you sure?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure I’m sure. She’s coming back with something, no question.”
“She doesn’t have her invisible friend anymore,” Checker said. “She probably used to use him to set things. Like at your place, Cas.”
“What invisible friend?” D.J. said.
“His name was Oscar,” I answered. “Asian Australian, not altogether with it. Someone you know?”
“Oh, Oscar Lee?” D.J. said. “The washed-up med student? Gotta be. God, what a whiny bitch that guy was. I suggested she kill him, or at the very least break up with him, but she dug being worshipped. I mentioned the ego, right?”
“Wait, they were a couple?” Checker asked. “How—”
D.J. waved a hand. “Yes, yes, of course you’re asking yourselves why she was in some insipid hetero relationship when she could’ve been hitting on me, but this dude would do literally anything for her. She’d test that sometimes when she was drunk—blew half his face off once and he still stuck with her.”
“Not anymore,” I muttered.
Oscar’s history got more horrific the more I learned about it. I couldn’t recall his face terribly well, but I didn’t think he’d had obvious scarring—that wouldn’t be forgettable. Which implied all sorts of things. He’d apparently been with Fifer before she’d decided to go after Teplova’s outfit—and then maybe Fifer had told him she’d repair the damage and instead made him disappear. If no one else could ever know he existed, he’d worship her forever, with no other option unless he wanted to fade from the world completely.
I pushed aside my disgusted pity for another time.
“So, if she doesn’t have the person who helped her set things, what’s her plan?” I said. “And more importantly, how do we stop it?”
“Fifer’s about six thousand percent more psycho than I am,” D.J. said blithely. “But if it were me…”
Checker muttered something under his breath. D.J. flicked his shoulder and then went on as if there had been no interruption.
“If it were me, I’d blow something next door or down the street. The cops all run to help, chaos galore, and she can sneak in with a nice little boom stick and whack your pals. Kill a few other prisoners along with ’em, and it might not even be obvious who she wanted out of the way, though I’m guessing that ship sailed with the BLEVE.”
“We could stake out the station…” Checker suggested.
I checked my watch. Thirty-three minutes since Fifer had called. We might have a little more breathing room since she’d so recently been down at the station rather than waiting for us in person, but not much.
“We’re going to need to split up,” I said.
“You on one team, D.J. on the other,” Checker added. “You’re the only two who’d have a shot at disarming things.”
“I’ll go after Tabitha,” I said. “You two head down to the station.”
“With any luck, she’s still going to be hanging around the station now, and it’ll give you a window for a rescue,” Checker pointed out. “We can keep updating you if we get a bead on her. Fifer is claiming she’s got Tabitha at the Barberry Canyon bridge.”
“And whether she’s there in person or not, I’m guessing the biggest things to worry about are going to be bombs or more of the dogs,” I said. Or their human counterparts. Depending on who Fifer had made—or could co-opt.
Crap. I’d momentarily thought having D.J. along would give me an edge. Not only on the explosives—as much as I could leverage theory and logic and place my bets that way, I didn’t have his expertise—but also in throwing Fifer off her game, predicting her next steps. Without a wild card like him, and without someone like Simon …
Fifer was baiting us in with Tabitha, but her setup would be designed to kill us all before we got her hostage out. I would have put money on it. But we were running out of time to come up with anything better than dashing after Tabitha headlong.
The sudden breakthrough of information had made me so sure we could come up with something better—some way of coming at her weak points, taking advantage of what we now knew …
“Did you say Barberry Canyon?” D.J. asked. He cocked his head at us. “During the day? You guys know this is a trap, right?”
“Of course it’s a trap,” I said. “But our friend—”
“No, I mean, like, sure she’s probably rigged the whole bridge to do something spectacular, but the kid you’re after won’t be there. Remember, Charles? We used to goof off there all the