Zero Sum Game

by SL Huang

There was a pause over the line. Then: “Shit,” he said eloquently.

  I hadn’t been sure Tresting himself hadn’t abducted Polk or ordered someone else to while we were in Camarito, but he sounded so surprised and defeated that I relegated the possibility to slightly-less-likely. “My thoughts exactly. You still got a GPS on her?”

  “Yeah. Give me a sec.” His words sounded muffled, and with a slight pang of guilt I remembered he had just had his face bashed in. His night wasn’t going terribly well either.

  A minute later, Tresting’s voice came back on. “I got it. South of LA, and moving.”

  “I’m going after her. Where are you?”

  “Receiver won’t help you.”

  My suspicions swung back the other way. “You do realize you want her found, too, right? So help me, if you don’t give me the—”

  “Whoa, hey, not what I meant. Meant you can’t catch her. Moving too fast to be in a car.”

  “Train?” I asked, my stomach sinking.

  “Faster. Guess again.”

  Shit.

  “Won’t be able to do anything until they land. But hey…” He hesitated. “Listen, if you still want to share intel, come meet me. Might be we can still get ahead some.”

  If he had Courtney himself, I thought it unlikely he would want a face-to-face. On the other hand…“You’re awfully calm about this,” I said.

  He sighed, and when he spoke again he sounded frayed. “Ain’t surprised. This case has been fubared six ways from Sunday ever since I took it. Think I’d die of shock if something went right.”

  I squeezed my eyes closed. I needed sleep, even a good hour of it, but time wasn’t on my side. I decided it didn’t matter whether Tresting had taken Polk or not—either way, I needed to take the meet. “All right. Where?”

  He named an intersection in a part of town I was vaguely familiar with. “And, Russell? Please. Come alone.”

  What he meant was “Don’t bring Rio.” I snorted. “Your delicate sensibilities are safe. He’s working another angle.” I paused. “I won’t be unarmed, though.”

  He took a quiet breath that sounded like relief. “Not a problem. Good. Thank you.”

  “Whatever. I’m surprised you still want to work together, after that show you made.”

  “Not sure I do,” he admitted frankly. “But I made a few calls. Like I said, I’d heard of you. Your rep’s solid.”

  Well, that was nice to know. I wondered which of my former clients he’d talked to. I wished I had a way to check him out, but I’d lost my information guy, and I hadn’t made a whole lot of friends in the past couple years I could check a reference with and trust the answer I got.

  For all I knew, I could be walking into a trap. It didn’t feel like one, but I had no way to know.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Tresting was waiting when I arrived, a lean silhouette in the darkness. He’d cleaned up his face, and the damage didn’t look as bad as it probably was thanks to the darkness of the night and the dark shade of his skin, but I could still tell he’d been hit by a truck the shape of Rio’s palm.

  “This way,” he said.

  “I want to see the receiver first.”

  “Thought you might,” he said, taking it out of his pocket and handing it to me.

  I studied the display. Nothing said this couldn’t be faked, but it supported what Tresting had already told me. The red dot indicating Courtney crept forward somewhere over New Mexico. I measured its speed with my eyes and glanced at the scale. Slightly faster than most commercial planes went—private jet, I figured.

  Apparently presuming I was satisfied, Tresting started to walk, letting me keep studying the display as I fell in step beside him. I extended the plane’s trajectory in my mind, thinking through probable destinations, but there were too many variables. I sighed and handed the receiver back to him, a small gesture of cooperation. “Where are we going?”

  “My office. Meet with my tech guy.”

  I was pleasantly surprised. I’d been feeling Anton’s loss keenly every time this case took another left turn. From what he’d said, Tresting’s guy was good. “Can he be trusted?”

  “With my life.”

  I still wasn’t sure the PI himself could be trusted, but I liked the sound of that.

