by SL Huang
The email below it started with Rayal and then threaded through several responses:
Vikash, if you don’t stop trolling the team photos I’ll give the Bulgaria conference to Adrian.
Come on, you think it’s just as funny as I do!!! And Adrian is a tool.
It must kill you that he’s beating you on bug fixes right now, then. Chop chop.
Of everything I had seen in this house, the psychiatric meds and the dead son and the files full of claustrophobic NDAs, Rayal’s decision to tack up this printout on her bulletin board somehow felt the most profoundly sad. This woman had loved her work and loved the people in it. And in the last six months, she’d lost everything.
Including, quite possibly, a daughter.
I tucked the hard drive and the camera’s memory card in my pocket and slipped out the back door into the darkening evening, locking up behind me like the considerate little thief I was.
CHAPTER 8
AFTER A quick stop by one of my storage units, I reached Grealy’s about twenty minutes after nine and parked down the street. Normally I was late for appointments, but not when I had an ambush to set up.
I cruised into the dive of a restaurant, ordered a drink at the bar, and took it to a corner booth. The bar was in its usual state of smoke-filled semi-darkness; California’s anti-nicotine laws were flagrantly violated here, probably because most patrons were conducting business far more illegal than lighting up inside an eating establishment. I sat observing the few other customers over my untouched tumbler of whiskey, my senses drawing out their fields of view in overlapping angles, the mathematics bouncing off the mirrored wall behind the bar and the chrome edges of the greasy oyster buffet under the heat lamps. Binocular vision, monocular vision, reflections, blind spots—the instant everything aligned to make me invisible to everyone in the room, I stood up and stuck a small convex mirror on top of the decorative molding above my head.
Mathematics. The poor man’s invisibility cloak.
Then I dumped my whiskey out onto the floor under my chair—this place was not exactly resplendent in its cleanliness; no one would notice—abandoned the empty glass on the table, and left.
I stopped back at my car to retrieve a bag of gear and then ambled to the building across the street. Directly opposite Grealy’s was a first-floor club shaking the street with terrible, bass-heavy music under a few stories of rundown apartments. I’d already evaluated the lines of sight to know where I needed to be. I trekked into the alley at the side of the building, shouldered my gear, and vaulted into the dumpster.
The noisome odor of decomposition and filth clogged my nostrils, and my boots slipped on splitting, oozing bags of garbage. I made a face and attempted to take small sips of air through my mouth as I lifted a Steyr SSG 08 sniper rifle out of my gear bag, snapped open the stock, and screwed a high-end suppressor onto the barrel that would take my decibel contribution down almost to the same level as the horribly loud club music. Then I balanced the stock against my shoulder and the barrel on the lip of the dumpster and pulled out a large piece of dark burlap to throw over myself and the gun. It was full dark by this time; no one would notice the muzzle peeking out or the edge of the scope tented underneath. Best of all, when I settled my eye down behind the scope, my tiny convex mirror leapt larger than life in my vision—the mirror I had positioned to give me a perfect view of the entire inside of the bar.
Of course, that didn’t help with the stifling heat under the burlap, or the foul smell—instead of growing accustomed to it, I only became more suffocated, the noxious air pressing thickly against me. Sweat soaked my neck and back and stuck my short hair to my scalp in damp curls. The awful club music gave me a headache within minutes, but even though it crowded out almost all other sound, I could still hear flies buzzing around my feet.
About an hour after I had begun my vigil, I wiped the sweat out of my eyes for what felt like the twentieth time to watch three men—who all had dark Italian coloring, and who all wore coats despite the warm night—enter Grealy’s together. They conferred briefly by the door before one of them split off to the bar and the other two went to sit at a table near the front, next to the window. The man at the bar stayed there with his drink, completely ignoring the companions he’d come in with.
Well, hell. They were definitely here to kill me.
