Zero Sum Game Read online

  Oh, fuck. Courtney Polk was a headache and a half, and clearing the names of idiot kids who got mixed up with drug cartels wasn’t in my job description. I’d been very much looking forward to dumping her on her sister’s doorstep and driving away.

  Though that small voice in the back of my head kept whispering: drive away where?

  I didn’t have any gigs lined up after I finished this contract. I don’t do too well when I’m not working.

  Yeah, right. Between jobs you’re a fucking mess.

  I slammed the voice away again and concentrated on the money. I like money. “Just how much cash do you have?”

  “You’ll do it?” Her face lit up, and her whole body straightened toward me. “Thank you! Really, thank you!”

  I grumbled something not nearly as enthusiastic and revved the station wagon down the empty dawn freeway. Figuring out how to steal back someone’s reputation was not my idea of fun.

  The voice in the back of my head laughed mockingly. Like you have the luxury of being choosy.

  Chapter 2

  I pulled the station wagon into a grungy roadside motel near Palmdale, the type with a cracked plastic sign of misaligned letters misspelling the word “vacancy.” I’d detoured again, and we’d circled around enough to be coming in from north of LA, through the dusty shithole towns of meth gang territory. Courtney’s friends, on the other hand, had been smuggling coke, which I supposed made them the classy drug dealers.

  I didn’t need to rest, but I suspected Courtney did, and I wanted to think. I had no idea how the hell I was going to approach her case. The obvious plan was to find enough evidence on her old employers to give the DEA some sort of smashing takedown, let Courtney take the credit for it, and broker a deal to expunge her record. That would involve dealing with the police, though, and that sounded about as appealing as driving two-inch bamboo splinters under my fingernails.

  I ushered Courtney ahead of me into the motel’s threadbare office; her jaws cracked with a yawn as she stumbled in. The clerk was stuttering into the phone. I crossed my arms, leaned against the wall, and waited.

  The clerk stayed on his call for another ten minutes, and kept giving us increasingly nervous glances, as if he expected me to bawl him out for not helping us straightaway. I supposed that made sense, considering my messed-up fatigue-style clothes and my messed-up face, which had to be turning into a spectacular rainbow of color by this point. Or maybe he saw brown skin and thought I was a terrorist—I’ve been told I look kind of Middle Eastern. Goddamn racial profiling.

  I tried to smile at him, but it ended up more like a scowl.

  The clerk finally got off the phone and stammered his way into assigning us a room on the first floor. He dropped the key twice trying to give it to me, and then dropped the cash I gave him when he tried to pick the bills up off the counter. If he’d known I’d pulled the money from a succession of stolen cars that night, he probably would’ve been even more nervous.

  I pulled Courtney back into the sunlight after me, where we found the right door and let ourselves into a stock cheap-and-dirty motel room, the type with furnishings made of stapled-together cardboard. Apparently relieved by my promise to help her, Courtney zonked out almost before her frizzy head smacked against the pillows on one of the dingy beds. I tossed the cigarette-burned bedspread over her and went to push open the door to the small washroom.

  A gun barrel appeared in my face. “Howdy,” said the black cop from the compound from where he sat on the toilet tank. “I think we need to have a talk.”

  Well, shit.

  No matter how much math I know, and no matter how fast my body is trained to respond automatically to it, I can’t move faster than a bullet. Of course, if the cop had been within reach, I could have disarmed him before he could fire—but the bathroom was just large enough for the math to err on his side, considering he already had his gun drawn and pointed at my center of mass.

  “Don’t mind me,” I said, inching forward and trying for flippancy. “I’m just going to use the—”

  His hand moved slightly, and I froze.

  “Good,” he said. “You stand still now, sweetheart. You move and I’ll put a bullet through your kidney.”

  I knew two things about him now. First, he was smart, because not only had he tracked us here and then gotten into our bathroom before we had reached the room, but he also wasn’t underestimating me. Second, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about proper police procedure, which either meant he was a very dangerous cop or a very dirty one—or both.

