Russell's Attic, Books 1 - 3

by SL Huang

  It outstripped me by the smallest fraction of a second, and as it fell between the bars and the top lip of the wall above the window, I shot out my left foot and came down on it with my entire body weight. The frame of the handgun slammed against the bars on one side and the top lip of the window on the other with all the force a simple machine could harness, and became my very own makeshift crowbar.

  When I’d fired from across the alleyway, I’d been aiming at the four bolts fixing the bars to the wall. A handgun round wasn’t strong enough to break them, but it made a heck of a drill. With the drilled bolts and the massive leverage, the bars scraped in their sockets and then shrieked out of the wall.

  I had no time to gather myself. My left foot leveraging against the falling bars was the only thing keeping me from tumbling twenty feet and splatting on the pavement. I kicked away from them and smashed my upper body into the naked window.

  No chance I’d keep from getting cut; I needed all the math I had to generate enough force to break the glass from this direction. I crashed into the room shoulders-first, the blinds coming down with me in a shower of broken shards. As I fell, I windmilled my legs to catch the shooter who’d been standing closest to the window—she wasn’t Tresting—I scissored my legs with a snap and took her out before I hit the floor.

  I had no weapon anymore, but I scooped up a piece of broken window pane in each hand, spinning as I came up. Not Arthur—the glass left my hand, not Arthur again and the other piece of window pane found its mark, the boy dropping his gun and clutching at his throat as he fell. I glimpsed Tresting across the room taking cover behind his gun safe and whirled to face the last hostile, who screamed inarticulately as he brought his Glock around. I dove and rolled over the desk, grabbing at one of the tall, tree-like houseplants as I did—my roll translated into centripetal acceleration as I spun the plant with me and let fly like it was a slingshot. Heavy clay pot hit face before he had time to get a shot off. Heavy clay pot won.

  I let my body complete its roll over the desk and landed on my feet.

  “Tresting?”

  He emerged shakily from behind the safe and stared at me with wide, unblinking eyes, his Beretta twitching in his hand.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  He kept staring.

  “Are. You. Hit?” I enunciated. Is this what they called shock? I wouldn’t have thought Tresting would go in for shock, being an ex-cop and all.

  “That window’s two stories up,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “Good job, I guess that’s why they call you a private eye. Now, seriously, are you okay?”

  He touched his right bicep; blood glistened on his fingertips. “Graze. Lucky, I guess.” His eyes flickered over the scene. Four bodies. Broken glass and dirt everywhere. “It had bars on it,” he whispered.

  I’m not going to lie: I like impressing people. Especially people who’ve just walked away from me in the street and told me they never want to speak to me again.

  “Yup,” I said. “I’m just that good.”

  Chapter 13

  “You’re bleeding,” Tresting managed, once he had found his voice again.

  “So I am,” I said. I have a hyper-awareness of my own body; all the math in the world won’t help me if I can’t match calculation with reality. I can make estimates about other people’s anatomies, but mine I know every detail of at any time, and I knew I’d sustained five shallow cuts on my face, neck, and hands, and that none of them were worth worrying about. “So are you,” I added.

  Tresting half-shrugged and kept his left hand pressed against the graze as he crunched across the glass-strewn floor to crouch by the nearest of the corpses. He reached out to place his fingers against the boy’s wrist.

  “They’re dead,” I informed him. I wasn’t entirely happy about that. I was only now registering just how young they were—four teenagers, a girl and three boys, probably around fifteen or sixteen. Kids.

  I hate it when bad things happen to kids. Especially when I’m the bad thing.

  I also noticed something else. “They’re all Asian.” It seemed strange. “Did you rob a Chinese restaurant or something?”

  “They’re Korean,” corrected Tresting. I made a face; I couldn’t tell the difference. “And gang members.” He pointed to a blood-smeared tattoo on the hand of the boy next to him as he stood.

  I almost said, “So?” but something pinged in my memory about Koreans and African-Americans and race riots. I made a mental note to ask the Internet at some point. “Oh,” I said instead.

  Tresting moved over to the window. I didn’t miss how he glanced out through the shattered panes and then at me, disbelief still sketching his features. I felt rather smug.

  He crouched down again to touch the girl’s wrist, checking for a pulse I knew wouldn’t be there. I looked away.

  The sounds of the street filtered up through the broken window, traffic noise and horns and people going about their days. A light breeze accompanied them, stirring the air in the office and making the cuts on my face start to sting.

  “Thanks,” said Tresting suddenly.

  The word parsed oddly, as if I were listening to a foreign language speaker say something and knew it wasn’t coming out the way he intended. “Sure,” I said.

  Tresting stood back up and regarded me with a slight frown, as if I were a puzzle with a new twist. “They would’ve killed me,” he said. “This neighborhood, cops would’ve been too slow.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “I ain’t…thanks,” he said again.

  I looked around the ruined office. Depression had neatly replaced the smugness. “They’re kids,” I whispered. Maybe I was the monster he thought I was after all. “They’re kids.”

  “I know,” he said heavily, and it sounded like he did.

  I took a deep breath. “What now?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know. Something’s different. First time Pithica’s targeted me.”

