Which would ensure we’d run into the cops when we arrived. “Really?”
“Forty minutes in traffic. Call.”
I cast around for something sharp to use on the vacuum-packed plastic—the math said I wasn’t getting in otherwise—and found a ball-point pen on the floor of the truck to pry it open with. “You call, then.”
“I’m driving. Ain’t safe.”
“Really?”
“For the—we can’t afford to get pulled over! Just make the damned call. And put your seatbelt on.”
“Now you want to be law-abiding?” I muttered, but I did as he asked, punching the buttons a little harder than necessary. I relayed the address Tresting gave me to the dispatcher and hung up when she tried to ask my name.
“Does her son still have that bodyguard?” I asked Tresting.
“Far as I know. And he’ll be at school right now. Good. Don’t think they’d risk something at a school.”
“We still don’t know who ‘they’ are,” I pointed out. “Or what they’re after.”
“There’s an agenda,” Tresting said, his jaw clenched. “Don’t know what, but they’ve got one for sure, and we’re monkeying it up, lucky us.” He gave me a brief, almost calculating glance. “You especially, I think.”
“What are you talking about? I just stumbled in on this, thank you very much. You’re the one who’s been working it for months.”
“Yeah, but I think they was happy to see me chasing my own tail. Entertainment, probably, for all the headway we was making. You show up, and…” He slammed down a little too hard on the brake as we approached a red light, and the stupid seatbelt tried to garrote me. “I tracked Polk for months, and they don’t care about saving her hide from no one till you hook up with her. Then they’re after you post-haste, she disappears, and a day later I got a target painted on me too? Don’t believe in coincidences.”
He was right. Dammit. After all, I hadn’t exactly randomly chanced upon this mess. Rio’s words came back to me: What interests me more is who made such a concerted effort to draw you into this…
“Got anything you want to share?” said Tresting. His tone wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t neutral, either.
“Hey, I’ve been playing catch-up from the beginning,” I said. “You still know way more about this shit show than I do.”
“Well, you know something. Maybe you don’t realize. Or maybe they want something from you.”
“I’m not special,” I objected.
It was a stupid thing to say. Tresting wasn’t an unobservant man, and my little display while rescuing him hadn’t been what one might call “discreet.” He didn’t answer right away, shifting gears with feeling and jamming down the accelerator to cut rudely onto the freeway. Then he said what I’d been dreading.
“At my office. Not that I ain’t appreciative, but how the hell…?”
I sighed. My usual response, that I’m really good at math, wasn’t going to suffice in blowing off a guy like Tresting. He seemed the type to worry at something until he got every last kernel of fact about it.
“I jumped,” I said, deliberately obtuse.
“Two stories.”
“No, stupid. From the fire escape.”
He digested that. “And pried off the bars.”
“With my SIG. It’s a good crowbar. Metal frame, you know.” I was proud of myself for not making a dig about cheap polymer piece-of-crap Glocks. I’m the soul of tact.
Tresting looked like he was searching for another question to ask. “Damn. If I hadn’t been there myself…”
“I train a lot,” I lied.
“In being Spider-Man?”
“Among other things.” At least he hadn’t actually seen me leapfrog the alley. I was a lot faster than most people imagined.
“Damn,” Tresting said again. Then he hazarded, “Military?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Your background. Ex-military?”
“I seem military to you?”
“Oh-kay, so not ex-mil.” There was a pregnant pause.
“School of hard knocks,” I supplied, trying for clever.
“Hey, that was my alma mater, too,” said Tresting. “But apparently you graduated summa cum laude or something.”
“Gesundheit,” I said. “Hey, stop PIing me or next time I won’t come save your sorry ass.”
I didn’t expect that to stop him, but for some reason it did, and he dropped into a thoughtful silence.
Relieved, I took the opportunity to shoot Rio a cryptic text to see if he had any new updates. The bloody corpses played through my vision again, the stench in the air heavy and metallic and cloying. Those people were dead anyway; was I hypocritical if I hoped it hadn’t been Rio?
Then who else?
I thought of Anton. I’d assumed Pithica had been the one to come after him, but the explosive fire didn’t fit with their usual MO. A stunt like that wouldn’t fly under the radar; it would demand investigation. Same with the massacre at the office suite, I supposed.
Rio wouldn’t have gone after Anton, however. I felt sure of that. He wasn’t bothered by collateral damage to innocent people, but he would never make a concerted hit against a decent man and his twelve-year-old daughter. It was impossible. He himself might be capable of such an act, but his God wasn’t.
Who was?
One fact was inescapable. No matter who had come after Anton, the office workers, me, Tresting, or Courtney Polk, Tresting was right: none of it had happened before I had gotten involved. Correlation didn’t imply causality—but it was also possible I was the kiss of death. You know something, Tresting had said. Or maybe they want something from you. I thought back through my retrieval clients, but I’d only been doing this a few years, and I couldn’t think of any past cases that had been strange or unusual enough to have a connection to Pithica. Certainly I didn’t think I knew anything worth killing for.
And the only thing special about me was my math ability. Which was cool, sure, and occasionally made me into some sort of flying squirrel on crack, but in the grand scheme of things, even I wasn’t conceited enough to think I was worth as much trouble as some people were putting in to stop us.
Things weren’t adding up. And for someone with an overpowered math brain, things not adding up meant a serious problem.
Chapter 14
We arrived at Leena Kingsley’s house fifty-two minutes after we’d left Tresting’s office. The drive had been mostly silent—Tresting was lost in his own thoughts, and for my own part, I figured our détente was too touchy and fragile, and going into a possibly-hostile situation wasn’t the time to mess with it.
Tresting cruised by the first time without slowing. A cop car sat on the street outside, but only one, and its lights weren’t flashing. The small house was still—no sign that anything was amiss, and no neighbors gawking. It didn’t look like there had been a shootout here.
Of course, that didn’t mean anything. This was a nice residential neighborhood, with well-groomed yards and picket fences and rosebushes, and Pithica liked subtle.
Tresting circled the block and then pulled over a few houses prior to Dr. Kingsley’s. He reached into the duffel he’d brought the shotgun in, pulled out a scope, and held it up to one eye. “Can’t see much,” he said after a moment. “But there’s movement. Think she and the cops are talking.”
“Do you think they’d come after her with police there?”
“Seems stupid.”
“We wait, then?”
“Think so.”
We sat in the truck, tense and silent.