sob. “I need you. Tabitha needs you, Arthur—I can’t do this by myself! I need you to be your cocky, smug son-of-a-bitch self right now and tell me if anyone can do this, it’s you, of course it’s you, and we’re going to get her back or literally die trying, because that’s what we do. Otherwise we might as well just call the police, and if they arrest all the rest of us, then fuck it, because we weren’t doing her any good anyway.”
By the end of it, he was quaking, every breath heaving like he was about to shake apart at the seams.
He’d been so strong for Juwon. I hadn’t put it together that this was probably the worst day of his life.
Checker’s phone went off in his hand. He jumped and almost dropped it, then glanced at the screen. “It’s—it’s an unknown number…”
It could be a ransom call. Oh, God, please let it be a ransom call. Let her be alive.
“Answer it.”
Checker swiped his fingers rapidly on the touchscreen, changing some settings before he wet his lips and hit the button to pick up the call on speaker. “H—hello?”
“Charles,” breathed the person on the other end. “I got you.”
thirty-three
THE WORDS came through some sort of synthesizer, disguising the voice. But it was no less gloating for that.
Checker jerked in his seat. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
“You don’t remember me? After all the hijinks we got up to together, I’m hurt. I’ll never forget the time we trolled all those serious wannabe actors in North Hollywood—”
“D.J.,” Checker whispered.
“The one and only!” sang the disguised voice. “I have your friend’s daughter. Or would you say your sister? I don’t want her, though. I want you.”
“Don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurt her,” said Checker.
“I only blew her up a little,” the person said. “Oh, she’ll be fine, don’t shit your trousers. As long as you come, that is. Come meet me, right now, the same place we used to do RC racing—and I won’t even tell you to come alone. Bring your whole ridiculous little posse.”
The line went dead.
“I have to go,” Checker said. “I have to go, we have to go, of course we have to go—”
“Wait.” My brain was dragging itself out of its sludge and suddenly processing very fast. Very fast, dredging up memory, running every algorithmic comparison I could find …
“No,” Checker cried. “We have to—to figure out what we, and we have to go, he’ll kill her—”
“Wait,” I repeated. Wrong, wrong, wrong, sang the algorithms in my head, spitting out high-probability mismatches. “Wait. This is going to sound—I don’t even know. But I’m not sure that was D.J.”
“You—what?”
I’d only met D.J. briefly before …
“Were you recording?” The way he’d adjusted things before picking up, I had a suspicion. Checker was security-conscious to a fault. He nodded and quickly tapped at the screen to play the phone conversation again, the voices coming tinnily from the speaker.
I was sure this time.
“The cadence is off,” I said. “The voice is disguised, but the sinusoidal features of the intonation—there’s a vanishingly low probability this is the same person.”
“But then who…?” said Checker. “What—why—”
“I don’t know. Do you have anyone else in your past who’d want to kill you and everyone you care about?”
He inhaled sharply and looked away.
I hadn’t meant the question as a dig. But we didn’t have time to dwell on it—because whoever had called us had just made a very big mistake.
Either they didn’t know what I could do, or they’d underestimated it.
I told you it was a gift, murmured Valarmathi.
A fragile bubble of hope wobbled up in me. Our enemy wasn’t infallible. They’d made a mistake, and they didn’t know what I could do, and oh, fuck, maybe this gave us a chance after all. I hadn’t been able to save Coach, but like Checker had said … that didn’t mean we couldn’t make this one last desperate dive after Tabitha.
It wasn’t about proving myself to anybody. Not anymore. It wasn’t about me at all.
“Get on your computers,” I said. I dug in my pocket and tossed him Coach’s phone. “See what you can do with that too. I’ll get Pilar inside and then join you.”
“Cas, he said—he said to come now; what if—”
I pointed at the streets. “It’s rush hour. That gives us a magically expandable amount of time to prepare. Let’s not waste it.”
* * *
I HURRIED in getting Pilar into the house. Whoever had called us …
They didn’t know