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

by Robert J. Crane

  Low-profile would have been the conventional way to do this. Keep it quiet, announce it slow. Inflict Brance on a few people at a time. Roll them up, consolidate them in fear, let them know he was the new power in town.

  But Jules was tired of the slow-march bullshit, and Brance was enough of a pussy that he’d probably bitch out after busting the eardrums of a couple people.

  The Nashville underworld needed a visionary leader.

  Jules was the guy. This was going to show them all.

  Sure, it was a big bet. But you didn’t get to the winner’s circle on penny ante bets. He needed to open in a big way, and this was it. This was going to get all their attention.

  He’d make his play tonight, in front of every mafioso of consequence in this town. The organized crime in this burg seriously needed someone to organize it.

  That was going to be Jules. All he needed was a display of power, and he was convinced he could make the moves necessary to solidify it from there. Play one against another, convince them of his supremacy...

  Yeah, it’d be tough. But he’d pull ’em together, one way or another.

  And failing that, he’d just let Brance kill ’em all tonight and step into the power vacuum that resulted.

  The best part? If Brance did it, no one could even blame it on him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Reed

  Logan Mills struggled under the force I was applying to him beneath the tornado. He didn’t say anything, just looked up at me as he tried to push through the curtain of wind that was holding him down.

  “That’s not going to do you any good,” I said, staring at him in concentration. “Question: what are you doing here?”

  Mills looked up at me without bothering to insert any credulity into his expression. “This is my warehouse!”

  “Which you tried to burn down?” I asked, watching him for a hint that he was about to burst into flames.

  “No!” He sure seemed insulted, but he stopped struggling a moment. “I came as soon as I figured out what was going on with the black smoke.” He paused, looking around. “Why aren’t the fire alarms going off?”

  “Because someone disabled them and the sprinklers before starting the fire, I assume.” I looked him right in the eyes. “Who’d have the ability to do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Mills said, hackles rising as he looked in my eyes. “Did you?”

  “I don’t know my way around any fire suppression system, let alone yours,” I said. “I did catch the firebug in the process—after I put out the flames. When I came after them, I found you. Coincidence?”

  “Yeah, it’s a coincidence.” Mills started struggling again. “Why the hell would I burn my own warehouse?”

  I surveyed the torched debris. There was no one in here, no hint that anyone had been for a while. Even in the distance, only sunlight flooding in through the aging windows provided light, suggesting either the fire had devastated the building’s electricals, at least in this area—

  Or they were just turned off. Maybe because there was no one in here.

  “Are you accepting orders right now?” I asked, not letting him up. The sirens were close now, and I could hear doors slamming outside through the broken window. The cops and firefighters weren’t far off.

  “Yeah,” Mills said, looking me squarely in the eye, quite angrily, again. “Backorders. For when we get everyone back to work.”

  “You collecting any money for those?” I asked.

  Mills stopped struggling, then hung his head. “No. Without a line of sight to the end of this...no. I wouldn’t take their money until we can fulfill the orders.”

  “So,” I came back to my feet, lifting him up, “I’m just spitballing here, but—insurance fraud.”

  “What?” He just stared at me.

  “You asked why you’d burn your own warehouse? Insurance fraud.” I shrugged. “The merchandise isn’t doing you any good just sitting here during the strike, so...”

  Mills just stared at me in dumb disbelief. “I did not burn my own warehouse.” He made an effort to break out of my wind trap and failed, again. Holding him in wasn’t that taxing of an effort at this point. He was definitely human, and had the strength to prove it. “I just came to see what was happening.” He tried one last futile time. “Will you please let me go? You’re trespassing, the cops are almost here, and I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. Somebody hammered on a door in the distance, presumably the nearest one to the outside. I could hear someone running to it, then opening it. Words were exchanged, then a whole lot of footsteps came pounding toward us.

  The firemen came first, followed by the cops, followed by Ben Kelly, his tie askew, flapped over his shoulder. It took a few minutes for me to tell my story to the officer in charge, then Mills to say his bit.

  The cop in charge was a plainclothes detective named Houghton. He seemed to be straight-up handling it, and was a career man, hard-nosed and suspicious-eyed. This was the first I’d seen him, but he looked like he’d been around the block a time or twelve.

  “So you didn’t see who was throwing the balls of fire at you?” he asked.

  “Nope,” I said. “I was pretty worn out after sucking all the oxygen out of here. Had to keep my head down.”

  He nodded. Mills had been separated for the purposes of the interview, and was a little farther away, explaining his part—very mutedly for a guy whose life’s work had been both burned and flooded the last couple days. “What do you make of this?” Houghton asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, watching Mills. “My gut runs to insurance fraud. Catching this guy in the area of the fire? Convenient, at least for me. But he could be telling the truth about running in the direction of the fire.” I shrugged. “I guess it’s in your hands, but—”

  “Nope,” Houghton said. “Not mine.”

