Tormented

by Robert J. Crane

  “Sienna, it’s got to be forty degrees out here,” Sarah called from just inside the door. I looked back to see her silhouetted in the entry to the bar and did a double take because she looked oddly familiar. My eyes pierced the veil of light that cast her in shadow, and I realized it was just Sarah, truly her, yelling to overcome the sound of the rain hammering the sidewalk and rooftops around us with deafening sound.

  “Hey,” Jake said, and he laid a reassuring hand on my elbow. He’d ventured farther out than the other two, with Sarah still lurking in the entryway and Brant only a couple steps out of the bar, blanching at the dousing he was receiving. I felt the rain patter on my head, soak my shirt, my pants, my skin, and I didn’t care. “Come back inside,” he said.

  “I don’t like this,” I said, staring back down the darkened street. I couldn’t even see the clouds above, and an artificial night had set in, because I knew for a fact that if it hadn’t been raining, the high-summer sun would still have been shedding its light in the sky.

  “It’s some pretty crap weather,” Jake agreed, not realizing that wasn’t what I was talking about. “All the more reason to go back into the bar.”

  The visibility was so poor I couldn’t even see the dock at the end of the street. A curtain of rain cut off my view of the world about thirty feet away. “Not that,” I said. “I’m talking about this thing that’s being done to me.”

  “I don’t really know anything about what you’re going through,” Jake said, stepping to where I could see him, standing there in the freezing cold downpour, looking desperately uncomfortable, “but I don’t think you’re going to solve it by standing out in this mess, catching your death.”

  I snorted. “Only mothers say ‘catch your death.’”

  Jake smiled. “You’ve met my wife. Which of us do you think is the most maternal?” My stony resolve broke under the light laugh I let go at that, and I shivered at the chill. “Come back inside,” Jake said. “We’ll talk about it if you want.”

  I cast my eyes once more around the town, wondering where Z had gone. I could feel the sense of paranoia start to settle in, that desire to run through town and grab hold of everyone, shaking each of them while questioning them about what was happening, as though the physical act of rustling them like a dirty carpet would loose the dirt they were hiding. I questioned whether I was crazy to even still be here, talking to Brant, Jake and Sarah. They could have been involved in this psychological warfare exercise, after all. They could have been the key players for all I knew.

  I pulled lightly against Jake’s hand on my elbow. He wasn’t maintaining much of a hold, so I slipped free without even trying. He didn’t attempt to grasp me again, just stood there. “Come inside,” he asked once again, gently. My suspicious nature warred with my desire to talk to someone, anyone, to not be … alone, in a cabin, by myself, while this … whatever this was … was going on.

  “All right,” I said and followed him back toward the bar. It wasn’t as though I was in any real peril. Not yet, anyway.

  Besides, at least now I knew what I was dealing with. A telepath. And when I got my full strength back with my other souls tomorrow, I was going to track them down and crack their skull open like an egg for messing with me. Then maybe I’d get back to this business of vacation, all fun and fancy free. Or something like that. Because it was still me, after all.

  16.

  Reed

  When Andrew Phillips came driving up in his company car, I’ll admit I had to stifle a little bit of a grin. As I've said before, I like the guy, but about nine months earlier Sienna had destroyed the agency director’s car while fending off a terrorist attack, and the replacement was, uh, tied up in budgetary issues. Phillips had made his fair share of enemies in his short tenure at the agency, and while I didn’t count myself as one of them, Ariadne Fraser, our head of finance, clearly did.

  So, for now, Andrew Phillips, on the rare occasions he needed to leave the agency campus for work reasons, had been assigned a Volkswagen Beetle. Not a normal government car by any means, but the motor pool had assured him that it was well-treated and normally used for surveillance work when we needed something nondescript. It was low mileage, probably the lowest mileage vehicle we had in the motor pool, and since we’d had the aforementioned budgetary issues and no one else had surrendered their car, Phillips was kind of stuck. He could have demanded someone give up their SUV or he could have pitched a fit and looked like an ass. He’d chosen the more politically astute move of simply going with the flow and had not complained about it, as I suspect more than one person in his position might have done.

