Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  I felt myself flush. “Wouldn’t that, uh…degrade us?” She gave me another withering idiot look. “Uhm, or something?”

  “If getting showered in dollars while keeping my clothes on is degrading, then I wish I could get degraded like that every day,” Veronika said. “Every. Damned. Day.”

  Before I could piece together a reply to that, I heard something in the distance. “Did you—” I started to ask.

  Veronika flicked a blast of plasma the size of a pencil eraser past my face and held her glowing finger to her lips to shush me. Her lips took on the burning, ultraviolet cerulean quality of her plasma powers for a moment before fading back to her customary crimson shade, and she cocked her head to the side, looking at one of the casinos.

  “You should, uh, be careful doing that,” I said, watching the little piece of plasma fade off into the distance. I didn’t think she’d noticed, but it had caught my personal space bubble and been arrowed through the air to land somewhere near where I’d entered the Fremont Street corridor.

  The doors to Binion’s Gambling Hall were thrown open and something was moving inside, a clang and clamor rising within as a slot machine came crashing over. No coins came spilling out, to my surprise. Probably kept those locked up tight.

  “Heads up, cutie-pie,” Veronika said, and I did a double-take to make sure she was talking to me. She was.

  I frowned and shook it off, my attention stolen by the blur of motion coming out of Binion’s. It was hard to see, but it had a black tinge to it, the air rustling as cocktail napkins exploded out the front door of the place in a whirlwind, as though Reed himself were exiting with all the force of his winds with him.

  “Hey, Professor Zoom!” Veronika called, waving at the blur with glowing blue hands like she was guiding in a jet aircraft. “Over here!” She put her head down, steadied her feet. “You are cleared for clashing. Also, you should really wear something reflective in that clothing. You know, since you’re out jogging and all, and it’s getting toward night.”

  A high-pitched titter echoed over Fremont Street, and the blur, which had held still for a quarter-second, long enough for me to see a shadow with a hoodie over its head, shot at Veronika, who had anchored her feet for this. She thrust out a hand, glowing with blue plasma, and I could feel the heat where I stood, ten feet away.

  I watched as it happened, the speedster blurring in at 600, 700, 800 miles per hour? I didn’t even know. I couldn’t see anything but a blur of motion, then a sudden black human-shaped object popped into view next to her for a second and then—

  Veronika went sailing into the front windows at the Golden Nugget, plasma trailing behind her until it snuffed out just before she disappeared through the twinkling glass.

  “Uh oh,” I said, looking at the black figure, who just sat there, in a blurred state, as though shifting back and forth between their two feet so fast I couldn’t quite get my eye to settle on them.

  We were all alone now, not a cop in sight.

  Gulp.

  20.

  Sienna

  The Big Easy was so far being nothing of the sort; it was more like the Big Hard, especially on my tender bare feet as I sprinted around the corner onto Bourbon Street.

  The faint scent of sewage tickled my nose, like there was an open main in the distance. Crowds swirled, cramming a street that looked like it had been made for horse-drawn buggies and never widened when the automobile came along. There was so much neon visible it felt like Vegas was nodding in admiration. An adult toy store beckoned from my left. Surely more fun than running barefoot along a crowded street. I ignored the call to adventure that it presented in favor of the task at hand.

  Bars lined the street after that. Bars and restaurants. But mostly bar/restaurant combos. Yes, Bourbon Street was bars, bars, everywhere, and not a drop I could drink.

  The steady thud and scrape of my every footfall made it plain to me that Michelle—damn her and, yes, thank her—had orchestrated this, every bit. She’d meant for me to get caught flatfooted, or rather, barefooted, and to have to run my ass off to catch the only damned witness I had for whatever scrap of info she might have.

  Why did she do this?

  Hell if I knew. Maybe it was as simple as a criminal needing to balance helping a cop with causing her a problem, too. Maybe there was something more ominous coming, like a sudden explosion that would spray the street with glass, forcing me into a John-McClane-type situation that would bloody the hell out of my feet.

