“Being afraid of this guy means he wins,” Flannery said, answering perfectly. She even sounded sincere. “And you can’t let the guy who killed Bree win.” She added just the right amount of feeling to Bree’s name. It was perfect, and it gave Kat the opening.
“It’d really be disrespectful to Bree’s memory to let him get away with it, wouldn’t it?” Kat asked, looking to Flannery for support. She hoped the camera didn’t catch the glimmer in either of their eyes.
“Totally,” Flannery said, just a hair too eager.
Kat didn’t need much pushing; her alternatives were to stay here all night and film moody scenes of brooding, or to go out to a kickass party where she could maybe dance the night away. It’s not like the killer would be able to find her there; she hadn’t even really been invited. She was just going with Flannery, after all. “Okay,” she said, drawing in a breath and trying to sound resolute, “let’s do it for Bree.”
53.
Sienna
I found the house without too much trouble, a small, one-story, nondescript house in the middle of a nondescript block. There were bars on all the windows, though, which seemed apropos given what I’d seen of the neighborhood thus far. It wasn’t exactly MacArthur Park, but that was only because I hadn’t run across a mentally ill person juggling their own feces. Yet.
I walked down the sidewalk with my ears focused on the sounds around me. It was harder in a city environment, with all the ambient noise for blocks and blocks. It wasn’t as disruptive as New York City, but it wasn’t easy, either. In New York, the tightly packed nature of Manhattan meant I could almost always hear sirens going, even a mile or two away. Something was always happening, someone was always requiring an ambulance, people were always shouting. It wore on me. I could feel it, could taste it, and it was overwhelming to my meta senses. London was similar, at least close to the city center. At the edges of the sprawl it was less intense.
Los Angeles was different, though. This city was all spread out to hell, and even though I could see downtown from where I stood, it seemed like the city just went in all directions for a hundred miles. For all I knew, it was a hundred miles. It had certainly looked huge when I’d flown in the night before. The population density wasn’t as compactly layered as New York or London, and so it was a little quieter, though I could hear lots of hushed voices around me. Still it wasn’t midtown Manhattan, and for that I was grateful. So were my ears.
I ignored some of the ambient noise—the nearby freeway and its rush of cars, the plane flying overhead at my one o’clock, the two guys lighting up three doors down on the porch, watching me walk and snickering as they admired the gentle sway of my hips. That wasn’t exactly how they said it, but since it was one of the less creepy comments I’d received lately, I took it that way.
I focused in on the house, listening for anything within. I couldn’t hear much through walls—meta senses aren’t like psychic powers, after all—but I listened anyway. I walked past on the sidewalk once, sneaking peaks at the front windows, all of which were dark. Either there were blackout curtains hanging inside, or the occupant was sleeping, or there was no one home.
I dialed up Detective Waters and got a sleepy answer on the third ring. “Hello?”
“Hi, Detective,” I said, awfully chipper. “Guess who?”
“Who?” she asked, mind chugging along a little slower than I would have liked. I didn’t have all day.
“It’s Sienna Nealon,” I said, doubling back to pace in front of the house. I looked closer this time; there were no blackout curtains, as near as I could tell, just the normal variety. “I’ve got an address on our suspect.”
“We’ll need a warrant,” Detective Waters said, coming to life now.
“I actually don’t,” I said. “I’ve heard screams from within the premises and am moving to enter. I just wanted to let you know as a courtesy. I’m texting you the address.”
“Wait, you can’t—” I hung up on her before she had a chance to reply with what I’m sure was going to be a whole diatribe about civil liberties, blah blah blah. I debated that stuff with Reed, I didn’t need to get up to the hip waders in it now with an LAPD detective just before I kicked down the door on a random house. I was waiting for laws to catch up with my agency, but Congress was curiously deadlocked about us and our mission. It had resulted in some great debates, some serious arguments in the courts—really fascinating stuff, if you were a boring lawyer type.
