by S. L. Huang
“You—!”
I kept my Colt in his face. One bullet left, and I only needed one. “Hi there,” I said. “The bomber’s been taken care of. Like I said we would.”
He quieted and studied me, his face going back to close to its normal color. Now that he was free, he was far less unnerved than I would have expected. He might’ve been a good cop, once upon a time.
“You aren’t a PI, are you?” he said.
“No,” I answered.
“You gonna kill me?”
“Not yet.”
That did make him twitch.
“I don’t need to kill you anyway,” I said. “We have you on video, threatening to torture us. Now, we could turn you in, but that sounds like a lot of bother for everyone involved. So instead, I’m here to offer you a lot of money. I hear you like that sort of thing. Don’t get shirty about me saying so; I’m the same way.”
I patted the briefcase next to me, then pulled out his service Glock, which Pilar had been thoughtful enough to retrieve at the mansion. I stuck it on top of the briefcase, empty and with the slide locked open. I’d given Pilar the nine-mil for her CZ.
“Some cash, but that’s the smallest bit, and hard to use too much of it without suspicion. Especially given your … history. So, there’s a flash drive right inside with the information for a bank account that has a lot more. Perfectly laundered.”
His brow furrowed, his eyes going squinty. The funds had come from me, but I hoped he didn’t draw the connection of how I knew someone with expertise in how to launder money that effectively. I kind of suspected Checker had been one of the best money launderers around, before he’d reformed and all.
“I’m a business person,” I continued to Sikorsky, hopping off the desk. “It’s worth it to me to pay you in order to keep from having to deal with the cops hassling my friends. So, here’s how it’s going to work. Forget you arrested Rosales. Stop looking for reasons to push him and his kids around. Take the money. We’ll keep that juicy little recording to ourselves, and you’ll keep living.”
He studied me for a moment longer. Then he pushed himself up off the bed, came over, picked up the briefcase, and holstered his empty gun.
I didn’t blame him. It was a good deal. And hey, for all I knew, he was happy for an excuse to get out of an arrest as illegitimate as Diego’s had been.
* * *
PILAR AND I probably should have gone to see Simon right when we got back. But we were so busy, and I disliked being around Simon so viscerally, that we put it off. I suppose we just weren’t worried about it.
To the others, I made the excuse that he wasn’t well enough to have us constantly tromping in so he could fix us. Which had the benefit of being true.
But Rio appeared the next afternoon at Willow Grace’s mansion, after I arrived with a car full of tarp and bleach and D.J. in tow. D.J. had immediately scampered off to go bomb hunting, and I ran into Rio on the curving walk by the infinity pool, where he greeted me with, “Simon telephoned. You must return to him as soon as possible.”
“Sure, whatever,” I said. “Once I’m done here.”
“Cas. I am given to understand this is serious.”
Apparently Simon’s first phone call had been checking up on me with Rio, then. I tried not to resent that. As for Rio …
We stood staring at each other. I’d left a message to ask if he’d help with cleanup here, and he hadn’t called back.
“I don’t…” I rubbed at my eyes. “My brain’s a little wonked right now on purpose, as you seem to know, and it’s not like I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, but … I don’t know, Rio. I don’t know.” I swallowed. “Maybe what I did to Simon was wrong. Maybe it was—maybe it was really wrong. Or maybe it wasn’t. I have to think about it, and … I want the answer to be mine. Okay? Not yours or Arthur’s or anyone else’s.”
He studied me for a moment longer. Then he cocked his head slightly and said, quite softly, “Perhaps that is for the best.”
“What is? Me reading Simon’s mind to stop Fifer, or insisting on having my own moral compass?”
He didn’t answer, just paused a hairsbreadth longer and lifted a hand slightly toward the mansion. “I believe you requested my aid?”
I chalked up the conversation as the most I could have hoped for and told him I’d appreciate the help.
D.J. went through the premises like a whirlwind, declared he’d made all the explosives inert, and then carted them off for his own personal collection, leaving us to do the actual cleanup. It went mostly as expected—Rio had an amount of experience in this sort of thing that even I was squeamish thinking about. To my surprise, he also volunteered to take the dogs off the premises.
“You’re not going to kill them, are you?” Pilar said, her mouth folding downward disapprovingly. I wondered if she’d be that aggressive with him normally.
But Rio answered her, apparently unruffled. “No. I know of places that would see their value and give them purpose. They will be treated well.”
He wouldn’t say more than that, but Pilar reluctantly let it go. It wasn’t like the rest of us would have had any idea what to do with the poor creatures.
The rest of the cleanup went smoothly, albeit with one unexpected surprise in the pool house—where we found the real Willow Grace. She was still alive, if not very coherent at first, and exactly as beautiful as Fifer had been. Even with the burns and blood and starvation and filth. I wasn’t sure how that was possible.
“Well,” Rio said, “that makes this job easier,” and went back outside, leaving me to deal with a very out-of-it news reporter.
He was right—having a living Willow Grace would make this all much simpler, as it meant no one would be looking for a corpse.
