Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  “Go on,” Veronika hissed. “Don’t be a baby, shoot him in the ass! He’d do it to you, given half a chance.”

  I did, slipping the needle into his butt cheek and then injecting it. He only grunted in reaction, then settled back into his snoring undeterred the moment I pulled the syringe out.

  The moment it was done, Veronika snapped on the lights, her phone already in hand and dialing. “Hey, Norton,” she said, smirking at me. “Got a pickup for you in Henderson.” She paused, and I heard Norton saying something on the other end, though I couldn’t tell what it was.

  Even with the lights on, Crumley still didn’t stir. Looking at his face, I saw a guy in his twenties, cheek mashed into the pillow, a little drool seeping out. Man, he’d really done a number on himself. He was covered in the desert sand, and I wondered if he was just sleeping off the damage to his body, or if this was mostly the product of the prescription by his bed. Either way…he was out.

  “Yeah,” Veronika said, sounding triumphant. “We got him. Come on out here and pick up your prize. We’ll keep an eye on him until then.” She hung up the phone and looked at me. “And that’s how it’s done, kiddo. Let’s finish up and head home.”

  59.

  Sienna

  I was just boiling when I left the Herald-Tribune offices, seething with a deep-seated fury that bubbled in my guts like I still had Gavrikov powers and had somehow turned them inward. My back-to-back meetings with Michelle Cheong and Whit Falkner had left me with shaking hands, and my short ride back downtown had my Uber driver take one look at me and decide trying to talk was a bad idea.

  The Uber dropped me out front of my hotel, and I walked through the rotating glass doors in a blind fog of rage. My phone buzzed and I looked down at it before answering. “What is it, Burkitt?”

  “Hey, where are you?” Burkitt’s normally even tone came out in a low whisper. There was background noise on his end, like a small party was going on behind him.

  “Just made it back to the hotel,” I said. “Why?”

  “We’re here, too,” Burkitt said, raising a question of who comprised “we,” which he promptly answered. “The governor took over the entire 16th floor. The state police are trying to move him back to Baton Rouge under heavy escort, but he’s refusing to go.”

  “Why?” I asked, a little savagely. “Does he have a girlfriend in town that he needs to see tonight?” Once her middle school lets out for the day, I barely kept in.

  “Uh, he’s married,” Burkitt said. “Are you coming up? Because if so, I’d keep that kind of sentiment in. This place is already at a high boil.”

  “Gotcha,” I said. “I don’t think you need me right now. Why don’t you finish up whatever you’re doing, and we can regroup later?”

  “Is that Nealon?” Holloway’s voice pierced the conversation on the other end. “Lemme talk to her.” There was a rustle, and I figured he was swiping the phone, because a second later he was on, and loud. “Nealon! What are you doing? Playing grabass with the locals? Doing another barefoot 10k? Get your ass back here.”

  “I am ‘back here,’” I said, barely keeping it in as I walked across the lobby, drawing a lot of eyes, because I wasn’t quiet, and let’s face it, I was famous in the worst way. If the news hadn’t reported my presence in town, I might have gotten less scrutiny, but alas, it was not to be so. “But trust me, you don’t want me up there. Not right now.”

  “Hey, listen, I know you’re new to the bureau—” Holloway’s voice turned serious and stern “—and you probably don’t want to hear this from me, but we’ve got a standard of professionalism to maintain. The governor is asking about you.”

  “I’m so very flattered,” I said, entering the elevator alcove and spearing the buttons for my floor.

  “You should be. He wants to thank you for saving his life.” Holloway lowered his voice. “So get up here. And afterward, we can plan our next move.”

  Then the son of a bitch hung up on me.

  “Oh ho ho,” I said, laughing maliciously and low, a cold rage now radiating out of me. Without thinking about it, I stabbed my fingers into the buttons for floor 16, aware that I was probably doing something I shouldn’t be, and unable to stop it nonetheless.

