The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind (The Frost Files)

by Jackson Ford

  “So what do we do now?” Carlos says.

  “Keep looking.” I nod to Annie. “She must have more contacts, right? Other than this Mo-Mo Saunders guy?”

  “Yeah, about that.” Annie sits back on her heels. “Phone’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Forgot to plug it in, with everything that’s been happening.” She pulls it out her pocket, frowning down at the black screen. “All the numbers I got, they’re on here.”

  “I’ll find what you need,” Reggie says. She speaks quietly as if every word costs her. “Someone hand me a phone. It’s not my Rig, but…”

  “Where’s yours?” Paul asks.

  She winces. “It was in my chair.”

  Which is now scattered in pieces across El Segundo Boulevard.

  “Carlos?” I say.

  “Left it at the office. You tried to call me, remember?”

  “You know—” Paul pulls his phone out of his pocket “—you folks really ought to take better care of—”

  “Zip it,” I say. “Anyway, we’re not getting online with that.”

  “What about yours?” Annie asks me.

  “Gone.”

  “What? How?”

  “Afraid so.” I close my eyes. So. Most of our phones are either stolen or destroyed. The phones we do have are dead or from 1975. Same thing, really, if we’re talking about tech.

  A wave of nausea slithers up my throat, and I lean my head back against the tank, willing it to pass. Willing myself not to think about any of it. It’s not just about having a phone. We might work for the government, but we’re not special forces. We can’t keep going for ever. We need to take a breath.

  It’s as if Paul senses my thoughts. “OK, so we get somewhere with a computer.” He leans back against the truck, spreading his arms out on the metal. “In any case, it’ll be dark soon. This place doesn’t have heavy security, not since they built the new plant in Fresno, but there’ll still be a nightwatchman.”

  “Yeah.” I get a foot underneath me, planning for a future in which I’m actually able to stand up. “Plus, we need to eat.”

  “Where, then?” Paul looks around. “We can’t go back to Venice Beach. Annie, Carlos and myself—all on the police systems.” He ticks us off on his fingers, looking more morose by the second. “They’re probably staking out our homes right now. Annie, do you have anybody—”

  “Nobody whose numbers I know off the top of my head.”

  “Carlos?”

  He puffs out his cheeks. “I mean, we could go over to Pomona. I got fam out there.”

  “Way too far,” Reggie mutters. She sounds as if she isn’t in as much pain now. Maybe Annie’s massage really did help.

  I slowly get to my feet. Reggie’s right: it’ll take at least an hour and a half to get over to Pomona, and that’s assuming we get lucky with the traffic, which we won’t. That’s not time we have. The sun is already—

  “Wait. What time is it?” I say.

  “Um…” Paul looks at his watch, a chunky piece of metal that looks like it could control a space station. “Six fifty-one. Why?”

  I lean back against the tank. Then I thump my head against it, then do it again, letting out a disgusted groan.

  “You OK?” Paul asks.

  “I know where we can go.”

  “Great. Where?”

  I raise a finger. “Before I tell you, question: if you stand someone up on a date, what’s the best way to apologise? I mean it’s not technically a date, per se, but let’s say it’s definitely something you shouldn’t have missed. Are flowers enough, or—”

  “The fuck are you talking about?” Annie says.

  “Never mind. I have a friend who can help us out. You’ll like him. Assuming he doesn’t actually slam the door in my face.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Teagan

  But first we have to steal a car.

  We can’t Uber, thanks to the sudden lack of phones built in the twenty-first century. We could call a cab, but even if we got one sent out to us—which could take anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour in this city—we don’t really have a way to pay for it. The only one of us who still has their wallet is Paul, and of course he never carries cash.

  We can’t take the risk that the cops aren’t watching his bank accounts. Even a quick withdrawal would lead them right to us. That’s if we could actually find an ATM and if a cab would even take us; we don’t exactly look like the safest passengers to have in your ride. So car theft it is.

