“I read the preliminary from the FBI,” Phillips said. He was a relatively straight-to-business guy. “What else do you have?”
“Just the basics on the suspect, Benjamin Cunningham—”
“Already got it,” Phillips said. “What’s your next step?”
“Visiting the suspect’s home,” I said, moving quickly ahead to adapt to our conversation. Sienna had serious problems getting along with Phillips; I found him pretty easy to understand, easy to deal with, too. He wasn’t unreasonable, he just had a mission to get accomplished and a limited tolerance for anything that got in the way. I suspected the reason he and Sienna were always at loggerheads is that they were way, way too similar to work together without bumping skulls. “Word is he lives with his mother. We’re halfway to Roseville now.”
“Good,” Phillips said. “Keep me apprised of any changes. The FBI issued a BOLO to local law enforcement. Cunningham took his own car out of the garage at the airport.”
“That could be dangerous,” I said. “A local cop pulling over this guy? Don’t you think that’ll end in fire?”
“They’re not supposed to pull him over,” Phillips said. “They’re instructed to contact us if they run across him, to keep their eyes open.”
“Any chance you’ve got Rocha doing his ‘all cameras’ bit on this?” I asked.
“Rocha’s at Fort Meade for the week,” Phillips said matter-of-factly. “I’ve put in a request with the NSA, haven’t heard back yet. Harper has a bird in the air. If the cops catch Cunningham’s car, we’ll have eyes on it in minutes. Harper’s also got an eye on heat blooms, so if he decides to blow up again, we’ll see it.”
“Slick,” I said. It was good thinking, really. “I’ll let you know if we get anything from the mother.”
“Keep your eyes open,” Phillips said, “it’s possible, though unlikely, that this Cunningham will head home at some point.”
“I’ve got some of our new agents at his work and on the way to stake out the house,” I said with a little pride. Phillips wasn’t the only one that could anticipate and plan ahead. “We’re going to start digging into this guy; figure out who he is and what he wants.”
“Let me know what you find,” Phillips said. And then he hung up. Like I said, he’s a straightforward guy.
“Man,” Augustus said, “y’all had a real mutual masturbation circle going on there for a minute. Thought I was going to have to step out of the car and give you some privacy.”
“Let me tell you something that you probably haven’t picked up from hanging out with Sienna,” I said, a little tightly, “you get no points in this world by being a dick to your boss.” Sienna had proven that, once again, this very week.
“Hey,” Augustus said, shaking his head, “that’s not exactly something I didn’t already know. I made supervisor in my factory because I knew the value of being the kind of employee the boss wants on his team. But this is different. You got something else going on here, like you’re running to him as much as you’re running away from her.”
“If you’d been standing next to her for more than a couple months,” I said, smirking, “you’d want to put some distance between you, too. It’s not a healthy place to be for very long.”
“This job ain’t healthy,” Augustus said. “Seems to me cozying up to the strongest meta in the world, knowing she’s got your back, might be a smarter thing to do than kiss up to some dude in an office that’s more worried about what’s going on up the chain than down it.”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re seeing Phillips through her eyes, and she’s never been able to look at him with a clear head because she’s still burning that he ‘took her job.’ There are rules for a reason, and Phillips understands that.”
“I know you two don’t exactly see eye to eye,” Augustus said, “but—”
“Hard to see eye-to-eye with someone who’s being willfully blind,” I said, cutting him off. “Who just goes out there and does whatever she feels like on any given mission instead of trying to do the job the way it was meant to be done.”
“‘The way it was meant to be done’?” Augustus said. I’ve seen supermarket turkey sliced thicker than his thinly-veiled disbelief. “Before she came along, no one was doing this job at all, at least not for the government.”
“This is a complicated conversation,” I said, shaking my head. “There’s a lot that goes into this, a lot of factors—”
“Maybe because I’m the new guy, it seems pretty simple to me,” Augustus said. “Bad guy does something bad, we stop him and put him in jail. If he resists being stopped, we have to kill him in order to protect the people and ourselves. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like that part either, but—”
“What if it didn’t have to be that way?” I asked. “What if we’re making it too easy to skip to the killing part?”
