Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) (24 page)

“You got past my security,” he said. He didn’t seem concerned.

“Hey, Vance told me you were smart,” I said. “I woke you up because I wanted you to know. I’m about to kill you.”

“I could use someone like you.” He gave me a lazy half-smile. “How much will it take?”

“No one’s ever told you no, have they?” I said.

“Not yet.” He sat up. “How much?”

I shot him in the knee.

The inhuman squeal that ripped out of him as he went down was extremely satisfying. I raised my Colt back up and pointed it at his left eye.

“Please!” He cringed behind his hands, the confidence finally gone. With his skin pale and tight with pain and the bed spattered with blood, he suddenly looked so young. Like a boy who’d only wanted to play a game. “Whatever you want, just tell me, whatever—”

“I wanted you not to traffic in kids,” I said. “I’m going to kill you now. I’m telling you so you have a few seconds of abject self-loathing to contemplate the fact that you lost.”

He tried to plead through the sobbing.

“Bye,” I said, and shot him.

I was Los Angeles’s avenging angel.

I pulled out my phone and called Yamamoto. “I just shot Jacob Pourdry,” I said. “You call everyone else and tell them. Anyone makes a move, they join him. You know how good I am, Taku. I am not fucking around, and I am not going to let this city devolve into a war. If I have to clean up Los Angeles by wiping all of you from the face of the planet, I will fucking do it.”

“Cassu-san—”

I hung up on him.

Vengeance!
someone cackled, and I wasn’t sure whose voice it was.

I thought back through everybody who had been at Yamamoto’s little meeting. Maybe I should pay them all a visit myself, just so they knew I could.

♦ ♦ ♦

Malcolm was
the only one who got the drop on me. In the ensuing fight he threw me through a plate glass door.

“You got one minute, then I let the dogs loose,” he called from inside the estate house I’d tracked him to, a sawed-off dead-steady in his hands. “Now we’re even.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Rio met
me at the same diner we’d eaten at before. He raised an eyebrow at my appearance.

“Your move,” I said.

Green for you, and red for me. Do you need infrared?

“Cas,” Rio said.

I turned to go.

“Cas. I have spoken with Simon.”

Chapter 24

“I would
kill him for his sins, if you did not need him,” Rio informed me.

I closed my eyes. “I’m not going to let him help me. It’s off the table.”

“All right.”

I remembered what Arthur had suggested. “Do you…do you know of anyone else?”

“Another with his abilities, you mean?” Rio asked. “Yes. But all would be even less advisable to invite into your life.”

So there were others.

“Simon attempts to sin no more. It does not excuse him, but the Lord is forgiving. More so than I.”

“And I,” I said.

“Understood.” Rio stepped around to face me again. “Cas. Stop this madness.”

I blew out a breath that was almost a laugh, and didn’t dignify that with a response.

“You must know. This is not the way.”

“I don’t know anything, Rio,” I said. “I don’t even know who I am. And hey, I’m dying.” My lips twisted into a devil’s grin. “Once I’m gone, the secret of what I’ve done to LA dies with me, no matter how many innocent people you kill. I just have to wait you out.”

“Cas,” Rio said. He said my name with as much anguish as I supposed someone like him was capable of.

“There won’t be any point once I’m dead or insane,” I said. “You’ll just be helping more people get hurt, and I know you won’t want that, so you’ll stop. LA will go on and be better, and so maybe all this is okay.”

“Do not do this, Cas.”

“Which? Save LA, or die?”

“Either.”

“Free will, right?” I said. “My choices. My decision.”

Rio didn’t usually have much expression, but he tensed as if he didn’t want to go forward with what he said next. “Cas, three militia groups arrive tomorrow.”

Of course they did. “You can’t let me fucking have this, can you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well, then I’ll fight them, too. And if it doesn’t work, you’ll be stuck with the cleanup.” I started to push past him, but he caught my shoulder very gently.

“Cas.”

I didn’t look up. “This is the only thing I give a damn about right now, Rio. I’m going to keep at it until I can’t anymore. That’s it.”

“So be it,” he said, and let go.

