by SL Huang
Oops. “Nothing.”
“Cas!”
“I’m still working on it, okay?” I snapped. “You are in deep trouble! She wouldn’t back off—nice work with the whole ‘shagging a student’ thing, by the way, bang up job there—and the only way I could buy time was to threaten her, which, as you might guess, is only a temporary solution when it comes to the Mafia! I’m working on something more permanent, but she’s hell bent on taking down both you and your and Arthur’s business, so a little gratitude here would be nice.” I leaned back in a huff and blew spider plant babies out of my face.
Checker had gone pale. “Cas,” he said. “I swear I had no idea—you should have told me it was this serious—”
“You knew the Mob was gunning for you and you didn’t think it was serious?”
“But before, when you said you bought some time—I thought it was—I thought we were—this is going too far. I’m so sorry I got you into this.” He pulled out a laptop and opened it with the force of a man on a mission. “I’m going to drag Isabella out of her retreat if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Who?”
“The niece. The, uh, young woman in question.”
“Wait, you didn’t talk to her already?”
“It’s not like I didn’t try! She made it very clear that our arrangement was to be no-strings-attached, which, awesome, that was what I wanted, too, but when I tried to get back in touch with her she sent me a very polite email that made it sound like she’d be very angry if I insisted on contacting her and that she’d delete all future communications unread because our relationship had been a commitment-free one, and I know how she hates having all her family baggage brought up, but I don’t think she knows what’s going on—and now she’s on some school retreat up in the mountains—”
“Tell me where she is; I’ll go talk to her in person.”
“Don’t you dare! If Gabrielle Lorenzo hears you went near her niece, she will alter the space-time continuum to see you dead! I’ll figure out a way to get in touch or get them to send her back to LA. I don’t care if I have to tell them her grandmother died.” His fingers were already drumming across the keys.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” I said. “All Mama Lorenzo needs is another excuse to come after you. She might not wait.”
“Fine, then I’ll figure out a way to get a message up to her. Or something. Hey, answer me this, why would anyone voluntarily go to a place with no computers and no cell phone coverage? Not to mention no electricity or indoor plumbing? I swear, I absolutely do not get why people would ever camp out of their own free will. It’s like they want to go back to the stone ages. Modern technology is part of what makes living today better than living a few millennia ago; you might as well write off every advancement from internal combustion to RSA as a total waste of time if you’re going to—”
“You do that,” I cut into the flow of words. “Where’s my computer?”
“Oh, right.” He twisted to grab another laptop from behind him and handed it to me. “Don’t break this one, okay? I set the password to the last twenty digits of Graham’s number; reset it to one of your own after you log in.”
The water in the bathroom shut off, reminding me Miri was still in the apartment. I’d continuously been on the alert to make sure I’d catch anyone trying to follow me, but still…I was the one who had a target painted on her right now. The faster I was gone, the safer Checker and Miri would be.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll head, then. See you later.”
“Yeah,” said Checker, buried in his laptop again.
I tucked the computer under my arm and started for the door. Checker’s voice stopped me.
“Hey. Cas.”
“Yeah?” I turned.
His hands had stilled on the keys, and his thin face was pinched behind his glasses. “I really am sorry I got you into this. I didn’t think—I didn’t mean to put you in any danger.”
“Oh. Uh, I know.” My temper had cooled, and him dwelling on it was making me feel wrong-footed. After all, I’d successfully escaped all the hitmen so far, albeit with a few hitches. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not that big of a deal.”
“Yes,” he contradicted with a sigh, “it is a big deal. You just don’t think so because you’re weird and scary. I’ll get Isabella back here and fix this; I promise.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s good. Hey, thanks for this.” I hefted the laptop. “I’ll see you soon.”
“Promise you’ll be careful?” said Checker.
“Sure,” I answered. For some definitions of careful, at least.
Chapter 11
I stuck the laptop in my trunk and tried to decide where to go next. I could see if Denise Rayal was home, but I wanted to check out her hard drive first, now that I had a working computer. I’d see about chasing down more information on the Lorenzos once night rolled around—who knew, by then Checker might have gotten in touch with Isabella and the whole thing might’ve blown over. It would be nice only to have to dodge Mafia assassins for another day or so.
That left Arkacite. Specifically, one Albert Lau, who had definitely known more than he was saying. He’d be at work right now. I texted Checker to check whether he lived alone, and when I got an answer in the affirmative I hit the 405 and drove back to Venice.
The address for Albert Lau’s condo turned out to be on a crowded street with no parking at all. I didn’t want my new computer to get towed and didn’t fancy bringing it in with me, so I drove around for twenty minutes until I found a tiny stretch of empty curb. Not that I wouldn’t have a problem if parking enforcement drove by with a license plate scanner—this was still the final car I’d jacked after the escape from Grealy’s the night before—but that hardly ever happened.
