Dragon: Out of the Box (The Girl in the Box Book 37)

by Robert J. Crane

  Looking around, I saw a couple of the techs watching my bloodhound act. Well, who could blame them? At least if I didn't get down on all fours and sniff the sidewalk, I might not add too much weirdness to my legend today.

  Now that the sun was down, it was getting a little cooler. I thrust my hands into the pocket of my jacket, feeling fortunate I had it now, and shuffled after the oily smell, wondering how far it would lead me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I had made it a block and just crossed the yellow crime scene tape when heavy footfalls on the sidewalk behind me made me stop and turn, hand tensed over my gun.

  “Wait up!” Bilson puffed, jogging the last hundred feet or so to me. He had his cell phone clutched firmly in hand, suit jacket open and his tie askew. He caught up to me where I waited, then stopped. To his credit, he didn't put his hands on his knees and puff openly. Just looked me in the eye and asked, “Where you going?”

  “I...caught a scent,” I said, reddening a little as I was forced to speak that aloud. “A smell I got from the perp in the furniture store earlier.” I raised my phone and pulled up the GPS map from the Volvo. “Based on the time stamp, I'm guessing he hid out in the woods behind the store until he had a clear shot, then came and grabbed the Volvo to make his escape.” It had probably been easy, too, he'd just waited until Hilton and I had retreated back inside to wait for the local cops, then took it and bailed. I hadn't really registered it during my scouting of the parking lot, focusing instead on that Ford Taurus.

  “Wow, this is so interesting,” Bilson said, looking at my phone and the map on it of the Volvo's path for the last couple days. “What now?” He looked up at me, expectantly.

  “Well, I'm gonna...follow my nose,” I said lamely. “See where it goes.”

  He nodded. “Great. Lead on.” He paused there for a second, then said, “I was thinking about your situation, and I came up with more that I think can help you. You know, besides the social media bit. Sort of a hundred-point restoration for your public image.”

  I stared at him blankly. “Uh...like what?”

  “There's a lot of things you could do to improve your public perception.” He started ticking them off on his fingers. “Be more public with your face. Do a PSA for kids on some white-hot issue, like vaping. Smooth out your interactions with others by paying attention to the general rules of sociability–”

  “Wait, what?” I had a feeling I knew what was coming here, but I couldn't just stop him.

  He paused, giving it a thought. “You know, develop charisma, both in person and with the camera.”

  “How...how do I do that?” Trying to focus on both the oily smell and Bilson's advice was not easy, and the advice was winning the war for my attention.

  “It's a process,” he said jovially. “The biggest thing you can do? Smile more.”

  I took a slow breath. “Hey, uh, can we put a pin in this until later? Also, can you stand back? This guy's smell is distinctive, but your cologne...”

  Bilson paused, looked down at himself. “Oh. Yes. Sorry. We'll talk more later. I think this could really help you, though.”

  “I'm sure it could.” Also to his credit, Bilson didn't spray himself in his cologne, unlike some guys I'd met. It seemed he dabbed, and not in the Millennial/Gen-Z way. I could still smell him, but now the oily scent was primary in my nose, and I began walking along the sidewalk, the row homes standing dark and empty to my left.

  We crossed an abandoned street, and ahead I could see at least two of the houses on the next block were lit. I wasn't sure whether to take that as a good sign or a bad one, but I hoped it was good. Maybe a hint that the neighborhood – and our fortunes – were improving.

  Old, rickety fences separated the overgrown yards from the street. A lot of garbage had been dumped here, and I wondered who would do such a thing. Did they just decide that they needed to get rid of trash, and any old place would work? Because there were bags of the stuff, like someone had just decided to make some of these yards their personal landfill.

  I supposed that garbage collection services of the sort at my apartment cost money, and if you were down on your luck, it was a lot cheaper to just haul your crap to an abandoned neighborhood and give it the old heave ho into an overgrown yard. Still, that sensibility offended my desire for cleanliness and order. I shook it off, trying to ignore the smell of the waste in favor of the oily scent, drifting down the cracked sidewalk past one of the lit houses as I continued to make like Toucan Sam and follow my nose.

