Cold

by Robert J. Crane

“It’s supposed to be,” Shaw said. “By conventional means. Frozen water is too brittle to resist the explosive forces applied to a bullet. Whatever was done to this particular bullet, it held up remarkably, impossibly well given it was shot out of a gun after being exposed to the extreme heat produced in the firing. Ergo…”

  “The working thesis is a meta made it with ice powers,” I said, glancing at the paper, even though it offered no new information.

  “Bingo.”

  “All right, well, I’m on it,” I said, heading for the door.

  “I feel very reassured knowing that,” Shaw called after me. “My bureaucratic heart can rest easy knowing that the loosest cannon I’ve ever worked with is on the case. It’s so fortunate that the stakes are very low, too. Just a nice, easy assassination of a US governor to cope with.” He dropped the sarcasm and went serious. “Make sure you stop this crazy before they actually succeed?”

  “I’ll do my best,” I called back, heading for the door. I glanced over at Holloway’s cube. He was already gone. Shaw must have told him about the assignment before I even arrived, and he cleared out before I could pigeonhole him about our game plan.

  “I’ll sleep real easy at night knowing you’ll do ‘your best,’” Shaw said. He was standing at his door, arms folded, sour again. Who could blame him? I was carrying the reputation with his department with me, after all. Maybe not something a bureaucrat would care about, but a career FBI agent who prided himself on getting the job done…

  “You should,” I said, looking back at him seriously. “Because my best always gets it done. Always. Take that one to the bank. Just not the one at 50th and 8th.” I winked. And off I went, to pack and catch my flight and kick ass.

  9.

  Olivia

  “Hey there, honey bunches,” Veronika Acheron said as I made it into the baggage claim. I wasn’t too surprised to see her here, though I’d yet to check my cell phone in the retreat from the plane to see if Reed had sent me an update. Flipping it off airplane mode yielded two texts from the boss—one confirming the Las Vegas Metro PD and state of Nevada were cool with hiring us for this job, the other confirming he had sent Veronika to meet me.

  “Hi,” I said, a little tautly. Hopefully working with her wouldn’t be a tragic mismatch on Reed’s part.

  Veronika sidled over, her flawless suit complete with a skirt and black panty hose moving with her sway. She planted an arm around my shoulders and squeezed gently. “Don’t worry, kiddo. I’m not holding a grudge for that Orlando thing. Much.” And she let go, heading off toward the baggage carousels.

  I followed after, a little tentatively. Was she serious or kidding? I didn’t know her well enough to tell.

  “I never meant for you to get hurt there,” I said. I’d worked with Veronika a few times since then on bigger stuff, as part of a team—the Scotland trip, the Revelen, uh…sojourn? But in all that time, I’d never worked with her one on one.

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” Veronika said, paying more attention to the luggage carousel in front of her, the sign proclaiming that it was delivering from Flight 3847, from San Francisco, than she was to me.

  My phone buzzed. It was an address, and I realized it was the one for the convenience store that had been robbed, the one I’d looked into that had kicked this whole thing off. Reed had texted it to me. Had he thought I was too dumb to remember to take down the address before I caught my flight?

  That lovely seed of doubt firmly planted in my mind, I moved off to collect my luggage at my own carousel. I saw the soaked guy from the plane across the way, and he shot me a dirty look but kept his distance. I just stared down at my phone and pretended not to see him.

  When my bag showed up, I grabbed it, nearly launching out of my hand just before I picked it up. Once it was on the ground, I deployed the handle and started to reach for it—

  “Lemme save you the trouble of accidentally sending that across the room, huh?” Veronika swept in and caught it, pulling it along behind her next to her bag. She headed for the taxi line.

  I stared at her receding back—and my luggage—and hurried after. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Yeah, but I doubt Reed wants to pay for a new luggage carousel or replacement for the glass windows here, so…” She shrugged and kept wheeling.

  “I don’t break stuff like that…all the time,” I said, blushing and giving up my protest about halfway through.

