Chapter 322

The windshield exploded in a starburst pattern where the rock struck, smaller than a golf ball but thrown with enough force to startle us both into silence. The sedan swerved around a boy in jean shorts, who stood psychopathically unmoved by the oncoming car as he bent down to grab another projectile from his pile of assorted rubble.

Air rushed in as the driver’s side window opened and Jackson stuck his head out to holler. “You trying to die, three-foot-nothin?”

The boy’s answer came in the form of another rock, thrown with all the give-a-shit of pre-adolescence. It fell yards short, skipping down the street until it caught something uneven and tumbled into a pile of debris.

“Where are we?” I asked, finally setting the laptop aside and twisting around in my seat to watch the kid. Passing car attended to, he’d climbed back to his perch in the bed of a rusted-out truck, returning to his vigil with unsettling focus. Something about it put me off. Latchkey vandals weren’t uncommon around the metroplex, you didn’t have to look too far to find one, even in the before days.

Difference was, they usually chose their locations better. Hurled artillery from the safety of high bridges over abandoned maintenance roads, targets scattered and spread out over time. Not walking directly towards a moving car and hurling debris at it, all but taunting the target to accelerate and run you down in return.

“Still a ways off. Once we’re in, we’ll be skirting the nineteen-twenty DMZ from the nineteen side.”

I fought the urge to tap my fingers, to fidget. In theory, I was in a much better position now. No longer purely on defense. But with Miles going so far out of his way to monitor and pin me down, time was slipping away. And I had no real leads when it came to running down my safety net.

It didn’t necessarily mean anything. Maybe the kid was just fed up. Maybe Jackson had it right.

Still, the dichotomy was striking enough that I forwent the laptop entirely for the moment and start paying attention to our surroundings. Probably for the best. It was exactly the type of thing I’d obsess over, if I gave myself enough leeway to do so.

Not that I had any fucking idea what I was looking for.

An older man on a park bench we passed had no surface-level thoughts pertaining to the galleria or its thefts. Neither did the vagrant, or the mother and daughter exiting the bodega, their eyes tracking our slow-rolling car with the wariness of prey animals.

“We are being noticed,” Jackson observed.

“Not a lot of alternatives.” I murmured, giving the mother and daughter a second look. It wasn’t so long ago that I’d disregarded a similar pair hopping into the back of an SUV, and I’d lost count of the ways that particular lapse had come back to haunt me. The car approached a no-outlet, still cruising at five miles under the posted twenty-five. “Turn left, then left again.”

“Grid search?” Jackson guessed.

“Kind of.” Unfortunately, this was the best option I could think of. The Galleria’s theft issue, as the Steward described it on paper, was too extensive to be the work of a single thief. From the quantities we’d discussed, and the elevated payout of the quest he’d assigned me, it almost had to be a ring. And while it was always easier to track down a group of people than to find a single individual, we were dealing with two large, hostile regions forming a substantial slice of territory to cover.

“It’d be easier if you read me in.” Jackson’s words came clipped, the subtle hints he’d been dropping all morning finally giving way to direct confrontation.

“I like you, Jackson. Hence, me trying to keep you away from my shit.”

“Respectfully, Mr. Client, I’m already in your shit.”

“Are you now?” I asked, divesting myself of the view of the painfully dismal street to eye Jackson again. Beyond his loyalty to the almighty dollar, he hadn’t really done anything to invite suspicion. He’d gone over and above on the Adventurer’s Guild drop, but not too far. Good instincts.

“We’ve spent enough time together to fill in the blanks that you’re well-connected. You have open lines of communication with multiple high-level contacts. On good enough terms with the boss that she just lets you roam around her sanctuary freely. And while I don’t believe for a minute that you’re ‘just’ a communications broker, you’re clearly competent enough at it to give a dedicated cynic pause.”

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“Thought you liked Sera.”

He shook his head at me, frustration evident in the set of his jaw. “That’s cause I do like her, misdirecting motherfucker. It’s not impossible to see someone, observe that they’re jaded on account of experience, and still want to take ’em out for a matinee and a bucket of popcorn.” Jackson’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel as he attempted to return to the matter at hand. “Point being—”

I interrupted, not wanting to go through the bother of creating a lie to explain why this was an effective method of search. “Pretty sure, from how Sera came onto you, she wasn’t interested in a matinee.”