Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  “Austin, I think,” Ariadne said.

  “And it’s not like I have an office to sit around on a daily basis, waiting for something to happen.” That was also true; our office had been destroyed a couple months prior, and no decisions had been made as yet on what was to happen next. My feeling was that it’d be decided after the election next week, probably a quiet announcement telling me to pack my crap and move to Washington, D.C. Most of the time lately I worked from home, which coincidentally was done with the television on. I’d grown tired of watching paternity tests with Maury in the afternoons, but on the plus side I hadn’t seen Andrew Phillips’s smiling face in almost two months. Almost worth it.

  I stood up definitively, drunkenly, and almost fell over onto the coffee table. Whoops. “All right,” I said, putting my fists on my hips. “I’m going to go and—you know, be a hero and stuff.”

  “I knew you’d do the right thing,” Ariadne said. She looked nervously at me. “But, uh, maybe you should change first.”

  “Wha—oh,” I said, looking down at my dress. My bra was still showing, and there was a smudge of dirt across the surface of the dress. “Is that—aw, hell, must have picked it up from the nose of the plane.”

  “Yeah, I doubt they wash those very often,” Ariadne said, giving me a sympathetic look as I left the room.

  I put on a somewhat nice blouse, buttoning it up over my new bra holster that concealed the Glock 43 I carried these days as a backup gun. I strapped my new CZ 75 Shadow II onto my hip carefully after I’d put on my jeans and belt, slipped my badge and ID into my jacket pocket, and wondered where my phone had gone as I strapped my boots on.

  “Hey,” Ariadne called as I walked back out into the living room down the long hallway, “you got a text message.”

  “Oh,” I said, scooping up my phone from the coffee table as I came into the room. “Did you see who it was from?” I swiped and keyed the unlock code.

  “I don’t know,” she said in a voice that told me she was a lying liar.

  “Yes, you do,” I said, pulling up my text messages as I flushed the guilty look out of her. I knew she’d looked because the message didn’t show up under my notifications, which meant SOMEONE *cough cough* Ariadne, had already peeked. I put my finger on the first message in line without reading the preview, and froze as it came up.

  Ricardo

  You are the most intriguing woman I have ever met.

  “I thought you said the date didn’t go well.” Ariadne was giving me a slight smirk, a sort of I-told-you-so look that was clearly mixed with a little triumph.

  Son of a bitch.

  9.

  Kat

  Los Angeles

  “What do we do now?” Scott asked, his voice quiet in the expansive environment.

  “Karyn?” Taggert asked from his place on the lush white couch in the living room. “Get Kitten a bottle of water, will you?” He looked calm for the most part, especially considering what they’d just been through this afternoon. Kat watched him with slightly lowered eyes, trying to figure out what the man was thinking. Taggert stood abruptly, stalking his way over to the glass doors that led out to the pool deck. “We just need to hang tight. I’ll get another bodyguard or two.”

  “You saw what that guy did to the last bodyguards,” Scott said, his voice laced with quiet menace. Taggert had argued against letting Scott come back to the house after the attack. Kat didn’t argue with Taggert very often—he was so very often right, and she could see that almost always—but Taggert didn’t have experience with metas, not really, and he was operating from the assumption that the two police officers lurking outside would be enough to stop her attacker. Kat was not laboring under such illusions.

  Karyn gently placed an opened bottle of Fiji water in Kat’s hand. Wordlessly she pressed it to her lips, drinking it down by a quarter of the bottle.

  “Ah ah ah,” Taggert said, scolding her from his place by the glass doors, “graceful. You’re drinking like some dude at the gym; be more birdlike.”

  “Are you joking?” Scott asked, his temper going right to the top—again. “Someone just tried to kill her and you’re worried about how she looks drinking water?” His eyes flashed to the cameraman in the corner. This one’s name was Jed, and the sound guy was—well, she didn’t remember his name. She was mic’d now, though, which meant he could hold the boom mic closer to Scott, who was the only one in the room not wearing his own microphone. He’d refused.

