Zero Sum Game Read Free Page A

be turning into a spectacular rainbow of color by this point. Or maybe he saw brown skin and thought I was a terrorist—I’ve been told I look kind of Middle Eastern. Goddamn racial profiling.
    I tried to smile at him, but it ended up more like a scowl.
    The clerk finally got off the phone and stammered his way into assigning us a room on the first floor. He dropped the key twice trying to give it to me, and then dropped the cash I gave him when he tried to pick the bills up off the counter. If he’d known I’d pulled the money from a succession of stolen cars that night, he probably would’ve been even more nervous.
    I pulled Courtney back into the sunlight after me, where we found the right door and let ourselves into a stock cheap-and-dirty motel room, the type with furnishings made of stapled-together cardboard. Apparently relieved by my promise to help her, Courtney zonked out almost before her frizzy head smacked against the pillows on one of the dingy beds. I tossed the cigarette-burned bedspread over her and went to push open the door to the small washroom.
    A gun barrel appeared in my face. “Howdy,” said the black cop from the compound from where he sat on the toilet tank. “I think we need to have a talk.”
    Well, shit.
    No matter how much math I know, and no matter how fast my body is trained to respond automatically to it, I can’t move faster than a bullet. Of course, if the cop had been within reach, I could have disarmed him before he could fire—but the bathroom was just large enough for the math to err on his side, considering he already had his gun drawn and pointed at my center of mass.
    “Don’t mind me,” I said, inching forward and trying for flippancy. “I’m just going to use the—”
    His hand moved slightly, and I froze.
    “Good,” he said. “You stand still now, sweetheart. You move and I’ll put a bullet through your kidney.”
    I knew two things about him now. First, he was smart, because not only had he tracked us here and then gotten into our bathroom before we had reached the room, but he also wasn’t underestimating me. Second, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about proper police procedure, which either meant he was a very dangerous cop or a very dirty one—or both.
    I let my hands hover upward, showing I wasn’t going for a weapon. “I’m not moving.”
    “Pithica,” he said. “Talk.”
    “You have me confused with someone else,” I said. Mathematics erupted around me, layering over itself, possibilities rising and crumbling away as the solutions all came up a hair short of the time the handsome cop needed to pull the trigger.
    “Talk,” said the cop. “Or I shoot you and break your pet out there.”
    Courtney. Shit. Stall. “Okay,” I said. “What do you want to know?”
    In the bathroom mirror, I saw the rising sun peek above the sill and through the almost-drawn curtains.
    Specular reflection. Angles of incidence. Perfect. As long as the cop wasn’t going to fire blind, I had him. Hands still raised in the air in apparent surrender, I twitched my left wrist.
    At the speed of light, the glint of sunlight came in through the window, hit the bathroom mirror, and reflected in a tight beam from the polished face of my wristwatch right into the cop’s eyes.
    He moved fast, blinking and ducking his head away, but I moved faster. I dodged to the side as I dove in, my right hand swinging out to take the gun off line. My fingers wrapped around his wrist and I yanked, the numbers whirling and settling to give me the perfect fulcrum as I leveraged off my grasp on his gun hand to leap upward and give him a spinning knee to the side of the head.
    The cop collapsed, out cold, his face smacking inelegantly into the grimy bathroom floor.
    I checked the gun. Fully loaded with a round in the chamber, as I’d expected. I gave it points for being a nice hefty .45 with an extended magazine, and points off for being a Glock. Typical cop. I hate Glocks.
    I searched him