Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4)

by Robert J. Crane

  He smiled, but it was a thin, menacing line. “I can promise you it will be an amount commensurate with your agency’s budget, and it will go to good causes that you can certainly promote your involvement in.”

  I sucked in a big old breath of air and then let it out again. “Wow. I had no idea this was why I was coming here. So interesting.”

  He frowned, three big creases showing up in his brow as he stood there. “Why did you think you were coming here?”

  “Because Flora Romero was killed by a lightning-wielding metahuman, and she worked in a homeless shelter that one of your ‘good causes’ funds,” I said. “I was just going to poke around and ask you some questions. I didn’t exactly expect … this.”

  He didn’t take his gaze off me, and it was a power look. I got the feeling that Cordell Weldon had stared a few people down in his time. “How would you describe … ‘this’?”

  “How should I put it delicately?” I asked. “Oh, yeah—a shakedown.”

  “That is false,” he said, “and not at all delicate. I’m apprising you of a problem you’re about to face, and ways you can correct it—”

  “By giving you money and exposure,” I said. “But I’m glad you brought up how you’re doing me a favor by letting me know, because that’s actually what I came here to do for you.”

  His eyes narrowed again, and I felt like he’d spent half the meeting looking at me like a mongoose looks at a snake. “Excuse me?”

  “Well, here’s something tragic you might not have heard,” I said, “they started digging bodies out of Ms. Romero’s lawn last night, and two of the skeletons matched with former residents of your shelter.” I stood because I was so ready for this meeting to be over. “I’m sure you have nothing to do with it, but I thought I might mention it since it could be … problematic.”

  I could feel the steam coming off him when he answered. “Are you to here to accuse me of something?”

  “Gosh, no,” I said, holding my hand up to my chest and feigning utter surprise. “Like I said, I wanted to warn you. I like how you jumped straight to that, though. It tells me a lot about you, even more than the shakedown—oh, I’m sorry—the ‘warning about my blind spot.’”

  He seethed quietly for a beat, nostrils flaring. “You should be careful what sort of accusations you make right now, Ms. Nealon. You’re not in a very good position to be believed.”

  “I haven’t made any accusations yet,” I said. “I just stopped by for a chat and got … so much more than anticipated.”

  “I think you should leave,” he said and gestured toward the door I’d entered through.

  “I’m not allowed to go out through the front?” I asked, feigning hurt this time. “But we took pictures together.”

  “Yes,” he said, “somehow I don’t think those are going to see the light of day, seeing as you’re probably about to vanish from public life. After all, it doesn’t matter what you do—it matters what you’re seen doing.”

  I raised both eyebrows on that one. “Are you threatening me?”

  “I’m predicting your future,” he said and stepped out from behind the desk. “You’re disliked at the moment, inches away from losing your job. All it will take is one slip, one mistake that can be seized on by a gullible press who doesn’t like you, and you’ll be finished. Lord knows, the president’s close to just letting your past sins all fall out, watching the chips drop all over the table, pardon be damned. The only thing saving you right now is the election. When it happens, when your past catches up to you,” his eyes glowed with the certainty, “you won’t want to be around humanity. You’ll retreat somewhere quiet, maybe change your name, and become the hermit that your upbringing practically destined you to be.” His eyes glimmered, and he practically crowed. “Oh, yes, I know all about you, Ms. Nealon. And the difference between us is that accusations made by you will fall on deaf ears while anything I say about you, no matter how trivial, will be swiped up like gold dust as long as it advances the narrative.”

  “The narrative, huh?” I asked. “I guess that makes you the storyteller.” I took a step closer to him and watched his eyes widen slightly. I don’t think he’d planned ahead before threatening me while alone in his office. “You know what another name for storyteller is?” I looked him dead in the eyes. “Liar.”

  The doors behind me opened and I looked back to see the young lady who had shown me in, quivering like a leaf. I guess the bodyguards were still hoofing it up three flights of stairs. “I’ll see myself out,” I said and went for the side entrance, throwing it open with a delicacy that I certainly didn’t feel at the moment. A snake like Weldon would use any property damage I caused against me, though, and I knew that in some reptilian, calculating part of my brain.

  I met the bodyguards on the stairwell, almost to the door. All it took was a look and they stood aside, flattening against the wall with expressions that told me everything about the look on my face. I guess I’ve still got it.

  28.

  Augustus

  A search turned up nothing on a second Cavanagh facility in the Atlanta area. I did another for Cavanagh bioresearch, and then did five searches for variations on that theme. I was walking the whole time, not really paying full attention to what I was doing, playing Edward Cavanagh’s biography (which, incidentally, turned up first in the results when I searched for “Cavanagh bio”) in my head as I went.

  Edward Cavanagh was a mechanical engineering guy all the way, from his roots to his education to his corporation. Cavanagh Tech was a mechanical concern. They built processors, automation systems, they had software divisions in Seattle and Silicon Valley. Factories all over the world that built hardware, and server farms all over the country that provided storage. They even had facilities in Texas, Florida and California that were fighting it out with SpaceX and others for who was going to build the next big rocket. Cavanagh had his fingers in tons of pies because his fortune allowed him to.

