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

by Robert J. Crane

  “Yeah,” Brance said hoarsely. “I could be in jail.”

  What. A. Little. Bitch.

  “You’re being dramatic,” Jules said. The sirens were getting closer. “Come on, we need to go.” He reached for Brance’s arm again.

  Brance staggered back from him like Jules’s hands were on fire and he feared getting burned. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  Jules’s face was burning. He’d had it up to here with this kid’s whiny bullshit. “Gil...”

  Gil came in on Brance hard, snatching him into a headlock and anchoring that arm around the kid’s throat. The kid struggled, jerking Gil around the hallway, fighting like a demon against him.

  “Come on, kid, just go with it,” Jules said. “Let us get you out of here.”

  “I—don’t—want to—go—anywhere—with you!” Brance said, ramming Gil into the wall and making a hell of a hole. That was going to come out of Jules’s security deposit.

  Jules watched for another second and then he just lost it. He swept in on the kid as Gil battled with him, riding him like a cowboy on a pissed-off horse, and Jules slipped in, raised his hand up—

  He cracked Brance across his bitch face so hard that it popped loudly, echoing down the hallway. Brance’s eyes bugged out from the impact, from shock that someone would have the audacity to smack his bitch ass. He stood there for a second, mouth moving up and down fruitlessly at Jules.

  “Listen to me, you little shit,” Jules said, keeping his hand raised, primed to deliver another slap. “I have done a lot of work getting your stupid self out of trouble. I’m not asking for much, but you owe me—”

  Brance opened his mouth and something came shooting out that made it feel like Jules had stepped out in front of a bus. He went tumbling down the hall, legs flipping over his head, bending in ways he hadn’t since he was a young man.

  Jules came to rest on the hard floor, knees shellacked as they slammed into a small riser of stairs. Blood dripped down his forehead, and he rose—just for a second—in time to see Brance ram Gil into the wall again, then throw him off.

  “Don’t...kid...don’t...” Jules managed to get out.

  Brance looked at him for a second, then bolted down the hallway. In the distance, Jules could hear him bust through a door, but that was all before he succumbed to the raging pain in his head.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

  Sienna

  “Got a real interesting mess here,” Captain Parsons said, walking me into the Ryman. I’d passed the cordon already thrown up after running the whole way to the auditorium. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get there in time to do any sort of car chase, and downtown Nashville was packed solid with rush hour traffic anyway, so I’d showed up sans car.

  “Interesting how?” I asked, still idly thinking about that shot of whiskey I’d left back at the bar on Broadway. I’d come awfully close to kissing my sobriety goodbye after a solid year, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that I’d made the right choice.

  “This place was rented out for a private show tonight,” Parsons said, trying to keep a smile off his face and failing. “Now, we just got here and finished sweeping the place, but here’s what I can tell you: the audience?” The smile broke out. “Local mafiosos of every race, ethnicity and creed, from La Cosa Nostra to the Russians to the Triads—and their bodyguards.”

  I frowned. Why the hell would the heads of the local underworld all meet at a historic auditorium where our perp had been hitting his high notes?

  Parsons waved me on, and I followed. Paramedics were swarming down on the floor stage, tending to a whole mess of dudes, mostly. I saw one woman in the bunch, but that was it. The rest were burly guys who tended toward the ugly, not a pretty face in the bunch. What was it about ugly work that attracted ugly people, ugly souls?

  “So these guys are frequent flyers for you?” I asked, making my way down the aisle.

  “Yep,” Parsons said. “We’ve arrested them all at some point, or connected them to something. Not an innocent one in the bunch.” He waved me toward the stage. “This might be the most interesting thing of all, though. Follow me.”

  He climbed up on the stage and offered me a hand, but I hopped it before he even got it proffered, clearing it with a jump that made one of Lebron’s dunks look like he was hopping over a stone in the road. I came out of it in a soft landing, too, and gestured toward the wings, indicating age should go before beauty.

