Zero Sum Game

Chapter 38

The odd jobs I’d been able to hustle as LA recovered dried up as we hit the second week out from the disaster—people weren’t desperate enough anymore to hire me for necessities, and were still too occupied with rebuilding their lives and routines to worry about trivialities. Arthur had gone back to his own place, leaving me alone with too many thoughts—about Dawna and Pithica, about what she had been able to do to me, about Rio and whatever he hadn’t told me. When I slept it was fitful and at odd hours, and the rest of the time I drank. A lot.

A week and a half after our final confrontation with Pithica, I got an email from Checker saying he’d been keeping tabs, and as far as he could tell, over seventy percent of Pithica’s revenue sources had moved their money out of the organization’s reach. Dawna and her people would need a long time to rebuild those resources. We had knocked them down but good.

I spent a lot of time staring out at the streets wondering when I would see crime start to spike. And then I drank some more.

I woke sober one evening, vivid dreams chasing a blurry reality, scenes so real my brain wobbled for a few seconds before settling on which world was the correct one. Nightmares had plagued me for as long as I could remember, but they had been worse these past couple of weeks.

Since Dawna.

I lay on the blankets and tried to latch onto the shreds of the dream, an intense feeling of déjà vu overpowering me. Places, faces—they wavered just out of reach, the itch of forgotten memory overwhelming my brain and twisting my stomach until I tasted bile at the back of my throat. Whatever had crawled through my subconscious last night, I had seen it before.

Or dreamt it before.

Dawna’s face intruded in my mind’s eye, backlit by forms and figures I didn’t want to see, scenes half-forgotten, visions and memories and a world only half real—

Pain in my knuckles slammed the images away. I’d put my fist through the drywall next to the mattress.

I wiped blood and plaster dust off the back of my hand with my shirt and dragged myself out of bed to find more alcohol. The bottles from the night before—or whenever I had last been awake—were empty, expanding in a glass forest across table and floor and attesting to my usual company.

Halberd.

I picked up a bottle with a stylized drawing of an axe on the label.

Halberd. Why had I just thought that?

The word pinged me like a fragment of another forgotten dream, a half-buried shred of awareness.

Halberd and Pithica, the memo had said, the one Anton had given me a lifetime ago. But no, something else—the word poked at me, itching, an irritating nub that wouldn’t go away, echoing against the edges of my mind.

An echo in Dawna’s voice? Her image swam in my memory, standing tall above me, blurred in a thousand pixelated layers. Her hands on my face, reaching into my brain—I could hear her voice, but the words overlapped in a jumbled mass.

Was I remembering something she had said while we were fighting? As she was shattering me?

Fear clenched at me. I started digging through the mess in the flat for a scrap of paper, tossing bottles and food wrappers and dirty clothes to the side while I repeated the word in my head over and over, afraid it would fade away again before I snatched the chance to write it down. I found an old envelope and a half-dried ballpoint and scribbled faster than I could form the words in my head:

HALBERD. THIS MEANS SOMETHING IMPORTANT. FIND OUT.

The sentences floated in front of my vision: mad, mocking, absurd. They meant nothing.

Stupid. I crumpled the envelope in my hand.

Then, for some reason, I smoothed it back out and put it in a drawer. Halberd did have something to do with Pithica, after all; Anton’s memo had shown that much. Foolish to think it was anything more than that, and I wouldn’t be able to look into it anyway after what Dawna had done, but still…it had to mean something.

For some reason, I shivered.

I needed a drink. Yes. Large amounts of alcohol sounded perfect right now. Something in me needed to get royally drunk and pass out for about three days. Good plan.

I grabbed my keys and headed for the door. I yanked it open to reveal Arthur, his hand raised to knock.

“Arthur,” I said, surprised. “Hi.”

“Hi, Russell,” he said.

We stood awkwardly for a moment.

Arthur waved a hand apologetically. “Tried calling.”

Phones. Right. I felt around in my pockets and found my latest cell phone. A blank screen stared back at me, and I vaguely remembered getting annoyed with the ringing a few days ago and turning it off. I hit the power button and saw a message proclaiming fourteen missed calls.

Oops. “Sorry,” I said. “You need something?”

To my surprise, he chuckled. He had a very handsome smile. “Russell, you remind me of someone I knew once. Someone who’s a damn smart cookie like you, and almost as prickly.”

“Huh?”

“Mind if I come in for a minute?”

“Sure, whatever.” I let the door swing all the way open and led the way in to flop on the saggy couch. Arthur sat down next to me. His eyes took in the forest of empty liquor bottles, but he didn’t say anything, and I told myself I didn’t care about his opinion anyway. “So? What’s up?” I asked.

He looked like he was searching for words. “Checker’s back,” he said finally. “Just been to say hello.”

“Oh,” I said. “Good.”

“You okay?” he asked. Oddly, he sounded like he cared about the answer. In fact, I was struck with the strong impression that he had come all the way here to…well, to check in on me. What the hell?

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Really?” He laughed a little hoarsely. “’Cause I ain’t.”

Was he trying to confide in me? “I guess I’m just waiting for life to get back to normal,” I said. It sort of already was, for me. Except for the dreams. But maybe those were normal, too. I was having trouble remembering.

“Ain’t worked any case but this in six months,” said Arthur. “Gonna be weird, going back to doing background checks and divorce cases.”

“The exciting life of a private eye?” Boy, was I glad I didn’t have his job.

