the third or the fourth, the Outfit, or whoever else is going to hire him, will just get someone else. You follow?”
“But—”
“So we have to find the killer, you bet. But we don’t assume it ends there. Not by a long ways.”
She made some calls—one of them to Seven, sketching the problem and ordering him to climb inside Blackstone’s tux and stick close until the danger was past. His superhuman luck would have to protect the both of them. Then she went to bed. The windowless basement was perfect (I realized I’d been tense the entire time she’d been upstairs), and Artemis had explored the racks and piles of camping gear and made a nice little nook before I’d woken up. She threw herself down on an open cot, and looked up at me.
“Take the light bulb with you?”
“Okay.” I unscrewed the single bare bulb that lit the cellar and went upstairs, softly closing the door.
Chapter Ten
Decibel, an A-class audiokinetic, is suing the State of California for violation of his civil rights in the wake of passage of Proposition 12, the special initiative which includes both the Watch List Act and the Public Security Act. As a superhuman with “powers of mass-destruction” and a criminal record, Decibel is banned by the Public Security Act from entering public buildings, including government offices and schools, without submitting to restraint. Since Decibel’s criminal record consists of convictions for extreme vandalism from his time as an eco-terrorist with the Green Knights—crimes nearly a decade old and for which he served time before joining the LA Guardians—legal experts have called his case the perfect test of the new law’s constitutionality.
The Wall Street Journal
* * *
I thawed and cooked up a breakfast of hash browns, pancakes and syrup, and reconstituted and seasoned eggs to keep my hands busy, then wandered the little valley like I’d planned. I found the doe and her fawn, and around noon I called Shelly and asked her to commit a serious felony for me. Sunset painted the sky with spilled oranges and violets, and, knowing what to listen for, I heard the drone when it returned to circle high above the cabin. When Artemis came back upstairs I was changed and ready to go. Before she could ask, I hugged her.
“Thanks Jacky,” I said. “Fly safe? I’m going back to LA.”
She smiled a predator’s smile. “Don’t do anything I would do.”
I flew to catch the sunset, hitting the coast as the last rays faded over water, and stopped first at Restormel, where their Willis waited for me with a stuffed book-bag and an improbably bored look. One of Platoon’s duplicates, Restormel’s Willis knew me as well as our Willis did, and had been happy to pull everything together for me no questions asked—not that there’d been anything illegal about this part of it. After I changed back into civvies, he brought a car around. An old sedan, it looked like it belonged where we were going, but it was probably armored and tech-pimped in every possible way.
Shelly had found me an address, a name, and, hacking the LAPD database, an arrest file. I tied my hair up while Bob drove, put on the baseball cap and sunglasses he’d stuffed in the bag on top of the money, and went over my notes. He parked us in front of an old apartment tower, one of the survivors of the quake. Nine Ninety-Nine Cypress Road.
“Thanks Willis. I shouldn’t be long.”
He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Good. I’d hate to get ticketed while we’re in there.”
“Can’t you stay with the car?”
“It’ll tell me if anybody tries to mess with it. I’m more concerned someone will try and mess with you and you’ll have to go all Astra on them.”
I looked out the window. Half the streetlights were dark, and probably had been before the quake. Boards still covered a lot of storefront windows, and the few pedestrians on the street hurried, on their way somewhere else. The address next to the tower was an empty lot, like a missing tooth, with a clap-board construction wall around the cleared space. If I wasn’t what I was, there was no way I’d get out of the car. Willis looked… prohibitive. Plain dark suit, short dark hair, narrow face. A face that said I’m a nice guy. Don’t mess with me, and I’ll stay nice. I was back in cargo shorts and cotton cami; together we’d look like a child-star and her bodyguard, but at