S Huang - Zero Sum Game

“No. It was very flat.”

Which did sound like Rio, but it also could have been someone else. Someone meaning anyone. “Can you remember him telling you anything more specific? Anything might be helpful.”

“He said—he said they would kill Courtney if I didn’t—” She started to tear up. Honestly, woman, get a hold of yourself. “He said you were very good, that you were the only one who could save my sister. He said to pay whatever you asked.”

Well, that had been nice of Not-Rio.

“I knew she’d been taken,” whispered Dawna. “The police, they interviewed me about what happened. The news stories about the cartels, what they do to people—the police wouldn’t help; they already thought she—” Her voice broke. “I was scared to go to you, but if I hadn’t and Courtney had—I couldn’t bear that.”

Yes, yes, I was such an intimidating person. Dawna had given me exactly zero new information. “Aside from the drug stuff, was Courtney mixed up in anything else?”

“Of course not!” Fire flooded Dawna’s eyes. “My sister is a good person! How could you even think—?”

“Okay, okay, I get it.” This interview had been useless. The woman didn’t know a damned thing.

“Ms. Russell.” Dawna reached out, taking me by surprise, and grasped my hands in her own slim, birdlike ones. “Please. What’s going on? I thought Courtney was safe.”

“She is. Now. But…” I sighed. “It turns out my friend Rio wasn’t the one who called you. There may be more going on here than we thought.”

“What are you going to do?”

In spite of myself, I felt sorry for her. “I’m meeting with Rio tonight,” I said, trying for a soothing tone. “I’ll see if he knows anything. And then we’ll figure out why everyone is after your sister.”

Dawna’s eyes widened further. “Everyone? After her?”

“Well, we know why the cartel is and why the cops would be, but I think someone else…” I frowned. “Dawna, have you ever heard of something called Pithica?”

She shook her head. “No. What is it?”

“I don’t know yet. But some people think Courtney’s involved in it.”

“Who? The cartel?”

“The cops. Or at least, a cop we…ran into. I don’t know about the cartel.”

“And this Pithica thing, it’s…bad?” hazarded Dawna anxiously.

“Considering people seem pretty willing to kill her over it, yeah.”

She started tearing up again.

Oh geez. “Look, Dawna, I’m going to get her out of this.”

She tried to nod, but she was trembling with the effort of not breaking down. She brought her fine-boned hands up to cover her face, breathing raggedly.

I’m not great with people, but I tried. I reached out and put a hand on her thin shoulder. The motion felt very contrived. “Hey, don’t worry. We’re going to find out what this Pithica thing is, and why people think Courtney is involved in it, and then we’re going to shut them down.”

She managed to nod, face still in her hands.

“Here, I’ll buy you a coffee.”

I finally got Dawna calmed down; she drank her latte with small, dignified sips, dabbing at her ruined makeup with a napkin. “I’m sorry, Ms. Russell,” she whispered, her voice shaking only slightly. “It’s so overwhelming.”

“I understand.” I didn’t, but whatever.

“I, ah, I have to get back to work,” said Dawna softly.

I wondered where she worked that she couldn’t take time off right now. Well, maybe she needed the distraction. It wasn’t like I was unfamiliar with that myself.

“To meet with, uh, Mr. Rio—are you going back to the—to where you found my sister?” Dawna asked in a quiet, fearful voice as she cleaned herself up.

“Yes,” I said. “To a little town nearby.”

“Be careful, Ms. Russell. Please.”

“I will,” I assured her.

It wasn’t until I had left Dawna tottering back toward work and was back on my borrowed sport bike that I realized I’d forgotten to ask her about payment.

Huh. That was unlike me—I never forget about money. This case must be getting to me more than I thought.

When I got back to the loft, Courtney was still asleep, her skin pale and tight with ashy smudges under her eyes. I hesitated, then left her cuffed to the pipe, locked the door and ziptied it shut on the outside, and set off for Camarito.

I took a straighter—well, slightly straighter—route this time, but full night had fallen by the time I hit the desert, and when I slung off the exit toward Camarito, it was well after eleven. This far from civilization, pitch blackness swallowed the road. The bike’s headlight beam hit a wall of cavernous darkness only a few meters in front of me, a maw of nothingness threatening to swallow me whole; I revved the engine and sped into it even faster. I’d left the helmet behind at the apartment, and the wind sliced harshly against me, taking everything but thought.

The sound sparked against my senses first, a low rumble just at the edge of my hearing. The neurons in my brain fired with Warning! Danger! and I slued off the road before I even identified the noise as other motorcycles—a lot of other motorcycles—

A crack split the darkness, and my brain spasmed with a disbelieving holy fuck, mines in the road! even as the charge caught the edge of the bike and the frame contorted and leapt like a living thing. I twisted with it, the forces and variables splintering and erupting in every direction until I snapped into alignment and counterbalanced to slam the heavy motorcycle into a controlled skid.

Metal screamed as the bike took off the top layer of the rocky desert, the headlamp blinking to darkness and fairings snapping off in an explosive cacophony. I balanced the mathematics and rode the dying motorcycle to a crashing halt amid the rocks, levering off right before inertia flung me free, and I hit the stony ground on one shoulder to roll up into a crouch, the cop’s Glock in one hand and the SIG I’d grabbed in LA in the other.

I snapped my eyes around the darkness, straining to adjust to the pitch black of the night without my bike’s headlamp. Someone had mined the fucking road in an effort to assassinate me—what the fuck —and it sounded like they were bearing down to finish the job—

The motorcycle engines I had heard on approach built to an overwhelming thunder. Making a few safe assumptions with regard to engine size, I had about four seconds before they closed. My mind flipped through options and found precious few—these people knew my location; they had been waiting for me; they were undoubtedly armed. I couldn’t outrun them on foot. I had to fight, which meant finding some cover and attempting to pick them off with the handguns. Considering my marksmanship, the plan wasn’t as stupid as it might sound…the one flaw being that cover is severely lacking in the desert, and pitch darkness isn’t the best place to go looking for it.

With no better choice, I dove behind my downed bike as a dozen heavyweight motorcycles roared off the road in my direction. The blackness was still total; they must’ve clipped the wiring on their headlamps and been riding with night vision gear, which boded even worse for me, but I’d been listening, and I popped off my first shot before I even hit the hard-packed ground behind my improvised cover. A shout and a shriek of metal rewarded me. I listened and fired again, and again, the brilliant muzzle flash in front of my eyes blinding in the darkness.

Bursts of light lit up the night in front of me as my attackers fired back—and then a white flash burned my retinas and a deafening concussion shoved me down so hard I cracked my chin on a twisted fairing of the motorcycle.