Masks (Out of the Box Book 9)

by Robert J. Crane

  “I don’t think they’re gonna come through for you,” Joseph Tannen said, almost crowing. Something Nadine had figured out in the last two hours was that Joseph Tannen was crazy as hell and that he had the worst breath she’d ever smelled, pouring through her hair like stink released from a bottle, stirring the strands against her shoulder and caressing the back of her neck roughly, like that ex she hated.

  “Idiot,” she said. Her patience and niceties had been exhausted about fifteen minutes into this—and she’d never had much to begin with. “That means you’re going to die, too.”

  “I dun care,” Tannen said, and he sounded like he truly didn’t. That caused Nadine a worried roll of her eyes, almost as much for the pathetically stupid way he spoke as for the suggestion that she was going to die and leave an ugly corpse behind. She almost gagged on the injustice of it, because this wasn’t how her story was supposed to end. She had deals. Plans. She had a sales success system that was going to help bridge the money gap for her until this legal battle cleared up and blew over. It was just waiting for approval, and it was the most deliciously ironic thing, her nastiest slam against the Old Boys.

  She called it the Balls Out™! Success System. It fit.

  “What’s this?” Tannen asked as the reporters on the screen went breathless again. “Oh, looky. Heroes.”

  “It’s one hero, moron,” she said, sagging. She’d figured out early on that Tannen didn’t give a damn if she called him names. That gun in his hand seemed to give him a feeling of boundless security she couldn’t even dent. Either that or he viewed her as subhuman scum. She didn’t really care which, because she certainly viewed him through that microscope, like any other fungus or intestinal parasite. “It’s … Captain Frost.” She rolled her eyes again, involuntarily.

  And it indeed was. “Captain Frost!” a reporter shouted at the square-jawed, overmuscled loser on the screen. “Captain! Are you planning to intervene?”

  Of all the dumbass things that had happened since the day President Harmon had gone on TV to announce that superpeople were real, the arrival of not one but two of them as New York’s very own meta superheroes over the last few months ranked right at the top. Nadine could get behind government task forces with metas on them, but the idea of these do-gooders flying around New York with nothing but heroics on their mind …

  It was just stupid. But at least this Captain Frost had figured out how to monetize it.

  “I’ve done a little informal survey,” Captain Frost announced, his voice loud and confident, “on Twitter and Facebook, and it looks to me like the people of New York are pretty content to watch Nadine Griffin—just another Wall Street fat cat with her hand caught in the cookie jar, twist in the wind.” Frost grinned broadly, with rows perfect white teeth like he had just had them bleached. “I think this is just justice being done.” There were some hoots in the background, and someone started chanting, “Frost! Frost! Frost!” as Frost stopped to smile at the onlookers.

  “Idiot,” Nadine muttered.

  “They aren’t fans of you,” Tannen opined.

  “Thanks, ass,” Nadine replied as Frost motioned for the crowd to quiet down. “Lacking any self-awareness at all, I guess I didn’t know that.”

  “Maybe if you hadn’t tried to be the female Madoff,” Tannen said.

  “I’m not—” Nadine flushed. “Madoff stole from his own clients in Ponzi scheme, okay? I didn’t do that. I made my clients money.”

  “And also stole from them,” Tannen said flatly.

  “Allegedly,” Nadine said. “What do you even care? Were you a client?”

  “Nope,” Tannen said. “Just an average Joe sick of seeing you assholes get away with murder.”

  Nadine’s eyes narrowed before she could control her reaction, a sudden burst of chill rolling down her. “I haven’t committed murder.” Yet.

  “Nah, your crimes are just daggers to the heart of people who saved their money and trusted you,” Tannen said, pushing the barrel deeper into her temple.

  “And your crime is to try and extort the people of New York by putting a gun to my head and hoping they’ll see enough value in keeping me alive to pay you for it.” Nadine held her head surprisingly high considering she was in danger of losing it. “At least I—allegedly—stole from rich people. You’re stealing from everybody, including the middle class and the poor.”

