Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  “Yes, that’s a keen insight you’ve got there,” I said, as dry as MacArthur Park’s Lake. “You sure know women. It’s no wonder you’re such a highly in-demand guy in the dating pool.”

  He shrugged with a self-assurance that I found so disgusting that I was tempted once again to burn everything around me preemptively. “I do all right for myself.”

  “Not so well for anyone else, though.”

  He shrugged, uncaring. “So, I saw what you did today. Good work. I’ll say it again, though—I could make big things happen for you, just say the word.”

  “The word is still ‘Ewww,’ followed by a gagging sound.”

  He was undeterred. “I know they’re looking for contestants on ‘The Biggest Loser’ right now. I could get you on, no problem. I know the producer, we go way back.”

  I blinked, stunned. Did he just …? Scratch that. What I really wanted to say was, ‘OH NO HE DIDN’T!’

  “I know, I know,” he held up both hands to ward me off, “it wouldn’t be like the real show, more like a favor to help you drop a few pounds—”

  “I could help you drop a few pounds, too,” I said coldly in order to keep from turning it into ‘hotly,’ as in burning flames of Gavrikov consuming the minimal soul and wrinkly flesh of Taggert. “How much do you figure all your limbs weigh, ballpark? Because I could rip them off one by one and it’d be instant results, no diet, no exercise needed. I mean, I know your dick is insignificant, but still, every little bit—and I do mean little—helps, right? You could start a new fad diet—the SoCal douchebag limb amputation plan. There could be a cookbook and everything.”

  “I think Hannibal might have written that cookbook,” he said wryly. “But hey—I’m just trying to help you.”

  “You know what would really help me? Like, really, really help me?” I asked. “You not being a creep and gross and making incredibly unwanted advances or non-helpful suggestions about my weight—actually, just not talking to me in general. That would be a huge help.”

  “Did I hurt your feelings?” He was actually leering.

  “Please. It takes a lot more than an asshole like you to hurt my feelings.” Now I was sneering. “I’m just going through an adjustment process, categorizing you as the worm you are, making peace with that and trying to work around it.”

  “Women love assholes,” Taggert said, now back to placid. Everything I’d said was water off a duck’s back to him, he cared so little. “Assholes and liars, they’re your bread and butter.”

  I couldn’t even stop myself from making a face. “That is … the dumbest, most revolting, insulting thing—”

  “It’s true,” he said, “or they wouldn’t go for them ten times out of ten.”

  “How has no one snatched you up yet?” I asked, feeling strangely euphoric, like my efforts at restraining myself from murdering Taggert had resulted in a psychotic break from reality. It was a heady feeling, like I was floating away from my body. But since I hadn’t absorbed Redbeard’s ability to go insubstantial and since even Taggert had just remarked that I was far from weightless (the prick), I had to chalk it up to fatigue and dealing with this a-hole.

  “Well,” he said, and I braced myself for what was surely going to be crass and horrific, “I think I’ve snatched—”

  “Hey,” Guy Friday called from above, interrupting, “Brunette Girl. You’ve got a call.”

  I blinked, staring up at him on the balcony. “What are you, my secretary? Because, if so, you should at least know my name.” I adjusted myself and glared at Taggert. “Everyone else does.”

  Taggert arched his eyebrows. “You’ve got good brand recognition. It’s just that your image is shit—”

  “Girl, call,” Guy Friday said, annoyed, and tossed something at me. I caught it with one hand as he disappeared back over the balcony and closed the door to Kat’s room. I wondered if I should worry about what was going on in there, but since he was still wearing a mask and Kat was apparently sleeping with Taggert at least some, I tried to put the whole thing out of my head.

  I looked down at the object Friday had thrown at me. It was a phone, but an old one, like from the mid 2000s, an old Nokia of the sort that had a grey screen about a half-inch wide and tall. “What the hell is this?”

  “Hello?” came a muted voice out of the earpiece, blaring out at me, barely audible save for my powers. “Sienna, are you there?”

