Masks (Out of the Box Book 9)

by Robert J. Crane

  Her daughter was furious with her.

  Her house was about to be taken away.

  Her business was on its death throes.

  “At least I’m still a hero,” she said, to no one in particular, but as her gaze settled on Kyra’s closed door, she wondered whether being a hero to strangers but an enemy to her daughter was really cause for any gratitude at all.

  64.

  Sienna

  It was morning in New York again, and I was energized by the possibility of making today the day that Nadine Griffin found herself in a metal cell with a bunch of bars or Plexiglas between me and her smug face. I didn’t even care which of those it was, so long as there was a barrier of law and order between us, something that proved the system worked to protect the people from evil souls that just looked to exploit and damage them.

  I sprang out of bed, all chipper and shit, and went over to my room’s mini-fridge. It had a spare SmokeShack burger from Shake Shack, because I’d made a foray out last night and ordered extra with my fries and shake; I didn’t want to face the possibility of the morning without something good to eat. It worked, and I felt happier as I pondered the morning conference call coming up, and the exciting idea of Nadine Griffin being imprisoned with a bunch of people who would probably like to hurt her (so that I wouldn’t have to).

  It’s the little things in life, really.

  I set up for my morning videoconference call, humming quietly to myself as the sound of honking horns filtered in even through the window. I tapped a finger on my phone screen. I’d read through all my favorite sites last night while I was killing time, and I still hadn’t bought into using Netflix via my phone, so I was running low on ideas for ways to kill time when the conference started (thank goodness).

  Reed popped up first, followed by Ariadne a second later, then J.J. I hit the center square, wearing a slightly creepy smile that I immediately struck from my face, but not before Reed noticed, his eyebrow rising in response to it.

  “Good morning,” I announced, probably too happy.

  “It’s a morning,” Augustus said from somewhere behind Reed. “Don’t go getting overexcited about it.”

  “He seems in a good mood today,” I said.

  “We caught a bad guy last night,” Reed said. “Late, late last night. Low-level meta with the power to make people forget what he looks like. Creepy effect, by the way, like you’ve been looking at a Dick Tracy villain.”

  “Is Dick Tracy still a thing now?” Ariadne asked, her brow lined in concentration. “Because that was old when I was a kid.”

  “Jamal says hi, Augustus,” I said, hoping my words would reach him through Reed’s phone.

  “What were you doing talking to him?” Augustus said, slipping bleary-eyed into view.

  “Consulting,” J.J. announced. “I take it he got ahold of you, Sienna?”

  “No, I just psychically determined he’d probably want me to say howdy to his brother,” I lobbed back gently. “So, the Texas team seems to be one for two this morning. Any word from Cali?”

  “Not that we’ve heard here,” Ariadne said. “And it’s all quiet on the Midwestern front, with our security team on standby in case they need to deploy to back any of you up.”

  “Highly unlikely we’ll get the chance to use them where I am,” I said. “Or, where Kat is, actually.”

  “Hampton says they’re on standby anyway,” Ariadne said. “If needed.” She tried to play coy. “And … if I may suggest … based on the events I saw out of New York yesterday—”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t good,” I said. “Any idea of a death toll?”

  “The buildings were mostly evacuated when the word got out,” J.J. said. “So … surprisingly minimal. A dozen deaths, I think, mostly at FBI HQ.”

  I’d been avoiding news coverage, because seeing things I had been powerless to prevent tended to affect my emotional state in unfortunate and unpredictable ways. I’d once had a bad crying jag after a lunatic meta had walked into a school in Oklahoma and done horrible things. I didn’t like to talk publicly about my emotional states, but if I let myself feel too much, I tended to go through a predictable pattern—disbelief that it could have happened, unquenchable fury, daydreams about inserting myself into the conflict before it became a tragedy, revenge fantasies—all manner of fantasies, really, including ones where I’m the hero who saves the day—followed by crushing sadness and then a reluctant willingness to move on to the next thing. I could hold off the cycle if I was in the middle of a case, or ignore it completely in some cases, just by shutting out the news.