Lau’s condo was on the second floor, through a tall, locked gate in a hedge and up an outside flight of stairs. I’d forgotten to bring lockpicks again, but mathematics was an easy substitute for the appropriate tools, and I’d found a couple of paper clips and hairpins in the detritus on the floor of my stolen car. I worked the makeshift picks into first the lock on the gate and then the lock on the condo door and walked into an excessively neat apartment that looked like it belonged in a furniture catalogue, all horrendously stiff white couches and granite countertops and steel appliances. The only thing even approaching clutter was a few artfully placed magazines on the glass coffee table that were far too glossy and crisp-looking ever to have been read.
Well. At least the place would be easy to search.
I pushed through a door into a large bedroom. Lau wasn’t a secret slob—the bed was made with the precision of a hotel maid, and blandly impersonal art prints hung on the wall. Even the closet was neatly ordered, his suits all facing the same freakin’ direction. The pristine bathroom had a second toothbrush, a box of tampons under the sink, and a profusion of brightly-colored women’s bath products lining the edge of the tub, but apparently Lau was very particular about his girlfriend leaving anything else around the apartment.
I wandered back out to the living room. The only thing that appeared promising was a closed white laptop that looked like it had been chosen to match the decor. I started to step over to it when a key scraped in the lock.
The sparse apartment had nowhere to hide, but I crouched down behind the arm of the sofa where I was at least not advertising my presence. The door swung open, and Albert Lau appeared, briefcase in one hand, eyes on a folded newspaper in his other hand as he walked in.
Apparently he’d come home for a late lunch break. Oops.
I stood up and crossed the living room as he shut the door, and when he turned back he ran straight into me. He stopped in his tracks and stumbled back a step. The paper flopped to the floor.
“Hi,” I said. “Remember me?”
He tried to bolt for the landline. I whipped my arm around and clotheslined him.
He sprawled to the carpet in an ungainly heap and shot me a look that was half fear and half lo
athing. Then, with a wince of pain, he edged back from me a few feet in a crab walk until he was against the wall. “What do you want?”
“I want to talk about Warren’s daughter,” I said.
His eyes hooded with the same cagey expression he’d displayed at Arkacite, and he didn’t say anything.
I drew my gun.
He choked, his feet skidding fruitlessly against the floor as if he could push himself through the wall and back outside.
“Tell me,” I said.
He wet his lips, then burst out, “Warren’s the person you should be asking. Maybe he knows it’s worth more than his useless hide to tell you.”
That was not the response I had expected. “Tell me what?”
Lau was a terrible liar. His eyes skittered across his dropped briefcase by my feet.
“Stay where you are,” I said. Keeping my gun on him, I crouched down to turn the briefcase toward me and pushed at the hasps.
Lau’s eyes bugged out when he saw what I was doing. “No, don’t—!”
He was too late.
On top of the papers was a thick sheaf of some sort of project reports. My eyes skipped down each page, but the language wouldn’t connect into meaning at first, the headings just black words on a white page—
Subject’s reactions to isolation from human contact—
Subject’s fear response—
Subject’s reaction to pain stimuli—
A strange buzzing filled my senses and the papers hit the floor as I descended on Lau. He tried to stumble up and get away but I slammed him against the wall, my hand on his throat and my gun in his face—he choked and gurgled against me—
My finger squeezed against the trigger, not quite enough to trip the hammer, but close. “You’re experimenting on her,” I whispered. “A little girl.” My skin felt too tight, the mathematics too sharp, razor edges of vectors and forces singing to me of the pathetic fragility of one worthless human life…
Lau’s brownish complexion had paled to the color of parchment, his skin slack against his bony face. “It’s not what you—!”
I moved before I had considered it. The math felt red with rage as my hand blurred and I whipped the Colt against Lau’s face before he could react to it coming.
His head cracked against the wall, and his body sagged suddenly, a dead weight collapsing against me. I stepped back and let him tumble down in a heap, his limbs smacking against the floor. He would be painfully bruised when he woke up, in addition to the head injury. A jagged laceration had opened across his cheek where I’d pistol whipped him. Blood trickled down his limp features.
My right hand twitched against the gun. I still wanted to kill him.
A child. They were doing this to a child.
I forced myself to take a deep breath. Then another.
I slid the gun back into my belt. I picked up the scattered papers and returned them to the briefcase, trying not to look at them, revulsion crawling through me as I touched the pages. I forced myself to check the computer, but it was so spartan it was obvious he used his work computer for almost everything.
I picked up the briefcase and left.
I didn’t look at Lau again. I knew what I would do if I looked.
Chapter 12
I was half an hour away from Lau’s place before I realized I didn’t know where I was going.
I stopped the car in a red zone and sat gripping the steering wheel. My breath scraped in and out. I was having trouble remembering anything after leaving Lau’s building.
I should have killed him, I thought.
Or maybe I should have taken him. Interrogated him. Found out everything about Arkacite, used him to break in and rescue a scared five-year-old girl who had done nothing wrong.
My phone jangled in my pocket.
“What!” I yelled into it, without looking at the ID.
I heard an indistinct shuffling. “Hello?” asked a tremulous female voice.
“You called me,” I said. “Who is this?”
“Pilar Velasquez. From Arkacite.”
“Oh. Yeah.” I tried to pull myself together, to sound something less than hostile. “What do you want?”
