Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) (17 page)

“The answer’s no, Rio.”

“It is your decision.” He sipped from a paper cup of tea.

“But, what? You’re going to keep trying to convince me?”

“Yes.”

“The answer’s still going to be no.”

“As you wish.”

A flat in an infinitely tall apartment building, one that reached for the sky. “I can’t keep doing this. I don’t care if it’s the safe thing.”

“As you wish.”

“Are you just waiting until I start to go off the deep end?” The question came out forced and brittle. “What, you’re standing back until I’m a babbling idiot, and then you’ll shove my addled brain in Simon’s direction?”

“I hope there will be no need for that, Cas,” answered Rio.

I stared at the remains of my meal. I wasn’t hungry anymore.

“I have business to occupy me in LA anyway,” Rio said.

Crap.

“Oh,” I said aloud, and tried to moderate my tone so I wouldn’t sound so goddamn obvious. “What’s that?”

“Doubtless you have noticed there is some new power in the city.”

Playing dumb would probably be
too
dumb. “A lot of people are pretty unhappy. I met with some of them last night.”

“They will not be able to counter this,” Rio said. “This is a force of widespread strength.”

“And you think it
should
be countered?” I said. “The people it’s affecting aren’t ones I’d consider saints.”

“It is wrong regardless, Cas,” Rio answered, perfectly serene. “Just as Pithica was wrong. The ability to make our own choices is God-given. No man can be judged a sinner or saint without his free will intact.”

“You think this, uh, you think this is Pithica?” I said. “I thought your deal with Dawna was that you had to leave them alone.”

“It is not Pithica. The methods do not match closely enough. But the aim is the same, and the sin is just as grave.”

Shit.

“Cas, it seems you know something about this. I would be grateful for the intelligence.”

Double shit.

“Right,” I said, way too fast. I’d have to work on avoiding Rio for a while—I wasn’t a good enough liar for this. “Okay. Um. You might run into some people.” Grateful I had something to tell him as a cover, I related Yamamoto’s meeting the night before, keeping it as vague as I dared.

“And nobody seemed to know the provenance?” Rio asked.

“Nope,” I said.

“Perhaps I should speak to Mr. Yamamoto.”

“Knock yourself out,” I said. “I can give him your number. He probably knows who you are, though.” Not many people who did were willing to talk to Rio by choice, and he knew it.

Rio nodded his acknowledgment of the fact. “If you would attempt the connection, it would be appreciated. Otherwise, may I depend on you to pass on any information that might be of help in combating this?”

“You want us to work together?” I blurted. Oh,
brother.

“If you like. I would not refuse the help, but it is your decision. I would ask for any data you happen across regardless, if you do not mind the imposition.”

Rio wanted to work with me, against me. Only he didn’t know it.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll, uh, relay your interest. Um, as for anything else, let me—let me think about it. I’ve got some—things going on right now.”

There was no way Rio didn’t know something was up with me, but he let it pass. Maybe he thought it was just my mounting madness. “Of course, Cas,” he said.

“What are you going to do when you figure this out?” I asked.

“I shall find whoever is responsible, and allow God to be the judge of their souls.”

Rio continued sipping his tea, and I sat back, my appetite entirely lost.

♦ ♦ ♦

Rio’s oblivious
threats and Yamamoto’s efforts to start a multi-family mob war against me notwithstanding, I couldn’t help but feel decently celebratory when I stood in Checker’s Hole a few days later and admired screens full of crime statistics. The line graphs tripped and tumbled over cliffs into statistically significant abysses. Violent crime. Property crime. Organized crime.

“It’s only been about a week,” Checker said. “But this…okay, Cas, I have to admit. I still don’t like it, but it’s staggering. I think it’s been having a knock-on effect, too—I mean, obviously not all crime is caused by what you’re preventing, but this has caused such a shake-up everyone’s chasing their tails. Hopefully we won’t see them re-acclimate.”

“Yeah. Good,” I said.

And hopefully we wouldn’t end up dead if anyone found out this had been us.

“Job well done?” Checker asked.