Augustus blew air through his lips. “Pffft. Nothing easy about it that I’ve seen, but I guess you’ve been on the job longer.”
“Things should be different,” I said confidently. “Like this Benjamin Cunningham. Looking at that footage, you know he didn’t do this on purpose, right?”
Augustus hedged. “Maybe. Maybe not. I didn’t have a camera inside his head.”
“I don’t think he intended to do it,” I said. “I think he’s scared. I think he got overwhelmed by his emotions, got too angry, blew his stack in a very literal way. Now we could approach this in the way Sienna would, which is, you know, a hundred miles an hour straight at him—”
“Straight at the dude who’s already exploded and killed fifty people today,” Augustus said. “Gee, why ever would we want to do that? It’s almost as if we’d be trying to stop him.”
“That’s not the only way to do it, though. What if we took a gentler approach? Tried to talk him down, get him to surrender?”
Augustus frowned. “You think your sister doesn’t talk people down when she thinks she can?”
“I think she backs them to the edge a lot of the time, then pushes them right off,” I said. “Or corners them and expects them to do something other than come out swinging. She leaves a trail of bodies behind her everywhere she goes, and even when she doesn’t kill, she does things like that leave PR time bombs all over the internet to make her—and us—look worse.”
“So, in this instance,” Augustus said, “you want to try to talk this man down.” He gave me a nod. “Fair enough. What’s your backup plan?”
It was my turn to blink at him. “I don’t think it’ll come to that, but Gavrikov-types are susceptible to bullets, provided they’re not burning too hot. Or you could snuff him out with a ton of dirt.”
“That’s a lot of dirt,” Augustus said. “I mean, I’m not in chemistry or thermodynamics or whatever class yet, but I’m thinking that’ll be a whole construction site worth of earth to put out his fire if he goes. Not sure I’m that fast or that strong.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I said confidently, “but I don’t think it’ll come to that. This man is scared. He killed fifty people in the blink of an eye, but he’s a normal enough guy. He’s probably scared, and the guilt’s setting in. We just need to make him see reason.” I steered us down the side street indicated on my GPS. “Let’s go talk to his mom, see if she can steer us in the right direction for that.” I pulled up to the curb and put the car in park.
“If you say so,” Augustus said. I could tell he was skeptical.
“Listen,” I said, “things are going to be different with me in charge, okay?”
“Oh, I’m seeing that,” he said.
“No PR bombs this week,” I said, opening the door and stepping out as I buttoned up my suit.
“I’m rooting for no bombs of any kind,” Augustus said as he stepped out opposite me.
I thought about coming up with some quippy reply, but this was serious, and I was in charge, and he needed to see that I wasn’t scared. “Let’s go,” I said simply, and we started up t
he walk toward Benjamin Cunningham’s house, trying to figure out what made an exploding man tick.
6.
Sienna
I ducked into a place that had “Shorty’s Restaurant and Bar” written on its overhanging sign in what looked like Comic Sans. I thought about avoiding it on that basis alone, but I was way too hungry to pass it up, and there wasn’t a lot of selection here on Main Street, Bayscape Island. I hadn’t eaten since before I’d left for the drive, and that had been hours and hours ago. When I stepped inside I found myself in a reasonably well-lit area, windows to the street casting clouded daylight over a darker room. Aged wood paneling gave the whole place an old-timey effect. There was a ramp that led up, with a wooden divider that kept me from seeing any of the rest of the place.
I took a stroll up the ramp and came out in a room that looked like it might have been dragged out of the Old West if not for the modern stuff like a soda fountain behind the bar. Also, I suppose the shiny metal bar stools capped with red vinyl upholstery wouldn’t have fit in very well in Deadwood.
