Zero Sum Game

Chapter 18

I decided to walk for a little while to clear my head; the night air felt good—and, I’m not going to lie, I sort of hoped someone would try to mug me, but nobody did. Eventually I ended up near a metro station, and on a whim I elected to travel legally for once. I tended to forget LA had a metro system.

I took the line up to Union Station, where I stopped at a tourist stand to buy a large and obnoxious “I ♥ LA” T-shirt, a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a tote bag, and then found a toilet to change in. The sunglasses covered half my face, including most of the bruising that made me look like I had raccoon eyes, and with the baseball cap and loud T-shirt and sans tall black guy next to me I was sure I wouldn’t catch anyone’s eye as matching certain witness reports. The T-shirt was thin, so I rolled most of my hardware up in my jacket and stuck it in the tote bag, leaving only one of the Glocks tucked in my belt underneath my clothes.

I rode the subway for a while after that, zigzagging the city and letting my mind go blank. I didn’t want to think about Arthur, or Leena Kingsley, or Dawna Polk and what she might be capable of doing. I didn’t have much I could do about any of it anyway.

Courtney Polk was probably dead. Maybe I should drop the case and disappear into the woodwork—I didn’t precisely live on the grid anyway; I could get a new set of IDs and head off to a new city, and just let Pithica or anybody else try to track me down. I could leave Steve and his people chasing Dawna Polk, and the police chasing their tails, and Arthur and Checker doing whatever the hell they wanted, and Pithica could keep playing its merry game—I didn’t really care. And screw Courtney. Dawna had hired me to rescue her under false pretenses anyway and hadn’t even paid me.

The thought of abandoning Courtney gave me a squirmier feeling than anything else. I’d never broken a contract before. My priorities probably proved Tresting’s point about me being a bad person.

I tried not to think about that either, or what Tresting had said to me. Your first solution is always to pull the trigger…That wasn’t a bad thing, I insisted to myself. It meant I survived, and would keep surviving. I needed to keep reminding myself of that, because Arthur’s words kept echoing in my head, tedious and ugly and irritating. Life is cheap to you…

I rested my head against the dark train window, exhausted. My trail was clear as far as I could tell; some sleep might finally be in order. Maybe everything would look better in the morning. Fat chance of that. More likely everything would be far more apocalyptic in the morning when I wasn’t strung out on fatigue. Too drained to bother stealing another car and driving a long distance, I switched trains to head back toward Chinatown—I had a little hole of an apartment paid up a few blocks outside of it. I fell into a doze on the way there and almost missed the stop.

It was the middle of the night when I finally reached my bolt hole, and I was almost afraid I wouldn’t remember where it was. But no, I found the ugly, rundown building and the outside door that led into the room I kept there. I studied the address and concentrated; I had an algorithm for where I hid keys that used the house number and the letter count of the street as inputs. I measured with my eyes and leveraged up the appropriate brick—ah, there it was.

I barely got inside the room before I collapsed on the thin mattress in one corner and fell asleep. At least I didn’t dream.

I woke up in the middle of the next morning. The room was still dim; heavy curtains hung over the one small window that was too grimy to see through anyway, but I could hear traffic out on the street and someone yelling in Chinese, and my watch told me it was after ten. Fuck. I’d slept for a long time.

I sat on the thin mattress and ate some cold breakfast out of a can while I tried to think. I had a lot of people after me right now. Fortunately, none of them knew who I was, and I was as prepared as a paranoid crazy person could be for needing to stay out of sight, hence places like this that I kept paid up and stocked with food and basic medical supplies. I had a box of other necessities here, too, hidden in a nook carved out of the drywall: a bundle of cash and another firearm at the very least. My bolt holes varied with what supplies I’d stashed in them, but they all had the basics.

So potentially I could do what I’d thought about last night and disappear. The easiest way out would be to lie low here indefinitely, then stuff a bunch of cash in my pockets and get the hell out of LA. Switching my base of operations to another big city would make no difference at all to me. I had no reason on earth not to get out, and every reason to run as far as possible from a place where a lot of people seemed to want either to kill me or to scramble my brains into an omelet.

Like Dawna Polk.

I shivered and wrapped the bed’s thin blanket around myself, pulling it tight. The chronic headache had resurged as a dull throb. Dawna Polk—a woman who could look at you and read anything she liked from you, no limits, easy as you please. A woman who could pluck out your deepest secrets. A woman who could compel you to do anything. Believe anything.

I remembered how I’d felt after I’d spoken with her, when I was defending her to Rio to the point of irrationality. I had felt perfectly normal. Every thought, every reaction, had seemed to follow logically from the last. As far as my brain had been concerned, Rio had been the person acting strange. It had taken Rio’s pushing, and consequently me doing something wholly and appallingly out of character, for me to realize something was wrong—and if “Steve” were to be believed, even that wouldn’t have snapped most people out of it.