  The neighbourhood is a little way to the north, but it takes us for ever to find the right car—one that won’t immediately be reported stolen. We have to be careful: scouting for cops, zipping across the still-busy El Segundo Boulevard, checking out various side streets… it all adds up. It takes us half an hour to go half a mile and to find a car we can use. We pick a beat-to-shit green Corolla with rust on the door panels, parked on a side street. The buildings around it are low-rise apartments and flat-top warehouses, most of them looking like they haven’t been visited in a while.

  Fortunately, the car looks the same way. There’s a good amount of dust on the windows, and the building it’s parked front of looked unoccupied. Whoever owns the car probably hasn’t used it in a while and definitely won’t have bothered to install a tracker.

  Opening a locked car isn’t exactly hard when you have PK. The only problem is, I can’t do it.

  I am so badly out of juice that it takes me a full minute just to wrap my mind around the door mechanism. I have to focus hard, block out everything around me. That’s not easy with Paul fretting and Reggie (who is being carried by Carlos) telling him to can it. It’s the first thing she’s said since we left the industrial zone. She’s drawn into herself, blocking everything out. I’m guessing only some of it is pain. The rest is probably her replaying the chopper crash over and over. Doesn’t matter that it came out OK or that no one got hurt.

  And I don’t have the faintest idea what to say to her.

  Another five minutes go by, everyone standing awkwardly while I try to winkle up the lock. Paul is just asking about maybe breaking the window when I finally get inside.

  Carlos knows how to hot-wire a car, and before long we’re on our way, skirting LAX as we head north. The clock on the dash reads 7:37.

  Nic lives in Sawtelle, a suburb just south of UCLA. It’s a twenty-minute drive, if you take the 405 and get really lucky with the traffic. We don’t even bother. We zigzag through Del Rey and Mar Vista, adding another fifteen minutes to the trip, easily.

  My shoulder muscles tense every time we hear a siren or spot a cop car rolling past at the end of a distant block. Our only hope is that they won’t recognise the car we’re in.

  I’ve got out from under worse before. I survived my parents. I survived Wyoming. I am going to figure this out. Yes, Tanner’s deadline is ticking closer and closer, and yes, there’s a killer with identical powers still running around, but I can do it.

  All I have to do is convince Nic. I focus on that, take this one step at a time, and it’ll all work out.

  As we move further into Sawtelle, heading up a side street lined with double-storey apartment buildings, the Corolla starts to cough. Carlos swears, working the gas, but it doesn’t help. The engine dies with a long, wheezing sigh, and we coast to a stop, Carlos pulling us in at the kerb.

  We sit for a moment in the silent car, none of us willing to move. Or too exhausted to.

  “What you expect?” says Annie eventually, popping the door. “Damn thing’s a lemon. Amazed we even got this far. Yo, Teagan, where we going again?”

  “Westgate Ave. Just off Wilshire.”

  “Maybe we should try another car.” Paul looks around as if a likely candidate is just sitting there, waiting for us.

  “Nah.” Carlos squints out the windshield. “Round here? People’ll report that shit stolen in like ten seconds. We gotta walk. Westgate ain’t far.”

  The sun has set. There’s still a little
light in the sky, edging the cloudless horizon in purple and blue. The street lights are on, just starting to dapple the sidewalk. There aren’t many people around, and for once there are no cops. The odd office worker arriving home, a group of kids messing around by a big tree on Missouri Avenue. I’m worried that we look out of place, but nobody gives us a second glance.

  I’m lost in my own thoughts, so much so that the group has got ahead of me. All except Annie.

  She’s walking alongside me, staring straight ahead. There are dark circles under her eyes, and she’s moving with a deliberate, focused stride. Like she’s just got to keep going, and everything will work out. Can’t blame her. I’m feeling the same way myself.

  “Annie,” I say.

  She doesn’t respond at first—I have to say her name a couple of times before she looks my way. I don’t think she planned to end up walking alongside me. “Huh?”

  “You OK?”