There was a man behind the bar in a very classic bartender getup: white shirt, black vest, black pants and a mustache, with a towel thrown over his shoulder. He was young, wore a smile that lit him up all the way to the eyes, and he was alone in the room.
“Hey howdy hey,” he said, and to his credit, he said it in a way that didn’t make me want to smack him for it. “Welcome to Shorty’s. Sit down anywhere you’d like.”
“Okay.” I wandered from the top of the ramp over to the bar and situated myself on a stool gingerly, like I was expecting it to dump me off on the ground or something. I wasn’t, actually; it just felt weird to be sitting alone in a bar with this guy. Not that I feared he’d try anything—I was more than confident I could wreck his entire life if he did—it just felt … weird. “Are you … Shorty?”
He laughed, and it was a nice sound. “No. I’m Brent. Shorty’s is just a name. Like McDonald’s.”
I frowned. “Which was named for the McDonald brothers.”
Brent cast his eyes upward, like he was searching for an answer before his gaze flitted back to me. “I thought Ray Kroc founded McDonald’s?”
“He just franchised the hell out of it and—” I shook my head. “Never mind. There’s no Shorty, and you’re Brent. Got it. I’m Sienna, and I’m hungry. Can you help?”
“This isn’t going to sound like much of a boast,” Brent said with a grin, “but we’ve got the best food on Bayscape.”
I thought about the little town that Jake had shown me with one sweep of a hand and tried to find a way to sugarcoat my reply. “But does that mean it’s any good?” Probably needed more sugar on that.
Brent feigned an injured look. “It’s decent,” he said. “We’re not an authentic French eatery or your mother’s home cooking, but we’re pretty good.” He paused. “By which I mean I’m pretty good, since I’ll be doing the cooking if you order something.”
“My mother’s home cooking all came straight out of a box,” I said, pausing once I said it. “And coincidentally, so did I. What do you have that’s … uh, palatable?”
He skated right past whatever oddness I’d packed into that statement and slid a plastic menu in front of me. “Today’s special is a turkey sandwich with avocado. Personally, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about avocado, but they’re putting it on everything these days, so we’re just following along out here. I’m trying to pioneer an avocado spaghetti, but so far it’s resulted in three visits to Sarah over at the clinic.”
“Did she induce vomiting to try and cure it?” I asked, looking down at the menu. “Because based on my limited interaction with her, that feels like something she’d do.”
“Nice,” Brent said, leaning over on the bar with both elbows. “That what happened to your hand?”
I held up the bandaged palm. “This old thing? Nah. I had a lightsaber duel with someone, and they almost Skywalkered me.”
Brent kept a straight face. “Was it your dad?”
“Nah,” I said, “unlike Vader, my father actually is dead.” Long, long ago, before I even had a chance to meet him. “I pointed at one of the menu items. “This burger …”
“Yes?”
“How is it?” I asked. “In your clearly impartial opinion of your own cooking?”
“Pretty good,” Brent said, nodding his head. “And cheap, too, so you won’t feel like I lifted your wallet afterward.”
I felt a frown crease my eyebrows. That felt like a slightly odd thing to say. “Uhmmm … I guess I’ll take that.”
“Comes with fries,” he said, scooping up my menu, “and avocado, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“Since we skipped right to food, I should probably ask you if you want anything to drink. Beer? Pop?” He lowered his voice. “The dreaded ice water?”
“Why is the ice water ‘dreaded’?”
“It snows like half the year here,” he said. “Once the white stuff clears out, I don’t really care to even see a cube of it until November rolls around.”
“You a year-round resident?” I asked.
“I’m even better than that,” he said. “I’m a born and raised resident.”
“Uh huh,” I said, not looking away. “Did Sarah deliver you?”
“Hah,” he said. “A little before her time. What did you want to drink?”
I thought about it for a minute. I was on vacation, after all, and a quick glance back through the window suggested to me that the rain wasn’t going to let up soon. “Got anything boozy and sweet? The sweet part needs to trump the boozy.”