  “Have you considered the Olympics as an alternative career?” Parsons asked with a smirk. “Seems to me you’d walk away with the gold—and I do mean walk, because you don’t look like you strained hard to do that.”

  “The IOC is really struggling on how to handle metas in the Olympics,” I said. “I’d suggest we be banned, but no one wants to hear from me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, unless you want to destroy the ability of normal humans to compete,” I said, ducking behind the stage with him. “I’d like to see any of you non-powered people try to outrun me. I’d leave Usain Bolt in the dust without even breaking a sweat. And I’m not exactly a hard trainer, you know? I prefer the couch to my morning run by a factor of miles. Which is why I don’t run that many.”

  “Interesting, interesting,” he said. “You should be signed up for a billion endorsement deals by now.”

  We rounded a corner and found a guy sitting on the steps, a couple Metro PD officers for company. He was older, grey, running toward balding, but wrinkled and severe. He was watching everything, and caught sight of me immediately, though he played it cool, holding a bloody bandage to his forehead.

  “Jules,” Parsons said with quite a bit less enthusiasm than I’d imagine he’d have shown if he’d stepped in dog shit, “can I just say how surprised I am to find a lowlife like you in this gathering of esteemed shit piles?”

  “You’re really busting my balls here, Captain,” Jules said, looking up from beneath the ice pack. He pulled it back to examine it, and there was a stain of red across his forehead that looked like he’d taken a hard landing on something, or maybe gotten neatly sliced by a knife. He pretended to notice me now, giving me a casual once-over.

  I wasn’t entirely sure, but in Jules, I thought I might have encountered one of those oh-so-rare smart criminals. So rare. Not genius, but a cut above your average moron who grabs a knife and waves it at unsuspecting victims for fun and profit.

  “Better than busting your head,” I said, giving Jules an excuse to look right at me, which he did. “What happened here?” I pointed at his forehead. “Cut yourself shaving? Those unibrows are a real hazard.”

  “Thing about getting older, you get stray hairs in the funniest places,” Jules said. Cool customer.

  “Speaking of, lemme draw your attention to your nostrils,” I fired back.

  “So much ball busting,” Jules said with a sigh. “What do you people want from me? I’m clearly the victim here.” He waved the bloody bandage in front of us.

  Captain Parsons let out a light snort of derision. I just busted out laughing.

  Jules didn’t take it personally, but he acted like he did. “The sympathy. You see this?” He looked over his shoulder at the mook he’d gotten caught with. The guy looked like he’d been run through the ringer. Drywall dust on his suit jacket suggested that the indentations in the wall around us had been made by him being shoved into them, repeatedly, throughout the hallway. Looked like someone had a wrestling match in here, and this guy had lost.

  “Where’s the singer, Jules?” Parsons asked.

  “We tried to stop him,” Jules said, almost sincerely. Almost. “You see this? We were doing our Samaritanly duty—”

  “That’s not a word,” I said.

  “—and he just linebackers over us like one of the Titans,” Jules said. “Hey, we tried.”

  “You get a good look at him?” Parsons asked.

  Jules shrugged, made a face. “It’s dark, I don’t see so well these days. He was on the young side.”
<
br />   I stared at the guy over his shoulder, and the mook started to squirm just a bit. His profile looked familiar—like he might just have been the guy that had picked up Brance in that alley. He looked at me, looked like he wanted to say something.

  Jules shot him a look and he clammed up before he even got started. I just smiled at him—my best predatory smile. I hope it made him shit his pants in worry. “How’d you happen to be here?” I asked. “At this time?”

  “We rented the place for a corporate event,” Jules said. “We’re a growing company, and we were having a team building exercise.”

  I shared a look with Parsons, then looked back to Jules. “That’s so interesting. What’s the name of your company? ‘Scumbag, Inc’?”

  “Hah, very funny,” Jules said. “I’m a legitimate businessman. I own a club here in town called Bones.”