As I might have suspected if I’d thought about it, the real Willow Grace turned out to have a personality eerily similar to the façade her kidnapper had worn. From what she eventually pulled herself together enough to tell me, Fifer had kept her alive specifically to keep getting information, mannerisms, and anything else she needed to make sure the mimicry was complete. Fifer had successfully taken her out of circulation with the fake “sabbatical to write a book” story—although it turned out as part of her detention, Willow Grace really had been forced to write the book—but had also needed to keep up her imitation with anyone she happened to meet, and it had kept Willow Grace alive.
Willow Grace had the same forthright selfishness and oddly admirable self-righteousness Fifer’s impression had presented. She insisted on staying in her house instead of seeing anyone for medical treatment, and after she’d showered and cleaned herself up somewhat, she sank onto a couch in one of her many rooms, saying all she wanted was to have her place back when we had finished.
When we questioned her about Teplova’s methods, she denied knowledge of anything other than being a client, and said she hadn’t suspected her surgeon of any dubious background either. And though she admitted to having met Coach peripherally, my inquiries aiming toward Halberd or Pithica only prompted confusion. She claimed that in reality, she’d met Eva Teplova only after the latter had moved to LA and set up her practice.
It all made me a little suspicious—was Fifer forward-thinking enough to have realized on her own that she could turn Teplova’s client list into a conveniently valuable asset? And Willow Grace’s face might be as good at making me believe her as her twin’s had been … I made a mental note to talk to Rio about it in depth. And to actually listen to him this time.
But if we could believe her, that meant Teplova’s changed people were all still out there, but separate. Powerful in their own roles, more than they should have been, but not being harnessed together to take down countries.
Small favors.
At least we had a partial client list. I’d have Checker set up some kind of system to keep an eye on them.
And when I started to drill Willow Grace about what to tell the authorities, to my surprise she agreed immediately to burying
most of the events.
“You aren’t tempted to write another book?” I said.
“Not at the expense of my career. This one would have to be posthumous,” she said. “Warning every single place I’ve been in the prior six months of a possible attack may already end me.”
I’d passed on Fifer’s motive when we’d shared information—after all, Willow Grace was the person best-suited to making sure none of Fifer’s devices had already found their way into a dangerous position. “What do you mean?” I said. “With your connections, you’ll be taken seriously.”
She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Her wet hair framed a bruised face that was skeletal with lost weight, and she was the very definition of fragile loveliness. “I’m not worried about being taken seriously. But some people will want to spin this to make me responsible, and I’ll need to spin them back.”
Despite her grim trepidation, I didn’t envy those people.
* * *
RIO INSISTED on driving me back to Simon’s hospital as soon as we were done at Willow Grace’s.
Despite Rio walking me in, I hesitated at the door to the room, my hand hovering near the handle. “I’ve been thinking,” I said.
Rio lifted an eyebrow.
“Maybe I should go see Professor Halliday, before I let Simon put everything back.”
I got both eyebrows now.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “She wants me to do math with her. She’s been bugging me about it since I’ve known her. I can’t, not like she wants, but…”
I’d always shut down her requests entirely before. Because I was afraid.
Because I knew I’d run up against that mental block, the one that always stopped me, the missing parts of myself. Because I didn’t want to limp along as the slow second fiddle, the one only filling in the gaps in Sonya’s breakthroughs.
Better not to try than to be that, right?
Except now … well, maybe it would only be a shadow of what I should be able to do, but it would be something. Something real, something I could be proud of, a thing that meant something instead of just money or kicking people in the head all the time. Something that wasn’t only about cash or bullets.
“Would it be so bad?” I said softly. “Not to fear anything?”
Not to fear Valarmathi cackling in the back of my head, waiting to tear down my sanity? Not to fear Simon’s fingers trawling through my memories as if he owned them? Not to fear that I was only one footstep away from fucking up and becoming the same sort of monster Fifer had wanted to twist me into?
To be someone who could have friends without teetering on a knife point, and maybe do some math, and discover some small things that would make the world more knowledgeable rather than bloodier?
“Cas,” Rio said. He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, the pressure light. “You can inquire with Simon. But he tells me remaining in such a state would be very dangerous.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said, conscious of the irony.
He let his hand drop. “I will not force you, Cas. But I would request of you that you let Simon repair this.”
It had always been hard for me to go against Rio. I sighed and reached for the door again. “I do listen to you, you know.”
“I am aware,” Rio said. I wasn’t looking toward him anymore, but for some reason, the words sounded remote, resigned, as if he wanted to pry them out of their truthfulness but had no leverage to try.
forty-one
SIMON MANAGED to fix up both Pilar and me in short order, but after that, his health was too bad for him to bug me for brain sessions for a couple of weeks. This was both good and bad, considering I hated but needed them.
Valarmathi chittered in the background. Now that I was about to be out of work again, the chittering got even louder, throwing my thoughts sideways if I ever started to relax.
Every time I thought of Coach, it got worse. Sometimes until I felt on the verge of free fall. But I didn’t want to forget him either. Rio had helped me disappear the Rosales’ minivan and all its contents, and in the end I’d stood out in the desert tending a chemically heightened pyre, the lone mourner at the funeral that deleted him from the world.