  No response. Beyond the low-rise buildings a thumping bassline reaches us: a car driving past in the distance, system cranked, the sound fading almost as soon as we notice it.

  We’re at the end of the block when Annie says, “Please don’t make me do that again.”

  She sounds so sincere, so polite. I blink in surprise. “I don’t—”

  “Hitting you. I didn’t want to.”

  “Um… sure. I won’t. Promise.”

  “Thank you.”

  Another few moments of silence. Then: “My dad used to do it to my mom.”

  “Oh, Annie…”

  She continues as if I hadn’t spoken. “He never hit me. Always my mom, though, and it’d come outta nowhere. One second fine, the next second boom. She serve his food wrong, say something he didn’t like, not answer him fast enough, that was it.”

  Her tone of voice doesn’t change. The whole way through, she sounds like she’s talking about the weather.

  “He worked at a children’s library over in Carson. You believe that shit? Guy spends his whole day working with kids, giving ’em books, talking to ’em, then comes home and beats the shit out of his wife. Like it was nothing.”

  “I didn’t know,” I say quietly.

  “That’s cos I never told anybody. Not till now, anyway. That’s why I’m not mad at you for it.”

  “He still with your mom?”

  “That asshole? Got himself killed back in ’03. Drank too much and went for a ride down the 110 to San Pedro. Lost control on an off ramp, and it’s a miracle he didn’t kill anybody else. You wanna know the most fucked-up thing?”

  My voice is barely there. “What?”

  “I take after him.” It’s as if she’s swallowed something rotten. “I got his face. And I get angry like this.” She snaps her fingers.

  Her expression when I slapped her in the back of Paul’s truck, to make her hit me. She was furious—like a completely different person had taken her place at that second. What must it have been like for her, knowing what was happening, knowing she couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it? And afterwards…

  “Please don’t ask me to hit you again,” Annie says. “I know your voodoo, your thing, whatever, you gotta give yourself that fight or flight now to get it working… but I don’t wanna do that again.”

  “I won’t.” I mean it too. “I only did it because—”

  “I know. Like I said, ’s aight.”

  We walk in silence for a few minutes. We’re passing a school now—a low rectangular building with blinds down in the windows. There’s a fenced-off soccer field to our right, a tattered banner hanging from the chain-link. GO TIGERS!

  “Your mom. She still around?”

  “What? Oh. Yeah. She still out in Watts. Got emphysema and can’t walk more than three steps without huffing oxygen, but she here. Got a mouth on her too. You don’t take your shoes off when you come in the house, you’ll be hearing about it for months.”

  “Sounds like it’s not just your dad who passed things down.”

  “Watch yourself.” But there’s no anger in her words, and the ghost of a smile plays across her face, caught in the glow of a street light. It’s almost full dark now. “Anyway, we get by. Folks in the neighbourhood look after her when I ain’t around. She got good days and bad days, but it all evens out.”

  “Insurance?”

  One of the weirder things about our arrangement with Tanner: we actually get federal health benefits, same as any other government worker. Don’t ask me how Tanner pulled that little trick off. I keep meaning to ask Reggie, but I haven’t got around to it.

  “Doesn’t cover parents,” Annie says.

  “What about—”

  “Private’s too expensive.”

  “You couldn’t ask Tanner for help?” Our insurance might not cover family, but surely our supreme commander could pull a few strings…

  The look on Annie’s face is one of absolute disgust. “I ain’t asking that bitch for a goddamn thing.”

  “But—”

  “I work for mine. I don’t do charity. Never have, never will.”

  Her eyes are fixed on the road ahead, and there’s an edge to her voice, one that warns me not to push it.

  Another long silence. In the distance Paul yawns.

  “Annie?”

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “I swear to you,” I say. “I didn’t kill Steven Chase. I know I can do some crazy shit, but I would never—”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.” It’s a few seconds before she continues; she’s quiet for so long that I’m about to prompt her. “I admit, I thought you was lying about it, but that was… Look, now it’s different. You could have gone on the run a million times over, but you’re still here. That counts for something. At least to me. I didn’t wanna see it before but… anyway. You’re here, and that’s what matters.”