“I…” Her voice hitched, and I suddenly realized what the noises I was hearing were: she was crying.
“What happened? What’s wrong?” I demanded, too fast. After what I had just learned—
“I lost my job,” she burst out, and started full-on sobbing.
I had to strangle back the urge to take her fucking head off. On the scale of one to important, Pilar Velasquez getting fired didn’t even register. And why the hell was she calling me about it? “So what?” I snapped.
“I’m in big trouble,” she hiccupped. “I’ve got rent due in less than a week and my car payment right after that and I—I don’t have any savings—but that’s not why I called. I, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dump on you, only you asked, and it only just happened, and I don’t know what to do…”
I didn’t have time for this. “Get to the point.”
“It’s, it’s Denise. I found out—she’s not dead.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, I know.”
Silence. Even the crying had stopped. Then Pilar wailed, “You could have told me!”
“Sorry,” I said, with no sincerity. “I didn’t think of—”
“You didn’t—? I was depressed all night about this! I got fired because of it!”
“They can fire you for that?”
“Well, I was talking about it at work today; I asked a couple other people if they knew she’d passed—I wanted to do something, like, I don’t know, a company memorial or something, and then Mr. Lau called me into his office and asked where I had heard that and asked who I’d been talking to about Denise and then he accused me of corporate espionage and—and—”
And fired her. I thought of Lau lying unconscious and bleeding on his floor at home. Too bad for Pilar I hadn’t done that this morning.
“And I also wanted to tell you, before I left I ran the program thing your friend sent me,” Pilar added, sniffling. I started to demand, What program?, but she ran right over me. “I wasn’t sure I was going to—I mean, it seemed like kind of a shady thing to ask me to do, you know? But when they fired me I just figured, what the heck, right? What are they going to do, fire me again?”
By that point my brain had caught up with my mouth. “Uh—thanks,” I said, the word coming out only a little too firmly.
Pilar hesitated. “You did send it to me, right? I didn’t just unwittingly commit real corporate espionage against my former employer? Because I’m pretty sure they can arrest me for that—”
“You’re fine,” I said. It wasn’t a lie; Checker had broken me out of jail before in less than half a day, so if Pilar did get arrested we could get her out of it. “I’m going to call you back in five minutes.”
I hung up over her sputtering protests and dialed Checker.
“Why didn’t you tell me you sent her a program?” I ranted, before he’d finished answering. “That was you, right? Tell me it was you.”
“Hang on, slow down! I assume you’re talking about the lovely Miss Velasquez? Yes, that was I, and I would have told you if you had been speaking to me at the time. In fact, I distinctly remember leaving you a voicemail about it, which apparently you didn’t listen to—”
“What did you have her do? Are you getting anything useful?”
“Hold your horses! I had her run a script that Trojans me in behind their firewalls. And yes, it worked. I just need some time to—”
“We don’t have time on this! They have a little girl.” Subject’s reaction to pain stimuli…
“I was going to say I just need time to figure out their system. You know, Pilar might be really helpful, if she’s willing—she can give me the Cliff’s Notes on how all the departments are set up so I don’t have to keep on looking everything up; this company is absolutely Byzantine—”
“Done,” I said. “I’ll se
nd her over to you.”
I hung up and dialed Pilar again. “Hi,” she said. “Is everything okay?”
“You just lost your job, right?” I said. “Do you want a few hours of work?”
“Uh…yes?” The word was a perfect blend of hope and skepticism.
“My friend who sent you the program wants some help figuring out the ins and outs of Arkacite. I’ll pay you cash. What’s your standard hourly rate?”
“Uh—I don’t know—I guess, well, I was making seventeen an hour at Arkacite—”
“Done,” I said. As far as I was concerned that was abysmally cheap; the woman was lucky she didn’t have that job anymore. “I’m going to text you an address. Go straight over; this is time-urgent.”
“I—uh—okay,” said Pilar. “Listen, I don’t mean to be rude or anything, and I really appreciate it, but, uh, this isn’t, like, illegal or anything, is it?”
“They kidnapped a little girl,” I reminded her. Subject’s fear response…“Does it matter?”
“Well—it does to me, a little. I don’t want to go to jail.”
“You won’t. Besides, running the script for us in the first place was probably way worse than giving us the lowdown on the company will be. If they want to jail you, they’ll jail you for that. Now will you help us or not?”
She made an unhappy squeak.
“You met Liliana. For God’s sake, her father just wants her back.” Subject’s reactions to isolation from human contact. “Jesus Christ, we’re not asking for a lot!”
“Okay,” said Pilar in a tiny voice.
“Good. I’m sending you the address now.” I hung up and forwarded her Miri’s apartment, making a mental note to tell Pilar that if anyone from the Mob found her and put a gun to her head, I would kill her myself if she told them anything.
On second thought, maybe she was right to be nervous about being associated with us.
Chapter 13
I’d been too hasty, I realized.
Checker and Pilar would find out where Arkacite was holding Liliana, but I would still need a way in. Albert Lau might be able to help give me that.