I wondered if he’d had any family. I couldn’t remember if it was something I’d ever known.
I could try asking Simon. I doubted he’d tell me, even if he had the answers.
Coach had joined Simon in my dreams now. Their faces snapped clear even where others were a blurred mass. Simon and Coach, and also Eva Teplova, young and brash with her too-intelligent scalpels. Sometimes, they slipped and slid into my waking reality as well, imaginary friends who’d forgotten to stay in their place.
“Hopefully I won’t collapse in the gutter again,” I said to Pilar, only half-jokingly. She and I were cleaning up Arthur’s office, which had just been cleared by the police. Pilar was still on crutches, but she’d taken on the herculean task of putting all the filing to rights. Meanwhile, I was keeping her company by installing and restocking a new gun safe, which was definitely the easier half of the work.
“You could stay with me,” Pilar said absently.
“What?”
Her head came up from the folder she was buried in, sweaty hair falling across her eyes. “Just, you know. In case. Arthur and Checker don’t have guest rooms, but my roommate just moved back home, so I’ve got the space if you want.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “It’s up to you, but I won’t hover, I promise.”
It was mildly appealing to think that if I blacked out again before Simon was back on his feet, someone would find me.
“I come with a lot of alcohol and guns,” I said. “That okay?”
“As long as you don’t get me arrested.”
“I promise,” I said. “I’m really good at bribing cops.”
She rolled her eyes.
I almost cracked a joke about her own good aim, then, but a thought gave me pause. “Hey,” I said instead. “Are you good? Fifer was the first time you…”
She put down the file she was working on. “You’re asking if I’m okay? No. Probably not. I don’t know.” She let out the smallest edge of a hysterical laugh. “I think I’m still in shock about it. I feel like I should find a good therapist, but I don’t know how to talk about it without getting thrown in prison. So.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d recommend mine, but I heard he did something inappropriate to a previous patient.”
That got a slightly more genuine laugh out of her. But then she sobered. “Cas, I’ve been meaning to … I shot you.” She met my eyes, and hers were large and troubled. “I could have killed you.”
“But you didn’t,” I said.
“I wasn’t afraid. I knew there was a chance, a bad chance, but I saw that the shot was there, and—I wasn’t afraid I was wrong.”
“You weren’t wrong,” I said.
“That’s … there’s something really disturbing about that.”
“That you weren’t afraid?”
“That I did everything wrong, and it was right.”
* * *
PILAR WASN’T the only one feeling raw about the fallout. I was over at Checker’s tying up some more loose ends when D.J. dropped in so we could see him off. He’d messaged after our sweep of the mansion to proclaim zealously that he’d taken care of cleaning off the bridge for us too, but that was the last we’d heard from him.
From the slack expression on Checker’s face when D.J. burst into the Hole, I could tell he hadn’t been expecting it. Probably hadn’t ever expected to see D.J. again.
“Don’t forget, Little Miss Logic Fingers,” D.J. said, waving at me. “We had a deal, right? You’re gonna come give me some sweet-ass tech.”
“We have a deal,” I confirmed. “I’ll come hold up my end. Once things get settled here.” And once Simon got my brain oiled so it didn’t keep trying to stutter off the rails. At least temporarily.
“Oh, goody!” D.J. gave me a double thumbs-up.
“By the by, you seem like a trustworthy sort, but if you stiff me on this, I will leave presents for all your friends. Except Charles.” He reached over and poked Checker in the shoulder. “Don’t be a stranger, yeah, Charles? Drop a dude a phone call every now and again. Oh, and stop making faces at me, I’m totally kidding about blowing up your buddies. I need to teach you to have a sense of humor again.”
“Have you ever considered…” Checker cleared his throat.
“Words, Charles. Use your words.”
Checker kept starting to say something before trailing off, and I had the sudden awkward desire to fade into the background.
“If you—I could help you,” he finally managed to get out. “Will you consider it? You could—you could go straight.”
“Like you?” D.J. cawed a laugh. “So, I only blow shit up if it’s white hat? Ha!”
Checker blushed. “Mostly straight, then.”
“Just like your sex life.” D.J. tweaked his nose.
Checker batted him away. “I’m serious. We could—”
“We! You and your little team. Adorable.” He stretched. “Remember what all we used to talk about, Charles? Taking over the world?”
Checker licked his lips, suddenly tense. “Yeah?”
“I don’t care anymore. Too much work, you know? I just wanna blow shit up. Like, a lot of shit. All the shit.”
Checker might have let out a choke or a laugh. I wasn’t sure.
“I’m gonna find more people who’ll hire me to do that,” D.J. said.
“You know you almost killed me, right? That day.” It might have been the light, but Checker’s eyes were gleaming. “You almost killed both Arthur and me. And you almost killed Arthur again last year—the only reason you didn’t is because he remembered how we got out of it the first time.”
“No harm, no foul, right?” D.J. answered brightly.
“And you’ve almost killed Cas, and a ton of other people,” Checker continued inexorably. “And, uh—there’s also lots of people you have killed and—that doesn’t give you pause? At all?”