  If that happened, my vow to avoid looking too deeply into her criminal enterprise? Null and void. I’d move down to New Orleans and tear her shit apart brick by brick, twisting every case the FBI handed me into being Michelle’s responsibility somehow. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I could probably do it.

  It took me about a hundred yards at a flat-out sprint before I realized that I didn’t need a field of broken glass in order to turn my feet into a bloody, McClane-like mess. My skin, exposed to the natural skid and push of running, was doing that to itself just by virtue of my meta speed.

  I should have known. There was a reason I went through boots like some people went through underwear. Every step started to hurt, and I blotted out the pain. I was really good at that.

  “Slay Queen!” someone yelled. That I wasn’t so good at blotting out, especially when the crowd took it up in a slow-moving chorus of surprise at my high-speed approach.

  I was bolting down the middle of the street, which was crowded, people moving through in groups. I was sprinting my ass off, passing through another intersection so quickly I almost hit a slow-moving car. I leapt right over it instead, keeping an eye out for my target as I reached the apex of my leap—

  Nope. There were a lot of jet-black heads bobbing in the crowd ahead. Bourbon Street wasn’t exactly packed from curb to curb, sidewalk to building, but it was pretty damned busy. No cars were moving on it, at least not for a few blocks, and the one I saw was cruising really slow with the crowd, maybe five miles an hour or so.

  The landing drew a grunt of pain as I skidded, crushing my little toe when I came down. I suppressed the scream and the profanity that might have drawn under normal, in-my-apartment-and-stubbing-my-toe circumstances, but it damned sure hurt. I couldn’t quite hear the crack over the background noise of Bourbon Street, but it must have been there, subtle and quiet under a nearby shout of, “Slay Queen!” by a really inebriated jackass in a leather jacket.

  “Hi,” I said as someone stepped into my path and I detoured around them, skinning a layer off the sole of my foot as I pushed sideways.

  “Whoa,” some guy behind me said, loud enough that I heard him clearly. “Look at the bloody footprints. She’s following a trail.”

  “No, I’m leaving one,” I shouted behind me.

  I kept sweeping the crowd, looking for black hair, black hair, black hair and a certain skin tone. I’d find a possibility, then look to the clothing, and it was an easy elimination nine times out of ten. Americans wear denim. Denim and yoga pants, and lots of it.

  Not this lady. That was what had been distinctive about her—she was wearing cloth pants. It was a very different look. Maybe just old.

  Bourbon Street was young people and tourists on vacation. Denim, denim, denim. Blue jeans, black jeans, black stretchy pants, clear and obvious in the waning twilight and neon shine.

  “Ow, ow, ow.” I hobbled to a stop, picking up first one foot, then the other as I checked myself for injury. I flicked a shard of glass out of the ball of my left foot. I’d felt it, but thought it was a really lodged-in pebble. Removing it caused a steady stream of red to well up and run down the side, following the course of gravity.

  “Are you okay?” a guy with a deep Southern accent asked. He was wearing a purple hat that proclaimed him a fan of LSU.

  “Nothing that a good face-punching of a certain Chinese mob-running yoga pants mom wouldn’t fix,” I said, checking the other foot quickly. It was lacking a layer of skin or five, oozing blood fr
om a dozen capillaries.

  There was nothing for it; I broke into a run again, zigzagging my way through the Bourbon Street crowds as gingerly as my feet allowed.

  Black hair—nope. Black hair—there. Cloth pants? No.

  Neon burned my retinas as I ran down the street, fighting to ignore the screeching, escalating pain in my feet. A horn honked behind me and I looked back to see Burkitt and Holloway in the SUV, probably five blocks behind me. The lights were flashing in the front windshield, but the crowds were not exactly parting for them. I could see Canal Street another five or so behind that.

  I’d run ten blocks in less than a minute. No wonder my feet were shredded.

  “Has anyone seen a Chinese grandma?” I shouted, trying to make myself heard over the occasional shout of—yes—“Slay Queen!” That was going to get old. Hell, it already was. “Yea tall?” I held up a hand a little bigger than myself. “Anybody? Bueller?”

