Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) (21 page)

She shrugged, the rise and fall of her shoulders so extreme it was comical. “I didn’t say I had good judgment.”

Checker smothered a laugh. Well, I suppose I had walked into that one.

The dust and dried blood caked on my skin was starting to itch. Mulling over Pilar’s information, I dragged myself up and washed my hands and face, then raided Miri’s kitchen for some food. She had mostly unrecognizable organic things with unpronounceable names, but I succeeded in throwing some edible-looking piles together on a plate. Warren swept out in the meantime, shutting the door behind him almost too quietly, the way a man would if he was trying like hell to maintain his dignity.

I almost felt bad for him. Almost.

My eyes caught on Liliana, who had spread paper out on the floor and was intent on her crayons. Warren must have brought them—I thought it unlikely Miri had crayons lying around.

After a moment of hesitation, I took my plate over and sat down next to her. “Hi.”

“Hi,” she said. I managed not to flinch.

“What are you drawing?” I asked.

“I want to draw Mr. Mittens,” she said, pointing at the white-booted tabby, who was busy batting at the fronds of one of Miri’s many plants, “but he isn’t being still.”

“Why don’t you draw, uh, that one instead?” I asked, jabbing my fork at the white cat. It was snoozing on its back, its legs sprawled in a way that didn’t look like it could possibly be comfortable.

“I drawed him already.”

I blinked. The NLP shouldn’t have been tripped up by one irregular verb. Maybe Liliana’s programming threw in random errors to make her seem more natural.

She dug through the blank papers she had spread out and offered me a sheet festooned in color. “Do you want to see my picture?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

She raised it toward me with delicate reverence for her own creativity.

I stared. She’d drawn the room—or at least, the prominent shapes in it, the contours of every object. Behind the wax outline of the cat in the foreground rose the couch, the table, the door—every line perfect, the mathematics of the perspective exact.

“I like drawing,” said Liliana, oblivious. “Do you like drawing?”

“Um,” I said. “I guess I never really thought about it.”

“Here.” She thrust a piece of blank paper and a fistful of crayons at me. “Draw with me.”

“I, uh, I don’t really have time,” I said.

Her lower lip trembled. “Please?”

When it comes to kids, I’m a sucker—apparently even when they aren’t real. I put down my plate and took the paper and crayons.

Liliana sprawled on her stomach and started a new picture, her crayons dragging across the page in precise lines. The new drawing looked almost exactly like the old one, only in different colors.

I hesitated with a red crayon poised over my sheet. I could do the same thing as Liliana, if I wanted: register every edge and corner before me with mathematical precision. The certainty of the result struck me as boring. Instead, I started to push the crayon in abstract shapes, letting my mind wander.

It didn’t make a difference what Liliana was or wasn’t, I reflected, or whether Warren was right in the head to want to stay with her. We’d sort it all out tomorrow and make everyone happy. Meanwhile, I’d called Okuda on the way home; I wanted to get the batteries to her tonight and then go straight to Cheryl’s and leave a deposit. I didn’t know how much the Grealy’s repairs and loss of income would amount to, but Okuda’s payment would at least be the right order of magnitude, conveniently saving me the time and effort needed to pick up large amounts of cash from my hidey-holes. I didn’t want to leave Cheryl massively in the red if something happened to me. Something like a Mob hit.

Speaking of which, after taking care of Cheryl, I had to prepare for the Arkacite meeting tomorrow, and while I was doing that…

“Hey, Checker,” I called. “Your girlfriend. When is she getting back?”

“I told you, Miri isn’t my—”

“Not her. Isabella.”

His face wrinkled with concern. “Are things getting—I mean, are you—?”

“I’m peachy,” I said. “You said you were getting her back here. When?”

“Um, I’d think by Monday at the latest,” he answered. “You made a good point about not antagonizing her aunt further, so I’ve had increasingly hysterical reports of a crazy and aggressive mountain lion auto-posting different places since yesterday. Today her school got flooded with emails worrying about the outdoor club camping trip thingy she’s on, some of which weren’t even faked. She was supposed to be there another week with them, eating mud and team building until the first day of classes, but I’m betting university administrators are getting interrupted at dinner by calls from frantic parents right about now—whether it pushes through on a weekend depends how motivated by potential liability they feel, but they’ll be axing the trip and bringing the students back.”

Slower, but it wouldn’t trace back to us or single out Isabella. In fact, under different circumstances it would have been a good idea, but in this case it left me two or three more days to evade Mama Lorenzo—and make sure she didn’t come after anyone else.

If Isabella wasn’t back by the time I’d squared away Warren and Liliana tomorrow morning, I decided, I’d take her return into my own hands. Which gave me less than twenty-four hours to figure out exactly how I was going to play her kidnapping. I needed to anticipate Mama Lorenzo’s next move, and the move after that…make sure to force her into the endgame…I circled the crayon in my hand, mushing it against the paper.

“Hey,” said Checker from above my left shoulder. “Where is that?”

I looked up. “Huh?”

He pointed. “What you’re drawing. Where is it?”

My drawing had splayed out into overlapping red shapes, circles and rectangles and long straight lines slashing through them. “It’s just a doodle.”

“It looks like a floor plan.”

Walls rising up, extending, dimensionalizing—

“No. It’s just scribbles.” I stood abruptly. “I have to get going.”

As I gathered my things and left, out of the corner of my eye I saw Checker lean down, pick up my drawing, and fold it into a pocket. For some reason, that irritated me. I banged my way out of the apartment.

My first stop was back at the park, where Okuda waited on the same bench, this time with a messenger bag beside her. I unzipped it and peered inside. The setting sun revealed a tumble of mustard-colored currency straps wrapping bundles of hundred-dollar bills. I gave the bag a precise shake to rearrange the contents and checked again—she’d been as good as her word.

“Nice doing business with you,” I said.

“With you as well,” said Okuda, with a slight inclination of her head. She turned and left the park, the package of plutonium batteries tucked under her arm.

I hefted the messenger bag. Christ, it was nice when things went smoothly. I called Harrington on the way out of the park to tell him all was well and the plutonium situation was taken care of—which it was—and set off for Cheryl’s.

I’d thought about doing a dead drop, but this was an awful lot of cash to leave somewhere. At the same time, I wasn’t fond of showing my face around Cheryl’s while I still had a hit out on me, just in case the Mob had connected the dots and figured I’d show up. So I texted Checker for Cheryl’s address and stopped about a block prior, parking crookedly in front of a fire hydrant.

The backseat of the clunky SUV had plenty of clutter from its previous owners, from empty fast food bags to papers and receipts to some ratty sweatshirts. I stuffed some of the clutter into the messenger bag on top of the money so it wasn’t visible anymore and then hopped out, all my senses on alert.

Cheryl’s block was on the rougher side, apartment buildings all mashed up against each other and trash strewn across the sidewalks and into the streets. A homeless guy was snoozing on the sidewalk against a low wall in front of one of the apartment buildings. I went up and crouched down next to him, my nostrils twitching at the odor of stale sweat and staler alcohol. “Hey,” I said.

He blinked awake, his eyes bloodshot in a face greasy and black with grime. “Can’t a man sleep!” he slurred at me aggressively. “Fuck you!”

“Wanna make a hundred dollars?” I asked, undeterred.

“Hundred dollars! What you talking about making a hundred dollars? I look like I have a hundred dollars to you?”

I pulled five twenties out of my pocket. “No, I’m giving you a hundred dollars. Take this bag to number 5208. Give it to a blond woman named Cheryl. You do that, I’ll give you this money. Okay?”

He reached out a grimy hand to snatch at the bills; I lifted them out of his reach. “No, take the bag first. If she’s not there, just bring it back. I’ll be watching.”

“Fuck you, hundred dollars,” he mumbled at me, but he wobbled upright and reached for the bag.

“Number 5208,” I reminded him. “A woman named Cheryl. Got it?”

“Five-two-oh-eight, fucking Cheryl, not fucking stupid,” he mumbled, and ambled off. I went back to my car and watched. I wasn’t sure my messenger was quite all there, but he would do.

I dialed Cheryl while he ambled down the street.

“Hello?”

“Cheryl? It’s Cas Russell.”

“Russell.” She snorted. “What do you want?”

“Are you at home right now? I’m sending someone to your door with some cash.”

She paused for a minute, as if that wasn’t what she’d been expecting. “Yeah, I’m here. Got no place else to be, you know. Grealy’s is a fucking crime scene, thanks to you.”

“Well, there’s a guy heading up to you with a bag of cash. Ignore the smell. The bag’s from me.”

“I got no idea how much the damage’ll be,” Cheryl said, still belligerent.

“Then you can consider this a down payment, and you can update me,” I said impatiently.

She hesitated again. I realized she hadn’t actually expected me to make good on the other night. Probably with reason, considering I’d been the one to get her bar shot up in the first place.

“Christ, I’m not going to leave you hanging,” I said. “That’s not how I do business.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said. “More and more douchebags out there tryin’ to stiff me on shit. Nobody’s old school anymore.”

By that time my dirty messenger had made it to her doorstep. I watched him ring the bell; Cheryl pulled open the door, nodded to him, took the bag, and shut the door again.

“Got it,” she said in my ear. I heard some rustling, and then Cheryl’s voice took on a very different tone. “Shit. Russell. This is too much.”

I’d been hoping that would be the case. “Then consider it an apology for the inconvenience.”

“You’re still banned. This don’t change nothing.”

“Yeah, fine.” My delivery man was shuffling back toward me; I put down the window and tossed the folded up bundle of twenties out onto his little stack of belongings before starting the car and peeling away from the curb. “If the Lorenzos give you any trouble, call me.”

She didn’t answer.

“Cheryl?”

“I got someone here right now wants to talk to you.” Her tone was back to belligerent. “I’m not taking sides in this, you get me? I don’t want me or my bar in the middle of your goddamned feud. You and me, we’re square, and anything else happens, I’m not a part of it. That fucking clear?”

I opened my mouth to ask her what the hell she was talking about, but before I could, Benito Lorenzo’s voice came loud and obsequious over the line. “Cas! It’s Benito!” He drew his name out like it was a declaration. “You didn’t call me back, man! I’m hurt.”

I almost crashed into the car in front of me. Fuck, they
had
staked out Cheryl’s—or at least, Benito had. I’d thought I was being paranoid.

“Your family is trying to kill me,” I reminded Benito acidly. “Why on earth would I call you back?”

“It’s a misunderstanding,” he said cheerfully. “You and me, we’ll make this right, eh?”

Like I believed that for a second. “Your mother—”

“Stepmother,” he corrected. “My step-mama.”

“Your stepmother doesn’t see it that way.”

“Eh. She’s a woman, you know? They get emotional about these things.”

His dismissal was so far off from reality that I wondered briefly if he’d even
met
his stepmother. “I’ll tell her you said that,” I said.

“Oh, uh—better not. Don’t want to rock the boat, you know.” He laughed a little too loudly. “How about you and me, we work this out? Huh?”

“How?” I demanded.

“Eh?”

“How do we work it out?”

“Eh, you know. The Madre, she likes me,” he bragged. “I get her to come, I get you to come, we sit down all civilized and talk, right? Everyone’s happy. Worth a try, eh?”

“I tried talking to her,” I said. “It didn’t work.”

“Because I wasn’t there. I told you, I’m her favorite.”

“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. “Good-bye.”

“Wait wait wait wait! You owe me one, remember? For the introduction? You said. Hear me out.”

“I’m not going to repay a favor by walking into an ambush—”

“No, no—just listen, okay? You let me finish.”

I wondered how long it would take someone to trace this call. If Benito himself was tracing me. How long had I been talking to Cheryl? The SUV had no pickup, but I flattened the accelerator, speeding toward the freeway. “You have one minute,” I said. “And that makes us square.”

“You drive a hard bargain, man! Okay. My stepmama—she maybe isn’t the best person to run things, you know?”

What the fuck?
“What are you saying?”

His voice got lower, fast and cagey. “All I’m saying is, maybe I tell you where she is, is all. Maybe if she’s not running things no more, maybe there’s a new person in power. And maybe he’s got no problem with you and your friend. You know?”

I almost laughed. The idea that
Benito Lorenzo
would be the preferred person to step into a power vacuum was ridiculous, no matter what his family connections. But if he could at least leverage those connections to get the sword lifted off Checker and me once Mama Lorenzo was out of the picture…well, I couldn’t say I cared one way or another about what happened with the Mob’s power hierarchy, as long as Benito could make sure we were forgotten.