by Huang, SL
I pulled up outside the emergency room’s ambulance loop. Arthur levered himself out with a grunt, hopping a little as he landed on his good leg. I felt like I should say something, but all I could come up with was, “We’ll get him, Arthur.”
“Yeah,” he said.
I waited for him to limp up the sidewalk before speeding off to ditch the truck. God, he’d better be all right. If he wasn’t, I would kill him.
I called Checker as I switched cars, my still-bleeding hands making the burner phone’s keys stick.
“Cas? Is everything okay?” He didn’t sound like I’d woken him.
“No.” Something shifted behind me, out of place, and I whipped around, the carbine coming up again. But it was only shadows.
I was going out of my mind.
“Cas? Cas, what’s going on? Are you guys all right?”
Goddammit, focus. “I’m coming over,” I said to Checker, crushing the words to diamond hardness. “And I want everything you can give me on Jacob Pourdry.”
Chapter 5
“Jacob Pourdry,” Checker said, fully dressed and alert when I entered the Hole an hour and a half later, “is a piece of trash of the highest order. Law enforcement knows all about him, but hasn’t been able to touch him because he keeps his hands clean on paper. What’s with the gloves?”
I’d swung through a convenience store and picked up some work gloves so I would stop bleeding all over everything. “It’s nothing. They’ll heal. Keep going, but tell me how Arthur is first.”
“He’ll have trouble sitting down for a few weeks, but if you have to get shot, apparently the gluteus maximus is the place to do it. They left the bullet in and patched him up, and I’m tracking the police investigation. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah. Keep going on Pourdry. I know he’s a scumbag; everyone knows he’s a scumbag. Tell me what I don’t know.” Pourdry’s was a name even I hadn’t been willing to work for, long before Arthur and I had started getting in his way. But if this was becoming a war, I’d need more than common knowledge and urban gossip. A lot more.
“Okay, well, do you want his history?” As usual, Checker worked as he talked, scrolling through documents I didn’t recognize as he recited the litany from memory. “Jacob Pourdry is your basic run-of-the-mill privileged sociopath who got bored making millions on Wall Street. I’m not kidding. He was born vanilla and middle-class in Toronto, blew his peers out of the water academically, and ended up at Harvard Business School, where he was apparently so unchallenged he started running a drug ring for all the jacked-up over-pressured grad students. Allegedly. He dropped out halfway through to go be an asshole in the financial sector, wrung what he could out of New York, then decided that wasn’t enough of a playground and expanded his business into one of the most sprawling criminal enterprises in the southwestern United States.”
“This is all public knowledge?”
“If you know where to look. I’m telling you, this guy is like Al Capone: the only way they’re going to get him is if they find a misplaced decimal on his taxes. Everybody knows what he does but no one can charge him.”
“That’s okay; I’m going to put a bullet in his brain.”
The skin around Checker’s eyes tightened, and he swallowed, still studying his screen.
“Come on,” I said. “This guy traffics in children. He doesn’t get second chances.”
“Yeah, just—I’m helping, but give my conscience some plausible deniability, please.”
I didn’t have the patience for his squeamishness. “His guys shot Arthur tonight. They could’ve killed us both. I need to know where I can find him and what’ll happen to his network if there’s a sudden power vacuum.” If it was only Pourdry who had the charm and skill to keep the ranks following him, maybe beheading the snake would be all I’d need.
Checker blew out a breath. “I can’t help you with those. They don’t write that sort of thing down on paper, or, you know, in digital files. But I can tell you he runs things through a bunch of fronts and shell corporations, and I can give you a list of addresses for those. I want to make sure the police investigation isn’t snapping back on you and Arthur first; can I email it?”
“Do that. And remember, you still owe me statistical data.”
“Right.” The word was brittle.
“This is why we need a better way of fighting back,” I said. “Picking off these assholes one at a time is never going to be enough.”
Checker folded his lips together.
“What the fuck.” Part of me was itching to start a fight, and Checker was both available and infuriating me. “Arthur just got shot and you still don’t want to help me?”
“Can we talk about this later?”
“When? After I get shot? After you do? After Pilar is walking down the street by the office and gets mugged?”
“That’s not fair—”
“Of course it’s not fair! That’s the whole reason we need to do this!” Of course it’s not fair, mimicked a voice in my head that wasn’t mine. We were born to it. I pushed away the phantom. What the hell was going on with my brain? “I’m trying to make it fair, and you won’t help me.”
“Because I’m against this. Influencing people’s thought patterns is wrong. It’s wrong and it’s evil and I’m not going to help you do it.”
“What, I’m evil now?”
“Not what I said,” he snapped. “But I wouldn’t want my brain messed with, and I’m not going to help you do it to anyone else. Period.”
“Oh, you think you’re likely to get caught up in a mob, do you?”
“Not the point.”
“It fucking well is the point,” I said. “Because if you were, and you temporarily lost your ability to reason, I guarantee the thing you’d want most in the world would be for something else to beat that feeling back.” I knew the argument was going to work as soon as I started it, and I tried to keep the egotistical triumph off my face. “Crowd psychology is like a drug. This is going to help people not be affected by something that would otherwise make them feral and amoral against their will. And you don’t want to help.”
