Zero Sum Game

by SL Huang

  She started tearing up again.

  Oh geez. “Look, Dawna, I’m going to get her out of this.”

  She tried to nod, but she was trembling with the effort of not breaking down. She brought her fine-boned hands up to cover her face, breathing raggedly.

  I’m not great with people, but I tried. I reached out and put a hand on her thin shoulder. The motion felt very contrived. “Hey, don’t worry. We’re going to find out what this Pithica thing is, and why people think Courtney is involved in it, and then we’re going to shut them down.”

  She managed to nod, face still in her hands.

  “Here, I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  I finally got Dawna calmed down; she drank her latte with small, dignified sips, dabbing at her ruined makeup with a napkin. “I’m sorry, Ms. Russell,” she whispered, her voice shaking only slightly. “It’s so overwhelming.”

  “I understand.” I didn’t, but whatever.

  “I, ah, I have to get back to work,” said Dawna softly.

  I wondered where she worked that she couldn’t take time off right now. Well, maybe she needed the distraction. It wasn’t like I was unfamiliar with that myself.

  “To meet with, uh, Mr. Rio—are you going back to the—to where you found my sister?” Dawna asked in a quiet, fearful voice as she cleaned herself up.

  “Yes,” I said. “To a little town nearby.”

  “Be careful, Ms. Russell. Please.”

  “I will,” I assured her.

  It wasn’t until I had left Dawna tottering back toward work and was back on my borrowed sport bike that I realized I’d forgotten to ask her about payment.

  Huh. That was unlike me—I never forget about money. This case must be getting to me more than I thought.

  Chapter 6

  When I got back to the loft, Courtney was still asleep, her skin pale and tight with ashy smudges under her eyes. I hesitated, then left her cuffed to the pipe, locked the door and ziptied it shut on the outside, and set off for Camarito.

  I took a straighter—well, slightly straighter—route this time, but full night had fallen by the time I hit the desert, and when I slung off the exit toward Camarito, it was well after eleven. This far from civilization, pitch blackness swallowed the road. The bike’s headlight beam hit a wall of cavernous darkness only a few meters in front of me, a maw of nothingness threatening to swallow me whole; I revved the engine and sped into it even faster. I’d left the helmet behind at the apartment, and the wind sliced harshly against me, taking everything but thought.

  The sound sparked against my senses first, a low rumble just at the edge of my hearing. The neurons in my brain fired with Warning! Danger! and I slued off the road before I even identified the noise as other motorcycles—a lot of other motorcycles—

  A crack split the darkness, and my brain spasmed with a disbelieving holy fuck, mines in the road! even as the charge caught the edge of the bike and the frame contorted and leapt like a living thing. I twisted with it, the forces and variables splintering and erupting in every direction until I snapped into alignment and counterbalanced to slam the heavy motorcycle into a controlled skid.

  Metal screamed as the bike took off the top layer of the rocky desert, the headlamp blinking to darkness and fairings snapping off in an explosive cacophony. I balanced the mathematics and rode the dying motorcycle to a crashing halt amid the rocks, levering off right before inertia flung me free, and I hit the stony ground on one shoulder to roll up into a crouch, the cop’s Glock in one hand and the SIG I’d grabbed in LA in the other.

  I snapped my eyes around the darkness, straining to adjust to the pitch black of the night without my bike’s headlamp. Someone had mined the fucking road in an effort to assassinate me—what the fuck—and it sounded like they were bearing down to finish the job—

  The motorcycle engines I had heard on approach built to an overwhelming thunder. Making a few safe assumptions with regard to engine size, I had about four seconds before they closed. My mind flipped through options and found precious few—these people knew my location; they had been waiting for me; they were undoubtedly armed. I couldn’t outrun them on foot. I had to fight, which meant finding some cover and attempting to pick them off with the handguns. Considering my marksmanship, the plan wasn’t as stupid as it might sound…the one flaw being that cover is severely lacking in the desert, and pitch darkness isn’t the best place to go looking for it.

