S Huang - Zero Sum Game

“I jumped,” I said, deliberately obtuse.

“Two stories.”

“No, stupid. From the fire escape.”

He digested that. “And pried off the bars.”

“With my SIG. It’s a good crowbar. Metal frame, you know.” I was proud of myself for not making a dig about cheap polymer piece-of-crap Glocks. I’m the soul of tact.

Tresting looked like he was searching for another question to ask. “Damn. If I hadn’t been there myself…”

“I train a lot,” I lied.

“In being Spider-Man?”

“Among other things.” At least he hadn’t actually seen me leapfrog the alley. I was a lot faster than most people imagined.

“Damn,” Tresting said again. Then he hazarded, “Military?”

I blinked. “What?”

“Your background. Ex-military?”

“I seem military to you?”

“Oh-kay, so not ex-mil.” There was a pregnant pause.

“School of hard knocks,” I supplied, trying for clever.

“Hey, that was my alma mater, too,” said Tresting. “But apparently you graduated summa cum laude or something.”

“Gesundheit,” I said. “Hey, stop PIing me or next time I won’t come save your sorry ass.”

I didn’t expect that to stop him, but for some reason it did, and he dropped into a thoughtful silence.

Relieved, I took the opportunity to shoot Rio a cryptic text to see if he had any new updates. The bloody corpses played through my vision again, the stench in the air heavy and metallic and cloying. Those people were dead anyway; was I hypocritical if I hoped it hadn’t been Rio?

Then who else?

I thought of Anton. I’d assumed Pithica had been the one to come after him, but the explosive fire didn’t fit with their usual MO. A stunt like that wouldn’t fly under the radar; it would demand investigation. Same with the massacre at the office suite, I supposed.

Rio wouldn’t have gone after Anton, however. I felt sure of that. He wasn’t bothered by collateral damage to innocent people, but he would never make a concerted hit against a decent man and his twelve-year-old daughter. It was impossible. He himself might be capable of such an act, but his God wasn’t.

Who was?

One fact was inescapable. No matter who had come after Anton, the office workers, me, Tresting, or Courtney Polk, Tresting was right: none of it had happened before I had gotten involved. Correlation didn’t imply causality—but it was also possible I was the kiss of death. You know something, Tresting had said. Or maybe they want something from you. I thought back through my retrieval clients, but I’d only been doing this a few years, and I couldn’t think of any past cases that had been strange or unusual enough to have a connection to Pithica. Certainly I didn’t think I knew anything worth killing for.

And the only thing special about me was my math ability. Which was cool, sure, and occasionally made me into some sort of flying squirrel on crack, but in the grand scheme of things, even I wasn’t conceited enough to think I was worth as much trouble as some people were putting in to stop us.

Things weren’t adding up. And for someone with an overpowered math brain, things not adding up meant a serious problem.

We arrived at Leena Kingsley’s house fifty-two minutes after we’d left Tresting’s office. The drive had been mostly silent—Tresting was lost in his own thoughts, and for my own part, I figured our détente was too touchy and fragile, and going into a possibly-hostile situation wasn’t the time to mess with it.

Tresting cruised by the first time without slowing. A cop car sat on the street outside, but only one, and its lights weren’t flashing. The small house was still—no sign that anything was amiss, and no neighbors gawking. It didn’t look like there had been a shootout here.

Of course, that didn’t mean anything. This was a nice residential neighborhood, with well-groomed yards and picket fences and rosebushes, and Pithica liked subtle.

Tresting circled the block and then pulled over a few houses prior to Dr. Kingsley’s. He reached into the duffel he’d brought the shotgun in, pulled out a scope, and held it up to one eye. “Can’t see much,” he said after a moment. “But there’s movement. Think she and the cops are talking.”

“Do you think they’d come after her with police there?”

“Seems stupid.”

“We wait, then?”

“Think so.”

We sat in the truck, tense and silent.

About twenty minutes later the door opened, and two uniformed LAPD officers came out onto the porch. Leena Kingsley saw them out, speaking politely. They gave her a last nod and good-bye and headed back to their patrol car. But instead of staying on the street and watching the house as I’d expected, the black-and-white pulled away from the curb.

“They’re leaving?” I cried. “I called in a death threat!”

Tresting shrugged. “Police are busy.”

As the patrol car cruised past us, without meaning to I twitched my face away from their line of sight.

“Stop flinching,” said Tresting. “That’s a good way to get noticed.”

“I wasn’t flinching,” I protested.

Tresting shook his head in disgust. I opened my mouth, feeling absurdly defensive, but he was already getting out of the truck. I told myself I could clean his clock in a fight any day, and in fact already had, and checked on the weapons tucked into my belt under my coat before following him out onto the sidewalk.

We’d only taken a few steps when a man in a suit stepped out of a black sedan and started briskly up Kingsley’s walkway. We both stopped for a split-second and then simultaneously began walking faster.

“Door-to-door salesman?” I muttered.

“Don’t think it’s a coincidence he waited till the cops left,” Tresting muttered back.

The suit reached the porch and pressed the doorbell. As Dr. Kingsley pulled the door open, he reached into his suit jacket, and I already had a gun out and aimed before we saw he was only flashing a badge and ID at her. Leena Kingsley spotted us over his shoulder at the same time.

“What’s going on?” she asked, her eyes going back and forth between Tresting’s face and my gun.

The suit turned, a lanky white guy with a scraggly beard, and saw the barrel of my newly acquired Smith & Wesson in his face. He stumbled back a step, immediately raising his hands in the air. “Miss, please put down the weapon.”

I’d thought he was familiar when he first turned, but now I definitely recognized him: Mr. Nasally-Voiced, one of the fine examples of humanity who’d been sacking Courtney’s place. Oh, hell.

Tresting grabbed the leather badge holder out of the guy’s hand and scrutinized it. “FBI?”

The man nodded. “Agent Finch. Now, please put down the weapon.”

FBI? That didn’t track at all, not with what I’d seen him doing earlier. “No,” I said. “Let’s go inside.”

Tresting either agreed with me or wanted to present a united front. He gestured Finch ahead of him, and Leena Kingsley apprehensively stepped back to let us in.

I glanced back at the street as I went inside, but nobody was stirring. With luck, our little cowboy stunt had gone unnoticed. I kicked the door shut behind us; Tresting was already closing the blinds in the living room.

“Sit down,” I ordered our new friend.

He did so, sinking onto an upholstered chair, arms still raised. “What do you want?” he asked calmly.

“To know who the hell you are, first of all,” I said. I could feel Tresting’s eyes on me, questioning. “Ten to one the badge is a fake,” I told him. “Now, who are you?”

“I’m SSA Gabriel Finch,” the man repeated. “I’m here to speak with Dr. Kingsley—”