  I let my hands hover upward, showing I wasn’t going for a weapon. “I’m not moving.”

  “Pithica,” he said. “Talk.”

  “You have me confused with someone else,” I said. Mathematics erupted around me, layering over itself, possibilities rising and crumbling away as the solutions all came up a hair short of the time the handsome cop needed to pull the trigger.

  “Talk,” said the cop. “Or I shoot you and break your pet out there.”

  Courtney. Shit. Stall. “Okay,” I said. “What do you want to know?”

  In the bathroom mirror, I saw the rising sun peek above the sill and through the almost-drawn curtains.

  Specular reflection. Angles of incidence. Perfect. As long as the cop wasn’t going to fire blind, I had him. Hands still raised in the air in apparent surrender, I twitched my left wrist.

  At the speed of light, the glint of sunlight came in through the window, hit the bathroom mirror, and reflected in a tight beam from the polished face of my wristwatch right into the cop’s eyes.

  He moved fast, blinking and ducking his head away, but I moved faster. I dodged to the side as I dove in, my right hand swinging out to take the gun off line. My fingers wrapped around his wrist and I yanked, the numbers whirling and settling to give me the perfect fulcrum as I leveraged off my grasp on his gun hand to leap upward and give him a spinning knee to the side of the head.

  The cop collapsed, out cold, his face smacking inelegantly into the grimy bathroom floor.

  I checked the gun. Fully loaded with a round in the chamber, as I’d expected. I gave it points for being a nice hefty .45 with an extended magazine, and points off for being a Glock. Typical cop. I hate Glocks.

  I searched him quickly and found three spare mags fully loaded with ammo and a little snub-nosed Smith & Wesson tucked in his boot. No wallet or phone—and, more importantly, no badge or ID of any kind. I was right; he was dirty.

  I dragged him out into the room, yanked the sheet off one of the beds, and began tearing long strips from it. In the other bed, Courtney stirred and squinted at me sleepily. When she saw me tying a tall, unconscious man to the radiator, she came fully awake and shot bolt upright. “What’s going on?”

  “He followed us here,” I explained. The guy must have regained consciousness fast enough to track our escape back at the compound, and must have been the one on the phone with the motel clerk when we checked in, making sure someone let him into our room before we got the key. This time I’d make sure he couldn’t track us. By the time he woke up and got himself loose, we’d be long gone.

  “Who is he? Is he with the Colombians?”

  I frowned at her from where I was securing my knots. “He’s the cop from back at the compound. Remember? As to whether he’s with the cartel, I don’t know. I think he’s dirty.”

  “How do you know he’s a cop in the first place?”

  “Police training makes you move a certain way.” It came to me in numbers, of course, the subtle angles and lines of stride and posture. But I didn’t feel like explaining that.

  “Oh.” Courtney’s hands had tightened into fists on the threadbare bedspread, her knuckles white.

  I finished my work and moved toward the door. “Come on, kid. We’ve got to hit the road.”

  Courtney scrambled up and stayed behind me while I checked outside. The sun gleamed off the cars, the dusty parking lot completely still. If our police friend was dirty, it was unl
ikely he’d have a partner nearby, fortunately. I glanced around to see if I could spot his car, figuring it might have some nice toys in it—as well as maybe his badge and ID, which could give us some leverage—but no vehicle stood out as promising. Instead, I led Polk over to a black GMC truck so caked with dust and grime it looked gray. In my business, getting into a car and hotwiring it are such necessary skills I could literally do them with my eyes closed, and I had the engine coughing to life in fourteen seconds. We left the motel behind in a cloud of dust.

  I flattened the accelerator, and the desert sped by around us, the morning sun flashing off dust and sand and rock. I drew a quick map of this part of the county in my head, calculating the best way to travel so that even if the cop woke up quickly and used the most efficient search algorithm he could—or had supernatural luck—the probabilities would drop toward zero that he’d be able to find us again.

  Courtney’s subdued voice interrupted my calculations. “Was he after me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I brooded for a moment. “What do you know about something called Pithica?”