  Tresting led me up a hill of close-packed buildings leaning against each other in the darkness, storefronts crammed in against ancient apartments with barred windows and rusted security grilles. We turned down an alley at the top of the hill that led between a tall brick building and a revamped warehouse with cement blocks for walls; bars were bolted across the windows here too, even the second-story ones. Tresting led the way up a narrow metal staircase climbing the side of the warehouse and stopped at a second-floor door reinforced with sheet metal. The stenciling on it read, “Arthur Tresting, Private Investigations” in clean, professional lettering, and he unlocked it and pushed it open.

  Part of me had still been suspicious of a trap, but instead we were in a tastefully furnished office with a broad wooden desk backed by several comfortingly decorative tall houseplants. Plants. It was absurdly normal. The only thing in the place that hinted the office didn’t belong to a tax lawyer was a tall gun safe abutting the file cabinets against one wall.

  “Come in,” said Tresting, going behind his desk and pulling one of the client chairs around with him so he could gesture me to sit. He powered on a sleek desktop computer with dual monitors that booted into some Unix-based variant of operating system. I squinted at him in surprise.

  “My tech guy set it up,” he explained.

  “Speaking of, when is he getting here?”

  “Right now,” said Tresting, opening a video chat link.

  A clear image of a room snapped into focus on one monitor, and my immediate impression was the lair of someone who was one-third hacker, one-third supervillain, and one-third magpie. Bundles of wiring and edges of hardware I didn’t recognize filled the whole view, and multiple monitors showing abstract screensavers backlit the darkened space, racked one over the other to create a wall of screens. The dim light silhouetted a man who sat presiding over his nest of computers, and as the chat link came alive, he turned to face us, levering one side of what I realized was a wheelchair around to bring himself closer to the camera. He was surprisingly young, probably Tresting’s junior by two decades, and was one of the skinniest men I’d ever seen, with a skinny lean face, a skinny little goatee, and skinny long fingers, which he steepled under his chin as his eyes flicked over us. A manic grin lit up his narrow face.

  “Well, well, well, Arthur,” he said. “What do you bring to stimulate my genius today?”

  Tresting gestured to me. “Checker, meet Cas Russell.”

  I nodded to him. “You have the data on the Pithica stuff?”

  Checker narrowed his eyes at me behind wire-framed glasses. “I do.”

  “I want to see it all.”

  He affected surprise. “What, all of it? And you haven’t even bought me a drink first?”

  “I’ll pay your rates,” I assured him, thrown by his flippancy. Most business deals were a quick and easy exchange of money and services. I wasn’t used to a bantering preamble.

  “I charge double for new clients,” Checker said cheerfully. “Discounts for beautiful women and anyone who can quote the original Doctor Who. I can see you aren’t going for the former, but if you offer me a jelly baby I’ll take off ten percent.”

  “Hey,” said Tresting. “Behave. Ain’t nobody ever teach you not to insult a woman’s looks?”

  “I’m not insulting her looks, only her deportment,” said Checker. “So I like good scenery. At least I’m willing to offer financial incentives for it.” He winked at me. “Want to come back in something slinky and ask again?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I sputtered. “You know we’re on the clock here, right?” We didn’t have time for clowning around, but more than that, it was…off-putting. Besides, it was objective fact that my lo
oks fell on the lacking side of any aesthetic scale. Symmetry and proportions—who cared?

  Checker pulled a face that made him look about five years old. “I don’t know if I like her, Arthur.”

  “Cut her some slack,” said Tresting. “We all had a rough night.” He cleared his throat, then said carefully, “She might have some more pieces of the puzzle, too.”

  Checker perked up immediately. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” He rubbed his long, thin hands together and reached out to start clattering on one of his many keyboards, his fingers so fast the clack of the keys was almost indistinguishable. “What’ve you got for us, Cas Russell?”

  I blinked. I’d had Tresting’s relationship with this guy all wrong. Checker wasn’t merely his information broker. This wasn’t just a business deal. The two of them were friends. And Checker was as invested in this case as Tresting himself was.

  Which meant, duh, of course they were much more interested in what I could bring to the table in terms of the case than they were my money. That was new.

  I supposed this was the time to toss in. If I wanted their resources, I would have to be a part of that—that team effort. It felt…completely and horribly wrong to me. After all, I reminded myself, Arthur Tresting had introduced himself to me by threatening to kill me and torture my client, and had tried to point a gun at me no less than three times. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell this man or his friend anything at all.