  “How far do you suppose it is?” Bilson whispered, probably twenty feet behind me. It was another mark in his favor that he didn't yell it, but even a whisper was like a normal voice to a meta. If Firebeetle Bailey happened to be nearby, he'd probably heard it. Of course, he could have just dumped the Volvo and grabbed an Uber out of here, hoping the car would be picked apart by the time we found it. Or just not cared if we found it, because he'd cleaned it up first.

  I shrugged, then held a finger to my lips to hush him. I doubted my foe was just hanging out, but weirder things had occurred in my criminal-hunting life. As I glanced back at Bilson, I realized we'd come a long way from the police cordon. Probably a couple hundred yards. Peering into the darkness, I noticed a couple uniformed Baltimore cops about halfway back to the yellow tape. They were heading this way, shadows in the dark.

  Torn between waiting for them to catch up and proceeding in my search, I split the difference and kept walking and sniffing. I'd made it about thirty, forty more yards when suddenly the scent faded. I stopped, sniffing.

  Bilson's footsteps stopped behind me as well. He said nothing, though.

  I took a few steps back. The scent grew stronger. I was playing the hot/cold game, and was getting warmer. This is where the trail moved off the sidewalk, I realized, and turned.

  A dark row home stood empty and looming in front of me, windows all broken out. It was a two-story building, sandwiched between similar ones on either side. Two doors down was the lit house, and as the Baltimore cops caught up to us, I gestured for them to be quiet and come closer.

  “Hobbs,” one of them introduced himself, then pointed to his partner, “and McGee.” Both were African-American, one I guessed to be in his twenties, the other in his early thirties, at most. Young guns.

  “You know my name?” I asked, and caught the Duh! look from both.

  “Saw you moving away,” Hobbs said. “Thought maybe you might need some backup.”

  “Yeah, I'm following a trail,” I said. “I'm going to take a look in this house, but I need someone to knock on that door.” I pointed at the lit house two doors down. “Ask them if they've seen anything. But I need you to be quiet. Metas can hear for miles around them.” A slight exaggeration, but it'd get the point across.

  “You think your suspect is in there?” McGee spoke up. His voice was a little higher than I would have expected, a nice falsetto that would probably sound great in a choir.

  “I doubt it,” I said, “more likely he decided to cut through to the next street after coming across an inhabited building.” That seemed plausible. If Firebeetle Bailey was out here to dump his car, he probably hadn't wanted to leave a clear and easy trail to follow. “I'm going to take a look, though.”

  Hobbs nodded, then looked at McGee. Without saying a word, they launched into a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. McGee deployed paper against Hobbs's rock, then pumped his fist in victory. Hobbs, looking a little dispirited, started heading toward the lit-up house, presumably to knock on the door.

  I watched the whole thing with barely-veiled disbelief. First, that McGee was excited to hang with me, and secondly:

  “I have never understood how paper can beat a rock,” I said, shaking my head. “Doesn't it seem like you could just drop a rock through a sheet of paper?”

  McGee nodded sagely. “But it doesn't work unless something can beat rock. Otherwise it's like a nuclear weapon.”

  Bilson was shaking his head in either dismay or disbe
lief at our conversation. “Keep an eye on the civilian here, McGee,” I said, lightly jumping over the gate and heading up the cracked concrete path to the house's front door.

  “Roger that,” McGee whispered, and I heard his hand brush against his duty weapon. Apparently I wasn't the only one feeling nervous in a dark and abandoned neighborhood.

  I carefully minded my footsteps as I picked my way up the path to the front door. Whoever had been using this neighborhood as a dumping ground had done their chucking all willy nilly, and as a result the trash was strewn everywhere. This forced me to be very careful where I stepped, lest I turn an ankle on something or crush a discarded Coke can loudly and warn whoever was in the area I was coming.

