Driven

by Robert J. Crane

  I stared at Harry, who seemed just as tense as before his outburst. “Is there a not-so-subtle message somewhere in there for me, Harry?”

  “Huh?” He looked up, frowning. “No. I mean—yeah, probably. I was just thinking … “

  I waited as he drifted off for a second. “Yeah?”

  He stirred back to life. “I admire you,” he said, not looking at me.

  I looked around. There was no one near us, and our waitress had bolted into the back again, probably griping to the other servers about the couple in our seats that had enough tension between us to seem like we’d been fighting, even though really it was just the man in the situation apparently holding in all his feelings, until this moment—at which point he denounced talking about feelings.

  “Huh?” I said, because what the hell else do you say to that?

  “You’re old school,” Harry said, finally meeting my eyes. “Look at you. If you haven’t had every damned thing go wrong in your life, I don’t know who has. And even when they were going right, you didn’t put everything out there for the world to see, like Kat does—”

  “You should really call her ‘Mom.’”

  “—and I admire that. You don’t want fame. You don’t want the cheap popularity that comes from sharing your feelings with total strangers.” He made a cutting motion with one hand. “You just want to live your life, and keep your friends close, and that circle tight—and not let anything out past that point.”

  I tried to think through what he was saying. “Well, Harry … there’s a certain need to keep things close to the vest when you’re a wanted fugitive.”

  “Loyalty is your thing, though,” Harry said. “It’ll take you to the end of the road, and you’ll let it. You don’t spill your feelings out for strangers, but you’d risk your life for them. Most people wouldn’t put their life on the line for a stranger, but they’d dump their feelings all over them. It’s a strange reversal. You’ve taken hits that’d put most people right out of the park, but you? You get right back on the field.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m like a sports hero who has never played a sport.” I tried to soften my edge. “What is this all about, Harry?” He didn’t look my way. “I mean, really. Everything was going great after we got back from Japan.” I tried to push my gloved hand across the table toward him, but he moved his away. “And suddenly, after a week of radio silence, now you’re all … “ I searched my brain for an appropriate metaphor. “Effusive as Mick Foley.”

  Harry adopted a pained look. “Letting you use my credit card to subscribe to the WWE network is right up there with my worst decisions ever.”

  “Hey, man, it keeps me entertained in my fugitive-hood, which is more than I can say for you since you clammed up.” I leaned in. “What happened, Harry?”

  He looked away, and I knew, at that moment, it was something big. Harry Graves, the futurist, to whom all the probabilities of what was coming were known … had something on his mind that he wasn’t sharing.

  With me, his putative girlfriend.

  “Please don’t freeze me out,” I said, softer. “Look … we’re reaching the end of my usual shelf-life for relationships, okay? So … if it’s me, please let me know. Because usually, I kinda see the end coming a little clearer than this. I mean, other than the time my boyfriend was killed—”

  “So, basically, your frame of reference is that one,” Harry said, “and the time you stole your boyfriend’s memories, and—”

  “And the time I broke up with a guy just before my fugitive days began, yeah,” I said, feeling suddenly a little uncomfortable at my brief and scorched-earth relationship history. “I’m a walking catastrophe, I admit it. I’m working on getting better.”

  “You know why you fail at relationships, Sienna?” Harry asked, once again looking at his coffee.

  “Duh, catastrophe. Weren’t you listening?”

  “It goes a little beyond that,” Harry said, looking back up at me. “Yeah, Zack was a catastrophe, but you had problems before that. And your nameless boyfriend just before fugitive-hood—”

  “He had a name, and it was Jeremy Hampton.”

  “—that might have been doomed by circumstance, but you pushed him away,” Harry said. “Just like you pushed Scott away.” He looked a little cool, but beneath I could see hurt. “Just like you’re going to push me away.”