  Except my client was winging her way away from me on a jet plane, and a motorcycle gang had just tried to wipe the desert with me in a high-tech hit, and Rio was weirded out by this whole case—and, overshadowing everything else, I had told my plans to a woman I barely knew and then attacked the only person I trusted in the worst way I knew how.

  I needed information. I was desperate for it.

  I felt a distinct sympathy for Tresting’s instant decision to trust me earlier.

  Perhaps thinking along the same lines, the PI took pity on me. “Start with the basics,” he suggested. “Who hired you to protect Polk?”

  Dawna had waived her client privilege when she had drugged-or-whatever me anyway. I unstuck my tongue and said, “Her sister. Dawna Polk.”

  Tresting frowned at Checker. Checker was frowning at me. “She doesn’t have a sister,” the skinny computer guy declared authoritatively.

  “What? Yes, she does,” I said.

  Checker was already shaking his head and turning to his keyboards. “I did deep background on this girl. Thoroughly, for Arthur here. She hasn’t got a sister.”

  I gripped the edge of the desk, fighting off a massive, almost desperate sense of foreboding. “What about a half-sibling or something? One she didn’t grow up with?”

  “Nope. Not unless the person was entirely off the grid, which is so unlikely as to border on the impossible,” Checker answered. “Otherwise there would be paternity tests, or adoption papers, or birth certificates, or—or something. You can never disappear completely, unless maybe your parents were hippies who went off the grid before you were born and raised you with wolves in the wild.” He wrinkled his nose. “Courtney’s parents, on the other hand…if I remember rightly, they were a boring little high school romance turned into a boring little small-town marriage, and then they died in a combine accident. Right, Arthur?” He was typing rapidly, his attention on a screen I couldn’t see as he continued talking. “Yeah, a combine accident. Hey, can you believe we still have those? I thought combines were from the Laura Ingalls days or something. You know, back when they still had farms.”

  I shook my head, trying to get back on track. “But Dawna says Courtney’s her sister, and Courtney says Dawna’s her sister—why on earth would they both be lying about that?”

  Tresting shrugged and looked at Checker.

  Checker raised his eyebrows. “You’re not asking me, are you? Because, yes, I am all-powerful, but some questions—”

  “Maybe they could be, I don’t know, really close childhood friends,” I broke in. “So they started calling each other ‘sister,’ or something.”

  “Except you said they’re both using the name Polk,” Tresting pointed out. “Unlikely coincidence for unrelated friends, unless they’re running a game.”

  He was right. Shit. You already know they aren’t on the level, idiot. Why are you still looking for honest explanations?

  My head started to hurt, an aching, buzzing pain behind my eyes. I pushed it away. “What else did you find on Courtney?”

  “Born and raised in rural Nebraska, moved out to Los Angeles a few years ago,” recited Checker. “On paper, totally boring until the arrest warrant for murder. She grew up with an aunt and uncle in Nebraska after her parents died. They didn’t have any kids who could have been a ‘sister’ either,” he added, preempting the question I’d been opening my mouth to ask. “And aside from them, all her living relatives are of the distant variety.”

  “Does she have a psych record?” I asked.

  “What part of ‘totally boring’ didn’t you understand?” said Checker.

  “We ought to look into Dawna,” said Tresting. “Whoever she is.”

  The buzzing pain got worse, the strange insistence of wrong, no, Dawna’s all right! still tugging at my consciousness.

  I beat it back savagely with a mental crowbar. What the hell was going on with me? “Yeah,” I forced myself to say. “I agree.”

  Checker levered one of the wheels of his chair and spun to a different keyboard, then looked back expectantly at the webcam. “Okay, Cas Russell. Give me what you’ve got on her.”

  I took a breath, ignored the headache, and recited all the contact information I had, again with a flush of embarrassment at how little it was. I barely had more than her work and cell numbers. A slight pause followed my rundown, as if the two men were waiting for more, and part of me wanted to explain and defend myself—she had done something to me!—but my humiliation at being bested was stronger than the mortification of not having done a good background check, and I bit back the information.

