by S. L. Huang
“Russell, I can’t…” Arthur’s inflection bent with pain. “I got to—can’t just sit. Not when…”
“You have three other kids who need protecting,” I said.
Four if we could get Elisa to join them in hiding, though with Diego needing a lawyer now, I rated that as only slightly more likely than impossible.
Until D.J. came after them too. Shit, shit.
If they were all about to disappear anyway, maybe we should just break Diego out. That’d make this a one-way trip. But that might be what was happening anyway.
“Can’t just do nothing,” Arthur whispered.
“You will be doing something. For them. Leave Tabitha to us.”
Arthur didn’t answer. His face had gone closed and hard.
I had to pull over and see what I could do about the van’s tire. I swung into a nearby park and obscured us between a line of trees and a span of tennis courts and baseball diamonds. The hour was still early enough that they lay flat and empty.
My ankle and knee both flared when I jumped down onto the pavement, but I determinedly ignored them and hiked around to the back of the van to hunt for a spare. Before I could open up the back, my eyes snagged on the snarls of wood and metal stabbed deep into the panels of the vehicle. House bones made shrapnel. If those had hit a window …
“Russell.”
Arthur had gotten down out of the passenger side and was limping back to confront me, leaning on his crutch with one arm and the side of the van with the other.
I hauled open the rear hatch and started searching for a jack kit. The cargo area behind the seats was piled in semi-ordered detritus—umbrellas, blankets, reusable grocery bags. I pushed things aside and found a side panel with the tools. Pilar twisted from the back seat as if she were about to offer to help, but I waved her off and busied myself with cranking the spare tire down out of the van’s undercarriage.
“Russell,” Arthur said again, a little louder. It sounded like it took every ounce of energy he had.
“Give all your phones to me,” I said to him mechanically. “I’ll have Checker forward them to VOIP in case the cops call.”
He grunted. “Matti and Roy and Juwon, they can go. I’m gonna find my daughter.”
The twins had started to glance around from the back too, shifting to overhear. I rolled the spare around, away from their watching eyes, and began jacking the car viciously.
“How long are you able to stay awake right now?” I said to Arthur. “Twenty minutes, tops?”
I wasn’t looking up at him. But I could feel his eyes on me, angrier than I’d ever known him, searing into my back.
No father would want to be benched when his daughter was missing, but especially not someone like Arthur. The crack private investigator who would brave hell and high water for any victim wasn’t going to be able to help his own kid.
But he had to accept reality. For Tabitha’s sake. And I was going to have to make him.
“You’re dead weight right now,” I said. “You’ve got almost no mobility, and you’re hopped up on drugs. If we have to move fast, you’re going to get yourself killed. Tabitha’s best chance is if you stay out of the fucking way.”
Even if we put Arthur on a computer, I was betting he couldn’t type more than ten words per minute. I was going to maximize our chances of getting Tabitha back alive, and if I had to sacrifice Arthur’s sensitivities in the process, so be it.
I told myself that was the reason I bit the words at him as harshly as possible. And I told myself the same old flash of hurt was irrelevant, and not why I was saying any of it at all.
“Dad still might see something you don’t,” said a defiant voice.
I glanced up from wrenching at the last of the lug nuts. Juwon had slipped out of the van to come up next to his father, his face puffy and streaked with tears. The twins had climbed around and poked their heads out behind him.
Arthur tried to turn and say something back, but he hunched in pain. All three of the kids leapt to support him.
I stood to face them. “We can keep a phone line open. But be realistic. You shouldn’t even be out of the hospital.”
He wouldn’t look at me.
Since the house, I’d been mostly running on auto. The numbness let me function. If I let myself stop and think … but now a darkness twisted below it, the oily smear of everything I’d felt toward Arthur since all this began.
“Arthur,” I said, and I tasted the ache of it on my tongue. “Do you trust me?”