“Well, Arthur’s strong-arming me into a cleanup mode,” I answered.
Thank Christ.
I needed the work more than ever right now. “Chasing the bad guys while they’re chasing their tails, as you said. Have you found anything on Lauren Vance?”

“Oh, yeah, I was going to update you on that. As far as I can ascertain, she’s both Pourdry’s very genteel attack dog and one of the more public faces of his operation. Assuming you can hang around here a while longer, I’ll have a summary on the server for you and Arthur by this evening.” There’d been no sign Pourdry was after Checker, but he’d still asked me to come back to the Hole with him to collect some additional laptops and do some work that required more processing power. “Where is Arthur, anyway?”

“I thought he was off on some PI thing today,” I said. “He’s not?”

Checker half-smiled. “I am incredibly flattered you think with all the work we’ve been doing for you, we would still have time to have a case on.”

“Well, Pilar said he had some emergency with, um, a couple of kids I saw hanging around the office. Katrina and—Jason, maybe? Justin? I don’t remember. They’re not a case?”

“Oh, that must be some of Arthur’s lost kids,” Checker said. “Huh, hopefully all this’ll be a help to some of them. Arthur would be ecstatic.”

“What do you mean, Arthur’s lost kids?”

“Well, what do you think
we
are?”

I looked at him blankly.

“Come on, you didn’t realize this?” Checker said. “Arthur’s got a weakness for troubled kids. Almost an obsession. He’s not happy unless he’s trying to fix someone.” He frowned. “That sounds bad. I don’t mean it that way. Heck, Arthur saved me, him and—” He coughed.

“We’re not kids,” I said. I wasn’t sure how I felt about being someone’s project. On the other hand, it wasn’t like I hadn’t known I was one; I just hadn’t known he had others.

“Yeah, well, it’s all relative, isn’t it?” said Checker brightly. “Arthur does a lot of good for people. He’s pretty swell at it.”

We built you. You’re something better, now.

My mood soured. “I’m goddamn sick of people trying to fix me.”

Checker turned from his computers, the movement slow and deliberate as he gave me his full attention. “We’re not talking about Arthur anymore, are we?”

I didn’t answer.

“Do you…want to talk about it?” asked Checker.

Do you want to see what you can do?

“No,” I said. “Unless it’s to tear you a new one for fucking
not telling me
you had decided to blunder face-first into my business and kidnap the person I told you to stop looking into.”

“You know what we did made perfect sense.” Checker sighed. “So can you stay? If you can, I’ll get Pilar over here and we’ll finish this double-time.”

I didn’t have anything to do anyway, at least until Arthur was done with his thing or I had some intel on Vance to chase down. The lack of a focus to occupy me was in itself a problem. “I can stay, as long as you have some tequila in your kitchen,” I told Checker.

“Yeah, uh. Knock yourself out.” His face twisted up a little. “Cas, seriously. With so much going on, we haven’t talked about—they said you aren’t—is it true you aren’t okay?”

“They” meant Simon and Rio. “We’ve known I’m not okay for months,” I said. “Nothing’s changed.”

“Your vitals are not improving. The current course is unsustainable.”

I flexed my fingers against my palms, skin singing. “What will it take for you not to inform them?”

“Cas…”

“What?”

I could tell Checker was steeling himself to say something I would hate by the way his hands clenched and his whole posture tightened. “The, um. The thing you told me about last year. The math thing. About not being able to do, um, proofs and stuff—if this guy really is a ‘good’ psychic, maybe he can help you with—”

“What, and
you’d
trust him?” The dig about the mathematics stabbed. The reminder that I wasn’t whole, that grasping after anything beyond raw computation would leave me only with a phantom wisp of forgotten wonder…Checker was the only one who knew what I’d lost, and I regretted having told him about it at all.

At least he hadn’t told anyone else.

“Simon seems to think whatever’s a problem here is all down to Dawna Polk a few years ago,” I said. “Whatever messed up my brain initially did it long before then. And may I remind you that Simon keeps telling me
not
to try to remember things, so he’s clearly not interested in fixing my memory or anything else, only whatever
she
knocked apart, and why he’s even interested in
that
is highly suspicious bordering on disturbing.”

