Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  “Oh, yeah.” Veronika nodded. “The first mission I met Sienna on? The villain was this super genius evil doctor who wanted to wipe out all the metahumans on the planet with a tailored bioplague.” She took down the whole shot in one good gulp. “But guys like him are the outliers. We deal with ten or twenty or fifty morons who accidentally trip over their own genitals during a bank heist or a convenience store robbery before we encounter one who’s got a plan, some discipline, and is a real investigative challenge.” She frowned, shaking her head. “I hate those assholes. They always gotta be making things tough on me. I just want things to go nice and easy, so I can head home and do some reading, check in on my mom…” She looked for a second like she was going to nod off right on the chair.

  “So…” I said, still trying to solidify the thoughts I had, “this thing where we found the bad guy and he was sleeping…that happens a lot?”

  Veronika’s eyes were starting to get unfocused. “No. Not really. Even the dumb ones aren’t usually that bad.” She raised her glass, newly filled by the bartender, the tequila sloshing over the edge. “Here’s to him, making our lives easier, because without him being a moron, this celebration would not be possible!” And she drank again.

  I lifted my Mai Tai to my lips and took a very, very small sip. My stomach was rumbling unpleasantly for some reason. “So, it doesn’t bother you that it was easy?”

  Veronika stared right at me. “Girl…you gotta take a moment when it’s easy to appreciate it. Because often it’s not. Right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess. I think Reed’s been sending me on the easy ones, because I haven’t really had any of the ones that you could classify as super difficult.”

  “You think he’s holding out on you,” Veronika said, nodding along. “Taking it easy on you, because…what? He feels sorry for you? For what you went through in the past?”

  “Maybe?” I tipped back the Mai Tai and almost choked because I took in way, way too much. “I mean, it’s not because I’m a girl, right?”

  She shook her head. “Hell no. You should see some of the hard cases he sends me after. But he knows I can handle it, right? He’s probably easing you in.” She lifted her filled shot glass again in a toast. “And bless you for it, my child, because hey, I needed an easy win right now.” She tipped back the tequila again, then shook her head. “Brrrrr. Wow.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing,” I said, staring at my Mai Tai. “That Reed’s looking out for me.”

  “Maybe, baby bird,” Veronika said. “Or maybe it’s time for you to ask for more. Step up. Really challenge yourself by going after a superpowered serial killer or a chaotic monster ready to destroy a city. Up your game.” She lifted her empty glass to flag the bartender back down, but he was at the other end of the bar, filling someone else’s cup.

  Something about what she’d said bothered me. “Chaos…the speedster was talking about it on Fremont Street.” I frowned, trying to put together a piece I felt like I’d missed. It felt…important.

  “Yeah.” Veronika nodded. “Sometimes you get those kinds, y’know? They don’t want to rob the convenience store, they want to tear it up for fun. They don’t care about busting into the casino vault, they just want to make a mess.” She shrugged. “The psychobabble explanation is that they hate the system or hierarchy or whatever and want to rip it down.”

  I blinked, trying to remember something I’d heard about that on a podcast, and it just sort of fell into place. “Right,” I said. “So…if the speedster was a ‘lord of chaos’…” I paused, putting down my Mai Tai. “You saw his room, right? Not a thing out of place?”

  “Yeah…?” Veronika just stared at me, almost inscrutable, like the wheels were turning. “Huh. Yeah. That’s an interesting point. Personality-wise, you’d think someone who was into chaos would have a living space that was a little more…chaotic.”

  “I would have thought so,” I said, then shook it off.

  “But,” Veronika said, sitting up a little straighter on her stool, “maybe that was the driver for their desire for chaos. They hated that everything outside their control was not quite right, so better to knock it all over and start fresh.”

  I shook my head. “Sometimes I feel so out of place in this job. I don’t have a degree, I don’t have any prior training—I was a receptionist at a dental office, for crying out loud. There’s all this psychology and training and people skills and fighting and guns and whatnot…” I stared at my Mai Tai, not really sure I wanted to take another drink. “Maybe Reed’s holding me out of those tougher jobs because he knows…I’m not ready.”