  But I’d never heard even a hint that one of his pies crossed out of his core competency, the world of mechanical engineering. And he’d even said this very morning something to that effect when he was throwing kind words my way about my new metahuman status.

  But Roscoe Marion, murder victim at the hands of a metahuman, apparently worked for a Cavanagh lab where bioresearch was being done.

  Or was about to be. That was a possibility.

  Still, this made no sense. Why hide it if he was getting into that branch of the sciences? This was not a secret that would be easy to keep, after all. Edward Cavanagh’s finances were under constant scrutiny, because people wanted to know what he was investing in so they could jump in with him. He didn’t get to be a billionaire in his thirties by throwing his money around stupidly, after all. He got returns.

  I tried to apply Occam’s Razor to what I was seeing here, and came back with this: it wasn’t out yet because he wasn’t ready to announce it. If he had a biological research division, maybe it was a new acquisition. Maybe it was something that was about to go big, and he didn’t want to jump the gun on it, let his thunder (uh, metaphorical, I hoped) get stolen before he was ready to let everyone know.

  Yeah, that was the simplest explanation for why a man with that high of a profile would try and hold something back.

  But it wasn’t the only one. Especially since he’d just lied about it to my face.

  I was halfway across a street when I got this little tingle that ran down my spine, telling me something was … off. I couldn’t tell if it was the noise of the city, the smell of the exhaust of the cars passing by, or just a general sense of malaise, but it was like a finger run right down my back unexpectedly, a caress from the touch of a hand unseen, and I could almost feel the shivers run across my scalp.

  I spun in a circle and took in the scene behind me. It wasn’t good, and it was a total surprise.

  There was a guy with a ski mask. All I could tell was that he was black, and big, and he looked like he’d been trying to sneak
up on me. He almost made it, too, was about ten feet away when I turned and saw him. We both froze for a second, and I took in the details around him. He’d crossed the parking lot of a shut-down gas station to get to me, and there were five other guys dressed similarly coming up behind him with automatic weapons.

  “Oh, hell,” I said as he pulled up his hands—way faster than a human could have done it. My eyes followed the motion to a shotgun clutched in his massive hands and fired from the hip, belching fire and death at me from a mere ten feet away.

  29.

  Sienna

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Calderon asked me, more than a little put out. I’d come back to the station to talk to him, to check up on his progress, if any, regarding Joaquin Pollard. I hadn’t even gotten out so much as a “hello” before he unloaded on me. Apparently in the five minutes it took me to fly from Cordell Weldon’s office to his precinct house, the crap had already rolled downhill from the mayor’s office to the chief of police and straight through Calderon’s door, sweeping him off his feet.

  “I was thinking, ‘Oh, hey, a lead, maybe I should follow this where it takes me,’” I said. “Apologies if I screwed up on that. Maybe I should have gone the other direction and thought, ‘Maybe I should just bury this and never think about it again.”

  Calderon put his hand over his head, a perfect facepalm that I could tell he was using to stall while he formulated a response that didn’t sound like complete bullshit dropped from on high. “You can’t go after a city councilman like Weldon—hell, leave off the City Council part and just say he was a powerful wheel in the community. You can’t just walk into his office and throw down on him like that.”

  “In fairness, I didn’t actually accuse him of anything,” I said. “But he got real defensive after the first part of our conversation went south. Enough to make me think he’s guilty of something.”

  “Of course he’s guilty of something,” Calderon said, like he was explaining this to a child. “All politicians are criminals. You should know that! And you can’t come to Atlanta and accuse Cordell Weldon of something like this—”

  “I told you, I haven’t accused him of anything!” I lost my temper a little in my response. “Well, other than being a shakedown artist.”

  “You accused him of what?” Calderon’s eyes were as big as the bottoms of pill bottles.

  “Well, he was kind of trying to shake me down,” I said. “But it’s not like I accused him of complicity in the murder of Flora Romero or any of the others.”

  “That’s good,” he said, and I could almost taste the sarcasm.

  “I might have called him a liar, though.”

  He made a noise full of utter frustration, and his face went into his palms again, hiding his eyes from me. When he came out, he was just looking at me with a jaded look, like he expected nothing and was getting exactly that. “You don’t even care whose toes you step on anymore, do you?”

  “I tried to tread lightly,” I said, “but he decided to be ungainly during our dance, so I stopped watching where I stepped.”

  “Well, you ended up stepping in it,” he said. “I can’t help you any more. The chief has pulled me off the case. I was already getting flack from my captain, but I was trying to shoehorn in a look at Joaquin.” He tossed a file on the desk. “Now that’s done. And you’re persona non grata around here.”

  “You’re going to deny a federal agent assistance that she’s asking for on a murder investigation?” I looked at him with a dark look of my own, an icy chill running through my voice.

  “I don’t think I’m going to have to,” he said, crossing his arms. “I suspect you’re going to get yanked back to your headquarters by a hard jerk of the leash in less than an hour.”

  I almost snarled my reply. “This bitch don’t wear a leash.” And I turned away from him before I said anything else that might make the situation worse. I was really good at that, and I’d liked him, so I decided to quit while I was only a few miles behind.

