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

by Robert J. Crane

  “He’s got plenty of money,” Drake fired right back. “Look at the lists. The guy’s a billionaire.”

  That was true. I’d seen him in Forbes. Something about that rankled me, too, a little dark surge of emotion that might maybe have had roots in my failing agency back home. Sucked that a douche like Logan Mills was a billionaire when I was wondering how to pay my employees next week. “Look, I just don’t want to see people get hurt,” I said, some of the wind leaving my sails. “Cops, workers, management—I’m here because I’m worried something bad is going to happen.” I looked Theresa Carson in the eyes. “And it seems to me you might be getting close to exactly that.”

  “Our people feel disrespected by Logan’s negotiation tactics,” Theresa said. “Like I told you, some of us—a lot of us—have been here since the beginning. We’ve known Logan since long before he was a billionaire. He could have talked to us when this all came up. He chose not to. Handed it off to those lawyers.” She looked like she was ready to spit on the floor. “That was an insult to us all. A thumb in our eyes. Well, we’re not going to sit down and be quiet anymore. We’re going to get our due. Logan Mills can spread his billion around as far as I’m concerned.” She thumped the table lightly for emphasis.

  “Damned right,” Big Bert rumbled.

  “Well, I think I see where you’re coming from here,” I said, pushing back from the table. “If there’s nothing else...”

  “You need to pick a side, wind boy,” Drake said, causing me to raise an eyebrow. “You think you can stand between us and Mills, you’re wrong. There’s no middle ground—”

  “Angelo,” Theresa said, patting him again. “Mr. Treston, please. Take a look around. Talk to our people. You’ll see what we mean. Logan’s not negotiating this in good faith. He’s worried about keeping his money—and not paying us fairly for what we’re doing.”

  I brushed some of my long hair back. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. Pure boilerplate. With a nod to each of them, I turned to leave, because I damned sure wasn’t going to sit around and drink with the three of them. Not when I was already having a bad feeling about what was going on here.

  I hit the door and was out on the street a moment later, thoughts swirling in my head. What the hell had Harry Graves drawn me into? This just looked like a labor dispute of what I viewed as the normal variety—big rich versus little poor people, except someone had thrown a meta in.

  “It’s not as simple as it looks,” came a voice from behind me, almost causing me a heart attack. I whirled—

  And there stood Harry Graves, leaning against the front of Puckett’s, an irritating smile on his face.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Jules

  “Here he is!” Jules said, throwing his arms wide as the dark car pulled into the warehouse and the door clanked down behind them. “Man of the hour, this guy.” Gil hurried out of the passenger side and opened the rear door. Inside, Jules could see a scared guy. Twenty-something, good-looking kid, but scared shitless and looking miserable, like he’d sat on his balls the whole way here. “Here’s our mystery singer. Why the long face, cowpoke?”

  “Who are you?” the kid asked, taking Jules’s hand, staring at it as Jules shook it heavily.

  “Just an interested party who hates to see a good man take it on the chin,” Jules said, putting an arm around the kid’s shoulders and steering him away from the car. There was a naivete that whiffed off this kid like cheap cologne, so Jules prepared to pour it on thick. If this guy was older? No way. He’d have gone more reserved. Kids ate up the horseshit, though, especially this generation. They didn’t know shit but thought they knew everything. This was going to be a pleasure. “I’m a guy who’s been in your shoes, you know? Who’s taken his hits. That’s reason enough for me to help a man like yourself.”

  A strangely choked look ran across the kid’s face, twisted into a frown. “Who are you?”

  “Jules Sharpe.” Jules placed one hand on his chest in a gesture of sincerity. “And you are...?”

  “Brance,” the kid said. And he really was a kid. Couldn’t be more than twenty-two, twenty-five at most.

  Jules split into a wide grin. “Brance. Good name. So, uh...what are you up to here, Brance? You trying to do the Nashville thing? Make your name?”

  Brance’s head sagged, eyes finding the concrete floor. Yeah, Jules had hit it. “Yeah,” Brance mumbled. “Trying to. Or I was.”