  “Well, kiddo, there’s a learning curve,” Veronika said. “And if you’re not ready a year in…maybe it’s because you haven’t been doing the work. How much effort have you put in outside office hours? How many books have you read on criminology? How many times have you been to the range? How much practice are you putting in on controlling your powers?” She held up a hand, flat-palmed, the empty shot glass in the other. “Because me? I’ve done it all. Like learning to administer suppressant. There was a whole course on it I took from the cops in SF. On my own time, with my own money, so I could be better at my job, since that pays my bills.” She leaned in. “Do you do any of that stuff when you’re off the clock? Or do you kinda sit around and wonder why things aren’t getting better?”

  I felt a little like she’d thrown her shot glass right in my face, hitting me dead between the eyes. “Well, no. I just sort of—”

  “Ugly little secret that’s out there, but not spoken about much?” Veronika leaned back, the authority just oozing out of her. “Sienna Nealon is widely considered the baddest-assed meta on the planet, and she has basically your same upbringing. Confinement, abuse, no traditional high school, no college. But she’s brought down more meta criminals than anyone who has degrees in all that stuff because she trains like a mofo.” Veronika shuddered. “One of the first times I fought her, she beat the shit out of me, and not one of her powers really lent itself all that well to clashing with mine. She used her flame abilities to create glass boxing gloves out of dirt and proceeded to whoop on me until I embraced the better part of valor and fled.” The bartender finally came along and filled her shot glass. “That wasn’t anything but her frigging grit and effort coming out.” She took down the shot and slammed it back down on the bar just loud enough to get the bartender to turn back around and come fill it again. “The question you’ve gotta ask yourself, Olivia…do you really want to do this? And are you putting in the work? And there’s no shame if the answer is no on question one. The only shame is if the answer is ‘yes,’ and you keep the answer to question two a forever ‘no.’ Because that just means you’re delusional, and you’ll never get better.” She lifted the shot glass again. “Capische?”

  I felt like I’d had a long guzzle from a fire hose, or been smacked around, or some combo of both those things. “Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. And I feel stupid that I didn’t ever put that together before, that I thought I could just sit back and things would get better.”

  “Yeah, it’s a weird and prevalent thing in our society,” Veronika said, “like we believe we’ll just get awesomer at what we do by osmosis. Strange disconnect. But whatever—now you know. And knowing is—”

  Whatever she was going to say to finish the thought, she never got a chance to get out. A black blur shot by and hit her so hard that she was there one second, gone the next, disappearing in a shattering of glass bottles and wooden shelves, vanishing through the wall so quickly I almost thought I’d missed her getting up and leaving.

  But she didn’t leave, and the crashing, shattering, screaming noises proved it.

  I stood, looking around for the source of the trouble. I found it a moment later, that same black shape that had been present the last few days, that I’d talked to on Fremont Street.

  They were back.

  We’d arrested the wrong person.

  62.

  Sienna


  “You know, I think that went really well,” I said as the three of us—me, Burkitt and Holloway—entered the elevator down the hall from Governor Warrington’s suite. The Louisiana State Police troopers were still eyeing me like I was going to fly off the handle, charge down the hall, and murder Warrington, and so every one of them had their hand on their holsters.

  “What the hell was that?” Burkitt blew up, throwing his arms wide as the elevator doors closed. “You just accused the governor of Louisiana of raping a teenager!”

  “Yeah, I did,” I said, nodding along, “and I gotta tell you—it felt real great. Righteous, really—”

  “Are you out of your ever-loving mind?” Burkitt’s voice strained, and he looked to Holloway for support. “Say something.”

  Holloway took a second and cleared his throat, looking down. “Well, if true, it’s damned near impossible to prove. And way outside the FBI’s purview.”

  Burkitt’s eyes burned. “This is your comment? She burns the damned house down around us while we’re trying to protect an assassination target, and this is what you have to say about it?”