I’d intended to wait until eleven to start the party, but by a quarter till, a gunfight sounded a thousand times better than staying in my stifling, fetid sniper’s nest for another minute. I snaked a Bluetooth out of my gear bag and looped it onto my ear; I’d already synced the earpiece with one of the new burner phones I’d grabbed from storage.
The man at the bar looked down at his phone as soon as it started ringing, but he took a long, deliberate drink before picking it up to answer it. “Hello,” I heard over the headset, at the same time my eye on the scope saw him mouth the word in the mirror.
“It’s Cas Russell,” I said. I stifled a cough as I accidentally inhaled the foul air. “I’m running a few minutes late.” The words sounded far too facetious to my ears, but he probably wouldn’t know me well enough to tell.
“No problem,” he said.
“I’ve had some…business problems lately,” I said. “Are you alone? You understand why I ask.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And yeah, it’s just me. Tegan says you’re the best.”
I already knew he was there to ambush me, but the lying cemented it. It occurred to me that I’d have to make a point of reaching Tegan and making sure he hadn’t purposely sent me a murderous client.
I exhaled gently and concentrated on the scope. The optics of my convex mirror blasted through my brain, incident rays and reflected rays and virtual images, all converging at the focus and then shooting back out into the bar in an instantaneous tableau of every person and movement and drink. I was about to shift the rifle slightly and fire blind, but mathematics let me see through walls.
“Tegan’s right,” I said, “I am the best.” And I twitched my aim to pull the trigger in perfect time with the dance music’s next thump.
The man’s liquor glass shattered.
“Don’t move,” I said in the half second before he could react, as I swung the scope back to the reflection in my spy mirror and worked the bolt on the rifle in one smooth motion. “Don’t you fucking move or the next one is in your skull.”
He didn’t move.
“Now, let’s try this again. Are you alone?”
He sat still as the bartender came and cleaned up the shards of glass, frowning at him as she did so. He didn’t offer her an explanation, and she didn’t ask. Fortunately, she also didn’t see the hole in the bar a little farther down where a .308 rifle round had buried itself.
“No,” my contact said slowly when she’d moved away, a good deal of loathing in the word. His companions had looked up when the glass went, but now they’d gone back to conversing between themselves, unconcerned. Good.
“Who do you work for?” I said.
The man’s left hand had started twitching. “You know the answer to that.”
“Yeah, but I want to hear you say it, and since I have a high-powered sniper rifle pointed in your direction, I think you should answer me.”
“You’ve made a powerful enemy in the Madre.” Venom crawled through his voice. “You won’t get out of this alive.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “What remains to be seen is whether you and your friends get out of tonight alive. Right now I just want to talk, but I might change my mind very fast. Now go and collect your buddies and sit in the booth in the back right corner. Face away from the door and put your hands palm down on the table, all of you. If you move before I get there, or you do anything else, I will shoot you. Understood?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment’s pause.
“Good. Go. I’m watching. Keep your hands visible at all times.”
He hung up and cast a malevolent look around the bar, so baldly hateful I co
uld feel it through the distorted image in the mirror. Then, after he didn’t see me, he got up and did as he was told. I couldn’t hear what he said to his people, but they shot to their feet and one of them put a hand under his coat.
I fired again and grazed the tip of the guy’s earlobe. He jumped and smacked a hand to the side of his head, his eyes roving wildly.
Then he very slowly lifted his hands in the air, one of them now damp with blood, and all three of them went to the back table I had specified and sat with their palms on the table.
It was a mark of how disreputable this particular bar was that everybody was too hunched over a drink to give them a second glance.
I waited another seven minutes, until I was pretty sure the men weren’t going to try moving. Then I threw off the burlap with a grateful gulp of fresh, cool air, slung the sniper rifle on my back, and swung down out of the dumpster, drawing my Colt as I did so.
I marched across the street and into the oyster bar. A patron near the door saw the weapons and stumbled back, her hand going to the small of her back, but I saw her in my peripheral vision and in one motion grabbed a full beer bottle off a nearby table and whipped it across at her. She crashed against the bar, knocked silly.