  I had a feeling that what had happened here, in New York, while I was trying to stop the bank heist … it was probably going to get to me later, so it was fortunate that very few people died. That news did not, however, make me any less gung-ho about shoving Nadine Griffin into a slightly more populous and sapphic version of how I’d spent my youth.

  “Did I miss anything?” Kat asked as she beeped onto the line. She wasn’t bothering to look put-together today. In fact, she looked kind of haggard.

  “Good grief,” Reed said when he saw her, “did you have a run-in with that criminal meta?”

  “What?” Kat asked then peered at her screen. “Oh. No, I just … Miley Cyrus had a party last night and it went until really late, like … I just got in an hour ago, and I was asleep, and then my phone beeped me awake so I could be here with you lovely people.” From the tone of her voice, I guessed that “lovely” meant something else. “Can we please account for the fact that not all of us are living on East Coast or Central Time now? Pretty please?”

  “No,” I said, “because some of us have very, very important things to do with our day and can’t be bothered to interrupt them at the crack of noon to conference with you. Learn to love the dawn, Kat.”

  “It’s not dawn here,” she moaned. “It’s the crack of dark, okay?”

  “If I’d waited until noon to do the conference call yesterday,” I said, “I would have missed out on a very important break in my case, and a lot more people might have died.” I left out the part about how Gravity Gal kind of did most of the heavy lifting in the bank job, because let’s face it, if I hadn’t been there, she might not have acted with as much urgency. I was important, dammit.

  “I heard Gravity Gal did most of the work,” Reed said, never one to be deterred by facts that might make me look worse. He was wearing a grin, of course.

  “I carried her across the harbor, okay?” I puffed up to defend myself. “Without me, she and Scott wouldn’t have even laid eyes on the Tirragusk before it blew up.”

  “That the boat?” Kat yawned.

  “Ah, yeah,” I said. “How’d you know?”

  “Because ‘Tirragusk’ literally means ‘boat’ in Shervich, which is the language they speak in Canta Morgana and Revelen and the surrounding area.” She sounded bored as she spelled this out for us.

  “Kat speaks multiple languages?” Reed asked.

  “Yeb tvoyu mat,” Kat said, looking unamused. “That was Russian for—”

  “I got it,” Reed said.

  “I’m not stupid, you know,” Kat said. “I know a lot more than people give me credit for. I was the top of the class in trig back at the Directorate, remember?”

  “There were like three of us in that class,” I said. “And I’ll be honest, I didn’t try very hard because I was a little more focused on the survival-based aspects of our training. Something about meeting Wolfe must have awakened an instinct in me.”

  “Still,” Kat said, pointing at her own head, “I’m not stupid. Just … put that on the record, okay?”

  I looked at the other participants in the conference call. “Reed,” I said, once that moment had passed, “are you and Augustus on your way up to Austin today?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to find evidence of Nadine Griffin’s involvement in this whole mess and use it to pin her to a wall like a tail on a donkey.�
�� My phone buzzed, and a message notification popped up with a picture that looked like—“What fresh hell is this?” I muttered.

  “Glad you realized that using a ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ metaphor for catching a criminal was somewhat inappropriate before anyone had to say anything about it,” Ariadne said.

  “Huh?” I pushed the button to send the conference call app to the background of my phone. “Oh come on, you know I wasn’t talking about that. Because when has something being inappropriate ever stopped me from saying it?” I clicked the messaging app and noted that the text I’d just gotten was from an unknown number. Stupid small screen had made the preview tough to figure out, but it looked like clouds and a human being in there, somehow.

  “Never,” Reed said, beating Augustus by a half second. “Too slow,” Reed said with a smile.

  “Dammit!” Augustus said.

  “What are you doing, Sienna?” Ariadne asked.

  “I got a text—err, picture message from someone,” I said as I clicked on it. It popped up obligingly, and it took a few seconds for what I was looking at to really sink in. “Oh,” I said at last.

  “‘Oh’ what?” Kat asked.