  With no better choice, I dove behind my downed bike as a dozen heavyweight motorcycles roared off the road in my direction. The blackness was still total; they must’ve clipped the wiring on their headlamps and been riding with night vision gear, which boded even worse for me, but I’d been listening, and I popped off my first shot before I even hit the hard-packed ground behind my improvised cover. A shout and a shriek of metal rewarded me. I listened and fired again, and again, the brilliant muzzle flash in front of my eyes blinding in the darkness.

  Bursts of light lit up the night in front of me as my attackers fired back—and then a white flash burned my retinas and a deafening concussion shoved me down so hard I cracked my chin on a twisted fairing of the motorcycle.

  Holy Christ on a cracker, they have grenades? Shit!

  I focused past the ringing in my ears as I got the handguns up again, but the Glock was an inert lump—it must have gotten slammed against something when the grenade hit and jammed, dammit, typical Glock! I swept the SIG across the wave of attackers, firing over and over; I could take down one enemy per shot, but there were too damn many of them—

  And suddenly there were fewer.

  White light flashed across the scene with a roar, blinding me. I had a vague impression of massive, hulking silhouettes on monstrous Harleys as chaos tore through the gang; shouts and grunts became panicked screams as shadows I hadn’t aimed at twisted and fell. Not wasting time in surprise—thank you, Rio—I took out one more, then half-saw a snarling shape lob another grenade toward me and fired without thinking about it. The bullet found its mark on the little bulb and the grenade bounced off course to detonate halfway between me and my enemies. The tooth-jarring concussion slammed into all of us; I ducked back behind the cover of the bike just in time and sensed more than heard the explosive fragmentation as it chewed up the metal.

  I peeked out again and snapped off another shot, but the fight was almost over. One last would-be escapee revved a bike to life, seesawing wildly; I fired a hair before another gun also rang out, and bike and man jerked and went down together. The motorcycle’s engine sputtered for a final few seconds and then died, leaving the desert a still and silent graveyard, the glaring headlights of a truck throwing the edges of leather-clad corpses into shadow and relief.

  My ears rang in the sudden stillness.

  I rose cautiously from my crouch behind the downed bike and stepped out gun first, my boots crunching on sandy gravel and the shards of my shredded motorcycle. I had expected to see Rio striding toward me, tan duster swirling around him; instead, the silhouette of my assist was shorter and darker—and was transferring his gun from the defeated biker gang to me. My own SIG snapped over in the same instant, and I found myself facing the cop who had held me up earlier that same day, who was apparently really fucking good at tailing me, and who was quickly becoming the bane of my existence.

  We stood for a moment pointing guns at each other.

  “Someone wanted you super-dee-duper dead,” the cop said finally, almost idly. His eyes flickered down to the muscle-bound corpses, then back up to me. “You piss off some one-percenters?”

  One-percenters? I searched my memory. That was cop-speak for the outlaw motorcycle gangs, wasn’t it? The answer to his question was no, I wasn’t at odds with anyone in the outlaw biker crowd—in fact, I’d had a few as clients before, and they’d all been perfect gentlemen. I did have enemies who might have hired these guys, but…well. If this attack wasn’t related to Courtney Polk somehow, I would eat my gun.

  I kept the SIG pointed at th
e cop and didn’t say anything.

  “This ain’t random lawlessness,” the cop mused. “This was a hit. A real overboard hit. Either these fellas had a big ol’ beef with you, sweetheart, or someone out there—”

  I was about to mete out fair punishment for calling me “sweetheart”—in the form of a high-velocity .40-caliber bullet—when someone behind the cop coughed wetly.

  I moved before the sound had registered. With two possible threats and only one weapon, a quick slip to the side put the cop and the cough in the same trajectory so they formed one neat line in front of my gun.

  The cop himself hesitated for half an instant. Then, apparently making a split-second judgment call that I wouldn’t shoot him in the back compared to the definite threat if one of the biker gang was still alive, he too spun toward the noise, weapon first.

  “First rule,” I growled, annoyed. “Make sure they’re dead when you kill them.”

  “He ain’t getting up,” said the cop, though instead of sounding defensive, he only sounded grave.