He hesitated.
“It’s not a pacifier, and it’s not messing with people’s brains,” I insisted. “It’s preventing the deindividuation from doing it.”
Checker leaned his elbows against his desktop and dropped his face against his hands. “Screw you, Cas.”
“You should know by now. I’m always right.”
“That is not even close to being true.” He sat back up, taking off his glasses to rub his eyes. “I want you to leave out the Hole. I don’t care what you say; I don’t want my brain affected by this.”
“Fine,” I said. “Your delicate little neurons will be spared.”
“And if this thing starts making people so peaceful they want to lie down and die, I’m holding you personally responsible—”
“You watch too many movies,” I said. “I’m telling you, it’s only going to affect people who are already getting their buttons pushed by groupthink.”
“I’m still against it.”
“And I’m still against you poking into my business, so we’re even.” Suddenly feeling every inch of the bruising from tonight, I hitched myself stiffly up to sit on Checker’s desktop between monitors and leaned back against a computer tower.
I felt Checker move closer to me. He picked up a keyboard off the desktop and slid it on top of one of the towers so he could prop his elbows next to me. “Cas. Hey.”
I curled my gloved hands loosely against my knees. Blood was starting to seep through along the seams.
Checker nudged my legs with his shoulder. “You know, only you would assign yourself the problem ‘fight crime’ and then try to come up with a general solution.”
“General solutions are the only ones worth anything,” I said.
“Nah,” he answered. “For instance, I think we’re going to find a kickass particular solution to the Cas Russell recombinat
ion problem.”
I huffed out a breath of air that was something like a laugh.
“Tell me about some of your clients,” he said softly. “The regular ones, or the older ones.”
“Don’t you have a police investigation to follow?”
“I’m waiting on CSU. We have a minute.”
God, everything hurt. I wanted to go sleep, but moving would hurt, too. “I can’t tell you what I do for them,” I said to Checker. “Discretion is part of the job.”
“That’s okay. Just tell me about meeting them.”
I sighed. “Yamamoto got my name from Anton. I don’t know what Anton told him, but he put together a ridiculous display the first time he met with me. Huge array of power, lots of guards with guns, a spread that was practically a banquet. I’ve never met someone who tried so hard to impress me.”
“From what I hear of Yamamoto, that doesn’t surprise me,” said Checker, the ghost of a smile in his voice.
“Yeah. He’s a character.”
“How did you meet Anton?”
“Through Tegan, I think. Anton was—he and I went back pretty far.” I swallowed. Anton’s death still stabbed. I hadn’t known him all that well on a personal level, but the big, gruff man had left more of a hole than I had expected. And his death had been my fault—his and his daughter’s deaths both. “I needed an information guy, and I asked—no, that’s not right. Tegan mentioned him and I asked for a referral because I knew I’d need someone.”
“How long ago was that?” asked Checker.
“Oh, uh…five years, or thereabouts? Maybe a little less.”
“Did you have an information guy before Anton?” Checker continued.
“No, I did most of the looking up myself before that. But I was sorely in need of someone—I can’t do much beyond basic search engines.”
“Trust me, I know,” Checker said.
“Shut up.”
“And how about Tegan? How did you meet him?”
I winced a little thinking of Tegan. I’d asked him for another referral half a year ago and then promptly screwed him over. Since then, I’d been too much of a coward to see if he’d still take my calls.
At least I hadn’t gotten him killed, like Anton.
“I met him when I did a job for him,” I told Checker, a little too loudly. “He needed—no, wait, when he called me to hire me I knew him already.” I thought for a minute. “That’s right. I hired him first.”
“For documents?”
“I don’t know; it’s—it’s fuzzy. I mean, yes, obviously for documents; what else would you hire Tegan for? But I don’t remember for what. Rio and I went in—I can’t remember what the package was for though, or what job. I don’t think it’s a memory thing, I think it’s just been too long and it wasn’t that important.”
“Maybe,” said Checker. “Could the docs package have been for you? Do you have any IDs?”
Cassandra, is it? Good to meet you.
“Yeah, of course.” I forced my answer to override the voice in my head. “I have twenty or so. I’ve had Tegan make me new ones as a regular thing. None of them with my name on them, though.”
“Of course not,” said Checker with fond irony. “And how about, uh, Rio? How long have you known him?”
“Oh, forever,” I said. “We go way back.”
“How far is way back?”
“I don’t know; years. Forever.”
He paused for a moment. “Will you tell me how you met?”
He sounded surprisingly neutral, and I wondered if the hesitation had been to make sure he’d leached the judgment out of his voice. Checker and Arthur didn’t like Rio. I couldn’t say I blamed them. Rio was…not a nice man.
They have sinned in the eyes of God. The echo was spattered with blood and death. “He saved my life.”
“From what?”
“From…” I squeezed my eyes shut, my brain crackling behind my eyelids. “I don’t want to talk about it.” I swallowed. “Jesus, I was shot at and almost run over tonight, in case you don’t remember. Can we not do this now?”