  I waited. “Uh, okay. Then whose—”

  “Tennessee Bureau of Investigation,” came the voice from behind me. I’d never even heard anyone approach, but there stood a black woman with knockout, model-good looks in a suit, gun revealed where she held her suit jacket back to park a hand on her hip next to it. She was wearing a grin that crinkled all the way to the corners of her eyes. “Ileona Marsh. And this must be my lucky week.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Because yesterday I met your sister for the first time, and now I’ve got you,” she said, clearly far too jolly about this. “I’m collecting the whole metahuman family set here.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  “I’m just getting all the metahuman business this week, I swear,” Ileona Marsh of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said, still bearing a winning smile. It was hard to take offense at what she was saying when it sounded like she was pretty amused about the whole thing.

  “You don’t get metahuman ‘business’ on a regular basis now?” I asked, trying to keep calm about the fact that Sienna was somewhere in the same state—and that I almost certainly wouldn’t see her.

  “It’s still pretty rare for us here,” Marsh said. “That big blowout case your sister had in Atlanta a few years back, that was the biggest and closest thing we’ve had around here. Everything TBI has touched has been minor stuff, the kind of thing that we haven’t had to call you in on.”

  “Lucky you,” I said. “Lots of states haven’t been so fortunate.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Hard to miss some of the incidents in the news.” She perked. “So...flooding a couple days ago, and I’m assured this location isn’t in a flood plain. That one seemed suspect. Now we’ve got arson. Is this a metahuman incident?”

  I nodded. “Yep. I spied with my little eye what we call a ‘Gavrikov type.’ Threw some flames at me, then...possibly escaped.” I eyed Logan Mills with great significance.

  Marsh caught my inference. “I see. You got any proof to go with that?”

  “Circumstantial at best. Caught him in the vicinity. He sa
ys he came running when he figured out the building was on fire. It could be. It’s a big place; the firebug could have run in the opposite direction.” I nodded that way; the building extended for four or five more football fields of length in that direction.

  “I appreciate your honesty,” Marsh said, pulling out a pad and making some brief notes.

  While she scrawled, I figured I could play it cool and get some info. “So...you met my sister. How’s she doing?”

  Marsh looked up. “Why don’t you call her and find out?”

  I made the motions of an uncomfortable reaction, letting out a grunt and kicking a foot at the concrete floor. “We, uh...don’t really talk anymore.” When I looked up, she had the perfect inquisitive look of a cop. “We had a falling out.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, I’m not a fan of her current job,” I said, hoping that would be explanation enough for her.

  It was. “Oh,” she said. “Well, she’s...alive and kicking, at least. By which I mean she kicked in the door of a sex trafficker and saved about forty underage girls from a hellish life in the trade this morning. And killed a few traffickers.” She kept a thin smile. “A couple survived, which...honestly, is kind of a shame.”

  I didn’t know quite how to take that. It certainly wasn’t the sort of thing TBI would have said in a press release. I hoped. “How’d she get on that?” I asked. “Was it a metahuman operation?”

  Marsh shook her head. “Nah. The mayor and governor are trying to get her to take a position with my agency and figured letting her run with our local law enforcement on some cases would sweeten the pot for her after what the FBI just did to her in New York—”

  “What did the FBI just do to her in New York?” I asked. I hadn’t heard this.

  “Ahhh, maybe I shouldn’t say.” Marsh debated for about two seconds before apparently deciding, whatever, I was cool. Or at least that was how I saw it. “They yanked her from duty in the field office and moved her to DC, effective when her assignment here ends. Landed on her for assisting the NYPD outside of formal FBI requests and channels.”

  I frowned. Keeping my sister’s nose out of trouble was an impossible task, but it sounded like the FBI was about to give it a try. “Whatever,” I said under my breath, all part of the act. In reality, I wanted to talk to her ASAP, and tried to do the mental arithmetic around when the last time we spoke was. It had been a few days, which meant I was probably due for a visit in my dreams soon.

  “So, this case,” Marsh said, tapping her pad against her black suit pants. “A metahuman kink in the nozzle of what otherwise looks like a labor dispute. You came down here on your own accord or what?”

  I froze. “Yeah, kinda. I got a tip it might be getting out of control, so I’ve been watching the demonstrations the last couple days.”

  Marsh wrote that down, too. “Interesting,” she said without looking up. “Very interesting. See anything of note?”

  “A damned near untenable situation,” I cracked. “The CEO doesn’t seem to want to talk, and the demonstrators are getting...well, restless. Speaking of...” I paused, trying to listen over the sound of the crime scene. “I wonder if they’re still going?”

  “Oh, they’re still going,” Marsh said. “Loud and proud when I drove through a few minutes ago. Looks like a real handful for local PD.”

  Ugh. I let out a long sigh. “I should probably get back out there. I have this fear that if I’m away for too long, it’s going to turn into a riot.”

  She quirked an eyebrow up while smiling at me. “Why is that?” she asked innocently. “Do you sense the desire for violence among these poor, oppressed workers, who make considerably above the minimum wage?” Her words were just drenched in irony.