  Jules put the arm back around his shoulder. “Hey, kid. Why the long face? It’s a tough town. You had a couple rough nights.”

  Brance looked up at him with watery eyes. “I blew up the sound system in two bars. Hurt people with...I don’t even know how I did it. And Sienna Nealon is after me now.”

  “That’s a tough break.” Jules nodded along, keeping his arm around Brance’s shoulders. “Tough crowd, tough break. But look—did you do that on purpose?”

  “No.” Brance shook his head. “I was just singing. And it happened.”

  “Never happened before that?” Jules asked.

  “No.” The kid wasn’t lying. Jules knew a liar when he saw one.

  “Then it was an accident,” Jules said. “Accidents happen. Believe me. My brother-in-law? He once plowed a car into a McDonald’s. Almost killed a guy. You know what happened to him?” Brance looked up. “Nothing,” Jules said. “I got him a good lawyer, and we took care of it. You have an accident in your car, it shouldn’t be something you fear for the rest of your life, you know? It’s not like you went into the bars and tried to blow people’s heads up, you know?”

  “No,” Brance said, nodding along. “No, I didn’t. It was an accident.”

  “Exactly,” Jules said, pointing a finger at him. “Accidents happen. You just need a little help explaining your way out of it, you know?” He patted Brance on the shoulders a couple times. “I can help you with this. No problem.”

  Brance blinked. “You can?”

  “Absolutely,” Jules said. “You’re new in town, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long you been here?”

  “A couple months,” Brance said.

  “I’ve only been here a couple years myself,” Jules said, smiling. “We out-of-towners got to stick together. I’ll call my lawyer tomorrow, get him working on explaining this through.” He walked a few more paces. “So, uh...you came to town to be a singer?” Brance nodded. Looked like the dream had stuck in his throat, he looked so stricken. “You mind favoring me with a verse or two?” Jules smiled. “You know, show me what you do? Nice and easy.” He made a motion as if to cover his ears. “I don’t need to start bleeding from the canals if you know what I mean.”

  Brance flushed, and it looked to Jules like his words had the exact effect he’d intended. “Yeah, no, I can—here.” And he took a breath, then let out a small sigh before launching into some ballad that Jules had never heard. He did it a cappella through one verse and a chorus before sliding to a slow stop.

  “That was great!” Jules clapped, looking behind him to make sure that Gil and Leo did too. “Wasn’t that great?” Nods, of course. “You got a real voice on you, kid.” Here, he had to be a little careful, because he wanted to sample the goods, but not go deaf. “So, uh...how’d the thing happen? You know, in the bars.”

  “I don’t know,” Brance said, shaking his head slowly. “I just sang and it started to happen.”

  “Okay, okay,” Jules said, nodding. Everything he did here was to be agreeable with Brance, to build the trust—but also get the kid to do what he wanted. By the time it was over, he wanted Brance eating out of his palm. So far, so good. The kid was in a tough place, and he was being plenty easy. Dangle his dream in front of him, feed the desires of Brance’s heart, and Jules would have him. He could see it already. “About my lawyer—he’s really good, by the way. Top lawyer in town. Here’s what he’s going to say: ‘How did it happen if it was an accident? How are we going to keep it from happening in the future?’” Jules looked Br
ance in the eyes. “You know what I mean? Court’s going to wonder. They can’t have bars on Broadway getting blown up every night.”

  “Yeah,” Brance said, sagging. “But I don’t know how it happens.”

  “Okay, well, maybe we can work on that,” Jules said. “Hey, Gil.” He snapped his fingers. “You guys got any earplugs?”

  “Yeah,” Gil said, and tossed Jules a pair sealed in plastic. He grinned. “Got to have ’em if I go downtown. My ears are always killing me in those places on Broadway.”

  Nice. Jules had given him that line to put Brance at ease. He ripped them open and shoved a foam plug into each ear canal. “So here’s what we do, Brance. You sing, see if you can hit that note or whatever it was that caused things to go off. I’ll stand here, listen, and we’ll narrow it down so when you go to the lawyer you can say, ‘Here’s how it happened, I got it under control, it’ll never happen again.’ Right? Right.” Jules took a couple steps back. “Okay. Hit me.”

