Zero Sum Game

Chapter 7

Tresting’s truck was a beat-up old clunker that looked like it had come out of its share of brawls not only still kicking but bragging about how tough it was. I stowed my bag of toys on the floor of the passenger seat and climbed in.

“Seatbelt,” said Tresting, as he coaxed the ignition to a shuddering rumble.

I didn’t explain that I could buckle up plenty fast enough if I calculated it would help with anything. Tresting had seen too much of my skills already. I fastened my seatbelt, muttering, “Yes, Mom,” under my breath.

Tresting revved the engine, the tires spinning against the sandy ground before they found enough purchase to rocket the truck forward with an almighty lurch. We bounced back onto the dusty highway, the headlights sluicing through the empty darkness.

“So,” I said. “GPS tracker?”

Tresting’s eyebrows jumped in surprise, and his teeth flashed in a sheepish grin. He put one hand in a jacket pocket and held up the tiny device between two fingers. “Smart gal.”

“On the bike,” I guessed, sure I was figuring this right. “You retrieved it when you got the Glock. And you knew to trace the bike because…you had another tracker on Courtney.”

He looked surprised again. “Quick study, too.”

“Which is how you found us at the motel. And you must have been watching where Polk is in LA. When I came back on the bike before leaving, you slapped another GPS on that. Smart.”

“Thanks.”

“Unless your clumsy surveillance gets my client killed, in which case I will not be amused. In fact, I’ll be so unamused I’ll put a bullet in you.”

“Ouch. And we was just getting to know each other.”

“I’m serious. If someone else figured out you’re tracking her, all they have to do is follow the same signal.”

He was silent for a moment. “She’s your client,” he said finally. “I only want to see where she leads.”

I scowled. “Compassionate man.” Pot, kettle, it was true, but he wouldn’t know me well enough to point it out.

Tresting’s knuckles tightened against the steering wheel. “Rather she don’t end up dead. But she murdered my client’s husband, and I’m gonna find who put her up to it.”

In fairness, he had a far guiltier conscience about putting Courtney in danger than I would have, had our positions been reversed. “One thing I don’t understand. If you got close enough to plant the tracker, why not interrogate her then? Why wave a gun at me so unsuccessfully at the motel?”

He didn’t rise to the bait, only let a frustrated breath hiss out through his teeth. “Didn’t get close enough. Got the opportunity to slip one into her food when the drug runners had her.”

And he’d figured a GPS would cover all bases in case he had to follow Courtney back to…well, to her masters, if Tresting was to be believed.

“Your turn,” Tresting said. “Who are you?”

I’d forgotten I hadn’t introduced myself. “Tell me more about Pithica.”

“Hey, I told you about the GPS.”

“You didn’t tell me; I guessed. And considering you were using it to track me, I think it was about time I knew.”

“Whatever,” he muttered. “In for a penny, I guess. Pithica’s some government project or other.”

“I know that. What else?”

He cut his eyes at me suspiciously.

“I did some digging after you mentioned it while pointing a gun barrel at my face,” I explained impatiently. “What else?”

“It’s buried deep. I got a tech guy. He can only find bits and pieces. But it’s far-reaching. My client’s husband, he was a journalist. Started digging into some things. Political decisions, that sort of stuff, ones that didn’t make sense. Nutso crime spikes. Chances are they could’ve left him alive; I don’t think he ever saw the connection.”

“What connection?”

“Pithica. Just the word. Buried deep. Didn’t find it linked up to all the things he been looking at, but it was enough to be, uh, a ‘statistically significant correlation.’ Or so say my tech guy.”

His tech guy must be good. Anton had been able to find almost nothing. “And you think Pithica killed him. The journalist.”

“Sounds crazy, but yeah. Some of what we found, it was a pattern—it’s too similar, the MO of his murder. Can’t prove it, not yet, but his death’s got Pithica all over it.”

“So Courtney Polk is, what, some sort of secret government agent?”

“Always the ones you least suspect, right? She’s the only one who could have done it. We managed to figure out she saw my guy day-of.”

“Wait. So you don’t have any hard evidence?” I narrowed my eyes at him. “If you can prove Polk committed cold-blooded murder, why aren’t the cops investigating her for it?” I’d seen her police record. Nothing about being a person of interest in a prior crime.

