Zero Sum Game (6 page)

“Of course not!” Fire flooded Dawna’s eyes. “My sister is a good person! How could you even think—?”

“Okay, okay, I get it.” This interview had been useless. The woman didn’t know a damned thing.

“Ms. Russell.” Dawna reached out, taking me by surprise, and grasped my hands in her own slim, birdlike ones. “Please. What’s going on? I thought Courtney was safe.”

“She is. Now. But…” I sighed. “It turns out my friend Rio wasn’t the one who called you. There may be more going on here than we thought.”

“What are you going to do?”

In spite of myself, I felt sorry for her. “I’m meeting with Rio tonight,” I said, trying for a soothing tone. “I’ll see if he knows anything. And then we’ll figure out why everyone is after your sister.”

Dawna’s eyes widened further. “Everyone? After her?”

“Well, we know why the cartel is and why the cops would be, but I think someone else…” I frowned. “Dawna, have you ever heard of something called Pithica?”

She shook her head. “No. What is it?”

“I don’t know yet. But some people think Courtney’s involved in it.”

“Who? The cartel?”

“The cops. Or at least, a cop we…ran into. I don’t know about the cartel.”

“And this Pithica thing, it’s…bad?” hazarded Dawna anxiously.

“Considering people seem pretty willing to kill her over it, yeah.”

She started tearing up again.

Oh
geez.
“Look, Dawna, I’m going to get her out of this.”

She tried to nod, but she was trembling with the effort of not breaking down. She brought her fine-boned hands up to cover her face, breathing raggedly.

I’m not great with people, but I tried. I reached out and put a hand on her thin shoulder. The motion felt very contrived. “Hey, don’t worry. We’re going to find out what this Pithica thing is, and why people think Courtney is involved in it, and then we’re going to shut them down.”

She managed to nod, face still in her hands.

“Here, I’ll buy you a coffee.”

I finally got Dawna calmed down; she drank her latte with small, dignified sips, dabbing at her ruined makeup with a napkin. “I’m sorry, Ms. Russell,” she whispered, her voice shaking only slightly. “It’s so overwhelming.”

“I understand.” I didn’t, but whatever.

“I, ah, I have to get back to work,” said Dawna softly.

I wondered where she worked that she couldn’t take time off right now. Well, maybe she needed the distraction. It wasn’t like I was unfamiliar with that myself.

“To meet with, uh, Mr. Rio—are you going back to the—to where you found my sister?” Dawna asked in a quiet, fearful voice as she cleaned herself up.

“Yes,” I said. “To a little town nearby.”

“Be careful, Ms. Russell. Please.”

“I will,” I assured her.

It wasn’t until I had left Dawna tottering back toward work and was back on my borrowed sport bike that I realized I’d forgotten to ask her about payment.

Huh. That was unlike me—I never forget about money. This case must be getting to me more than I thought.

Chapter 6

When
I got back to the loft, Courtney was still asleep, her skin pale and tight with ashy smudges under her eyes. I hesitated, then left her cuffed to the pipe, locked the door and ziptied it shut on the outside, and set off for Camarito.

I took a straighter—well, slightly straighter—route this time, but full night had fallen by the time I hit the desert, and when I slung off the exit toward Camarito, it was well after eleven. This far from civilization, pitch blackness swallowed the road. The bike’s headlight beam hit a wall of cavernous darkness only a few meters in front of me, a maw of nothingness threatening to swallow me whole; I revved the engine and sped into it even faster. I’d left the helmet behind at the apartment, and the wind sliced harshly against me, taking everything but thought.

The sound sparked against my senses first, a low rumble just at the edge of my hearing. The neurons in my brain fired with
Warning! Danger!
and I slued off the road before I even identified the noise as other motorcycles—a
lot
of other motorcycles—

A
crack
split the darkness, and my brain spasmed with a disbelieving
holy fuck, mines in the road!
even as the charge caught the edge of the bike and the frame contorted and leapt like a living thing. I twisted with it, the forces and variables splintering and erupting in every direction until I snapped into alignment and counterbalanced to slam the heavy motorcycle into a controlled skid.