  It felt like my jaw hit the table. And it was glass, which resulted in breakage and my head spinning at the nonsense he’d just said. “Did you just … you’ve been dead silent this whole week. If we were communicating by text, this is where you’d have been ghosting me, okay? So to have you say I’m going to push you away seems really frigging rich, Harry.”

  “You are going to push me away, Sienna,” Harry said, and that flash of hurt I’d seen was cooling, already, into dull pain. “It’s coming. I’m just the first guy you’ve been with that’s known it was coming.”

  “How?” I snapped. “I thought you couldn’t see your own future.”

  “I can’t,” he said, and now he looked back at his coffee, long empty; it felt like it was some sort of metaphorical indicator of how he felt. “But I can see yours … and I know,” he said, quietly, mournfully, “that where you’re going to go … where you’re going to choose to go … is somewhere I can’t follow.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Angel

  The silence in the parking garage at Miranda’s condo made it seem like it was just another day, nothing unusual going on. But it wasn’t usual, and Angel knew from the sound beyond the silence—the background noise on the fringes of her awareness—that something was really, really wrong.

  It was the subtle things. The garage was always quiet, but here there were the muffled noises in the distance, audible only to meta ears. Angel stood next to her car, a Honda Accord, just listening, staring at the path to the elevator from the visitor spot. Smooth metal doors that stood like silent sentinels in her path forward.

  The parking garage was underground, a typical Minneapolis kind that protected the residents against the bitter chill of winter, closing itself against loss of heat except when those permitted access approached. She had Miranda’s code combination, so here she was, taking a look around for the first time, even though the heavy feeling in her gut made her pretty sure of what she’d find.

  Angel hurried to the elevator, hands at her sides, trying not to be obvious about looking around. She knew there were people watching, listening, breathing in the dark, huddled in vehicles where their sounds were insulated from obvious identification. A meta could almost always tell when someone was watching, especially in a quiet place. The whispers were subtle, but acted like a quiet background track to her movements.

  As she reached the elevator, she pressed the button. She tried to play it easy, play it cool, even though her heart was thundering in her chest. Angel had been in fights, sure, but she didn’t go looking for trouble, unlike … others. Her eyes flitted around, searching the garage shadows for motion and seeing none. That didn’t mean there was no one there, though.

  Because there definitely was someone out there.

  Angel had taken this gig because it was a job, and because Miranda had asked her to, and because … of other reasons. Debts to be paid and all that. Thinking about it just made her stomach twist a little.

  And she had a feeling … that it was going to twist more in a moment.

  The elevator dinged and opened, and she swept in, hitting the button for the eleventh floor, then popped the close button. It helped cut the tension that was hanging thick in the empty elevator, and in the garage, but only a little bit. Her eyes searched furtively around the small compartment, even though it was empty. As though someone would melt out of the stainless steel wall, her own reflection jumping out to attack her.

  She rode in silence, straight up to Miranda’s floor, and when the elevator dinged again to announce her arrival, she thought she might sprain something as the tension in her muscles spiked at
the unexpected sound. “Shit,” Angel muttered under her breath as the doors opened on an empty hallway.

  Sticking her head out, she looked around, poking through the elevator doors before stepping out. Charging into trouble was not high on her list, not now. That was a spice she didn’t need, not in the realm of people who thought they were invincible.

  Angel Gutierrez was under no illusions about her fallibility.

  She tottered down the hall stiffly, feet pressing into the luxurious carpet that lined the calming beige hallway, which was punctuated every twenty feet or so by a soothing landscape print. Her head moved as though it were swivel mounted, spinning about every few seconds to make sure someone hadn’t crept up behind her in the interval between scans. It was a desperately uncomfortable feeling, being watched, and it churned the acid in her stomach like she’d overdone it on ghost peppers. Again.