  Of course, all the whispering going on between me, Bilson and the cops might have already given us away, but I lived in hope that some element of surprise remained on my side. Mostly because thus far, Firebeetle Bailey had proven to be a tough fight.

  I steered around a big black trash bag that had burst, leaving soiled diapers, a jug caked with rotten milk and a bunch of empty cans strewn across my path. I was trying to follow my nose, but now the stink of rot was beginning to interfere. I caught a whiff of the diapers and nearly gagged, soldiering on and trying to keep my nose focused on the oily undertones.

  The smell seemed to lead to the front door, and I reached it shortly, catching a huge whiff of the oily smell coming off it. It was ajar, and had me wondering how long it had been this way. Pressing my nose right up to the crack, I sniffed within.

  Yep. He'd gone into the house.

  With a quick glance back at Bilson and McGee, I signaled that I was entering the house. Hopefully Firebeetle had moved through and gone out the back door, but I was well aware that he could be squatting within, though it was hard to imagine an agent of Chinese Intelligence – if that's what he was – deciding to use an abandoned house in Baltimore as a crash pad.

  I ran through the options quickly – wait for backup, surround the place, try and contain him with the cops. Who didn't really have a hope of penetrating his shell, even with their guns.

  Or, I could just cowgirl up and do what I always did.

  I split the difference. “McGee...call for backup,” I whispered. He nodded, and went for his radio. As soon as I heard him radioing dispatch for additional units, I took a deep breath of trash-filled air and shouldered my way into the house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I wished I had a flashlight as soon as I entered the abandoned house. My metahuman eyesight was good, but even it didn't operate in total blackness, and that was just about what I was dealing with. Distant light from one of the few functional street lamps outside cast faint illumination that seeped through the front window and painted a picture of despair.

  The walls had been bashed open, pipes stripped for their copper, pieces of drywall and plaster caking the floor. Water damage marred the ceiling, chunks of which had collapsed into the corner to my right. More fallen ceiling pieces lay in a pile to my left, next to what had once been a kitchen. The staircase lay to my left, but I put aside searching that, at least for now.

  I was pretty sure the first floor would be where my perp would be hiding anyway. His scent seemed to veer to the left, toward a hallway just past the kitchen. I could only hope he'd decided to go through, thus limiting my time spent in this place to a minimum. I felt a chill pass down my spine, and it wasn't from the cool night air.

  The floorboards creaked with every step I took. I debated drawing my gun, given that I was now out of sight and Chalke wouldn't be able to crawl up my ass for drawing my weapon in sight of the public (apparently it panics people to see a crazy lady with a gun out, the wusses). But my gun wouldn't really do much against Firebeetle Bailey.

  So I pulled my knife instead.

  It was a CobraTec Spartan with a 3.75 inch blade. I held it behind my back to muffle the noise as I slid my thumb along the button on the side. The blade shot out, spring-loaded, making a hard, metallic popping noise. I gripped it for proper stabbing and advanced toward the hallway, listening.

  Nothing except the faint sounds of McGee talking into his radio permeated the house. That and the occasional protests of the floorboards at bearing my weight. I stopped, concentrated on being quieter, and went forward again, a little slower.

  The hallway wasn't very long and had two shadowy doorways on either side. It turned left about ten feet ahead, looking like it ran into a back door where it opened out into the yard. I sniffed, hoping that was where I was heading.

  I reached the first doorway and paused, not even daring to breathe. Someone had taken the door off this room. It was a small bedroom. I leaned in and scanned the blind corners quickly, knife at the ready. No one was hiding in here.

  Onward. I moved toward the next door. The smell was tightly confined here, and seemed like it was getting stronger.

  Shit. I didn't dare curse under my breath, but I could feel the pressure mounting. My heart was thudding under my ribs, loud enough I worried that my foe could hear it.

  An itch presented itself right in the middle of my shoulder blades, but there was nothing I could do about it. I wanted to jerk, to reach back with my knife and give it a good – but gentle – scratching.