Checker paused for just long enough that I could tell he wanted to say no. “Of course. We’ll pick it up later. Thanks, Cas, this helps.”
“Helps whom?”
He ignored me. “Get some sleep. I’ll, uh. I’ll start sending the data you asked for, okay? Promise.”
I grunted. I did need sleep.
My body had stiffened enough that I thought about asking Checker if I could kip on his couch, but I figured I should peel off the work gloves before they started sticking and then properly dress my stupid hands. The right one had moved from a sting to a dull throb. I levered myself out of Checker’s workspace and left the Hole.
On the sidewalk in front of his house, I stopped. The night snapped into numbers and data structures. I breathed them in, slowly.
Something was wrong.
I’d left my carbine in the car, but the three-dimensional model of my Colt drew itself in my head, outlining where it rested against the small of my back. I’d checked it over after delivering Arthur, and the drop had banged up the finish in a way that pained me more than my hands, but all the tolerances were still tight and solid. My brains and muscles teetered on the edge of pulling it, of drawing and firing at the threat I knew was out there, if only I could pinpoint it—
“Please,” said a voice. “Don’t.”
I spun and dove, the conjecture becoming reality as the Colt swooped out of my belt and into my gloved fingers.
“Please!” cried the man, the bronze-skinned man with the dark curly hair, the one I’d seen in the bar and outside Arthur’s office, the man who’d been following me—me—for days. The man I’d seen even before then, even before all the times I’d noticed him and forgotten…over and over, haunting my dreams. He raised his empty hands, palm out, and stepped back. “I’m not going to hurt you, Cassandra.”
I kept my gun trained right between his eyes. “Who the fuck are you?”
Chapter 6
“Cassandra, please,” he said. “Put the gun down.”
“You’ve been following me.” Nobody was able to follow me. Not like that. “And what did you just call me?”
The dark-haired man took a slow, cautious step forward, but not as if he was afraid—more like one might approach a frightened puppy. I felt like I was seeing his outlines properly for the first time: a handsome face with well-defined features, a medium build in nondescript casual clothes, a little taller than average but not enough to be remarkable.
“Cassandra,” he said. “It’s your name, remember?”
What the hell? “I know that,” I said. “I want to know how you know it.”
He let out a breath that sounded like relief. “It’s okay. We knew each other a long time ago. You wouldn’t remember.”
I scrabbled at the disordered mess of my brain, at every memory I could muster up. Every time in the past few days I’d felt like I was being watched, seeing his blurred shape out of the corner of my eye…the impressions crossed with my dreams until I didn’t know which had actually happened. The dark man running with me through a forest, crouching together in a hidden place, afraid…
“Cassandra, what’s wrong?”
I tried to reach back, strained for something solid, and suddenly he seemed horribly familiar, like someone I’d known in another life. But I still couldn’t remember him—
“Cassandra, stop! Stop trying!”
He had closed the distance between us and was gripping my shoulders, heedless of the gun that was now in his face. And I—I hadn’t seen him do it. Somehow I had missed the movements of a potential threat while in the middle of a standoff.
I tore back from him, away, tightening my grip on the Colt, making my aim straight and sure. “Don’t touch me. Don’t fucking touch me!”
“Cassandra—”
“Stop calling me that!” Who was this man, this…apparition? And the only person I’d ever known who used my name every othe
r sentence that way was Rio—
Rio.
I saw Rio and this man standing together, talking, backlit against a deepening twilight—
“Cassandra! Stop! Come back to me!”
He’d come up and grabbed my wrist this time, pressing my gun down. I twisted out of his grip, shoving him back. My heart slammed in my chest, my adrenaline spiking. “What the hell are you doing to me?”
He didn’t seem to have heard my question; his eyes were crawling slowly over my face like he was surveying me as a home furnishing. “Oh—oh God—what happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened? Who are you?”
He blinked very fast, his forehead knitting, and his eyes fastened on mine again. His gaze was arresting, a dark magnetism that threatened to pull me in. I choked on it.
“Cassandra,” he said softly. “I have to ask you something.”
“Tell me who the fuck you are first.”
“My name is Simon. Like I said, I knew you. A long time ago.”
“That doesn’t tell me shit.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “But I have to ask something of you. It may—it may seem crazy.”
“How were you following me?” My voice was hoarse. I didn’t bother trying to raise the gun again.
“When I try not to be noticed, people usually don’t notice me. It’s nothing nefarious, I swear to you.”
“You’re doing something to me. My thoughts. My memory.” Fuck, I’d met other people like him before—or at least, one other person. Dawna Polk.
Dawna Polk, psychic extraordinaire, who’d had me betraying Rio, Arthur betraying Checker, and her minions so brainwashed they believed entirely in her cause.
“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s why I can’t—you’re from Pithica. We had a deal!”
“No! No. I’m not Pithica. I swear.”
Buzzing filled my brain, as if it wasn’t getting enough oxygen. “You say you’re not them, but you know who they are. You know that name.”
“Yes. And I see you do, too.” He searched my face.
“You, you’re…you’re like them.” A psychic. Another bloody psychic.