  Oh, and this particular car? It was orange. I didn’t even know they made them in this shade of orange/brown, which I would characterize as a burnt sienna (no pun intended). Apparently when the agency bought it, we were aiming for the ‘hide in plain sight’ style of surveillance.

  Phillips came squealing to a stop in the middle of the crime scene, lights mounted in his front window flashing. Credit where it was due, he’d driven himself (because a budget for a chauffeur also got, uh … lost) and when he levered his tall frame out of the small car, he stretched. I was sure the drive hadn’t been all that pleasant, especially since rush hour was still going on. The Beetle looked way out of place in the middle of all the cop cars and ambulances and fire trucks.

  “What’s going on, Harry Dresden?” I quipped as Phillips stalked over to me. He had a pretty neutral expression most of the time, calm just this side of thunderclouds drifting over his brow.

  Phillips came at me full steam, stopping just short of running into me. I guess he was in a hurry. “What the hell is going on here?” he asked, voice clear but not very pleasant.

  “Anselmo Serafini is back in town,” I said, though I knew he already had this tidbit of information. “He attacked us while we were eating dinner.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” Phillips said, leaning forward. “What the hell is happening here?”

  “It’s a crime scene,” I said, after taking everything in. “There were witnesses, some minor injuries—”

  “And you started a manhunt for him,” Phillips said, and at this I caught a flash of anger in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I guess I could have waited for you to give the approval—”

  “Do you realize how incompetent this makes us look?” Phillips asked, folding his arms in front of him. The storm clouds were gathering over his head now. “This is the one who got away, and in addition to the incident at the airport earlier, it makes us look like we’re complete boobs.”

  “Serafini is a serious threat,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I couldn’t just ignore the fact that we had a very obvious sighting of him here in our backyard—”

  “Have you ever heard of anyone on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list walking into a bar in Washington, D.C. and smacking around a couple of their agents?” Phillips asked, surveying the scene briefly before letting his gaze fall back on me. “Of course you haven’t. Because it doesn’t happen. And if it did, the criminal in question damned sure wouldn’t have gotten away afterward!” He raised his voice loud enough to include several other people in the immediate vicinity in our conversation. I glanced behind me and saw Augustus looking over at me from where he was talking to one of the local cops. He raised an eyebrow at me and I quickly looked away, back to Phillips, whose face was slightly red.

  “Well, if the FBI had as one of their nemeses a guy who could shrug off bullets like some of us ignore parking citations,” I said, “maybe that would happen more often. It’s not like I could just shoot Serafini and be done with the problem.”

  I could see Phillips chafing under that argument, like he wanted to burst free and fight it out some more. “Where did he go?”

  “I’ve got J.J. working the traffic and other surveillance cameras in the area,” I said, “but it looks like he found a gap in them and waltzed off.” That was true, and Anselmo had done it very quickly after m
aking it out of the empty storefront, almost like he was being guided by someone who knew where the cameras were located. “I doubt we’re going to find anything.”

  Phillips watched me carefully. “You think he has help.”

  I nodded. “I think he’s working with the Brain, the one who masterminded the Federal Reserve heist and the subsequent jailbreak. Probably Eric Simmons, too, because we’ve had zero notice on either of them since they disappeared in January. That just doesn’t happen in the modern world. Everyone leaves an electronic trail—whether it’s on cameras or some other way. Someone’s covering for these guys, helping them escape our notice.”

  “Making us look like idiots,” Phillips said, tearing slightly looser of the restraint he’d shown before. “What’s Anselmo’s game?”

