Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) Read online

  PLASTIC SMILE

  by SL Huang

  Copyright ©2016 SL Huang

  The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License:

  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

  For more information or further permissions, contact information is available at www.slhuang.com.

  Cover copyright ©2016 Najla Qamber

  All rights reserved. The cover art may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission from the copyright holder, except as permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance in the text to actual events or to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-0-9960700-9-6

  Cover art: Najla Qamber Designs

  Editing: Anna Genoese

  Chapter 1

  My name is Cas Russell. Six months ago, I found out it isn’t.

  Six months ago, I discovered everyone else has memories. Memories of being a child, of growing up, of a life before becoming a supernaturally mathematical retrieval specialist who drinks her way from one job to the next.

  Yeah. That would be me. Cas Russell.

  Right now, however, I was suffering from an unfortunate lack of being drunk. Right now I had an extremely muscle-bound and exceptionally filthy woman writhing around on the floor in front of me, casting baleful glares over the duct tape plastered against her mouth. Her wrists and ankles were duct-taped, too. She was my best lead on finding out where a bunch of scared kids were, and I was going to make her tell me.

  But I had to do it without torturing her. Torture would piss off the tall black man who’d decided to become my conscience, and who was currently lounging against one wall of the room, complicating this job with his moral compass.

  I’d been having another go of being a better person lately. It was making things difficult.

  “I’ve had a really bad few months,” I told the woman on the floor. “Really. It’s sucked. Please believe me when I say I want to take it out on someone.” I swung the gun in my hand down in a casual movement and shot the floor right next to her head, so close the bullet grazed her cheek. A line of red welled up and she froze, her eyes bugging out of her grimy face.

  I saw my conscience twitch out of the corner of my eye. Arthur didn’t like it when I was cavalier with guns, even though he knew I could see the math with perfect accuracy, knew I could predict exactly where I would hit, probability one.

  Our captive, however, did not know this.

  “Hey, that was lucky,” I said. “Next time my aim might not be that great.”

  She stayed very still.

  I stepped forward, leaned down, and tore the tape off her mouth.

  “You’re one of Pourdry’s goons,” I said. “Don’t waste your breath trying to deny it. Where did they take the kids?”

  “I don’t know!” she cried.

  I shot her again, this time grazing her thigh. I let the bullet take a little more flesh with it, and she howled.

  “Russell,” said Arthur.

  I ignored him and aimed the gun at our prisoner’s face. Pourdry was the scum of the earth, but somehow he inspired devoted allegiance in his rank and file—which meant I had to make this woman more afraid of me than she was loyal to him. I kept my muzzle right between her eyes and weighted the pad of my index finger against the trigger with only a hair less force than I needed to trip it.

  “I don’t like it when bad things happen to kids,” I said, my voice low. “Tell me where they are. Right now.”

  “Russell,” Arthur said again, more urgently.

  My vision blurred for a moment, the woman’s outline going fuzzy. I tried to blink it away.

  But something bubbled up in me, another place, another time, another kidnapper—

  The woman’s face became male for a moment, then snapped back—

  My hand on the gun was slick with sweat.

  “Tell me where they are!” The words came out both more panicked and more dangerous than they had a moment ago. “If you don’t tell me where they are right the fuck now, I will blow your fucking face off. I mean that literally! I will shoot chunks off your nose and cheeks until your head looks like it’s gone through a woodchipper, and then I will—”

  “Cas!” Arthur had crossed to me; he placed a cautious hand on my gun arm and nudged it off line. “Take a breath, Cas.”

  My field of view slid back into focus.

  “You okay?” murmured Arthur.

  The room felt too close and too cavernous all at the same time. “I…” I had been somewhere else for a moment, somewhere not here, somewhere in a boiler room with a different man next to me and I had been pointing a gun at someone else and saying, Tell me where the kids are—

  A dream? Or a memory?

  I let up on the trigger and clenched my hand against the grip of the Colt to keep it from shaking. I was on the job right now. I couldn’t get distracted on the job. I didn’t get distracted on the job.

  I turned back to the woman. Her face had gone gray and doughy; sweat trails mingled with trickles of blood from the graze I’d given her and fear flooded her eyes.

  Not fear. Terror. “You’re Cassandra Russell,” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Retrieval expert. I hear I have a pretty badass reputation, thank you very much.” I swallowed. I was calm again, I told myself. “Now tell us where the kids are.”

  She’d started trembling. “I—I’m sorry—” she stammered. “I know what you did to the Fox—please—”

  “What?”

  “The port,” she gasped, her eyes rolling in her head like she was a spooked horse. “They’re near the port. They’re still there, I swear. I—I’ll give you the address—just please don’t—”

  “Uh, good,” I said, thrown. “Right. And, uh, we’re only going to hand you over to the cops. As long as your tip’s solid,” I amended hastily.

  The panic in her edged back down. “Okay—okay—thank you…”

  People didn’t usually thank me for sending them to prison. “Sure,” I said—though, to be fair, turning the case over to the police had been Arthur’s call, not mine. “I’ll have that address now.”

