by S. L. Huang
“And as for you, Wells,” Sikorsky continued, “or should I say … Dhar.”
Dhar—it took me too long to remember that was the name on the license I’d given the uniform who’d told me off for loitering. A day ago. It seemed like a century.
And if that cop had taken note … oh, fuck, there’d been a lot going on that night. My bomb. The evacuation. The murders of twelve police officers who were investigating it.
Sikorsky was watching my reaction closely. I tried to stop my face from twitching.
“See, I don’t think you’re our killer,” Sikorsky went on, still casual. “You don’t got enough heft. But you know something. And as for that bombing dance, we all know you’re buddies with a right little terrorist.” He flicked a hand at Checker. “And if you’re conspiring about all that, well, let me tell you, none of my colleagues are going to cry if you turn up missing. Or missing some teeth. They’ll line up to testify I was at the fucking movies.”
With Sikorsky’s obvious grudge against Arthur and Diego, plus the implications of his corruption—it had never occurred to me that he might actually be a good investigator. But he was dead-on.
I’d set the bomb. I knew everything about the killings.
“And now,” Sikorsky went on, “just now, we got a tip. Did you know that?”
Both of us stayed quiet. Sikorsky slammed a fist into the computer tower he’d just been fondling, and Checker flinched.
“I asked you a question,” Sikorsky bellowed.
“We didn’t know,” I said.
“It’s a solid one. Real classy lady, and she might do some investigatin’ but she knows when to let the police handle things. And she’s heard all these whisperings on more bombings, a whole criminal plot.”
“Willow Grace.” I said it without thinking, my stomach going leaden. Fuck, she was still ahead of us. Now tipping off the police—what had she told them?
Sikorsky loomed over me, practically vibrating with rage. “Everything you say just digs you deeper. Some pissant judge might say we still don’t have enough, but I say this is terrorism, and that every fucking one of you should be in Gitmo. And in Gitmo, there are no rules.”
His hand went for his service weapon.
It was the moment I’d been waiting for. The visual that would slam-dunk Checker’s recording, just in case we needed it.
I lashed out to strike him just below the elbow and transfer a nice wad of kinetic energy to the nerves in his forearm. His hand jerked and dropped his weapon, which I brought up a foot to meet. I gave the Glock a pop like it was a hacky sack, and it sprang in the air and rotated, so I caught it pointing right at Sikorsky’s face.
“Why do you cops always have such bad taste in weapons?” I couldn’t help saying. “This is a toy, not a gun.”
Sikorsky had started to lurch toward me, but he aborted the move just as abruptly when the business end of his own firearm popped up right in front of him. His little deep-set eyes flicked around, assessing the situation, searching for a way to regain the upper hand. He wasn’t panicking, not yet, but his face was creeping over red with anger.
“What were you going to do?” I said. “Pistol whip us until we gave you something?”
“Oh, you’ve done it now.” Spittle limned the edge of Sikorsky’s mouth. “Put the motherfucking gun on the ground or I will end your motherfucking ass right here.”
“Look, we’re honestly not the people who—” I tried.
“Drop the fucking gun!”
He lunged at me. He executed the move fairly well, trying to trap me between him and the long desktop and tangle up my arm before I could shoot him. But I slipped my center of gravity just off where he needed it to be, and his lunge did nothing but take him wildly off balance. He crashed into Checker’s machines and hit the floor without any help from me.
But he didn’t stay down. Some part of me had to respect him—he thought we were terrorists out to blow up the world, or at least involved with someone who was, and due process wasn’t letting him torture information out of us, so he was going dark to do it. And now he probably believed this was a last stand and that I was going to shoot him with his own gun, but he wouldn’t stop fighting.
He threw himself back up at me, but the instant before I kicked him in the head, his limbs jerked and he went down with an unearthly yell.
Keeping the gun on Sikorsky, I followed the leads of the Taser back to Checker, who was holding the device in a white-knuckled grip. “I thought you didn’t—” I started.
