He moved only slightly, stirring as he lifted his head. Blood dripped from between his lips, a tooth stuck in the flow, perched on his chin like an unchewed kernel of corn. He’d have a lot of those now, at least until he got some dental implants.
“Whuh...happn...?” He looked up at me with bleary eyes, not fully conscious.
I looked down at him. He looked up at me, uncomprehending. He didn’t know what or who he was looking at, he might not even have known where he was. “You got about a tenth of what you deserve,” I said, lifting him to his feet. He staggered, but I held him up, then pulled up Mr. Cooperative with the other hand. He wasn’t adding anything to this conversation; by the look on his red face, I could have kneed him in the kidney and he would have done his best not to make a sound.
Part of me hoped some unseen friend of theirs would come leaping out of a closet, try to shoot me. I’d throw one of them in the path of the bullets, then the other one, draw and dust the shooter.
But it didn’t work out that way. The house was quiet, except for the rattling breathing of one of the girls in the living room to my right and the sounds of Spencer’s team at the back of the house. Metro PD squad cars were already rolling up, and I grabbed my prisoners and started walking them out, eager to rid myself of them before I did something to them that I probably wouldn’t regret.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Jules
The warehouse, again. Jules was pretty tired of this place. But he wasn’t tired of the dream of having a superpowered person at his disposal to make Nashville his town. Even if it was this little weenie, Brance.
“I just don’t think this is going to work,” Brance whined. Jules resisted the urge to slap him. For now. He had a look on his face like he already might cry. Jules didn’t have kids of his own, but he suspected he could have raised one better than this. Kids these days were giant crybabies because their mommies and daddies blasted through every legitimate issue they could have ever faced, leaving them nothing to deal with but low-grade emotional problems.
Jules chafed at that. He’d grown up hardscrabble, in Jersey, to a mother who’d given no shits about him and a dad that thought spoiling the rod meant you were a wuss, and any kid who didn’t snap-to at the sound of his father’s voice just needed a beating. He hadn’t spared the rod, and Jules had the scars on his bare ass to prove it. His definition of a problem diverged from Brance’s by a pretty fair margin, he guessed.
“Listen, kid,” Jules said, keeping his patience on a thin thread so as not to scream at the kid, “I’m not going to lie—you got a problem.” He held his hands out, trying to get the dumbass to see reason.
He didn’t, but he didn’t speak, either. Just stood there like he was going to cry. Jules shuddered inside. What the hell had happened to country music? Once upon a time, even their luminaries knew what real shit was like. Some of them even did time. This kid was so weak he’d walk out bowlegged after an hour in jail, just because the other detainees could smell how ripe he was for plucking.
“But this ain’t an insurmountable problem,” Jules said, trying to bring his thoughts back around. The dumb shit wanted to be a star, singing for crowds. Well, whatever Jules put in front of his ass right now was going to end up with bleeding ears—
Heeeyyy.
Jules paused, thinking that one through. “And you might even say it’s got its own sort of possibilities attached,” he said, once he was sure, yep, that was an idea.
Brance just squinted at him. “What...how has this got any possibilities?” He touched his throat. “I can’t control this.”
“Sure you can,” Jules said, eyeing him. “There’s something specific you’re thinking about whenever this goes off. Right?”
“No,” Brance answered, way too quickly.
Yeah. This little shit had daddy issues, because of course he did. Jules could see it a mile off. But he shook his head. “I’m going to set up a small concert for you.”
Brance’s eyes went wide. “But—I just—I blew up that studio!” His voice lowered. “People could get hurt. Really hurt.”
Jules was counting on that, actually, but he wasn’t going to say it to this knucklehead. “We’re going to work on this. Train your mind to avoid the thing that’s causing you to break into this, uh...killer frequency or whatever. And the best way to solve a problem is plunge right through the fear and do something amazing.” He arched his eyebrows. “Hey, Gil. Check on whether we can rent the Ryman for a small event. Tonight, if possible. Otherwise, as soon as we can.”
Brance looked like he’d swallowed a truck tire.
Jules was smiling, though. It was like a coming out party for him, and all he had to do was get some influential assholes in the organized crime world there, then get dumbass Brance to do that thing he did so well—screw up.
Yeah. This one was in the bag.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Sienna
“That should have been a lot harder,” Spencer said, sauntering up to me amid the sea of police cars and flashing lights that swamped the once-calm city street.
“It was plenty hard,” I said. I longed for something to do with my hands as I sat on the hood of my BMW, watching paramedics escort dirty, heroin-addled teenage sex slaves out of the house one at a time to waiting vans. For the first time in my life, I wished I smoked, some combination of antsy-ness and self-loathing combo-ing up. I could imagine taking a deep breath of that toxic air, letting it fill my lungs like the poison it was, feeling it choke my super sense of smell and grip my lungs like the hands of death.
Yeah. That’d be better than how I felt right now.
“You ever seen anything like this before?” Spencer asked. He had his arms folded and was leaned against the BMW next to me.