To go to any lengths, never rest, sacrifice anything, until I either found Tabitha alive or proved I never would? To know this was a one-way function, and that I would find his daughter—his precocious, headstrong, too-smart-for-her-own-good daughter—unless I literally died trying? Whatever else he thought of me, did Arthur at least believe that?
His face creased, a deep pain I was sure wasn’t physical. Tears slid down and over his jaw. And then he turned his eyes on me at last.
“You were there, Russell. You were there when she got taken. You didn’t stop it.”
My joints stopped working. Everything in me went dead. The accusation shattered at my feet, the shards lethally sharp.
I couldn’t speak. The silence swelled and cracked, fissuring every tie with Arthur I’d thought I had.
Into that silence, from off to the right, a keening yell wailed at the sky.
I had one narrow instant before it barreled directly at us, when I heard before I saw and managed to slam my eyes shut. I tried to shout a warning, but it was too late.
A cacophony erupted, inarticulate voices, cries and yells and thuds. I kept my eyes glued shut. Sound localization in space wasn’t a difficult computation—it only depended on two ears, two points of input from which all other points can be mapped, as long as those points are off the axis between them …
It helped when everyone was screaming.
I turned my head in a rapid twitch to cover every angle, and the scene snapped into place. Arthur collapsing on top of Juwon—he must have tackled him, his panic risking every re-injury to block his nearest child from danger. The twins spiraling behind them, falling to the asphalt, and Pilar, spinning up at the open rear hatch from the back seat of the van.
And Coach. A hundred and ten degrees around from me. Closing fast.
Even with my eyes closed, the memory of him staggered me. I reeled against the bumper of the van, banging my swollen knee, the one Coach had bruised and nearly broken. The shape of him yanked at every neuron, clambering over itself to drag me down.
And strung through it, other memories—Coach and I laughing in the dark, doubled over in giggles as we raced back from a well-executed prank. Coach making a dubious face at what he’d just challenged me to do, and telling me he was pretty sure it was impossible, and I looked and measured and ran a thousand scenarios in a second and smiled.
Coach looking at a stopwatch and shaking my hand. Telling me he was proud of me.
Gunfire roared out over my head. Pilar, shooting from the back seat, but wildly, the heat and concussion so close, they stung my cheek.
I pressed my hearing past the gunfire that threatened to eclipse it. The audio outputs whizzed and bounced, almost an extra point-seven milliseconds between one ear and the other, here shadowed by the diameter of my head, here making a ratio between the direct signal and the reverberation off the van. Coach’s path arced around, smooth and intentional and deadly. In nine-tenths of a second, he was going to reach us.
No. Not us. Arthur. His velocity vector stabbed directly to where Arthur’s and Juwon’s cries overlapped, not deviating, not slowing.
Arthur who I’d just been arguing with. Arthur and the kids, who’d been confronting me. Antagonistically. Aggressively. As if they were my enemies.
Just like the cops Coach had thought I wanted dead.
I could have tried to reach him first. Hack through the strands of induced fear and the memory of another person’s life. Fight blind and try to incap
acitate him. He was a brutally efficient fighter, but still no match for me—not usually. Not when my brain wasn’t so slick, it was squirting out of my grasp.
My ankle buckled under me, and I flashed on Coach again, finding me in the dark, and I was shaking so hard, every muscle vibrating apart, and I knew what this was. “Don’t tell them,” I whispered, the words tasting of weakness. He bent under my arm and helped brace me upright, and his steady grip around my shoulders was built of wry challenges and kept promises.
Less than half a second until he reached Arthur.
I shot my hand up and palmed Pilar’s weapon away from her. She’d been almost on target. Adjusting took no time at all.
The gunshot seemed to ring out louder than any of the others.
thirty-two
SCREAMING. Crying.
The continued anguish around me seemed to reflect every atom in my body. I kept my eyes closed, my hip against the rear of the van holding me up, Pilar’s CZ limp in my hand.
“Cas? Cas! Shit—”
Checker’s voice. He’d still been inside the van—“Don’t look!” I yelled.