  I sidled cautiously up beside him. He was right. For starters, an eight-hundred-pound Harley pinned the guy solidly to the ground. Still, considering he was a spectacular specimen of outlaw motorcycle gang, as enormous as a mountain troll and with tattooed biceps as big around as my waist—literally, which was kind of scary—he might have been able to rescue himself except for the professional double-tap in the center of his chest leaking a black stream of wetness through the leather.

  Typical police technique, I thought derisively, but still, the marksmanship impressed me. If the guy hadn’t been the size of a Yeti, he’d be dead already. As it was, he was well on his way, nerveless fingers scratching weakly at the metal trapping him. I knew the math, but it was still somehow fascinating that two comparatively tiny holes could take down such a giant.

  I did a quick visual survey of the carnage to make sure no one else had survived—I knew all mine were dead; I never mess around with that center-of-mass crap—then stepped over to stand above my erstwhile attacker and put the barrel of my SIG in his face. “Who hired you?”

  He glared at me, glassy-eyed and hateful. “Cunt,” he whispered, blood bubbling in the corner of his mouth.

  I quashed the urge to quip that he’d noticed my gender; I could already hear something of a death rattle in that one word. “Who hired you?” I repeated.

  “No one,” he spat. “We wanted to.”

  Well, that was new. People who wanted to kill me for fun.

  “Who told you she’d be here?” the cop asked next to me.

  “Go…fuck…” the gang member managed to hiss, and then he choked on his own blood and went still, the hate in his eyes unfocusing, blood still oozing from his mouth and chest.

  Death is never pretty.

  “Real pleasant dude,” commented the cop.

  We no longer had our weapons pointed at each other, and re-initiating that situation seemed like a bad idea. Still, I kept the SIG out and pointed in a direction that wasn’t quite down as I turned to face the man who had both threatened my life and, I reluctantly admitted, probably saved it in the same day. “Who are you?”

  “Name’s Arthur Tresting.”

  “And you’re a cop.”

  “Not anymore,” he said, and something I couldn’t read flickered through his eyes. “I’m a PI. Lady, I think we might be on the same side here.”

  I resisted the urge to haul off and sock him one for calling me “lady.” “You didn’t think so this morning.”

  He glanced at the carnage surrounding us. “That was before Pithica tried to kill you.”

  Pithica again. I thought of Anton. Two people I liked were dead, and this Arthur Tresting knew something about why.

  And he was going to tell me.

  “What’s the Polk girl to you?” said Tresting.

  I hesitated. As a general rule, I didn’t give out information—any information, to anyone, and particularly not to a person I had every reason to mistrust. Still, I wanted to keep him talking, and the value of a few low-intelligence tidbits…

  “Purely fiscal,” I answered. “Someone hired me to protect her.”

  “Who?”

  “Quid pro quo,” I shot back. “What’s your interest?”

  “Guess you could say money started it for me, too. A woman hired me to find out who killed her husband and the father of her eleven-year-old boy.”

  “What does that have to do with Polk?”

  Tresting studied me. “Well, she did it, you see.”

  What the hell? The desert silence blanketed us. “One of the cops on the drug bust,” I guessed. But the police had already blamed Courtney for those murders. Why would the widow feel the need to hire a PI?

  “No,” Tresting said, overly casually. The word fell between us—soft, final, incriminating. “A busy young woman, our Courtney Polk.”

  I’d already known she wasn’t on the level, but I’d been assuming some combination of fear and naïveté. That maybe she hadn’t realized what she’d gotten into, or had been too scared to face it. “She doesn’t seem the type,” I offered, stalling.

  “Nah, she doesn’t, does she?” said Tresting. “Was an odd sort of crime. Odd in the same way these lovely motorcycle gents discovered an irredeemable hatred for you. Makes you think it wasn’t their idea.”

  “Maybe they thought it was a fun night out,” I said, stubbornly not thinking of the mines in the road or the freaking grenades, or the fact that all the biker guys I’d known had a code against baseless killing. Okay, something fishy might be up with the bikers, and it very well might have to do with Courtney Polk, but a mastermind theory that cast her as a hired assassin alongside them? It didn’t wash.