  “Thanks,” I murmur.

  A few blocks later Annie speaks again.

  “What I said last night…” She clears her throat. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was just kind of freaked out, is all.”

  For a second, I struggle to even remember where I was last night. Then her words come back to me: I think you wanted to use your power. Your ability. Whatever the fuck it is. I think you were looking for an excuse. It sounds like something said to a different version of me. When Annie first went off, it stung, but now? Nothing. After all that’s happened, it’s impossible for me to stay angry.

  And in the last twelve hours I’ve found out exactly what happens if I push my ability. I can do things—things I never thought were possible. I am stronger than I thought was possible. Sure, it kills me every time I do it, but if I can find a way past that…

  “It’s cool,” I tell her. “I did just throw you out a window.”

  She grunts.

  “Hey,” I say, “Did you ever—”

  “Oh, the fear of heights I did tell you about. Your ass just forgot.”

  I blush. “My bad.”

  Another ghost of a smile. “Forget it.”

  My stomach growls, knotting in on itself in a painful cramp. It’s impossible not to start thinking about food. Smashed burgers wrapped in grease paper, dripping sauce, curly fries on the side. A Vietnamese bahn mi, jammed so full of spices and crisp veggies that the baguette can hardly close. Sushi. Oh my God, sushi. Nigiri, the fish relaxing onto a soft pillow of rice. Sashimi: a hit of straight, clean, healthy protein, the tuna so fresh it almost snaps between my teeth.

  Nic’s apartment is on the second floor of a concrete apartment building—a corner spot overlooking the intersection of Westgate and Ashton. The building itself is a dull grey, clearly designed by someone who really wanted to make an art-deco masterpiece and didn’t have the budget. It’s all weird swirls and curves and arches. The first time I came here, I thought it looked like an alien spacecraft—one which had landed on earth and was trying to blend in, but the aliens had only studied humans for about five minutes before coming. It’s one of several identical bl
ocks on this street.

  As we approach, I clear my throat. “Guys, maybe let me go in first?”

  “Is that a good idea? Splitting up?” says Carlos. He’s still carrying Reggie and hasn’t shown any signs of getting tired.

  “No. But he’s probably already pissed at me, so seeing a bunch of people on his doorstep isn’t really gonna help.”

  The complex next to Nic’s has a path straight through to the inner courtyard, but of course the one we want to get into has an outer security gate made of thick white metal. I hit the buzzer.

  No response.

  I hit it again, then lean on it, willing him to answer. Please, God or Buddha or Satan or whoever happens to be listening, let him be home. Don’t make us have to break in or go somewhere else. Let one thing in this clusterfuck of a day go right. Let—

  “Hello?”

  His voice is tinny, distorted, but there’s no mistaking the annoyance in his voice.

  “Nic? It’s me. It’s Teagan.”

  Nothing for a moment. Then: “Not right now, Teagan.”

  “Nic, please. I just wanna talk, that’s all. Just for a minute. Can I come up?”

  No answer.

  “Look, I’m really sorry about N/Naka. I can explain everything.”

  He laughs. “Yeah, I bet you can. Get out of here, Teagan.”

  I blink. That stings.

  “No way.” I say. “Please. Just five minutes, that’s all I ask.”

  Something’s not right. He might be pissed at me about N/Naka—I definitely would be—but he wouldn’t just… shut me out like this.

  When he doesn’t respond, I lean on the buzzer. When he still doesn’t respond, I turn round, giving everyone a confident smile. “OK. Plan B.”

  “And what would that be?” Paul says.

  I gesture to the top of the gate. “Give me a boost.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Teagan

  There’s a big central courtyard and parking area behind the complex gate, half-filled with cars. An old rusty sign informing residents that garbage pick-up is on Mondays and Thursdays is bolted to the wall. Big terracotta pots are dotted between the cars; some of them even have plants in them, big ferns with spiky leaves.