  “Crap,” I muttered and looked up at Taggert. “I have to take this, and not just because I’d rather talk to anyone than talk to you.”

  “Brand image,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “This is part of the problem, your interactions. You need to always play to the camera, like I always tell Kitten—”

  “Fuck off, Taggert,” I said, more resigned than angry at this point. He shrugged broadly and headed back to his room, no doubt leaving a slime trail across the floor like the slug he was. I sighed as he closed the door then pulled the phone up to my ear, bracing myself for something that would probably be horrific, but was at least destined to be less crass than anything Taggert had to say. “Director Phillips? I’m here.”

  46.

  I was all prepared for Andrew Phillips to lambast me, for an eighteen-minute epic rant about how evil I was as a person to let civilian casualties go down the way they had, for a speech on the virtues of public property and how we ought to make sure that it’s not destroyed. I was ready for all of that, for a general screaming of the speaker in the cell phone.

  What I got was none of that, and I’ll tell you, it shocked me. “Are you all right?” Phillips asked. He didn’t sound concerned, because he didn’t really have many emotions to display, but he didn’t sound angry, either, and he didn’t open with, “What the hell were you doing/thinking/up to?” which was his normal go-to when he spoke to me.

  “Well, I died,” I said, taken aback enough that I answered honestly, “but other than that … yes?” Phillips asking me if I was all right had me wondering if I was still dead, passed on to Valhalla or something.

  “… Died?” Phillips actually sounded shocked.

  “I got better,” I said. “CPR and whatnot.”

  “That’s not on the news,” Phillips said, and for him, it sounded like panic. “Don’t let that leak. It’d be bad.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, frowning, “it wasn’t exactly a picnic when it happened to me, either. I had broken ribs and—”

  “Are you okay?” he asked again, and now I could tell I was straining at his patience a little.

  “Fine,” I said, letting it go. “What do you want?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” Phillips said.

  I thought about it before answering. “Well, I’d like to beat Kat about the face and neck like an actual cat playing with a ball of yarn—”

  “Seriously.”

  “I am serious,” I said, “but failing that, I could use an In-and-Out burger.”

  I could hear Phillips take a breath on the other end of the line. “How do we get this guy?” he asked, clearly shifting to another conversational track in order to not lose his shit with me.

  I was still scrambling to understand how he’d come out of the gate of this conversation without being an a-hole for once. “Uhmm … that’s a good question,” I said, “unfortunately, I’m a little busy bodyguarding to run an investigation at the moment. Kat keeps exposing herself to stupid situations that give this bastard opportune shots at her.”

  “Okay, that needs to stop right now,” Phillips said.

  “I agree,” I said, “which is why I really want to beat her around the face and neck like—”

  “No.”

  “But I guarantee she’d stop when rendered unconscious—”

  “No …” He paused. “Still no.”

  “I like that you had to think about it for a minute.”

  “Do we have any clues?” Phillips asked.

  “Well, Augustus faced this guy down in Atlanta,” I said. “Buried him in the ea
rth. I put in a call to him to try and get his take, and he gave me a good pointer on how to hurt him, but we’ve still got nothing on the guy’s identity.”

  “You didn’t answer your phone,” Phillips said. “Can I assume another replacement is in the works?”

  I pulled out my phone and looked at it before trying to push the on button. “When I died, it kinda got—I dunno, either electrocuted or waterlogged or maybe both—”

  “Okay, don’t tell me that,” he said, “I don’t really want to make an official report on that up the chain.” I rolled my eyes. Presumably he was worried, again, that if he had to make an official report on me dying, it would eventually make it out to the press and get covered—well, probably poorly. Your champion dying at the hands of the evil villain is not the most inspiring news, I suppose. “I’ve got J.J. working on this, and the rest of the agency is digging in now. It’s all hands on deck. We’ll get this guy.”

  “What about Reed and Augustus?” I asked.

