Prisoners (Out of the Box Book 10)

by Crane,Robert J.

  “Holy hell,” Gustafson said, and his mouth was slightly agape. “Did we Miranda her yet?” The officer at her side nodded. “Whew. That sounded like an admission of guilt to me.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “a real open and shut case.”

  “Ye—” Gustafson started to say, but another pair sirens—everyone else had switched theirs off—broke through the night and split the quiet buzz of conversation around the crime scene as a black SUV pulled up just outside the yellow tape perimeter. “What’s this?”

  “Feds,” I said, thrusting my hands into my pockets again and rolling my eyes as they squished in my own blood once more. It wasn’t even close to drying; there was just too much of it, like I’d washed my clothes in my own gore.

  Scott popped out of the SUV a second later, and Friday got out right behind him. I was sick of seeing the two of them but I held in my nausea, as they sauntered over to me—well, to Gustafson, because they ignored the hell out of me—and Scott asked, “Are you the officer in charge of the scene?”

  “That’s me,” Gustafson said, and somehow his straight-line of a mouth got even straighter than when he’d been dealing with me. “You are?”

  “FBI.” Scott flashed his ID. Friday just lurked with his arms folded, swelled once more to beyond normal size. “What’s the story?”

  “Attempted murder,” Gustafson said. I didn’t mind him answering for me. Anything to keep me from having to say bupkis to these assclowns was fine by me. “The lady took a shot at Ms. Nealon here, the gentlemen tossed grenades at her. The woman admitted to tracking her by cell phone, and they ambushed her as she came out of the bar.”

  “And yet she’s not dead,” Scott said, clearly unimpressed. He gave me a once over.

  “No, I’m totally fine,” I said, “except for all this blood, y’see. Got shot through the heart, and the kidney, took a hundred or so pieces of grenade shrapnel I had to heal from.”

  “Your mouth still works fine, I see,” Scott said.

  “So does hers.” I tossed a thumb over my shoulder to indicate Borosky. “She copped to tracking me. You’ve got a mountain of physical evidence from the gun to the bullets, so …” I threw my hands wide. “Congrats.”

  Scott ignored me, looking everything over with a detached calm. He did this for a few seconds, making my stomach tangle into knots, and then, finally, when he’d given it serious thought, he turned to Gustafson and said, “Cut ’em loose.”

  That landed like a bomb, provoking a stunned silence. “Sir,” Gustafson said, politely, Minnesota Nice forcing a strange Are you serious? smile onto his face for the first time since I’d met him, “they used firearms and explosives in a public place—”

  “Did you see it?” Scott asked, honing in on him. His face was so flat, so expressionless, that he would have won a contest with the Gustafson of thirty seconds earlier, and that was saying something.

  “No, sir,” Gustafson said, leaning hard on his manners in a way that suggested to me he was trying to keep some emotion from coming out, “but Ms. Nealon—”

  “Ms. Nealon,” Scott cut right over him as I stood there, speechless, retreating into myself by the second, “is untrustworthy and would be torn apart on any witness stand, in any court of law. Let them go.”

  Gustafson stood there for a long moment, and when he spoke, it felt like a gunshot in the quiet. “But they tried to kill her.” I looked at him again, and gone was the passive, plain, restrained demeanor. He was staring at Scott in flat disbelief, like he was trying to determine if he’d heard him right.

  “Says her,” Scott said, unwavering. “Says a serial liar and murderer.” He didn’t even look at me as he said any of this. “I’m not going to repeat myself—they are not going to the Cube, and if you try and stick them in your local jail, the Department of Justice is going to come at you.” He took a step closer to Gustafson, whose expression was starting to harden, probably because he could sense he was being threatened.

  “Come at me for what?” Gustafson asked, exuding defiance.

  Scott paused to grin before answering, and it was just as horrible as when he’d smiled when he kept me from stopping my house burning down. “Anything. Everything at our disposal—lawsuits, turning the press loose on you, putting you under the microscope. Your life will be hell, and anything you do to try and keep them in will be for nothing, because sooner or later … they’ll get out.”