“I don’t like guns. Fifty thousand volts is totally okay.”
The flatness he said it with belied any humor.
I bent down and searched a twitching, groaning Sikorsky, found a cell phone, and tossed it to Checker. “See if anyone’s going to come looking for him.”
“What are you—what are we going to do? He’s a cop—”
“We are going to worry about this after we find Tabitha, that’s what we’re going to do.” And if we didn’t find her … if we didn’t, nothing would matter anymore. “I’ll secure him until then.”
I zip-tied Sikorsky’s hands in front of him and forced him up and into the house at gunpoint, where I shoved him down on Checker’s bed and used more zip ties and some plastic rope to thoroughly hogtie him to it. By that time, he’d recovered himself enough to holler and snarl at me. I stuffed some socks in his mouth and gagged him.
“The irony is, we’re actually the good guys on this one,” I told him while I secured the knots. “We’re trying to stop your bomber.”
He glowered at me.
I made sure to use enough redundancy that he had no nontrivial chance of escape and left him in Checker’s bedroom, wedging the door shut so Pilar wouldn’t go wandering in. She was in mostly the same state, though she’d ended up on the floor, hugging one of the legs of the coffee table. I satisfied myself that she was still breathing—there wasn’t much more I could do, not until we reached Simon—and went back outside.
“We’ve got all day,” Checker said rapidly as soon as I came back into the Hole. “Probably till morning even. He told his partner he’d check in by the end of his shift, which I can totally fake. And he already texted his wife that he’d be home late if at all, to which she didn’t even reply, likely because his text and GPS history are a patchwork quilt of being as irresponsible as humanly possible, lucky us.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Of course I’m not sure, Cas! This could backfire on us in a thousand and five ways! For fuck’s sake, I am trying to keep it together when my sister is missing and a police detective is being held hostage in my house—”
“I’ll handle him,” I said. “Tonight. As soon as we get Tabitha back.”
The blood drained out of Checker’s face. “You mean by turning him in, right? You’re not going to—”
“No.” Coach’s victims splashed themselves across my vision again, and I felt a little sick. “No. It’s not—practical. Cop murders draw out more cops, and his grudge against all of you is a known thing, and—” I took a breath. “We’re not killing him. But it’s not the smartest play to turn him in either. That would mean getting tangled in an IA investigation, and that recording’s not the best for us even if it buries him.”
Checker swallowed. “What’s your plan, then?”
“I told you, I’ll handle him. But I might need your money-laundering skills.”
“How did you—I never—”
“Come on, give me some credit,” I said. “Remember how we met? I’m capable of adding two and two.”
“Oh. Uh.” He rolled his lips together. “Do you think Willow Grace was trying to send the police after us?”
I started to say of course, but then stopped. If Willow Grace had wanted the whole LAPD on Checker’s doorstep, she could have engineered it. Her background as a reporter would have given her any credibility her face hadn’t conferred. If that had been her aim, she could have told them anything, could have claimed fear of her lif
e or national security, and she would have been taken seriously.
Instead, we’d only gotten one rogue cop …
Horror dawned, exploding in my hindbrain.
“Oh, shit”—I’d thought of this, but everything had been moving too fast—“Checker, get us security footage of the station Diego and Elisa are at. Right now!”
He keyed it up faster than I’d ever seen him move at a monitor. I leaned to look over his shoulder.
The screen showed security footage of a police precinct. Presumably also the station Sikorsky worked at. And with the unmistakable form of Willow Grace strolling through the halls.
“What do we do?” Checker said, his voice going high and scared. “She was there, she was just there—”
Willow Grace wanted to kill us. She wanted to kill us, and we had footage of her poking around the station, right where Diego and Elisa were, where we couldn’t protect them, couldn’t fight back, couldn’t do a goddamn thing to stop her.
Checker’s security system pinged. We both jerked around to look.