Me, I had a job to do, and I was intent on doing it until they told me I had to follow normal rules. I had a feeling that the way things were going now wasn’t the way they would go forever, but much like if there was a terrorist with a WMD on American soil, some rules might get bent or broken in order to bring that person down before they leveled a major US city. I didn’t set the tone, but I didn’t mind having a little leeway in doing this job. It wasn’t like you could contain a metahuman in a normal prison population. Hell, most people were still trying to wrap their brains around what we could do. And it wasn’t like America had a meta on every corner. There were like five hundred of us left in the entire United States. We were rarer than albinos.
If you went by strictest interpretation of “a jury of your peers,” a meta trial would be a real bear to set up.
All of this was just my way of justifying to myself that I was about to kick down a door that I didn’t have a legal warrant to do so on, nor any real probable cause to believe a crime had been committed by anyone in this house. What I had was J.J., illegally accessing passive surveillance footage in public locales for the purpose of tracking a very bad guy back to his hideout. In any court of law, I’d be laughed out.
And yet, Captain Redbeard was out there killing people for fun and sport, and the law had about as much chance of catching him as I did of catching a cold. (I can’t, by the way. Zero percent.)
I crept along the concrete wall that ran along the side of the house and made my way around to the back door. I drew Shadow (I like that my gun has a nickname) and prepared myself to knock down the door.
I took a long breath in the still night, the sounds of the Elysium neighborhood playing all around me, and when I heard the first hint of sirens, I raised my leg and kicked my way into the house.
54.
Karl
Karl had fallen asleep sometime after all the videos had been uploaded and played back time and again on every station from ABC to ZZZ. Well, not ZZZ, but—well, sort of, since he had fallen asleep, finally. Karl didn’t sleep well anymore, but he’d slept like a baby after the massacre. It was like the mere act of putting the film on the internet had been a release of the sort that aided sleep. It had been a long time for Karl in that regard, too—sex didn’t interest him anymore—but he remembered the after feeling, and this was like that, only way more intense.
When he woke up, he found the networks still playing it like crazy, still hashing it all over. It wasn’t as satisfying now, though. It wasn’t like there was any breaking news, any new detail, any cool new stuff to pore over, just the same old shit they’d been reporting before he’d fallen asleep, stirred up so that it looked different. Victim interviews. Politician reactions. Doctors in a press conference talking about the surgery one of the bombing victims had undergone. Panels weighing in on Karl’s motives, his identity.
Well, the last part was fun, anyway.
Karl sighed. Even at its reduced level of entertainment, he could still watch this all night.
Then his phone rang. He glanced at it and scrambled to pick it up immediately. “Hello?”
“Karl,” came the voice at the other end of the line, “That was some fine work today. Fine work.”
“Thank you,” Karl said, feeling the warm rush of accomplishment. “It was … fun.”
“Good, good. Hey, I’ve got something for you,” the voice went on.
“Oh?” Karl quirked an eyebrow.
“Yeah,” his benefactor said. “This Kat girl, she’s supposed to be going to a party tonight at the L
uxuriant hotel. Big soiree. Thinks she’s going to be safe. Should be a lot of cameras, though, in case you want to … make an appearance.”
“Oh,” Karl said, nodding along. “Okay. Are you thinking—”
“Yes,” the answer came immediately. “I think it’s time to be done with Kat Forrest. Make it big. Make it showy. Don’t let anyone forget it, Karl—or you.” Karl heard the sound of the click at the other end of the line.
Oh, yeah. Karl would make it memorable, all right. No one would ever forget how Kat Forrest ended. Not the way he was going to do it. Not even if they tried.
No, they’d be talking about this death for years and years to come. Karl could pretty much guarantee it.
55.
Scott
When he’d answered the knock at his door with a simple, “Come in,” he’d expected it was going to be Sienna.
It wasn’t.