  I tried not to dignify that with a guffaw, but I failed. “They have a point, you know,” I said, trying to make up for my chortle. “Especially about the working conditions here.”

  “Yeah, apparently it’s a real fire trap,” Marsh, turning back to her notepad. “I think I’d be a lot more receptive to their protest if someone wasn’t using it as a cover to cause a lot of property damage.” She looked up at me, that same knowing smile plastered on her face. “I wish someone would look into that. Someone with some real expertise in dealing with metahumans. I feel confident saying that the State of Tennessee would pay handsomely for someone to take this burden off our hands. Some expert, maybe.”

  It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

  “That’s so,” she said.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, with a tight smile. I mentally wrote off her offer immediately, given we were already beyond broke and state governments didn’t exactly pay with haste. But with that, I hurdled out the window and flew off on the wind, heading back to make sure the protest didn’t get out of hand.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  Jules

  “Open the house,” Jules said. He’d always wanted to say that.

  Of course, he was saying it to Gil and Leo only, because he’d refused the typical compliment of ushers and staff the Ryman recommended for his event, but still. He said it.

  And Gil and Leo stepped to it. They propped open the doors, and mob bosses from across Nashville started to flow in.

  Jules set himself up to greet them all, just inside the main aisles into the theater proper. He was ready with a smile and a handshake. “Larry. Good to see you.”

  Larry Philmont took his hand and gave him a firm shake, gripping Jules’s elbow. “Interested to hear what you have to say here. No one’s ever summoned us together before. I assume this has something to do with that miserable superhero bitch tearing up our town?”

  “I felt like there were some things that needed to be addressed,” Jules said, still grinning. Subtle was the way to go. “Someone needs to take the lead here, given current events.”

  Larry nodded at that. “Someone does indeed.” And he walked off, a couple bodyguards in tow.

  The inference was obvious: no way in hell did Larry feel that Jules was the man to lead, but he’d shown up anyway to see what was going on. That was smart on his part, and Jules could respect that, even if he didn’t care for the blatant disrespect shown by Larry’s lack of enthusiasm to him taking up the crown.

  But Jules did understand it. When it came to operators in this town, he was small-time. Little fish in a medium-sized pond. Better than Jersey, where he’d been a minnow in an ocean, though.

  Still, how did a fish get bigger? It had to eat. And summoning the bigger fish here, well, he was about to take a big bite. He had it in his head how it was going to go, and even if he only made it happen to 50%, he was still going to make a big splash.

  “Hey, Billy,” Jules said, grinning as he glad-handed the next guest. “Long time no see.”

  Billy just grunted. Taciturn bastard. Disagreeable, too, but this was what he was dealing with. Jules just smiled and got on with it. Once they got everyone greeted and seated, then they could begin.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  Brance

  The dressing room was a little smaller than he might have thought, but still—this was the freaking Ryman Auditorium. Brance just stared at himself in the mirror.

  Gil had gone out and gotten him a new pair of blue jeans and a shirt, had picked up his guitar from his apartment up in Germantown. His boots were the same ol’, but they were okay. Had a layer of wear on them that came from Wyoming.

  “Keep it cool, keep it cool,” Brance whispered under his breath. He needed to stay level for this. That was going to be the key to not...

  Well, to not having an...incident.

  A knock sounded at the door, and Brance almost shat himself. “Come in,” he said, voice all wobbly.

  “Hey, kid,” Jules said, grinning wide as he came in. “The house is open, almost everybody’s here...you about ready?”

  Brance stared at himself in the mirror. Was he? “I don’t know,” he said, suddenly unsure. Was this stage fright?

  �
��I think I can confidently say you’re ready,” Jules said, meandering over to him.

  “But what if it goes wrong?” Brance bubbled over. All his fears seemed to be coming out now. “What if the same thing that happened at the recording studio, at Screamin’ Demons, at Mercy’s Faithless—what if it happens here?”

  There was a slight waver in Jules’s demeanor that looked—for a second—like amusement. Then he shook it off and smiled, warm and engaged. “You’ll be fine,” Jules said, clapping that heavy hand on Brance’s shoulder. “You’re going to do just great, kid. I have faith in you.”

  Brance didn’t argue, but the thought popped up nonetheless: How can you have faith in me when I keep messing up? He did not give voice to this thought. Instead: “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Jules said. “And I have something for you. To help.” He produced a tiny earpiece from his hand, holding it out for Brance.

  Brance took it, staring at it. It was no larger than a hearing aid. “What is this for?”

  “Stage direction. All the big stars use them for their concerts.” Jules grinned. “I’ll be right there, ready to talk you through any problems. I’ll be watching the whole time.”

  Brance nodded, trying to get command of himself. “Okay. Right.” He looked up, filled with a steely determination. “All right. I’m ready.”

  “Good, good,” Jules said, heading for the door. “I’ll send Gil for you when we’re ready. I’m going to go say a few words, warm up the audience, y’know.”

  “I can go wait in the wings—” Brance started.