  She blurted it out in a shaking voice; Arthur pulled out a burner cell and moved to the other side of the room. I tucked my gun back in my belt. “We’ll leave you for the LAPD to pick up,” I said. “I don’t recommend looking Pourdry back up. I’m going to go find him after we’re done here, and once I do, you won’t want to work for what’s left.”

  The woman bobbed her chin in a frantic nod, the vaunted devotion of Pourdry’s outfit evaporating like it had never been. She was still staring at me with eyes that were unnervingly wide, even considering I had shot her.

  I moved away from her gaze, uncomfortable, and rejoined Arthur on the other side of the room. He was just hanging up. “Done?” I asked.

  “Done.” He pried open the back of the phone, popped out the battery, and stuck the pieces in a pocket of his leather jacket. “Let’s split before they come pick up our friend.”

  “You know, you could have given the cops the location of the kids now and then called again from the road, once we were out of here.”

  “Thought it might be good for us to get gone anyway. Come on, I’m gonna buy you a drink.”

  I rolled my eyes. Arthur was doing his worried-parent routine again. I reminded myself for the thousandth time that I was trying really hard to be a better person these days, a big part of which was not blowing Arthur off. “Fine.” I crossed to the door, trying to ignore our captive’s still-terrified stare, then turned back to her. “You didn’t s
ee us, right? No one matching our description. And think about who you goon for after this, or next time I won’t be so nice.”

  She nodded again. “Yes—thank you—thank you—I’m sorry—”

  Okay, this was downright weird. Arthur glanced at me questioningly; I shrugged at him and led the way out the door.

  The night was late enough for even Los Angeles’s preternaturally frustrating traffic to have died down, and Arthur sped up the freeway toward the Valley. Instead of heading to drop me at my current hidey-hole in Santa Clarita, however, he swung off onto the streets to pull up in front of a dim dive bar. It was still open despite having only one other customer, a man with curly dark hair hunched over his drink at a corner table.

  “You going to lecture me?” I asked Arthur.

  “Nope. Gonna buy you a drink,” he answered. “Come on.”

  He ensconced me in a booth at the opposite side of the room from the bar and then came back a minute later with a beer for himself and a glass of something stronger, which he set in front of me.

  I knocked it back all at once. The burn felt nice.

  “Thanks for the assist,” said Arthur after a few minutes. “We done a good thing today.”

  “I’ve been proud of you, willing to go all vigilante.” Arthur had been the one to bring me in on this job, when he couldn’t smash into the trafficking ring by himself. He’d done that a surprising number of times the past few months. “What happened to law and order?”

  “Exceptions,” he murmured. “Seems like it’s more and more of those nowadays.”

  “You mean because it’s our fault?”

  He fiddled with his beer bottle a little. “Maybe some of that, too.”

  The guilt I heard in his voice felt all too familiar. Two and a half years before, we’d been jointly responsible for taking out an international conspiracy bent on making the world a better place—though doing so through murder and brainwashing—and, as we’d dreaded, without their influence crime had been burgeoning slowly ever since. In the last year, it had exploded. Los Angeles had never been a particularly friendly city, but now it was becoming a nerve center for gang violence, for organized crime, for kids OD’ing in squalor and for drive-by shootings in neighborhoods that had so recently bragged of safety and revitalization. Los Angeles wasn’t the only place, either. But in LA, we saw it up close and personal.

  I was pretty sure the whole thing was harder on Arthur than it was on me. He cared a lot more.

  “Talk to Checker lately?” asked Arthur.

  That was a subject I definitely didn’t want to discuss. “No.”

  “You’re killing him, you know.”

  I pushed up out of the booth. “I’m getting another drink.”

  I persuaded the grubby bartender to give me the whole bottle, mostly by waving a C-note at her for a fourteen-dollar bottle of whiskey. When I came back, I slid onto the booth’s bench and chugged from it.

  Arthur watched me with what was probably disapproval, but he didn’t say anything.

  I thunked the half-drunk whiskey bottle on the table. “If Checker wants to be friends again, he can do as I tell him and stay the hell out of my past.”

  “He’s stubborn. And he’s worried about you. He ain’t the only one, neither.”

  “I’m fine,” I snapped.

  Arthur studied me, his expression unreadable.

  “What?”

  “What happened in there today?”

  “What do you mean, what happened?”

  He spoke slowly, picking out his phrasing. “Ain’t always agree with your methods, but…ain’t never seen you lose control before.”

  “I didn’t.” Even if Arthur didn’t know me as well as he did, I’m an abysmal liar. The words sounded as hollow as they felt on my tongue.

  “Talk to me, Russell,” he said softly.

  I gulped some more whiskey, grateful for the slight edge it took off my senses, and then leaned my elbows on the table so I could press my head against my hands, conveniently burying my face behind my forearms and avoiding Arthur’s gaze.

  “I think I’ve been remembering,” I mumbled.

  I felt him sit up across from me.