D.J. was coming up the walk, a huge mountain backpack on his back and a spring in his step like he didn’t have a care in the world.
thirty-five
I HURRIED out of the Hole and went to meet the amoral bomber who’d tried to kill me more times than I really felt comfortable with.
“D.J., over here. Quickly.”
He turned. Or rather, he bounced around to face me on the balls of his feet like he was executing a dance move. “Hi! Hi, you! Oh, delightful. Top-shelf fucking peachy to see you again. How you been?”
“Not dead yet.” I grabbed him by the backpack and dragged him with me into the garage so he had to scurry to keep up.
“You’re so serious. Lighten the fuck up. Literally if you want to; I have a lighter and some very volatile—”
He stopped. We’d gotten to the doorway.
Inside, Checker had gone so still that I doubted my senses for a moment.
D.J. immediately became more hyperactive than usual, rolling his weight back and forth and looking a thousand directions at once without ever meeting the gaze Checker had fixed on him.
“Charles,” he said finally. “Nice digs you got. You sure you’re a hundred percent on the level now? You know you can tell me. I’m an angel of discretion.”
“It turns out I have related skill sets. Legal ones.” The comeback was brittle.
D.J. guffawed and started to say something back, but I interrupted, “We’ve got a new problem. Your buddy Fifer has been casing the police station two more of our friends are at right now.”
“Right, right, deadlines, I can dig it,” D.J. said, swinging down his backpack and twirling around a chair to drop into it. “Give me the scoop.”
Checker brought up the footage. “We think she went in pretending to have a tip. About her own plans, believe it or not…”
I rubbed my forehead. “I could call in a bomb threat again, try to push another evacuation. But I’m not sure if they’d take it seriously.” Would Willow Grace have hidden things too cunningly to find? Should we plant another fake to make sure the cops would evacuate? I wasn’t as good as Rio at being convincingly menacing over the phone—not to mention that we didn’t have time for this. Tabitha’s seconds ticked down almost audibly in my head.
“And it would only be a delay tactic,” Checker said miserably. “She’s going to go after them wherever they get moved.”
Which would keep us scrambling to protect people.
“Here’s the video of what she did to—our friend’s house,” Checker added. “Our police stalkers were nice enough to give us dash cam footage.”
Sikorsky was good for something, then. The sequence played out in silent black and white on the monitor: the front of the Rosales home, still and quiet, then our frantic exodus, and then …
I hadn’t seen the explosion happen while we were fleeing. The entire house went up in an all-consuming fireball that filled the screen and mushroomed more than fifty feet into the sky. Large chunks of unidentifiable debris cannoned in all directions. The viewpoint shook and then wheeled into blurred scenery as Sikorsky and his partner took off.
I swallowed. Checker had stopped watching.
But D.J. squealed like Christmas had come early. “Oh my God, she BLEVE’d your ass!” he crowed. “This is amazing! I love a good BLEVE. They’re so dramatic.”
“What the hell is a blevy?” I said.
“Boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion,” D.J. enthused very fast. “Ya get the gas so pressurized, it goes liquid, and then you clog the release valves and get it hot enough with a nice little fire until the whole shebang gets pee-vee-equals-en-ar-tee’d.”
He noticed me staring.
“What? Dollie, I build bombs. Of course I know all the science shit.”
“Do you think she could do that at the station?” Checker interrupted. “Sneak things in the same way? It didn’t take her long; at the house she only had minutes—”
“Play it again!” D.J.’s grin filled up his whole face.
Checker obeyed.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing. Just appreciating the beauty of a well-executed pressure explosion. Fifer does get it right once in a while—”
Checker stabbed the keyboard so viciously, it probably hurt his hand, and the screen blanked.
I thought of the twins’ music posters, Tabitha’s crime novels and stuffed animals, Juwon’s science puzzles and Latin. All gone in less than a heartbeat.
