Music: Out of the Box 26 (The Girl in the Box Book 36)

by Robert J. Crane

  She had some tightness in her jaw area, and I wondered if she did, in fact, remember that. She nodded, though, which told me she probably did.

  “Excuse me, sir—sir—” The voice of Casey, the receptionist, carried down the hall and into the bullpen, causing me to sit up straight in my chair. “You can’t go back there—”

  “Don’t worry, darlin’, it’s fine; I’m a friend of the family,” came a deep voice. A man appeared at the far end of the bullpen, his stride confident and unerring. He didn’t even hesitate or miss a step as he came into view, navigating through the place like he’d been here a thousand times before, even though—to my knowledge—he’d never even been here once.

  “Did he just call Casey ‘darlin’?” Angel asked under her breath.

  “Who is this guy?” Olivia asked, on her feet. The air distorted slightly around her as she prepared to do...well, whatever it was she did to move things around her.

  “Hey,” Scott called after him, popping up from his cube, “you can’t come back here.”

  “Hold your seahorses, Scotty,” the man said, waving him off with a hand. That made Scott do a double take, then sag as he recognized the man making his way to my office as unerringly as if shot out of a cannon.

  I rose, leaving my seat behind me. An unintentional pucker came to my lips, that sour taste like I’d gotten a bite of something really unpleasant.

  Because seeing this guy here, right now? Probably wasn’t going to result in anything good.

  “Reed,” he said, stopping a few feet from me. “Got a problem.”

  “I kinda figured it wasn’t a social call when I saw you come in here for the first time in...ever,” I said, looking him over. He seemed a lot more put-together than the last time I’d seen him, which had been in South Dakota, almost three years prior. “Team,” I said, nodding to Olivia and Angel, who did not look remotely like they were ready to stand down, “I’d like you to meet Harry Graves.” Blank looks greeted me, except for Scott, who had a faint burning behind his eyes. “You know...Sienna’s boyfriend.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sienna

  “Tell me what we’ve got, Welch,” I said as I popped out of the NYPD cruiser outside the Biridelli Theater, just off Broadway. It looked like a classic movie house, complete with a red carpet stretched up to the front door. It was like Grauman’s Chinese Theater, but with a more New York sentiment about the place. I might have liked it if I wasn’t finding it at the worst of times.

  Captain Allyn Welch of the NYPD stood behind a squad car that was parked on the curb. A waiting police cruiser had ferried me from the courthouse right to the theater, like Uber but with a police siren and lights to get me where I was going in a double hurry. Welch was an aging man, complete with a combover, his uniform the dress blues of New York’s Finest. He surveyed me with squinty eyes that emphasized his crow’s feet, as though daring to ask me why I was late to this party. “Hostage situation. We think it’s actually a meta this time.”

  “Oh, actually actually a meta this time?” I asked, stepping up behind the police cruiser with him. “Not one of your fake meta calls designed to give me an excuse to intervene and solve all your problems for you?”

  He shook his head, all serious. “Not one of the fakes, no. Or as I like to think of them, Metahuman Pretense Situations.”

  “That’s too unwieldy. It’ll never catch on.”

  He pointed at the ruins of some cell phones scattered around the red carpet, and at a limo that was turned over down the street. “We think the guy did that.”

  “And you’re sure it’s a guy?” I surveyed the damage with a wary eye, then looked down at my shoes. Steel-toed boots, the perfect fashion accompaniment for Sienna Nealon, ass-kicker to the stars. Excellent for almost all occasions.

  “Not sure of much at this point,” Welch said, gesturing at the scattershot cordon around the place. Only a half-dozen units had responded, which told me that they’d called me in right away, before they’d even had a chance to bring in overwhelming force and really seal this place off. “The theater was hosting the world premiere of a new movie. Everybody Goes to the Valley or something like that. Anna Vargas is the star.” He looked down at me. “You know who she is?”

  “Yeah, I went to one of her parties out in LA one time,” I said, bending over to untie my boots. “Met the President. Got in a fight with a guy who could phase in and out of reality. It was a real hoot.”