  Taggert made a throat-cutting gesture to Jed, the cameraman, who shrugged. “Fine, we’ll cut it later.” Taggert turned to Scott. “In case you’re as slow as I’m taking you to be, she’s always on, okay? Any moment could be a moment that makes it onto television, and that affects her brand, her image. Now, we can cut around things that don’t look so good, and can even do a little re-shoot here and there if we have to, but if we can get it right the first time, then—”

  “Holy shit,” Scott said, hands coming up to his tousled, sandy blond hair as he turned away from the conversation.

  “Scott, it’s okay,” Kat said, trying to soothe him before he made himself look like even more of an ass. The way he was acting wasn’t going to play well once it was edited, and he probably had no idea. She looked squarely at Taggert. “We still have the party tonight, don’t we?”

  Taggert met her gaze coolly. “The fundraiser at Anna Vargas’s house? Yeah. I was gonna say that you need to be seen there for that. It’s a can’t-miss.”

  “I’m surrounded by insane people,” Scott said, now talking to himself, but loudly. That wasn’t going to play well, either. “Out of your minds, all of you.”

  “Can’t show fear now,” Taggert said, looking at her with a glint in his eye. What he really meant was that she couldn’t show fear until this episode of the show premiered. Then she could look as scared as she was right now, because it’d look great. All she had to do was put up a mostly brave face in front of the other cameras, and let the ones that orbited her like planets around a celestial body catch her doing a little crying just out of sight, maybe.

  “Showing up to a party and dying is cool, though,” Scott said. Kat grimaced; she needed to find a way to break it to him—gently, of course—that he needed to think about his image. He looked right at her. “Kat … this guy looks like the type that can walk through walls. I can’t stop that. You can’t stop that—” He frowned. “Not that you tried real hard to, in any case.” She remained silent, and after a moment he went on. “We need to get you out of here. Can’t you—I dunno, take a beach vacation or—hang out on a private island or something?” He waved a hand in the air. “Anything, really. Basic security considerations.”

  Taggert mulled that one, and Kat watched him. “You just got back from St. Kitts. I think we need to establish you working for a bit, you know, build the drama of the season around something. I’m all for the glamour of the high vacation lifestyle, but if we do too much of it without showing you digging into other projects, your brand is going to take some hits on—”

  Scott rammed his head against a wall, cracking timbers somewhere within and causing Kat to jump. “Sorry,” he said. “Couldn’t help it.”

  “Listen, pal,” Taggert said with a sweet smile and a friendly tone that set off every warning bell in Kat’s head, “you just don’t understand the business—”

  “Is it the funeral business?” Scott asked, turning around to reveal a gash on his forehead that was trailing a thin trickle of blood. “Because that’s the business you’re about to be in—”

  A hard knocking at the door caused all of them to jump. “Karyn,” Taggert snapped a finger, pointing Kat’s assistant to the door.

  Karyn looked dumbstruck, even though she regularly opened the door and answered the phone. “Uhh …”

  “I’ll get it,” Scott said, running a hand across his brow. It took a second for things to settle and for Kat to realize that the knock had come from the back door, the one that led to the pool deck, not the front
door where guests would normally—

  “Wait!” Kat threw up a hand just as Scott came up short of the handle. The door swung wide; it was unlocked. Oh God … she thought.

  “Apparently you people don’t learn from Paris Hilton’s mistakes.” Sienna Nealon stepped inside, dressed in her usual trainwreck of too-loose to be flattering jeans, a blouse top that looked appropriate for a low-paid teacher, lace-up boots of the sort a construction worker or a Goth might wear, and a leather jacket that was too baggy to be cool and too ugly to fit in anywhere Kat had ever been.

  “Sienna,” she said, blanching at the woman’s taste in clothes.

  “Kat,” Sienna said, halting just in front of Scott and behind Taggert, who stood there looking at her with dollar signs dancing in his eyes. She made a face, like she’d taken a swig of Diet Coke and gotten the lime by accident. “I heard someone’s trying to kill you and I came to help.” She paused. “… To help you, I mean. Not help them kill you. Probably.”