  Holloway’s expression seemed torn, like he was really searching for something to say. Which was strange, because Holloway certainly hadn’t been reticent to say…well, anything at all during my association with him. “Yeah, it could have gone better,” he finally managed.

  “The man raped and abused a teenage girl that worked for him,” I said, surprisingly calm. “I’m not going to just sit back and let that slide past because he’s gotten himself elected to high office since.”

  “You don’t know that he did that!” Burkitt lost it again. “There is zero evidence. Literally zero!” He threw his hands up. “Or do you have something? Because it’d be great if you did before tossing that accusation and wrecking everything for us.”

  In spite of the fact that I’d just blasted Ivan Warrington with moral certainty, Burkitt’s statement hit me hard, right in the face. “You have an annoying point. What I have is a statement from the victim prior to death via a local newspaper reporter and an inference of the same from her sister—”

  “A twice-attempted assassin,” Holloway said evenly.

  “—and a gut feeling that Warrington is so dirty that his laundry requires extra bleach in every load,” I said.

  “For the sake of—” Burkitt bowed his head, eyes closed. “Didn’t you just tell me that you wanted to believe in the system? Wasn’t that the crux of what we talked about at breakfast this morning?”

  “Hey, you guys went to breakfast without me?” Holloway asked.

  “I figured you were sleeping it off,” I said, “and also, I wanted a grope-free breakfast.” That shut him up. “And yeah, I said that.” I looked right at Burkitt, but he still had his head bowed and had now added massaging his temples to his repertoire. “I do want to believe in the system. But I also want to believe that a man can’t rape a thirteen-year-old girl and have it go completely unreported by anyone until she dies of an OD and her sister begins a quest for vengeance. Yet here we are.”

  “There are proper procedures for these sorts of things—” Burkitt started.

  “Not on our end, there aren’t,” Holloway said. “I’m sorry, but unless he brought her over state lines, this is a Louisiana case through and through, and completely outside our purview unless they call us in for an assist. Likelihood they do when their chief executive is the accused: is there anything lower than zero? Because I’m thinking it’d be around there.”

  “Which means there’s no damned justice for Emily Glover,” I said. “Look, I came here to save Warrington from the assassin, and I’m all about that. But justice isn’t just keeping him from being assassinated. It’s getting to the core motive of why Brianna Glover is trying to kill him in the first place. I can’t just ignore what caused all this. I’m not wired to let rapists skate, regardless of jurisdictional crap and no matter how high they’ve climbed in government.”

  “But the system is not wired for you to rip it apart going after a man like Warrington when there are no witnesses—I’m assuming—to prove this happened!” Burkitt blew again. “How the hell is the man supposed to prove he didn’t rape a girl who’s now dead?” Burkitt thrust his index finger at me. “You—prove you didn’t kill twelve people yesterday and then violate Holloway after he passed out.”

  I exchanged a look with Holloway. “See how he’s still able to stand upright? That’s proof on the latter.” I wiggled the fingers of my right hand at him. “Because if I violated him, I wouldn’t stop until he became a full-on puppet. We’re talking Kermit the Jackass FBI Agent here—”

  “You keep those hands away from me,” Holloway said, bumping into the elevator wall.

  “Same goes, bub,” I shot back.

  “You can’t prove a negative,” Burkitt said, lapsing back into massaging his skull as the elevator dinged to herald our arrival at my floor. “That’s my point. Our system is set up around proving guilt. Someone doesn’t have to prove their damned innocence. That’s the cornerstone of our entire judicial philosophy, the idea that a thousand guilty men should walk free before we imprison a single innocent one. Isn’t that what you were talking about buying into? So that what happened to you can’t happen to someone else?”

  I burned a little, mostly because of how right he was. “Yes, okay, I did say that. But I didn’t mean someone as loathsome and seemingly guilty as Warrington. Did you see his face when I accused him? Nothing. No righteous indignation about how I’d wrongly burned him. Dude is guilty.”