  “You could just pay me and I’d leave,” Tannen said coolly, rolling the barrel around the side of her head painfully. “Then only the rich would take the hit, see.”

  “They impounded my money, moron,” Nadine said irritably. “Locked down all my accounts. Seized my homes, my cars, my yacht—” She cut herself off, furious. “And besides, you have no way out of here even if I had millions to give you. You’d walk right out into the loving arms of the NYPD, and they’d arrest you even if you don’t kill me—though it’s kind of a toss up whether they’d be madder if you did or didn’t do it. I couldn’t say which would get you better treatment—”

  Tannen guffawed. “Yeah. We’re in a pickle here.”

  Nadine lowered her head, and Tannen followed, keeping the barrel pressed to her skull like a too-tight diamond-studded tiara she’d tried on once, but without any of the glamor. She looked straight ahead; she could see the NYPD snipers moving on the next rooftop, and she’d just given them a clear shot before Tannen pulled her head back up in front of him.

  They hadn’t taken it.

  “Uh uh,” Tannen said, sounding a little more pleased than he had a second ago. “No help there.”

  “Of course not,” Nadine said, and now her voice sounded dead to her own ears.

  And why wouldn’t it? The police weren’t going to help.

  The hero—Captain Frost—wasn’t going to help.

  Her old press contacts that used to answer her calls immediately—they hadn’t rung her back in weeks. They were watching, circling her carcass, and they wouldn’t help one bit. Though if she miraculously survived, they’d want interviews, of course, the scum.

  The people of New York wanted her dead.

  No one was coming to help.

  So Nadine just sat there, a gun to her head, a little tear of impotent rage threatening to well up in her eye as she waited for the crazy man to kill her, and she felt nothing—no regret, no humility, no sadness. Nothing but rage.

  6.

  Sienna

  “Son of a …” I muttered, covered from head to toe in pink paint from the damned grenade that had gone off not three feet in front of me.

  “I think that might have killed even you, if it had been a real one,” my opponent said, similarly covered, his grin barely visible beneath his plastic facemask, letting his HK paintball-converted gun sag in its sling. He didn’t let his hand wander too far from a weapon, though, either the HK strapped across his chest or the big pistol on his hip. “You didn’t see a suicide attack coming?”

  I pulled off my goggles, which were smeared from my attempt to wipe off the blotches of hot pink that had coated them. The paint smelled a little funny. “I don’t typically get suicide attacked a lot, no. Mostly I have mercenaries and metas come after me, and they’re … you know, not motivated to fight all the way to the death, I guess, at least not as a first move.”

  “Well, it wasn’t my first move,” Jeremy Hampton said, pulling back his mask so I could see his handsome face. “It was my last.” He had an easy grin, and brown hair mussed by the tight-fitting mask he’d been wearing. Lines from where it had been suctioned traced around his cheekbones.

  Hampton had been the sole survivor of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team when their helicopter had crashed following an attempted prison break from the Cube—the metahuman facility beneath the old agency where I’d worked. I’d been on board with him, and he’d struck me then as a pretty cool character. When the backer of my new organization had suggested hiring some former law enforcement types to help us with training and also as a security team for deployment in case of emergency
, Jeremy Hampton’s name had been right at the top of the list.

  Lucky me.

  “Those paintballs hurrrrrt,” Kat moaned as she moped her way into the house. She was splattered with red and yellow all across her black tactical Kevlar vest, her goggles hanging in her hand. Her blonde hair was all mussed up and her lips were pouty as ever. “Like a tit punch.”

  “Stay classy, Kat,” I said as Reed stood up from behind the island where he’d gone down, rolling his neck like he’d cricked it. “You okay?” I asked him.

  “I tried to fall where I got shot,” Reed said, frowning. “I guess I should have just stayed still or gradually worked my way down.”

