Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) (3 page)

I looked at him pointedly. His skinny frame was fully clothed in jeans and a T-shirt that had a picture of a sheep plugged into an outlet on it. Besides, both of us knew his absurd security system had told him I was here long before I came in.

Checker grinned. “It’s like Schrödinger’s pants. You didn’t know for sure till you opened the door.” He hit a key and then pushed his wheelchair back from the keyboard, the monitor continuing to flash through footage faster than the human eye could detect. “What’s up?”

“You put an ad on Craigslist about me,” I accused, tossing the offending piece of paper at him.

He cackled. “I told you I was going to! Did it get you work?”

“If you count a crazy man as work.”

“Hey, don’t hate on crazy people; sometimes they need badass retrieval specialists, too. And besides, you didn’t tell me not to do it.”

“Because I was drunk.”

“Really? I’d bet fifty bucks you still could’ve walked a straight line.”

I scowled. “Not fair. I can always walk a straight line.”

“Ah, but then the ‘superpower’ moniker isn’t inaccurate, is it?” He waggled his eyebrows at me.

Arthur and Checker had both been prying about my slightly abnormal set of abilities since I’d known them, though Arthur was way more subtle about it, and also—admittedly—more concerned with my moral compass than with my skill at instantaneous vector calculus.

“So I can do math,” I said. “Just because I can do it really fast doesn’t mean I’m some sort of superhero.”

“I didn’t say super
hero,”
Checker argued. “You’d have to be heroic for that.”

“Thanks.”

“Superpowers do not imply superhero. The converse isn’t true either, y’know. That would preclude Batman.”

“Batman is fictional.”

Checker threw his arms wide. “And yet he still saves Gotham City every week! Think how much more you could do being real!”

I leaned a hip against the nearest rack of computers. “You know what?”

“What?”

“The way you chatter reminds me of a squirrel.”

“Such persecution! What have I ever done to deserve this?”

“You made me watch that horrible movie where the Wookies growl at each other for twenty minutes.”

He winced. “Er, yes. Sorry about that. I don’t suppose you’d buy ‘rite of passage,’ would you?”

“Not in a thousand years. Hey, I’m here on business.”

“Your crazy man?”

“Yeah. He says his daughter’s missing. I told him I’d look into it.” I was already regretting accepting the case, but I grabbed a pad of paper and scribbled Noah Warren’s name and contact information on it. “I need as much as you can give me on him. And I need to know whether he actually has a daughter.” I added the address for the Southern California headquarters of Arkacite Technologies that Warren had given me. “And anything suspicious about his wife’s colleagues. According to him, they’re the ones who have his kid.”

Checker crossed his arms. “How rude. What am I, your trained monkey?”

I stopped writing, puzzled. He had never given me the runaround before. “That’s why I’m paying you.”

“And I’m not selling today. Not even to good friends with superpowers.” He shrugged apologetically. “Sorry. Um, seriously, I’ve got this—
thing
I have to deal with today; I’m not—” He cocked his head at me, cutting himself off. “Unless…”

“You want more than your usual rate?”

“You’re so mercenary-minded! No, I said I’m not
selling.
But now that I’m thinking about it, I might be open to a trade. A, uh, a barter, if you will. It’s remotely possible you might be able to do me a wee little favor—”

“What kind of a favor?” I asked.

“Just a small one.” He picked up a pencil from the detritus among his keyboards and started fiddling with it. “I, ah…well, I may have…angered some people.”

“You? Really?”

His jaw dropped open in mock offense. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m a very genial person!”

“Wookies. Growling. For twenty minutes,” I reminded him. “So who else did you piss off?”

He fidgeted in his chair. “It’s possible…the Mob.”

“
What?”

“By accident!” he squawked.

“I hope so!”

“I didn’t mean to! But I thought, well, maybe you could do that thing where you, you know, threaten people, and they go away—”

“You want me to be your
goon squad?”
I cried.

“Uh—maybe? I hear you’re very good at it.”

“Goddammit, Checker. I work for the Mob.”

“You do?” His eyebrows shot up. “
Definitely
not heroic.”

“Well, it’s not like they have me on retainer or anything, but I’ve done the odd job for the odd Mafia member,” I said. “And let me tell you something. Unlike some of my other clients, they always paid me on time.”