“You got a cigarette?” I asked, looking over at him. He gave me a subtle shake of the head. “No, I’ve never seen a sex trafficking house before. Only read about them.” My hand twitched. “I generally stick to the metahuman side of the business, unless the NYPD asks for my help in an emergency. Which is usually bank robberies, assaults—the stuff you get 911 calls for, you know?”
Spencer nodded. “There are places like this in all fifty states now.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Ugly business,” he said as the paramedics led another girl out covered in a blanket. A lot of them didn’t have even a single outfit to call their own. Whatever possessions they’d come into this with had been sifted by the guys who took them. Valuables were sold. Extraneous clothing was tossed. As near as we could tell, this was a passing stage of their new lives, the one where they got to experience the joys of opioid addiction before being handed off to the establishments and pimps where they’d fully begin their working lives in the underground, underage sex trade.
Another was led out just then, shaking like she had a palsy, the paramedics having to hold her up. Whether it was from the drugs or from what she’d experienced in the house, it was hard to say. It wasn’t hard to imagine what she’d dealt with in there, given the living conditions.
And what I’d caught Dumbo up to before I painted the wall with his brains.
“They’re going to be on methadone the rest of their lives, aren’t they?” I asked. My hand was shaking. No one had taken my HK yet for evidence, though one of the officers had gotten the AR-15 I’d picked up from Grimy-No-Teeth and bagged it after unloading it.
“Some of them, maybe,” Spencer said flatly. “But at least we got them out before—”
“Before they got to experience the soul-crushing life of a drug-addicted career prostitute?” I balled my hand into a hard fist. My nails dug into my palm. “I guess that’s something, but it would have been nice to get them before they even got to this house.”
Spencer nodded in my peripheral vision. “It would have. But we were lucky to even find out about this. Most of the time these places are kept pretty tight secrets by whatever organized crime group runs them. The fact that one of our confidential informants m
anaged to get a tour...” He shook his head. “Well, let’s just say that kind of break doesn’t happen every day.”
“They were runaways, weren’t they?” I asked.
“Probably.” Spencer gave a half-shrug. “Hard to say without getting their stories. Some of them might have been sold by their parents or guardians. Some could have been kidnapped.”
God, I wanted a drink. “Figures,” I muttered. “What’s next?”
“Someone’ll be by to get your statement,” Spencer said. “You know, because of the shooting.”
I nodded. “And then?”
He shrugged. “Nothing, probably. Every one of them had a gun in their hand or damned near to it. We had the intel that said they were armed going in. We all knew it could get messy. Personally, I consider us damned lucky to have had you.” He cast a look over his head at the front door, where yet another girl was being brought out, this one on a stretcher. “If it had been down to me and my men having to try and bust down both entrances while neutralizing the suspects?” He shook his head. “I don’t see how there aren’t casualties.” He cocked his head at me and I looked him in the eye. “The guys in there were ex-military, weren’t they?”
I nodded. “They knew their way around their rifles and had basic tactical knowledge. Eastern European accents. I’d say they served in their home country before joining the local mafia and coming to America for the sweet, sweet opportunity to traffic young women at prices far above what they’d get in their home countries.”
“That was my guess, too,” Spencer said with a curt nod. “Yeah, if we’d tried to rush that door ourselves, without you? The place would have turned into a shooting gallery. Your reflexes, the way you lulled them...” He shook his head. “It was a hell of a fine job.” He stuck out his hand.
I stared at it for a second before I shook it.
He must have caught me making a face. “What?”
I shook my head. “Why is everyone so nice to me here? I just killed people. Several people. My boss is currently pissed at me for killing one guy who’d taken a famous hostage. You didn’t even blink when I ripped down an entire squad of sex traffickers. Not to mention the brutality I perpetrated earlier on a couple drug dealers.”
Spencer looked like he was trying to hide a smile behind his caramel lips. “You’re a little jaded, aren’t you?”
“Just a bit.”
It was Spencer’s turn to shake his head, I guess. “They were trafficking little girls. The oldest was maybe seventeen, the youngest...I don’t even want to think about it. It wouldn’t have troubled my conscience if none of them had walked out of there alive, so the fact you saved two for interrogation, we saved all the girls, and suffered no team casualties?” He just smiled. “This day was nothing but a win to me.”
My phone started buzzing in my pocket, and when I pulled it out, the caller ID read HEATHER CHALKE. “Let’s hope my boss feels that way, too,” I said, nodding that I was going to take it.
“Good luck,” Spencer said, “ma’am.” And with a slight smile that seemed like respect, he walked off as I hit the button to take the call.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Reed
I felt a visceral twist in my stomach at the mention of Flashforce.net. If there was any purported news organization that had done more to rile up humanity into a mob and then point it at my sister, I couldn’t think of one.
And they’d sent a reporter here, to this already simmering labor dispute where I was seemingly stuck against my will.
Yay.
It didn’t take too long for Yolanda Biddle to make her way over to me and Alan Kwon where we stood at the sidelines of the Lotsostuff worker protest. She was tall and blond, and her face had a very blank, plain look to it, the make-up she wore just enough to convince me that even if she applied the level volume that a hooker did, she’d still be just about the plainest-faced Jane I’d ever seen.