  Gustafson just stared at him, like he was trying to decide how to respond, but as he opened his mouth to do so, I spoke first. “You asshole,” I said to Scott.

  Scott looked at me coldly. “What’s that?”

  “He’ll do it,” I said to Gustafson, who was frozen with his own mouth open, an intemperate response about to leak out. “He’ll wreck you for trying to hold them, and it’ll all be for nothing. Just …” I closed my eyes. “Just let them go. Save yourself the hell.” I opened my eyes again.

  Gustafson stared at me, and his lips were pursed. Still in a line, but pursed. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he finally said. “Before we let them loose, maybe you should—”

  “I want to question her,” Scott said.

  “For what?” Gustafson got up in his face. “You already said there’s no crime here. So what do you need to question her for?”

  Scott’s ruddy face lost a shade or two of complexion. “Watch yourself, officer.” He gave it a moment’s thought. “Fine. She can go.” He looked right at me. “For now.”

  “Thanks,” I said and leapt past him, missing him by less than an inch. Friday swept out a hand, trying to knock me off course, but he was too slow, and I dodged around it, hurtling off once more in the only way I could, leaping away from the crime scene before they could turn the two people loose who had just tried to murder me before they could get a third chance.

  32.

  I stopped briefly in east Bloomington to smash my phone to pieces without fully considering the consequences. I’d had this one for a while without destroying it; I guess it only made sense that Borosky and Shafer could track it. I’d certainly tracked suspects by their cell phones in the past; I just hadn’t reckoned someone would turn that around on me.

  Unfortunately, that move cut me off from being able to call any of the people I usually relied on for support. I hadn’t talked to Reed in what felt like forever, though in reality it had only been a day. He was probably almost fully recovered by now, but I couldn’t know for sure because I’d just destroyed my lifeline.

  I could pick up another tomorrow from my office, if I wanted to risk going there. I could pick one up at a phone store as well. I was lucky my contacts were stored in the cloud, because I’d be damned if I could remember anyone’s number.

  I came down after another giant leap, this one carrying me over the sparsely trafficked interstate 494. I landed outside a hotel, walked quickly under the portico and into the front door. It was the middle of the damned night, and there was a lady in a professional-looking business suit behind the front desk. She glanced up as I entered and smiled. “Welcome! You looking for a room for the night?”

  “Boy, am I,” I said, and as I got closer to her, she stared at my clothing. I had already forgotten I was covered in blood. She shrugged after a minute, apparently writing it off as part of the shirt’s design or something, and tapped away at the keyboard in front of her.

  “King room or a double?” she asked.

  “King.”

  “All right,” she kept up the pleasant demeanor. “How many nights will you be staying with us?”

  “At least one,” I said. “Can I leave it open-ended for now?”

  “Sure,” she said, not looking up from the keyboard until she finished a final few taps. “I’ll need a credit or debit card and your ID, Ms …?”

  “Nealon.” I pulled both out of my back pocket and put them on the counter in front of her.

  She stared at my ID for a long second, and then took a stumbling step back from the counter, her smile gone. She looked at me like I was
diseased, like she wanted nothing more than to have the ability to fly just so she could soar away from me, zip out the back and never see me again. “No,” she said.

  My mouth fell open. “‘No’ what?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Just no. We don’t need this.” She shook her head harder. “We don’t need … you … here.”

  I felt like she’d slapped me across the face rather than backpedaled from me as quickly as humanly possible. I blinked a few times, stunned, feeling cold inside, and picked up my ID and credit card. Without another word, I walked back out into the cold night.

  I couldn’t recall ever feeling quite so rejected. She’d acted like I was a carrier of the plague, like what I had was so awful and contagious that she couldn’t bear to be in the same building with me, and I’d taken it without pushing back.