“Did I say, ‘not heroic?’ I think I meant ‘anti-hero,’ bordering on ‘villainous’—”

“You’re asking me to piss where I work,” I told him severely. Not to mention that I didn’t want to make enemies of a very, very powerful organization with whom I currently had a good working relationship.

Checker raised his hands placatingly. “Okay, okay. Geez. We all know how important your money is to you. Forget I said anything.” He levered one of the wheels on his chair to spin himself toward his monitors, saying forlornly, “What did you say you need? Hopefully I can find it for you before the Hole burns to a crisp with me inside. Probably even odds there, so you only need to give me half up front.”

I groaned. Very loudly. “Fine. Stop whining; I’ll help you. Under duress.” That last was a little bit of a lie. I still wasn’t sure how this whole “friends” thing was supposed to work, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to let a friend get a hit put out on him. It didn’t mean I couldn’t be annoyed about it, though. “Give me the details, then. Who’d you cross?”

“Gabrielle Lorenzo,” he answered, cringing a little.

“Wait, seriously? Mama Lorenzo?” The Los Angeles Family had been fading into impotence before Gabrielle Lorenzo had married in and dragged the whole operation up by its bootstraps. She had reorganized organized crime until it reached a might that steamrolled any police effort to make the slightest dent. She ran a tight, clean operation, inspired devout loyalty, and came down with the wrath of God on anyone who put a toe on her turf.

You did not cross the Lorenzo family. Not if you valued your physical well-being. Checker hadn’t just poked the Mob, he’d pissed off the Mob’s supreme deity.

“What on earth did you do?” I demanded.

Checker twitched. “I, uh, may have, uh…she may have a favored niece, who, I hasten to point out, I did not know was her niece at the time, and the young lady and I may have…enjoyed a night of pleasurable activities together,” he finished very fast, mumbling to the side.

Of course. If there was one thing Checker could be counted on to do, it was flirt with any attractive young woman who crossed his path. The man was a menace. But I didn’t see why that would mean he was in hot water with the Lorenzos.

“But why would—I mean, it was consensual, right?”

Checker choked. “Cas! Honestly! What do you
think
of me?”

“But then why’s Mama Lorenzo so bent out of shape?”

“Uh, you may not have noticed, being the complete social recluse that you are, but the world is not always entirely logical when it comes to sex.”

“Hey! This isn’t about me.” I snapped my fingers at him. “Back to your screw-up, Romeo.”

“Well, her aunt objected to our, uh, liaison, and things may have escalated. Badly,” Checker admitted. “I was just contemplating the dilemma when fortune brought you to my humble abode. You see, it turns out that Gabrielle Lorenzo has people.”

Saying Mama Lorenzo had “people” was like saying the Dirichlet function had a few discontinuities. The Lorenzo family had access to an army if they chose to use it. Great. “Fine, I’ll see if I can resolve this. Where is she right now?”

He punched a key and one of his many screens unblanked itself to show a program running. “Their estate in the Hollywood Hills. The address is hitting your phone.”

I stared at the screen over his shoulder. “You are downright creepy.”

“Thank you.”

“Okay, I’ll take care of this. In the meantime, you shouldn’t be alone, just in case. I’ll ring Arthur.”

“No! I mean, please don’t.”

“Why not?” In addition to being business partners, Arthur and Checker were solid. They went back. And Arthur was a dab hand with a gun when he wasn’t trying to be all moral. “If Mama Lorenzo sends someone—”

“I’ll go somewhere else and lie low,” he promised. “I’d rather not—uh—Arthur doesn’t have to know about this, okay?”

I looked at his earnest expression. To be honest, I could understand wanting to keep Arthur out of it. Arthur might not be the type to think less of you for screwing up, but you still didn’t want him to see when you stepped in it. “Okay,” I said. “You need a place to go? I can give you one.” Like a truly paranoid person, I maintained at least five safe houses around LA at any given time, apartments I kept paid up just in case.

“You have an accessible one?”

Shit. I ran through the list of places in my head—they were all of the hole-in-the-wall variety, and I was pretty sure they all involved stairs at least somewhere, even if it was just to get up the walk. Dammit, I hadn’t even thought about that.

“No worries,” said Checker. “I can find someone to crash with. I have full confidence you’ll have this completely cleared up by tomorrow.”

