Zero Sum Game

Chapter 15

My hand tightened on the grip of the Smith & Wesson—I itched to have a target again, but who was my enemy? Or what? “I say again,” I addressed the room at large. “What the hell is going on?”

“I interviewed Senator Hammond’s assistant,” said Tresting. “From Kingsley’s, Reginald Kingsley’s, notes. Same thing, almost word for word. Assistant remembered the Senator saying he ‘supposed’ he had a liedown. Except then he about-faced on a nuclear arms treaty.”

“So someone from Pithica is telling her to say this,” I said.

Tresting was watching Dr. Kingsley very closely. “Or something.”

Kingsley drew away from him. “What are you implying?”

Tresting didn’t answer. “What do you say, Agent Finch?”

“Unfortunately, this is need-to-know,” said Finch. “What connection do the two of you have to Dr. Kingsley?”

“Unfortunately, that’s need-to-know,” I parroted back at him, and raised my gun again. “You know something about Polk, and about Pithica, don’t you? You’re going to tell us.”

“This has gone far enough,” said Kingsley. Her voice was firm again, with the strong charisma of authority, and it was hard to believe she didn’t mean it. “Leave, all of you, or I’m calling the police.”

Tresting reached out and grasped her shoulders. “Please, Doc. Talk to me. What happened today that made you change your mind?”

She twisted back from him, fury clouding her features. “Let go of me! This is my decision. Mine, not yours, and not anybody else’s! How dare you imply someone talked me into it?”

“’Cause nothing else makes sense!” cried Tresting. “Doc, you’ve been in my office almost every day for the past six months bullying me about this case! You moved across the country; you got Ned a bodyguard, for God’s sake—and now you say you’re giving up?”

“That’s exactly why I have to! This—this obsession, it’s destroyed my life. I have to let go of it!”

“But we have a lead now,” I argued, gesturing at Finch. “This guy knows something. I saw him at Courtney Polk’s house. Don’t you want to know—”

“No!”

The absolute denial rang through the room, unqualified and final.

Something echoed in my memory.

Kingsley took a breath, resettling her composure. “I’m done. Please, just leave.”

“Holy shit,” I said.

“What is it?” asked Tresting.

I ignored him and turned to Finch. “Okay, how’s this? If you don’t tell us what’s going on, I will bring you somewhere and tie you up and call someone who can make your worst nightmares come true.” I met his eyes squarely, never mind that something inside me was starting to feel creeped out and terrified, and my headache had returned with a pounding thunder. “And then I think you’ll spill everything.”

“Wait,” said Tresting, his voice quick and panicked. “Don’t—”

The man really had to do something about his fixation with Rio. “Stop getting your knickers in a twist; I don’t mean him.” I was about to step off a cliff, and the vertigo was dizzying. This was little more than a shot in the dark, but I was right. I knew I was right. “I have a phone number,” I said to Finch, “for Dawna Polk.”

Finch blanched.

I’d thought he had gone white before, but now all the blood drained from his face as if sucked away, leaving him gray as a corpse behind his scraggly beard. It threw me off balance; I tried to cover with more bravado. “I’ll do it,” I pressed. “I’ll leave you somewhere, and I’ll call her.”

“You don’t want to do that,” Finch croaked. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

“Oh, really? Why don’t you tell me then, Mr. SSA Finch?”

Sweat had broken out all across his face, exacerbating the grayness. He rolled his gaze desperately toward Tresting, but the PI’s expression was unreadable. “I…I can get you a meeting with my supervisor,” he offered finally. “Please.”

I began to be more than a little unnerved by his reaction. The man was folding like a wet piece of cardboard. Who the hell was Dawna Polk? Christ, my head hurt. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“You’ll come with us,” added Tresting. “We’ll set up a meet in a neutral place.”

“Yes, all right, okay.” Finch sounded so desperate that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d started offering up friends and family as human sacrifices to us. “We can do that.”

The doorbell rang.

We all jumped.

Tresting went to the window and peeked around the closed blinds. He swore softly. “Cops.”

I looked at Leena. “Can you go out and tell them nothing’s wrong?”

Tresting shook his head. “Too many. Shit. They already think something’s going down here. Someone must’ve seen us pull a weapon.”

Finch raised a hand weakly. “I can take care of them.”