  “Ha ha,” Welch said without mirth. “Everything’s always a joke with you—what the hell are you doing?”

  I kicked off my shoes without booting them into the next county. “I’m not joking,” I said, slightly nonplussed as I undid my belt and started shimmying out of it, careful not to drop my gun. Once I’d removed the pistol from the belt, I handed both to him without ceremony.

  Welch took my pistol, holster and belt from me, eyes wide as I piled them onto his arms. “Seriously, what gives?”

  I promptly added my cell phone and backup gun to the pile. “Getting rid of all the metal on my body.” I nodded at the overturned limo, then the busted cell phones abandoned just off the red carpet. “See those?”

  Welch’s eyes looked like they were about to pop out of his head. The sergeant behind him had his gun drawn and was pointing it over the trunk of the squad car we were standing behind, but he was craning his head, probably to see if I was going to complete my little undressing game. I did, reaching to the back of my shirt and fumbling with the clasp of my bra beneath it.

  “The hell, Nealon?” Welch hissed again. He looked like he was going to pop a vein in his forehead.

  “Don’t get all hot and bothered. It’s a Magneto,” I said, just tearing the damned strap off and pulling my blouse back down so I didn’t flash the whole street. I slipped each arm in and finished removing the bra before I popped them back out, catching it in my hand and brandishing it in front of me before adding it to Welch’s pile. “Underwire is metal and I don’t want to get squeezed to death while I’m dodging whatever else he throws at me.”

  Welch’s brow subsided a little as I tossed my cell phone and keys into his mounting pile and he struggled to keep from dropping all my stuff. “You could have just said that.”

  “I’m not a great sharer.” I turned toward the theater, giving it a quick once-over. “How many hostages?”

  “Lucky for you I am a great sharer,” Welch muttered. “We don’t have an exact count—”

  “Then it really doesn’t matter whether you’re sharing or not, does it?”

  “But it’s in the fifty to a hundred range,” Welch said, getting the other officer to open the car door for him so he could dump all my personal effects into the cruiser’s seat. “The premiere wasn’t scheduled to start for another few minutes, so the theater wasn’t full yet. The big stars have already showed up, though.”

  I patted myself down, looking for any other points of metal. My blouse buttons were plastic, and thankfully I’d worn dress pants for court, complete with—to my shock—a button fly instead of a zipper. Small miracles, but this was what happened when I managed to shed my denim habit. “Okay,” I said, thinking it through. “I’m going in.” I beckoned to the cop behind Welch. “Nightstick? Is it metal?”

  He shook his head and pulled it off his belt, tossing it to me. I turned and looked at another cop, who sighed and tossed me his as well. I brandished both and spun them; they were of the baton variety, complete with a handle sticking out at a right angle. The smooth, heavy industrial polymer was cool to the touch. The February air had a nice little chill to it, and I looked down. “Okay, I need to get this done quickly.”

  Welch nodded. “Right. There are people’s lives on the line.”

  “Yeah, that,” I agreed, turning my back as I headed for the door, “but also, it’s cold and I’m no longer wearing a bra. Do the math on that.”

  “But...also the people’s lives, right?” Welch called after me.

  “Always,” I muttered, waving one of
my newly borrowed batons. “Always with the people’s lives.” And in I went.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Biridelli Theater lobby looked like it had been ransacked by a very angry poltergeist. The popcorn machines were overturned, the Slurpee maker was squirting neon blue out of a perforated plastic spinner and making an unhealthy grinding noise. It hit a pitch that made me cringe as I came in.

  Ushers in tuxes were cowering along the sides of the room, a counterpoint to the well-dressed attendees. All were hiding, squatting behind potted ferns and under the popcorn buttering stations. I met the timid gaze of one of them as she stared at me, clad in a formal dress that had been split all the way up to the ass. “Which way?” I asked.

  She pointed toward a door in the distance. There was some noise from within, but I couldn’t decipher it over the rumble of the sick Slurpee machine.