  “They’re still in Austin,” Phillips said. “If you need them desperately, I can pull them back, but they’ve been on stakeout for a hundred and ninety two hours. I mean, there’s a murderer at work on their case, too—”

  “Leave them in place for now,” I said. “If we can keep Kat from exposing herself to the public—both literally and figuratively—we won’t need them. We’ll hunker down. That might give me a chance to poke my head up and see if I can nail this prick to the wall.”

  “Got it,” Phillips said. “Get that phone replaced and call me if you need anything else.” He hung up without saying goodbye, of course. He was still Phillips, after all.

  I pulled Guy Friday’s phone away from my ear and stared at it. “This is just weird,” I said aloud to the empty room. Why was Phillips not being an asshole? Phillips was always an asshole. It was like an iron law of the universe. Gravity pulls down. Fire burns. Andrew Phillips is an asshole.

  My world was crumbling around me.

  My phone buzzed and lit up, displaying a text message.

  Ricardo

  You are as beautiful as you are mysterious.

  “And suddenly the world makes sense again, in all its rampant and infinite bizarreness,” I said and started upstairs to return Guy Friday’s cell phone before I went to have my little chat with Scott.

  47.

  Kat

  Kat was pacing in her room, the big guy with the mask watching from the door, immovable, his arms folded like always. She didn’t mind having him here. He was just another servant, like a piece of furniture but one that could speak if necessary.

  “Can you believe this?” she asked, practicing her poise as she walked—no, stalked, because she was furious. “She acts like she doesn’t remember. As though absorbing me wouldn’t be the fulfillment of her dreams, as though being able to touch anyone she wanted wasn’t her greatest ambition.”

  “My greatest ambition is to visit the Santa Monica pier at this point,” Guy Friday said. “I wonder if they have Skee-ball?”

  Kat stalked on. This was important. “Well, she may be fooling herself, but she doesn’t fool me. I’m a tasty meal, like fries with truffle oil after she’s been eating McDonald’s for years.”

  “Or like a USDA prime filet mignon when you’ve been eating canner grade meat for years,” Guy Friday agreed.

  “Yes!” Kat agreed, though she hadn’t had a steak in years. Red meat was too unhealthy for her to consider it. “Exactly that. But good luck getting anyone else to see it. It’s always Sienna, Sienna, Sienna.”

  “I think you mean, ‘Marsha, Marsha, Marsha.’”

  Kat made a face and ignored him; she had no idea what he was talking about and it didn’t matter, anyway. “Do you know how long it took for me to step out of her shadow? She was the face at the front of the war, like me fighting—like I had nothing to do with it?” She placed her ragged nails on her t-shirt, which was a $250 lime-green, all-cotton original. She needed a manicurist terribly. “When we were at MacArthur Park, did you know some ragged fashion victim came up to her asking for an autograph? From her.” Kat scoffed. “She’s probably never taken a headshot in her life.”

  Guy Friday paused, thinking it over. “I think she’s taken a few headshots. She’s pretty good with a gun, I doubt she makes all her shots for center mass—”

  “Not that kind,” Kat snapped, seething. “We all know she’s good with a gun—like that’s some sort of virtue. How many people do you think she’s killed?”

  “Hundreds,” Guy Friday said. “Maybe thousands—”

  “That’s just …” Kat felt her skin crawl. “I could be one of those thousands, you know. Sometimes I’m surprised I’m not, that she didn’t just kill me in the war and call it an accident.” She wandered toward the bed and threw herself lightly onto the bedspread, letting her mussed hair get trapped under her neck as she reached for the remote and turned the TV on. “And then no one would even know me.”

  The TV picture resolved after the brand name showed on the screen for a few seconds. A news anchor for one of the local stations was talking in a hushed voice. “… Fans of Bree Lancer are in mourning today, still shocked by the sudden death of the—”

  “Ughhhh,” Kat said, lifting her head for a second and then driving it back into the bed as she rolled over onto her face. “Yes, poor Bree, who got killed by the murderer who’s still after me, by the way. Way to bury the lede, guys. Her problems are over.”