  Somehow, I’d entered that state where I knew, in my gut, that I was around the bend, well past emotional stability. The smart move would have been to ride the elevator up to my room, take a long, hot shower, get my blazing feels under control by shutting myself in the closet or engaging in some primal scream therapy, then maybe contemplate facing the governor of Louisiana, who I now knew in my gut was a damned pedophile and a rapist, to say nothing of being an avowed liar.

  The elevator arrived with a ding, and I stepped in, hands still shaking. I felt warm, almost clammy, fists clenched as I rode the elevator up. It whirred softly, the machinery moving behind the metal walls, and I closed my eyes. It dinged, presumably at floor 16, and I resolved myself to ride on, to just stay in the box until it closed and started moving again—

  “Ms. Nealon?” I opened my eyes to find an LSP trooper with his hand extended over the door mechanism to keep it from closing. “The governor is expecting you.”

  “How?” I asked, then sighed. “You had someone in the lobby watching.” I hadn’t even noticed them, I was so damned off kilter and angry.

  “We had a dozen troopers in the lobby, ma’am,” he said with an almost apologetic smile, as though it was somehow his fault that I was so steaming pissed my situational awareness was down to tunnel vision.

  “I need to go to my room and clean up before I see the governor,” I said, gesturing at my hair, which was, I realized at last, completely frizzed from the humidity and the run.

  “Hey, Nealon!” Holloway rounded the corner and the end of the hall, waving his hand at me. “Come on. Everyone’s waiting on you.”

  The trooper smiled again, apologetically, and I stepped past him. I didn’t even catch his name, not that it mattered. The hallway in front of me stretched like in a movie, seeming to elongate before my very eyes. Rage bubbled in my veins as I walked toward Holloway. He turned the corner when I was about ten feet away, and when I came around it, I saw that he’d gone ahead to a door where several troopers were gathered, standing guard.

  “Let’s go,” Holloway said, beckoning me forward. “Warrington wants to talk to you.”

  “This is not a good time for me to talk to him,” I said, dimly aware that I shouldn’t do this, not now.

  “I doubt he cares what you want,” Holloway said, face stiff. “He’s the governor; he wants to thank you…now come on. Get in here.” And he opened the door.

  The world around me seemed to pitch with every step I took, as though it were swaying, every movement my body made exaggerated. I followed Holloway into the governor’s suite, feeling dimly like I was walking into my doom.

  60.

  The governor’s suite was fairly impressive, in that there was not a single hotel bed in sight when I walked in. The room was busy, but not overcrowded, with Warrington over in the far corner sitting huddled over a table with Jenna Corcoran, standing stiffly, her bright green eyes on me.

  “There she is,” Warrington said, rising as I came in. He brought his hands together in an explosive clap, and Corcoran and the couple troopers in the room joined in. It set my ears to ringing, pushing my kilter even more off. I closed my right eye, cringing at the sound, which, for some reason, pained me more than gunfire usually did.

  “I caught her dawdling on the elevator,” Holloway said, doing some clapping of his own. He was grinning broadly, perfect teeth just asking to be knocked out. “You didn’t think you could get away from this without getting an ‘attagirl’ for saving the governor, did you?”

  I didn’t say anything, because all the things I wanted to say were like using a fire truck to spray acid on a parade crowd: savage, brutal, and ill-advised if you weren’t a villain.

  “You saved my life back there,” Warrington said, stepping forwa
rd, his suit jacket shed, his tie loosened and shirt unbuttoned a couple in the front. His broad grin was deep and sincere, and he, too, seemed to be asking to lose some teeth by virtue of showing me so many. He slipped his hand out and took hold of mine, unasked, and my eye twitched again. “If not for you and your quick shooting,” Warrington said, “I’d be dead right now.”

  “Which would be a terrible shame,” I said, so straight-laced that even I couldn’t tell if it was sarcasm.

  Burkitt stood a few steps behind Warrington, and his brow furrowed as he stared at me. Maybe he’d picked up on the undercurrent of emotion flooding through me. I couldn’t tell for sure.

