By then a horrifically tortured man had shown up in a hospital and been identified as the sole survivor of the office massacre on Wilshire. Considering that he couldn’t stop gibbering madly about an Asian devil, and that no bodies had ever been recovered from the Griffith Park shooting despite the wildly conflicting witness reports of the violence there, Arthur’s and my composites got shuffled off the “most wanted” boards. I wondered if the surviving Pithica man had any inkling that he probably owed his life to Rio magnanimously getting the police off my trail.
As for Rio himself, I tracked him down a little over a week after the EMP disaster. We met in an empty subway station—the trains still weren’t up and running, and the station was deserted, though someone had stopped by with copious amounts of spray paint and already graffitied over every surface. Gotta love LA.
Instead of coming down from street level, Rio walked casually into the station on the track, emerging out of the yawning darkness of the tunnel with his duster swirling around him and wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat that only enhanced the cowboy image.
“Are you auditioning for the Old West?” I asked, hopping down off the platform to join him on the rails.
“The American frontier would suit me, I think,” he said. “What did you wish to see me about?”
“The police aren’t after me anymore,” I said. “Thanks for not killing that guy.”
He lifted one shoulder fractionally. When I didn’t say anything else, he asked, “Is that all?”
“No.” I’d been doing a lot of thinking since our final battle with Dawna. The memories of her attack still shifted and blurred, fuzzier with each passing day, the pieces I was able to jigsaw together making less and less sense. And every frustrating contradiction led me not to Pithica, not to Dawna—but to Rio.
Rio was keeping something from me.
And I was going to find out what. I just didn’t know how to ask him.
“Are you going to keep your deal with Dawna?” I asked finally.
“Yes,” he said.
“She neutralized us, you know.” Arthur and I had tested it late one night, and neither of us would be looking into Pithica ever again. We couldn’t. We couldn’t even try. “She told us not to come after them again, and we can’t. I doubt they’re even keeping an eye on me anymore. They know I’m not a threat to them.” I crossed my arms, hugging my jacket to me against the underground chill. “Could you talk me out of it? Destroy their influence?” He’d done it before, after all.
“Probably,” said Rio.
“Will you?”
“No.”
“Why not?” I exploded. The possibility had been the one thing that might have made his deal make sense, if he had figured somehow that I could do more damage to Pithica in the future than he could, and therefore had a life worth trading for Dawna’s—again. “Why did you even make that deal, then?”
“You know why I do what I do, Cas,” he said calmly. “Are we done here?”
“No. I don’t care how mysterious the ‘mysterious ways’ are—this isn’t adding up. There’s something you’re not telling me!”
He raised his eyebrows. “I have many things I don’t tell you. Would you like to know what I had for breakfast this morning?”
“Sarcasm. Nice.” I swallowed. “You aren’t my friend. You’re telling the truth when you say that.”
“I know,” he said.
“So? None of this makes any sense. You traded my safety for Dawna’s back there, and that wasn’t the first time. Back when she had Arthur and me—you were trying to take down Pithica, and you had the perfect opportunity.” Looking back, it made me want to scream in frustration that he hadn’t taken it, even given what it would have meant. Paradoxically, I remembered how certain I had been that he wouldn’t make that choice, and it made me doubt my own sanity. “You should have killed me, secured Dawna’s trust, and then destroyed them from the inside out. Tell me I’m not acceptable collateral damage for that kind of coup! It would have been perfect.”
I waited. He was silent.
“But you didn’t,” I said. “You broke us out instead.” An anomaly, Dawna Polk had called me. It suddenly bothered me intensely that she seemed to understand Rio’s relationship with me better than I did.
It was a long moment before Rio spoke. “I had other considerations. You were not aware of them.”
“So make me aware of them.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He was silent.
I stared at him, completely flummoxed. Irresistible force, meet immovable object. “This goes back even further,” I said. “I should have seen it right away. Back at the beginning, you told me not to get involved. Why?”
“Because I didn’t want you involved.”
“Why not?”
Again he said nothing. The expression on his face was the definition of blandness.
“Someone who didn’t know better might think you’ve been trying to protect me,” I said. “Which I know isn’t true. So I’d like some answers here. I think,” I added, drawing myself up to my full not-very-imposing height, “I have a right to know.”
Amusement touched Rio’s features. “You might disagree with that.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Cas,” said Rio, “I’m not going to answer your questions. I advise you to stop asking them.”
“Why should I? For crying out loud, I’m not asking you to tell me something that isn’t my business! You know something, and it has to do with me, and I’m not going to—”
Rio tipped his hat to me and walked away, back down the darkened subway tracks. I was left ranting at the empty air.
I took a frustrated breath. “This doesn’t make sense, Rio!” I shouted after him. “I don’t like things that don’t make sense!”
My own words echoing back at me were my only response. Rio was gone.
I sighed and climbed back up to the platform. I had one more meeting today, and I was hoping it would be far more satisfactory than this one had been.
Steve met me at an empty construction site. He looked quite a bit the worse for the wear: several days’ worth of five o’clock shadow darkened his square jaw, and the purple shadows under his eyes were so deep they made his face look hollow. He had lost at least two kilos, and every twitch of his movement was that of a hunted man. A man with nothing left in the world.
I liked that look on him.
“We got your message,” I said. I had told Checker I would handle it. “So much for your security, huh?”
He scrubbed both hands over his face. “They knew everything. They—when they came—”
According to his frantic email, when Pithica had knocked LA to its knees, the first thing they had done was figure out where the alerts had come from. Then they had proceeded to destroy Steve’s organization with no quarter—at least, the cell here in LA. Apparently they had already been perfectly aware of every detail Steve and his colleagues had tried so desperately to keep hidden, and up until that point they just hadn’t cared. Steve’s group had been no more than a gnat gnawing on Pithica’s big toe.
“Tell me, Steve,” I said. “What bothers you more? That despite killing everyone you came in contact with, your little band of merry men was still leakier than a Swiss cheese umbrella? Or that for all your grandstanding against Pithica, you guys never achieved the annoyance level of an advertising jingle?”