Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) (12 page)

“Cas,” Checker said. He was looking down at the keyboard now, but didn’t seem to see it. “I—I think I made a mistake. You told me to respect your wishes on this a million times, and I just kept pushing, and—I think that was, was wrong of me. So if you still want me to, I’ll drop it.”

Of course I wanted him to. I opened my mouth to say so.

His hands were shaking. Checker’s hands were shaking.

“Holy crap,” I said, everything about his odd behavior collapsing to a conclusion at once. “What did you find?”

“What? Nothing!”

“Bullshit. What did you find?”

He looked me square in the eyes. “I swear to you, I didn’t find anything.”

The man was a fucking asshole. He wouldn’t stop looking into my past no matter how much I asked him to, and now he was suggesting we drop it when I knew he was lying to me?

I thought about letting it go. I wanted to. But the way he was acting…if I was in danger, or if he was in danger for looking into this—
It would serve him right,
some part of me thought. But it was only a small part.

“Checker,” I said, and I hoped I was the only one who heard the slight tremor. “So help me God, if you don’t tell me what you found out, I will start shooting up the Hole.” I drew my Colt and pointed it at the nearest computer tower. “Now what. The hell. Is going on?”

Checker paled. “You wouldn’t.”

“Watch me,” I said. I carry in Condition Zero and the gun was ready to fire, but I lowered the hammer and re-cocked it for dramatic effect.

“Hey,
whoa!”
cried Checker. “I want to tell you; I do! I—I still might. The reason I didn’t—I’m
scared,
okay? I’m not like you.”

I brought the gun back down. “What are you talking about?”

“I—I can’t say.”

“If you came across something dangerous, we can deal with it.”

“No, that isn’t—I told you, I didn’t find anything. I was telling the truth.” He sniffed loudly and turned away from me. He wasn’t just scared. He was
terrified.
Holy fuck. “It isn’t just me, either,” he said, his voice muffled. “I don’t know what’s going to happen if I tell you. I don’t. To anyone.”

“Hey,” I said. My breaths were shallower than usual, but I forcibly steadied them. “Whatever happened, whoever scared you this badly, we can deal with them.” I wasn’t sure if I was saying it more to convince him or myself. “We can. I promise. We’ve taken on psychics, and the Mob, and murderous robots and science-hating rioters and global conspiracies, and we’re all still here. I’m very good at finding people and rendering them impotent, and so is Arthur, and so is Rio—”

Checker choked.

“Come on, I know you don’t like Rio, but this is the exact kind of situation he’s good in. If there’s someone who’s a threat to us, I can think of no better—”

Checker’s whole posture had knotted up as if he were about to have a seizure.

“Oh my God,” I said. All my senses contracted and hardened. The room went flat and unreal.

“Cas—”

I couldn’t string thoughts together. Logic scattered like dry leaves. “Tell me you’re kidding,” I said. “Christ almighty, tell me you’re kidding! Tell me it was someone else!”

“I didn’t say anything!” Checker shrieked.

Fuck, he’d
told
me he was going to call Rio—“No. No. I refuse to believe this. You must have misinterpreted. Rio doesn’t come after people like you. He doesn’t. He can’t. He wouldn’t. You’re—you’re lying, or you imagined it, or—”

“If it makes you feel better,” Checker said in a strangled voice, “I think he’s trying to protect you.”

“Protect me from
what?”

“I don’t know!”

“I’m perfectly capable of protecting myself!”

“I know that!”

We both stared at somewhere that wasn’t each other. Checker sniffed hard again, and knocked over a few things on his desktop to find a pack of tissues.

“Cas,” he said hoarsely, “I’m really, really scared right now.”

“He won’t come after you,” I said again, wondering why the words felt hollow. “He won’t. He doesn’t do that.”

“He told me he would.” His voice cracked. “I don’t know why you trust him the way you do, but he said—” His mouth worked.

“What did he say?”

“He said he was going to destroy everything I held dear and then—and then kill me, he
said
it—Cas, he was serious, and I don’t know if he meant Arthur, or—”

I pulled out my phone. My hands were stiff.

“What are you—are you crazy? You can’t call him! Tell me you’re not calling him!”