  “Oh, but sweetcheeks, you do,” Veronika said. “Don’t make me count ‘em for you, because your property damage is really through the roof. Or rather through the wall, usually.”

  “I don’t…I mean…” I felt my face burn, but I kept following her out to the taxis.

  We got in, the cabbie loaded our luggage and we were off. Veronika stayed silent, her heavy black glasses down over her eyes, Vegas sunshine reflecting off of them. She scanned her phone like I wasn’t even there, and I pretended to do the same while I worried about two different things—whether Veronika had actually forgiven me for our run-in in Florida, and whether Reed was worrying I might destroy everything on this case. I didn’t know which of those bothered me more, but they both were working on my nerves from different directions—the Veronika thing because she was inches away from me, the Reed thing a little more distantly but just as importantly, because he was my boss.

  “Have you considered taking up blogging?” Veronika asked, looking up at me from behind those dark glasses. “I feel like you’d do well on Tumblr. You could look at cats, and reblog cat pictures that you liked. Maybe some videos, too.”

  “I…why do you say that?” I asked.

  “Because you strike me as a person who needs that sort of soothing hobby in her life,” Veronika said, looking at her phone. “I mean, I don’t come to the office that much, but you’re always there when I do. Like a gym rat in the locker room. And I think it’s because you don’t have anywhere else to go or anything else to do. So…Tumblr.”

  “I have…I mean, I could…” I did a little stuttering trying to come up with an answer to that. “I’ve been in Minneapolis less than a year. I don’t really know anyone but my co-workers, so…”

  “That’s a good excuse.” Veronika nodded along. “It even sounds reasonable, to the uninitiated.”

  “‘Uninitiated’…?”

  “I’ve been an excuse maker my whole life.” Veronika was nodding along like she heard music. “Especially for my antisocial tendencies. See my thing? It’s books. Coping mechanism. Whatever you want to call it. I’d rather be home reading. I have a huge…library.” She smirked, and I got the feeling she was trying to put out a double entendre but swerved at the last second. I pretended not to get it, keeping my face stiff in concentration. “Anyway, I know what I want, and it’s mostly to be left alone. Not always, but a lot. No bones about it, I just come out and say it, now. For years, I used excuses. And that’s what you’re doing. ‘I don’t have friends because I just moved to town a year ago.’” She leaned over and started to pat me on the knee but thought the better of it and pulled her hand back. “No, sweetie. You don’t have friends because you are terrified of people the way I’m terrified of crying in public.” She sat back in her seat, looking back out the front window.

  “That’s not…I’m not…” I spluttered. “I’m not terrified of people.”

  She just nodded.

  “Here we are,” the cabbie said, and suddenly I had a mortifying thought—he’d been listening to our whole conversation.

  I wanted to crawl under the rear axle of the minivan and let him drive over me, but unfortunately that’d probably just result in me accidentally shooting his vehicle into low Earth orbit. Instead I blushed and bailed out the side door as Veronika went out the other.

  “Keep the meter running and wait for us here,” she said, pure command, no question. The cabbie nodded, but she was already off. He’d apparently gotten out to retrieve our luggage, but he halted and made a little salute to her, like they’d both joined the
army.

  That had been easy. If I’d been in charge of this, I’d have let him unload everything and tried to keep my luggage by my side as I examined a crime scene.

  “You need some self-confidence, sweet cheeks,” Veronika called as I trailed her, hurrying along.

  We were in the parking lot of a sun-drenched convenience store, asphalt glaring as it reflected the desert heat at us. A couple Las Vegas cop cars were parked out front, officers just hanging by their vehicles, talking. They spared a glance at us as we approached, but neither said anything.

  I felt a little sticky before I even made it halfway to the doors, a tiny trickle of sweat trying to work its way out at the small of my back and my armpits, which I squeezed tighter self-consciously to trap any escaping drops before they wetted my shirt.

  Veronika tossed a look over her shoulder. “You’d move a little faster and smoother if you’d pull that giant metal pole out of your rectum before trying to walk.” She cackled and kept going. I followed behind, mortified, as I caught a chuckle out of both the waiting LVPD officers.