Metal screamed as the bike took off the top layer of the rocky desert, the headlamp blinking to darkness and fairings snapping off in an explosive cacophony. I balanced the mathematics and rode the dying motorcycle to a crashing halt amid the rocks, levering off right before inertia flung me free, and I hit the stony ground on one shoulder to roll up into a crouch, the cop’s Glock in one hand and the SIG I’d grabbed in LA in the other.

I snapped my eyes around the darkness, straining to adjust to the pitch black of the night without my bike’s headlamp. Someone had
mined the fucking road
in an effort to assassinate me—what the
fuck
—and it sounded like they were bearing down to finish the job—

The motorcycle engines I had heard on approach built to an overwhelming thunder. Making a few safe assumptions with regard to engine size, I had about four seconds before they closed. My mind flipped through options and found precious few—these people knew my location; they had been waiting for me; they were undoubtedly armed. I couldn’t outrun them on foot. I had to fight, which meant finding some cover and attempting to pick them off with the handguns. Considering my marksmanship, the plan wasn’t as stupid as it might sound…the one flaw being that cover is severely lacking in the desert, and pitch darkness isn’t the best place to go looking for it.

With no better choice, I dove behind my downed bike as a dozen heavyweight motorcycles roared off the road in my direction. The blackness was still total; they must’ve clipped the wiring on their headlamps and been riding with night vision gear, which boded even worse for me, but I’d been listening, and I popped off my first shot before I even hit the hard-packed ground behind my improvised cover. A shout and a shriek of metal rewarded me. I listened and fired again, and again, the brilliant muzzle flash in front of my eyes blinding in the darkness.

Bursts of light lit up the night in front of me as my attackers fired back—and then a white flash burned my retinas and a deafening concussion shoved me down so hard I cracked my chin on a twisted fairing of the motorcycle.

Holy Christ on a cracker, they have grenades? Shit!

I focused past the ringing in my ears as I got the handguns up again, but the Glock was an inert lump—it must have gotten slammed against something when the grenade hit and jammed,
dammit, typical Glock!
I swept the SIG across the wave of attackers, firing over and over; I could take down one enemy per shot, but there were
too damn many of them
—

And suddenly there were fewer.

White light flashed across the scene with a roar, blinding me. I had a vague impression of massive, hulking silhouettes on monstrous Harleys as chaos tore through the gang; shouts and grunts became panicked screams as shadows I hadn’t aimed at twisted and fell. Not wasting time in surprise—
thank you, Rio
—I took out one more, then half-saw a snarling shape lob another grenade toward me and fired without thinking about it. The bullet found its mark on the little bulb and the grenade bounced off course to detonate halfway between me and my enemies. The tooth-jarring concussion slammed into all of us; I ducked back behind the cover of the bike just in time and sensed more than heard the explosive fragmentation as it chewed up the metal.

I peeked out again and snapped off another shot, but the fight was almost over. One last would-be escapee revved a bike to life, seesawing wildly; I fired a hair before another gun also rang out, and bike and man jerked and went down together. The motorcycle’s engine sputtered for a final few seconds and then died, leaving the desert a still and silent graveyard, the glaring headlights of a truck throwing the edges of leather-clad corpses into shadow and relief.

My ears rang in the sudden stillness.

I rose cautiously from my crouch behind the downed bike and stepped out gun first, my boots crunching on sandy gravel and the shards of my shredded motorcycle. I had expected to see Rio striding toward me, tan duster swirling around him; instead, the silhouette of my assist was shorter and darker—and was transferring his gun from the defeated biker gang to me. My own SIG snapped over in the same instant, and I found myself facing the cop who had held me up earlier that same day, who was apparently
really fucking good at tailing me,
and who was quickly becoming the bane of my existence.

We stood for a moment pointing guns at each other.

“Someone wanted you super-dee-duper dead,” the cop said finally, almost idly. His eyes flickered down to the muscle-bound corpses, then back up to me. “You piss off some one-percenters?”

One-percenters? I searched my memory. That was cop-speak for the outlaw motorcycle gangs, wasn’t it? The answer to his question was no, I wasn’t at odds with anyone in the outlaw biker crowd—in fact, I’d had a few as clients before, and they’d all been perfect gentlemen. I did have enemies who might have hired these guys, but…well. If this attack wasn’t related to Courtney Polk somehow, I would eat my gun.

