by Huang, SL
“I know that!”
We both stared at somewhere that wasn’t each other. Checker sniffed hard again, and knocked over a few things on his desktop to find a pack of tissues.
“Cas,” he said hoarsely, “I’m really, really scared right now.”
“He won’t come after you,” I said again, wondering why the words felt hollow. “He won’t. He doesn’t do that.”
“He told me he would.” His voice cracked. “I don’t know why you trust him the way you do, but he said—” His mouth worked.
“What did he say?”
“He said he was going to destroy everything I held dear and then—and then kill me, he said it—Cas, he was serious, and I don’t know if he meant Arthur, or—”
I pulled out my phone. My hands were stiff.
“What are you—are you crazy? You can’t call him! Tell me you’re not calling him!”
“I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” I said. I had to. I had to.
“If he finds out I told you—that’s what he was threatening me about! To keep you from knowing! If he finds out I told you what he said, he is going to kill me, do you understand? And—”
I closed my eyes. “Checker. I promise. I will not let anything happen to you.”
“He could do it in a way that you don’t know it’s him! Do you understand what I’m saying? Please, please, please, if you have any regard for me whatsoever, please do not call him, and do not tell him I told you any of this!”
I curled my fingers around the phone. “Why did he threaten you in the first place?” I asked.
“To stop me from looking into your past,” said Checker quietly. “He knows something for sure.”
Rio knew something. About me.
“Cas,” said Checker. “Whatever he knows, he thinks it’s best if we don’t find it. I think he’s trying to protect you. Maybe—uh, maybe we should let him.”
“What happened to, ‘knowing is always better than not knowing?’”
“Maybe there are exceptions.”
Rio wanted to keep me in the dark. With Simon stalking me, and voices in my head, and notes in graveyards and Rio threatening Checker and my whole fucking past hurtling forward to crush me.
Which felt…just fine with me, because I didn’t want to know. Every fiber in my being was screaming about how much I didn’t want to know. I wanted to run.
Rio apparently thought I should run, too. So why not?
A woman with short, steel-gray hair frowned down at a clipboard. “Have they told you—”
“Yes,” I said.
She nodded. “I agree. Giving up is for those who would have us fail. We will never do something great if we run.”
Too bad for her, because in this case I was going to do my damnedest to try.
Chapter 11
I left Checker’s place and walked back to my car. I sat down on the curb, holding my phone. A light breeze blew around me, and the sun wandered across the sky.
After the initial shock, my brain had recalibrated to believe Checker about Rio’s threats. It was hard to imagine Checker having any motivation to lie about this. Unless he was trying to put me off Rio, but he’d always been open about his discomfort with Rio’s and my friendship—and he wasn’t the type to play games.
Besides, I did know what Rio was. I knew what he was capable of. What Checker had claimed…it wasn’t out of the question.
What was out of the question was Rio going after someone innocent of real wrongdoing—someone like Checker—in a way he couldn’t be talked out of. By me. I was as bone-sure of that as I was about the type of man Rio was, the type of pleasure he derived from doing unspeakable things to people. After all, I’d known him a hell of a long time.
How long?
I ignored the question.
“He doesn’t go after innocent people,” I said aloud. “He doesn’t.” His faith prevented him, a religious faith that guided him to channel his proclivities into being judge, jury, torturer, and angel of death only to those he weighed as sufficiently evil.
That didn’t include Checker. It couldn’t. It would violate every axiom of understanding I had. Rio wasn’t going to come after Checker or Arthur unless he thought he had to, and I was going to make sure he didn’t ever feel like he did.
I dialed Rio’s number.
The message from his permanent voicemail box played, the one set up the same way mine was. “Hi,” I said. My throat was dry. “It’s Cas. Call me back.”
I hung up the phone and sat, and waited. The evening drew on and got chillier. I got up and drove back to the apartment I was using, watching for tails I couldn’t see.
I’d made it back and was pushing open the door when my phone rang with a blocked number. “Hello.”
“Hello, Cas,” said a flat baritone. Rio.
“Hi,” I said. The word was tight. It was hard to know what to say.
I’d never been good at hiding anything, however, especially from someone who’d known me as long as Rio. “He told you,” he said.
“I guessed,” I corrected. I shut the door and leaned against it, staring at a spot on the carpet. “You scared him. Badly.”
“I meant to.”
“Why?”
“Cas, it’s important you not look into this. Will you trust me?”
“Of course,” I said. “We’ll stop. We already have. I didn’t want to in the first place.”
“I would have expected.”
“Checker assumed you had a reason, you know. In between being petrified, he said he thought we should give it up anyway. You could have made your point without threatening him.”
“Evidently.”
“Rio…” I swallowed. “Please don’t do that again.”
He was silent.
“Checker is—important to me. I don’t know if you can understand that, but—please at least remember it.”
“I shall take it into consideration.”
“I don’t want to go back to…” I cleared my throat. “Before Checker and Arthur were in my life, I was—if something happened to either of them…” My voice rasped. I felt oddly naked saying this out loud, weak and maudlin, but I had to make him understand. “If it did, I’m not—I’m not sure what I’d do. I’m not sure what it would do to me.”
