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I slipped through the hedge to the other side right as the car turned around it, following Wilson. This meant that I was separated from Zen by the squat wall of densely packed foliage. It ran all the way along the parking lot here.
I scurried along the hedge, head down, keeping pace with Zen’s car. It passed Wilson as he parked, then continued on in a presumably nonsuspicious way toward another section of the parking lot. I caught brief glimpses of black car through holes in the hedge—a shadowed driver, but nobody else visible. The car pulled into a parking stall a short distance from where the hedge ended.
Ahead, the leaves rustled, and J.C. slipped through, handgun out, joining me. “Nice work,” he whispered. “We’ll make a Ranger out of you yet.”
“It was your push,” I said. “Sent me tumbling exactly the right way.”
“I said I’d help.”
I said nothing, too nervous to continue the conversation. I was manifesting something new, an extension of my previous . . . framework. What else could I learn to do by having one of my aspects guide my fingers or steps?
I peeked through the hedge, then took out my handgun. J.C. motioned furiously for me to hide it in front of myself, so cars passing along the street to my right wouldn’t see. Then J.C. nodded toward an opening in the hedge.
I took a deep breath before scrambling through and crossing the short distance to Zen’s car. J.C. tailed me. I came up beside the car in a crouch.
“Ready?” J.C. asked.
I nodded.
“Finger on the trigger, Skinny. This is for real.”
I nodded again. The passenger’s side window, just above me, was open. Palms sweating, I threw myself to my feet and leveled my gun through the open window at the driver.
It wasn’t the assassin.
11
The driver was a dark-haired kid, maybe eighteen, wearing a hoodie. He cried out, dropping the pair of binoculars he’d been using to look toward my SUV, his face going white as snow as he stared down my handgun.
That was most certainly not Zen Rigby.
“In the car, Skinny,” J.C. said, looking around the parking lot. “Back seat, so he can’t grapple you. Tell him to keep quiet. Don’t look suspicious.”
“Hands where I can see them,” I told the kid, hoping he didn’t see that my gun was shaking. “Don’t say a word.” I pulled open the back door, slipped in, but kept the gun on him.
The kid remained quiet save for a whine in the back of his throat. He was either terrified, or was a very good actor.
“Where’s Zen?” I said to him, lifting the gun up beside the youth’s head.
“Who?” he said.
“No games. Where is she?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know anything . . .” The kid actually started weeping.
“Damn it,” J.C. said, standing by the front window. “You think he’s acting?”
“No idea,” I said back.
“I should fetch Ivy.”
“No,” I said, not wanting to be left alone. I inspected the kid’s weeping face reflected in the rear-view mirror. Mediterranean skin tone . . . Same nose . . .
“Don’t kill me,” the kid whispered. “I just wanted to know what you did with him.”
“You’re Panos’s brother,” I guessed.
The kid nodded, still sobbing.
“Oh hell,” J.C. said. “No wonder it was so easy to spot the tail. Two people were following us: an amateur and a professional. I’m an idiot.”
I felt cold. I’d heard Wilson’s honk through the line when on the phone with Zen, so she had been nearby, yet we hadn’t spotted her. Zen had been invisible to us all along.
Bad.
“What’s your name?” I asked the youth.
“Dion.”
“Well, Dion, I’m putting the gun away. If you are who you say, then you don’t need to be afraid. I’m going to need you to come with me, and if you start to run, or cry out, or anything like that . . . well, I’ll have to make sure you stop.”
The youth nodded.
I climbed from the car, gun holstered, and pulled the kid out by his shoulder. A quick frisk determined he wasn’t armed, though he considered himself quite the spy. Flashlight, ski mask, binoculars, a mobile phone which I took and turned off. I marched him across the parking lot, fully aware that this whole exchange would have looked very suspicious to anyone watching. With J.C.’s coaching, though, I maintained the air of someone who knew what he was doing—arm on the youth’s shoulder, walking confidently. We were in the government complex; hopefully, anyone who spotted us would think I was a cop.
If they didn’t, well, it wouldn’t be the first time the police had been called to deal with me. I think they kept a department pool going on the frequency of it.
I shoved Dion into my SUV, then climbed inside, feeling a little more secure with the tinted windows and more of my aspects in attendance. Dion moved to the back seat and slumped there, forcing Audrey to climb onto Tobias’s lap—an event so unexpected, the aging aspect almost seemed to choke.
“Wilson, please give me warning if anyone approaches,” I said. “All right, Dion. Spill it. Why are you following me?”
“They stole Panos’s body,” Dion said.
“And by ‘they’ you mean . . .”
“I3.”
“And why on earth would they do such a thing?”
“The information,” Dion said. “He had it stored in his cells, you know? All of their secrets. All the terrible things they were going to do.”
I shared a look with J.C., who then facepalmed. Panos had been talking to his family about his research. Wonderful. J.C. removed his hand and mouthed to me, security nightmare.
“And what kind of terrible things,” I said, “do you assume I3 was going to do?”
“I . . .” Dion looked to the side. “You know. Corporate things.”
“Like take away casual Fridays,” Audrey guessed.
So Panos hadn’t completely confided in his brother. I tapped my fingers on the armrest. The family assumed that Yol and his people had taken the body to keep their information hidden—and, to be honest, that wasn’t far from the truth. They’d been planning to see it burned, after all. Someone had merely gotten to Panos first.
“And you’re following me,” I said to the kid. “Why?”
“You were all over the internet this morning,” Dion said. “Getting into a car with that weird Asian guy who owns I3. I figured out that you were supposed to crack the code on Panos’s body. Seems obvious. I mean, you’re some kind of superspy hacker or something, right?”
“That’s exactly what we are,” Audrey said. “Steve-O, tell him that’s what we are.” When I said nothing, she elbowed Tobias, in whose lap she was still sitting. “Tell him, grandpa.”
“Stephen,” Tobias said, somewhat uncomfortable, “this youth sounds earnest.”
“He’s being honest,” Ivy said, inspecting him, “so far as I can tell.”
“You should reassure him,” Tobias said. “Look at the poor lad. He looks like he still thinks you’re going to shoot him.”
Indeed, Panos had his hands clasped, eyes down, but he was trembling.
I softened my tone. “I wasn’t hired to crack the body’s code,” I told him. “I3 has plenty of backups on all their information. I’m here to find the corpse.”
Dion looked up.
“No,” I said, “I3 didn’t take it. They would have been perfectly content to let it be cremated.”
“I don’t think he believes you, Steve,” Ivy said.
“Look,” I said to Dion, “I don’t care what happens with I3. I just want to make sure the information in that corpse is accounted for, all right? And for now, I need you to wait here.”
“Why—”
“Because I don’t know what to do with you.” I glanced at Wilson, who nodded. He’d keep an eye on the kid. “Go climb in the front seat,” I told Dion. “When I get back, we can have a long conversation about all of this. For
now, I have to go deal with a very surly coroner.”
12
The city coroner was housed in a sterile-smelling little office beside the city morgue, which was only one set of rooms in a larger medical complex. Technically, Liza liked to be called a “medical examiner,” and she was always surprisingly busy for a person who seemed to spend all of her time playing internet games.
At the stroke of eight, I strode through the medical complex lobby—suffering the glare of a security guard who was far too large for the little cubby they’d given him—and knocked politely on the coroner office door. Liza’s secretary—I forget his name—opened the door with an obviously reluctant expression.
“She’s waiting for you,” the young man said. “I wouldn’t call her excited, though.”
“Great. Thanks . . .”
“John,” Tobias filled in.
“. . . John.”