  “You think this was Pithica?”

  “Korean gang members trying to hit a black PI in a bad neighborhood,” Tresting recited. “Cops would write it off as a hate crime.”

  “So? Maybe it was.”

  “You saw the data, Russell. Hell, you’ve been attacked.”

  I waited, but he didn’t say anything else, as if daring me to figure it out. I thought about the cases from Kingsley’s journal. A few of the strange deaths had involved gang violence, sure—drive-by shootings, or people caught in the crossfire in places gangs shouldn’t have been active. But Checker had connected a lot of other deaths in the file to Pithica that had nothing to do with gangs—suicides, freak accidents, muggings gone wrong—

  My thoughts ground to a halt. “They don’t want it investigated.”

  Tresting pointed a finger at me, as if to say, bingo.

  “They’re killing people in ways the police can write off easily,” I realized. “Close the case.”

  “Senseless tragedies,” he agreed. “Don’t know how Polk got Kingsley to write that note, but if it wasn’t for Leena—” He broke off. “Shit. Leena.”

  He strode back to his gun safe, spun the combination to open it, and started reloading his Beretta. “You armed?”

  “I will be in a minute.” I picked my way through the debris and slipped weapons out of the lifeless fingers of Tresting’s teenage attackers. The girl by the window had been toting a TEC-9 illegally converted to full auto; the others had two Glocks and a cheap and ugly Smith & Wesson semiautomatic. Jesus, it was irritating enough they had to be so young; couldn’t they at least do us the courtesy of carrying nice hardware?

  Tresting had his phone to his ear as he reloaded; he left a terse message for Dr. Kingsley to take her son, get somewhere anonymous, and call him back. He hung up and holstered the Beretta, then reached back into his safe to hoist out a shotgun that I didn’t need my math ability to tell was far too short to be legal. He wrapped it in a spare shirt like a bundle of curtain rods and comp
letely ignored me when I raised my eyebrows at him.

  “Your prints and DNA are here,” he said instead. “That going to be a problem?”

  “They’d need something to compare ’em to,” I answered. “How about you?”

  “I’ll wake up in an alleyway later and claim amnesia.”

  “You don’t want to stay like a good citizen and help with the investigation?”

  “Not when the doc might be in danger.” He relocked his safe and grabbed a duffel behind his desk to stow the wrapped shotgun in. It still stuck out slightly, hopefully not too obviously.

  Sirens sounded in the distance.

  “Better dash,” said Tresting.

  “For an ex-cop, you’re very cavalier about the law, aren’t you?” I commented, heading for the door.

  Something dark shadowed his face. “Law ain’t never done me much good.”

  We crept down the outside stairway in a hurry; I scooped up my battered SIG from the ground and we made it to Tresting’s truck at a fast walk. The engine came to life with a reluctant shudder; Tresting swung out into traffic and immediately pulled over to make way for five police cars, their sirens wailing and lights flashing. I watched them pass us, trying to keep a poker face. Tresting pulled back into traffic and then reached across to grab a burner cell still in its plastic packaging out of his glove compartment. He tossed it in my lap.

  “Call in an anonymous tip on the doc. I’ll give you her address.”

  Which would ensure we’d run into the cops when we arrived. “Really?”

  “Forty minutes in traffic. Call.”

  I cast around for something sharp to use on the vacuum-packed plastic—the math said I wasn’t getting in otherwise—and found a ball-point pen on the floor of the truck to pry it open with. “You call, then.”

  “I’m driving. Ain’t safe.”

  “Really?”

  “For the—we can’t afford to get pulled over! Just make the damned call. And put your seatbelt on.”

  “Now you want to be law-abiding?” I muttered, but I did as he asked, punching the buttons a little harder than necessary. I relayed the address Tresting gave me to the dispatcher and hung up when she tried to ask my name.

  “Does her son still have that bodyguard?” I asked Tresting.

  “Far as I know. And he’ll be at school right now. Good. Don’t think they’d risk something at a school.”

  “We still don’t know who ‘they’ are,” I pointed out. “Or what they’re after.”

  “There’s an agenda,” Tresting said, his jaw clenched. “Don’t know what, but they’ve got one for sure, and we’re monkeying it up, lucky us.” He gave me a brief, almost calculating glance. “You especially, I think.”

  “What are you talking about? I just stumbled in on this, thank you very much. You’re the one who’s been working it for months.”

  “Yeah, but I think they was happy to see me chasing my own tail. Entertainment, probably, for all the headway we was making. You show up, and…” He slammed down a little too hard on the brake as we approached a red light, and the stupid seatbelt tried to garrote me. “I tracked Polk for months, and they don’t care about saving her hide from no one till you hook up with her. Then they’re after you post-haste, she disappears, and a day later I got a target painted on me too? Don’t believe in coincidences.”

  He was right. Dammit. After all, I hadn’t exactly randomly chanced upon this mess. Rio’s words came back to me: What interests me more is who made such a concerted effort to draw you into this…

  “Got anything you want to share?” said Tresting. His tone wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t neutral, either.

