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

by Robert J. Crane

  “She’ll see,” Creeper said confidently. “I just need to give her a chance to see.”

  A hammering sound like a rock drill assailed my ears, but I didn’t dare peek over the seats keeping me separated from Creeper. Besides, I knew to a ninety-nine percent certainty what he was doing, anyway.

  He was using the ball bearings to chip away at the floor, hurling them with all his power into the ground. It was having roughly the same effect as a grinding drill bit, chipping away at the carpet, then the concrete sub-floor.

  He was boring an escape tunnel out of the theater so he didn’t have to go out through the cops. Which was either smart or cowardly, and judging by the fact he wasn’t trying to pursue and destroy me, I had a guess it was a little bit of both.

  “Come on, dude,” I shouted, looking for any kind of help from the rows of seats above me. These Hollywood superstars were hiding like they were bugs trying to escape the exterminator. Smart, but not helpful. “My kingdom for a Steven Clayton among you assholes,” I said under my breath. Steven Clayton was a Hollywood heartthrob but also a real action hero who’d helped me in the past. It’d have been too much to hope that he’d have been invited to this premiere.

  “Just let us go!” Creeper called, and Anna Vargas screamed from somewhere near him. I guessed he had her bound up somehow, supervillain style. Probably gave her a belt of ball bearings and was hauling her along like a proper abductee. “I don’t want any trouble!” There was a hint of pleading from him, one that bypassed my cold heart and made me feel a spark of sadness for Creeper. Dude had problems in the head. Needed a therapist.

  Unfortunately, I was not a therapist.

  I was the bullet sent to dispatch the problems no one else could seem to.

  “You know we can’t do that,” I called back. “You’re taking someone who doesn’t want to go with you—”

  “She doesn’t know me yet!” Creeper shouted. “When she does, she’ll love me!”

  “That’s really not how this works,” I called back. “Please. This can’t sound normal to you.”

  “Our love defies the bounds of normal!” Creeper screamed, definitely rounding the bend between sanity and insanity, if he hadn’t already crossed over. “No one understands us!”

  I cringed. This was not going anywhere good. “Please—” I started to say.

  I was interrupted by ball bearings smashing through the seats around me, and I rolled again until I fell out into the aisle on the far side of the theater and almost tumbled down the steps to the floor level. Catching myself before I did, I looked up just in time to see the last of the ball bearings arcing into the air and retreating down into a hole in the floor the size of a municipal bus.

  Cracking my neck from the constant rolling and its impingement on my spine, I slowly inched up to the gaping hole in the floor. Darkness waited below, and at its bottom, I could see train tracks.

  The subway.

  I let a brief noise of impatience, and the sound of Anna Vargas’s screams echoed up to me from somewhere down the tunnel.

  “Tally ho,” I said, and down I went, into the darkness, chasing the Creeper and the starlet.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The New York City subway was probably the least comfortable place I could imagine on the island of Manhattan, with the possible exception of Marina Abramovic’s dinner table. The mechanical rattle of a train somewhere in the distance set me on edge, and the darkness was broken only by the faint light seeping in from the hole above and a dim glow somewhere in front of me.

  I listened and heard a high-pitched grunt; Anna Vargas was struggling against her captor, but I doubted with much efficacy. I had my doubts about how well this would come out for her if she fought him too much, but I hadn’t had time in our brief exchange of words to really delve into Creeper’s psyche. My initial impression: he was nuts. Obsessed. Normal, well-adjusted people didn’t use their superpowers to kidnap their celebrity crush during a movie premiere, after all, dragging them into the darkness of the underground afterward.

  But hey, Phantom of the Opera here didn’t play by the normal rules.

  I sprinted along the center of the track, keeping an eye out for the third rail in the little light I had. Getting zapped to death would put an end to my mission rather abruptly, and I didn’t need that. Running with my shoes off (again) was forcing me to slow down and be a little more careful, especially given the ground was cluttered with debris. The last thing I needed was to catch a stray needle or stub my toe at superhuman speed and accidentally tear it off in the process.

  “Stop following us!” Creeper screamed in the distance. He was waaaaaay out there, and I heard something whistling through the dark.

  I dove for the ground and ball bearings smacked into the concrete and rails behind me, making an awful racket that rang through the tunnels like metallic thunder.

  “Why won’t you leave us in peace?” Creeper cried. He really did sound like he was on the edge.

  “Do you know who I am?” I called, then leapt up and bounced off the nearest wall, vaulting into a sideways run then flipping against the opposite wall for a few steps before vaulting back. It was very Matrix-y, wall-running. Running on the ground down a small tunnel with the enemy in front of me was going to be dangerous—and predictable. Time to use my super strength and speed to defy conventions. And hopefully keep from catching a shotgun blast of ball bearings from turning me into a metahuman smoothie. “Peace isn’t really in my repertoire. Not when someone’s kidnapping.”

  “She just needs time to see who I am so she can love me!” Creeper shouted. His voice sounded a little rattle-y, but not just from the emotion. There was a distant light glowing in the tunnel past him, slowly getting brighter. Not a single source, like a bulb, but a glow like a...