  “Hey, are you looking for that lady?” Some guy in a Saints jersey pointed at a woman next to him in a touristy Panama Jack shirt, a pair of mom jeans, and her hair in a tight bun.

  She looked scandalized. “I’m Korean, jerk face!” She hauled off and slapped him across the shoulder.

  “Ouch,” I said as he clawed at his shoulder in misery. It looked like she hadn’t held back. “Also, clearly no.” I moved past them and she huffed off. “Anyone? Looking for a Chinese grandma-type, answers to the name of—hell, I don’t know her name.” I used an unsuspecting couple burly guys as a support, planting my hands on their shoulders and shoving off them to spare my poor, tender feet. It gave me a little boost, and a farther look down the street.

  There wasn’t a hell of a lot of hope that I could see. The next corner had—surprise—another bevy of bars, one of which was open air, pumping throbbing music out onto the street.

  “Sonofa,” I said as another honk sounded behind me, now only a block back. I’d slowed my pace and they’d picked it up, and Burkitt and Holloway were now right there. I was tempted to wait for them, but I pressed on, stumbling ahead, my feet now screaming at me with every single step. I’d ignored it before, but now the pain was so intense I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I was limping, trying to walk on the less-sensitive, marginally less wrecked edges of my feet rather than plowing ahead at full speed and skinning them down into hamburger meat.

  “Get out of the damned way, you idiots!” Holloway shouted, voice echoing over the idle chatter and loud music on Bourbon. “Can’t you see the flashing lights?”

  “Somebody must have got wrecked,” a guy in front of me said, walking in a line with four or five of his buddies. They looked like the offense for one of the local college teams, but hell if I had enough blood flow left in my body to remember any of their names.

  “Yeah,” I said, causing him to look back. “It was your mom. Move out of the way so the ambulance can come get her, huh? Your rivals really had a good night with her. I mean, she had fun, too, but if you don’t move out of the way so she can get treatment, she’s never going to walk right again.”

  “What the—” he started to say, eyes flaring to hate as his buddies laughed. They hauled him out of the way before I had to, and I stumbled past as they held him back.

  I stopped at the end of the next block, right in the middle of the street. My bloody footprints were almost puddling now, crimson coming out of me thick and heavy. I could hardly walk, I’d done such a damned number on myself. A wise person might have stopped before ripping their own feet to shreds, but I guess nobody ever called me wise.

  They called me Slay Queen, duh. Because I pursued the target until the job was done.

  But now it was starting to look like maybe I was the one who was done. One final stumbling leap and I still didn’t see her. Nowhere in the crowd ahead, which seemed to thin the farther we meandered along Bourbon, did I find a Chinese grandma sticking out at me. She could have taken off at any one of a dozen or more cross streets. I didn’t keep track of any of them, so stubbornly had I plunged ahead trying to find her on this one, singular track.

  Probably because given the dozen cross-streets, and each one thereafter carrying its own cross-streets…the possibilities became infinite very quickly. Or at least near enough that I could never have tracked her down.

  “Shit,” I said as Burkitt honked again behind me, now only twenty feet back, cutting through the crowd as it split to give way to them. I rested my hands on my knees, trying to distribute my weight in a way that didn’t make the bottoms of my feet scream pain at me. I didn’t find one.

  “Any luck?” Holloway shouted as Burkitt pulled up behind me. I had a hard time hearing him over the music blaring out of the bar to my left.

  “Only the bad kind,” I said, standing up straight, but only through great effort. “I haven’t seen one damned Chinese grandma anywhere on this street. I don’t think she’s here.”

  “Oh, we’re looking for a Chinese grandma?” Burkitt was now hanging his head out the window, too, talking to me. “Like that one?” He pointed toward the front of the bar.

  And there she was.