  Then again, what was the point of pushing back? She was a night manager of a hotel, and I was the most powerful human being in the world. I could smear her all over her desk area like she was a fly that buzzed me, and she knew it. It was probably why she was so scared and revolted at the very sight of me. People had reacted strangely to me for a long while, some of them even pretty nasty about it. I’d been spat on, cold-shouldered, gotten a million awkward stares and more than a few leers.

  But this … this was new.

  I didn’t even make it to the front desk at the next hotel. The clerk’s eyes got wide and he said, “Please don’t hurt me!” before running out of the room and leaving me alone in the lobby.

  In the third hotel I found myself served by a guy with the least amount of give-a-shit of anyone I’d ever met, a slacker to the max, and I was so grateful when he took my credit card and my ID without comment that I almost wanted to kiss him. Except that I probably would have been so enthusiastic it would have lasted too long, and then he would have died and I would have had slacker soul in my head forevermore. He was better admired from a distance, I decided.

  I made it up to my room without encountering another human being, and as soon as I was in, I shed my bloody clothing. There was nothing for it; I didn’t have new clothes. I thought about visiting a Wal-Mart, because there was one nearby, but I couldn’t bring myself to face the world yet, even though I knew that the middle of the night would be the best time to get new clothes. If I waited until tomorrow, I was almost guaranteed to have to face more people, and that sounded like a losing formula to me.

  Still, I couldn’t motivate myself to get out the door.

  I showered and collapsed on the bed, warring with myself. I was tired, but I needed new clothes. I was tired, but I didn’t know if I could sleep. I was tired, but part of me wanted to turn on the cable news nets and see what kind of shit they were talking about me.

  I didn’t motivate myself to get up, and I didn’t dare close my eyes, but I did manage to turn on the TV to cable news, thus proving that when faced with a decision, I did occasionally pick the very worst one possible for myself. At least shopping for clothes or sleeping would have had some positive result if I’d managed to pull them off. Watching cable news was like deciding to self-harm my psyche.

  It only took ten seconds for me to figure out that, yes, 90% of news coverage was about me. They were set up with a live feed, again, in front of my office, where the reporter on scene was breathlessly (why are these people always breathless? Do they not do cardio?) telling me and the other five viewers awake at this hour that there had been an incident in Bloomington earlier tonight that was being attributed to me. They didn’t have anyone live at that scene, fortunately, because really, that bar was a shithole, and I needed to associate my sagging reputation with it like I needed another hole in my heart.

  I lay on the soft bed, naked because I had nothing to wear that wasn’t covered in blood, and tried to remember the last time I’d felt this lonely. It took a while, because in spite of the other hell I’d faced in the last year or so, I’d felt somewhat warm and insulated from the nasty arrows of life for a while now. I thought back, back to when I’d last been alone, really alone, and realized it was just before I met Augustus. I was living at the agency, Reed wasn’t talking to me, and Kat had just sold me out on national television.

  “It’s been a year,” I whispered to myself. “Over a year.”

  That had felt like dark times, too. But I’d come through it, obviously. Reed and I had patched things up, Augustus had helped lighten the load. Even Kat had come back and we’d made peace. She was even trying to figure out how to help my public image. Ariadne was living with me like a den mom …

  “I haven’t been alone—really alone—for the past year … until now,” I said to the quiet room. The bedspread felt rough against my back, scratchy like I was lying in a bed of thorns.

  Now I was alone again, and I could feel it. I missed my phone, and suddenly felt a dash of remorse at ignoring Ariadne’s calls earlier. That was stupid. Ariadne was always full of encouragement, and usually when I needed it most.

  And now … I definitely needed it.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the steady stream of stupid flowing out of the reporter’s mouth. At least her voice was soothing. I was dazed, dozing, and quite content to drift off, when a voice broke through the haze that wasn’t soothing.

  “… Seems like everywhere she goes,” the man said in a lazy drawl, “people get hurt.” My eyes snapped open and I focused on the screen. There was a broad, sneering face on it, one that looked a little weird without being composed of metal. “I mean this is her office,” Clyde Clary, Jr. said, pointing over his shoulder at the building behind him. He really was outside my damned office. They had turned the son of a bitch loose, and I could see other members of his damned family in the background, along with Thunder Hayes, Bronson McCartney and Louis Terry, all loitering. “People’ll probably get hurt here, too, before the night is over,” he said, and laughed, looking right at the camera.