“I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” I said. I had to. I had to.

“If he finds out I told you—that’s what he was threatening me about! To keep you from knowing! If he finds out I told you what he said,
he is going to kill me,
do you understand? And—”

I closed my eyes. “Checker. I promise. I will not let anything happen to you.”

“He could do it in a way that you don’t know it’s him! Do you understand what I’m saying? Please, please,
please,
if you have any regard for me whatsoever,
please
do not call him, and do not tell him I told you any of this!”

I curled my fingers around the phone. “Why did he threaten you in the first place?” I asked.

“To stop me from looking into your past,” said Checker quietly. “He knows something for sure.”

Rio knew something. About me.

“Cas,” said Checker. “Whatever he knows, he thinks it’s best if we don’t find it. I think he’s trying to protect you. Maybe—uh, maybe we should let him.”

“What happened to, ‘knowing is always better than not knowing?’”

“Maybe there are exceptions.”

Rio wanted to keep me in the dark. With Simon stalking me, and voices in my head, and notes in graveyards and Rio threatening Checker and my whole fucking past hurtling forward to crush me.

Which felt…just fine with me, because
I
didn’t want to know. Every fiber in my being was screaming about how much I didn’t want to know. I wanted to run.

Rio apparently thought I should run, too. So why not?

A woman with short, steel-gray hair frowned down at a clipboard. “Have they told you—”

“Yes,” I said.

She nodded. “I agree. Giving up is for those who would have us fail. We will never do something great if we run.”

Too bad for her, because in this case I was going to do my damnedest to try.

Chapter 11

I left
Checker’s place and walked back to my car. I sat down on the curb, holding my phone. A light breeze blew around me, and the sun wandered across the sky.

After the initial shock, my brain had recalibrated to believe Checker about Rio’s threats. It was hard to imagine Checker having any motivation to lie about this. Unless he was trying to put me off Rio, but he’d always been open about his discomfort with Rio’s and my friendship—and he wasn’t the type to play games.

Besides, I did know what Rio was. I knew what he was capable of. What Checker had claimed…it wasn’t out of the question.

What
was
out of the question was Rio going after someone innocent of real wrongdoing—someone like Checker—in a way he couldn’t be talked out of. By me. I was as bone-sure of that as I was about the type of man Rio was, the type of pleasure he derived from doing unspeakable things to people. After all, I’d known him a hell of a long time.

How long?

I ignored the question.

“He doesn’t go after innocent people,” I said aloud. “He doesn’t.” His faith prevented him, a religious faith that guided him to channel his proclivities into being judge, jury, torturer, and angel of death only to those he weighed as sufficiently evil.

That didn’t include Checker. It couldn’t. It would violate every axiom of understanding I had. Rio wasn’t going to come after Checker or Arthur unless he thought he had to, and I was going to make sure he didn’t ever feel like he did.

I dialed Rio’s number.

The message from his permanent voicemail box played, the one set up the same way mine was. “Hi,” I said. My throat was dry. “It’s Cas. Call me back.”

I hung up the phone and sat, and waited. The evening drew on and got chillier. I got up and drove back to the apartment I was using, watching for tails I couldn’t see.

I’d made it back and was pushing open the door when my phone rang with a blocked number. “Hello.”

“Hello, Cas,” said a flat baritone. Rio.

“Hi,” I said. The word was tight. It was hard to know what to say.

I’d never been good at hiding anything, however, especially from someone who’d known me as long as Rio. “He told you,” he said.

“I guessed,” I corrected. I shut the door and leaned against it, staring at a spot on the carpet. “You scared him. Badly.”

“I meant to.”

“Why?”

“Cas, it’s important you not look into this. Will you trust me?”

“Of course,” I said. “We’ll stop. We already have. I didn’t want to in the first place.”

“I would have expected.”

“Checker assumed you had a reason, you know. In between being petrified, he said he thought we should give it up anyway. You could have made your point without threatening him.”

“Evidently.”

“Rio…” I swallowed. “Please don’t do that again.”

He was silent.

“Checker is—important to me. I don’t know if you can understand that, but—please at least remember it.”

“I shall take it into consideration.”

