The Detachment

talented,” he said, and it was incongruous enough to make me realize it must have been another line from the movie.
    “And they are so dumb,” Dox said, confirming my suspicion. They both laughed, and I thought maybe they would be okay now. He wasn’t a man you’d want to fuck with, but laugh at Dox’s jokes and chances were good you’d have a friend for life.
    Treven, though, was still an open question. I slid the gun back into my waistband. Treven hesitated, but then followed suit.
    “Let’s try to stay chilly,” I said. “We have enough people trying to kill us just now without doing the job for them.” Dox and Larison were still laughing, so the message was mostly for Treven. And, I supposed, for myself.
    I briefed them on my conversation with Kanezaki. We all agreed that, overall, our safest move was to stay put until we met him in the garage.
    “I should have known these targets and this thing were too big for them to leave us alone afterward,” Dox said. “I let the damn money cloud my reason.”
    No one spoke. Dox looked at Larison. “I believe you’ve earned the right to say ‘I told you so.’”
    Larison shook his head. “The question is, what do we do now?”
    “Exactly,” Treven said. “Wherever your guy takes us, all right, we’re out of the crosshairs, at least for the moment, but what do we do then?”
    I turned to Larison. “You said you had a way of getting to Horton.”
    He nodded. “If you’re really ready to hear it.”
    I looked at him. “I am.”
    “Okay, then. We’re going to need your friend’s car. Not just to get out of the area. To get back to Los Angeles.”

L arison briefed us on the vulnerability he had discovered. It was Horton’s daughter.
    “She’s a film school grad student at UCLA,” he explained. “Name is Mimi Kei. Parents are divorced and she uses her mother’s maiden name. The mother’s Japanese.”
    “But I checked him out on Wikipedia,” I said. “When you first mentioned his name, in Tokyo. There wasn’t much outside a few highlights of his military career, but it said he’s divorced with no children.”
    “He doesn’t want people to know about her,” Larison said. “He has a lot of enemies. That’s probably why she uses her mother’s name. Makes it that much harder for anyone to make the connection.”
    “Well, how did you make it?” Dox asked.
    Larison smiled. “I always knew if I ever got exposed and someone came after me, it would be Hort, and I wanted an insurance policy against that possibility. So after I pulled my little disappearing act, but before I made my move with the torture tapes, I tracked him. Caught a lucky break, observed him having lunch one day with a pretty young woman in downtown D.C. Followed her back to Georgetown University. Spent some time on Facebook and found her. Her page was privacy protected, but it was easy enough to use the name to confirm she was an undergrad at Georgetown, to track the name Kei to Hort’s failed marriage, and then to do some judicious social engineering to get her to accept a friend request from a Facebook profile I created. I can tell you from her photo page that she’s close with both her parents. And more importantly, that Hort dotes on her. You should see his face in the photos of them together. I guarantee you, take her as collateral, and Hort will do anything we tell him.”
    I realized that an hour earlier, I had reacted with anger and disgust that the plotters were threatening someone’s family. And yet here I was, contemplating the same. I had two routes of rationalization available: first, that unlike Schmalz, Horton had brought this on himself. Second, that unlike those of the plotters, our threats against Mimi Kei would be bluffs.
    I looked at Larison’s expression, and realized we weren’t going to see eye to eye on that last point. I would have to watch him. Closely.
    “And she’s at UCLA now?” I asked.
    Larison nodded. “Second-year this fall. Taking summer classes even as we speak. I’ve been keeping tabs.”
    “That’s why he knows L.A. so well,” I said. “I wondered about that the two times I met him there. In fact, he suggested L.A. to me. I first thought he was just proposing it as a convenient point between Washington and Tokyo, but no. He was looking for an excuse to visit his daughter.”
    Larison smiled again. “His little girl.”
    “All right,” Treven said, “but what’s the play? We don’t know where she lives, we don’t