  No time for that now. The oily smell was so strong here, it felt like it might overwhelm me the way the diapers outside had. And I hadn't even drawn a breath in thirty seconds or so now.

  Pieces of plaster had been chipped out of the walls to pull out the pipes, and they hung there, at arm level. I didn't dare put my back to the wall or stack up like I normally would have when charging a room for fear I'd dislodge one and have it make a noise as it dropped.

  The next door was shut, or nearly so, a crack of light making its way out from the street lamp that must have been visible in the back yard. I held in place for just a beat, then pushed the door open–

  It made a fearsome squeak, long and loud and terrifying to someone trying to be quiet. I took advantage of its noisiness to take a breath, then stuck my head in to check the corners–

  Nothing.

  I heard the creak of a floorboard behind me and started to turn–

  Something slammed into me before I got all the way around. It hit me in the rib cage and I tumbled back, crashing through the wall. Ribs broke, something else broke, and pain lanced through both my sides – in one direction high, on the shoulder, where I'd led crashing through the wall.

  On the other side, low, where I'd been slammed into by what felt like a speeding truck.

  Crashing through the darkness, I could see only one thing.

  Fiery eyes in the dark.

  I'd found my enemy.

  Or rather, he'd found me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I crashed into the ground in a cloud of dust and plaster, feeling the dozen scrapes of skin and the cry of bones roundly abused. Common things that one feels when tackled through a wall. The flaming eyes of Firebeetle (no Bailey at this point, because he just wasn't jaunty enough to justify the appellation) stared remorselessly and inhumanly down at me.

  Then he punched me in the busted ribs, and I thought I was going to explode.

  All my breath left me, and I turtled up, curling into a ball. No thought went into it, pure instinct contracting my muscles to protect me from further injury. The level of pain was agonizing, even to someone who seemed to accumulate injuries for a living.

  Firebeetle said something, but it was hard to hear over the rush of blood in my ears. The oily smell was lost, too, under the coppery taste of blood welling up in my mouth. The sharp pain in my tongue told me I'd bitten it on my trip through the wall. That seemed the least of my problems, though.

  A dark whisper permeated my consciousness as Firebeetle said something else. Not in English, though, or at least not in English I could understand. He planted a kick in my side and I almost passed out, the ribs encircling my entire chest spiking pain like someone had laced them with C4 and pushed the detonator.

>   The world blurred into darkness and shadow around me, and I spat blood as I tried to draw a breath. I'd been hit a lot. Even been battered through walls from time to time.

  I couldn't recall a time where someone had smashed into me below my guard at forty miles an hour, shattering my lower ribs, then crashed me through at least one wall. I was pretty sure I'd broken my shoulder on the way through, though it was complaining much less than my ribs about the whole experience. If the ribs were a ten, the shoulder was maybe a soft six.

  But the net result was that my instincts had me curling up and not moving. Everything in my brain was shut down, screaming at me to PROTECT PROTECT PROTECT, freezing me in the fetal position against a foe with superhuman strength and free rein to beat me to death.

  Fighting against that instinct was hard, maybe impossible. Firebeetle moved as a shadow just beyond my range of perception, which was narrowed around me like I was stuffed back in the box. My sense of smell and taste were all blood and gasping for breath around it. All I could feel was pain, pain, pain, around my midsection and back, my ears were awash in the sound of my veins pumping past them like river rapids.

  And all I could see was about a foot around me. Anything past that was like a projection shown on a screen. My brain had entered a primal state, seeking the predator hunting me but assuming it was close, choking me.

  I gasped for breath, seething, stabbing pain hitting me in the lungs. Every breath was a fight that I lost, that resulted in what felt like another knife being plunged into my side. Having been stabbed my fair share of times, I was not exaggerating.

  Like a shadow moving on a distant wall, Firebeetle and his glowing eyes looked down on me piteously. He said something else that I didn't understand, harsh and low, and I couldn't do anything but prepare myself for the end.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE