his work apart, and now he has to see me to keep patching it up, so I don’t go crazy and die again. That’s it.”
“My God, how have you not—” She cut herself off, but I had the distinct feeling the end of that sentence was going to be, “killed him,” which was … uncharacteristically violent of Pilar. “I didn’t know,” she said instead. “I’m so sorry.”
But she didn’t sound pitying. She sounded angry, and not just passingly angry, but an intense, deep kind of fury I’d only seen in her once before.
“I’m over it,” I said, not strictly truthfully. “We need him. I need him. And he’s been behaving. Water, bridges. Don’t shoot him, please.”
“I won’t.” The promise was immediate but grim, like she gave it while contemplating all the ways she could make Simon’s life hell without shooting him.
Touching of her, but also annoying. “Follow my lead,” I said. “No shooting, no maiming, no conspiring with Checker to make him miserable. Don’t dig it all up again.”
“All right. I’ll do—if you want me to. I can be civil.”
She could, too. She was always civil to Rio, despite putting a hand on her weapon every time she saw him. And I knew she hadn’t forgiven him.
* * *
THE MISSION was a little ways outside the urban sprawl. Between the lack of city lights and the hour, the darkness had begun pressing in on us as the road wound through dry hills.
“What’s the plan?” asked Pilar, as we drew nearer.
“I take point, you watch our six,” I answered. “If there are more ‘dogs,’ or any humans like them, Simon will just have to start talking as fast as possible.”
“And if it’s rigged with bombs and stuff?” Pilar said. “We might not be able to see that, will we?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a risk. Are you sure you want to go in?”
She touched her holster. “Yes.”
I thought back to the other times D.J. and I had crossed paths, what his setups had been like. “Watch where you put your feet,” I said. “This guy is in the cool-but-lazy school of thought—”
“Like Checker,” Pilar said absently.
“What?”
“Oh, I just mean, I mean Checker’s sort of like that, isn’t he?” Pilar said. “Never mind.”
Checker had never struck me as lazy, but then, the only things I’d ever seen him doing were things he was already obsessed with. I thought of him climbing the walls in police interrogation again. He’d be miserable.
Shit.
“You were saying?” Pilar prompted. “Watch where I put my feet?”
“Yeah,” I said, wrenching my thoughts back onto the rails. The headlights cut through the darkness ahead of us, the barest hints of scenery flashing by on the periphery. “D.J. likes elegance, and he likes showing off. If I’m remembering right, he’s the type who might even show off at the expense of efficiency, which is good for us—it gives us an extra margin of possibility to spot anything he has set. Try to step only on ground unlikely to have a pressure sensor, like asphalt and cement, if possible. And keep your eye out. If you see anything, freeze where you are until I can look at it.”
“Okay,” Pilar said. “Am I looking for anything specific? Would it be like in the movies, um, wires and sticks of dynamite and blinking lights?”
“Probably not the blinking lights,” I said.
Except D.J. might. Of all the people in the world, he might.
I sighed. “Maybe, but probably not. And dynamite is less stable than plastic explosives, but this might have been set up as a short-term snare anyway. Plus, you saw the binary at Teplova’s—I’d say it’s safe to assume that was him, and he very well might have something else we’ve never seen before. Use your imagination, and tell me right away if you see anything.”
“Got it.” In the dimness of the car, I saw her press the palms of her hands against her thighs.
But if she was up for this, I wasn’t going to turn her down.
I’d gotten some gear from Rio, including the KRISS Vector with a night-vision scope for the rail, a wand he said was good for registering explosive material about eighty-five percent of the time, and an independent GPS unit we were following to the mission address. Half a mile out, I pulled the e-brake and hairpinned the Yaris in a smooth one-eighty to point the other way, then took us off the shoulder onto dry grass before turning off the engine.
Pilar had slapped a hand against the dash when I