  “Axe to grind with me or us,” I said, shaking my head, a little more casual now that Phillips was pointing his irritation elsewhere. I frowned, remembering something he’d said. “He said his quarrel with Sienna was done.” I scratched my hairline on my right temple, where a little itch was starting. I hadn’t really thought about this after he’d said it, but now that I was, I started to feel a little uneasy.

  “Done how?” Phillips asked, still sweeping the scene with his eyes. His faint blondish hair was being turned red and then blue by all the flashing lights.

  “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “I have a hard time imagining he’s done anything to her.” I started to feel nervous, then dropped it. Sienna could beat the living crap out of Anselmo with one hand tied behind her back. Maybe both.

  Phillip' s eyes were heavily lidded. He looked tired. “Might want to warn her, in case he’s got ill intent.”

  “I can’t imagine Anselmo ever having good intent,” I said and started to walk away, fumbling for my phone.

  “Get back to the agency when you’re done,” Phillips said, tossing the order after me. I turned and watched him beeline for the police commander, who was talking with the fire commander on scene. He didn’t follow up on it, and part of me wondered why he’d bothered with it at all.

  “Whatever,” I muttered to myself. I’d head back to the agency, all right, because there wasn’t any point in just standing around in the north metro waiting for something to happen. Besides, now that rush hour was over, I could be here in half an hour, tops, if anything went awry during the night.

  I looked at the screen on my phone as I walked back toward the car, making a gesture for Augustus to follow me. He disentangled himself from conversation with the cop he’d been talking to and threaded his way through the crowd toward me as I pushed the button to call someone who I hadn’t actively called in several months. I listened to as it went straight to voicemail.

  I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at the screen that flashed “Sienna Nealon.” She was up north, and that meant shoddy phone reception, right? It was perfectly normal. And she was a big girl, she could take care of herself. A villain like Anselmo had way, way more to fear from her than she did from him.

  “What’s up?” Augustus asked as he fell in beside me. I headed toward my car, but slowly, hesitant, mulling everything over in my mind.

  “Probably nothing,” I said and hit redial. The phone rang went straight to voicemail once again. My hand went back to my hairline, to that same itch, and this time I found a little, lonely bead of sweat waiting. I rubbed it back into my hair as I put away my phone, letting it drop into my pocket like a ten ton weight that threatened to drag me down. “Hopefully nothing,” I amended, and picked up the pace back to my car. “Hopefully nothing at all.”

  17.

  Sienna

  Brant got me another drink, which I took a quick swill of as soon as it was in my hands. I swished the sweet, fruity flavor around in my mouth, let it permeate my taste buds and waft up into my nose where it lingered before I dropped it down my throat into my wildly fluttering stomach below. It did not seem to put that particular part of me at ease with its arrival.

  I sat on the stool with Sarah watching me carefully from one side while Jake drank his beer on the other as he studiously tried to avoid looking at me, both of them acting in the oddest sort of concert to ignore me and pay attention to me all at once. They were a strange couple, I thought, but probably well matched.

  I took another drink.

  “So,” Brant said, looking over the now-empty bar before letting his eyes settle on me, “do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not much to say.” I took a sip this time. My nerves needed soothing. Work, alcohol, work, damn you. “I’m done with passively sitting back and waiting for this jackass to show himself.”

  Brant paused, and looked uncertain when he spoke again. “How do you know it’s a him?”

  “When it comes to villainy,” I said, “it’s usually a him. When the stats start to shift in the other direction, I’ll start to assume it’s a she when things go wrong for me.”

  “Oh,” Brant said, “well, okay then. So long as you don’t think it’s me.”

  “It’s someone close by,” I said. “They’re here on the island if they’re monkeying with my head.” I took another drink. “And tomorrow, I’m going to find them, and commence to skinning them for the rest of my vacation. In fact, I may need to take some additional time off just to do the job properly.”

  “You could just take them to a taxidermist back on the mainland,” Jake said, smirking slightly. “Probably get the job done quicker. Or slower, since it sounds like you might be aiming for that.”