  Checker’s fingers danced over his keyboards. “Cell’s a prepaid disposable,” he announced. “And the work number…is also a prepaid disposable.”

  I avoided looking at them, my face heating.

  “Let’s try something else,” said Checker, and I tried not to feel like he was working to spare my feelings. He hit a few more keys, and Tresting’s second monitor lit up to show an array of photographs, mostly poor headshots. I realized they were driver’s license photos, women named Polk with the first name Dawna or Donna. I didn’t even know which way she spelled it. “Do you see her?” Checker asked. “If she backed up the alias with paperwork, I might be able to track it.”

  Eighty-seven photos had matched his search, and I took a good minute to scroll through them all, even though I didn’t need that long. After all, bone structures are only measurements, and measurements are only math. None of the eigenvectors of the feature sets were even close to Dawna’s, but I compared the isometric invariants anyway, delaying the conclusion I already knew was true.

  Dawna’s face wasn’t there. I shook my head.

  “Color me shocked,” murmured Tresting.

  My embarrassment was hardening into a cold fury. The anger gave me a focus, made it easier to think. “What about a picture?” I said. “Would that help?”

  Checker brightened. “Sure! I’ve got the best facial recognition software out there. I know because I wrote it.”

  “Pull up a map of Santa Monica.” One was up on Tresting’s other screen in front of me before I had finished the words. I reached over to the mouse and traced the cursor along the streets. “I met Dawna here at about four p.m. yesterday. We walked this way.” I carefully followed the walking route we had taken. “Then we sat and talked here for…” I thought. I’m capable of measuring time down to the split-second if I want to, but I hadn’t been paying attention. “About half an hour.”

  Checker had begun grinning more and more broadly. “Oh
, Cas Russell, good thought. Good thought!” His fingers did their mad dance again, and the map on Tresting’s other monitor disappeared to be replaced with a flickering slideshow of grainy black and white shots. A color photo came up in the corner of my own face, a frowning mug against the background of Tresting’s neat office—clearly a screen grab from our video chat—and digital lines traced and measured my forehead, cheekbones, nose, chin. The black and white security camera footage flashed by next to it faster and faster and then finally disappeared, leaving three still frames arrayed across the top of the screen.

  “Downright disturbing, how much they see,” said Tresting.

  “What are you talking about, Arthur? Security cameras keep us nice and safe,” said Checker sarcastically. “But it’s okay. As long as I can use their power for evil.” We took a good long look at the three frames that showed clear shots of both Dawna and me.

  “That’s her,” I confirmed.

  “‘She,’” said Checker.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Predicate nominative. It should be, ‘that’s she,’ though I admit some allowance can be made for colloquialism because it does sound frakking weird to say that.”

  Tresting flicked a finger at the computer screen. “Go back to being a computer nerd.”

  “I’m a pan-geek,” Checker said loftily. “Besides, it’s your fault for giving me the Kingsley research to do.”

  I stared at them, utterly confused. “That’s Dawna,” I repeated.

  “Yes, yes, I know, supergenius on it,” Checker muttered, waving dismissively at me over the webcam. Dawna’s face replaced mine on Tresting’s screen, the digital markers now measuring her fine Mediterranean cheekbones. “I’ll start with the California DMV.”

  The photos flashed by too quickly to see. A minute or so of suspense later, Checker sighed. “No matches, kids. We’ll go national. This might take a minute.”

  “Somehow I’m doubting she’s a licensed driver at all,” Tresting said.

  I slouched in my chair. “So we’re back to square one.”

  “Not so fast, Cas Russell,” Checker crowed. “You gave me a photo! Do you have any idea what I can do with a photo? If she doesn’t show up in a DMV photo, or a passport photo, or on a private security ID or a student ID or in a high school yearbook photo—well, it doesn’t matter, because as we speak I am tracking her from your meet.” He gave me another manic grin. “See? You can never disappear from me!” And then, God help me, he threw back his head and gave a textbook evil laugh.