  When she reached Miranda’s door, she paused. It was ajar; unsurprisingly, and yet a little tickle of nervousness presented itself nonetheless. She let out a little curse, under her breath, in Spanish. Old habit. “Should have known.” She pushed the door open. Perfectly greased, the hinges didn’t even squeak, and when it swung wide—

  The condo had been tossed, so obviously even Ray Charles would have known immediately. Every piece of furniture was turned over, the couch cushions were slashed, even the refrigerator had been pulled away from the wall and was lying on its side in the middle of the kitchen.

  Stepping inside, it only took a minute to give the place a once-over. The results seemed obvious to her now-practiced eye—whatever these searchers had been looking for, they hadn’t found it. Miranda’s cell phone was sitting on the counter, smashed to pieces, and a thought occurred: She did that herself. Probably after the place had been tossed. The SIM card was missing, too. Another thing Miranda had probably done, though Angel couldn’t be sure. Whoever had given the place the hard once-over could have smashed her cell phone and stolen the SIM card to keep it from pinging to their location when they kidnapped her.

  “Shit,” she breathed. The bedroom was clear, so was the bathroom. Even the toilet tank was tossed. Angel was out the door two seconds later; nothing to see here.

  She punched the elevator call button nervously about twelve times before it showed up. Plans ran through her mind—ditch the car and walk out the front door? Being on foot made no sense. Stealing a ride made even less; talk about drawing attention to herself for no reason. It might come to that soon, but the longer she could evade trouble, the better off she knew she was going to be.

  Keep it cool. Keep it calm.

  Get home. Wait for tonight.

  When the elevator arrived, it was empty again. Angel stepped inside and pushed the button for the garage level, B2. The ride stretched into forever as she tapped on her own leg, fingertips against the denim. The Muzak in the background didn’t help, the bland melody at odds with her racing mind.

  The elevator dinged again, and the doors slid open. She’d let herself relax too much on the ride; she expected the elevator doors to open onto the empty concrete garage, cement flooring spilling into endless darkness and rows of parked cars …

  But the garage wasn’t empty.

  An even dozen guys with guns were waiting, barrels pointed … right at Angel.

  Long breath. Eyes wide. Scanning.

  Surprise registered. Fingers started to move on triggers …

  Angel launched herself low.

  Saving grace: they were too slow to be metas.

  Angel skidded underneath their barrels with perfect muscle control. She struck the first two members of her half-moon firing squad in the gut, sending them flying up. There was enough separation between their ranks that they didn’t hit the second row yet, just launched into the air at a forty-five degree angle toward the concrete-beamed roof of the parking structure.

  Staying low, she swept her feet around in a precise kick. It broke the ankles of the next two guys on contact. The clean snap of bone and joint parting ways was drowned out by their screams, which in turn were lost beneath a chorus of surprised shouts. Nobody was saying anything coherent. She’d moved like a blur, and they had yet to bring a weapon to bear.

  She rose to her feet as one of them tried to snap a barrel around at her, but she snapped first and caught it along the side, yanking him forward. He was just a little too nervous, a little finger-on-the-trigger-happy, and he loosed a burst that Angel controlled, pulling it along the axis that lined his shots up with the members of his team opposite him. Blood spattered, bullets found exposed flesh and tac vests and all sorts of points in between.

  Angel didn’t care. Their quick trigger fingers told her everything she needed to know about them. Deadly ambush, not a tickle fest. Message received.

  This was a death squad.

  Three of them went down before the guy whose gun she grabbed realized what he was doing and quit shooting his own teammates. By that time, the two who she’d struck on her charge collided, leg-first, with three guys in the second rank, crashing down in a failed pyramid of the sort that championship cheerleaders have nightmares about. The two guys whose ankles she’d broken hit the ground, screaming and cursing.

  She did the math in her head quickly, like counting tickets in a kitchen. Three down, probably for good, four seriously injured, three more hurt to varying degrees. Out of twelve. Angel whipped out a hand and heard a crunching from the throat of the guy whose gun she’d commandeered. The choking noise he made put another guy in the “disabled” column.