  “Says you,” Burkitt said, holding the elevator as it tried to close, face grey. “But if the system doesn’t work to defend someone you find loathsome, like Warrington, then it won’t protect you, either. Because until the Revelen thing went down, a lot of people found you loathsome, too.”

  “Low blow,” I said, stepping out of the elevator. “How dare you speak to me with truth and honor and shit like that? I just wanted you to validate my hateful feelings toward acts of obvious evil like raping a thirteen-year-old. Curse you, sir, curse you.”

  “I think we can all agree that, if it’s true, Warrington deserves what you just said you’d do to Holloway,” Burkitt said.

  “Pretty sure that falls under ‘cruel and unusual,’” Holloway muttered, sauntering out of the elevator but careful to place himself as far from me as he could, back to the wall.

  “But how the hell do we prove that?” Burkitt asked. “After this much time. I mean, ideally, law enforcement would have been informed immediately after the bastard had done it. They could have gotten forensics. Witness statements. Maybe even caught Warrington in the act with a sting.” He shook his head. “I don’t like this any more than you do. And I don’t want to cover for the bastard if he did it. But it’s totally separate from what we’re here to do, which is stop Brianna Glover from taking the law into her own hands and avenging this perceived wrong.”

  “If it was your sister, I bet you’d perceive it as wrong, too,” I said quietly.

  “I would,” Burkitt said. “You’re damned right I would. And I’d want to saw the son of a bitch in half with a shotgun. But…” He shook his head. “What I want doesn’t equal what’s right.”

  “Damn,” I said under my breath. “Why couldn’t we have had this conversation before I went in there full blow with Warrington?” The answer occurred a moment later. “Oh, right. Because I got dragged into that meeting when I really didn’t want to do it yet.” I looked pointedly at Holloway.

  Holloway raised his hands in surrender. “Hey, I was just doing what Warrington told me to—getting you up there so he could thank you. I didn’t know you’d had a hearty drink of hate-whiskey for lunch and decided our protectee was the most convenient target at hand for all the rage you’ve been building up in your life.”

  “It’s gotta go somewhere,” I said. “Shit. What do we do now?”

  “Uh, stay away from Warrington,” Burkitt said. “Wait for things to fall
out. If I had to guess? You’re going to get a very, very angry call from your superiors extremely soon. Take the ass chewing with grace, and tell them you were wrong.”

  I made a face. “See, I’m not sure I was ‘wrong,’ per se. I just maybe could have handled it better.”

  “How could you have handled it worse?” Holloway asked. “Hypothetically?”

  “You think that ass-puppet thing is ‘better’?” I asked. “Also, you should see what I can do to a man’s face with one good punch.”

  “I don’t need to see any of that,” Holloway said. “I swear I thought there was steam coming out of your ears at one point during your talk with him. Like, literal steam.”

  “Just let it cool down on its own,” Burkitt said, withdrawing his arm from the elevator door. “We’ll see where we stand.” He shook his head. “Man. I thought maybe we were going to stumble on Warrington sticking himself into political corruption after this morning. Not this.”

  “Yeah,” Holloway said. “Makes you wonder what else is going to come bursting out of his closet by this time tomorrow. We’ll probably get the coroner’s report back from that corpse we dug up and find evidence of necrophilia or something.”

  “And on that note,” I said, shuddering, “I’m going to go take a very, very long shower to get the hate of the day and also that comment off of me.”

  “Do I even have to say ‘Stay out of trouble’?” Burkitt called after me.

  I waved him off. “I’ll stay away from Warrington. He’ll live to walk like a normal person for at least another day.”

  Holloway swore under his breath but followed along behind me, at a considerably slower pace, owing at least to the fact he appeared to be walking with his butt cheeks clenched tightly together. “You really are hell on wheels, Nealon. I bet Warrington’s never had anyone get all up in his junk like that before.”

  “Yes, I’m a holy terror,” I said, as my phone started buzzing in my pocket. I looked at it, and the caller ID said it was from Washington, DC. “Speaking of.” I showed him the screen. “I should probably take this so I can get the ‘ass chewing’ portion of today over with.”