  Warrington didn’t, though. “Your dedication to duty and quick reflexes demand recognition, Ms. Nealon.” He was still smiling. Did he really not care if he kept those teeth? One punch, I bet I could have taken ten of them, watching them launch out of his perfect smile like buckshot out of a shotgun cartridge. It would be beautiful.

  And deserved. So well deserved.

  I still said nothing, though, just nodded and mumbled something under my breath, hell if I knew what.

  Warrington either didn’t hear what I said or didn’t care, because he just nodded along. “I’ll admit, I was beginning to worry you were just wasting your time on this. Ms. Corcoran informed me that you had a suspicion the assassin would try again, and—sure enough. I was so sure he wouldn’t—”

  “It’s a she,” I said. This, I got out with perfect clarity.

  Warrington blinked his surprise a couple times. “Is it?” He glanced at Corcoran. “Did you know this?” Then to Holloway, who nodded, and finally back to me. “A female assassin? That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it?”

  “A little,” I said, and then my simmer came to a boil, “but less so when you consider that the woman who’s trying to kill you is Brianna Glover, and she’s super pissed that you raped her sister Emily back when she babysat for you.”

  I couldn’t have brought the room down into silence any faster if I’d dropped a grenade with the pin pulled. Absolute quiet filled the air for seconds that felt like they dragged on for minutes. Burkitt, just over Warrington’s shoulder, looked like he’d swallowed a porcupine and was trying to shit it out. Holloway was just open-mouthed, as though waiting to be fed his own porcupine (and God, would he have deserved it). Jenna Corcoran looked like I’d slapped her in the face with said porcupine after Burkitt and Holloway had finished passing it.

  The only one in the room who kept his composure was Ivan Warrington. The bastard never even blinked, and all he said, after a brief flicker of surprise that lasted maybe a millisecond, was, “Who?”

  “Bree-onn-uh Gluh-vur,” I said, emphasizing her name and staring Warrington right in the face. “Good God, man, don’t tell me you forgot her sister after nailing her. I mean, the girl was all of thirteen when you started with her. You’d think that’d be the sort of thing that’d stick in the old memory, but maybe it got lost with your moral compass and marital fidelity.”

  “Jesus, Nealon,” Holloway whispered. It seemed like the only thing that he could come up with.

  “This is—simply outrageous,” Jenna Corcoran finally sputtered, back to life. “How dare you come in here and accuse—”

  “It’s all right, Ms. Corcoran,” Warrington said, holding up a hand to stop her. “Ms. Nealon saved my life today. I reckon she’s earned the right to say a little…uh…something. No matter how false it might be.”

  “I really only have one question,” I said, and now my words were just flowing out, like I’d had enough scotch to render Holloway unconscious, plenty enough to remove my good sense, and uncork all my inhibitions. I was burning, and I had to get it all out. “Did you have your bud Mitchell Werner claim Emily’s body for burial? And if so, was it because you were being ‘gentlemanly’? Or because you just wanted to be sure the body was disposed of?”

  “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, Ms. Nealon,” Warrington said, and he had an almost sad, paternal aura about him. “If Emily Glover is dead, I’m afraid this is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “Maybe the first you’ve heard of it today,” I said, staring him straight in the eyes. He didn’t bat one, didn’t flinch. Most people standing toe to toe with me, knowing what I was capable of, seeing me in a spitting rage—they would have balked.

  Ivan Warrington was one cool damned customer. And I hated him all the more for the fact he could be so cavalier about the life of a woman that he’d destroyed.

  “Uh, Sienna, maybe we should get you out of here,” Burkitt said, finally surging back into motion. He was at my side in a couple seconds, a hand gently upon my upper arm.

  “How damned cold do you have to be to stick it in a thirteen-year-old, Warrington?” I asked, wanting to see something, anything, in his eyes to explain his behavior. Guilt. Remorse. Amusement, even.

  But there was nothing there. No shame. No doubt. Not even a hint of anger at my accusation, which would have been a normal reaction from an innocent man.

  Then again, Ivan Warrington was probably well-conditioned from a life in politics of hearing the most appalling sort of insults directed his way. He’d taken mine like a champ.

