Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) (8 page)

More importantly for tonight, it was well-known enough as a locus for shady dealings not to arouse suspicion in my new potential client—or fake potential client—and I knew the surroundings well enough already to have a few ideas for how to set up my own counter-ambush there.

I called Warren and left a message for him, too, telling him I’d confirmed he probably had a case and we therefore needed to discuss my fee. He was lucky I had principles about children, otherwise I would’ve been dropping his investigation like it was diseased until that good ol’ cash-in-hand moment—but Liliana deserved someone figuring out exactly what was going on here. Then I turned off the damn cell phone, pulled the battery again, and hoofed it away from Venice Beach while I churned through the options on my Mafia problem.

Maybe Dino had hared off on his own, or maybe Mama Lorenzo had been testing me, but one thing was certain: the people after me from now on wouldn’t be inexperienced kids. I’d be dealing with Lorenzo family hitmen.

Well, what did you expect when you deliberately made yourself a target?
I’d bought myself little bit of time and had my one lucky break—I needed to come up with a better way out
now.

What I needed was some sort of leverage. Mama Lorenzo hadn’t gone for bribery, which left blackmail, threats, or maybe my own plan of outright violence.

I could flip onto the offense and just start killing members of her family until she gave in. But that would mean I’d have to tell Arthur I’d broken my streak and restart my count, and something about that felt twitchy and unsatisfying, even though I didn’t have a moral problem with capping Lorenzos. Besides, there were an awful lot of them, and starting to take out their ranks might lead to the same problem I’d have if I assassinated Gabrielle Lorenzo herself—escalating this into a war with me as the sole target, with no way out and no going back. Right now, I still had the option of finding a better solution, but that wouldn’t be the case if the Family went mad with blood and vengeance.

Violence might not be such a good idea after all. Who knew Arthur had a point about these things?

I filed “Lorenzo assassination spree” under Plan B. Threats were hard to make work if I wasn’t planning to back them up, which left blackmail.

I would have put money on Mama Lorenzo herself having a spotless record—she was the type who demanded just as much out of her own leadership as she did from her family. But were all the people around her so squeaky clean? If I could gather enough dirt on the Lorenzos’ activities…find a handful of good tidbits valuable enough to trade silence for our lives…

Checker usually would have been my first resource on such fact-finding, but I was still pissed at him, and more importantly, I didn’t want him knowing how far I was from finishing off his Mob problem. I’d gather some intel on my own, hopefully starting with tonight. And if the meet happened to be a legitimate client, well, I’d just have to put “break into Lorenzo estate” on my to-do list for afterward. In fact, I’d do that anyway.

Blackmail it was, then. Damn, having a plan in place was a relief.

And since I couldn’t do anything on that plan till dark, I’d use the remaining daylight to conduct a civilized visit. Swearing colorful curses at Checker and his refusal to violate Denise Rayal’s privacy, I boosted another car and started for her house in Altadena.

Going west to east across LA during rush hour is the seventh circle of hell. It took me over two hours to traverse the city, and I might have left more than a few pissed-off drivers in my wake.

I pulled up outside the address Checker had given me just as the sun was setting. Denise Rayal was renting a pleasant-looking, ivy-covered clapboard cottage on a little spot of land nestled at the foot of the mountains. I parked in the driveway, climbed the steps onto the porch, and rang the bell.

No one answered.

Well, hell, I’d fought rush hour traffic to get here; there was no reason to waste the trip. I thought about kicking the door in, decided that was slightly rude, and went around to the back, wishing I’d brought something to pick the locks with.

A window air conditioner sticking out of the side of the house caught my eye. Perfect. I took a running start and vaulted on top of it. My feet balanced on the fulcrum as I slid the window up, and I slipped inside, equalizing my mass so the unit barely wobbled before I let the pane slam back down.

Rayal’s home was simple but comfortable. I wandered from room to room, wondering what I was looking for.

