposite sides a few times, I’d always had the impression it was because good money was changing hands for the explosions. It made me less leery of meeting D.J. again than I otherwise would’ve been.

  It also meant that even if D.J. was involved here, the mastermind was probably someone else putting out a contract …

  Wait. Except Pilar had mentioned Checker. Who didn’t exactly run in the same violent and not-so-legal circles I did. “Back up,” I said. “You said this is related to Checker? How?”