“I’m not! I’m not, I’m not looking…”
I pushed myself to action. Gunfire and screams—the population within the radius to hear, chances were good someone had called it in. I had to clean up. Get the tire on …
I turned my back on what I’d just done, opened my eyes, and stuck Pilar’s gun in my belt to paw through the back of the Rosales minivan for the blankets I’d seen there. Large picnic blanket. A tarp under it. I grabbed some bungies from under the seats too. Pilar was slumped over the seatbacks, mewling slightly, her hands clawing at the fabric so hard, her fingernails were bloody.
“Checker,” I called. “Find out if we can reach Simon, right now.”
Then, with my armload of coverage, I shut my eyes again and stepped over to where I’d murdered the man who used to be my friend.
He sprawled less than two meters from Arthur. The probable position flashed against my eyelids like an afterimage, and I draped the picnic blanket, then the tarp. Something in me curdled away from touching him, but I had to tuck in the edges and loop the bungies around by feel.
My hand ran into something hard at one point. A phone. I slipped it out and into my pocket. Robbing the dead.
I didn’t even know how effective masking his body like this would be, and I didn’t want to test it, but I also couldn’t leave it here. I got my hands underneath and dragged him to the van, then rolled the body inside, wedging it to fit behind the seats and then shoving the rear hatch closed. I took a second before I did to push Pilar back over onto the rear seats, where she curled on her side, making small noises in her throat.
Coach’s blood would soak into the blankets and umbrellas and carpeting until the stain would never scorch away. A final, humiliating tomb, crammed into a vehicle on the run like he’d been nothing. A nobody I had cut down like a rabid animal.
“Cas, I think I got—I think I found Simon,” came Checker’s voice, high and reedy. “San Fernando Memorial, as a John Doe, but the rest of it fits. He’s in the ICU—I don’t think we can reach him…”
“Hold on.”
I rolled each of the twins into a fireman’s carry and hauled them inside, then more carefully tried to move Arthur. He seemed mostly catatonic. I couldn’t tell if he’d torn open his injuries or not. I supported his spine as well as I could and got him back into the front seat.
Juwon had been curled crying beneath him. But when I went back to get him, he staggered up and back, beating at me with his hands. “What happened? Oh my God, oh my God, what happened, what happened!”
“Wait,” I cried. “You’re okay?”
His elbows were scraped and bleeding from where he’d hit the pavement, and the side of his face was pebbled in red also. But he wasn’t comatose in residual panic like the others.
Arthur had tackled him down before he’d seen.
“Get in!” I commanded. “Right now. Checker, get him in there!”
I hauled the spare tire onto the hub, tightened it down, kicked a layer of dust over the blood on the asphalt and then shoved the old wheel and tools into the back after Juwon, who had cowered in next to Checker.
Four minutes and thirteen seconds after I’d pulled the trigger and killed the man I meant to save, we rolled back onto the street and sedately joined the flow of traffic.
Juwon hadn’t gotten into a proper seat. Checker had his arm around him, and Juwon stayed shivering against his foster brother, hitching away from Matti and Roy when they rolled and moaned on the floor.
“Hey. Juwon.”
He twitched and turned red and frightened eyes up to me in the rearview mirror.
“You’re going to have to take the van,” I said. None of this changed the fact that the whole family had been targeted, that I needed to send them somewhere safe. Safer. “We’ll follow for a few minutes to make sure nobody’s behind you. I’ll give you a warehouse address where you can drive it right in, and then you’re to stay there. Take care of your brothers and your dad, don’t leave for any reason, and under no circumstances look in the back unless you want to end up like they are. Got it?”
“I—I can’t—” He was hyperventilating. “I can’t, I can’t do it—”
“Yes, you can. Checker, tell him he can.”
“No, I mean I can’t,” Juwon sobbed. “I don’t have, I don’t have a driver’s license. I failed the test…”
“But you know how, right?”
He jerked his head in a nod.
“You can’t get stopped anyway. Nothing in this car will be explainable to the police, do you understand? Do not take risks, do not crash.”