  A station. There was a station somewhere ahead.

  But the noise? It wasn’t just his voice. It almost went over his voice, made him harder to understand. There was an echo that persisted even after he finished shouting too, like—

  “Motherf—” I Samuel L. Jackson’d.

  Light was refracting off the concrete walls around me, coming from behind.

  A subway train was only a hundred yards back, and closing on me fast, as though it neither saw me nor cared that I was blazing down the damned tunnel trying to rescue Anna Vargas.

  And in another few seconds, it was going to hit me.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Reed

  “This is the thing that drives me nuts about these future-seers and telepaths,” I vented, loudly, pacing across my living room, a cushion of air beneath my feet for reassurance. “They never tell you the whole story.” I was gesticulating wildly with my hands. “So Harry Graves shows up and just dumps this on me—” I flung the clipping he’d left with me toward Isabella in a twirl of wind, a little tornado of the sort I used to stir her hair when I was feeling mischievous “—and I’m supposed to...what? Take his word for it that I need to go to Murfreesboro, Tennessee and intervene in some penny ante labor dispute?”

  Isabella Perugini was a woman who was all about the no-bullshit lifestyle. Somehow, too, she was all about me. How those two radically different forces reconciled, I had no clue. She was paging through a magazine while listening to me, and I knew from long experience she was paying very close attention to my every irritable utterance. “Then don’t go,” she said simply, turning to the next page.

  “Ah ha, but maybe that’s what he actually wants me to do,” I said, twisting my brain in another knot trying to figure out why Harry had inflicted this stupid directive on me. “He’s not a normal guy, you know. Maybe he’s playing three-dimensional chess—”

  “Or maybe he told you what he needs you to know and anticipates you’ll be a good guy and go intervene in the problem,” Isabella said. So simple. So matter-of-fact.

  So trusting.

  I narrowed my eyes. “Or maybe that’s what he wants me to think.”

  This made her pause, narrow her own beautifu
l, brown eyes, and look up at me quizzically. “But that’s not what you think. You think he’s working some scam on you.”

  “Because he’s tricky that way,” I said, popping off my air lift and slipping onto the couch next to her. “See, you don’t know Harry. Hell, I don’t really know him, except to know that I don’t like what I know of him.”

  Isabella shrugged. “Sienna trusts him, plainly.”

  “Sienna has legendarily bad taste in men and they often betray her,” I said. “Women too, actually. And you don’t even like her, so I’m not sure why you’re taking her side on this one—”

  “I’m taking my own side on this one,” Isabella said, flipping to the next page. I realized at last this was a fashion magazine she was looking at, and the article she was paging through was 27 Hot Looks for Spring! Which was funny, because it was February and Minnesota, which meant spring was a good eight hundred months away by my reckoning and would only last two days before we were straight into the one day of summer and two days of fall before winter’s ominous, reckoning return. “I don’t need to listen to you sit and get spun up about this all night. You’re chasing your own tail.”

  “I don’t actually have a tail, and I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough.”

  She closed her magazine with great ceremony, placing her hands in her lap for a moment before reaching out and grabbing one of mine, holding it very earnestly as she looked me in the eyes. “So you’re worried your sister’s boyfriend is trying to manipulate you into a mission that will be too dangerous for you?”

  “Right,” I said. Then paused. “Well, sort of. Maybe. I—”

  “Mm, this is well thought out, I see.”

  “I’m really just concerned that there is something going on in his thinking that will be of negative repercussions for me,” I said, trying to boil it down.

  “Because you don’t trust him.”

  “Right,” I said. “He’s asking me to do this Tennessee thing as a leap of faith.”

  “But you don’t have faith,” Isabella said, still staring right in my eyes.

  “Exactly.” I snapped my fingers at her. “I am faithless. Especially as pertains to Harry Graves.”

  “Well, it seems like your decision is made, then,” she said, and patted my hand a couple times before letting it loose so she could pick up her magazine and get back to paging through the spring looks she’d get to wear in four to six years when that season came here to us.

  I watched her study the magazine with great interest for a few moments, stewing in my own juices, before I finally burst out with, “But is it really?”

  She slumped, head bowing in defeat as she cast aside her magazine again and turned to me with her very serious look, the one she put on right before delivering bad news to a patient or telling me that no, tonight intimacy was definitely not going to happen, before hitting me with her reasoning for said decision. “Reed. I love you, mi amore. I trust you, si?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “I hope so.”

  “I trust you because you have shown to be the kind of man I can respect.” She landed one hand on each of my cheeks and I felt suddenly self-conscious that my five o’clock shadow was probably a little rough on her smooth, sweet-smelling hands. “You try so hard to make these things work, even when they are not working.”

  “Did you just bring this around to the agency?” I asked. Where the hell was she going with this?

  She nodded. “It is a very determined approach you take. And I respect you for it. It endears me to you. It—and many other things in our history—make me trust you, yes? Because you are an honest man. Very forthright. And you trust the people that you are close to.”

  “Thanks. I think?”

