Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) (2 page)

I stared at him. He stared at me. The only sound was the cry of seagulls and the creaking of the boats in the dock.

Oh-kay.

Wow.

“You think someone’s building a nuclear bomb,” I said.

“In the current climate, the terrorist threat—”

I barked a laugh.

His mouth turned downward. “I assure you, this is not a joke.”

“No, no, sorry. It’s the whole terrorism thing,” I explained. “Terrorism is a statistical anomaly. You have a greater chance of being crushed under your own furniture than of dying in a terrorist attack. Terrorism is—well, it’s just not mathematically viable enough for me to take seriously.”

Harrington’s eyebrows had drawn down into a bushy white V, and he was regarding me as if I had declared playing with pure nitroglycerin to be perfectly safe. I huffed out a breath.

“Look, I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” I assured him. “I don’t think anyone in LA is building a nuclear bomb. Even if someone’s getting grabby for plutonium, there are plenty of other uses for it. Maybe they just like shiny things.” He was still looking at me like I had boarded the train to Crazytown. “I promise, if I hear of anyone building a bomb, I’ll jump in and stop them. Pro bono. Okay?”

He sighed again. “I cannot help but feel you are not taking me seriously.”

I wasn’t, but I should have been trying harder to be nice to a client. Especially one who had just paid me a vast sum of money. “I’ll keep my ear to the ground,” I soothed him. “Full alert. Promise.”

His mouth still had a distinct downturn to it, but he nodded.

Before I lost my last veneer of professionalism, I bid Harrington good day and extricated myself with my briefcase full of money. Dawn was breaking as I disembarked down the yacht’s ramp. The harbor smelled like wet socks, but the rising sun’s rays stabbed upward over the city and cast the sky above the water in tinctures of gold and pink, and the docks were pleasantly cool and empty this early in the morning. I started back along the water on foot, reflecting that my day wasn’t going too badly so far.

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I fished it out and answered. “Arthur. You’re up early.”

“Mornin’,” said Arthur Tresting’s voice. Arthur had the distinction of being the only person in the entire world who called me on the phone just to talk. He sounded cheerful today, though his breath kept hitching quickly. “Hope I didn’t wake you. Figured, hours you keep, I’d be as like to catch you now as at high noon.”

He wasn’t wrong. “You sound funny,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Just on a run, thought I’d check in. How’s it going?”

“Sixty-three and two-thirds days and counting,” I said.

“Hey, good girl,” said Arthur. “Don’t it feel great?”

Well, me not killing people made him happy, and for some reason I couldn’t figure out, making Arthur happy was important to me. Besides, being nonlethal was turning out to be an interesting mathematical challenge in an existence that got boring too quickly. An experiment.

“Sure,” I said. “If you say so.”

He breathed out a sigh that was half a chuckle. “All right, Russell. So, what you been up to?”

“I’m just finishing a job,” I said.

“Anything good?”

“Oh, the usual. You know. Getting stuff for people.”

“Hope you mean getting stuff
back
for people.”

“Right,” I said. “That.” It was possible I occasionally stretched the job description of “retrieval expert” to be more along the lines of “procurement expert.” I thought of Harrington’s “acquisitions” label and smiled to myself. “You can’t ask me to give up more than one of the Seven Deadly Sins all at once, you know.”

“Think you’re thinking of the Ten Commandments.”

“Those, then. Hey, I didn’t know you were religious.”

“Episcopalian. Don’t change subjects.”

I wasn’t going to let Arthur’s moralism spoil my good mood. “They paid me a lot of money,” I explained pleasantly. “A
lot
of money.”

He paused in that way I recognized as disapproving-but-not-going-to-push-it. He was lucky I’d decided I liked him. “Okay,” he said.

“Damn right it’s okay.”

“So, you got something lined up after this?”

I heard what he wasn’t saying. Arthur’s one of the few people who knows how I get when I’m not working. It isn’t pretty. “Not yet. I have client meetings all day.”

“I know you gotta take the work. But if you got some options, just give it some thought, all right? For me?”

Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure I had any choice. In associating with Arthur over the past year, I’d somehow let his ethics worm their way into being some goddamned miniature angel on my shoulder, chirping in my head in place of the conscience I’d never had. Not that I listened most of the time, but still, it was irritating.

“I promise I won’t steal some little elderly grandparents’ heirlooms as my next job,” I recited. “Happy?”

“Gonna start singing, girl.”

“You are so bizarre.”

He huffed a laugh. “Check in with you later?”

“Hey, wait,” I said, the thought almost slipping my mind. “Quick question. Have you heard of anyone scrounging around for plutonium lately? Or any other nuclear material?”

This time the pause was weighty. Arthur’s breath had ceased its steady rhythm, as if he had stopped running. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I said hastily. “At least, I think it’s nothing. I just heard something, is all.”

“If you think someone is building a—”

Really? Arthur, too? “Nobody is building a nuclear bomb. Forget I said anything.”

“If you heard something—”

“The likelihood of terrorism is so remote that it’s downright idiocy even to include it on a risk assessment,” I said. “Be worried about driving on the 101, if you want something genuinely dangerous.”

“But if you heard something about plutonium…” objected Arthur. “Ain’t there something—I dunno, if you’ve heard of something happening already, don’t that make it more likely?”

“You’re really trying to use Bayesian reasoning on me?”

“I’m using what?”

“Jesus Christ. All I heard was that someone might be looking for plutonium. It could be for anything. Or it could be a rumor.”

“You want me to ask around?” Arthur was a private investigator, and a damn good one.

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Can at least make some calls, see if anything pops.”

I
had
promised Harrington I’d look into it. “Only if you feel like it. My source is in the corporate world, if that helps at all.”

“I’ll give you a buzz later today.”

“Sounds good. I’d better get to my client meetings.”

“Should get yourself an office for that.”

“Why?”

Arthur let out a long-suffering sigh that told me exactly what he thought about my propensity for exchanging large sums of money in coffee shops and dive bars. “Later, Russell.”

“Bye, Arthur.”

I always got the feeling he didn’t know quite what to do with me.

Of course, I didn’t know what to do with him, either. By early afternoon, I was sitting in a Starbucks sorely regretting having talked to Arthur that morning.

C
HAPTER 3

“
I
’M SORRY,”
I said to the determinedly stoic man across from me. “I don’t think I can take your case.”

I winced as I said it. He was my last meeting of the day, and I’d turned everyone else down.

It was Arthur’s fault, really, because wouldn’t you know it, but the first potential client turned out to be a woman who literally was trying to steal her grandparents’ heirlooms, and I almost took it, except I wouldn’t have been able to look Arthur in the face for a month. After that I had a no-show and a person who was trying to con
me
—seriously, you don’t pitch a variation on a pyramid scheme to someone who eats exponentiation for breakfast—and that brought me to Noah Warren, my fourth and last potential client scheduled. I had hoped he would be an arms dealer looking to score a case of illegal weapons or something. Those always paid well.

Instead, he was crazy.

Warren sat across from me unnaturally straight, as if he had a steel rod rammed up his spine. He was a very dark African-American man who was entering middle age, but in a way that suited him, with a close-trimmed silver beard and a thick build he wore well. He’d ordered a muffin but it sat on a saucer in front of him, untouched.

“Why not?” he asked in an overly measured tone, his hands rigid on his knees. “Why won’t you help me?”

Because you either made this up or are insane
didn’t sound like a polite answer. “Have you tried going to the police?” I said instead.

“They think I’ve gone mad,” he answered, in that same measured tone.

I sat back in my chair. “Mr. Warren, I don’t know how to say this, but have you considered…”

“That they’re right?” His voice was very deep, and didn’t sound unsure even when asking a question. “They’re not. But even if they were, I don’t care. You hear? She’s my daughter. If she’s not real, life has no more meaning.”

Bizarrely, and despite my better judgment, something in me wanted to help him. I have a weakness for children in trouble. Even ones who were probably hallucinations. I tried one more time. “You’re talking about spending a lot of money to hire me for…well, potentially for nothing. Is there any chance that—”

“Please,” he said. He dug into a pocket of his jeans and pulled out a creased printout. “Please. Your ad.”