Tresting kept his eyes on the empty highway. “There was a suicide note.”

I almost laughed. Or screamed. One of the two. “Great. Just great. You’ve got quite the case there. You ever hear of something called Occam’s Razor?”

“He didn’t kill himself,” Tresting ground out. “His wife—”

“Is probably in denial,” I interrupted. “It sounds to me like you’ve invented a conspiracy—”

“He didn’t kill himself,” Tresting repeated, louder. “And Polk’s the only one who could have. Besides, why was she there otherwise? The kid was a trailer park migrant who ended up smuggling coke. Why was she there?”

“Maybe your guy was interviewing her for some other story,” I pointed out sarcastically. “Since he was, you know, a journalist.”

“Yeah, you spend the few hours before you dose yourself to death trying to meet a deadline. That makes sense.”

“Murder’s still a stretch. Like, a bungee-level stretch. I’m not buying it.”

“’Cause I’m giving you the short version. Lot of other details didn’t add up. The whole scene was fishy. Best part is, I don’t think this is the first time Polk’s done it.”

This was too unbelievable. “Wait, so now you think she’s a serial killer?” Jesus. I knew some serial killers. Courtney wasn’t one of them.

“Maybe,” said Tresting doggedly. “Or maybe she’s someone’s patsy. I’m telling you, I spent months building up this case. Didn’t start out trying to make it nutso, I promise you.”

“You just happened to see the bright light in the sky and realized your client had been abducted by aliens.”

“You don’t gotta believe me,” he said. “Whatever, sweetheart. But that’s the lowdown of what I got.”

“Mysterious crimes you say form a pattern.”

“Yeah.”

“Does this phantom Pithica group have a motive? Or do they just go around convincing biker gangs and driftless twenty-three-year-olds to kill random people?”

“Right now they’re protecting themselves, obviously,” Tresting said. “And I got no idea what they’re trying to do. All I know is there’s too much evidence, spread over the last dozen years or so. This is real.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Like I said, sister. You don’t gotta believe me.” He ground the truck’s gears as we jounced around a curve. The pickup bitch-slapped him with a hard jolt in response. “Your turn.”

I debated. Tresting’s summary was far too outlandish to be useful, but he did have one thing I didn’t: data, and a lot of it, though right now he was using it to wallpaper his fantasy with completely fallacious “patterns.” Humans, we like to see patterns. We see them all the time, even when they don’t exist. I wasn’t sure whether I was repeating what someone had told me once, or if it was an observation.

I couldn’t work from Tresting’s fanciful conclusions; I needed the raw data. I tried to come up with an angle from which a minimal dialogue with a loony PI might endanger either my case or my client, and decided a few cautious words were safe enough. Besides, the underground had a gossip chain with the efficacy of the Internet. He could probably ask around about a brown-skinned, curly-haired, angry-looking chick who could kick his ass, and he would find out who I was soon enough.

I sighed internally. I don’t like giving up information. Ever. “My name is Cas Russell.”

“Hey,” said Tresting. “Heard of you. You do retrieval stuff.”

Oh. I had a reputation?

“And good at it,” he acknowledged. “Word is you get things done.”

Well, that was nice to know.

“Nobody mentioned putting up with the sass, though. That new?”

I stared at him incredulously. “Sass? You want to see sass? I’m still armed, you know!” I sputtered to a stop. Tresting was laughing.

“Ain’t expect you to be so young, neither.”

“I’m older than I look,” I bit out. I hate being patronized.

“So how’d you get shanghaied into bodyguarding, then? Ain’t your usual shtick, is it?”

“I was hired to get Polk back from the cartel,” I explained stiffly. “I admit it was a guess, but I figured ‘alive and unharmed’ was implied in the contract.”

“See? Sass.” When I shot him a look that could have splintered his skull, he took one hand off the steering wheel and raised it in mock surrender. “Sorry, girl, sorry! I mock because I, uh, because I have respect. For your badass retrieval skills. Happy?”

“Only because from here I could kill you in less than half a second.”

Okay, maybe it wasn’t the smartest boast to make. But it was worth it to see that glib look in his eyes stutter into discomfort, and for the truck to fall into blessed silence. When Tresting spoke again, his tone was back to businesslike. “So, who hired you?”