Rio paused, then said, “Understood.”
“You’re not going to come after him, are you?”
“No. Not this time.”
“Not any time!”
He paused again. “I can’t promise that, Cas.”
“Yes,” I said. Anger started to burn in me, hot and furious. “Yes, you can.”
“Cas—”
“I can’t be worried about this,” I said. “This is not negotiable. Promise me, Rio.”
He was a long time in answering. “All right.”
The tension and frustration leaked out of me. I sank to the floor, my back against the door. “Thank you.”
“Cas, how have you been?”
The change in topic threw me. “Fine,” I said automatically. “What do you mean?”
“This…sudden interest in past events. Was there a reason?”
“Not really,” I said. “I…Checker realized I…” I trailed off. I had nearly forgotten what had started the whole thing. “I thought it was normal, not being able to remember. It’s not, is it?”
“No,” he said. “But you should not look into it.”
“Okay,” I said. I trusted him.
“Good.”
“I didn’t want to anyway.”
“Good.”
I pressed my lips together. It was on my tongue to tell him about Simon, but I didn’t. Rio had said to ignore everything from my past, and Simon said he was from my past.
I’d have to tell Arthur to stop looking into him, too. Who knew what I’d do about the man himself. Maybe I should tell Rio about him, come to think of it—Rio was unaffected by telepaths, as far as I knew, and given what he’d said to Checker, I was willing to bet
even odds my Simon problem would swiftly cease to exist.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t say anything. Simon had already influenced me not to kill him, and telling Rio would effectively bust that, so I couldn’t.
That thought really, really made me hope my enemies would shoot him. Fucking psychics.
♦ ♦ ♦
Arthur didn’t want to be dissuaded, especially when I didn’t give him a reason for calling off the investigation. He’d been doing a lot of legwork for a man with a fucked-up leg. First, he’d confirmed his theory about Simon keeping track of my grave was correct and gotten a hold of the phone records from the cemetery offices to trace his check-ins. The numbers all snaked back to countries on the other side of the world—Greece, Bahrain, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia.
The people he’d spoken to at the cemetery had all enthused about how this person whose name they couldn’t quite recall was such a nice man, who cared so much, and they were happy to keep checking on the wall niche for him. They also all concurred he’d been the one to entomb my empty urn, but none of them could agree on either a description of his features or the year it had happened. Or what relationship he was supposed to have had with me.
Simon had made himself well-liked and yet unmemorable, and gotten what he needed without technically brainwashing anyone. After all, people helped out likeable folk all the time, and forgot unmemorable ones.
“I’m surprised he didn’t just make me decide he was my friend,” I said to Arthur. I’d come to the apartment I was lending him to tell him to quit his efforts, and Arthur lounged back on the futon on his good side while I sat on a folding chair.
“You ain’t predisposed to it,” Arthur said. “You’d be suspicious of him whether he made himself likeable or not. But, and no offense here, Russell—you’re mixed up about him, too.”
I pressed my fingers against my forehead as I remembered something. “He knows where Checker lives.”
“Fuck, Russell. Gotta get them out of there.” He picked up his phone. “See, this right here is why when you say we stop, I hear red alert. We gotta keep investigating this guy. Even if he messed you up in the head—especially if he messed you up. Can you see that, at least?”
He didn’t wait for an answer before dialing Checker. A fair amount of profanity ensued from the other end of the line.
“I should’ve known, I should’ve known,” I heard Checker say more than once. I also caught my name.
They were right. I should’ve seen Simon’s knowledge as an immediate, actionable threat, and I hadn’t. Only one logical explanation offered itself for that kind of oversight.
Of course I’d trusted a telepath when I shouldn’t have.
Guilt washed over me. I might not be able to prevent Simon from messing with my neurons, but I was the one he was targeting. I was the reason Arthur and Checker and Pilar were getting tangled up with a psychic. Again.
We’d get the brain entrainment up and running, and then, if Simon was still dogging my heels, I’d leave town and give him the runaround for a while. He could chase me until he got tired of it. Or until the strange images he made rise in my head drove me insane, one of the two.
We stood on the roof of a silo, farmland quilting the land around us to the horizon, and Simon laughed. “We’re here; we’re alive; we’re free!”
I’m not, I thought, but I didn’t tell him. Time enough for that later.
Arthur hung up the phone.
“It’s not Simon who’s making me tell you to stop,” I said, hoping that was the whole truth.
“You can’t know that, Russell.”
“It’s not.” I sighed. “It’s Rio.”
Arthur stared at me. I was pretty sure he’d momentarily stopped breathing.
“I know you have a hard-on for Rio,” I said. “Quit it. He’s telling me we should stop, and I trust him, and you and Checker fucking promised you wouldn’t keep going if I told you no.”
“We did, but—”
“But?”
“Russell! You got another psychic after you. You saw what the last one did. This ain’t a matter of preference anymore. You ain’t the only one in danger!”
“Wait, you two digging into my past is a matter of preference?”
He glared at me. “Ain’t what I mean, and you know it.”