  “Get out,” I said, jerking my head toward the door and surveying the room. There was a sudden motion as someone dashed for the exit, followed by a few others. I looked at the woman who’d cued me in. “Go.”

  She must have taken some courage from my invocation, because this time she ran, ass hanging out in the breeze like she’d had underwire in it that the Magneto had removed with his mind. Or maybe she’d just gone commando, which seemed like a bad choice given that dress, but hey. Starlet fashion choices: where you pay obscene amounts of money for barely enough cloth to cover your important bits, if that.

  A quick glance around the lobby found I’d cleared the innocent bystanders here. The noise from within the darkened theater door was increasing, which was my cue to get moving. I had a real gut-churning feeling about this, and not only because I’d disarmed myself down to the damned bra before coming in here.

  What the hell was I supposed to do when I got dragged back to that courtroom and had to answer the question about how many people I’d killed?

  Also, I was about to face a master of the magnetic arts with nothing but a couple batons. But seriously, that wasn’t as vexing as figuring out how to answer the question, “How many people have you killed, Sienna Nealon?” without sounding like a complete and total psychopath. “Only as many as deserved it,” was not a valid answer.

  There was no point pouting about it, though, and even less point in ignoring the fact I really had to get moving if I wanted to save the day. I charged into the darkness of the waiting theater and burst out at the bottom of a stadium seating arrangement. The place was about a quarter full, and all with people who were entirely too well-dressed to be anything other than brief guest stars in my working-class life.

  Except for the one guy who was hovering ten feet in the air on a metal platform. He was wearing a cheap suit and wingtips with a haircut that screamed that he bought discount dandruff shampoo in five-gallon refill tubs.

  “‘Come live with me and be my love,’” he said, over the screaming of several women in the crowd, “‘and we will all the pleasures prove’—”

  He had a hand extended to a woman lurking below with a look on her face that could only be described as “horrified.” Or possibly “gastrointestinal distress-y.” Her long hair was perfectly coiffed, and her gown sparkled in a very classical style that made me wonder if her designer had made the entire thing out of diamonds. Even in the soft glow of the emergency exit lights, she was stunning.

  Also, she was Anna Vargas.

  “Hey, Marlowe,” I said, twirling a baton and chucking it for the Magneto’s head. “I don’t think the lady’s interested. Maybe thou shouldst learn to love the word ‘no.’”

  Our poet non-laureate (and also plagiarist) whirled on me, blocking my thrown baton with a hastily constructed shield made out of...

  Little steel ball bearings?

  “Oh, man,” I grumbled under my breath, getting a bad feeling about the way this was going to go based on my foe’s preparedness. He was standing on the equivalent power of a human claymore mine.

  And he let it off at me, steel bullets spraying at me like a blast of shrapnel.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Reed

  “What the hell are you doing here, Harry?” I asked, staring out the window at the sun-dappled parking lot. Sunset was nearly here, and the snow that covered it was reflecting the glare. The heat was pumping from the vent above my desk, though it was nothing compared to the warm sense of annoyance I felt from sitting across from Harry Graves.

  “It’s a pleasure to see you too, Reed,” Harry said, shifting in his seat and looking to either side like Olivia or Angel might come busting down the door to my office any second to “rescue” me from him. He did have predictive powers, though, so maybe they were going to do just that. “Especially with your wits about you again. Didn’t like seeing you under the control of Harmon last time we met. That had to be rough, losing your senses like that.”

  “Yeah, it’s just been a barrel of fun since I got them back,” I said. I suppressed the twitch that threatened the corner of my eye; conversations with Harry had a tendency to go like that in my (albeit limited) experience with him. “Why are you here?”

  “Well, there’s a crisis, of course,” he said. Like that answered everything.

  “There’s always a crisis,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “This is one you’re going to need to get involved in.”

  I felt a laugh that was very lacking in mirth spring out. Forced, really. “Do you remember the first time we met?”

  “Hard to forget.”

