by David Wong
“So?” Zoey asked. “Who was he? What was he?”
“Just a man, with some kind of gadget, a weapon, we think he had it augmented into his hand.” He shrugged, as if this was an unimportant oddity that was worth no further thought. “All of that—don’t concern yourself with it. He’s certainly not going to bother you anymore, and this room, right now, is the safest spot in the city for you. Maybe the safest spot in the whole world. Your father had enemies, as you know, but he spared no expense in protecting his home. The moment a foot bends a blade of grass anywhere on the grounds, a dozen armed guards spring into action. You will not be disturbed.”
Carlton emerged from behind her and placed onto an end table a sterling silver tray on which was arranged a pitcher of ice water, a glass, a bowl of lemon wedges, some sprigs of mint, a candy cane, and a box of Kleenex. He poured her a glass of water. The ice cubes were perfect spheres.
Will continued, “So, you know what you’re here to do.”
“There’s a vault and only I can open it. It scans my brain or something.”
“That’s correct. There is no way to fake it, it has to be you.”
“And once I open the vault, it’s all over, right? All the contracts and bounties and stuff disappear? I’m just a regular person again?”
There was a pause—ever so slight—from Will before he said, “Absolutely.”
He was lying. Zoey knew she wasn’t going to get the truth by just asking, so instead she said, “And we have no idea why he designated my brain as the key instead of yours, or hers, or … literally anyone else’s??”
Will shook his head and said, “Trust me, no one is more surprised than we are. In fact, as far as we know this is your first visit, so we’re not even clear how the vault can be set with your brain’s imprint if he never brought you in to let it scan you.”
Zoey started to say, “I have no idea…” but trailed off halfway through, when a memory suddenly popped into her head. “In the fall my mom made a doctor’s appointment for me, she said it was something they had to do for the life insurance. But it was weird, they put me in something like an MRI machine and I was in there for a solid hour. They told me they were checking for early Alzheimer’s or something, but … I don’t know. It seemed fishy. Like they wouldn’t answer direct questions. Could Arthur have arranged that?”
Echo glanced at Will and said, “Well, there’s one mystery solved.”
Will asked, “And how long ago was this?”
“September, early October, around there.”
Glances. Traces of confusion and alarm. This was a bombshell, apparently. Zoey tried to think of why, then it occurred to her that this meant she wasn’t here due to some drunken last-minute decision or a mix up with the vault’s programming. Her father had planned all of this months in advance—in other words, he had known he was going to die. Or at least, he was making preparations for the eventuality. And no one in this room had known.
Echo shook her head and muttered to Will, “I keep imagining him up there, laughing at us while we scrambled around the country trying to figure out exactly which trailer park he spilled his DNA in.”
Budd adjusted his cowboy hat and said, “‘Up there’? Echo, I don’t know exactly what religion you believe in that has Arthur Livingston makin’ it to Heaven, but I reckon I wanna join.”
Andre said, “Eh, probably just bribed his way in.”
Will, raising his voice to cut off the banter, said, “It doesn’t matter. The daughter’s here, let’s get this over with.”
The daughter. Zoey realized he had already forgotten her name. She sniffed, wiped her nose with her sleeve and took a drink from her water glass. She glanced around the room—a wreath on every wall. The stuffed and mounted buffalo, wearing its stupid Santa hat and beard. Yet another Christmas tree in the corner. Zoey and her mom had a plastic artificial tree they put together every year. It had a bare spot where two of the branches had broken off, so they had to keep that part facing the corner. Her estranged father, she observed, apparently had a real tree in every room. Zoey suddenly realized that her yearly salary would not even pay to decorate this place for Christmas, and that her entire trailer wasn’t big enough to serve as off-season storage for all of the ornaments, lights, and holiday tchotchkes that encrusted the walls of this place.