  “It’s very reputable,” Parsons said. “You can get a lap dance, a martini and a sirloin there for all the money in your wallet plus a missing ATM card.” He looked like he was suppressing a smile. “Allegedly.”

  “I’m glad you added that last word there,” Jules said, “because otherwise my lawyer was going to put some teeth marks in your ass.”

  “Your lawyer is an ass-biter?” I asked. “Figures he’d be a pit bull. Like lawyer, like client and all that?”

  Jules smiled, like I’d just paid him some great compliment. “I am a bit of a pit bull, now that you mention it.”

  “Really?” I faked a frown, surveying him. “You look more like an ankle-biter to me. Strictly small-time. A wannabe Tony Soprano whose aspirations of middling glory never quite came to pass.” I let a slow smile spread across my face. “How’d you get hooked up with Brance?”

  “I don’t know no Brance,” Jules said, and he was a reasonably convincing liar—if I hadn’t already known he was lying. “I just tried to stop that singer after he assaulted us.”

  “And how’d he come to assault you?” I asked.

  “He came busting in here during our meeting,” Jules said. “Took to the stage like he was Aretha Franklin or something, flouncing like mad. Knocked the audience dead. Or close. I guess we were lucky.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “He hasn’t killed anyone—yet.”

  “Felt like he was going to kill me,” Jules said. “He opened his mouth at me and it felt like a piston got driven into my chest.” He slapped the stairs he was sitting on. “Knocked me over here.”

  “One sympathizes,” I said, not really sympathetic but remembering the mule kick feeling when Brance had used his voice to pound me. “Say, you wouldn’t know anything about the Nissan Sentra that picked this guy up last night?”

  “Nope,” Jules said. Liiiiiiiiar.

  I looked over his shoulder at the mook. “I was actually talking to him. He looks more like the driver type.”

  “I don’t know nothing about that,” the minion said. He was less convincing than Jules.

  “Okay,” I said, smiling. “Well, this has been enlightening. Any idea where this Brance would go?”

  “No idea,” Jules said, shrugging broadly. “I’m just happy I got out with my life, personally. Hope I never meet this guy again.”

  I couldn’t help but keep smiling. “I wonder how many people have said that after meeting you?”

  “I don’t want to talk to you no more,” Jules said, waving me away.

  “Thanks for your help, Jules,” Parsons said as he steered me away. Once we were safely out of earshot, he asked, “What do you think?”

  “He’s in this up to his neck,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s the feeling I got, too. What’s his play?”

  I thought about it for a moment before answering. “Seems to me if you’ve got your entire criminal underworld pulled together and this is the guy doing the pulling, and then they get hit by Brance? This was a move. By your small-timer over there. Which would explain why he doesn’t have blood coming out of his ears and why his muscle got run into every wall over there. They tried to wrangle Brance and somehow it went wrong after the fact. Brance skips out, leaving them stuck explaining what happened.”

  “You don’t think this Brance could have run for it?” Parsons asked. “With Jules’s approval?”

  I shook my head. “That fight scene wasn’t staged. Brance got mad at Jules and nailed him with his full singing voice. It hits like a meta punch, sent Jules flying. Then he tried to get that big bastard off his back, hence the man-sized indentations in the wall. After that, he busts through the emergency exit and voila, disappears into the city.”

  Parsons nodded along. “So what was Jules trying to orchestrate here? Just a power move? Assert dominance?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Unite the underworld kind of play? Under his leadership?”

  “If it was intimidation, they certainly looked intimidated.”

  I nodded. “Even for scary guys like these, metas are still a new ballgame. Having a guy disrupt your ability to hold a coherent thought while a sonic shredder disables your senses? That’s gotta be disorienting even to the seemingly fearless and experienced mafioso. Yeah, I think he tried to intimidate them into something, put the power play on them for his purposes, and it backfired after the fact. The question is...” And this really was the kicker, the one I was going to need to figure out: “What happened to Brance?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

  Brance

  Brance had headed back to his apartment, because where else was there to go?