  “Might agree with you, if there wasn’t a pattern,” said Tresting.

  “A pattern of what?”

  “Murders. And other things.”

  “I don’t have time for riddles,” I said, my gun hand twitching.

  “Well. Hypothetically, let’s say Miss Polk and your new friends here ain’t the only ones acting out of character. Let’s say it’s more. A lot more.” He cleared his throat. “And let’s say it’s senators and grandparents and the folk next door.”

  I squinted. “Are you even listening to yourself? What, so every killer who doesn’t fit the profile is part of some shadowy conspiracy? Newsflash, Einstein: sometimes people are violent. A lot of times for no other reason than they want to hurt people.”

  “A lot of times.” He gave a non-committal half-shrug. “Maybe not all the time.”

  This was far too fantastic for me. “And Pithica?”

  “Far as I can tell, it’s them pulling the strings. Can’t pin it any closer than the word, though.” He seemed to make a sudden decision and holstered his gun. “So. What do you say? Can I give you a lift into town? Maybe share some intel?”

  My first impression was that the PI was one hundred percent cracked. But whatever else he was, Tresting was a lead, and I needed all the information I could get.

  “Fine.” I slid the SIG back into my coat. I could still kill him in a fraction of a second if I needed to, as long as he didn’t have a gun on me.

  Tresting jabbed his thumb at the source of the white headlights. “My truck. And I’ll pretend I didn’t see the extended mag.”

  “It’s legal two hundred miles east of here. ’Sides, you should talk.”

  “Yeah, speaking of, where is it?”

  I waved vaguely toward the desert scrub. “Back there somewhere.”

  He rolled his eyes and jogged over to where my bike had gone down, flashing around the white beam of a penlight. A few minutes later he returned, banged-up Glock in hand.

  “Afraid your bike’s a lost cause,” he told me.

  “Wasn’t mine.”

  He shot me a look. “Didn’t hear that, either.”

  “I thought you weren’t a cop anymore.”

  “Old habits, blah-dee-blah.” Examining his jammed handgun, he dropped the mag
out and racked the slide a few times, clearing the chamber, then stuck it in the back of his belt without reloading. I watched with some approval—I wouldn’t have trusted a weapon that had nosedived into the desert dust either, not if I had another choice. He patted his Beretta. “Lucky for you, I had another backup.”

  “Yeah, nine-mil?” I scoffed. “Did a little girl give that to you as a party favor?”

  “Best gun is the one you have with you,” he quoted at me mildly. “And someone stole my .45. Can I get the snubby back too, by the way?”

  “Can’t,” I answered breezily. “I gave it to a little girl as a party favor.” Something in me twinged, and the quip felt hollow as I remembered what had happened to both Penny and her new present. “Let’s go.”

  We did one last once-over of the bikers to look for anything out of the ordinary, but aside from some frighteningly high-tech night vision gear and more armaments I wouldn’t have expected this kind of gang to have—not that I was an expert or anything, but still, plastic explosives?—we found nothing. No clue indicating what might have brought them here, except that they really, really wanted me dead. Fun.

  I snagged a saddlebag off one of the Harleys and loaded up some of the nicer toys. A girl can never have too many grenades, after all. Tresting gave me a severe look, but didn’t say anything, fortunately for him.

  Chapter 7

  Tresting’s truck was a beat-up old clunker that looked like it had come out of its share of brawls not only still kicking but bragging about how tough it was. I stowed my bag of toys on the floor of the passenger seat and climbed in.

  “Seatbelt,” said Tresting, as he coaxed the ignition to a shuddering rumble.

  I didn’t explain that I could buckle up plenty fast enough if I calculated it would help with anything. Tresting had seen too much of my skills already. I fastened my seatbelt, muttering, “Yes, Mom,” under my breath.

  Tresting revved the engine, the tires spinning against the sandy ground before they found enough purchase to rocket the truck forward with an almighty lurch. We bounced back onto the dusty highway, the headlights sluicing through the empty darkness.