“Is it so strange to you that you might have had a friend before you lost your memory?” Checker asked.

“So he’s a friend of mine now instead of a dangerous enemy you helped abduct and hold prisoner for weeks? You wouldn’t want him in your head either, admit it!”

Checker shifted uncomfortably. “Well, no, but—I’m just saying. Not to underrate Pilar and Arthur and me or anything, but this guy’s thing about not influencing people without asking—to be perfectly fair, I’m not sure we
could
have held onto him if he hadn’t been sticking to it. Which makes me think…I don’t know. Maybe at least ask some questions? Find out more about, if you’re in trouble from what Dawna did or—”

“Sounds like he did influence you,” I said cruelly, and Checker flushed, though I wasn’t sure whether it was from annoyance at me or real fear that what I said might be true. “I’m going to go drink. Come get me when you’re done here.”

I stomped out of the Hole and through the back door into his house, where I found the tequila and slouched on the couch with a bottle. I’d self-medicated earlier in the morning as well, but the buzz that took the edge off my senses had already started to fade.

Did you take your medicine?
someone taunted.

“I had to do it. They were killing you.”

“How were they killing me if I’d never been so alive?”

God
damn
it.

Checker was right about one thing—if only one thing. I deserved some answers from Rio and Simon. I’d told Rio I wouldn’t look into my past, and still didn’t want to—but we weren’t talking about my past anymore; this was my present. The two of them were fucking up my life without offering the slightest explanation.

What with the brain entrainment and Yamamoto’s meeting and finding out Rio was going to try to stop me and working on finding Pourdry, the fury I’d felt about the whole thing had been piled over by other priorities. Now it came flooding back, burning in my gut until the edges of my mood charred and curled. I drank more, but it didn’t help.

“There’s no limit to this type of power.”

“That doesn’t scare you?”

“Why would it? I’m the one in control.”

I jumped off the edge of the world, and the land flew by below me, sea and sky and space and stars, and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

This time, instead of drowning me, the shards of unreality stoked my anger until I wanted to hit something.

Kill something.

For more than a moment, I considered destroying Checker’s house. I was still angry at him, and fuck, smashing things would be cathartic. But then I had a better idea.

I texted Rio. I’d been planning to avoid him, but we wouldn’t be talking about Los Angeles, and besides, I was feeling reckless.

Then I texted Checker:
I invited Rio and Simon over to your house. Happy now?

My phone buzzed with a reply immediately. Then another. Then another.

The general gist of the next seven text messages was,
FUCK U, CAS.

I gave the phone a bitter smile and put it down. Then I sat, drank tequila, and waited.

Chapter 17

Checker and
Pilar insisted on being in the room when Rio and Simon showed up. I had expected that to be the last thing they’d want, and I had the bizarre impression they were doing some weird imitation of wanting to be there in case they needed to protect me.

Which was, of course, absurd. I tried to ban them, but Checker and I got in a shouting match in which he pointed out I’d invited a dangerous killer and a possibly dangerous telepath to
his
house without asking him first, and therefore he was fucking going to be in the room.

I thought about leaving just to be spiteful, but at that moment Checker’s security system pinged at Rio and Simon’s arrival. I yanked open the door furious at the world.

Rio, of course, was perfectly equanimous, standing relaxed in his long tan duster. Simon hunched half behind him, hugging himself as if he wanted to disappear.

“Hello, Cas,” said Rio.

Simon nodded to me, but kept his mouth shut this time.

I ushered them inside. Rio’s gaze crawled over Checker and Pilar, who had retreated to the far side of Checker’s living room, against the wall. As far away as they could get without actually leaving the room.

“Ignore them,” I said.

We sat down.

“Cas,” Rio said. “May I take this as a sign you are reconsidering your decision?”

“No,” I said. “You may take it as a sign that I want some answers.”

“I am given to understand it would be dangerous to you to satisfy such curiosity.” Rio flicked a glance toward Simon.

“You mean telling me why I’m crazy will make me crazier? Yeah, he’s implied as much. But I’m calling bullshit. This isn’t buried in the past anymore, Rio, and you can tell me
something.
First of all,” I said, turning to Simon, “who are you, really?”