  “I don’t get it,” Sarah said, shrugging, finally pulling her gaze away from me and having a drink of her martini. “You’re some sort of über-hero. Aren’t you used to people trying things like this with you?”

  “No,” I said. “I tend to send a very strong message against messing with me. People are mostly smart enough to avoid it, and it’s because they know that people who try it always come to a bad end.” Say what you want about my YouTube videos; they mostly got people to steer wide away from me.

  “Sounds lonely,” Jake said, picking up his beer.

  “It’s not so—” I stopped. I’d started to say it wasn’t so bad, but … “It’s all right,” I said, still not very convincingly. I had …

  I blinked. What did I have? My privacy? Hah. I’d been exploited and betrayed on national television for ratings. Tabloids paid for scoops on me, ninety percent of which weren’t based even loosely on fact. Friends? Lulz. They were all pretty much gone, except for Ariadne, who I kept at a distance, and Augustus, my new best buddy—who was more of a co-worker. Romance? I’d had a couple of one night stands in the last year or so, but that didn’t exactly qualify as romance.

  Hell, my last boyfriend didn’t even remember that we dated. That one was my fault, but still.

  “You all right over there?” Jake asked, and I turned to see him looking at me, concern in his dark eyes.

  “I’m fine.” I smiled faintly. “At least I’ve got my health.” I could see the shared looks around me, but I just didn’t have it in me to argue at the moment.

  I picked up the glass and took another drink, hoping that maybe after a few more I’d bury this sense of growing unease, and maybe—just maybe—start to enjoy my time off.

  18.

  Reed

  Augustus and I came out of the top floor elevator in the agency with a destination in mind. We cut through the cubicle farm like men on a mission, like Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith (but without the sunglasses) and headed straight for the only man that could help us.

  Also, I think I’m funnier than Tommy Lee Jones.

  “Well, well, well,” J.J. said, spinning slowly around in his chair to face us with his fingers steepled, “if it isn’t the most improbable pairing I’ve seen since Wailord and Skitty.”

  I stopped just inside J.J.’s cubicle. “I need—what the hell did you just say?”

  “It’s a Pokémon thing,” Augustus said. “Don’t even ask.”

  “Right,” I said, lookin
g back to J.J. “I need help tracking fugitives.”

  “I know, I know,” J.J. said and spun back to his computer, which had a live surveillance feed from the elevator banks pulled up in the corner. Huh. So that was how he knew to spin around like that and do his little intro. “But I got problems, man. I can’t get the cameras of the world to eat out of my palm like they used to, at least not around the area where your friend Mr. Serafini is. There were just a few outages in critical places, enough to mask him from me. I can’t see where he came from or where he went.”

  “How does that even happen?” I asked, taking a few steps forward and leaning over to look at his screen, which was pointless because the only thing I understood on it was the live feed from the camera back at the elevators.

  J.J. typed some gibberish into a small black box, then hit enter. I watched it disappear. “I’d tell you I don’t know, but we both know I do. Anselmo’s got a guide, and she’s pretty damned good. She’s barely having to do any work to steer him clear of the monitors that are out there, and she’s shutting down the few cameras that she needs to in order to help him evade.” J.J. shrugged. “I can’t even get a good read on where she’s coming from yet, because her IP addresses are being masked. I’m getting everything here; she could be in Austin, Texas, Melbourne, Florida, Calabasas, California, Billings, Montana—”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to cut him off before he listed every municipality in the U.S. “What can you tell me?”

  J.J. froze. “Who said I could tell you anything?” He did not look up.

  “That’s like an admission of guilt,” Augustus said. “Why don’t you confess now?”

  “Well, I didn’t do anything wrong,” J.J. said quickly, “but I might have pursued some of those IP addresses to see what other traffic was generated from them, and I might maybe have discovered an email address that’s coupled with them.” He looked a little guilty. “And I might have hacked said email address and looked at what had been sent out—”