Critical Point (Cas Russell #3) - S. L. Huang Page 0,3
being flat on his back, tried to scramble to his feet and dash away. I snatched up a piece of wood rubble from the explosion and threw it.
And missed.
What the hell? I never missed. One hundred percent accuracy was one of the perks of having a freakish mathematical superpower. I picked up another piece of debris, concentrated, and tried again. This time the board smacked him against the back of the knees, and his feet flew up, landing him on his back for the second time in thirty seconds.
“You!” I shouted, bearing down on him. My voice sounded strange and tinny. Also, my head hurt. “You just tried to get me killed!”
He mouthed something at me.
I grabbed him by the neck and slammed his head into the gravel. “Who are you?”
His jaw worked frantically, as if he were trying to form words, and he stabbed one finger repeatedly at the side of his head like a jackhammer.
Ears. Right.
The car alarms I was hearing weren’t from far away. They were right next to me.
I yanked the guy to his feet and levered one of his arms behind his back to force him along with me. His face contorted in pain as he stumbled to keep up. I brought us to a car that wasn’t mine and shoved him to the ground while I jacked it open; glass showered down onto the seats. I shoved my new friend into the back, brushed the glass off the driver’s seat, and pried open the dash to touch the right two wires together.
The car thrummed to life beneath us. I couldn’t hear it.
Neighbors were starting to poke their heads out. An Armenian guy in an apron who was probably the owner of the car came running, waving his arms, but I was already pulling out, skidding in a 360 to squeal out of the parking lot. At least, I was pretty sure we squealed. My head felt like it was wrapped in wool, muffling all sound to almost nothing. A high ringing phased in over it, as if trying to prove the point.
Christ, I’d have to start tracking my hearing damage. Between firefights and explosives, I was pretty sure some of it was becoming permanent.
We had to switch cars fast; it wasn’t like we could stay under the police radar with all our windows blown out. I swerved into an underground garage beneath a run-down apartment building, and within minutes, we were driving back out in a much less conspicuous sedan. In the chaos I’d almost forgotten to haul my prisoner along in the car swap, but he’d tried to run again and I’d clotheslined him into the front passenger seat.
I texted Checker with one hand as I drove:
Office blew up
On the run
Burning this phone
In touch soon
Then I popped the battery out, dropped the phone out the window, and lost us in the summer heat of Los Angeles traffic.
My prisoner moaned next to me, reminding me again that he was there. He tried to reach for the car door handle, but I punched him in the throat.
“No, no,” he wheezed between bouts of coughing. “You don’t see me!”
“Of course I do,” I said. “You blew up my office!”
Come to that, where the hell should I go with him?
Aside from my office, I exchanged monthly cash payments for plenty of shabby little apartments around LA which doubled as both safe houses and interchangeable living spaces. Arthur had also tried to get me to stick to a semipermanent address, but I absolutely had never seen the point to that.
I had to get to Arthur’s office and home and check them, but what if those were rigged too? What if the explosion had to do with his disappearance? How likely was that? After all, I had plenty of enemies who’d be more than happy to blow me to kingdom come, and they had nothing to do with Arthur.
The grasping hands of my past reared up again. Flashes of fragmented memory had given shape to doctors and drugs, training and cruelty. Someone had been honing me—honing a lot of us—but I still didn’t know who or why. Only that they had been frighteningly similar to the people who called themselves Pithica, the mind witches who’d eventually claimed themselves puppet masters of the world until I’d been dumb enough to throw a spanner into their works.
Or maybe it’s closer to home. Maybe someone in the city found out about you screwing them all in the head.