  “You killed a man,” I said. “In cold blood.”

  “I was trying to save the world from a very bad man,” Harry said, shrugging lightly, like it was no big deal. “I’d think you, of all people, would understand that.”

  “You and my sister really are a well-matched pair, aren’t you?” I couldn’t keep the annoyed grin off my face. “Kill anyone who threatens the status quo. I mean, you two just hold hands whistling right through the graveyard and leave the rest of us to clean up the mess—”

  “Don’t pretend you’re that mad at her—”

  “I’m mad at you, Harry,” I said with a strange loathing, taking my voice meta-low to interfere with any bugs that might have been planted in my office. I’d had Jamal sweep it before he left, but that didn’t mean someone hadn’t planted one since then. “All this shit? Her working for the FBI? This whole godforsaken year?” I waved a hand. “This is you. I know it’s you.”

  Harry made a show of examining his fingernails, then gnawed on one of them. He must have seen—or anticipated—me making a face, because he said, “Come on, we’re metas. Germs don’t affect us in the slightest.”

  “I don’t see you drinking out of toilets to prove that point.”

  “Might have happened in the past,” Harry said, examining the nail he’d just bitten off. “I’ve hit a low time or two. But that’s neither here nor there.” He stood, reached into his coat, and pulled out a newspaper clipping. “I’ll leave this with you.” And he let it flutter down on my desk. Aided by the vent above, it landed squarely, perfectly in front of me.

  TENSIONS RISE AS LABOR DISPUTE UNLEASHES PASSIONS

  “You son of a—” I stared at the clipping.

  “Keep in mind my mom works for you,” Harry said. He was already at the door.

  I snatched up the clipping and stormed after him. “You cannot be serious,” I called across the bullpen.

  “Serious as you when arguing a civil libertarian position,” Harry called back without turning.

  I raised the clipping. “This is an article about a labor dispute.”

  “Keep reading.” He disappeared down the hallway.

  “Why would I—” I focused in on the second paragraph.

  Oh.

  ...flooding at the warehouse, which is not anywhere near a flood plain, lends speculation that metahuman activity may be involved...

  “You...utter and complete asshat,” I muttered. The door thumped closed in the distance. Harry had already left.

  I frowned, staring at
the wrinkled newsprint. Why the hell had he given this to me?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sienna

  A last-minute dive saved me from getting splattered by a shotgun blast of ball bearings as I sailed behind the cover of the first row of seats in the movie theater. I rolled end over end behind the concealment that the seats offered, ball bearings shredding through the wood and fabric behind me, and I didn’t stop until I reached the end of the row.

  “Leave me alone!” the Magneto screamed. “I just...I need her!”

  “Aww, man,” I muttered under my breath. “Obsessed fan, aisle two.” Raising my voice, I called out to him. “Hey, I’m not looking for a fight here, but do you care at all what Anna thinks?”

  “She doesn’t know me yet,” he called back, clearly social enough he felt he had to explain himself. That was good; if he’d been disconnected long enough to just write me off, he’d have grabbed her and been gone. While this storm of metal was not the greatest sign, like, say, him surrendering outright would be, it was a hint that he wasn’t completely gone ’round the bend yet. Just mostly. “She needs a chance to know me. The real me.”

  “I don’t want to know you, creeper!” Anna shouted, oh-so-helpfully. “You’re a freak!”

  “You...you don’t know that,” the creeper said, and the ball bearings disappeared, leaping from where they’d lodged in the floor and seats behind me. They arced up and toward Creeper, and I wondered what he was up to. “I need time—”

  “Dude, this is not good,” I called to him. “Come on. We’re talking kidnapping here. Let’s walk it back. There have to be better alternatives. Like, y’know, Tinder. That’d be a safer...ish...starting point in a companionship search than snatching up Anna Vargas and taking her to your love bunker or whatever, trying to trigger Stockholm Syndrome.” I moved a little to the side, hoping if he decided to launch another blast at me, he’d do so where I’d just been speaking from. I clutched my remaining baton tightly.