Once, as a teenager, she had spent all of Thanksgiving and Christmas with a cracked tooth. She endured the throbbing molar for six weeks, due to the wait list to get into a dentist that accepted Medicaid. Every day at work with this pain stabbing like a shard of glass when she bit down on anything harder than pudding. The cost of one bottle of whatever scotch these people were drinking would have paid for her appointment. And now, here were Arthur Livingston’s people, in suits that could probably put her through college, looking at her like she was a muddy dog running through their wedding reception. Her ears were getting hot. She pulled off her cap and shook her bangs out of her eyes.
Zoey let out a breath and said, “And then what?”
Will answered, “Then for us begins a very long and tedious task of sorting out the contents of the vault, whatever they are. But that’s our problem, not yours. We will release the fifty thousand dollars from escrow, and send you back home in whatever mode of transportation you prefer. Hell, we’ll rent you a private plane. Or let you take the company helicopter, if you like. After that, we will never bother you again.”
“And what if I see something in that vault I’m not supposed to see?”
Glances. Will clenched his jaw a little tighter. Echo pressed her lips together. The oilman in the corner—Budd—grabbed a bottle from a nearby cart and poured himself another glass of single malt or bourbon or whatever it was. He seemed to be trying to suppress a laugh.
Will, who was trying very hard to hide the fact that he clearly wanted to strangle Zoey, said, “‘See something’? Like what?”
“Arthur Livingston was a mob boss. You’re the mob. Maybe the rumors were right. Maybe there’s bodies in there, or stolen stuff, or drugs. Maybe just knowing the vault is here is dangerous information.”
“Don’t let your imagination get away from—”
“Bzzzt! Stop. Don’t play the ‘hysterical woman’ card here. I’ve been through three attempted kidnappings in the last five hours. I mean, I’m the vault key, right? Well, why are you any different from all the other crazies that keep coming after me? Because you’re wearing Armani? Maybe you don’t want the key to your vault just walking around out there.”
Andre said, “Come on, now. It’s not like that…”
“And despite the fact that you people all supposedly worked with my father, I still can’t get over the fact that he didn’t make any of you the key. Why not, if you’re so trustworthy? Hey, for all I know, you’re the ones he was specifically trying to keep out of the vault. For all I know, you’re the ones who had him killed.”
She wanted to see what Will’s reaction would be to this. The reaction was barely suppressed rage.
“Maybe,” said Will, “all of this is the result of nothing more than the fact that your father, despite extreme wealth and power, had a history of making terrible decisions.”
Echo smirked at the inference that Will was in fact looking at one of Arthur’s terrible decisions right now. Zoey literally bit her tongue, and took a moment to gather herself.
“So,” she said, evenly, “my question is, how do I know that after I’m done, the sedan I climb into isn’t going to take me out in the woods where Tex over there will pull out a little gun and shoot me in the back of the head? See, I know for a fact you won’t do that right now, because I haven’t opened your vault yet, and as you said, it doesn’t open for a corpse. As long as it stays closed and you want what’s inside, I’m safe. But the moment it opens, the value of my life drops to zero. And I, unlike you, care nothing whatsoever about what’s in there. So. Mr. Blackwater. I need you to sit down and explain to Arthur Livingston’s bad decision how you’re going to make it wort
h my while to open that vault for you, and how you can guarantee my safety after.”
Silence. Something popped in the fireplace.
In the corner, Budd laughed from around his drink and said, “I like her!”
Echo Ling, on the other hand, made an expression that could suck the laughter out of a child’s birthday party. She turned on her heels and said, “Well, she’s definitely Arthur’s daughter.”
Zoey stared into Echo’s back and said, “If I hear anybody say that again, I’m never opening that vault.”
Zoey grabbed a tissue from the tray and loudly blew her nose.
Will gathered himself and said, “I understand your concerns completely—”
“I said I want you to sit down and explain it to me. Stop looming over me. It’s rude.”
Will took a breath and seemed to count to ten in his head, then took a seat on the leather sofa in front of her. Probably a hundred cows murdered for that one.