  I stared at the picture, and the message attached. “Look what I woke up to this morning,” were the words in the message.

  The picture was of Nadine Griffin, smirking, next to an unconscious and shirtless Scott, who was in bed next to her.

  65.

  Nadine

  Nadine was already in the cab when she sent the picture. She hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near her house for this, especially since the reaction was unpredictable. No, she had it in her mind to leave for a while, to vacate the premises in case Sienna Nealon turned up furious. She might even spend the night away from her house, check into a hotel in Westchester County or in the Hamptons, maybe, somewhere she could lay low for a little while.

  She was on her way into Manhattan right now, though, a little smile perched on her face. It wasn’t there just because she’d gotten laid last night after a short, self-imposed drought—though he had been reasonably good, that meta boy, once he got into the groove. No, she was smiling because she was calculating the effect of her morning-after bombshell on the intended target. She’d taken the selfie very carefully, trying to avoid any chance of Scott waking up and asking uncomfortable questions. Finding Sienna Nealon’s number after that had been easy; stupid Scott didn’t even have a password on his phone. Pretty, but not too bright.

  Today, Nadine had a plan to dart around a little—first a trip to the office to drop a couple things off, then visit a few sights, do some window shopping, lose herself in Manhattan. She had errands to run. She’d just take care of her business, and maybe cast a few darts via text toward Sienna, see how that worked out. She suspected it’d go well.

  Yes, it was going to be a good day, she sensed as the cab entered the midtown tunnel. And as long as she kept moving, she’d get the full enjoyment out of this little game she was playing, with none of the nasty consequences. And pretty soon, the Department of Justice would remove itself from her back, she’d get her money returned, the SEC would get its nose out of her business, and she’d be back in.

  “All that’s left is for Gravity Cow to get hers,” she said. And she smiled.

  66.

  Sienna

  I stood there with my cheeks burning in hot disbelief as I looked at the picture. It was crafty of her to send it like this, I realized, because if she’d shown Scott in a slightly more compromised state, she might have run afoul of the law. As it was, his chest was the only thing bare, though I could see a little more of her than I cared to. It wasn’t difficult for my damned imagination to fill in the blanks.

  I heard a sharp hiss and realized it was me as Reed said, “Sienna, what is it?” with something approaching rising panic evident in his voice.

  I stared at the screen and at her face, leering at me with that horrific smirk, that nasty grin that made me want to knock out every tooth. She’d done this to spite me. I knew it, and she knew it. I’d had her over a barrel before Scott had showed up. Two more minutes and I could have followed her memories like a trail of breadcrumbs back to evidence that would have let us convict her of the attacks.

  Instead, she’d skated loose, and then she’d … apparently … slept with him.

  Scott.

  My Scott.

  The temperature in the room was rising, wasn’t it? I felt so hot, like steam was coming out of my t-shirt collar.

  Uh, Sienna, Zack said in my mind.

  “Not now,” I said, cutting him off and silencing every other voice in my head with a single furious thought. The picture shook in my hand, like the world was quaking around me, and I realized it was my hand that was shaking. I pulled my fingers back to keep from crushing the phone in my grasp, but it was like a drowning swimmer was flailing around inside me, trying to get out of my stomach, out of my heart, and fire was in there, too, threatening to burst out.

  “Sienna?” a quiet voice came from the phone.

  “I’ll call you back,” I said, and hit the button to end the videoconference before they could see me. All this heat, where was it coming from? Even my eyes were burning from it.

  This didn’t matter, did it? Nadine had done this to spite me, to do this very thing. She’d slept with my—

  He was my ex. I let him go, dammit.

  —with Scott.

  That pain in my heart got acutely worse, going from a sense of flailing to … disconnect, like someone had ripped it out, or was still doing it. I physically reacted, my shoulders slumping, and I cradled the phone with its picture in one hand and covered my mouth with the other. I was making sounds, unidentifiable sounds, things I’d never heard from myself before, as I stared at—at—

  That hateful bitch.

  I was going to kill her. Punch her in her smug face, rip the memories out of her head, tear her to—

  No.