He thought about it for a minute. “I might have something along those lines. Give me a few minutes?”
“Sure, I’ll just sit here and watch the rain come down,” I said, half-serious.
“That’s the spirit, you enjoy your little slice of the local weather.” He headed through a set of saloon-style swinging doors to his left, and I found myself alone in an empty bar.
I stared around the room at the nondescript décor choices, the faded old town newspapers that didn’t really register because the events were so prosaic; I mean, I couldn’t drum up much interest in a town festival that ended in with a tractor pull. Maybe it was because I figured I could win a tractor pull myself.
I felt the call of nature and looked around, finding a dark hallway just to the right of the bar. I hesitated, wondering if I should ask Brent before going, then remembered that I don’t really ask people for permission to do anything, especially not to go to the bathroom. I walked down the narrow hall and found the ladies’ room, the floorboards issuing creaking warnings all the while that made me wonder if maybe I should have gone with the turkey sandwich and had him hold the avocado.
I pushed through into a dimly lit bathroom and locked the door. I did my business and washed my hands as best I could, avoiding soaking the bandage. I wondered if the lack of healing was worth the additional pain, and after a moment’s consideration, I figured maybe it was. I stared at myself in the mirror, saw the dark circles under my eyes from years of stress, of hell, of the last few days of crap that had come cascading to a lovely finish, and I sighed. I ran the water over my uninjured hand and then wiped it across my face. “Two weeks,” I muttered, staring down at the white porcelain sink.
I saw a spread of crimson on my hand and realized the bandage was soaking through again. I started to curse, then shook my head. Give it a night and this wouldn’t matter. Being a plain old meta again was an adjustment, even though it was only for a few hours, probably.
I splashed my face lightly with water again, then brushed my hair back, letting it tangle a little as I did so. I stared at myself in the mirror, the glossy, black-painted bathroom walls a stunning contrast with my pale skin. The light over the sink flickered, then snapped off for a full second.
When it came back on, the face in the mirror wasn’t mine.
Where my pale, make-up free face had been a moment earlier was a
dark shadow, a featureless blur. It looked like someone had smudged black oil over the mirror, blotting me out, replacing me with something … else.
The sound of the humming fluorescent light filled my ears, and then, ever-so-quietly, I heard a voice, deep, sounding like it was somewhere in the distance.
“You shouldn’t be here,” it said, as I stared at the faceless darkness in the mirror.
Then the light over the sink flickered again, and when I blinked, my face was back. I looked around the bathroom, searching for some sign of something awry, of a power cord leading to the mirror, of anything to explain that strangely freaky display.
I found nothing.
I took a deep breath, then another, then a third. The light was at a steady thrum now, no hint of power interruption or weirdness. The mirror was clear, my face visible in perfect clarity, down to the small beads of water that I’d left on my face from the splashing.
“Maybe I’m imagining things,” I said and gave the bathroom another once over. There was nothing amiss here, nothing to hint that what I’d seen was anything other than a daydream or a delusion based on stress. Because I certainly had that.
Just the same, I took care when I came out the door. The hall was quiet, still no hint of anyone else in the bar. With a last look at the mirror, I left, walking back to the bar like someone was going to attack me at any moment.
Because let’s face it, it’s me. Someone was bound to try.
7.
Reed
Benjamin Cunningham’s house was a simple one story built over a sunken garage. It was the sort of thing you see a lot in Minnesota, but not much in other parts of the country, especially the ones closer to sea level, because it essentially left the house with a garage that emptied right into the basement. The front door to the house was on the upper level, and Augustus and I walked up the steps leading up the small hill from the driveway to ring the bell. The air smelled of fall breeze, with a lovely crispness that was a little early for the season.
When the door opened, we were greeted by a woman that I put in her mid-fifties. She wore a concerned look, probably wondering why two guys in suits were at her front door. “Yes?” she asked.
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