Even at this place that got people’s attention. In the few seconds it took for me to stride to the table in the corner, everyone had turned toward me, half of them reaching for weapons.
Fortunately, that was what I wanted.
I launched off a chair with one foot and spun to land on my would-be assassins’ table, facing them and the rest of the bar Colt first. The same man whose ear I’d shot tried to use that opportunity to move. I made sure my boot landed on his hand, hard.
“Hi,” I said to the silent bar. “I have business with these three gentlemen. Everyone else, leave. Don’t come back in tonight unless you want to be shot. You—lock the door behind them and turn off the ‘open’ sign,” I added to the bartender. “Now go.”
True to form, nobody in the bar wanted to get involved in someone else’s business, especially when that someone else had a gun pointed at them. They filed out in short order, including a few people in stained white aprons from the back, and the bartender switched off the neon red “open” light and locked the door behind her.
So far, so good. The riskiest part of this plan had been when I was hiding in the dumpster—it would have been too easy for me to lose control of my targets. Now I could relax a little.
I crouched on the table and patted down each of the Lorenzo guys one-handed, pulling out their pieces—and their wallets and phones—to dump on the table. I popped the batteries and SIM cards out of their phones by feel, pocketing the latter, and added my own burner to the pile. Then I dropped into an empty seat that put my back to the wall, keeping my eyes and my gun on the three men.
“Hi,” I said.
They were silent. I took this moment to examine them more closely. The guy on the left, the one with blood trickling down his neck from his nicked ear, was slightly overweight, with greasy chin-length hair surrounding a shiny bald spot. The guy in the middle was the one who had called me. He had thinning hair too, but covered with a severe comb over above a pointed, weaselly face. The third man was a lot younger, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, with a gold chain, a popped collar, and too much gel in his hair. He reminded me a bit of Benito.
I flipped open their wallets with my left hand and managed to extract all their driver’s licenses to stick in my pocket without looking down. “There,” I said. “I know who you are. Now tell me something valuable enough that I decide not to kill you.”
Weaselly Man licked his lips. “What do you want to know?”
“You know what I want to know.” Only certain types of information were valuable.
“I’m not sayin’ nothin’,” said the young guy, sticking his nose in the air.
I shot him in the arm. At this range, the boom and the flame bursting out of the .45 felt enormous, a thunderclap close enough to set them on fire. The young guy screeched and started hyperventilating, hunching over the injury.
“Wuss,” I said. “It’s only a graze. Now talk.”
The arrogance had faded from his posture, and he glanced toward his elders. When I decided they’d waited a second longer than I wanted, I pulled the trigger again and shot Weaselly Man in the side of his neck.
He jumped a mile in his seat and slapped a hand to the wound, blood running through his fingers. His eyes were wide and unnerved. I’d only just broken the skin—okay, and some powder burns—but I was willing to bet he didn’t know that. People were precious about their necks.
“Remember,” I said, “there’s a reason Mama Lorenzo sent you to kill me.”
The guy whose ear I’d hit broke right then. He began babbling about a protection racket with the city sanitation workers, and from that moment on I had won.
It was cute, really, how all three of them started pouring out information once they got started. I was kicking myself for not bringing a digital voice recorder so I could remember all the trivia they tripped over themselves to tell me. I’d have to verify it all and put some sort of coherent extortion plan in place, but things were looking up.
Blackmail, here I come.
Someone rapped on the front window.
The lights from surrounding buildings were bright enough for me to recognize the woman standing outside. Cheryl Maddox was an extremely tanned, extremely buxom woman with extremely bleached hair and two full sleeves of tattoos. She was also the owner of Grealy’s, and something of a legend. I’d only met her a time or two, but she had my respect, in no small part for running the bar the way she did.
She kept her hands raised up where I could see them. I nodded to her and gestured with the Colt.