He snorted. “Yeah, ‘exciting’ ain’t exactly the word for it. Usually, anyway. I work enough to take on pro bono cases for them that need it, though—those are always the better ones. Still not much excitement, but fulfilling, you know?”

I wasn’t sure why he was telling me this. “Sure,” I said.

“Can’t get it all out of my head, though,” he continued. “What she did to us. I ain’t fond of being someone’s puppet.” The edge of steel in those words might have made even Dawna think twice, if she hadn’t already beaten us.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me neither.”

“I can’t…” He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Everything I remember thinking, it made so much sense at the time. Still makes sense, if I’m honest. But there’s something in me that knows chunks of it ain’t me at all…and I still ain’t rightly sure which all those chunks are; I just know they gotta be there. Think that’s what scares me the most, still not knowing what was me and what was her.”

“I’m pretty sure you pointing a gun at me was all Dawna,” I said.

“Which time?”

We laughed a little at that, even though it wasn’t funny.

“Ain’t my usual habit, you know,” Arthur said. “Greeting people barrel first. You didn’t catch me in my best week.”

“Well, I don’t usually knock people unconscious to introduce myself, either,” I said.

He affected surprise. “You don’t?”

I punched him in the shoulder. Only a little harder than necessary.

“Ow!” He gave me a mock glare, rubbing his arm, and then got serious again. “Listen. Been thinking about something. Dawna—when she had us prisoner, she talked to us, both of us, for a long time.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, she did.”

“How do we know…how do we know there ain’t more?”

“You mean, how do we know that we don’t have, what, sleeper personalities or something? That what we’re thinking might not be our own thoughts anymore?”

“Something like that.”

I looked down at my hands. I wasn’t going to say it hadn’t occurred to me. “I don’t think it would be worth it to them,” I said. “That level of control. She got what she wanted from us, and—well, even at the end we weren’t under her total control, yeah?”

“You weren’t,” he said softly.

“Neither were you,” I pointed out. “You didn’t give us away until we pushed you to it. And at the last minute, you took your gun off line—when it mattered.”

“Barely.”

“You knew it would give me the window.”

He nodded, conceding the point. “Hey, about that. What you can do. It’s pretty special, ain’t it?”

The question caught me off guard. I tried to keep my face neutral. “What do you mean, what I can do?”

He chuckled. “I got eyes, Russell.”

“I’m good at math,” I said. “That’s all.”

He squinted at me, still smiling slightly. “You gotta tell me how that works sometime.”

“Sometime,” I agreed vaguely.

The moment of levity faded, and Arthur looked down again. “We really can’t be sure, can we?” he said after a moment. “Could be some small way. A thousand little bits she might’ve changed. Maybe we say she had a miss with us at the end there, but still…we don’t know what else she might’ve done.”

“No,” I said. “I guess we don’t.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, what can we do?” I pointed out.

Arthur took a deep breath. “Keep making the best decisions we can, I guess.”

And hope that nothing had wormed its way into our brains, ticking like a time bomb, waiting to make us betray ourselves. I wasn’t happy about it either. But we had no way to know.

“What if we watch each other?” I said suddenly. “It’s not foolproof, but it’s how—well, Rio could tell, with me. We can keep in contact, warn each other if we get crazy.”

He pulled a face. “Looking for excess crazy? How will I know?”

I punched him in the arm again.

“Hey!” He gave me a gentle shove in return. “Y’know, it’s a good idea. Better than nothing, for sure. You got my cell number, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Stay in touch, then. You know, call me, let me know you’re okay. Or you can always pick up when I ring. Can’t watch for excess crazy if we don’t talk regular.” He grinned at me, then reached over and squeezed my shoulder. “You’re a good kid, Russell.”

I blinked. By proposing we watch each other, I had been thinking in terms of a mutually beneficial business arrangement, but Arthur seemed to be taking it as an overture of friendship. “I…if you say so,” I got out.

“I do.” He gave my shoulder a final squeeze and then stood. “Talk soon, right?”

A sort of tight feeling was growing through my chest and throat, the same type of squeezing discomfort I got in certain death situations. Except it was kind of a good feeling, which made no sense at all. “Yeah, okay,” I said.

“Give you a buzz tomorrow,” said Arthur, and let himself out.

I stayed sitting on the couch, staring at the floor and feeling very strange.

I wasn’t used to having friends. Friends meant obligations, and complications, and effort—

And people who checked in on me, another part of my brain pointed out. And had my back. And could watch for signs of psychic brainwashing.

Huh.

My phone beeped.

It was a text message from Checker, newly arrived back in LA. The strange, fizzy feeling in my chest intensified.

DRINKING CONTEST 2NITE ITS ON BE @ HOLE 8PM SHARP CHECKER

And then, an instant later, a second one:

WEAR SUMTHING SLINKI

I stared at the messages. The invitation felt surreal, as if I were watching someone else’s life: somebody who lived in society, somebody who did the whole “human interaction” thing, somebody who got text messages that weren’t either about work or death threats.

Somebody who made friends and went out drinking with them.

Was I even capable of being someone like that?

I thought about Arthur’s visit. I looked down at Checker’s texts again. Maybe people weren’t all bad, I thought. At least not all the time.

Maybe…maybe it wouldn’t be such an awful thing not to drink alone tonight.

I hit reply.

As long as my new Colt 1911 counts. See you at 8. Cas.

THE END