  “But I feel that you are going to drive me absolutely nuts with this business about your sister’s boyfriend,” Isabella said, still looking at me very seriously. “You don’t trust him, fine. Decide not to trust him and be on about your business of trying to save the business, yes? Or decide to give him a shot and see if this Murveesburro—”

  “Murfreesboro.”

  “Whatever. See if this thing is a real thing for you to deal with,” she said. “Because this is, to my estimation, his first ‘reach-out’ to you.” Her face was so very earnest, eyebrows all in a cute little V line. “He must know you don’t know each other, really. He must know you are not a trusting person when it comes to strangers—”

  “Or people I view as jerking my sister around for strange and non-obvious reasons,” I muttered under my breath.

  “Exactly,” she said, clapping me on the cheek. Her mother did the same thing when we met, and I found it a little patronizing coming from her. Isabella, thankfully, deployed it usually under much more pleasant and intimate circumstances, so she got some leeway on that whole condescension judgment. “You have suspicions. That’s a fine thing. You should go into everything with your eyes wide open. But you should make a decision on whether you will try trusting Harry or not. And if the answer is not—”

  I sighed, loudly enough to interrupt her. “I don’t want to trust Harry.”

  “That much is obvious.”

  “This is not how I anticipated things would go when my sister finally got out from under the damned accusations against her,” I said, vaulting out of her grasp and back to pacing. “She was supposed to come home. She was supposed to start running this damned agency instead of leaving me holding the freaking bag—”

  “It is a heavy bag,” Isabella agreed. “Like a Gucci filled with many medical texts.”

  “I’m watching it sink every day,” I whispered, looking at her with this stark horror, afraid to even speak it very loudly. “I’m not sure I’m going to have anything to hand her when she gets back. And then Harry comes along with his damned warnings—”

  Isabella waved me off. “She trusts him.”

  “I don’t,” I said, pausing, floating on air.

  “Is it because you don’t trust anyone?” she asked quietly. “Or because you don’t like the message he gave her?”

  I sighed again, deeper, and slumped ’til I was bent nearly double. “Can’t it be both?”

  She rose and came to me, put a light hand around my shoulders and pulled me gently from the air. I dispelled the gusts and let her wrap me in her arms, chin on my shoulder.

  “It is very difficult to watch a dream die,” she said, fingers threading through my hair. “Even worse when it’s not your dream, but one you’re watching for someone else.”

  “Sienna,” I said, a little choked. “I wanted this to work for her. So she could get free of the damned government. But if she gets out and we’re not even standing anymore by the time she does—”

  “Shhhhh,” Isabella said. “You are worrying too much.”

  “I’m not sure that’s possible,” I said, my fingers holding tight to her waist, her shoulders. She felt so good, so smooth. When she breathed I smelled the Lindor truffle she’d snuck before dinner on her breath. Dark chocolate and orange. My favorite.

  “You will do the right thing,” she said, and that was it. She just held me close for a while as we stood in the living room.

  And I knew what that right thing was.

  I was heading for Tennessee.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sienna

  “The light at the end of the tunnel is a train,” I muttered as the subway train thundered ever closer behind me.

  Ahead was a kidnapper and his starlet kidnappee, not bound by the laws of gravity and probably slipping away—floating away? Flying away? By the second.

  Behind me was death, chewing up the distance between us quite handily, moving at about twice the speed I could manage on foot.

  The answer seemed obvious.

  When the train was twenty yards behind me, I jumped forward as hard as I could. I was relying on my limited knowledge of physics, a study I had not really made in earnest since the day I’d busted out of my house into the dead cold of a Minnesota winter.
/>   Fortunately, I’d done quite a lot of practical physics work since then, and I had a feeling this would work.

  Or a hope. Probably a hope.

  The train caught me mid-leap, my speed a little over half of its own. I slammed into the front window like a bug and hung there, grabbing a metal ridge in the front with one hand and catching the top with the other. My face was plastered on the windshield, staring in at the driver, who stared back at me with wide eyes and a jaw that was about ready to touch the ground.

  I saw her shake out of her stunned reverie and start to reach for the gearshift to stop the train, but I smacked the spiderwebbed window with a palm and shouted, at the top of my lungs, “Don’t slow down!”

  She stopped, hand halfway to the gearshift lever, and just stared at me, vacant-eyed.

  “Speed up!” I shouted, and you could just about see her brain freeze as she weighed that command against her instinct and training, which probably told her you’re supposed to stop the damned train when you hit a person.

  To hell with the training, I thought. Trains were for riding. And I meant to ride this one straight to my destination.

  I tapped on the window again, hanging there, feet bracing me from falling and taking up most of my weight. “I need you to go faster,” I said, throwing a look over my shoulder.

  She just stared, and her lips moved. Over the sound of the rattling train echoing in the tunnel, I could barely hear her: “Why?”

  I chucked a thumb over my shoulder. “Bad guy,” I shouted, looking again. Sure enough, we were gaining on Creeper. Anna Vargas was clearly visible, legs bucking in mid-air as he hauled her along a good ten feet ahead of him. Creeper was casting nervous looks back, watching the train approach with clear worry. “When I tell you to, stop. Fast. Emergency stop.” I looked the driver in the eyes. “Understand?”