I wasn’t in the mood to cooperate. “Client privilege.”

Anger clouded his features. “Hey, I told you—”

“A whole big sack of nonsense,” I cut in. “Here’s the deal. You show me all your precious data. If I agree there’s something there, then we can work together, and then you get to know everything I know. Not before.”

“What happened to quid pro quo?” demanded Tresting.

“I’m young and sassy,” I shot back. “This is all just a game to me.”

“Come on, I didn’t mean—”

“Hey look, we’re here.” The dirty handful of buildings comprising Camarito slumped jumbled around us in the darkness. “This is where I was going. You can drop me anywhere.”

Tresting stepped on the brake a trifle harder than he had to, and we jerked to a halt. “You owe me,” he said tightly. I’d forgotten how dangerous his tone could get. It was edging back toward that now.

“I told you,” I said. I wondered if I had let myself get needled into being ornery, and whether that was wise, but it was too late to second-guess myself now. “I want to see your data. Prove to me that what you told me wasn’t the ravings of some crackpot, and I’ll share what I know.”

I unbuckled the ridiculous seat belt, collected my saddlebag full of toys, and swung down from the truck. Tresting got out as well, apparently deciding for annoying. He came around the hood to face me.

“You can find me here.” He flicked a business card at me, probably intending for it to flutter to the pavement, but I caught it out of the air without thinking about it—projectile motion with a nice muddle of air resistance mixed in; please, challenge me. “I think you still need what I got on this. And you owe me. I saved your ass today.”

I offered him a one-shoulder shrug. “Maybe.”

“We ain’t gotta end up enemies. Don’t think neither of us wants that.” He brushed back his leather jacket to lay a hand not-quite-on his holster.

He wasn’t going to draw. The movement was all wrong. It was the posturing of the street, an unsubtle reminder that he was smart enough and good enough to be a threat to me if he wanted to be. Besides, if he had been intending to pull his weapon, I would have had him dead or incapacitated before his gun cleared. He was far too close to get away with trying. I lounged, leaning my weight back, content to let him posture.

Someone else wasn’t.

A step crunched on the gravel behind Tresting, and Rio’s voice said, “Hand away from the gun, nice and slow.”

The PI didn’t need to see Rio’s sawed-off pointed at the back of his head from five feet away. He knew danger when he heard it. Especially when it was behind him. Very slowly, making no other movement, he lifted his hand away from his gun.

“All right?” Rio asked me, not taking his eyes from Tresting.

“Sweet of you,” I said, “but I’ve got it covered.”

Rio nodded. He didn’t lower the shotgun, though.

Tresting was looking at me, his eyes unreadable, and I relented slightly. “Besides, he wasn’t drawing on me. It’s okay.”

Rio hesitated a moment longer, and then the sawed-off disappeared whisper quickly into his duster. He stepped carefully around Tresting, still keeping half an eye on him. “You’re late,” he said to me.

“Ran into some complications.”

Rio twitched his head at Tresting. “He one of them?”

“Sort of.”

“I think the motorcycle gang hit squad I helped run off you has me beat,” Tresting said. I could tell he was trying for lightness, but his tone was strained, and a muscle in his cheek twitched as his eyes flicked back and forth between me and Rio. Rio—you don’t have to know what Rio’s capable of to realize how dangerous he is. People underestimate me sometimes. Rio, on the other hand—the only reason people ever underestimate Rio is a lack of imagination.

“This is Arthur Tresting, PI,” I said. “He was following me.”

“And he’s still alive?” asked Rio mildly.

Tresting swallowed.

“Didn’t seem worth it,” I admitted. “Plus, I think he has information.”

“What kind of information?”

I opened my mouth.

“Hey,” cut in Tresting. “I shared my intel with you, Russell. You.” His eyes flickered to me and then to Rio and back again. “You ain’t gotta believe me, but I’m telling you, if you spread it around it’ll get us both killed.”

“I trust this man,” I answered, adding a trifle flippantly, “but you should know, it’s not the best way to keep something secret, telling a girl you only just met all about it.”

He glanced at Rio again. “Maybe not.”

“Besides, you’re the one who wanted to work together. You work with me, you work with my—the people I trust.”