  Brance hesitated. “But...what if I...” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “...hurt you?”

  “Just don’t close your eyes and keep an eye on my face,” Jules said. “You’ll know. Just stop, right?” This kid. This kid didn’t want to hurt a fly. This was the kind of naivete you couldn’t buy. Jules had a fleeting moment of worry that this wasn’t going to go so well, but then...he’d toughened up others in the past. Brought people into the lifestyle. That was toughening up, really. Making ’em coarse to decisions that would hurt others.

  No big deal to Jules now, and it wouldn’t be a big deal to Brance. Eventually. One step at a time, though.

  “Come on, Brance,” Jules said, prodding him. “You’re going to have to learn to control that instrument if you’re going to make it in this town as a singer. First things first: we find out where things went wrong. Then we work on making them right. Okay?”

  Brance was just standing there, staring. “Why are you doing this? You’ve got no reason to help me.”

  Jules just smiled. He had a line for this, too. “Full disclosure: I’m kind of on the lookout for new talent. I’d like to break into managing. You know...if you might be open to taking on an...agent. Business manager.”

  A smile bloomed slowly, out of pure surprise, and spread dumbly across Brance’s face. Jules would have staked his life on the fact that no one had said anything nice to this kid in a long time. Maybe ever. “Yeah,” Brance said, grinning stupidly. “That’s why I came to Nashville.”

  “Well, this worked out well for both of us then, didn’t it?” Jules just grinned. “Come on, kid. I like your voice. Let’s hit it and figure out how things go wrong so we can start making them right.”

  That worked, too: Brance started singing, like the canary that found itself in warm crap, and Jules just listened, hands close to his ears in case he had to cover them, waiting to hear whatever note it was that destroyed things.

  Because that note, that power? That was going to make Jules’s dreams come true.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Sienna

  I was well familiar by this point with how it felt to find yourself back at zero. No leads except a drawing—slightly updated and more accurate—of Brance. A confirmation it was his name. No getaway car info, really, no idea who’d pulled his fat out of the fire. Just lots of threads, no tapestry.

  Chandler and I were sitting across from each other at a conference table at TBI HQ. He’d brought me up here and we’d chewed over the same facts, limited as they were, over and over. We hashed them half a dozen different ways to come to the same conclusion:

  We were nowhere with this investigation.

  “So Metro’s going to continue to canvas Broadway?” I already knew the answer, but I’d run out of other questions to ask.

  “All night,” Chandler said. “But you think he’s unlikely to make another move, right?”

  “I think he’s unlikely to show his face on Broadway again between now and Ragnarok,” I said. “Unless he’s thrice as dumb as the dumbest stump.”

  Chandler nodded, tapping a hand against the table. “Metro cops have shared his sketch with the local bartenders. They’ll all be on the lookout for him now. He’s not getting a spot on stage there.”

  “There’s something to this,” I said. “No way he should have tried again tonight. And when I talked to him, he really seemed like he didn’t believe he was a meta.”

  “But he obviously is,” Chandler said.

  “Yeah, the massive bruise in the middle of my chest confirms that,” I said, fingering the spot on my sternum where he’d belted me with his mule-kick of a voice. “But he apparently didn’t know that until the last couple days. Really, until tonight.” I remembered the terrified, disbelieving look on his face. “It was like I’d killed a puppy in front of him, Chandler, I swear.” I shook my head. “This thing that happened to him? It hit him hard. Harder than it hit me, even.” I massaged myself again, cringing as I found the worst of the bruise.

  “Did your powers come as a surprise to you?” Chandler asked. He was probing, albeit delicately.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, finding a particularly rough spot in my left pectoral just above my bra line. The underwire seemed to have bitten into my skin. Luckily it’d be gone by tomorrow, because ouch. “One minute I was heading down into my basement to sacrifice myself to an unstoppable monster threatening the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the next I’m ripping his soul out through the touch of my hands. Came as a total surprise, especially when he started piping up in my brain.”