  She really did not give a single care about anything. I brushed a stray blond hair out of my eyes as I squinted against the horrifyingly bright desert sun and trailed a few more steps behind her as the convenience store doors swooshed open for her.

  “I don’t have a pole up my…anywhere,” I muttered as she walked inside. A cool blast of air pushed that stray hair I’d just moved aside back over my eyes.

  “Clearly for way too long,” Veronika said as the doors swooshed closed behind her.

  I almost walked right into the doors and stopped just in time to prevent my nose from colliding with the glass. “What the…?” I asked the doors.

  Veronika waved a hand inside and the doors opened again. I slid inside as soon as they did, eyeing them as if they were possessed by a devil. She just lifted her sunglasses and rolled her eyes. “If that’s not the perfect metaphor for your near-non-existence in the eyes of the entire world, I don’t know what is. Come on.” And off she went, toward a plainclothes officer standing by what had once been a soda fountain.

  I took a look around the convenience store. I’d seen the crime scene photos the LVPD had put online, but it really didn’t do this place justice. There were four or five long rows of shelves and every one of them had been overturned. Every single glass fridge and freezer case had been busted open, glass littering the floor like tiny diamonds, spreading from the back walls of the store all the way to the front. My shoes found them as I walked, a satisfying crunch issuing with my every step.

  “Somebody had fun up in here,” Veronika said, nonchalantly, as she walked up to the plainclothes detective.

  The detective turned around, and I realize for the first time it was a she. Mid-thirties, a little stocky, she had her hair cropped tight around her head and was wearing a shirt and tie along with dress pants and shoes. I didn’t quite know what to make of her attire so I didn’t say anything. Her hand rested just above the pistol that rode on her waist, as though she were looking for an excuse to draw it. I didn’t want to be that excuse.

  “You must be Detective Norton,” Veronika said.

  “You must be Veronika Acheron,” Norton said, looking Veronika up and down only once.

  “This is my barnacle, Olivia Brackett,” Veronika said, nodding to me. “Shhh. Don’t talk, Brackett. Just listen.”

  “I…excuse me?” I looked at her as though she’d swung a punch at me. No, wait, if she’d done that, she’d have ended up bouncing off in the opposite direction. I looked at her as though she’d connected a punch on me, because that was a hell of a thing to say in front of a Las Vegas police detective.

  “Shhh,” Veronika said again. “Tell us something good, Norton.”

  “Not much good to be had here,” Norton said, looking the place over casually. “What you see is what you get. Nothing on the surveillance cameras; clerk thought he had a poltergeist when stuff started blowing up and breaking and falling over. We were going to write it off as vandalism and an inside job until we saw the footage—which backs up the clerk’s story.”

  “How much damage?” I asked, looking the place over. The only thing that wasn’t trashed were the front windows, and I wondered why.

  “Why? You looking to make it a competition with the crook? See who can cause the most property damage?” Veronika asked.

  I couldn’t form an answer to that, and Veronika laughed as Norton moved on.

  “Place is a total loss,” Norton said. “Doubt insurance will cover it, either.”

  Veronika nodded. “Acts of gods.”

  Norton clicked her tongue. “Yep. Sure looks meta to us. No motive. No suspects. No one harmed, on the plus side. We were about done with this one until we got your call. Not a lot more we can do, not for this kind of crime, y’know? Homicides and whatnot get precedence, and combing through this place for forensics when there wasn’t even a gun used?” She just shook her head.

  “All right, we’ll take it from here,” Veronika said, staring very intently at Detective Norton. “If we come up with anything, should I just call you directly?”

  Norton looked right back at her, a little cool, then blushed. “Here’s my card.” She handed it to Veronika.

  “Excellent,” Veronika said, taking it and putting her body between me and Norton as she did so. It felt like something else happened there, but I couldn’t see it. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Sounds good,” Norton said, and off she went, out the door, with a look thrown back at Veronika. I was completely ignored.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, adding the appropriate amount of sarcasm, once the doors had slipped closed for her.