  “Don’t tell Checker,” I said.

  “Ain’t gonna.”

  “It’s ’cause of him, really,” I said. “Ever since he…the stupid son of a bitch.”

  “Russell,” said Arthur reprovingly.

  “I didn’t mean that.” And I hadn’t; I’d felt a spike of shame about the name-calling even as I’d done it. I might be pissed as hell at Checker right now, but he was still probably my best friend. If I knew what such a thing meant. “I was fine before,” I insisted, as much to myself as to Arthur. “Everything was good. And then he has to go and convince me…”

  No matter how much I’d tried to brush him off and deflect his inquiries, Checker had insisted on making me look, making me see. On making me try to remember and then realize I couldn’t.

  “I didn’t mind when I didn’t know,” I muttered at the table. “And now I can’t stop thinking about it. And I get these flashes, sometimes—I never used to notice them before, but now I keep thinking…”

  “You think you’re remembering something?” asked Arthur.

  “How would I know?” I growled. “And I know I shouldn’t look; I left myself a goddamn message telling myself not to, and I don’t even want to. But now that I know, I can’t help trying…”

  “To make sense of it?”

  “Yeah.” It was like picking at a scab, and the more I did it, the more the wound in my memory seemed to ooze and bleed, letting slippery half-images through. “I dream sometimes. A lot of times. I get—I always thought they were nightmares.”

  It had started with dreams, and for a long time everything had stayed confined there. Until recently.

  “These dreams, you think they might be real stuff, things that happened to you?”

  “I don’t know. The dreams, and the flashes—they’ve gotten a lot worse since the thing with Dawna. I thought maybe she left some sort of…mental scarring, or something, but now I wonder if she broke something free.” Dawna Polk, functional telepath, had attacked me psychically in a last-ditch effort to save her organization of global puppet masters. She’d almost killed me with the onslaught.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “What she said to me, as she was—” The attack was still confused in my head, a chaos of light and shapes, but something had just come back to me, something I’d forgotten. Or maybe buried. “She said—she told me—”

  “Russell? What she tell you?”

  “She said remember.”

  Chapter 2

  Arthur came with me to the Hole, probably because he was afraid I would chicken out.

  The sun was just rising, washing out the city in pale morning light as the day figured out whether it wanted to stay chilly or turn scorching. We were just moving out of Los Angeles’s version of winter, which meant it was still jacket weather but now mixed with increasingly frequent ninety-degree heat waves.

  The Hole was technically Checker’s converted garage-turned-hacker cave, but at this hour of the morning it was marginally more likely he was in bed in his house rather than online. We tromped up the ramp onto his porch, and I pounded on his door loudly enough that I probably woke several of his neighbors. When he didn’t answer right away, I pounded again. I was here, but I wasn’t happy about it.

  It took six and a half minutes, but finally we heard the deadbolt slide back and a skinny white guy with a goatee swung the door open. He blinked up from his wheelchair at us in the morning light as he shoved his glasses onto his face; his hair was tousled with sleep and he wore pajama pants and a T-shirt with a picture of the Milky Way on it and the words, “You are here.”

  “Cas,” he said stupidly, after a good eight seconds.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He couldn’t seem to think what to say back. I crossed my arms tig
htly and looked at the worn floorboards of the porch, and tried not to think about how long I’d been refusing to talk to him.

  “Can we come in?” said Arthur after another highly awkward fifteen seconds. I was supremely glad he was there; Arthur was Checker’s friend, too—friend and business partner. His presence meant it was a lot less likely Checker and I would end up in a shouting match that would end with me storming out.

  “Uh, right,” said Checker, and moved back from the door, pulling it open the rest of the way for us.

  We followed him into his living room. Arthur sat back on the couch; I remained standing, shifting from foot to foot.

  “So. What’s going on?” said Checker.

  “Cas has something to say to you,” Arthur answered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think I…I’ve been having…”

  “You got something to say before that,” interrupted Arthur firmly.

  “I do?”

  “You do.”

  “What?”

  Arthur just kept looking at me meaningfully. The awkwardness ratcheted up a couple more notches.

  “Oh, for the love of Tesla,” said Checker. “Arthur, stop it. He’s trying to get you to apologize,” he said to me.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “She doesn’t have to. It’s okay. Now, what’s going on?”

  Some of the tension in the room bled out. I moved over to sit next to Arthur on the couch. “The memory thing,” I said. “I think…it might be a problem.” I braced myself for a sarcastic I told you so.

  “What happened?” Checker said instead. He wasn’t a person I would have generally characterized as “gentle”—brilliant, cheerful, voracious, slightly mad, but not gentle—but he sounded that way now. As if he wanted to protect me.

  Which was ridiculous, of course, since I could have kicked his ass and Arthur’s together without breathing hard, but I was suddenly and incongruously reminded of how much I missed spending time with him.

  I cleared my throat and tried to focus. “I don’t know if looking into it would make things worse or not,” I ground out. “But I feel like…I don’t know. I feel like I’m going crazy.”