  “Sienna—” he started, and it suddenly sounded like every phone in the room buzzed at once, with a few rings thrown in for good measure. I spun and saw people ripping cell phones out of their holsters, getting to their feet.

  Calderon finished reading his message first, and his eyes fell right to me. “Augustus,” he said, sounding a little choked. “911 call—someone saw a guy getting shot at by masked men, and the ground exploded—”

  I didn’t even wait for him to finish, I just flew out of the bullpen at speed and twisted skyward, into the blue, figuring if the ground was exploding somewhere near English Avenue, I’d see it from the air. I went supersonic and felt my hair whip in the wind as I charged toward the fight without any thought but to save Augustus’s life—something that I had probably put in danger.

  30.

  Augustus

  The street exploded around me as the shotgun went off, and I hit the ground so hard that I didn’t quite know what was going on at first. It took me a moment to realize that the reason I’d hit the ground was that the street had been pretty much ripped up underneath me, every single piece of gravel and rock and dust from the asphalt torn out of the tar mixture, like someone had peeled a layer of the road off. When it had come up it knocked me over and formed a hard wall around me in a semi-circle, a dense mix of the stuff all formed into a long rectangular shield that protected my front.

  “What the—?” I heard a deep, pissed-off voice call out from behind the little wall I’d made. “Flank him!”

  I was still down on a knee, staring at my impromptu shield, but I heard steps coming to my left and right. I reached out, this time consciously, and could feel the street around me, waiting my command. I tugged at it, and it fought back. The asphalt mixture held it down, grounded it, wouldn’t let it go. I concluded that I must have absolutely lost it when I pulled it all up before. Panic aided my strength, clearly, so I panicked again and ripped at the asphalt around me, trying to swivel the shield I already had and pull it closer.

  Gunfire flew all around me, chipping away at my impromptu shield. The force of the bullets sent fragments flying over my head. One of them hit the top of my head, and I could tell it drew blood. I was clenching my left fist, my proxy for holding the shield together in my mind, and it was working—for now.

  It wasn’t going to work much longer, though, because I knew that they were circling even now. Once they got around the side of my little half circle, I was gonna catch a bullet to the head, and that was fact.

  I tried to rip more pavement up, but it was still resisting. I threw some fear into it, felt it give a little, heard the sound of concrete cracking around in front of me and to the sides. “Whoa!” I heard someone shout as the ground shifted.

  “Hurry!” Someone else called back, and I knew I didn’t have much time.

  I reached down deep and pulled, feeling the strain. I could sense the dirt underneath the road so much more strongly than the fragments in the pavement. Those felt like arms in a straitjacket, while the dirt beneath just felt like it was tamped down a bit. It was a difference in muscle strength, too; I felt like I was trying to lift the world when I was pulling on the road. I might have done it when the gun went off, but it was all due to instinct, that was for sure.

  But the dirt beneath? That felt like a muscle I could flex, like a lever I could use to lift.

  I pulled hard on just a small section of it and felt things shift again. I stumbled on the remaining layer of blacktop beneath me, the next section of the peeled onion I’d started ripping apart without even thinking about it. I held my hand aloft, though, and felt that dirt beneath, rock mixed in, felt it cry out to be released. I was just helping it, really, helping it after it had spent so long trapped, confined, compacted—

  And I drove it up from the weakest spot I could find … the already damaged pavement beneath my feet.

  A pillar of dirt broke through the asphalt like a park fountain bursting out of the ground. I could feel the fragmen
ts of the pavement crack and I drove them out as the dirt lifted me skyward. I launched into the air on a column of rock and ground, dragging my shield along with me. I rose ten, twenty, thirty feet, channeling it out and around me to protect my sides and back. The ground spewed forth enough to carry me up, and then I could feel it lose its strength. I’d overreached, spreading it out too far. Now I could feel empty air beneath me, and all I could think to do was throw dirt beneath, holding it in place for a few seconds as I started to stair-step my way back to the ground below.

  I heard shots fired underneath me and realized I must have looked like a dirt cocoon making its way across the air, trailing and losing particulate matter with every step. I could feel the hard impact of bullets under my feet, and I knew someone was right there, trying to kill me.

  I may not have been skilled, but necessity being the mother of invention, I came up with an idea pretty quick that filled my necessity—which was to not get shot and to not hurt myself while falling back to the earth.

  I hardened the ground I was carrying beneath my feet, holding it together, and just let myself drop without trying to fall slowly by using my little tricks. I didn’t have enough control to shape the dirt into anything other than a blunt object, and I’m not sure I would have wanted to, in any case. Either way, I fell a good twenty feet straight down and landed on someone, hard. The dirt absorbed most of the impact for me, and my legs took the rest like it was nothing. Fall like that would hurt most people.

  But I wasn’t most people anymore.

  I pulled my dirt shield up around me, tightened back into my circle. People were still shooting at me. Impacts behind me felt like a shotgun, the ones to my left and right felt harder, bigger hits. Straight on bullets rather shotgun pellets. One of them hit close and blew dirt in my eye from the impact.