I wished I had the same confidence. This was why I didn’t have friends. They made life complicated.

“I’ll take some laptops and work on your case,” Checker offered. “What was it you wanted me to look up?”

I dropped the notepad in his hands. “Here. Noah Warren’s daughter, supposedly named Liliana, and five or six years old—oddly, he wasn’t clear on which. His wife worked at Arkacite before she died, and he claims they kidnapped his kid.”

“Arkacite? As in,
Arkacite
Arkacite?”

“Just because they make a bunch of tech you like doesn’t mean—”

“Oh, trust me, I don’t buy their shiny corporate image; they data mine half the Internet, have no concern for privacy, and wouldn’t know a good mobile UI if it bit them in the ass. But why on earth would they kidnap someone’s daughter? And what’s with all the ‘supposedly’?”

“Well, it turns out not only is she missing, but there’s no record of her existence, and nobody else knows anything about him having a daughter. He freely admits all this. Oh, yeah, and according to him, she also has superpowers,” I told him helpfully. “Have fun.”

I might have been a little vindictively gleeful about leaving him with a lap full of crazy. Served him right for getting himself on the Mafia’s hit list.

C
HAPTER 4

A
S SOON
as I left the Hole, I called Benito Lorenzo. He was a sleazy, sycophantic, used-car-salesman kind of guy, but he was also both a recurring client and a made man. I was pretty sure he was Mama Lorenzo’s…cousin by marriage? Or something? It had never seemed important to keep track.

He picked up against extremely loud club music. I frowned at my watch—it was just before two in the afternoon. “Benito, hi, it’s Cas Russell,” I shouted into the phone.

“Cas! My favorite! This is not so much the best time—”

“I’ll be quick,” I said. “I need a favor. I have urgent business with Mama Lorenzo. I’m headed there now.”

Only the techno thumping through the line told me he hadn’t hung up.

“Hello?” I said.

“You want to speak to the Madre? Why?”

“It’s important,” I dodged. “Can you give her a call, give me an intro?”

“Right now?”

“Yes, right now.”

More techno, the bass vibrating my eardrum.

“I’ll owe you one,” I promised. It wasn’t something I liked to say lightly, especially not to a member of the American Mafia, but I was getting impatient. “Come on, Benito, it’ll take you five minutes. Just tell her I’m coming.”

“What you are asking me,” he said, an unhappy frown in his voice, “this is a very large favor.”

Yeah, yeah, cry me a river. “I won’t forget it,” I said, as solemnly as I could while still shouting over a dance beat.

“You owe me one. A big one.”

“Sure.”

“Introduction only.”

“Just let her know I’m coming,” I said again.

“All right. But you owe me.” My ears rang in the sudden silence as he hung up. Great. I was already pissing people off. To be fair, I did tend to be good at it.

I got in my car and headed into the Hollywood Hills.

The Hollywood Hills are a strange phenomenon. The sprawl of Los Angeles allows them to be right in the middle of the city, with the few canyon roads that wind all the way across becoming clogged to a standstill every rush hour. But the untamed elevation lifts them out of the urban mire enough that they’ve become an oasis of wealthy, private mountain estates. The rich get to have the best of both worlds: a secluded mountain hideaway that’s still smack in central Los Angeles, right next to Hollywood and fifteen minutes from downtown.

Los Angeles is such a culture of entitlement. It just figured that all the movie stars—and mob bosses—were able to have their cake and eat it, too, even when it came to real estate.

The address Checker had given me was up a twisting road that seemed graded far too steeply to be a good idea, especially considering the skill level of the average LA driver. I parked precariously around a blind curve and wondered how people who couldn’t do snap calculations of gravity versus static frictional force managed.

Since this was—at least for now—a civilized visit, I went up to the iron gates and rang at the intercom. I heard a click and a buzz, and then an impersonal voice said, “Yes?”

“My name is Cas Russell,” I said, hoping Benito hadn’t copped out on me. “I’m here to see Madame Lorenzo.”

After a brief silence—during which I automatically did all the calculations I’d need to vault the gate and be inside the estate before anyone could react—the intercom buzzed and the gate swung open on creakingly slow automated mechanics. I headed toward the house and tried to figure out which part of the grandiose architecture was supposed to be the front door.