I let my body complete its roll over the desk and landed on my feet.
“Tresting?”
He emerged shakily from behind the safe and stared at me with wide, unblinking eyes, his Beretta twitching in his hand.
“You all right?” I asked.
He kept staring.
“Are. You. Hit?” I enunciated. Is this what they called shock? I wouldn’t have thought Tresting would go in for shock, being an ex-cop and all.
“That window’s two stories up,” he said.
“That’s right,” I agreed. “Good job, I guess that’s why they call you a private eye. Now, seriously, are you okay?”
He touched his right bicep; blood glistened on his fingertips. “Graze. Lucky, I guess.” His eyes flickered over the scene. Four bodies. Broken glass and dirt everywhere. “It had bars on it,” he whispered.
I’m not going to lie: I like impressing people. Especially people who’ve just walked away from me in the street and told me they never want to speak to me again.
“Yup,” I said. “I’m just that good.”
Chapter 13
“You’re bleeding,” Tresting managed, once he had found his voice again.
“So I am,” I said. I have a hyper-awareness of my own body; all the math in the world won’t help me if I can’t match calculation with reality. I can make estimates about other people’s anatomies, but mine I know every detail of at any time, and I knew I’d sustained five shallow cuts on my face, neck, and hands, and that none of them were worth worrying about. “So are you,” I added.
Tresting half-shrugged and kept his left hand pressed against the graze as he crunched across the glass-strewn floor to crouch by the nearest of the corpses. He reached out to place his fingers against the boy’s wrist.
“They’re dead,” I informed him. I wasn’t entirely happy about that. I was only now registering just how young they were—four teenagers, a girl and three boys, probably around fifteen or sixteen. Kids.
I hate it when bad things happen to kids. Especially when I’m the bad thing.
I also noticed something else. “They’re all Asian.” It seemed strange. “Did you rob a Chinese restaurant or something?”
“They’re Korean,” corrected Tresting. I made a face; I couldn’t tell the difference. “And gang members.” He pointed to a blood-smeared tattoo on the hand of the boy next to him as he stood.
I almost said, “So?” but something pinged in my memory about Koreans and African-Americans and race riots. I made a mental note to ask the Internet at some point. “Oh,” I said instead.
Tresting moved over to the window. I didn’t miss how he glanced out through the shattered panes and then at me, disbelief still sketching his features. I felt rather smug.
He crouched down again to touch the girl’s wrist, checking for a pulse I knew wouldn’t be there. I looked away.
The sounds of the street filtered up through the broken window, traffic noise and horns and people going about their days. A light breeze accompanied them, stirring the air in the office and making the cuts on my face start to sting.
“Thanks,” said Tresting suddenly.
The word parsed oddly, as if I were listening to a foreign language speaker say something and knew it wasn’t coming out the way he intended. “Sure,” I said.
Tresting stood back up and regarded me with a slight frown, as if I were a puzzle with a new twist. “They would’ve killed me,” he said. “This neighborhood, cops would’ve been too slow.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“I ain’t…thanks,” he said again.
I looked around the ruined office. Depression had neatly replaced the smugness. “They’re kids,” I whispered. Maybe I was the monster he thought I was after all. “They’re kids.”
“I know,” he said heavily, and it sounded like he did.
I took a deep breath. “What now?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know. Something’s different. First time Pithica’s targeted me.”
“You think this was Pithica?”
“Korean gang members trying to hit a black PI in a bad neighborhood,” Tresting recited. “Cops would write it off as a hate crime.”
“So? Maybe it was.”
“You saw the data, Russell. Hell, you’ve been attacked.”
I waited, but he didn’t say anything else, as if daring me to figure it out. I thought about the cases from Kingsley’s journal. A few of the strange deaths had involved gang violence, sure—drive-by shootings, or people caught in the crossfire in places gangs shouldn’t have been active. But Checker had connected a lot of other deaths in the file to Pithica that had nothing to do with gangs—suicides, freak accidents, muggings gone wrong—
My thoughts ground to a halt. “They don’t want it investigated.”
Tresting pointed a finger at me, as if to say, bingo.
“They’re killing people in ways the police can write off easily,” I realized. “Close the case.”
“Senseless tragedies,” he agreed. “Don’t know how Polk got Kingsley to write that note, but if it wasn’t for Leena—” He broke off. “Shit. Leena.”
He strode back to his gun safe, spun the combination to open it, and started reloading his Beretta. “You armed?”
“I will be in a minute.” I picked my way through the debris and slipped weapons out of the lifeless fingers of Tresting’s teenage attackers. The girl by the window had been toting a TEC-9 illegally converted to full auto; the others had two Glocks and a cheap and ugly Smith & Wesson semiautomatic. Jesus, it was irritating enough they had to be so young; couldn’t they at least do us the courtesy of carrying nice hardware?
Tresting had his phone to his ear as he reloaded; he left a terse message for Dr. Kingsley to take her son, get somewhere anonymous, and call him back. He hung up and holstered the Beretta, then reached back into his safe to hoist out a shotgun that I didn’t need my math ability to tell was far too short to be legal. He wrapped it in a spare shirt like a bundle of curtain rods and completely ignored me when I raised my eyebrows at him.
“Your prints and DNA are here,” he said instead. “That going to be a problem?”
“They’d need something to compare ’em to,” I answered. “How about you?”
“I’ll wake up in an alleyway later and claim amnesia.”
“You don’t want to stay like a good citizen and help with the investigation?”
“Not when the doc might be in danger.” He relocked his safe and grabbed a duffel behind his desk to stow the wrapped shotgun in. It still stuck out slightly, hopefully not too obviously.
Sirens sounded in the distance.
“Better dash,” said Tresting.
“For an ex-cop, you’re very cavalier about the law, aren’t you?” I commented, heading for the door.
Something dark shadowed his face. “Law ain’t never done me much good.”
We crept down the outside stairway in a hurry; I scooped up my battered SIG from the ground and we made it to Tresting’s truck at a fast walk. The engine came to life with a reluctant shudder; Tresting swung out into traffic and immediately pulled over to make way for five police cars, their sirens wailing and lights flashing. I watched them pass us, trying to keep a poker face. Tresting pulled back into traffic and then reached across to grab a burner cell still in its plastic packaging out of his glove compartment. He tossed it in my lap.
“Call in an anonymous tip on the doc. I’ll give you her address.”