S Huang - Zero Sum Game

He crouched down again to touch the girl’s wrist, checking for a pulse I knew wouldn’t be there. I looked away.

The sounds of the street filtered up through the broken window, traffic noise and horns and people going about their days. A light breeze accompanied them, stirring the air in the office and making the cuts on my face start to sting.

“Thanks,” said Tresting suddenly.

The word parsed oddly, as if I were listening to a foreign language speaker say something and knew it wasn’t coming out the way he intended. “Sure,” I said.

Tresting stood back up and regarded me with a slight frown, as if I were a puzzle with a new twist. “They would’ve killed me,” he said. “This neighborhood, cops would’ve been too slow.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“I ain’t…thanks,” he said again.

I looked around the ruined office. Depression had neatly replaced the smugness. “They’re kids,” I whispered. Maybe I was the monster he thought I was after all. “They’re kids.”

“I know,” he said heavily, and it sounded like he did.

I took a deep breath. “What now?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know. Something’s different. First time Pithica’s targeted me.”

“You think this was Pithica?”

“Korean gang members trying to hit a black PI in a bad neighborhood,” Tresting recited. “Cops would write it off as a hate crime.”

“So? Maybe it was.”

“You saw the data, Russell. Hell, you’ve been attacked.”

I waited, but he didn’t say anything else, as if daring me to figure it out. I thought about the cases from Kingsley’s journal. A few of the strange deaths had involved gang violence, sure—drive-by shootings, or people caught in the crossfire in places gangs shouldn’t have been active. But Checker had connected a lot of other deaths in the file to Pithica that had nothing to do with gangs—suicides, freak accidents, muggings gone wrong—

My thoughts ground to a halt. “They don’t want it investigated.”

Tresting pointed a finger at me, as if to say, bingo.

“They’re killing people in ways the police can write off easily,” I realized. “Close the case.”

“Senseless tragedies,” he agreed. “Don’t know how Polk got Kingsley to write that note, but if it wasn’t for Leena—” He broke off. “Shit. Leena.”

He strode back to his gun safe, spun the combination to open it, and started reloading his Beretta. “You armed?”

“I will be in a minute.” I picked my way through the debris and slipped weapons out of the lifeless fingers of Tresting’s teenage attackers. The girl by the window had been toting a TEC-9 illegally converted to full auto; the others had two Glocks and a cheap and ugly Smith & Wesson semiautomatic. Jesus, it was irritating enough they had to be so young; couldn’t they at least do us the courtesy of carrying nice hardware?

Tresting had his phone to his ear as he reloaded; he left a terse message for Dr. Kingsley to take her son, get somewhere anonymous, and call him back. He hung up and holstered the Beretta, then reached back into his safe to hoist out a shotgun that I didn’t need my math ability to tell was far too short to be legal. He wrapped it in a spare shirt like a bundle of curtain rods and completely ignored me when I raised my eyebrows at him.

“Your prints and DNA are here,” he said instead. “That going to be a problem?”

“They’d need something to compare ’em to,” I answered. “How about you?”

“I’ll wake up in an alleyway later and claim amnesia.”

“You don’t want to stay like a good citizen and help with the investigation?”

“Not when the doc might be in danger.” He relocked his safe and grabbed a duffel behind his desk to stow the wrapped shotgun in. It still stuck out slightly, hopefully not too obviously.

Sirens sounded in the distance.

“Better dash,” said Tresting.

“For an ex-cop, you’re very cavalier about the law, aren’t you?” I commented, heading for the door.

Something dark shadowed his face. “Law ain’t never done me much good.”

We crept down the outside stairway in a hurry; I scooped up my battered SIG from the ground and we made it to Tresting’s truck at a fast walk. The engine came to life with a reluctant shudder; Tresting swung out into traffic and immediately pulled over to make way for five police cars, their sirens wailing and lights flashing. I watched them pass us, trying to keep a poker face. Tresting pulled back into traffic and then reached across to grab a burner cell still in its plastic packaging out of his glove compartment. He tossed it in my lap.

“Call in an anonymous tip on the doc. I’ll give you her address.”

Which would ensure we’d run into the cops when we arrived. “Really?”

“Forty minutes in traffic. Call.”

I cast around for something sharp to use on the vacuum-packed plastic—the math said I wasn’t getting in otherwise—and found a ball-point pen on the floor of the truck to pry it open with. “You call, then.”

“I’m driving. Ain’t safe.”

“ Really?”

“For the—we can’t afford to get pulled over! Just make the damned call. And put your seatbelt on.”

“ Now you want to be law-abiding?” I muttered, but I did as he asked, punching the buttons a little harder than necessary. I relayed the address Tresting gave me to the dispatcher and hung up when she tried to ask my name.

“Does her son still have that bodyguard?” I asked Tresting.

“Far as I know. And he’ll be at school right now. Good. Don’t think they’d risk something at a school.”

“We still don’t know who ‘they’ are,” I pointed out. “Or what they’re after.”

“There’s an agenda,” Tresting said, his jaw clenched. “Don’t know what, but they’ve got one for sure, and we’re monkeying it up, lucky us.” He gave me a brief, almost calculating glance. “You especially, I think.”

“What are you talking about? I just stumbled in on this, thank you very much. You’re the one who’s been working it for months.”

“Yeah, but I think they was happy to see me chasing my own tail. Entertainment, probably, for all the headway we was making. You show up, and…” He slammed down a little too hard on the brake as we approached a red light, and the stupid seatbelt tried to garrote me. “I tracked Polk for months, and they don’t care about saving her hide from no one till you hook up with her. Then they’re after you post-haste, she disappears, and a day later I got a target painted on me too? Don’t believe in coincidences.”

He was right. Dammit. After all, I hadn’t exactly randomly chanced upon this mess. Rio’s words came back to me: What interests me more is who made such a concerted effort to draw you into this…

“Got anything you want to share?” said Tresting. His tone wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t neutral, either.

“Hey, I’ve been playing catch-up from the beginning,” I said. “You still know way more about this shit show than I do.”

“Well, you know something. Maybe you don’t realize. Or maybe they want something from you.”

“I’m not special,” I objected.

It was a stupid thing to say. Tresting wasn’t an unobservant man, and my little display while rescuing him hadn’t been what one might call “discreet.” He didn’t answer right away, shifting gears with feeling and jamming down the accelerator to cut rudely onto the freeway. Then he said what I’d been dreading.

“At my office. Not that I ain’t appreciative, but how the hell…?”

I sighed. My usual response, that I’m really good at math, wasn’t going to suffice in blowing off a guy like Tresting. He seemed the type to worry at something until he got every last kernel of fact about it.