  She shook her frizzy head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Are you sure? You never heard a whisper from your former employers? Think hard.”

  Courtney winced away from my harshness. “No. I swear. Why?”

  I didn’t answer.

  What the hell was going on? Why was a peace officer on the take after Courtney Polk? She’d been a drug mule, for crying out loud, one the cartel had ended up locking in a basement. She hadn’t exactly been high on the food chain. And what the hell was Pithica?

  I didn’t go straight into LA; instead, I continued zigzagging through the brown desert of the northern outskirts and switched cars twice in three hours. I didn’t know if our dirty cop could put out an APB on us—he might even have enough resources to have his buddies set up roadblocks. Best to err on the side of being impossible-to-find no matter what.

  Once the morning hit a decent hour, I stopped at a cheap electronics store and picked up a disposable cell. I stood under the awning of the shop, watching Courtney where she sat in the car waiting, and dialed Rio.

  “Pithica,” I said, as soon as he answered.

  There was a long pause. Then Rio said, “Don’t get involved.”

  “I’m already involved,” I said, my stomach sinking.

  Another pause. “I can’t talk now.” Of course. He was still undercover. I’d assumed he was just taking down the whole gang for kicks, but now…

  “When and where?” I said impatiently.

  “God be with you,” said Rio, and hung up.

  I should’ve known, I thought. Undercover wasn’t Rio’s style. His MO was to go in, hurt the people who needed hurting, and get out. If taking down the gang had been his only objective, a nice explosion would have lit up the California desert weeks ago and left nothing but a crater and the bodies of several eviscerated drug dealers. That was Rio’s style. And why had he referred Dawna to me to get Courtney out in the first place? Why not do it himself? He was more than capable; in fact, I was sure he could have done it without even blowing his cover.

  Unless things were way more complicated than I had realized, and this wasn’t a simple drug ring.

  “Who were you calling?” asked Courtney, getting out of the car and squinting at me in the glare of the Southern California sun.

  “A friend,” I said. Well, sort of. “Someone I trust.” That part was true.

  “Someone who can help us?”

  “Maybe.” Rio was clearly working his own angle, and didn’t want help—even from me. Which hurt a little, if I wanted to be honest with myself. I’m good at what I do. Rio didn’t mean to hurt me, of course; he didn’t care about my feelings one way or another. He didn’t care about anyone’s feelings. I wondered what it said about me that he was the closest thing I did have to a friend.

  Suck it up, Cas.

  Rio wasn’t the only resource I had. I contemplated for a moment, then dialed another number.

  “Mack’s Garage,” said a gravelly voice on the other end.

  “Anton, it’s Cas Russell. I need some information.”

  He grunted. “Usual rates.”

  “Yeah. I need everything you can get on the word Pithica.”

  “Spelling?”

  “I’m not sure. There might be some ties to Colombian drug runners. And the authorities might be investigating already.”

  He grunted again. “Two hours.”

  “Got it.” I hung up. Anton was one of several information brokers in the city, and I’d hired him not infrequently over the past couple of years, whenever I wanted to know more than a standard Internet search would give me. If “Pithica” had a paper trail, I was betting he could find it.

  “Come on,” I said to Courtney, shepherding her back to the car. “We’re going to hit rush hour as it is.”

  Chapter 3

  “Do you have cash, or is your money all in the bank?” I asked Courtney as we inched forward through the eternal parking lot of the 405 freeway, the heat beating down through the windshield and slowly cooking us. The temperature had catapulted up by a full thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit with the rising sun as we finally headed into the city: Los Angeles at its finest. Our current junkpot car didn’t have air conditioning, and the still air and stalled traffic meant even rolling down the windows didn’t help one whit.

  Courtney fiddled with the ends of her ponytail self-consciously. “They paid me in cash. I didn’t—taxes, you know, I thought it would be better if…”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, trying not to laugh at her. “No sign at all they weren’t on the level. I can see why you thought it was a legitimate delivery service.” I dealt only in cash myself, of course, but I wasn’t exactly a yardstick for legality. “Where is it, under your mattress?”