“Hey,” she said, smiling, and I couldn’t get the image out of my head of a clown face with a smile painted on, it was that damned hollow. “I’m Yolanda Biddle, with Flashforce.net.”
“Hey,” Alan said without an ounce of enthusiasm.
She gave him an unpleasant look, telling me she knew him, too. Then she switched back to smiling at me, ignoring Alan entirely. “Can I ask what you’re doing here?”
I kept my voice level and out of the realm of loathing, but only through pure control. “You can ask. My answer is ‘no comment.’”
“Oh, come on,” she said, brandishing a phone in front of her like a reporter of old carrying a microphone. Because she was recording our entire exchange. After I didn’t say anything for a few seconds, she switched tack. “How long have you been here?”
I just stared at her. She stared back, smiling, in patient expectation.
“I’ve been here an hour or two,” Alan said. Clearly he couldn’t handle the stony lack of response I was inflicting on her. I got that. It wasn’t easy for me, usually affable, conversational, to completely ignore someone. It was almost painful, in a way, but I managed it because I hated the hell out of Flashforce.douchenozzles.net.
“Do you have any comment on—” she started.
“No,” I said. “No comment. On anything. Ever.”
“Wow.” She made a sort of faux-pained, contrite face. “Look, I don’t know what you’ve heard about me—”
“Nothing,” I said.
That took her aback. Her shoulders drooped. “Nothing...? Then why—”
“I didn’t know who you were until Alan here told me, and I don’t really care who you are, per se.” I stared her down. It was really a drain to project this much unrelenting hostility to a person who was trying to be nice, but I had a lot of inner fire to work with thanks to Flashforce’s prior actions. “But I know who you work for, and I’d rather fling myself off a cliff than ever talk to someone associated with your rat-fucking website.”
Yolanda’s jaw dropped, presumably at the boldness of my word choice. “I—ah. Flashforce isn’t what you think—”
“It’s the news outlet that literally led the shit-hot-takes charge against my sister when she was wrongly accused of—well, everything,” I said, just glaring at her. “You guys had a listicle of reasons why Sienna was ‘worse than Hitler,’ which doesn’t just offend me on the basis of being crappy, histrionic, historically illiterate and hideously inaccurate with regards to my sister. It also annoys me that you went full Godwin’s Law. You never go full Godwin’s Law.” I paused. “Well, you do, but that’s a perfect argument for me not to ever do anything related to your site.”
Yolanda took that one on board, processing, her blank-ish face moving a little as she considered her reply. “Wow, that’s like...wow.” She went through the full range of emoting that I suspected she was capable of. “I can see how you’d feel that way. But—”
“Everything before the ‘but’ is bullshit,” I said. “Spare me the rest.” Alan Kwon was trying hard not to laugh, barely holding it in.
“But you’re, like, a legend,” she said, and I could feel the flattery oozing out of her. It triggered a reaction of pure disgust; this was hardly the first time someone had tried honeyed words to get past my guard, especially since I’d become quasi-famous. It was actually one of the reasons I liked—no, loved—Isabella. She had no patience for flattering me. She just told me how it was.
“I’m, like, bored of you,” I said, and pushed wind beneath my feet, flying up over the crowd again. They were definitely raucous, but every time I took to the air they seemed to simmer down while watching me. Theresa Carson threw me a little wave. I guess she still wanted my sympathies, or my help, though what she was leading her people toward here was anybody’s guess. Especially since Logan Mills didn’t even seem to be showing his face.
I turned toward the Lotsostuff warehouse, figuring I’d do a quick flyover. It looked as it always seemed to, a big warehouse in the middle of a big, empty country, just a little steam rising out of the heating system—
No.
Wait.
It was black smoke that poured out of the far side of the building, at the distant tip of the sprawling warehouse, and I realized what I was looking at a moment later—
Fire.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Sienna
“Hello,” I said, bracing myself before Chalke had even gotten out a salutation. I paced away from my BMW, preparing myself for whatever ass-chewing my boss could throw out.
“What the hell are you doing down there?” Chalke spat out, surprising me only a little in that she was straight to pisseder-than-pissed, no warm-up needed.
“Cooperating with the local authorities,” I said, keeping as neutral as I could. No point pouring gasoline on the fire. “Isn’t that what you sent me to do?”
“I sent you to deal with the stupid meta who effed up a bar with his voice,” Chalke fired back. “Because I thought maybe a few days out working on something inconsequential would remind you that your job is dealing with the important things, not screwing around in the kiddie pool with the locals.”
I cast a long look back at the sex trafficking house, where another girl was being brought out on a gurney. She had an IV hooked up to her arm and was covered in a blanket. “I think you and I have a very different idea of what constitutes important things.”
“Yes, and mine is paramount,” Chalke said with a voice like hardened iron. “This case is almost insignificant. It should have been an easy lay-up. Listen, you—”
I killed the conversation by hitting the end button. Staring at the screen for a moment, I let the phone fall from between my fingers. It hit the ground and bounced once, then lay there, on the street.
I turned and walked away from it without another thought. There was no point arguing with Chalke, no point yelling at her, nor listening to her yell.
Music: Out of the Box 26 (The Girl in the Box Book 36) Page 21