“We already know this Simon guy’s a wuss. Objectively, Arthur; we know it objectively. He could’ve gotten whatever he wanted from all of us without anybody knowing, and he didn’t, because he’s a wimp. Rio’s a lot more dangerous than he is.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe this Simon fellow just ain’t got enough telepathic-type skill to do what you say. But he could still—”
“Skill? He can erase himself from security cameras!”
“And maybe that’s Telepathy 101. You don’t know what’s easy for him and what ain’t.”
He had a point. I didn’t like it when that happened. “Rio said stop, so we stop,” I said. “You really want to get you and Checker on his bad side? This is Rio we’re talking about.”
I hoped he wouldn’t press the issue. I didn’t want to tell him Rio had explicitly threatened them. Arthur was the martyr type; it would probably make him even more stubborn.
“Look into this instead,” I said, pulling out a sheaf of printouts. “Checker got me that list of Pourdry’s businesses and connections. If we shut him down, you and Pilar won’t have to be looking over your shoulders anymore. And you guys can be manual labor for me on all the hardware stuff I’m about to need, too. There’s a ton of shit to do without making extra work for ourselves.”
“This conversation ain’t over,” Arthur said.
“But you’ll stop looking into him for now?”
He hesitated.
“Arthur. This is important to me, and it’s important to Rio. You do not want to piss either of us off.”
“You got stuff you ain’t telling me, don’t you?”
My lungs clenched. “Yeah.”
He made a face and reached out a hand. “Give me the Pourdry stuff.”
Feeling victorious, I handed it over. It was kind of nice that Arthur’s and my relationship had progressed to where he’d go with my word, even if it took a little convincing. It was unexpectedly pleasant to see evidence he trusted me.
I should have known Arthur would consider any respect or trust he might’ve ever had for me to be utterly compromised when it came to a psychic being involved. And I should have remembered he was a very good actor.
Chapter 12
The next two weeks were a thankfully Simon-free flurry of activity. Arthur and I went out almost every day trying to track down Pourdry’s operation, but it was so well-hidden by layers of legitimate-looking fronts that we kept hitting dead ends. From what we could determine, Pourdry never even showed his face personally anywhere, but instead was a master string-puller from behind the scenes—we couldn’t find a single person who’d admit to having met him.
In between times, the little army of Arthur, Checker, Pilar, and I got a crash course in cell phone hacking. Checker was right: it was shockingly, terrifyingly easy. I’d calculated I needed at least two hundred and eighty-three of the fake cell tower signals to saturate LA effectively, and Checker had acquired our little hotspot boxes from various online companies through anonymized accounts and then had them overnighted to us. Each was about the size and shape of a wireless router, and even the power question turned out to have an easy solution—the boxes were low-draw enough that it had taken Checker about five minutes to sketch out a way to rig them to a solar panel and a rechargeable battery.
I could put them on top of roofs, telephone poles, overpasses…anywhere people wouldn’t be likely to notice them. I had a lot more flexibility with placing them than I would have had with the Signet Devices themselves, because all I needed to do was get to people’s cell phones, not solve a delicate constraint satisfaction problem. After all, the app itself would be doing that part—Checker had already coded up my algorithm
for deployment, and I didn’t even bother QA-testing the software. I knew the math was right.
The ease of it all would have been discouraging from a national security standpoint, if one were more worried about national security than I was.
With Arthur and me out investigating Pourdry, Checker and Pilar stayed at one of my crappy apartments and did the lion’s share of the deployment preparation, reprogramming and waterproofing the hotspot boxes and wiring them up to their new power supplies. The construction was monotonous enough for me to be glad to get out, even for our frustratingly fruitless field trips.
“How are you going to set them?” Pilar asked, on the evening she, Checker, and I sat exhausted and stared at the monstrous stacks of rigged-up boxes. Arthur had taken off on some sort of personal errand. “I mean, are you just going to climb up and superglue them on top of lampposts and stuff?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll do that part of it. Some of the places might be hard to get to.” That, and I had to follow the proper mathematics for reaching my critical population density.
Pilar giggled. “I just got an image of you swinging from a traffic light over the PCH. Okay, so once these are all set, they put your app on everyone’s phones, and done?”
“Sort of,” I said. “There’ll be a small delta. The app will download automatically whenever a smartphone comes within range, so it’ll keep downloading to more and more until we’re saturated, and from there all the affected cell phones should start coordinating with each other to put out the subliminal audio signals.”
“I’m just looking forward to everything getting back to normal,” Pilar said. “Normal but with less crime, we hope, right?”
“Yeah. And if we’re lucky, these things will start weakening all the big criminal organizations, including Pourdry’s. Once we can get to him, you won’t have to play musical apartments anymore.”
“There’s still—um,” Checker said.
“The telepath who’s stalking Cas?” Pilar piped up cheerfully.
“Oh, right, him,” Checker said, which probably should have tipped me off but didn’t. “Him and—other loose ends.”
He meant Rio. I’d reassured him multiple times that Rio had promised his safety, but he didn’t seem to entirely believe me. It irked me. “Simon hasn’t shown his face in weeks,” I said. “Maybe he finally listened to me and is leaving me alone. If so, we’re well shot of him.”