  Chandler’s eyes danced in interest. “What is it like? Having someone else in your head?”

  So fun. “It varies,” I said. “I had one guy who was a serial killer with terrible boundary issues, another who was a murderous lech...and who also had boundary issues. Another was a tough former soldier, another was an ex, and still another was a charming sociopath...they ran the gamut, really.”

  “This is all so very fascinating to me,” Chandler said. “You must get tired of answering questions about all this.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Uh...no, not really.” I screwed up my face in concentration as I thought about it. “I don’t get asked about myself much anymore.”

  Chandler cocked his head in curiosity. “What? Why not?”

  “Well, I’m not allowed to talk to the media, and I don’t really have great opportunities to talk to people outside of work, so...” I shrugged.

  “But your co-workers must be forever asking you all sorts of things,” he said. “You’ve been responsible for bringing down almost all the meta criminals imprisoned in the United States. I mean, like seventy percent of captures are you or your friends.” He just stared at me blankly, as if waiting for me to say something. “How can they not be asking you constantly about this stuff?”

  I gave it a moment’s thought and shrugged broadly. “Well, one of them doesn’t like me much and the other is a peeing puppy, she’s so new. So the guy who doesn’t like me—Holloway—doesn’t really go out of his way to talk to me unless he has to, and the peeing puppy—Hilton—is always trying to weirdly ingratiate herself to me in a very millennial kind of way, by oversharing what she’s done.” I shuddered, recalling a memory of her telling me about some guy she’d met at a club and brought home recently, ending with hilariously bad sex and humiliation for all involved. I had silently wished for the ability to turn invisible during her entire telling of the story, wondering why she would feel comfortable enough with me to inflict it upon me.

  “Oh,” Chandler said, taking it all in. “That sucks. But I mean, your bosses have to at least be interested in your wealth of experience.”

  “Mmm, my bosses hate me.”

  Chandler blinked like that didn’t compute. “What?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “In their defense, I’m kind of a pain in the ass, especially to authority figures. It’s a personality quirk. Besides, I only have one boss now, and it’s the FBI Director, apparently.”

  �
��I thought you worked in the New York office?”

  “Just got transferred before I came down here.” I smiled tightly. “I think they might have decided no one but the Director could properly put a leash on me. Not sure exactly how that will work, but I’m moving to DC when I get back.”

  “New York, DC; you really are kind of jet-setting,” Chandler said, readjusting back to enthused now that he’d taken in my news. “I’m a little envious.”

  “Don’t be,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t want to be ‘jet-setting’ or whatever. I don’t want to be in DC. Or New York, really.”

  Chandler just stared at me, brow furrowing. “Then...why are you?”

  I forced a smile. “Because that’s where the job is.” I looked back down at the new sketch of Brance. “So...do you guys have access to a downtown camera web? Somewhere we could run facial recognition and see if we can pick this guy up?”

  “I don’t think we’re quite that sophisticated,” Chandler said, looking down at the picture. “We’ve got a BOLO out statewide and to neighboring states, but it seems to me this guy is probably a transplant, given that he’s, y’know, ‘Runnin’ Down a Dream,’ to quote Bruce Springsteen. Depending on how recently he moved here, I don’t know how much contact he’s had in the local area, which may make finding him more difficult.”

  “So far he’s a nuisance,” I said, sliding his picture around. “Hard to say whether it’ll stay that way.”

  “What do you mean?” Chandler asked. Genuine interest. So nice.

  “Well, there’s a tendency among the newly empowered to get a little taste of godhood and like it a little too much,” I said. “Usually there’s a spiral effect where the crimes get progressively worse.” I looked at the wide-eyed innocence displayed on the artist’s rendering of Brance’s face. “But this guy didn’t start out doing criminal things. He ran because he was scared. I’m not sure what that means for his future in this investigation. If we’re lucky—” I picked up the rendering and stared into the eyes “—maybe it’ll end with a whimper. I think it would have, if not for his rescuers.” I put the picture back down. “Whoever they are.”