  And she grinned in a manner that was not very reassuring.

  10.

  Sienna

  Kat’s house wasn’t the hardest thing to find. I had to stop for one of those star maps, but once I had it, it was easy peasy to come drifting down in the backyard next to the lovely pool and just invite myself in. The temp was a pleasant seventy or so, a dramatic change from both what I’d left behind in Minneapolis and what I’d experienced flying here.

  “You don’t look so pleased to see me, Kat,” I said, looking past Scott, who seemed relieved, and another guy, to where the object of my ire waited. She did not look relieved or like she’d peed recently at all, really; she looked like she needed to go, mouth wide in a horrified rictus, like she figured I was going to jump over the lushly appointed couches between us, overturning the end tables as I went, just so I could punch her in her scaredy-Kat face.

  NYET! Gavrikov shouted in my head.

  Relax, Aleksandr, I thought real loud, I’m not gonna do it. Again.

  Probably.

  “I’m … glad to see you, Sienna,” Kat said, convincing me that a Best Actress award was not going to be forthcoming to her anytime soon, at least not for this performance. “Really,” she added, not exactly the frosting on the convincing cake.

  “Hi, how you doing,” the relieving guy said, sliding up to me. “I’m Taggert.” Like that alone was supposed to mean something to me. “I’m Kitten’s agent-producer.” He waved a hand to move a couple guys with a microphone and a camera huddling in the corner. They started working their way around the room closer to me.

  “Aren’t agents and producers supposed to be two different things?” I asked, watching the guys coming toward me with a wary eye. They were filming me, which seemed to always end badly, at least of late.

  “I have my fingers in a lot of pies,” Taggert said with a smug grin that I wanted to punch off his face, along with all the skin and his neatly ordered teeth. This was surprising to me, because it usually takes at least a few lines of dialogue after their introduction for someone to make me want to punch them. I imagined grabbing him by the back of the head and shoving his face in a pie until he stopped writhing. He moved his head slightly, his spray-on tan looking super orange in the room’s surprisingly bright lights. “You’re smiling.”

  “Uh, sorry,” I said, ignoring the hand he extended for me to shake. “I imagined you saying you had your fingers in a lot of butts.” I brushed past him, still ignoring that hand. Because he probably had had his fingers in a lot of butts. I glanced around the room, taking it all in. It was kind of a classic décor, all large windows and wood floors and—I dunno, Persian carpets or something. It all looked really expensive, and I felt completely ill at ease here. “So, I hear I’m not the only one you’ve been pissing off, Kat.”

  “People are always envious of success,” Taggert offered from behind me. I was regretting not practicing my punch-based dentistry on him already.

  “People are also annoyed when successful people stomp on them to become successful,” I offered in return, considerably cooler than I might have an hour or so earlier, before I sobered up some on my flight. “Also, I’ve met a reasonable number of successful people who never had to step on anyone to get that way.”

  “I doubt that,” Taggert said.

  “That I’ve met successful people?” I asked, carefully putting my hands behind my back and clenching them together, forcing a smile on my face, “or that some of them have done that whole ‘climb to the top’ thing without screwing anyone else over?”

  “Maybe both,” Taggert said with a ready grin. His hair was all slicked back, his skin more than a little rough from what looked like a few bouts of acne in his youth.

  “What’s the situation?” I had the good grace to pass on firing back at that jackass as I turned my attention to Scott, who was standing mute near the door I’d just come in. He was looking at me blankly but came back to life when I directed my question at him.

  “Did you see the news?” Scott asked.

  “Is this on the news?” I asked, inadvertently sighing. I bet this totally knocked the coverage of my saving the plane right out of the spotlight. Not that I’d stayed around to pose for pictures, but still … I get no credit.