Mystified, I took the piece of paper from him and unfolded it. It was a printed-out listing from an online classifieds site. “Retrieval Expert,” it read. “Will retrieve valuables, information, people. Investigator is a mutant with superpowers. Will not let you down.” My current mobile number was underneath.

“Oh,” I said. “That. I was drunk. And someone else thought it would be funny. What about it?”

“I thought maybe you’re like her. Special. Can you get her back for me?”

Jesus Christ. The probability his daughter was anything like me was so low as to be trivial. Chances were, she was a figment of his imagination.

Another possibility poked nauseating tendrils at me, a dark shadow hanging over my consciousness, reminding me I’d encountered the impossible before, during the very case I’d met Arthur on. People who were special. Events that didn’t line up with reality.

No. We’d stayed well away from Pithica, all of us—we’d had to—and they’d been forced to stay well away from us. It didn’t make sense for them to pop up here in such a roundabout and messy way. Besides, this didn’t sound like them at all. They wouldn’t leave a loose end like Warren wandering around where he could hire a seedy retrieval specialist, especially one they’d tangled with before.

Occam’s razor: Warren was a crazy man, and this disappeared daughter he kept insisting was “special” was either dead or invented.

But Warren was also my last potential client today. If I didn’t take his commission, I was out of work, and that was not a thought I liked to entertain. Besides, the version of Arthur in my head couldn’t complain about me trying to rescue a man’s daughter…unless, of course, I was only doing it to get his money when I knew he had gone off the deep end.

I sighed. “How about this. For now, you pay me for expenses. I’ll look into it. If I find out I can get her back, then you pay my fee. Deal?”

He nodded, the movement tightly-held enough for it to seem like a salute. “Thank you.”

“No promises,” I said grumpily. I shoved back my chair and left him rigidly overseeing his uneaten muffin.

Well, at least I was on the job again.

I stood on the sidewalk for a minute, but I didn’t need to think about where my first stop on my impossible case was going to be: Checker’s Hole. I’d swapped my dirt bike for a car that morning, and since the coffee shop I’d chosen this time was already in the Valley, I decided on hitting him up in person instead of calling.

Besides, I wasn’t ever going to admit it, but I sort of liked seeing him.

Checker was Arthur’s business partner and the king of investigative fact-finding. A hacker and information broker, he was masterful at ferreting out any piece of data that had ever been encoded in digital form, which was impressive or frightening depending on what he chose to focus on. Fortunately for me, he had also become…well, something of a friend, though not in the same always-checking-up-on-me way Arthur was, which was confusing. I wasn’t used to having friends, so I wasn’t sure if that’s what Checker and I were or if he just found it horrendously amusing to have someone he could drink tequila with and force-feed bad science fiction television to.

The Hole was Checker’s name for his hacker cave, and was a converted garage behind his house in Van Nuys. Not that his house didn’t have a computer on almost every surface, but the Hole was something different.

I pulled into the driveway behind Checker’s car, a black two-door sedan with a wheelchair license plate and a blue bumper sticker that read, “I’m only in it for the parking.” When I’d gotten nosy about Checker’s paraplegia one drunken night, he’d claimed it had been a raptor attack. When I didn’t get it, he’d insisted on showing me
Jurassic Park
at that very moment—complete with a mind-boggling amount of trivia commentary—and then emailed me a dozen comic strips filled with stick figures I still wasn’t sure I fully understood the humor of.

I bypassed the house and went to the back door of the Hole, knocking as I opened it. As expected, Checker was sitting like a magpie in a nest in the middle of at least thirty different computer monitors. Machines and wires surrounded him on all sides, some screens racked far above his head, a jumble I was certain only he could make sense of. Most of the monitors showed screensavers, but some were scrolling code, at least one was logged into some video game, and he was ignoring all of those to type madly into another one with images flashing by that looked suspiciously like security camera footage.

“Cas Russell,” he scolded, without looking up. “Way to barge in. I might not have been wearing pants.”