Kat had a hopeful look on her face, and a shining, shimmering red dress. A camera was lurking just behind her when she opened the door, capturing every moment of their conversation. Scott immediately pulled himself together, making the uncontrolled wash of perspiration that he’d let out after Sienna left dry up into his skin immediately. “Uhm, yes?” he asked, trying to smooth himself out.
“We need to party, Scott,” Kat told him seriously, her eyes alight as she said it. “Get dressed.”
Scott felt his lips part slightly. “Uhh … what?”
“We’re going to a party,” Kat said, hovering just outside his door, enough that she could lean in and the camera could capture them both. “Enough of this sitting around moping. We need to get out of here and have a moment, you know? Remind ourselves we’re alive and not dead like those—” her voice cracked, and then she caught it, “those poor souls in MacArthur Park, or,” she sniffled, “like Bree.”
Who is Bree? Scott wondered but did not ask. He started to say no, but a thought occurred—Sienna would say no.
“Come on,” Kat wheedled. “You know you want to. There’s going to be dancing. Stars.” She stopped. “But not Dancing With the Stars, because—well, because it’s a movie after party, not the show.” She smiled a little brighter. “Flannery would probably love to have you escort her.”
Flannery he knew. Hell, everyone with a nodding acquaintance with reality knew Flannery Steiner at this point, probably even the residents of nursing homes. “Really?” Scott asked, giving that one some thought. He’d seen the cop’s dashcam video. That girl was wild. She hadn’t even climbed off her boyfriend while the cops were chasing them at high speed.
“She’d love to spend some time with you—war hero and all that.” Kat made a face that was a little more suggestive than Scott was used to seeing from Kat, at least since—well, since she’d lost her memory. Hell, even before that. “You could both use a distraction, right?”
“Boy, could I,” Scott said, thinking of Sienna even as he said it. To hell with her, that’s what he was thinking. “All right, I’m in.”
56.
Sienna
No one was home, but boy was I glad I didn’t knock.
The door was booby-trapped, because of course a guy who plays with explosives is going to booby-trap his house. When I knocked it off its hinges it blew up around the frame. It would have killed any human who’d tried to enter at that moment, but I heard the click of the fuses over the door crashing inward and shot back twenty feet in an instant.
The explosion echoed in the night, the roar eclipsing the sound of sirens, setting off a million dogs within a ten-block radius, and causing local residents to crap themselves. If a SWAT team had been standing where I was when I knocked down the door, they would have suffered some death and injury. You can thank me later for going without you, LAPD. Send me a note or something, maybe a fruit basket since the likelihood of the president sending me one was dropping by the second.
I hovered about a foot off the ground in the middle of a brown yard, waiting for the smoke to clear and trying to get my ears to stop ringing. The bomb going off was an instant drop of adrenaline into my bloodstream, triggering my fight or flight response. Obviously in this case, flight had won out, but fight was right there, ready to take over now that I’d dodged the explosion.
I activated the flashlight feature on my phone and swooped into the smoky back door. Clearly Redbeard was not into rear entry, I noted as I looked at the damage. This door had been wired shut so that no one could come in. I could see the front door from where I hovered, and it was similarly wired. Of course. Why would a man who can walk through walls need a door?
I searched the house in a flash, finding the windows were all set to blow as well, and one of the rooms had an epic amount of explosives just lying there. It was clearly his cache, or his surplus, because I doubted he was sleeping on plastique.
Other than that, a computer, and an air mattress for sleeping, the house was empty. The fridge was as empty as mine at home, but at least I had expired ketchup.
I heard the first sirens and flew out the back, looping over the house and coming down on the lawn. The first cop car was swiftly followed by eight more, and I stood there with my hands up after identifying myself to the first pair of officers.
Detective Waters arrived on the scene about ten minutes after the first cop, wearing a scowl and looking like I’d dragged her out of bed. “You didn’t have probable cause,” were her first words to me.