♦ ♦ ♦

“This is
what life should feel like,” he said, but I needed blood, so we went out and found knives and guns and a crusade. Then we traded riddles until the sun set and I beat him at chess.

Maybe this is your chance to be normal.

I didn’t know you were so good at making jokes.

“Cas. Cas, are you with me?”

I struggled to dig back into reality. “Yeah. What’s going on?”

We were in Checker’s Hole. Now that Pourdry was out of the picture, Checker had moved back home, apparently finally taking my word for it that he didn’t need to worry about Rio.

I wasn’t sure how many days it had been. My sense of time kept eliding the hours, leaving blank chasms and collapsing spans of consciousness. Not more than two weeks had passed, probably—I’d looked at a calendar a few days before and been surprised to find it had only been ten days since I’d thrown out Simon.

Without discussing it, most nights I’d been staying on Checker’s couch. I’d punched him twice when he’d woken me from nightmares. For some reason, he kept doing it.

“Do you want to hear the latest on McCabe’s show?” Checker asked. The various leaders of the militia groups kept popping up as radio guests, under pseudonyms. Three men and two women were the most common ones. We hadn’t yet been able to figure out who they were or where they were camping out in Los Angeles, if they were even basing inside the city limits at all.

The mainstream news shows had started dropping line items on the situation, though they acted like they were reporting on conspiracy
theorists
rather than reporting on a
conspiracy.
Small favors.

“Summarize it for me,” I said. “Anything new?”

“They’re convinced it’s the water system,” Checker said. “The way they’re talking…I worry about an attack on the DWP.”

LA was in the middle of a desert. If someone knocked out the Department of Water and Power in a misguided attempt at justice, it would cripple the city. I thought back to when an EMP had fried every circuit in Los Angeles a few years before—that had been my fault, too, and a lot of people had died.

If I go back there, I’m going to kill them all.

“Are they still threatening the government?” I asked, with an effort.

“Honestly, I think the only thing that’s stopping them from marching on City Hall with guns is the brain entrainment,” Checker said. “My stats programs are still all over the place, though. There aren’t enough priors for them to have predictability. And there are some really odd things happening, like the drug numbers.”

“What do you mean, the drug numbers?”

“I’m seeing evidence the various cartels have been hit hard, as you’d expect. But then there’s other data suggesting recreational drug use is
up.
I mean, a lot of this is drawn from correlative factors, and who knows, those correlations might have been made obsolete for some reason, so I’m not sure if there’s a useful conclusion to be drawn. And I don’t know; if we somehow manage to have higher recreational drug use without the negative impacts of the drug
trade,
is that necessarily a bad thing, or just neutral? My libertarian soul is inclined to say the latter.”

“Bottom line?”

He flung out his hands. “I don’t know? There’s not really enough firm statistical data to draw solid conclusions on the overall domino effect of secondary and tertiary impacts. We’ll have to wait and see.”

“But the primary effects are still good? The gangs and big criminal organizations are feeling the impact still?”

“Oh, hell, yeah. Did you know Los Angeles has been heretofore known as the gang capital of America? Almost fifteen hundred active criminal gangs with hundreds of thousands of members. I didn’t know that till I started trying to run data on this. That’s staggering.”

“Only if you’re bad at estimation,” I said. It was about in line with what I would have expected. “Have those numbers changed nontrivially now?”

“The jury’s still out until I can get some more solid correlations, but from what I’ve seen so far, I suspect the answer’s going to be ‘yes,’ ‘absolutely,’ and ‘to great effect.’”

So all I had to do was keep them from falling for Rio’s instigation and firing the first shot, at least until that sort of provocation wasn’t worth it to Rio anymore. In other words, until I went insane or died.

I hadn’t told Checker and Arthur that part of my plan.

“This isn’t working,” Simon said. He was crying. He opened the door and left.

I turned to Rio. “Who was that?”

“Cas?” Checker said. “Are you okay?”

“What? Yeah.”

“Did you hear what I just said?” I didn’t know how he made the question as patient as he did.

“No. Go again.”