  And I couldn’t have gotten angrier if he’d admitted to slamming Emily Glover a hundred times with a grin and then spit in my face.

  “You smug son of a bitch,” I said, and Burkitt’s grip tightened on my upper arm. I could have thrown him through a window in a hot second, of course, and been up to my elbow in Warrington’s skull before he’d even cleared the shattering glass.

  “Nealon…” Holloway said, and he looked grey in the face, like ash. He nodded behind me, and I looked toward the door.

  The Louisiana State Police were behind me, weapons drawn and pointed at me. They’d branched out in either direction so I was at the center of a crossfire between them; X marked the spot where I stood, and the only treasure I’d dig up if I kept going would be the precious metal of lead, injected straight into my body at high velocity.

  “We should go,” Holloway said, and he sounded…choked.

  “That’d be wise,” Warrington said quietly. “Gentlemen…please lower your weapons.” He nodded at the troopers.

  They didn’t lower their guns. I wouldn’t have either, if I’d been them. I’d presented myself as a clear and present danger to the governor, who they were in charge of protecting. They’d be criminally negligent if they holstered their firearms now, and in spite of the rage that had bloomed around me, suffocating my brain of reason, I knew that, and respected them all the more for it. Their hands were steady, even though I could see the uncertainty in their eyes.

  “You’re just doing your jobs,” I said, loud enough they could hear me. I put my hands up, nodded once, and headed for the door. They looked a little conflicted, glanced past me at Warrington for direction.

  “Ms. Nealon saved my life today, gentlemen,” Warrington said, slowly. “Kindly let her pass without incident.”

  That, they obeyed, probably glad to be rid of me.

  “She just needs a little time to cool off,” Burkitt said, looking apologetically back at Warrington. “It’s been a stressful day, you understand.”

  “I understand entirely,” Warrington said, still cool as one of Brianna’s ice slides. “Do take a moment to breathe, Ms. Nealon. Relax, perhaps. Maybe see some of the local sights here. Take in Bourbon Street, get a more peaceful view of our fair city than you’ve had thus far.”

  “I’ll get right on that,” I said, passing between the troopers and out into the hall. Burkitt followed after, Holloway a step behind. One last look back showed me Jenna Corcoran, face still blazing with rage at what I’d said, and Warrington—

  Well.

  Warrington just stood in the middle of the room, towering like I hadn’t just accused him of pedophilia and threatened his life and political career. He watched me go, not a sign of turmoil under that implacable exterior, save for maybe a glint of something—triumph
? Anger? Sadness?—in his eyes as the door closed behind us.

  61.

  Olivia

  Veronika had launched into a chorus of “We Are the Champions” by Queen after her fifth drink, which seemed a little excessive, given our environs, which were a little bar tucked away in the back of the Venetian casino complex. It was kind of quiet in here, and fortunately her voice wasn’t too bad.

  “This is the job,” Veronika said, slurring a little, slapping her drink down on the bar and waving the bartender back over. “The pure joy of it. Capture done, we get to go back to the fun part of our lives. It’s like roughnecking, but without the extended periods of working terrible hours. Most of the time.” The bartender poured another round of tequila for her, and she lifted it in front of her. “Here’s to our criminals always being dumb, leaving their ID behind and drugging themselves into oblivion before we show up.”

  “Does…does it happen that way often?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, the cup paused just before her lips. The bar had a wood-paneled look that made it seem like an old library. “I know it’s popular in TV and books to have the criminal be like a super genius, but most people with super high intellects don’t go into the field of crime. It’s mostly idiots to middling intellects. People with a brain realize there are easier and less risky ways to earn money than doing shit that will get you thrown in prison or killed.”

  “Hmm,” I said, taking that in. I was still on my first drink, which was a very fruity Mai Tai. It was okay, but I could still taste the alcohol, and consequently, I’d taken all of two sips thus far. I think I was already feeling it, too. “Have you ever met any of the brainy ones, then?”