  My hotel room suddenly lost all warmth. The reporter plowed right past his last statement, apparently seeing nothing wrong in what he’d said. I’d caught it, though, probably because I knew him, and knew what kind of violent beasts the Clarys were.

  He had just threatened everyone around my office building. All those reporters on scene, looking for a story, and they’d just missed a big, honking, obvious one.

  Someone had just given an interview in which he threatened to kill them all.

  Just so he and his family could draw me out to the one place I had left to go.

  33.

  “I could just leave,” I said to the empty room. “Just … fly away. The FAA can’t really detect me on their radar, especially if I stay low.” The heater was humming in the corner, throwing off enough warm air that the shivering I was doing was because of the emotions I was feeling about the choices open to me, not because of the air temperature on my naked skin. “I could be in California before sunrise, hunkering down with Reed and the others.” I put my hands on my arms and rubbed the bare flesh. Little goosebumps had popped up on my skin.

  That’s not you, Sienna, Zack said softly. You can’t leave those reporters to—

  Death and blood? Wolfe asked. Sure she can. It would be easy, and deserved.

  They have done nothing but attack her, Bjorn said with haughty self-satisfaction.

  They hate her, Gavrikov said.

  Going to bat for your avowed enemies may sound noble, Bastian said, but it’s actually stupid.

  They won’t change their minds about her, Eve said, slinking out of the darkness to rejoin the conversation. Nothing will. They won’t even see her coming as meant to save them. They’ll say she came to pick on the poor, stupid Clarys, who wanted nothing but peace.

  That’s … really cynical, Zack said.

  “It might not be wrong, though,” I said, shivering again. I could almost see Eve nodding at my approbation in the dark spaces of my mind. “Clearly no one picked up that Junior was threatening the people around the building.”

  Maybe he wasn’t, Wo
lfe said. Maybe he was just trying to lure you so he and his family of tough meat could try and slaughter you again.

  “I’ve been fighting that family for years,” I said. “They’re dumb, but direct. The moment they got out they were guaranteed to beeline for me—which in this case, meant my office, since my house is ashes. Hell, they might have even done that, depending on when they got out.” I shivered again, and ran fingers through my hair. There was still dirt stuck in there from when I’d taken my dive in the dewy grass. “If it was Junior fishing for me, I’d be surprised.”

  You think he’d really kill innocent reporters— Zack started

  There is no such thing as innocent reporter, Bastian said with a little heat.

  But there is such a thing as a tasty one, Wolfe said with a grin.

  “Gross,” I said, breezing past another cannibalism reference, and I settled into the silence. “I could just leave,” I said again. It felt like I was battling to convince myself, trying to push myself to fight the instincts, to just run. They wouldn’t really hurt reporters, would they? They were pissed at me and all, but killing innocent people on the off chance I’d come running?

  It’s the Clary family, Zack said. They’re not overly bright, and they don’t care who they hurt.

  They don’t even really care if they go to jail, Eve added.

  You assume any conventional police force or FBI task force could get them to go to jail, Bastian said. I have my doubts that your ex the Waterboy or his gal Friday have the muscle to put down two stoneskins in steel form. All the suppressant in the world doesn’t do you any good if you can’t get them to take a breath of it or punch through the skin to administer it.

  I froze in my pacing and shivered yet again. The bumps on my arms were like tiny molehills sticking out on my pale skin. “Dammit,” I whispered. “They might do nothing, though. They might just sit there all night and—”

  Get angrier and angrier, Eve said. Like Clarys do. Limited intellect and capacity to understand are the hallmarks of these morons. You killed the brains of their operation, because the mother was the only one who seemed to have enough of a mind to keep the others from getting their heads stuck in a boot.