of my skin, and dialed with fingers that didn’t want to obey me.
Pick up, pick up, pick up—
“Hello,” Rio answered blandly.
I hadn’t realized how much I needed to hear his unruffled greeting. Everyone at Diego’s house was safe, at least. I tried to breathe through the residual fear the way Simon had told us.
“It’s Cas,” I managed after a beat too long. “Is everything okay there?”
“There is no sign of any new danger. What did you learn from your mission?”
My mission to the mission. I struggled to cut through the static in my brain. “We found Arthur … Pilar is getting him to the hospital.”
“I am aware. She called Mr. Rosales with an update.”
Of course she had. Because Pilar was not me, and remembered to tell his family he had been found, and was alive.
“Rio, I—”
“Cas, it strikes me that allowing your friend Mr. Tresting’s rescue was not the aim of this exercise.”
“I know. I just saw the—the man, one of Teplova’s—”
“Where are you?” he asked immediately.
“You need to stay with Arthur’s family,” I snapped back. “Don’t even think about leaving them. Rio, I’m at the police station. The one where Checker was—can you tell me if he’s still here? D.J. was a friend of his, if he sent…”
I couldn’t finish the thought.
“A moment,” Rio said.
The thirty seconds it took him to look up the information felt like an eternity. My hand that wasn’t holding the phone clenched and unclenched.
“He is still being held in the same precinct,” Rio confirmed. “Cas, if this man is there to attack your friend—”
“I’ll destroy him.”
“Cas, it appears you are still feeling the effects of having glimpsed him. Your frame of mind may not be best suited to a rescue.”
“Only because Simon won’t answer his goddamn phone.”
“He may have a situation of his own. Cas, there was an incident reported at the building where you left Simon and Oscar. The police were dispatched. I have as yet not been able to reach Simon.”
Oh. Oh, no. “What kind of incident?”
“Reports vary thus far, but they believe it to have been an explosive device.”
Of course it fucking was.
Maybe this wasn’t just about Checker, then. Maybe D.J. had also wanted to rescue—fuck, Rio had just said—Oscar, right. Fuck, I had to remember him.
But only Simon had been with Oscar. For that, the rest of us wouldn’t have needed to be spread thin and lured away.
“I do not yet have intelligence on whether Simon or Oscar was a casualty of the explosion, or whether it even occurred in the apartment in which you left them,” Rio continued. “But if not, it seems an unlikely coincidence. The police are on scene now.”
“I can’t leave here,” I said.
But even if I camped out watching all night … whatever role the monstrous, altered man played, he hadn’t been D.J.’s go-to assassination method. Nightmares of ticking timers danced in my mind’s eye.
I could watch every second from now on and never see a deadly blast coming. Not if it had been planted while I was conveniently out of the way.
“Rio, how can I tell if something explosive has been left here at the station, before I drove in? The sensors don’t pick up everything.”
“It is impossible to be certain, but I usually find a combination of technology, close observation, and prior knowledge can suffice to warn me of explosives.”
I only had the first one. I could trade places with Rio—he might have a better chance against one of Teplova’s villains too—but that left the station unprotected for far too long while I drove to Diego’s house and then Rio drove back. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave Diego and the kids without a guardian.
“I could break him out,” I said. “If it’s a choice between getting him in deep shit with the law and getting him blown to tiny bits—”
“Might I suggest that it would be better for your friend’s situation if the police move him to an unexpected location instead?”
That would at least give us a clean slate on the explosives danger. “But why would they…”
I got it even as Rio spoke. “I am capable of calling in a credible bomb threat. It may take some little time, but it will be taken seriously.”
My eyes strayed to Pilar’s Yaris, still parked in front of the station. “I may be able to speed that up,” I said. “Make it more credible. So to speak.”
twenty
THERE’S A certain finesse in setting a bomb you don’t actually want to go off and