  That was the problem he was facing now. Same problem he’d faced after Mercy’s Faithless, really, or, to a lesser extent, after that first night in Screamin’ Demons. He was stuck out on a branch by his lonesome, hanging out here alone.

  Jules had betrayed him. His voice had betrayed him.

  His dad...hell, he’d just been the first to turn on him.

  “I gotta get out of here,” he muttered, throwing his stuff in a bag. He didn’t have that much, didn’t want that much, really. He was packing on rote instinct alone.

  The dream had died. He’d sung on stage of the Ryman, the Mother Church of country music.

  And he’d screwed it up.

  Bag packed, he hit the door. Looked around one last time at his furniture, which was near ruin, worthless, like his life. At the small number of personal effects he had but couldn’t carry in the bag. Nothing he’d miss. A family photo from a few years before he’d left. Brother and sister in riding gear, Brance in...

  Well, no one cared what Brance was in, did they?

  “I just wanted you to hear me,” he whispered to the empty room, then shut the door without locking it. The police would probably be along soon.

  Jules had used him. That stung. His voice had turned on him. That was worse.

  Sienna frigging Nealon was after him. That was maybe the worst of all.

  Time to go. To leave Nashville behind. He fumbled with his keys as he walked to his vehicle. His old truck hadn’t been serviced in a while. He’d been deferring maintenance, thinking if he hit it big, he’d just buy something new.

  Now he was never going to hit it big. But he was going to have to get out of here, that was for sure.

  But where to? He shuddered as he contemplated going north. Anything in the vague direction of Wyoming was out, as far as he was concerned.

  South, then. Key West, maybe? He’d heard people talk about the Florida Panhandle, too. Lots of people here liked to vacation on 30A.

  Throwing his stuff in the passenger seat, Brance wiped the fatigue from his eyes. It had been a long day. Long couple days, actually, but he needed to get the hell out of Dodge now, not later.

  So he started his truck, listened to the choking sound of the engine until it caught, and threw it into gear. “Southbound” by Sammy Kershaw came on the country classics station his dial was tuned to. How appropriate, Brance thought, as he turned his vehicle toward I-40. He’d catch 65 just south of the city and be in Florida by morning—if he could stay awake that lo
ng.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

  Reed

  Hanging out waiting for something to happen as the protest began to peter out felt like a losing endeavor. I actually had felt like a loser all day, and maybe part of yesterday, too, given how unlike a normal case this had been. Usually I chased a criminal, mostly serious ones, but here I was performing picket duty for protesters, and knowing I was around had taken some of the gusto out of them. They hadn’t even edged up on the cops as aggressively as they had the day before.

  No chases, no evidence, no obvious criminal other than the guy who’d set fire to a (mostly) unoccupied warehouse. I was having trouble mustering enthusiasm for being outraged, even though that Gavrikov had putatively done something violent. I mean, technically it could have endangered lives, if I took Logan Mills at his word that he wasn’t the arsonist. He had, after all, run right toward the fire and into a section of warehouse where the sprinklers and alarm had been purposefully disabled. That could have resulted in his death.

  Still, people running into raging fires was an abnormal set of actions. Most people stayed away from danger.

  Then there was the flood, which had happened when the warehouse was closed, not a soul around for the night. The crimes that had been presented here were a hell of a lot closer to victimless than the usual sort, and despite Alan Kwon’s fine defense of property rights earlier, I was seriously wishing I was somewhere else.

  My mind kept drifting up to Nashville, and I wondered how Sienna was doing.

  I was edging toward saying, “To hell with all this,” and at least calling it a night if not abandoning the case altogether when I saw a familiar figure standing near the back of the crowd.

  Harry.

  That asshole.

  As soon as he knew I’d spotted him, he sauntered away from the crowd. He crossed the highway and entered a small grove of trees out of sight of the protesters, suggesting to me that he wanted to have a conversation, but not be seen.