She unlocked the door and came in, still keeping her hands up, but her posture was locked in anger. “Cas Russell, right?” she called as she crossed the room.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Sister, you can’t do this shit in here,” she said. “You want to get me shut down? Take it out in the desert or something. Fuck.”
“Hands on your head and split,” I directed the three Mob guys. I’d learned more than I could remember already; I’d have my hands full sorting out which of the info was good. With baleful glares, the three men put stiff hands on the backs of their heads and shoved their way out the front door, their various small wounds crusting with dried blood.
I lowered the gun. “Sorry,” I said to Cheryl. “I didn’t know for sure they were out to kill me till they showed up.”
“I got the story from my girl,” said Cheryl. “Sounds to me like you sussed it, then came in anyway. Bitch, please. You could’ve walked away, ’stead of hijacking my bar.” She said the word “bitch” the same way she said the word “sister,” like it was a term of endearment—though still a pissed-off one.
“Sorry,” I said again. To be fair, I had been pretty sure it was an ambush. “Let me know how much money you lost. I’ll cover it.”
“Ain’t the point. I can’t get a bad name.” She let her hands drop to her sides. “You’re banned, hon. I can’t have people pulling weapons in here.”
I nodded. “I get it.” Too bad, though. “I’ll still get you the mon—”
I’d been keeping half an eye on the outside as the mobsters climbed into a black Mercedes. Instead of driving out and away, however, the car swung into a screeching U-turn—
“Get down!” I shouted, bodyslamming Cheryl at the same time I brought the 1911 back up and fired as we both crashed to the floor.
There were pedestrians milling on the sidewalk, and between them, the tinted windows of the Benz, and the club goers behind them, I didn’t have a clear shot at the occupants, so I took out a tire instead. Metal crashed and splintered outside as Cheryl and I hit the ground. Several people screamed. And my new Mob friends opened fire with three fully automatic weapons.
Full auto isn’t great for accuracy, but it’s fantastic f
or suppression fire. The front window of the bar shattered in a glorious crash, and the building sounded like it was splintering around us. I might have been able to mathematically isolate the arc of fire for a single weapon enough to dodge and attack back, but not for three at once—I was going to have my hands full just keeping Cheryl from getting hit.
The two of us belly-crawled toward the swinging door to the kitchen. I listened hard to track the trajectories and predicted as well as I could, teasing apart the earsplitting bursts of gunfire and the overlapping explosions of glass and wood that told me where the rounds were hitting. Twice I yanked Cheryl back before a bullet slammed into the floor in front of us.
“There’s a shotgun behind the bar!” she shouted in my ear.
“Won’t help!” I yelled back. After all, I still had a goddamn sniper rifle if I had a split second to aim. “Get out!”
We dove through the door into the kitchen, hitting the tile floor hard in a heap. My brain had been keeping instantaneous track of the count, and the gunfire hit a lull just as I thought it should. I hauled Cheryl to her feet in the sudden silence. “They’re reloading. Go!”
We exploded out the back door into the night. The kitchens let out into an alley; I skidded across it and kicked open the door to the next building, the frame splintering where the deadbolt had held it. I hustled Cheryl with me into the darkness, wishing I had a flashlight on the rifle. Behind us, the Mafia guys opened up again, the tattoo of automatic fire muffled through the intervening walls.
The back room we had entered opened up into a darkened laundromat. The front door had been secured for the night, but Cheryl dashed over and yanked the security bar off, and we pushed out onto the next street over.
As per usual for LA, cars were parked bumper to bumper all along the curb, and I practically leapt over the hood of the nearest one to slam the butt of my rifle into the driver’s side window. The glass rained down. Cheryl and I yanked at the doors, scrambling to get inside—me in the front and her in the back—and I tore open the console, crossing the right wires to bring the engine to a coughing thrum. My foot jammed the accelerator into the floor, and inertia slammed us to the side as I peeled out.