Tresting hesitated.

“You’re the one who keeps telling me we might all be on the same side here.”

Still he hesitated, and it occurred to me—Tresting might be an excellent PI, but when it came to this case…I remembered him saying he’d been on it for months, and I realized that despite all his bravado, he was desperate. Desperate enough to go out on a limb and try to ally himself with someone he only had the most tenuous of reasons to believe might not sell him out to the highest bidder. He probably didn’t trust me to offer him a drink of water in a rainstorm, but he was taking a risk to break whatever deadlock he had found himself in.

Which put me at a definite advantage here. Excellent.

Tresting wet his lips and stepped forward, holding out a hand toward Rio. “Arthur Tresting. Sorry we got off on the wrong foot, brother. From what Ms. Russell says, I think we might have some similar goals.” His voice was tense, but civil.

Rio stared at the hand, and then looked askance at me. I couldn’t tell whether he was calling me an idiot or calling Tresting one. He looked back at the PI, not taking his hand. “Rio,” he said. “I work alone, though Cas keeps what company she likes.”

At least, that’s what he started to say. As soon as he said his name, Tresting’s face twisted, and before Rio was halfway through his next sentence the other man had gone for his gun.

I was faster, but Rio was closer. Tresting might be a ridiculously quick draw, but his gun hadn’t even cleared when he cried out, and the gun was suddenly in Rio’s right hand while the left whipped forward into Tresting’s face. I heard a sickening crunch as Tresting staggered back, but I was already diving in; I came up alongside Rio and twisted with his movement as he brought the Beretta up—the vectors of force and motion lined up and clicked into place and then the nine-mil was in my hand instead of his. I raised it and pointed it at Tresting myself.

Not that I truly thought Rio would have fired—at least, not without getting all the information we could first. But just because I didn’t think he would have pulled the trigger yet…well, you know, I would have felt bad if he had.

Rio had let me take the weapon as soon as he realized I was going for it—which, truth be told, wasn’t until after I already had it off him, but the whole thing happened so fast it made little difference. He relaxed and stood looking at me calmly, which was pretty much what I had expected him to do. Rio and I had never gone head-to-head, and I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which we would. I wasn’t sure what would happen if we did. I was better than he was, but Rio was…more willing.

“Okay,” I said, pointing Tresting’s own gun at him as he hunched against the side of his truck. He had his hands to his face, blood streaming freely through his fingers. I hoped Rio had pulled the blow enough that he hadn’t, well, killed him with it. I knew he could hit hard enough to do it. “Talk, Tresting. What was that all about?”

He tried to focus streaming eyes on Rio. “I know who you are,” he croaked thickly, through the blood. “Heard of you, too.”

“Have you now,” said Rio.

“I know what you are,” spat Tresting. “Would’ve done the world a favor to blow your goddamn head off.”

“I would prefer it,” said Rio, “if you did not take the Lord’s name in vain. Particularly when speaking of blowing off heads. It seems a poor choice for your soul.”

Tresting stared at him. It wasn’t, generally speaking, the kind of thing people expected Rio to say, unless they knew him.

“And I would prefer it,” I said, with all the menace of someone holding a gun in another person’s face, “if you not insult people I like.”

“Chivalrous, but unnecessary,” Rio said to me in an aside.

“Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s just necessary enough.” I raised my eyebrows at Tresting over the gun. “You meet a guy, you pull a gun on him—or, well, try—and then you insult him…Mr. Tresting, that’s just rude.”

“Russell,” Tresting managed, and his voice was thready and desperate. “Russell. You don’t know what he is. Get away from him. Please.”

“I know him,” I said, “and I trust him. If you want me on your side, deal with it.”

He stared at me, long and hard, blood still streaming from his face. Then he straightened up with an obvious effort, mopping a handful of the blood off in a fruitless effort at cleanup. The man had steel in him, I’d give him that.

“I will never,” he said, “be on the same side as someone like that.” He spat on the ground, the expectorant a bloody mess but the message clear, and, still using his truck for support, got around to the driver’s side, levered himself in, and roared away.

“It occurs to me,” said Rio, “that being acquainted with me is not the best decision for your social network.”

“Screw my social network,” I said.