  “That’s what the guys in the front hall were doing,” I said, looking at Hampton with an accusatory look. “I would have had you on the breach and clear if not for some of your boys failing to take a knee when I shot them fair and square.”

  “You should know,” Hampton said, grin broadening, “there’s no fair and square in a firefight.”

  I did know that, actually, and from anyone else, I might have taken umbrage and come back with ire. I let it pass this time, though, and put my finger to my ear instead as Augustus sauntered into the room, his goggles spotted with green right in the middle where he’d plainly taken a paintball headshot. “HQ,” I said, “what was the time on that?”

  “From infiltration to the grenade going off, I have ten minutes, fifty-seven seconds,” J.J. said into my earpiece. He sounded distracted, like his mind was on something else. “This little faux episode of Community is over, and just in time, too.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked, frowning.

  “There’s something going on in New York,” J.J. said. “Hostage situation on Wall Street. Looks kinda bad.”

  I caught Reed’s eye on that one and he frowned. “Doesn’t New York have its own superheroes now?” I said, a little mockingly. I’d seen them on the news, and my clearly professional organization of ass-kickers had done our own little MST3K mocking of the costumes and hero names they’d chosen. Captain Frost had struck me as about two steps away from the sort of third-rate losers I used to bust for using their powers to rob a convenience store when things went sour in life. Instead, this guy—this douchebag—had set up a Patreon and Kickstartered his way to a full-time career as a New York superhero with … I dunno, Twitter or something. Kat had described it as “platform building” in glowing terms, but I’d tuned her out after about ten seconds. I tended to do that with Kat.

  New York’s other hero, though … In spite of the lame name and lamer costume, I had to give her some respect. She sorta seemed like the real deal.

  “Captain Frost is on scene,” J.J. said. “He’s pretty much sidelining himself, says the, uhmm … well … basically that the victim has it coming.”

  That caused me to raise an eyebrow while I did a double take toward Reed, who had a pretty eyebrows-toward-the-clouds reaction of his own. “What the hell?” I asked, seeking some clarity.

  “The hostage is Nadine Griffin,” J.J. said. “I guess Captain Frost did a poll and found that people didn’t really want him to save her—”

  “That’s some genuine heroing right there,” Reed said in disgust. “Stick your finger up and see which way the wind is blowing.”

  “Even I can see the flaw in that one,” I said, causing Augustus to look away abruptly. “Not a great sign for the righteousness of his actions.”

  “Well, he seems to be gaining more followers and backers, so I’m not sure it’s the wrong call for him, at least …” J.J. said.

  “Brilliant,” Kat whispered.

  “I would have gone with unjust, dickish, morally reprehensible—” Reed said.

  “Of course you would, sweetie,” Kat said, reaching up to pat him on the head with what to her probably seemed like affection and to the rest of us seemed like complete condescension, “which is why you have a following of zero.”

  “I—do not—I have fans,” Reed said, sputtering through his outrage.

  “Given the weather, I would have sprung for an air conditioner, personally,” I tossed at him, drawing his annoyance like lightning to the tallest tree. As his little sister and boss, I felt this was my job. “I mean, it’s Minnesota, but it still gets hot here for like two months.” I paused. “Maybe we should get in position to go in case we get the call.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Reed said, and everyone started to spring into motion. We had done a decent amount of freelance work for New York State and the city itself in the last few months since we’d gone off on our own. Our little venture had actually been in the black for the last two months, thanks mostly to California, Texas, and New York calling us in to consult on a few things.

  “Uh oh,” J.J. said, and all motion in the room stopped. I turned around to look at Jeremy Hampton, who was listening along without saying anything. “Looks like—something’s happening on the scene right now … Sienna, your old pal Lieutenant Welch is the man in charge, and he’s—uh oh … I think this thing is about to go sideways.”

  I looked over at Reed, and I suspected his look mirrored my own. Helpless, that’s what we were—helpless to prevent a killing halfway across the country.

  7.