  Eleven-ish down. There was only one guy who had come through this unscathed so far, and he was to her right.

  It was time to scathe him.

  She unleashed a backhand that sent the cartilage in his nose up into his brain. She didn’t stop to confirm the kill. She didn’t care if he was dead, she just needed him to be down for a bit. Before he’d hit the ground, Angel was off like a runner, sprinting for the nearest cover, which was a midsize SUV at the start of the row opposite the elevator.

  The crack and spang of metal and glass echoed as bullets peppered the ground around her. She dashed, zig-zagging as they sprayed, bullets dislodging shards of concrete and asphalt wherever they hit. She dodged just behind the bumper as the guys unleashed another round and the SUV soaked up a dozen or so bullets right to the hood. The engine block absorbed them, but she was already moving on, darting between rows of cars, listening to the gunshots echo and the bullets clang against metal and concrete.

  Her Honda waited, but she went the opposite direction. Predictable was a bad move in the middle of an ambush. She’d learned that a long time ago, when she’d left the restaurant business behind and first started down this road of action and adventure. Breaking to the right, Angel hooked into the next row of parked cars, scanning for a good target.

  Experience had taught her that modern cars were a pain in the ass to hotwire if you didn’t have the right tools. Plus you had to deal with the alarm. None of these were insurmountable challenges if you were equipped.

  She checked her pockets; all she had was a small screwdriver, and that was only because old habits die hard.

  This was a high-end apartment building, though, and if there was one thing that was predictable about a high-end apartment building … it was that rich people loved their toys. She looked around … searching for …

  There. Perfect.

  A vintage 1968 Corvette waited in the middle of the next row, a beautiful cherry red convertible. Driving it in Minneapolis in winter would be a sin, but this was summer, and Angel would have driven it through the damned Arctic because this was life or death.

  She sprinted across the aisle between rows, getting to the door as another flurry of bullets found the wall behind her. Running her fingers over the handle as she passed, dodging beneath the shooting, she accidentally yanked it before she could even pull the screwdriver out to start working on the lock.

  It opened.

  She rolled her eyes. Silly rich people in their
supposedly secure garages. Tomorrow whoever owned this baby would wake to find out a full-on gunfight had taken place in basically the basement of his home, and his sense of security would be shattered. All the more so because he’d had his car stolen in the process. She didn’t spare a lot of thought for how thick of an idiot you had to be to think that anything, anywhere was safe, ever. But maybe one—because she’d learned a long time ago that safe was an illusion that ended abruptly the first time someone tried to kill you.

  Safe was an illusion.

  But some people persisted in the illusion. That kind of moron would probably even leave the keys in the car … she ran a hand up and flipped down the visor on a hunch …

  Sure enough, keys came raining down on her. She caught them before they pegged her in the head.

  “Experience is a hell of a teacher,” Angel muttered. Maybe this lesson would get through, because not only did insurance companies not pay for meta incidents, but they also didn’t tend to fork out cash when you left the keys in your car. “Stupid,” she whispered as she started it up.

  The engine roared to life and she shifted the sports car into gear, ignoring the thump as the transmission power dropped, flailing against the motor mounts. The driver had backed the car into this space, giving her a fast and convenient exit. Bullets pinged against the back of the vehicle as she slalomed around the corner in fine, drifting style, hitting the exit ramp and accelerating. She clicked the button to open the garage entry to the street.

  Shooting out into downtown Minneapolis, she skidded and turned toward Interstate 394. West, she needed to head west, get out of town a little before she even thought about slowing down. Checking her rearview, she saw no one behind her. Whew. Good. Still, she blasted through a couple red lights, narrowly missing a tractor trailer that honked loudly as she squealed tires onto the freeway and lit out for the west.

  Her apartment was out for laying low. If this kind of trouble had descended on Miranda, Angel damned well knew she was next. It wasn’t like she hadn’t known this day would come.