She had a number of photographs around, on end tables and hanging on walls and a few on the mantle. I figured out who she was from the pictures: a woman who looked her age but did it gracefully, her features a shade too wide to be beautiful but a broad smile that might get her categorized as handsome. Her skin tone was lighter than her husband’s—I wasn’t sure if she was light-skinned African-American or mixed—and in all the photographs her eyes were her best feature: large, bright, and lively. I saw pictures with a group of people who were obviously her family; with someone who looked like a sister, both of them bundled up in front of a ski slope; of her shaking hands with someone on a dais, everyone in business suits.

And there were quite a few pictures of a younger Denise with a small boy, a boy with a darker skin tone than she had and unruly black hair. In all of them, Rayal was laughing or smiling as she played with him or embraced him. There were also pictures of the boy alone, portraits they’d probably had taken, and one of him on Santa’s knee at a mall, and one of him playing with a large orange plastic truck.

I picked up a picture of Rayal tackling him while he appeared to be trying to run out of frame, squealing in glee. This was clearly her son, the one she and Warren had lost years before.

There were no pictures of a daughter.

What the hell was going on here?

The house wasn’t big. I found a neat but lived-in bedroom that showed me nothing but another picture of her son on a nightstand. The bathroom was unremarkable save for the prescription bottles of what I could only assume were psychiatric medication. I’d burned my phone, but Rayal had a fancy camera sitting on a tripod in her bedroom, and I swiped it to take pictures of the pill labels. Screw Checker, I could do a search on the drugs and find out what had happened to her myself.

The other bedroom had been turned into a study. Books overflowed the shelves and were stacked haphazardly on the chairs and desk, the towers threatening to tumble into her desktop computer. I scanned the titles; they all appeared to be related to her work—software engineering, machine learning, control theory, natural language processing. Books on programming languages I’d never heard of. She had lots of academic papers heaped around as well, loose or in large binders.

Whatever Rayal’s reason for leaving Arkacite, she hadn’t given up her work.

I tried turning on the computer—I knew how to get by rudimentary OS passwords—but Rayal had a touch more security and the machine stymied my elementary cracking. So instead I used a paperclip to pick the locks on the file cabinet. Aside from a plethora of paperwork connected to medical insurance claims—I gathered they related to her hospital stay and continued psychotherapy—I found a library’s worth of contracts and nondisclosure agreements from Arkacite, folders and folders of them, each inches thick.

I skimmed the pages. It looked like all the work she had done for the company had stayed with them, and that she was not permitted to work in the same line of research upon the termination of her employment or even discuss that research outside of the company. The convoluted legal language was downright frightening, if I was reading it correctly.

Jesus. What had she been working on?

Or was Arkacite just so worried about corporate leaks that they were desperate to cover themselves?

Scraps of paper and spiral notebooks around the office showed some electrical engineering sketches, but they didn’t seem complete, and after looking at her contracts I doubted they were related to her work for Arkacite. I snapped a few pictures of her notes anyway, on the off chance Checker could give me more insight once I decided to speak to him again.

Then, after a moment’s internal debate, I unscrewed and slid out her hard drive. With enough time to work at it I’d be able to get in without Checker’s help, and if I came back to talk to Rayal, she wouldn’t know I was the thief, so no harm done. Given what I’d seen in her file cabinet, she’d probably assume it was cat burglars in ski masks hired by Arkacite.

I turned to let myself out—it was getting late, and I had a meeting with a man who would probably try to kill me—but one more picture caught my eye. The photo was in a printout of an email tacked to Rayal’s bulletin board, and showed a posed group of eight people on the plaza in front of Arkacite’s headquarters, with Denise on one end. Next to her, a wiry Indian guy sporting a cheeky grin held up a device behind the head of the pudgy Asian man on his other side, and whatever it was he held had flashed two clever little forks of lightning at the camera as it went off—electronic bunny ears.

The email below it started with Rayal and then threaded through several responses:

Vikash, if you don’t stop trolling the team photos I’ll give the Bulgaria conference to Adrian.

Come on, you think it’s just as funny as I do!!! And Adrian is a tool.

It must kill you that he’s beating you on bug fixes right now, then. Chop chop.

Of everything I had seen in this house, the psychiatric meds and the dead son and the files full of claustrophobic NDAs, Rayal’s decision to tack up this printout on her bulletin board somehow felt the most profoundly sad. This woman had loved her work and loved the people in it. And in the last six months, she’d lost everything.

Including, quite possibly, a daughter.

I tucked the hard drive and the camera’s memory card in my pocket and slipped out the back door into the darkening evening, locking up behind me like the considerate little thief I was.

C
HAPTER 8

A
FTER A
quick stop by one of my storage units, I reached Grealy’s about twenty minutes after nine and parked down the street. Normally I was late for appointments, but not when I had an ambush to set up.

I cruised into the dive of a restaurant, ordered a drink at the bar, and took it to a corner booth. The bar was in its usual state of smoke-filled semi-darkness; California’s anti-nicotine laws were flagrantly violated here, probably because most patrons were conducting business far more illegal than lighting up inside an eating establishment. I sat observing the few other customers over my untouched tumbler of whiskey, my senses drawing out their fields of view in overlapping angles, the mathematics bouncing off the mirrored wall behind the bar and the chrome edges of the greasy oyster buffet under the heat lamps. Binocular vision, monocular vision, reflections, blind spots—the instant everything aligned to make me invisible to everyone in the room, I stood up and stuck a small convex mirror on top of the decorative molding above my head.

Mathematics. The poor man’s invisibility cloak.

Then I dumped my whiskey out onto the floor under my chair—this place was not exactly resplendent in its cleanliness; no one would notice—abandoned the empty glass on the table, and left.

I stopped back at my car to retrieve a bag of gear and then ambled to the building across the street. Directly opposite Grealy’s was a first-floor club shaking the street with terrible, bass-heavy music under a few stories of rundown apartments. I’d already evaluated the lines of sight to know where I needed to be. I trekked into the alley at the side of the building, shouldered my gear, and vaulted into the dumpster.

The noisome odor of decomposition and filth clogged my nostrils, and my boots slipped on splitting, oozing bags of garbage. I made a face and attempted to take small sips of air through my mouth as I lifted a Steyr SSG 08 sniper rifle out of my gear bag, snapped open the stock, and screwed a high-end suppressor onto the barrel that would take my decibel contribution down almost to the same level as the horribly loud club music. Then I balanced the stock against my shoulder and the barrel on the lip of the dumpster and pulled out a large piece of dark burlap to throw over myself and the gun. It was full dark by this time; no one would notice the muzzle peeking out or the edge of the scope tented underneath. Best of all, when I settled my eye down behind the scope, my tiny convex mirror leapt larger than life in my vision—the mirror I had positioned to give me a perfect view of the entire inside of the bar.

Of course, that didn’t help with the stifling heat under the burlap, or the foul smell—instead of growing accustomed to it, I only became more suffocated, the noxious air pressing thickly against me. Sweat soaked my neck and back and stuck my short hair to my scalp in damp curls. The awful club music gave me a headache within minutes, but even though it crowded out almost all other sound, I could still hear flies buzzing around my feet.

About an hour after I had begun my vigil, I wiped the sweat out of my eyes for what felt like the twentieth time to watch three men—who all had dark Italian coloring, and who all wore coats despite the warm night—enter Grealy’s together. They conferred briefly by the door before one of them split off to the bar and the other two went to sit at a table near the front, next to the window. The man at the bar stayed there with his drink, completely ignoring the companions he’d come in with.

Well, hell. They were definitely here to kill me.

I’d intended to wait until eleven to start the party, but by a quarter till, a gunfight sounded a thousand times better than staying in my stifling, fetid sniper’s nest for another minute. I snaked a Bluetooth out of my gear bag and looped it onto my ear; I’d already synced the earpiece with one of the new burner phones I’d grabbed from storage.

The man at the bar looked down at his phone as soon as it started ringing, but he took a long, deliberate drink before picking it up to answer it. “Hello,” I heard over the headset, at the same time my eye on the scope saw him mouth the word in the mirror.