  She was standing out front, watching me carefully, oversized bag held in front of her like a shield. As soon as I saw her, she shuffled her way over, keeping the bag between her and me as though it might protect her from me kicking her into orbit. It wouldn’t; only the pain in my feet and the knowledge that Michelle was wholly, entirely responsible for this would save her.

  “I think you have been looking for me,” she said, once she was close enough that a human could have heard her.

  “Yes,” I said. “I have.” I glanced at the bar behind her. Blue light spilled out the front door and there was no front window, allowing the band playing inside to blare out onto the street. Must have been like a free sample to entice people to come in. Personally, I might have if they’d offered me a place to sit and rest my hamburger feet. “Have you been waiting here?”

  She nodded, only once, and she didn’t smile, which saved her from a kick right to the damned vaj, bag-shield be damned. “This is where Michelle told me to wait for you.” No smile. At all. “Did she not tell you that this was where I would be?”

  That was the only thing that saved her. But the next time I saw Michelle?

  Well, those yoga pants were going to have the imprint of my foot in them for all eternity.

  21.

  Michelle wasn’t at the massage parlor when we rolled back by with the grandma, whose name was Liu Min. I hobbled inside, the guy on the stool out front pausing to look at me as I dripped blood onto the sidewalk with every step. Didn’t even ask if I wanted a foot massage for some reason; maybe he didn’t think rubbing the exposed fascia would do much good.

  One of the employees pointed to my boots sitting on a counter in the back, and I made sure to rub every bloody footprint into the low pile carpeting and leave streaks on the bare tile floor up front as I went. “Worst. Foot massage. Ever,” I declared to the gasps and general shock of the customers on the cots in the front of the store as I dragged back past them.

  “I called the office,” Burkitt said as I climbed back in the back. He and Holloway were up front this time, both strangely quiet, which was possibly related to my bloody hamburger feet, though I wasn’t entirely sure. “They’re getting the local sketch artist to meet us there.”

  “Awesome,” I said, dripping as much sarcasm as blood. “Then maybe we can run it through facial recognition and push it out to local news to see if we can get a match.”

  We fell into silence until we arrived at the local FBI office, a three-story, newish brick building a stone’s throw from the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. It was about twenty minutes, I gauged, working through the silence of dusk falling on the city. The tall downtown fell away to more medium-sized buildings down to long gaps between the buildings, until finally we arrived at the FBI office. It was nestled away behind a head-high (to me) black iron fence that surrounded the parking lot.

  Once we were inside, Burk
itt took Liu Min back into a labyrinth of interrogation rooms while one of the locals showed me and my bloody feet to the women’s locker room to shower. I didn’t actually shower because most of my ensemble was still good enough to go along with, but I did spend about five minutes or so with my feet under the cold spray, watching crimson traces dissolve in the clear water, washing it down the drain.

  When I came out, Holloway was waiting for me outside. He eyed my feet in vague disgust, then nodded in the direction that I assumed we should go, pushing off the wall he’d been leaning against and leading the way.

  The FBI office wasn’t as limited as our small branch in Midtown Manhattan, but it wasn’t as labyrinthine as I imagined the Hoover building in DC was. It was a mid-sized office for a more mid-sized US city, neither huge nor small, and I guessed there were probably 30-50 agents housed here.

  “She’s working with the sketch artist now,” Holloway managed as we walked along. He looked down at my feet again, which were covered with toilet paper as though I were a mummy. “Could be a while.”

  “She know anything else?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “She bumped into the lady one time, on her way to work, for all of two seconds. If she knows more than she’s telling, she’s a hell of a liar.”

  “She works for the head of the Triads here in New Orleans,” I said, “so I wouldn’t rule out that she’s a hell of a liar, especially given the trick that yoga-pants-wearing hell beast just pulled on me.”

  I half-expected Holloway to laugh at my pain, but he just shuddered. “I’ve got plantar fasciitis,” he said, as though that explained anything. “I wouldn’t have made it ten feet without my shoes, let alone half the length of Bourbon Street.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess that’s what makes me special,” I said. “Though apparently I could have walked and produced the same result.”