S Huang - Zero Sum Game

“Yeah, I’m irritating like that. I suppose there’s no getting around the fact that Tresting might be useful.”

“It seems not.”

I groaned and stood. “Best get it over with, then. I’ll call him in the morning. You want me to set up a meet with Dawna for you?”

“Perhaps, but not yet. For now, whatever contact information you have will suffice.”

I gave him everything I had on her. Embarrassingly, it was precious little, much less than I would usually be comfortable with. Rio didn’t comment, for which I was grateful.

“Off to try to talk to people, I guess,” I said. “Wish me luck.”

Rio touched his forehead in a brief salute. “Go with God, Cas.”

“Yeah. You too.”

“Oh, and Cas.” I turned back. “Do not concern yourself with defending my honor. It serves no purpose.”

“La, la, la,” I sang. “I can’t hear you.” I threw him a grin, hoping it looked remotely genuine, and strode off.

I stole a flashy sports car for the trip back to LA. I wanted to go fast, to feel the wind in my hair and watch the desert whip by too fast to see.

Dawna Polk had attacked me. Whatever she had done had wormed its way into my brain somehow, twisted my thoughts, manipulated me…beneath my fury lurked a sick sense of violation, an oily stain on my soul.

Dawna Polk was going down for this.

When I got back to the neighborhood my safe house was in, I yanked the e-brake and spun, sending the trendy speedster into a sideways skid against the curb between two SUVs with less than twenty centimeters of clearance. Yup, I’m that good at math: I can parallel park in Los Angeles.

Despite my anger, exhaustion overtook me as I climbed the stairs to the flat. I was going on two days without sleep. I needed some rest, some real rest, and I couldn’t call Tresting till the morning anyway. Well, I could, but I didn’t figure annoying him in the wee hours of the morning to be the brightest move at this point. I cut the ziptie I’d secured the knob with and nudged the door open quietly so as not to wake Courtney if she was still sacked out.

The loft was dark and quiet.

Shit.

My subconscious knew something was wrong before I registered the computations that told me the silence was too absolute. I hit the lights, dreading what they’d show me. The loft’s single room was empty, its small bathroom open and vacant as well. The other side of the handcuffs lay open and impotent on the mattress.

Courtney Polk was gone.

No time to coddle people with sleep. I’d ditched my old phone on the way home, having burned the number with Dawna, but I had a new one in one of the kitchen drawers. I pulled out Tresting’s business card and dialed.

He answered on the second ring. “Yeah.”

I swallowed something I was pretty sure was my pride. “Tresting, it’s Cas Russell. Polk is gone.”

There was a pause over the line. Then: “Shit,” he said eloquently.

I hadn’t been sure Tresting himself hadn’t abducted Polk or ordered someone else to while we were in Camarito, but he sounded so surprised and defeated that I relegated the possibility to slightly-less-likely. “My thoughts exactly. You still got a GPS on her?”

“Yeah. Give me a sec.” His words sounded muffled, and with a slight pang of guilt I remembered he had just had his face bashed in. His night wasn’t going terribly well either.

A minute later, Tresting’s voice came back on. “I got it. South of LA, and moving.”

“I’m going after her. Where are you?”

“Receiver won’t help you.”

My suspicions swung back the other way. “You do realize you want her found, too, right? So help me, if you don’t give me the—”

“Whoa, hey, not what I meant. Meant you can’t catch her. Moving too fast to be in a car.”

“Train?” I asked, my stomach sinking.

“Faster. Guess again.”

Shit.

“Won’t be able to do anything until they land. But hey…” He hesitated. “Listen, if you still want to share intel, come meet me. Might be we can still get ahead some.”

If he had Courtney himself, I thought it unlikely he would want a face-to-face. On the other hand…“You’re awfully calm about this,” I said.

He sighed, and when he spoke again he sounded frayed. “Ain’t surprised. This case has been fubared six ways from Sunday ever since I took it. Think I’d die of shock if something went right.”

I squeezed my eyes closed. I needed sleep, even a good hour of it, but time wasn’t on my side. I decided it didn’t matter whether Tresting had taken Polk or not—either way, I needed to take the meet. “All right. Where?”

He named an intersection in a part of town I was vaguely familiar with. “And, Russell? Please. Come alone.”

What he meant was “Don’t bring Rio.” I snorted. “Your delicate sensibilities are safe. He’s working another angle.” I paused. “I won’t be unarmed, though.”

He took a quiet breath that sounded like relief. “Not a problem. Good. Thank you.”

“Whatever. I’m surprised you still want to work together, after that show you made.”

“Not sure I do,” he admitted frankly. “But I made a few calls. Like I said, I’d heard of you. Your rep’s solid.”

Well, that was nice to know. I wondered which of my former clients he’d talked to. I wished I had a way to check him out, but I’d lost my information guy, and I hadn’t made a whole lot of friends in the past couple years I could check a reference with and trust the answer I got.

For all I knew, I could be walking into a trap. It didn’t feel like one, but I had no way to know.

Tresting was waiting when I arrived, a lean silhouette in the darkness. He’d cleaned up his face, and the damage didn’t look as bad as it probably was thanks to the darkness of the night and the dark shade of his skin, but I could still tell he’d been hit by a truck the shape of Rio’s palm.

“This way,” he said.

“I want to see the receiver first.”

“Thought you might,” he said, taking it out of his pocket and handing it to me.

I studied the display. Nothing said this couldn’t be faked, but it supported what Tresting had already told me. The red dot indicating Courtney crept forward somewhere over New Mexico. I measured its speed with my eyes and glanced at the scale. Slightly faster than most commercial planes went—private jet, I figured.

Apparently presuming I was satisfied, Tresting started to walk, letting me keep studying the display as I fell in step beside him. I extended the plane’s trajectory in my mind, thinking through probable destinations, but there were too many variables. I sighed and handed the receiver back to him, a small gesture of cooperation. “Where are we going?”

“My office. Meet with my tech guy.”

I was pleasantly surprised. I’d been feeling Anton’s loss keenly every time this case took another left turn. From what he’d said, Tresting’s guy was good. “Can he be trusted?”

“With my life.”

I still wasn’t sure the PI himself could be trusted, but I liked the sound of that.

Tresting led me up a hill of close-packed buildings leaning against each other in the darkness, storefronts crammed in against ancient apartments with barred windows and rusted security grilles. We turned down an alley at the top of the hill that led between a tall brick building and a revamped warehouse with cement blocks for walls; bars were bolted across the windows here too, even the second-story ones. Tresting led the way up a narrow metal staircase climbing the side of the warehouse and stopped at a second-floor door reinforced with sheet metal. The stenciling on it read, “Arthur Tresting, Private Investigations” in clean, professional lettering, and he unlocked it and pushed it open.