  “Wall to wall,” Taggert said, grinning again as he snapped his fingers, gesturing for a girl in her twenties like he was ordering a dog around. He pointed at the flatscreen mounted above the fireplace, which I assumed was ceremonial or decorative. It was November, but I’d been here for like, five minutes, and I was already wishing I’d worn shorts and ditched the jacket. The girl obediently scrambled for a remote and turned on the TV, and I added another simmering desire to my burgeoning wishlist: all I wanted for Christmas was to knock out Taggert’s two front teeth. And then all the rest of them.

  Sigh. Being good was such hard work.

  When the TV came on, I saw that Taggert was right, though. There was helicopter footage and on-the-scene reportage from Kat’s attack. They had the big lighting rigs mounted and everything, since now it was dark and that place looked like it was lit up like daytime. It was some office park on a city street, as near as I could tell, and the place looked way, way different from a Minneapolis street.

  “Can we have a minute?” I asked, looking around the room and making a motion toward Kat, who froze at my mere suggestion. “I think we girls need to work something out.”

  Taggert did not respond favorably to this idea. “Is it just going to be a talk?”

  “Yes,” I said, sighing again. I had a feeling I’d be doing a lot of this.

  “On your honor?” Taggert asked with a healthy dose of sarcasm.

  “Well, I damned sure wouldn’t bother swearing on yours,” I said, turning my back on the bastard. “I just need to clarify a couple of points with Ms. Gavrikov before I make any commitments here.”

  “Ms. Who?” Taggert asked, his face frowning in a way that looked wholly unnatural. There were parts that just didn’t move with the rest of his face, causing me to do a double take while looking at him. Plastic surgery, I realized after a beat.

  “Oh, you didn’t know that was her original name?” I smirked

  “Sienna, please,” Kat said, looking more than a little stricken. “Please, Taggert … we need a few minutes.”

  “Yeah, all right,” Taggert said and snapped his fingers at the poor girl who’d turned on the TV. She hurried after him as he swept from the room. Scott, for his part, seemed a little less put off by that shit than I was and paused on his way out of the room.

  “Thought you weren’t coming,” he said.

  “I changed my mind,” I said. “It’s a woman’s prerogative.”

  “If you say so,” he said, favoring me with a smile as he headed after Taggert.

  I waited another minute for the room to clear, but the camera guy and the dude with the big microphone on a stick did not make any motion toward leaving. I rolled my eyes. “You, Guido, Luigi, get the hell out of here, okay?” They didn’t
respond, like they were automated or furniture or something, so I mimicked Taggert and snapped my finger at them. “You know who I am?” I asked, summoning my most menacing, commanding voice. They nodded in sync. “Get the hell out of here or I’m going to take your boom mic and your camera and sodomize you both with them—sideways.”

  That got them moving. Probably in more ways than one, though I wasn’t close enough to smell them to be sure. They scrambled through the open archway and disappeared into what looked like a spacious kitchen, one big enough to probably swallow my entire house. Time was, I might have sighed in envy, but that was before I parked a half-billion dollars of moderately ill-gotten gains in a Liechtenstein bank account. Someday, maybe I’d get a house like this. But probably not in California. I already didn’t care for the weather. Not my speed. Also, I knew what real estate cost out here. Half a billion didn’t feel like it would go far enough.

  “So, Kat,” I said, tilting my head toward the aperture where Taggert was probably listening in on us with the cameramen, “why don’t we step outside?”

  She froze then nodded in surrender. “Okay.”

  “Stop acting like I’m going to murder you or something,” I said, opening the door for her, “it’s insulting.”

  “I know you have a temper,” she said, just loud enough I knew she was playing for the damned cameras.

  “Yes,” I said, “and remember that I’ve seen yours at work, too, including times when you’ve killed our fellow human beings in seriously unpleasant ways.” I spoke loudly too, enough to do a little playing of my own to the camera. “Remember that time in Gables, Minnesota, when you crushed like five guys to death with tree branches—?”

  “Okay, let’s go outside,” Kat said, hauling her bony ass out the door before I could even finish my sentence. I guess emphasizing her war record wasn’t good for “brand management.” It wasn’t like she’d done anything wrong; the guys she’d killed were sure doing their damnedest to kill us at the time.