“Going back to McCabe’s show for a minute, he had someone new come on this last time. Anonymous, again, but from what he was saying I think it was one of the people from Yamamoto’s group.”

“And?” I asked.

“What you’d expect. A lot of threats. A lot of rhetoric. There’s either a movement to join the militia groups and attack the powers that be, or a movement to wage war on them until they leave the city. I wasn’t quite clear on which.”

Either would be bad, and I was sure Rio was masterfully inflaming them in
both
directions.

I probably shouldn’t have burned my welcome in Yamamoto’s group. Then I might know what was going on.

“Is Rio still trying to get you to…” Checker trailed off.

“To let Simon fuck with me? Yes.”

He opened his mouth, then shut it again and turned back to his monitor.

“Go ahead,” I said, without acrimony. “You want to say I should consider it, don’t you?”

“I…” Checker looked down at his lap. “No. Yes. I don’t know. I get why you won’t. Just…”

He didn’t want to see me die.

“Are you?” Checker asked. “Considering it, at all?”

“No,” I said. “If I’m going to die, I’d rather die as me. Whoever I am now, at least. I’d rather have at least that.”

He nodded, and sniffed a little. “Yeah. Okay.”

He didn’t try to tell me it was possible Simon might not destroy me, this time. Rio had tried to convince me of that, and I’d walked away.

“If you change your mind,” Checker said, carefully, “Arthur suggested…”

“Yeah?” I wasn’t going to change my mind, but any idea might have aspects we could use.

Checker appeared to be trying to figure out how to phrase things. “Well. Rio. He, um. It’s pretty important to him, that you…not die. I mean, it’s pretty important to all of us, but—”

“You’re thinking I might be able to trade,” I said. “Myself for Los Angeles.”

Checker closed his eyes. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“It’s okay,” I said. I even might have considered it, if I thought it would work. If I was dying anyway, what did it matter how? What did it matter if I got remade entirely, if Rio gave up fighting us in exchange?

You can’t always get your way.

Yes, I can. That’s the problem.

“Cas?”

“Rio doesn’t work like that,” I said. Checker didn’t comment on my lapse. “He wouldn’t make the trade.”

“He did once,” Checker said. “With Dawna. For your sake.”

He had a point. Still, I was pretty sure Rio would see this as a different case. After all, not going to Simon was my choice; it wasn’t like someone else was preventing me or threatening me.

She has to believe me. She has to believe until we’re done.

“It’s only a thought,” Checker said. “I still want to find…maybe there are other things we can explore. I didn’t know how you’d feel about this, but I was doing research on—well, on conventional medicine.”

“What’s conventional about this?” I said.

“Nothing. But you know,
nobody
understands the brain very well, at least nobody who’s not one of our resident telepaths. There could be a chance some sort of psychiatric medicine would help you. Though I don’t know how the hell we’d even guess at the dosage, or which meds—”

“I don’t take drugs while I’m working.”

“
Cas.”

I sighed. “I’ve…probably already tried most of them.”

“What?”

Did you take your medicine?

I pressed my fingers against the desktop, not looking at him. “I’ve kind of experimented with pharmaceuticals. A lot. There were a few times between jobs…” I shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Scientific.”

“And what happened?”

“I discovered nothing really worked better than recreational depressants. Alcohol’s a lot more readily available, and usually made things workable, before.”

“God. Cas.”

“Stop feeling sorry for me.”

He cleared his throat. “Can you…um. Can you try any of that now?”

I gave him a half smile. “I don’t think it was ever doing anything more than masking some of the crazy. Work does the same thing, and I’d rather do that, for whatever time…” I didn’t finish, because I didn’t want to upset him.

That didn’t work out for me, either.

Chapter 25

Rio and
I had started having dinner every night. It didn’t bother me—in fact, I liked seeing him. I supposed impending death gave me a greater appreciation for everyone I considered a friend.

Even a friend who wasn’t really a friend at all, and was also working against me in two different directions.

“I regret my earlier deception to you,” he told me, at an outside table of a noodle shop. “Simon had informed me anything that might reignite your memory would only accelerate the undesirable effects.”