  “Hey, I’ve been playing catch-up from the beginning,” I said. “You still know way more about this shit show than I do.”

  “Well, you know something. Maybe you don’t realize. Or maybe they want something from you.”

  “I’m not special,” I objected.

  It was a stupid thing to say. Tresting wasn’t an unobservant man, and my little display while rescuing him hadn’t been what one might call “discreet.” He didn’t answer right away, shifting gears with feeling and jamming down the accelerator to cut rudely onto the freeway. Then he said what I’d been dreading.

  “At my office. Not that I ain’t appreciative, but how the hell…?”

  I sighed. My usual response, that I’m really good at math, wasn’t going to suffice in blowing off a guy like Tresting. He seemed the type to worry at something until he got every last kernel of fact about it.

  “I jumped,” I said, deliberately obtuse.

  “Two stories.”

  “No, stupid. From the fire escape.”

  He digested that. “And pried off the bars.”

  “With my SIG. It’s a good crowbar. Metal frame, you know.” I was proud of myself for not making a dig about cheap polymer piece-of-crap Glocks. I’m the soul of tact.

  Tresting looked like he was searching for another question to ask. “Damn. If I hadn’t been there myself…”

  “I train a lot,” I lied.

  “In being Spider-Man?”

  “Among other things.” At least he hadn’t actually seen me leapfrog the alley. I was a lot faster than most people imagined.

  “Damn,” Tresting said again. Then he hazarded, “Military?”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Your background. Ex-military?”

  “I seem military to you?”

  “Oh-kay, so not ex-mil.” There was a pregnant pause.

  “School of hard knocks,” I supplied, trying for clever.

  “Hey, that was my alma mater, too,” said Tresting. “But apparently you graduated summa cum laude or something.”

  “Gesundheit,” I said. “Hey, stop PIing me or next time I won’t come save your sorry ass.”

  I didn’t expect that to stop him, but for some reason it did, and he dropped into a thoughtful silence.

  Relieved, I took the opportunity to shoot Rio a cryptic text to see if he had any new updates. The bloody corpses played through my vision again, the stench in the air heavy and metallic and cloying. Those people were dead anyway; was I hypocritical if I hoped it hadn’t been Rio?

  Then who else?

  I thought of Anton. I’d assumed Pithica had been the one to come after him, but the explosive fire didn’t fit with their usual MO. A stunt like that wouldn’t fly under the radar; it would demand investigation. Same with the massacre at the office suite, I supposed.

  Rio wouldn’t have gone after Anton, however. I felt sure of that. He wasn’t bothered by collateral damage to innocent people, but he would never make a concerted hit against a decent man and his twelve-year-old daughter. It was impossible. He himself might be capable of such an act, but his God wasn’t.

  Who was?

  One fact was inescapable. No matter who had come after Anton, the office workers, me, Tresting, or Courtney Polk, Tresting was right: none of it had happened before I had gotten involved. Correlation didn’t imply causality—but it was also possible I was the kiss of death. You know something, Tresting had said. Or maybe they want something from you. I thought back through my retrieval clients, but I’d only been doing this a few years, and I couldn’t think of any past cases that had been strange or unusual enough to have a connection to Pithica. Certainly I didn’t think I knew anything worth killing for.

  And the only thing special about me was my math ability. Which was cool, sure, and occasionally made me into some sort of flying squirrel on crack, but in the grand scheme of things, even I wasn’t conceited enough to think I was worth as much trouble as some people were putting in to stop us.

  Things weren’t adding up. And for someone with an overpowered math brain, things not adding up meant a serious problem.

  Chapter 14

  We arrived at Leena Kingsley’s house fifty-two minutes after we’d left Tresting’s office. The drive had been mostly silent—Tresting was lost in his own thoughts, and for my own part, I figured o
ur détente was too touchy and fragile, and going into a possibly-hostile situation wasn’t the time to mess with it.

  Tresting cruised by the first time without slowing. A cop car sat on the street outside, but only one, and its lights weren’t flashing. The small house was still—no sign that anything was amiss, and no neighbors gawking. It didn’t look like there had been a shootout here.

  Of course, that didn’t mean anything. This was a nice residential neighborhood, with well-groomed yards and picket fences and rosebushes, and Pithica liked subtle.

  Tresting circled the block and then pulled over a few houses prior to Dr. Kingsley’s. He reached into the duffel he’d brought the shotgun in, pulled out a scope, and held it up to one eye. “Can’t see much,” he said after a moment. “But there’s movement. Think she and the cops are talking.”

  “Do you think they’d come after her with police there?”

  “Seems stupid.”

  “We wait, then?”

  “Think so.”

  We sat in the truck, tense and silent.

  About twenty minutes later the door opened, and two uniformed LAPD officers came out onto the porch. Leena Kingsley saw them out, speaking politely. They gave her a last nod and good-bye and headed back to their patrol car. But instead of staying on the street and watching the house as I’d expected, the black-and-white pulled away from the curb.

  “They’re leaving?” I cried. “I called in a death threat!”

  Tresting shrugged. “Police are busy.”

  As the patrol car cruised past us, without meaning to I twitched my face away from their line of sight.