Of course, the most obvious question was also the most terrifying one: aside from getting me to tell her my immediate plans and making sure I didn’t look too closely at her, had Dawna Polk suggested anything else to me?

How could I know any of my decisions since talking to her were my own? How could I even be sure I hadn’t been contacting her and then purposely forgetting about it? Leena Kingsley was proof that Dawna was capable of obliterating or changing any memory I thought I had. All of reality was suspect. I couldn’t be sure of anything.

The feeling was paralyzing.

I tried to think back through everything that had happened so far. It all sounded like me, and no odd blank spots struck me, but if I was compromised already, then that meant nothing.

I had a desperate urge to talk to someone who knew what I was supposed to sound like, to check myself and figure out which way in hell was up. I needed to talk to Rio anyway, I thought; we needed to touch base and compare notes, and with Tresting turning his back on me, I needed every lead I could get—and Rio might have new information.

Of course, he’d also been tracking Dawna Polk. If he’d talked to her, too…

I suddenly felt strangled, like I was having trouble getting air. If Dawna Polk had seen to meddle with Rio’s faith in God—if she had shaken his moral compass even in the slightest—

Fuck.

“Get a grip, Cas,” I said out loud.

I couldn’t sit here wallowing in indecision. That itself might be what she wanted. I still had to make choices, and hope like hell they were mine to make.

Do the math, I told myself. How many variables? How many possible paths? She can’t have microscopic control; it’s not practical. The thought let me breathe a little easier. Dawna Polk might have some foothold in my head, but there was no way she could have predicted every event that would happen to me and implanted her preferred reaction to it. At least, I hoped not. And are you really so egotistical that you think you merit her full-time puppet mastery?

It depended on what she wanted with me, I supposed, which brought me back to wondering why she had even called me in the first place. It was clear Pithica already had the resources to pull Courtney out of the cartel’s clutches if they had chosen to. So why me?

I mulled it over for a while, but I had no idea. The only possibility I could think of was what Steve had said—that I had shown some sort of unusual resilience to Dawna’s techniques. Maybe Pithica had known that somehow and wanted to test me on it. Was this all an elaborate game to see whether I was capable of shaking off their influence? Or—Steve had said Pithica had some normal human agents; could everything have been a strange way of recruiting me? Maybe each interaction was supposed to build up some web of faith in Dawna and Pithica until I was their thoroughly domesticated delivery girl.

I shivered again.

But that didn’t make sense either. If that were the case, Dawna Polk would be failing miserably at her indoctrination effort. Pithica had done nothing but try to kill or brainwash both me and the people I’d been working with since I’d rescued Courtney; I feared and distrusted them now more than ever, particularly Dawna. It would be nice to assume they were making mistakes, but that seemed like wishful thinking. No, I was missing something.

Dammit. I wasn’t sure how to begin to unsnarl this whole mess—like I’d told Tresting, I wasn’t an investigator. I didn’t usually need to figure anything out beyond how to get through a locked door.

I definitely needed to get in touch with Rio. And sooner rather than later.

I left most of my small arsenal under the mattress, disdaining the shoddy guns for the Ruger I had stashed in the wall, and set out to find an electronics store.

It was coming on noon when I finally got back to my bolt hole with a couple of new prepaid phones. I stuck one in my wall stash as a backup and dialed the other from memory. Rio picked up on the first ring.

“It’s Cas,” I said.

“Cas,” said Rio, and I could have sworn he sounded relieved. Odd. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“I burned my phone,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Have you seen a paper this morning?”

“A newspaper?”

“Yes, Cas, a newspaper.”

“No need to get sarcastic,” I said. “I’m part of the Internet generation. No, I haven’t. Why?”

“You’re in it.”

That brought me up short. “What?”

“Or rather, a bruised, if accurate, composite of you.”

“I didn’t do it,” I said, feeling sick.

He paused a moment too long. “I know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

“Beg pardon?”

“That tone,” I said. “You hesitated. What’s going on?”

“Nothing. It also says you’re a person of interest in a shooting in Griffith Park.”

“Oh, that one I did do. Do they have any leads?”

“Not that they mentioned. Cas, you have to keep a lower profile.”

I felt unfairly put upon. “I didn’t ask for this!” I reminded him. “Someone dragged me in, remember? And now people keep trying to kill me! The police are only after me because I tried to kill them back!”

Silence over the line. Then Rio said, “Cas, what’s wrong?”

“What, other than people trying to kill me?” Fear shot through me as I remembered one of the reasons I’d wanted to call Rio in the first place. “Wait, am I acting strange? Do I seem off to you?”

“You are very defensive.”

“Unusually defensive?” I pressed.

“Cas, what’s going on?”

“It’s about Dawna Polk. We found out why she made me act…when she talked to me; she can…” I didn’t want to say it. Saying it would make it real. “We met a group working against Pithica. Rio, they say she’s a real-life telepath. They say she can make you believe anything.” My words sounded crazy to my own ears. “You probably think I’m insane. I think I’m insane.”