“Cas,” Checker broke in.
I let him take over. He was better at being comforting even under normal circumstances.
We’re not normal, Valarmathi said in my head sadly. And she said it again—proudly—to Coach, a long time ago, gleefully celebrating how many sigmas off the mean we were. He smiled tolerantly and let her high-five him.
I flexed my own hand against the steering wheel. Push the memories away, bury them back down, the logical part of my brain reminded me, but the mantra lacked any teeth. Don’t be stupid, if you don’t stop, it’ll start taking you back over, you’ll crash the van, you’ll fail, you’ll fail Tabitha, like at the ranch with Simon …
What did it matter? I’d failed Coach—in the final, ultimate fashion. He deserved to have someone remember him. A bastardized wake in my head was a pale mockery of the rescue I’d sworn up and down I would make possible for him.
Arthur wheezed in the seat next to me, a plaintive, pleading sound layered on every breath.
Arthur. I’d just been trying to promise him too. To vow I’d save Tabitha, that if anyone had a chance, if she had a chance, I would make it reality. That he could trust me.
Right before I shot the other person I’d wanted to save.
I’d done it without even trying for any other way. I’d opted for the probability of one against Arthur’s body broken and dying, even when it meant pulling the trigger on a man who hadn’t deserved to die either.
He hadn’t deserved any of it.
Part of me had been so stunned and bitter that Arthur didn’t believe in me to get Tabitha back. But he’d been right. I’d been at the house, and I hadn’t stopped Willow Grace. I hadn’t saved Tabitha then, and I couldn’t promise I could save her now.
Rio might have been able to. Rio might have blocked it all—Willow Grace hadn’t taken a single step until he left, and then she’d jumped to action within minutes. Which meant I was to blame again, so many chains back, because if I hadn’t driven Rio away, he would have been present to stop her.
Rio. His absence ached all over again, a black hole of negative space. Like the support I’d been leaning all my weight against had turned out to be nothing but shadow and air.
I’d tried his number again while I was driving. Several times.
On
ce I hit Van Nuys, I pulled into a sparsely populated parking garage attached to an ancient apartment building, one without cameras where we could be hidden from watching eyes. The rusted signs proclaimed parking for residents only. I kept an eye out for an older-model car that would allow for easy pickings and slid the van into the space next to it—I needed to hotwire transport for me and Checker.
And Pilar.
It was unkind of me to take her with us, in the state she was in. If we couldn’t reach Simon ourselves, or if we had to leave her somewhere because she’d gone comatose …
But if we could reach Simon … I needed her.
I heard Tabitha telling me again about her gut, and my own clenched. Checker wasn’t a combatant. Without Rio, without Arthur, without Simon—if I didn’t have Pilar, I had nobody else to ask.
Checker had gotten my safe house address from me while we drove, and I’d heard him carefully writing down paper directions for Juwon to avoid the trackability of a GPS. I came around the side of the van to heave Matti and Roy more comfortably into the back seats and buckle them in. Roy clawed at me, his hands fisting against my shirt. I pried them off. The pulse beating against his wrist was alarmingly high.
How long could they stay in this state before it did permanent physiological damage?
I also collected all of their phones, and I stuck them in my pockets where they jostled up against Coach’s.
He’d had a phone. Odd. I’d levered it out while driving, while Rio wasn’t picking up, and run my eyes over it. It was dead, the battery completely drained. An artifact from his past life, before he became a violence-driven victim? Or from his current one? Who had been able to call him? Was there someone he had talked to, as he slipped into his damaged reality, held down and drowned by the world’s reactions to him?
I wondered if he’d been able to speak to people still. At the end, even hearing him had triggered enough sense memory to start warping my reactions.
Checker was helping Juwon install himself in the driver’s seat and gently reminding him how to adjust his mirrors and what everything did. Juwon wasn’t actually shorter than I was, but somehow he looked so small there, a terrified mouse thrust into a throne of towering responsibility.