  No.

  “He’s not mine anymore,” I whispered, but it sounded so damned hollow. “I let him go.”

  Then why does it burn so badly? I thought.

  The pain was just there, lingering, malingering, dwelling in me, and I wanted it out, out—

  GET OUT!

  I lashed out with my free hand and smashed the desk, sending it crashing into the dresser and TV, wrecking both of them in a horrendous crash. Metal, glass and wood shattered and flew, spreading debris from where I’d been standing next to the desk all the way down the short corridor to my door. Dusty splinters settled on the short, patterned carpet, and the remains of the TV cracked and hissed as I stood there, dusts from the pressed wood wafting through the air on the beams of light from the lamps across the room.

  My phone buzzed in my hand, and I answered it without thinking. “Hello?” I asked numbly.

  “Sienna,” Reed said, and the worry was thick in his voice, “what happened?”

  I looked down at my phone. The picture Nadine had sent me was gone, replaced with the videoconference again, and I realized I was holding the camera up to my cheek. I pulled it back and let them see me, and as a result, I could see myself in the fifth screen.

  “Whoa,” J.J. said in awe.

  My eyes were red, and there were traces of wetness that had worked their way down my cheeks. I opened my mouth to speak, but I couldn’t find the words. What was I even going to say? She slept with my ex!

  Who cares?

  “Sienna, what is it?” Ariadne asked with rising alarm, sitting forward in her chair, more alert than if she’d just gotten a fresh spreadsheet to work with.

  “It’s Scott,” I said, and it just popped out. “He … slept with Nadine Griffin.” And I watched another tear streak down my cheek on the screen, and I felt dumber, more weak, more pathetic and vulnerable than I had since I’d been forced in a metal box against my will.

  67.

  Jamie

  Jamie didn’t sleep well, or nearly at all, really. She had a lot of memories of wakin
g up and seeing the red numbers of the clock in her bedroom tick their way through various combinations—11:07, 12:53, 1:38, and so on, at least a few times an hour until sometime after three.

  Her alarm woke her just before six, and it was not a happy wake-up. Two days of mostly missed sleep had taken their effect, she realized, but the shower helped to reinvigorate her. The shower and her plan for the day, which was to roll back as much of the tide that had come in on her yesterday as she could. She had an idea about that. She had hope again.

  Jamie didn’t let bad things get her down for long. It was a personal mission statement, really: bad things happened. But good things happened, too, and you just had to fight through the bad things long enough for some good things to rear their head in order to make the bad feelings recede.

  So now, she had a plan. And the first step of that plan was to seek help, because she was plainly out of her league. Two hours of calls from her landline last night had left her with a litany of customer service representatives telling her the same thing: if their closures of her accounts were a mistake, they certainly couldn’t see it, and there was no record of any payments received on their end. Jamie had logged into her online banking to find even her personal accounts overdrawn, and any hint of prior payments utterly vanished.

  It was enough to make her suspicious that she might have been singled out for reasons having nothing to do with the real Jamie Barton. No, this seemed like it might be related to the other name, the one she didn’t care for at all.

  But there had to be a way to make it through this. She just needed expert help, and maybe someone she could sit down with, locally, that she could look in the eye and ask questions. Someone who wanted to be of help. Someone who knew finance, and had offered her assistance before things had started to go so horribly askew.

  Which was why she was sitting in the lobby of the bank, waiting for Mr. Penny to show up to work.

  There were a couple magazines spread out over a side table, but Jamie ignored them, staring straight ahead, trying to focus her thoughts on what she would tell Mr. Penny. She couldn’t tell him she was Gravity Gal, because in spite of however helpful he might want to be—and oh, she hoped that he would still want to be helpful—giving up her secret identity was not a step she was willing to take. She’d chosen it to protect Kyra. She’d stopped enough crimes here on Staten Island to have engendered some hostility from the local criminals. All it would take would be a few of them getting the idea that Kyra was fair game, and suddenly Gravity Gal would have a very obvious weakness to exploit.