I snorted. “I wouldn’t trust you to give me a band-aid for a paper cut.”

He let out a strangled laugh that had no humor in it. “Believe me when I say that I’m currently viewing you as a child playing with a nuclear missile. This is above my pay grade, and I don’t care who’s holding the gun, but I’m not letting you out of my sight if I can help it. Even to be arrested.” He held out a hand to Tresting. “My badge, please?”

“What are you going to do?” I demanded.

“You are free to listen in,” he said, picking up a receipt that was lying with a pile of mail on the coffee table and scribbling STING OPERATION IN PROGRESS on the back of it. He folded it into his badge holder and stood up, some of his previous equanimity returning. “Now, I suggest you all stay out of sight.” Without waiting for our response, he moved toward the door.

It looked like I was either going to let him try this, or things were going to get violent. Normally I’m in favor of violence as an easy answer, but with cops involved—fuck.

I kept my gun out and ready, but stepped back.

The living room was separated from the house’s foyer by a wide, open doorway. I tucked myself into the corner just on the other side of the archway from the door, where I’d be able to hear every word. Tresting herded Leena to the opposite side of the living room, where they’d also be out of line of sight from the porch.

I heard Finch unlock the door and swing it open. “Is something wrong?” His nasally voice had the tone of a concerned homeowner.

The cop on the doorstep hesitated way too long. I imagined him taking in Finch’s badge and the scribbled-on receipt and trying to figure out what to say. “Uh, we had a report of a disturbance,” we finally heard. “Do you live here, sir?”

“Yes, I do. Uh, my wife was screaming at me a little while ago for breaking some plates; maybe the neighbors heard it.”

“Very well, sir,” said the officer. “Sorry to have disturbed you.”

“No problem, Officer.” I could hear people moving around outside. “You all have a good day, now,” called Finch, and shut the door.

He hurried back into the living room. “We’re in trouble,” he said. “Someone give me my mobile back, now.”

Tresting squinted at him, but did as he asked.

Finch hit a few numbers. “Indigo,” he said into the phone. “Verification needed, Los Angeles Police Department. Eight five oh three two bravo.” He paused, then added, “And Saturn. Used Redowa as a threat. They want to meet.”

I snapped my fingers in his face. “Cut out the code words, superspy. What’s going on?”

He whirled on me furiously. “Look, missy, they’ve got SWAT out there. They’re not going away just because I waved a badge at them. And meanwhile you and your friend are a couple of children playing at something you know nothing about, and you’re going to get a lot of people killed unless I clean up your mess here, so now would be a good time to shut up.” He turned back to his phone. “Yes, sir. Yes. No objection. I’ll let them know. Thank you, sir.”

He hung up the phone and I punched him.

“What the hell!” cried Finch. His nose was fountaining blood. It was getting all over his suit.

“That’s for calling me ‘missy,’” I said. “Now, clearly you have some super string-pulling powers, so I’m not actually that worried about those police anymore. Like you said, that’s your mess now, with my thanks. What I am worried about is you thinking this is your game to run. It’s not. So I’ll thank you to talk to me like the heavily armed person I am.”

Finch glared at me, trying to staunch his bleeding nose.

Tresting touched my arm. “This gets us nowhere,” he murmured.

“Maybe,” I said. “But it felt really good.”

Tresting shook his head at me slightly, warning me back, and I felt a flare of resentment. He had no call to tell me how I ought to conduct myself. This wasn’t his game to run, either.

“Everybody calm down,” Tresting said to the room. “One crisis at a time. Let’s find out what’s going on.” He pulled out his phone and hit a button; as soon as someone picked up, he said, “We’re at Kingsley’s place. Everything’s under control, but I’d like some intel.” There was a slight pause, and then the person on the other end swore copiously and creatively, loudly enough for all of us to hear over the speaker. Tresting winced and held the phone away from his ear a little. “I said everything’s under control,” he tried to insist over Checker’s tirade. He looked at the rest of us. “Be right back.”

He headed through the foyer and into Leena’s kitchen, trying to get a word in edgewise. He didn’t close the door, however, instead leaning against the counter still in sight of the living room. I wondered if he was keeping an eye on me to make sure I didn’t punch anyone else.

The rest of us stood uncomfortably. I tried not to think about Dawna Polk and what she might have done to Leena Kingsley.