  She grimaced, red creeping across her cheekbones again. “A floorboard.”

  “All right. We’ll swing by. Let’s hope the cops didn’t find it.” I had a fair amount of my own liquid capital stashed in various places throughout the city, but I preferred to use hers. She was supposed to be the paying client, after all.

  “You think they searched my place?” Courtney asked, going tense and sitting up in the passenger seat.

  “You’re a murder suspect,” I said. “You think?”

  Her whole face had gone flushed now. “I—I just don’t—I have some things—”

  “Relax, kid. Nobody’s going to care about your porn collection.”

  She choked and broke out in a coughing fit.

  “Unless it’s children,” I amended. “Then you’d be in big trouble. Bigger, I mean. It’s not kiddie porn, is it?”

  “What—? I don’t—no, of course not!” she stammered. Her skin burned tomato red now, from her neck to the roots of her sweat-dampened hair. “Why would you—I don’t even—”

  I laughed for real as traffic started creeping forward again. She was too easy.

  Courtney’s place was only a few miles from Anton’s, and I decided to drop by the information broker’s first. Anton’s garage was a constant of the universe. A ramshackle mechanic’s outfit, the place had never changed in all the times I’d been there. The words “Mack’s Garage” barely showed through a decades-thick layer of motor oil and grime on a bent-up metal sign, and the junkers in the bays were the same derelict vehicles I’d seen the last time. No customers were in sight. Anton did know cars, as it happened, but he wasn’t known for being an auto mechanic.

  I knocked on the door to the office and Anton opened it himself, a faded gray work coverall over his considerable bulk. Anton was a big, big man in every way—six-foot-five and beefy all over, he had a thick neck, thicker face, and steel-gray hair shaven to a strict quarter-inch, which for some reason made him seem even bigger. Considering I was already short, I tended to feel like a toy person next to him. But as much as I was sure he could open a can of whoop-ass on someone if he wanted to, I always thought he was kind of a teddy bear
. A surly, taciturn teddy bear who never smiled, but a teddy bear nonetheless.

  He grunted when he saw us. “Russell. Come in.”

  Courtney and I followed him through the outer office and into Anton’s workshop. Computers and parts of computers sprawled across every inch of the place, some intact but many more in pieces, and bits of circuitry and machinery I couldn’t name hummed away all over the room in various states of repair, with teetering mountains of papers and files stacked on every marginally flat surface. A huge office chair sized for Anton’s bulk stood like a throne in the middle of the chaos, and perched in its depths was a twelve-year-old girl.

  “Cas!” Anton’s daughter cried, leaping up to run over and throw her arms around my middle. Even for twelve, she was tiny, and with her dark complexion, I always figured her mother must have been a four-foot-ten Asian or Latina woman whom Anton could have picked up with his little finger.

  “Hey, Penny. How’s it going?” I said, ruffling her dark hair.

  “Good!” she chirped. “We’ve got an intelligence file for you!”

  “Thanks. Hey, I’ve got a present for you.” I pulled the cop’s little Smith & Wesson out of my pocket. “Look, it’s just your size.”

  “Ooo! Cas! Thank you!” Eyes shining, she took the gun, keeping it pointed down. “Daddy, look what Cas gave me! What caliber is it?”

  “Thirty-eight Special, for a special little girl,” I said. “Take good care of it; it’ll last you a long time.” What can I say, I have a soft spot for kids.

  “You’re giving her a gun?” squawked Courtney from behind me. “One you stole from a cop?”

  “She knows how to use it,” grunted Anton.

  Courtney quailed. “That’s not what I—”

  “You think I don’t take care of my daughter right?” said Anton quietly, looming a bit. “That what you saying, girl?”

  Courtney stared up and up at him. Then she said, “No, sir,” very meekly.

  “Didn’t think so,” rumbled the big man. “Russell, I got that info for you. Not much to go on, mind.”