I kept the SIG pointed at the cop and didn’t say anything.

“This ain’t random lawlessness,” the cop mused. “This was a hit. A real overboard hit. Either these fellas had a big ol’ beef with you, sweetheart, or someone out there—”

I was about to mete out fair punishment for calling me “sweetheart”—in the form of a high-velocity .40-caliber bullet—when someone behind the cop coughed wetly.

I moved before the sound had registered. With two possible threats and only one weapon, a quick slip to the side put the cop and the cough in the same trajectory so they formed one neat line in front of my gun.

The cop himself hesitated for half an instant. Then, apparently making a split-second judgment call that I wouldn’t shoot him in the back compared to the definite threat if one of the biker gang was still alive, he too spun toward the noise, weapon first.

“First rule,” I growled, annoyed. “Make sure they’re dead when you kill them.”

“He ain’t getting up,” said the cop, though instead of sounding defensive, he only sounded grave.

I sidled cautiously up beside him. He was right. For starters, an eight-hundred-pound Harley pinned the guy solidly to the ground. Still, considering he was a spectacular specimen of outlaw motorcycle gang, as enormous as a mountain troll and with tattooed biceps as big around as my waist—literally, which was kind of scary—he might have been able to rescue himself except for the professional double-tap in the center of his chest leaking a black stream of wetness through the leather.

Typical police technique,
I thought derisively, but still, the marksmanship impressed me. If the guy hadn’t been the size of a Yeti, he’d be dead already. As it was, he was well on his way, nerveless fingers scratching weakly at the metal trapping him. I knew the math, but it was still somehow fascinating that two comparatively tiny holes could take down such a giant.

I did a quick visual survey of the carnage to make sure no one else had survived—I knew all mine were dead; I never mess around with that center-of-mass crap—then stepped over to stand above my erstwhile attacker and put the barrel of my SIG in his face. “Who hired you?”

He glared at me, glassy-eyed and hateful. “Cunt,” he whispered, blood bubbling in the corner of his mouth.

I quashed the urge to quip that he’d noticed my gender; I could already hear something of a death rattle in that one word. “Who hired you?” I repeated.

“No one,” he spat. “We wanted to.”

Well, that was new. People who wanted to kill me for fun.

“Who told you she’d be here?” the cop asked next to me.

“Go…fuck…” the gang member managed to hiss, and then he choked on his own blood and went still, the hate in his eyes unfocusing, blood still oozing from his mouth and chest.

Death is never pretty.

“Real pleasant dude,” commented the cop.

We no longer had our weapons pointed at each other, and re-initiating that situation seemed like a bad idea. Still, I kept the SIG out and pointed in a direction that wasn’t quite down as I turned to face the man who had both threatened my life and, I reluctantly admitted, probably saved it in the same day. “Who are you?”

“Name’s Arthur Tresting.”

“And you’re a cop.”

“Not anymore,” he said, and something I couldn’t read flickered through his eyes. “I’m a PI. Lady, I think we might be on the same side here.”

I resisted the urge to haul off and sock him one for calling me “lady.” “You didn’t think so this morning.”

He glanced at the carnage surrounding us. “That was before Pithica tried to kill you.”

Pithica again. I thought of Anton. Two people I liked were dead, and this Arthur Tresting knew something about why.

And he was going to tell me.

“What’s the Polk girl to you?” said Tresting.

I hesitated. As a general rule, I didn’t give out information—any information, to anyone, and particularly not to a person I had every reason to mistrust. Still, I wanted to keep him talking, and the value of a few low-intelligence tidbits…

“Purely fiscal,” I answered. “Someone hired me to protect her.”

“Who?”

“Quid pro quo,” I shot back. “What’s your interest?”

“Guess you could say money started it for me, too. A woman hired me to find out who killed her husband and the father of her eleven-year-old boy.”

“What does that have to do with Polk?”

Tresting studied me. “Well, she did it, you see.”

What the hell?
The desert silence blanketed us. “One of the cops on the drug bust,” I guessed. But the police had already blamed Courtney for those murders. Why would the widow feel the need to hire a PI?