“Let’s just approach this logically. What you’re asking is impossible—you want me to negotiate with you while you maintain the assumption that I’m operating in bad faith. After all, if we were the kind of people you just accused us of being, then my role would be to say whatever it takes to placate you, knowing we’d never have to follow through on whatever offer is made. So instead, how about you tell me what you want in the way of assurances, and I’ll see what I can do to accommodate you? But keep in mind, time is very short.”
“Why is time short? I don’t have to be back at work until Monday.”
“You don’t under—”
“No. Listen. Everything you said is right—the problem isn’t what you’re offering or failing to offer me. The problem is you. I don’t trust you. So before I can even begin to think about this, I need to convince myself that you’re on the level.”
“All right. And … how will we go about doing that, precisely?”
“I don’t know. But it’s late. And I’m tired. Is there a spare bed in one of the thousand rooms of this house?”
“We were really hoping to have this resolved tonight.”
“Well, to get over this disappointment, you’ll just have to console yourself with the fact that you have absolutely everything else you want in life.”
Will started to speak again, but Andre put a hand on his shoulder and said, “How about you don’t piss her off, eh? The world will still be here when the sun comes up tomorrow.” He turned toward the doorway, where Carlton had materialized at some point, and said, “Can you get a room ready for Zoey?”
“It is already done, sir. Her suitcase is up there as well.”
“Of course it is. See? It’s all good. Zoey, we even retrieved your bag—you left it on the train platform when you set that dude’s dick on fire. So get a good night’s rest, have Carlton make you some waffles in the morning, and we’ll figure this all out tomorrow while I nurse the hangover I’m about to cause.”
Andre smoothed his lapel and walked out, while Zoey silently planned how she was going to escape this terrible place.
TEN
The guest bedroom suite they set Zoey up in had its own bathroom, media room, and minibar. The covers were turned down on a king-size four-poster bed that would not have fit in her bedroom back home unless it was folded up like a taco shell. There was a touchscreen on the end table that, after tinkering with it, Zoey realized controlled the firmness, texture, and temperature of the mattress. Her suitcase was placed neatly on the bed next to a stack of white bath towels, the one on top folded into the shape of a swan. Carlton had found a cat bed, somewhere, and had sat it in the corner of the room. Stench Machine was curled up asleep on the floor next to it.
Zoey sat on the bed and stared at the door. She got up and locked it, but that was stupid because surely they had a key—it was their house. She scooted over an end table that had an expensive-looking table lamp on it so it blocked the door. The table wouldn’t delay someone breaking in for long, but would maybe give her a few seconds to try to escape out the window. Plus she would die knowing she had made them break one of their expensive lamps, so screw them. She looked around the room for a weapon, the closest thing she could find was a bag of golf clubs that was propped in one corner. She pulled out the heaviest-looking driver and sat on the bed with it across her lap. It didn’t make her feel any safer.
She had let Andre bring her here to get her away from the crazies in the van and the much larger group of crazies known as All of the Citizens of Tabula Ra$a. But she had no illusions about opening Livingston’s stupid vault and then riding off into the sunset with the escrow money. She wasn’t some little princess from the suburbs who just graduated college with a humanities degree, she knew what people were really like. They’d kill her just to save the price of a plane ticket. So her plan was to wait for everyone else to leave or go to bed (did they all live here?) and just slip out of the house.
She sat there, gripping the club, and listened. There was something very off about the sound this place made, and Zoey eventually figured out that the weird sound was what other people knew as “peaceful silence.” Zoey had been living in her mom’s trailer, because she’d had to move out of Caleb’s place when they broke up (Caleb being the guy she thought at one time she was going to marry and have babies with). So for two months she had been sleeping on a futon next to an aluminum wall, near a window that had been cracked by an errant fist and repaired with Scotch tape. All of the trailer park noises bled through into the room as easily as if she had been sleeping in the yard—always somebody revving a gasoline motor, a couple arguing or having loud sex, a barking dog or, more likely, twenty barking dogs. But the Casa de Ass-a was dead silent. She could hear her own breathing. So this was what a house sounded like when it had solid walls and, beyond them, acres of gated land onto which the poor were not allowed.
Zoey hated it.