“You people are so fucking sensitive,” D.J. whined. “All right, all right. You can stop a BLEVE by either popping the release valves or putting out the fire. They’re not all that useful in real life other than to look cool, ’cause there ain’t no good failsafe. Way too easy to make sure they don’t go if you find ’em in advance.”
Like Rio would have, if he had been there.
“So yeah, I don’t think she’s setting up a BLEVE,” D.J. went on. “She’d need to haul a tank in, for one, and you got her going in and out empty-handed. Easiest way to ice someone in prison is to slip a nice lil’ fellow inmate a shiv and a promise, but Fifer, she’s got an ego. Likes doing things her own self.” He cocked his head and watched the police station footage for another second. “Nah, I don’t think she’s setting anything. I think she’s casing the joint.”
“For later?” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure I’m sure. She’s coming back with something, no question.”
“She doesn’t have her invisible friend anymore,” Checker said. “She probably used to use him to set things. Like at your place, Cas.”
“What invisible friend?” D.J. said.
“His name was Oscar,” I answered. “Asian Australian, not altogether with it. Someone you know?”
“Oh, Oscar Lee?” D.J. said. “The washed-up med student? Gotta be. God, what a whiny bitch that guy was. I suggested she kill him, or at the very least break up with him, but she dug being worshipped. I mentioned the ego, right?”
“Wait, they were a couple?” Checker asked. “How—”
D.J. waved a hand. “Yes, yes, of course you’re asking yourselves why she was in some insipid hetero relationship when she could’ve been hitting on me, but this dude would do literally anything for her. She’d test that sometimes when she was drunk—blew half his face off once and he still stuck with her.”
“Not anymore,” I muttered.
Oscar’s history got more horrific the more I learned about it. I couldn’t recall his face terribly well, but I didn’t think he’d had obvious scarring—that wouldn’t be forgettable. Which implied all sorts of things. He’d apparently been with Fifer before she’d decided to go after Teplova’s outfit—and then maybe Fifer had told him she’d repair the damage and instead made him disappear. If no one else could ever know he existed, he’d worship her forever, with no other option unless he wanted to fade from the world completely.
I p
ushed aside my disgusted pity for another time.
“So, if she doesn’t have the person who helped her set things, what’s her plan?” I said. “And more importantly, how do we stop it?”
“Fifer’s about six thousand percent more psycho than I am,” D.J. said blithely. “But if it were me…”
Checker muttered something under his breath. D.J. flicked his shoulder and then went on as if there had been no interruption.
“If it were me, I’d blow something next door or down the street. The cops all run to help, chaos galore, and she can sneak in with a nice little boom stick and whack your pals. Kill a few other prisoners along with ’em, and it might not even be obvious who she wanted out of the way, though I’m guessing that ship sailed with the BLEVE.”
“We could stake out the station…” Checker suggested.
I checked my watch. Thirty-three minutes since Fifer had called. We might have a little more breathing room since she’d so recently been down at the station rather than waiting for us in person, but not much.
“We’re going to need to split up,” I said.
“You on one team, D.J. on the other,” Checker added. “You’re the only two who’d have a shot at disarming things.”
“I’ll go after Tabitha,” I said. “You two head down to the station.”
“With any luck, she’s still going to be hanging around the station now, and it’ll give you a window for a rescue,” Checker pointed out. “We can keep updating you if we get a bead on her. Fifer is claiming she’s got Tabitha at the Barberry Canyon bridge.”
“And whether she’s there in person or not, I’m guessing the biggest things to worry about are going to be bombs or more of the dogs,” I said. Or their human counterparts. Depending on who Fifer had made—or could co-opt.
Crap. I’d momentarily thought having D.J. along would give me an edge. Not only on the explosives—as much as I could leverage theory and logic and place my bets that way, I didn’t have his expertise—but also in throwing Fifer off her game, predicting her next steps. Without a wild card like him, and without someone like Simon …