“The back door just exploded,” I said, shrugging lightly. “I probably did not cause that.”
“You could have, for all I know,” she shot back.
“I can burn things, but I can’t, like, blow up a tree,” I said. “This place is wired to make a boom. Front door, all the windows. Might want to get your bomb squad on this.”
She made a grumbling noise. “They’re on their way.” She dialed the hostility back a notch or two. “He’s not here, I assume?”
“Nope,” I said, shrugging.
“Ma’am?” One of the patrolmen got Detective Waters's attention. “We, uh … picked up a naked pedestrian on the way in. He ran when officers caught him huddling over a small fire on the sidewalk. Said he got mugged, someone set fire to his clothes and his possessions.”
Detective Waters just stared at him, open-mouthed, before turning to me with an accusatory look. “Weird,” I said, “Who would do such a thing?”
“I wonder,” Detective Waters said. But I could tell she wasn’t wondering too hard.
“All kinds of perverts in this town,” I said with a shrug. At least that was true.
57.
Kat
The arrival was perfect, a red carpet appearance that allowed her to hold her head high as she came into the party. They got footage for the show, the paparazzi got their dish, and Kat got to shrug off a million questions, all of which told her that the narrative was going to be exactly what she wanted—that she was a fearless, bold hero for stepping outside her own door tonight.
“Ms. Forrest—”
“Kat—”
“Kat, who are you wearing tonight?”
“Ms. Forrest, how are you feeling after the incident at the park?”
“Kat, do you want to say anything about your friend Bree, how wonderful she was? Her fans are listening!”
“Ms. Forrest, do you have a message for the man who’s been terrorizing you?”
Kat stopped on that last one, a strange twinge running down her back. Her gown ran full-length, split up the side to show leg. It was a classic look for a classic occasion, and she turned to see the questioner, waiting.
“Yes,” she said and broke away from the line she was leading into the party. Flannery and Scott were a few steps behind her, Guy Friday and Butler a few steps in front of her. Both groups scrambled to catch up to her, probably afraid she was going to dive into the crowd or something. “I have something to say to him.” She looked right into the lens of the camera. “You’re a coward.”
A silence fell over the red carpet, and Kat pushed her perfec
tly sculpted hair back before continuing. “This is a man who hides himself, who hides his identity because he knows the world will hate him, will hate what he stands for, who he is.” She was going unscripted, improvising, but this was the sort of thing Taggert would approve of. She needed to look brave, to put on the brave face. “This is a man who’s been rejected, for good reason.” She brushed her hair back again. “He’s a murderer. He’s a man with powers who preys on the powerless. He’s a coward, as gutless as they come, and his days are numbered.” She stared right into the camera. “We’re not afraid of you. You’re doing what you’re doing because you didn’t want to do what it would take to make yourself heard without violence. You didn’t want to play nice, you didn’t want to be nice, and you thought you were better. You’re not. You’re the worst of us, and people saw that in you before you ever did what you’ve done now. Enjoy the attention you’re getting right now—and we all know that’s why you’re doing it, because you need attention—because your mommy didn’t love you or whatever. Try therapy, loser, instead of impotently taking out your pathetic issues on everyone else in the world.”
With that, she swept away from the camera, and a hundred media people seemed to all catch their breath at once.
“Ms. Forrest!”
“Kat!”
“Would you care to follow up on—”
“I thought we were supposed to be low profile,” Scott said, easing up behind her, Flannery still on his arm. “No one was supposed to know we were here.”
“Oh, relax,” Kat said, smiling for the cameras. “We’ll be out of here in less than an hour—just enough to make a splash, not long enough to give this guy a target.”
“You know what you’re doing, Kat,” Flannery said coming up next to her as they came into the lobby of the Luxuriant. “That’s probably going to trend in like, five minutes.”
Kat did not look at Scott. “Good,” she said. Because it was good, wasn’t it?
Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change Page 22