  “If you had any balls, Brackett, you’d have said that before she walked out,” Veronika said, looking at Norton’s card before pocketing it.

  I worked my jaw up and down for a second before saying, “Sorry.”

  Veronika shot me a hell of a look. “What the hell? Don’t apologize. You have no testicles, and be proud, because it means you can use your brain. Stop it with this meek mouse shit, though. Say it, next time.” She shook her head. “Now…let’s go.” And she went for the door, too.

  “Wait, don’t we need to look around first?” I asked, my feet suddenly frozen to the floor. “Check out the scene?”

  She just shook her head, but didn’t stop. “What do you see here, Brackett?”

  I glanced around once. “Destruction…?”

  “And…?”

  “I dunno. Looks like a whirling dervish went through here.” I felt a chuckle come on. “Or a Tasmanian dev—”

  “Close enough, yeah,” she said, and paused as the doors slid open and heat wafted in on the rays of the desert sun. “Chaos, destruction, nothing on camera.” She stared at me through those black glasses as though I were missing something obvious. “Speedster.”

  I blinked. “Speedster…?”

  She nodded, smiled, and then headed out. I followed behind, and the doors swooped shut once again, and I missed colliding with them by an inch.

  “Damn,” I muttered, waved a hand by the sensor up top, and they opened again. I hurried out into the heat to catch Veronika before she left without me.

  10.

  Sienna

  “Thanks, I got this,” I said as I shut my Uber driver’s door. She waved, almost bursting in her seat, and popped her Prius’s back hatch as I wandered around to get my bag. After I’d pulled it out, she shouted something practically unintelligible at me and I shut the hatch for her.

  It had been a weird ride. She’d picked me up at my broom closet of a loft in midtown, and spent the first five minutes screaming in excitement at recognizing me, top of the lungs, “SLAY QUEEEEEEEN!” about half the way to the midtown tunnel. After that it had been a steady babble of her entire bio, which I’d taken in with nodding and a blank stare, thankful I’d remembered my tinted sunglasses so I could look out the windshield while she assumed I was watching her every strange, emotive gyr
ation. She’d talked the whole way to JFK International Airport, pausing only to send and receive a few texts “to her mom,” she said.

  It was only as I was about to walk through the doors into the Departures terminal that I realized she was stone-cold lying to me.

  “Sienna,” a male voice called from beside the doors. I found myself looking at a middle-aged dude with glasses that were bordering on horn-rimmed, which had come dangerously close to coming into style now that hipsters tried to make up for the lack of attention their parents paid them in childhood by having massive frames that could probably be seen from space.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” I mumbled as I rolled my suitcase onward, through the doors. I knew him on sight.

  “Hey, can I have a word?” he asked, following after me, a pad of paper in his hand as opposed to a cell phone. Most reporters I met were usually filming me the entire time. Clearly, he was a classicist.

  “Sure,” I said, not stopping as I entered the cavernous, open-air space and started seeking out my check-in desk. “How about ‘garbanzo’?”

  “Garbanzo?” he asked, clearly not getting it. “Like the bean?”

  “Yes, like the bean,” I said, finding my check-in desk but pausing, just for a second. “It’s a good word, ‘garbanzo’, and now it’s all yours, champ. Not like anyone else is using it.”

  “It’s a real shame garbanzo beans have fallen out of favor.” He picked up his pace to bring himself even with me, then took a breath like he’d had to really exert himself to do it. He probably had; he didn’t look to be in peak shape, and I was faster than…well, almost everybody. “But that’s not the word I’m looking for, and I think you know that.”

  “Look, Mike,” I said, and his eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Yeah, I know who you are. Mike Darnell, formerly of the New York Times, now with flashfunk.net—”

  “Flashforce.”

  “I’m not saying that, because to utter the name of that frivolous website is to give it free advertising that it not only doesn’t deserve, but also lends credence to a place that has worked so very, very hard over the last few years to destroy its reputation of being the number one funny cat gif site on the internet. And also, me.”