Free Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) by SL Huang Page B

didn’t seem complete, and after looking at her contracts I doubted they were related to her work for Arkacite. I snapped a few pictures of her notes anyway, on the off chance Checker could give me more insight once I decided to speak to him again.
    Then, after a moment’s internal debate, I unscrewed and slid out her hard drive. With enough time to work at it I’d be able to get in without Checker’s help, and if I came back to talk to Rayal, she wouldn’t know I was the thief, so no harm done. Given what I’d seen in her file cabinet, she’d probably assume it was cat burglars in ski masks hired by Arkacite.
    I turned to let myself out—it was getting late, and I had a meeting with a man who would probably try to kill me—but one more picture caught my eye. The photo was in a printout of an email tacked to Rayal’s bulletin board, and showed a posed group of eight people on the plaza in front of Arkacite’s headquarters, with Denise on one end. Next to her, a wiry Indian guy sporting a cheeky grin held up a device behind the head of the pudgy Asian man on his other side, and whatever it was he held had flashed two clever little forks of lightning at the camera as it went off—electronic bunny ears.
    The email below it started with Rayal and then threaded through several responses:
    Vikash, if you don’t stop trolling the team photos I’ll give the Bulgaria conference to Adrian.
    Come on, you think it’s just as funny as I do!!! And Adrian is a tool.
    It must kill you that he’s beating you on bug fixes right now, then. Chop chop.
    Of everything I had seen in this house, the psychiatric meds and the dead son and the files full of claustrophobic NDAs, Rayal’s decision to tack up this printout on her bulletin board somehow felt the most profoundly sad. This woman had loved her work and loved the people in it. And in the last six months, she’d lost everything.
    Including, quite possibly, a daughter.
    I tucked the hard drive and the camera’s memory card in my pocket and slipped out the back door into the darkening evening, locking up behind me like the considerate little thief I was.

C HAPTER 8
    A FTER A quick stop by one of my storage units, I reached Grealy’s about twenty minutes after nine and parked down the street. Normally I was late for appointments, but not when I had an ambush to set up.
    I cruised into the dive of a restaurant, ordered a drink at the bar, and took it to a corner booth. The bar was in its usual state of smoke-filled semi-darkness; California’s anti-nicotine laws were flagrantly violated here, probably because most patrons were conducting business far more illegal than lighting up inside an eating establishment. I sat observing the few other customers over my untouched tumbler of whiskey, my senses drawing out their fields of view in overlapping angles, the mathematics bouncing off the mirrored wall behind the bar and the chrome edges of the greasy oyster buffet under the heat lamps. Binocular vision, monocular vision, reflections, blind spots—the instant everything aligned to make me invisible to everyone in the room, I stood up and stuck a small convex mirror on top of the decorative molding above my head.
    Mathematics. The poor man’s invisibility cloak.
    Then I dumped my whiskey out onto the floor under my chair—this place was not exactly resplendent in its cleanliness; no one would notice—abandoned the empty glass on the table, and left.
    I stopped back at my car to retrieve a bag of gear and then ambled to the building across the street. Directly opposite Grealy’s was a first-floor club shaking the street with terrible, bass-heavy music under a few stories of rundown apartments. I’d already evaluated the lines of sight to know where I needed to be. I trekked into the alley at the side of the building, shouldered my gear, and vaulted into the dumpster.
    The noisome odor of decomposition and filth clogged my nostrils, and my boots slipped on splitting, oozing bags