“I don’t want to go back to…” I cleared my throat. “Before Checker and Arthur were in my life, I was—if something happened to either of them…” My voice rasped. I felt oddly naked saying this out loud, weak and maudlin, but I had to make him understand. “If it did, I’m not—I’m not sure what I’d do. I’m not sure what it would do to me.”

Rio paused, then said, “Understood.”

“You’re not going to come after him, are you?”

“No. Not this time.”

“Not
any
time!”

He paused again. “I can’t promise that, Cas.”

“Yes,” I said. Anger started to burn in me, hot and furious. “Yes, you can.”

“Cas—”

“I can’t be worried about this,” I said. “This is not negotiable. Promise me, Rio.”

He was a long time in answering. “All right.”

The tension and frustration leaked out of me. I sank to the floor, my back against the door. “Thank you.”

“Cas, how have you been?”

The change in topic threw me. “Fine,” I said automatically. “What do you mean?”

“This…sudden interest in past events. Was there a reason?”

“Not really,” I said. “I…Checker realized I…” I trailed off. I had nearly forgotten what had started the whole thing. “I thought it was normal, not being able to remember. It’s not, is it?”

“No,” he said. “But you should not look into it.”

“Okay,” I said. I trusted him.

“Good.”

“I didn’t want to anyway.”

“Good.”

I pressed my lips together. It was on my tongue to tell him about Simon, but I didn’t. Rio had said to ignore everything from my past, and Simon said he was from my past.

I’d have to tell Arthur to stop looking into him, too. Who knew what I’d do about the man himself. Maybe I
should
tell Rio about him, come to think of it—Rio was unaffected by telepaths, as far as I knew, and given what he’d said to Checker, I was willing to bet even odds my Simon problem would swiftly cease to exist.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t say anything. Simon had already influenced me not to kill him, and telling Rio would effectively bust that, so I couldn’t.

That thought really, really made me hope my enemies would shoot him. Fucking
psychics.

♦ ♦ ♦

Arthur didn’t
want to be dissuaded, especially when I didn’t give him a reason for calling off the investigation. He’d been doing a lot of legwork for a man with a fucked-up leg. First, he’d confirmed his theory about Simon keeping track of my grave was correct and gotten a hold of the phone records from the cemetery offices to trace his check-ins. The numbers all snaked back to countries on the other side of the world—Greece, Bahrain, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia.

The people he’d spoken to at the cemetery had all enthused about how this person whose name they couldn’t quite recall was such a nice man, who cared so much, and they were happy to keep checking on the wall niche for him. They also all concurred he’d been the one to entomb my empty urn, but none of them could agree on either a description of his features or the year it had happened. Or what relationship he was supposed to have had with me.

Simon had made himself well-liked and yet unmemorable, and gotten what he needed without technically brainwashing anyone. After all, people helped out likeable folk all the time, and forgot unmemorable ones.

“I’m surprised he didn’t just make
me
decide he was my friend,” I said to Arthur. I’d come to the apartment I was lending him to tell him to quit his efforts, and Arthur lounged back on the futon on his good side while I sat on a folding chair.

“You ain’t predisposed to it,” Arthur said. “You’d be suspicious of him whether he made himself likeable or not. But, and no offense here, Russell—you’re mixed up about him, too.”

I pressed my fingers against my forehead as I remembered something. “He knows where Checker lives.”

“
Fuck,
Russell. Gotta get them out of there.” He picked up his phone. “See, this right here is why when you say we stop, I hear red alert. We gotta keep investigating this guy. Even if he messed you up in the head—especially if he messed you up. Can you see that, at least?”

He didn’t wait for an answer before dialing Checker. A fair amount of profanity ensued from the other end of the line.

“I should’ve known, I should’ve known,” I heard Checker say more than once. I also caught my name.

They were right. I should’ve seen Simon’s knowledge as an immediate, actionable threat, and I hadn’t. Only one logical explanation offered itself for
that
kind of oversight.

Of course I’d trusted a telepath when I shouldn’t have.

Guilt washed over me. I might not be able to prevent Simon from messing with my neurons, but I was the one he was targeting. I was the reason Arthur and Checker and Pilar were getting tangled up with a psychic. Again.