  Nadine

  “It doesn’t look like New York’s other hero is going to show up,” the reporter said on the screen, “and the NYPD is holding their position, waiting to see what happens here on Wall Street this morning. The stock exchange has announced that it will suspend trading for the day while this crisis plays out …”

  “So long, six million dollars,” Nadine muttered under her breath. There went the fortune she could have made this morning if she’d been able to place trades. But she couldn’t, so it didn’t matter anyway, except as an exercise in her head, keeping her sharp while this idiocy ran its course.

  “I don’t think this is gonna work out,” Tannen said, shuffling to his feet. “I just don’t think they’re gonna pay.”

  Nadine held in a scream, mostly out of self-preservation, and though she’d called him names, she held back what she was thinking, which was, Of course they’re not, you idiot! “I could have told you that,” she said instead. “Why would you even pick me for this dumbass plan, anyway?” she asked instead.

  Tannen spun her around so she could look right down the dark barrel of the gun. He wasn’t smiling. His round face was completely void of any expression. “Everyone knows your name, don’t they? And you had your own bucks.”

  “Had being the operative word,” she said. This was going down in flames fast. It might even be time for really drastic measures. She certainly had some overseas funds she could try and access, if it came to that, but they would be damned hard to get to—and like she’d told him before, it wasn’t like he was walking away from this. Even mentioning them to him would land her in deeper shit with the authorities once this thing settled out, and they’d be zero use to this moron other than to keep him happy for all of five minutes before he realized he was trapped and probably offed her anyway. “Look, if you kill me, it does you no good.”

  Tannen seemed to give this one a thought, the wheels clunking along visibly in his head as he chewed it over. “Yeah, but it’ll be fun and I’ll have some street cred on the inside.”

  “Wait—” she started to say, but it was too late. Tannen’s finger was already on the trigger and she could see it squeezing. Nadine closed her eyes tight, not wanting to see it coming, but she couldn’t block out the sound of the gunshot as it filled the room.

  Nadine just stood there, waiting for the pressure on her forehead to suggest her brains had been dashed out the back, and when the sound faded, a thousand rough thudding noises followed, like rain on a hard roof, and she opened her eyes to see Tannen in flight, his mouth open and hands empty and splayed out like he was falling off a building as he shot toward the glass windows that partitioned Nadine’s office off from the bullpen.

  Tannen hit one of the support beams that held the glass panes in place and
his head snapped up. He slid to the floor, dazed, and Nadine looked around for his gun. It was just … gone?

  She spun to find the glass window between her and the street was missing, a thousand glittering fragments embedded in the walls to either side like diamonds, catching the sunlight as she turned to the figure standing on the edge, between her and the open air.

  It was her, that other hero, in her black and white leotard and with the mask that extended around her eyes and nose, hiding her cheekbones but letting her long hair whip around her in the wind.

  “That … has got to be the silliest superhero suit ever,” Nadine said, looking at her savior in contempt. It was Spandex, for crying out loud, black and white, and while the lady clearly worked out to keep her tall frame in good shape, she didn’t exactly have the figure of a supermodel. “Also, those ‘shoes’—”

  “I just saved your life,” Gravity Gal said, watching her through those eyeholes with barely disguised contempt. “You could stop complaining for at least a few seconds.”

  Nadine just closed her eyes and shook her head. Saved by Gravity Gal. Well, it was better than being dead.

  8.

  Jamie

  Jamie hadn’t picked the name Gravity Gal, but there it was. She had an image in her mind of a cigar-chewing fossil, a walking, perpetual human sexual harassment defendant from the olden days of news hoping to sell more papers by assigning the moniker and trying to get it to catch on. And catch on it had, because nobody seemed to have a better name for her or her power over gravity, and all the other options seemed to have been either already trademarked. Not that they’d ever asked her, or that she’d ever have commented, because she didn’t talk to reporters.

  And so she’d become Gravity Gal, which was about as stupid a moniker as she could have imagined.