What she might have done to me.

Fuck. My head pounded like someone had driven an ice pick through the back of it.

Finch was still bleeding on Kingsley’s carpeting. “Can I get him a towel?” she asked hesitantly.

“No,” I said.

Dr. Kingsley went over to the window and peeked around the blinds. “It looks like the police are leaving.”

I studied her. She was walking and talking and functioning like a normal human being. But then, I had been, too. “Are you going to call them back after we leave?” I asked.

She shook her head, not meeting my eyes. “Just don’t bother me again. I want to be done with this.”

Pithica never wants an investigation, I remembered.

Leena Kingsley couldn’t be threatened into submission. Killing her to keep her quiet might have made people look more closely at her husband’s death. So someone had done something else to silence her. Something that had made it seem like she’d changed her mind on her own.

Something that Dawna Polk had also done to me in the coffee shop, when she’d asked me where I would be.

Drugs? Hypnosis? Was I still under her influence? I had a feeling Finch knew, and he was going to tell me or I would beat it out of him.

The fact that Pithica had acted now scared the shit out of me. Kingsley had been on this crusade for months, and today they had suddenly decided to kill the PI she’d hired and convince her to give it all up? Sure, maybe Tresting’s investigation had started to close in on something important, but Tresting was right: this was all happening right after they had hooked up with me. Dawna had targeted me to go in after Courtney and had targeted me on the road to Camarito, and I was a fool if I didn’t assume she was targeting me now. I just didn’t know why.

Tresting came back into the room, hanging up his mobile and tossing a roll of paper towels at Finch, who caught it clumsily and started mopping up his face.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Trouble.” Tresting hesitated and glanced at Finch before continuing, but probably decided that this guy had enough connections to find out everything on his own anyway. “Turns out the neighbors ain’t seen our hostage dance. The cops who was here earlier got back to the station and saw composites of two people suspected in a brutal multiple homicide at an office building. Happened they recalled noticing two suspicious characters who looked mighty similar to the sketches in a truck outside an address they just reported to. Told you not to flinch,” he added to me.

“Wait, so this is my fault, Mr. Let’s Report Everything to the Proper Authorities?”

He shot me an expression of thinly veiled disgust. “Good news is they ain’t ID’d us, just got composites from the lobby guy at the building.” He turned to Leena. “Doc…”

“I told your new friend already, I won’t tell anyone anything.” She sounded exhausted. “Just make this go away, please.”

He hesitated, then nodded. I supposed there wasn’t much else he could do but trust her. “Guess we better get while the getting’s good,” he said to Finch and me. “They going to find out you’re not a real FBI agent and come back?”

It was Tresting’s turn to get a baleful glare.

“I’ll take that as a ‘maybe,’” the PI said, unperturbed. He reached out and touched Leena on the shoulder. “Doc. If you need anything, anything at all, or if anything starts to seem…I don’t know, strange, or something frightens you—you call me, okay?”

She appeared to pull herself together slightly. “I…thank you. For sticking with me as long as you did. Maybe you can relax now, too.”

Fat chance of that, I thought. Tresting was never going to give up this case, whether he had an active client or not. He looked like he wanted to say something else to Leena Kingsley, but finally he just nodded at her once before moving away. He checked out the window to make sure the coast was clear and then pulled open the front door.

“Okay, folks, let’s all walk all normal-like,” he murmured as we followed him out. Considering that we’d now all been punched in the face recently, we would have been a sight to see, but any gawking neighbors had gone back inside already. Tresting led the way, and I lagged behind, watching Finch for any sudden moves. He was busy shoving a clump of paper towels against his nose, however, and didn’t seem inclined to try anything.

“We’ll take my truck,” said Tresting.

“It’s two-hour parking,” Finch protested in a muffled voice. “Let me—”

“Oh, Lordy, a parking ticket. Won’t kill you,” said Tresting, officially making him my new favorite person. “Now get in.”

We crammed Finch and his blood-covered suit in between us. “Understand something,” I said to him as Tresting shoved the truck into gear. “You are to keep your hands in sight at all times. I am faster than you, I am stronger than you, and the hand you see under my coat is on a gun that is pointed at you. If you try anything—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get the message,” he groused.

“Good. As long as we’re all on the same page.”