“No,” said Rio. The word was slow and deliberate. “I believe you.”

I digested that. “You knew,” I said finally.

“Yes.”

“When I started acting funny the other night—you already knew what she was.”

“I suspected.”

“You knew and you didn’t tell me?”

“Cas, I have been trying, to the best of my ability, to keep you out of this.”

“Why?”

“These people are not to be trifled with.”

“I’m very good at trifling,” I said.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“Cas, believe me when I say that you are not prepared to deal with them.”

First Arthur, now Rio. Did everyone think I was a child? “I’ve already beaten them,” I reminded him. “Several times.”

“You have not been their focus. And you have been lucky.” He took a quiet breath. “Please, Cas. Stay out of this.”

I felt myself frowning. Rio had never made a request like that of me before. “You’re the one who told me to go consult with Tresting,” I pointed out.

“To be perfectly honest, I had no idea he would prove so competent.”

“So you tried to send me on a wild goose chase.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I told you, Cas. Pithica is far too dangerous. You now know part of the reason why.”

“So it’s true, about Dawna.” I swallowed against a dry throat. “She can do that—she did do that, to me.”

“Yes.”

“How much can she do?”

“She could make you believe black is white. She could make a mother kill her child and enjoy it.”

The words parsed in my head, but they didn’t make sense. “How?” I breathed.

“She plays on emotions. Expertly. Small influences, but her targets eventually feel and believe whatever she wishes them to.”

“Small influences that can drive people to murder?”

“For an act that defies her target’s psychology in the extreme, it is true that it would take her time, not a single conversation. Months, perhaps, depending on the person she targets.”

“But you’re saying even a strong enough person can’t—”

“Strength does not enter into it,” he corrected. “It is—I suppose you would say psychology. What you would call a weaker mind might prevail for longer, simply because it may be more comfortable with the mental contradictions her influence would produce. Or it might fold immediately. Each psychology is unique, and each will itself respond differently according to what she attempts.”

“And there’s no way to fight it?” I pleaded.

“None that I am aware of.”

I pulled the blanket from the bed up around myself again, wrapping it close. I still felt cold. “How can I know if I’ve been affected?”

“It is nearly impossible to tell, because you will rationalize whatever she has made you believe. You are concerned?”

“Of course I am.”

“Walk me through the course of events since I saw you last. It is not foolproof, but I shall tell you if I observe inconsistency.”

And it would be good for him to have my intel in any case. I took a deep breath and started with Courtney Polk going missing, then described my night with Tresting, finding the office workers, Leena’s abrupt change, and the meeting with Finch and Steve. Rio listened quietly. I shared everything, up to and including Tresting’s and my final conversation.

“I think that’s why I’m feeling so defensive,” I finished unhappily. “Unless Dawna Polk has been messing me up again. But he was so—he was so patronizing.” And since he had implied I was not only a thoughtless kid but one who went around killing people…“Rio, am I—do you think I’m green? Do I act like it?”

He seemed to think for a moment. “In some circumstances. You can be impulsive.”

I wanted to curl up in a corner and disappear from the world. So much for being good at what I did.

“You are young, you realize,” Rio continued. “I am given to understand that impetuosity is to be forgiven in youth.”

“I’m not that young!” I protested. “Stop making excuses for me. Tresting’s right. Part of my job—I hurt people. I can’t mess up and then call it a learning experience!”

“You are, perhaps, asking the wrong person about that,” Rio said. “I myself have learned many things by killing the wrong people.”

I picked at the hem of the blanket. As much as I trusted Rio, I didn’t want to be him. Didn’t want people like Arthur Tresting to think of me that way. Didn’t want to live with being that type of person. “Rio…did you do the office building?”

He barely hesitated. “Yes.”

“Off the text I sent you?”

“Yes.”

I swallowed.

“Cas, if it helps, they were not the wrong people.”

I thought about how young the receptionist had been. Whatever mistakes she had made, her youth had not excused her from Rio wreaking God’s vengeance.

“Cas?” he said.

“Did you learn anything?” I asked quietly.

“Yes. Many things.”

“You aren’t going to tell me what they are, are you.”

“I would hardly have gone to such lengths to keep them from you only to divulge them later,” he answered.

I thought of the shredded and pulped papers. “Right.”

“What you shared with me today is valuable also,” said Rio. “I shall put it to good use. And although I cannot say for sure, I do not believe Dawna Polk has influenced you further.”

“Oh…good. Thanks.”

“Of course.”

“Are you trying to take down Pithica?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And you want me to stay out of it.”

“Yes. Will you?”

I closed my eyes. I had no leads. Tresting wasn’t talking to me. Courtney was gone. Rio wouldn’t help me. I had no allies, and nothing to follow up on.

“All right,” I said.

Rio’s tone when he answered sounded awfully like relief, even though I knew that wasn’t possible. “Thank you, Cas. God bless you.”