She didn’t have much of a plan beyond escaping the grounds of the estate. Maybe she would get out and find some hole to hide in, maybe find the Tabula Ra$a slums and make some friends. “Lay low,” like they say in the movies. Maybe the mob would eventually decide it was more trouble to go after her than to just get somebody else to break into their stupid safe. She hadn’t witnessed them do anything illegal—they didn’t have anything to fear from her running to the FBI or whoever was still enforcing the law around here.
Zoey grabbed Stench Machine and curled up with him on the bed, feeling warmth and annoyance radiating off him as he meowed and made halfhearted attempts to wriggle free. She closed her eyes and immediately saw Jacob, his brain fried in his skull, staring blearily and drooling. She felt so stupid. Handsome rich kid flirting with dumpy trailer trash, to win money and a day as a Blink celebrity. Millions of people listening in while she swooned and giggled and tried to impress him. A vast constellation of strangers she’d never meet, laughing at her.
That prompted Zoey to turn on the wall feed in the bedroom (they had one of those projection units rich people have, a fist-size dome in the ceiling that could project the feed on any wall you wanted) and tune into the “Hunt for Livingston’s Key” Event, to see what was going on in the fascinating lives of the various people who were trying to capture, kill, or torture her. The most popular feed at the moment belonged to the League of Badass—the ragtag group of morons who had chased them in their van earlier. They were back at their headquarters, which appeared to be somebody’s garage—leaning over a table in front of their busted-up van, going over strategy. Their leader—the muscle guy with a red Mohawk and sleeves of tribal tattoos—was explaining to the camera that Zoey was safely in her father’s estate and, as far as they knew, could be opening Livingston’s vault as they spoke. But then he explained why this was by no means the end of the Hunt.
Sure enough, Will Blackwater had lied.
The five-million-dollar contract this “Molech” guy had put out on her, it turned out, was not just about abducting her so he could stick her into the keyhole of Arthur Livingston’s vault. No, it w
as also about getting revenge for Doll Head guy. He had been an employee of Molech’s, and he was now dead. Zoey was startled to hear this (could a person actually die from a small whiskey-fueled crotch fire? Maybe he had a prior medical condition), but more importantly, it meant that escaping the estate would change nothing about the fact that there was still a multimillion-dollar bounty on her head—in fact, it would only double the number of people who were looking for her. Her whole plan had fallen apart in ten seconds.
Zoey closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. She supposed someone with more experience dealing with this kind of thing would know how to work this to her advantage—after all, if Molech’s people wanted her dead, but her father’s people needed her alive to open the vault, then her father’s people had motivation to protect her from Molech’s. But how long would she be able to keep that up before they decided it wasn’t worth the trouble? If she was alive but refusing to open their vault, then she was no more useful to them than if she was a corpse.
Zoey flipped around the “Hunt” feed and found someone had assembled a highlight reel of the “players” involved. She brought up one labeled “Arthur Livingston: The Suits.” There was a video of the four of them exiting a black sedan in slow motion, while ominous music played.
A gravelly voice said, “Arthur Livingston’s death has left behind a power vacuum, with four members of his ruthless inner circle vying for control. In the criminal underworld, they are known as The Suits. Andre Knox, aka, Black Mountain—Livingston’s deadly enforcer. Michelle ‘Echo’ Ling, the Chinese computer expert and sexy seductress. Budd ‘the Regulator’ Billingsley. And finally, Will Blackwater, The Magician—Arthur Livingston’s cold-blooded right-hand man.
“Seven years ago, when a cartel hit man went rogue and made an attempt on the life of Andre Knox, the dismembered corpse of the guman was found on Arthur Livingston’s doorstep twelve hours later … along with an apologetic note from the head of the cartel. When a Ukrainian mob tried to horn in on Livingston’s territory a year later, Livingston asked for a face-to-face to avoid all-out war. Witnesses say the Suits met behind locked doors with a dozen mob captains. After only four minutes, both groups filed out of the room. By nightfall, the Ukrainians had left the city, never to return. Not a single shot was fired.