S Huang - Zero Sum Game

Part of me had still been suspicious of a trap, but instead we were in a tastefully furnished office with a broad wooden desk backed by several comfortingly decorative tall houseplants. Plants. It was absurdly normal. The only thing in the place that hinted the office didn’t belong to a tax lawyer was a tall gun safe abutting the file cabinets against one wall.

“Come in,” said Tresting, going behind his desk and pulling one of the client chairs around with him so he could gesture me to sit. He powered on a sleek desktop computer with dual monitors that booted into some Unix-based variant of operating system. I squinted at him in surprise.

“My tech guy set it up,” he explained.

“Speaking of, when is he getting here?”

“Right now,” said Tresting, opening a video chat link.

A clear image of a room snapped into focus on one monitor, and my immediate impression was the lair of someone who was one-third hacker, one-third supervillain, and one-third magpie. Bundles of wiring and edges of hardware I didn’t recognize filled the whole view, and multiple monitors showing abstract screensavers backlit the darkened space, racked one over the other to create a wall of screens. The dim light silhouetted a man who sat presiding over his nest of computers, and as the chat link came alive, he turned to face us, levering one side of what I realized was a wheelchair around to bring himself closer to the camera. He was surprisingly young, probably Tresting’s junior by two decades, and was one of the skinniest men I’d ever seen, with a skinny lean face, a skinny little goatee, and skinny long fingers, which he steepled under his chin as his eyes flicked over us. A manic grin lit up his narrow face.

“Well, well, well, Arthur,” he said. “What do you bring to stimulate my genius today?”

Tresting gestured to me. “Checker, meet Cas Russell.”

I nodded to him. “You have the data on the Pithica stuff?”

Checker narrowed his eyes at me behind wire-framed glasses. “I do.”

“I want to see it all.”

He affected surprise. “What, all of it? And you haven’t even bought me a drink first?”

“I’ll pay your rates,” I assured him, thrown by his flippancy. Most business deals were a quick and easy exchange of money and services. I wasn’t used to a bantering preamble.

“I charge double for new clients,” Checker said cheerfully. “Discounts for beautiful women and anyone who can quote the original Doctor Who. I can see you aren’t going for the former, but if you offer me a jelly baby I’ll take off ten percent.”

“Hey,” said Tresting. “Behave. Ain’t nobody ever teach you not to insult a woman’s looks?”

“I’m not insulting her looks, only her deportment,” said Checker. “So I like good scenery. At least I’m willing to offer financial incentives for it.” He winked at me. “Want to come back in something slinky and ask again?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I sputtered. “You know we’re on the clock here, right?” We didn’t have time for clowning around, but more than that, it was…off-putting. Besides, it was objective fact that my looks fell on the lacking side of any aesthetic scale. Symmetry and proportions—who cared?

Checker pulled a face that made him look about five years old. “I don’t know if I like her, Arthur.”

“Cut her some slack,” said Tresting. “We all had a rough night.” He cleared his throat, then said carefully, “She might have some more pieces of the puzzle, too.”

Checker perked up immediately. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” He rubbed his long, thin hands together and reached out to start clattering on one of his many keyboards, his fingers so fast the clack of the keys was almost indistinguishable. “What’ve you got for us, Cas Russell?”

I blinked. I’d had Tresting’s relationship with this guy all wrong. Checker wasn’t merely his information broker. This wasn’t just a business deal. The two of them were friends. And Checker was as invested in this case as Tresting himself was.

Which meant, duh, of course they were much more interested in what I could bring to the table in terms of the case than they were my money. That was new.

I supposed this was the time to toss in. If I wanted their resources, I would have to be a part of that—that team effort. It felt…completely and horribly wrong to me. After all, I reminded myself, Arthur Tresting had introduced himself to me by threatening to kill me and torture my client, and had tried to point a gun at me no less than three times. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell this man or his friend anything at all.

Except my client was winging her way away from me on a jet plane, and a motorcycle gang had just tried to wipe the desert with me in a high-tech hit, and Rio was weirded out by this whole case—and, overshadowing everything else, I had told my plans to a woman I barely knew and then attacked the only person I trusted in the worst way I knew how.

I needed information. I was desperate for it.

I felt a distinct sympathy for Tresting’s instant decision to trust me earlier.

Perhaps thinking along the same lines, the PI took pity on me. “Start with the basics,” he suggested. “Who hired you to protect Polk?”

Dawna had waived her client privilege when she had drugged-or-whatever me anyway. I unstuck my tongue and said, “Her sister. Dawna Polk.”

Tresting frowned at Checker. Checker was frowning at me. “She doesn’t have a sister,” the skinny computer guy declared authoritatively.

“What? Yes, she does,” I said.

Checker was already shaking his head and turning to his keyboards. “I did deep background on this girl. Thoroughly, for Arthur here. She hasn’t got a sister.”

I gripped the edge of the desk, fighting off a massive, almost desperate sense of foreboding. “What about a half-sibling or something? One she didn’t grow up with?”

“Nope. Not unless the person was entirely off the grid, which is so unlikely as to border on the impossible,” Checker answered. “Otherwise there would be paternity tests, or adoption papers, or birth certificates, or—or something. You can never disappear completely, unless maybe your parents were hippies who went off the grid before you were born and raised you with wolves in the wild.” He wrinkled his nose. “Courtney’s parents, on the other hand…if I remember rightly, they were a boring little high school romance turned into a boring little small-town marriage, and then they died in a combine accident. Right, Arthur?” He was typing rapidly, his attention on a screen I couldn’t see as he continued talking. “Yeah, a combine accident. Hey, can you believe we still have those? I thought combines were from the Laura Ingalls days or something. You know, back when they still had farms.”

I shook my head, trying to get back on track. “But Dawna says Courtney’s her sister, and Courtney says Dawna’s her sister—why on earth would they both be lying about that?”

Tresting shrugged and looked at Checker.

Checker raised his eyebrows. “You’re not asking me, are you? Because, yes, I am all-powerful, but some questions—”

“Maybe they could be, I don’t know, really close childhood friends,” I broke in. “So they started calling each other ‘sister,’ or something.”

“Except you said they’re both using the name Polk,” Tresting pointed out. “Unlikely coincidence for unrelated friends, unless they’re running a game.”

He was right. Shit. You already know they aren’t on the level, idiot. Why are you still looking for honest explanations?

My head started to hurt, an aching, buzzing pain behind my eyes. I pushed it away. “What else did you find on Courtney?”