  “I think this is about her fans,” Guy Friday said as Kat tried to push her face further into the fluffy bedspread. It smelled like cotton but like something else, too, and she wondered when last it had been washed. She pulled her face out immediately. “Yeah, look at them. They seem really sad.”

  Kat managed to cast a look over her shoulder at the TV. There were people with posters of Bree, with signs, with tears running down their cheeks. They looked like they were near the police barricades that had been set up last night, the wreckage of Anna’s house in the background. “Yes, it’s so sad. Bree was a saint, Bree was an angel.” Kat snatched up the remote and turned the channel. “What they really ought to report is that Bree loved pills more than she ever loved another human being, and that when she was high, she was nasty enough to go down on a leper, or Pauly Shore.”

  “Did you ever see her do it?” Guy Friday asked, voice raised with curiosity.

  “Not Pauly Shore, no,” Kat said, gripping a pillow and pulling it down so she could curl up in the fetal position with it. “But I saw her give head to a Gawker reporter one time, which is probably worse than Pauly Shore or a leper.”

  “Hmmm,” Guy Friday said, standing a little straighter.

  Kat turned her gaze back to the TV. “The city’s insurance carrier is already refusing to pay,” the anchor said, live at the scene, with a shot of the drained MacArthur Park Lake behind him, “citing the recently ruled-on court case terming metahuman incidents as ‘Acts of gods.’ The city is pledging to fight it in court, but one of the legal scholars we spoke to suggested—”

  “Should have gone with Lloyd’s of London, guys,” Sienna said, bumping Guy Friday out of the way as she opened the door. “And speaking of which,” she looked directly at Kat, “you should insure your back with them, since you’re literally making a living on it.”

  “What do you want?” Kat asked, pulling her head off the comforter enough to look at Sienna. She still looked terrible, of course, the ruins of her suit hanging tattered about her. Redbeard dressed better than her.

  “Came to return the big guy’s phone,” Sienna said, slapping a mini-brick of a phone into the center of Guy Friday’s chest. It made a thumping noise as it hit him.

  Guy Friday grunted. “Careful.”

  “Because it’s an antique?” Sienna snarked, a nasty smile on her face. Kat wondered if she even knew how ugly those looks made her. She used them all the time, every single occasion she made one of her little jokes. “You’re a phone hipster, I get it.” She stood there for a second,
looking around. “Well, as much fun as this has been, I wouldn’t want to interrupt your scintillating conversation.” She snapped open the door. “Au revoir.”

  “I hate her so much,” Kat said, clutching her pillow so tight it felt like it might explode.

  “A lot of people feel that way,” Guy Friday said, and for some reason, Kat found that very comforting.

  48.

  Scott

  “Come in,” Scott said when he heard the knock at the door. He’d been sitting on the bed, waiting, hands sweating, reabsorbing the perspiration and then letting it seep out again accidentally when he lost himself in thought. He stood nervously, wiped his hands on his pants, then reabsorbed the liquid through the cotton trousers into his legs.

  The door opened smoothly, quietly, and Sienna came in, looking haggard. “Ugh, Kat,” she said. “Can you believe …” She sighed. “Never mind. What’s up?” She stood expectantly, her back against the suite’s beautiful paneled door.

  “I wanted to …” He paused, feeling as though there were a fork was through his center, twisting him like spaghetti noodles. “I wanted to have a talk with you … about something that happened at the park.”

  “Well, thank you for not being Kat about it,” Sienna said, coming in and looking around the suite. The floor to ceiling windows at his right offered a pretty nice view of the darkness falling over Los Angeles.

  “Go easy on her,” Scott said instinctively. “She’s had a rough day.”

  Sienna looked amused when she answered rather than upset. “She’s had a rough day? I died.”