Driven

by Robert J. Crane

  Was that why Jorge had lost his temper when he thought she’d overheard? Because they’d been discussing something illicit?

  Angel looked up at Sophie. “Are you with the DEA?”

  This prompted a smile. “No,” Sophie said coolly, as always, it seemed, “but I’ve known enough dangerous men in my life to recognize when one is into something more hazardous to the health than sewage disposal.”

  “Good God,” Angel said, resting her head in her hand. “How do I tell Miranda …?”

  “Family will understand,” Sophie said, rising to her feet. She was wearing tasteful flats, Angel realized, but was not terribly tall. Still, standing over her, Sophie gave off an impression of great presence, as though she were six feet or more even though she was probably only five and a half. Those steely eyes …

  Sophie produced a billfold from within her suit jacket, so quickly Angel didn’t even see it coming, and left another suite of bills just to the left of Jorge’s small pile. “You don’t have to do that,” Angel said weakly.

  “This has been a bad day for you,” Sophie said, catching her with that relentless gaze. “Tomorrow will be better.” And she smiled, and though it held a mountain of reserve … there was something reassuring about it. “Make sure you finish your drink,” she said, nodding at the margarita, and started toward the door.

  Angel didn’t need to be told twice. She finished the margarita in one slug, catching that chemical aftertaste for the last time. Ugh. Definitely needed to check the ingredients. The bell rang as Sophie left, and Angel looked over the ruined plate of chimichangas, and slowly scooped up the discarded bills scattered over the face of the tabletop in two distinct piles—Jorge’s careless scatter and Sophie’s careful stack. She counted them—three hundred from Jorge and nearing a thousand from Sophie—and for a margarita Angel had ended up drinking, that was all!

  This had been her best money day yet in the restaurant.

  And yet … the worst … in so many other ways.

  She felt the distinct stirring of something like heartburn in her chest as she pushed herself up, checking her watch. Luisa would be here in minutes. Gabe shortly thereafter, if she was lucky. That’d be a relief. And hopefully … soon … other customers would come. Maybe redeem this horrible, horrible day, and give her some cooking to do …

  So Angel could distract herself from having to think about how she was going to tell Miranda … about any of this.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Sienna

  Now

  We pulled up to the house in Richfield, conveniently located right next to one that looked like it had been bulldozed, and Angel looked fully skeptical after a glance at the wrecked one. “Here?” She was watching for my reply.

  “Yep,” I said, already unfastening my seatbelt. Safety first.

  “What is it with you and destroyed houses?” she asked as she put the Mazda into park and we got out.

  “I totally did not have anything to do with that,” I said. “That was all your boss.”

  “Reed did that?” Angel asked, casting a look at it as we strolled up to the front door, her face illuminated by an expression of respect as she nodded at the ruin. “I’ve seen him do some crazy stuff, but leveling a house in the ‘burbs? It’s like you’re rubbing off on him.”

  “Well, he kinda did it for me, so …”

  I started to press the doorbell, but a voice squeaked out of a speaker, a little tinny: “It’s open.”

  Pulling the knob, I swung it open and strolled in like I owned the place. Hell, I’d probably helped pay for it, this little one-story 1940’s era burb house. It was all redone, nice new beige carpeting extending across the entire living room where we entered, rolling straight into the open-concept, excessively plain kitchen that was visible ahead. It was all carpeted, all of it, from wall to wall, front of house to back, and my shoes felt like they were sinking into its plushness.

  “Where are you?” I called as Angel came in behind me and shut the door.

  “Basement,” Cassidy said, and it was hushed enough that I had to use my meta hearing to pick it up. Still, I got it, and looked around for a staircase. It wasn’t obvious, so I assumed it was in the hallway past the living room, ahead and to our left, and started moving accordingly.

  When I got there, there was a hallway, and a good four or five doors, all closed. “Marco,” I said.

  “Polo,” came a quiet voice from beyond the first one on my left.

  I opened it to find a carpeted stairway and started down. Angel put a hand on my shoulder, and, speaking meta-low, said, “I don’t like this.”

  “I know, the carpet is too much, right? It’s everywhere. But Cassidy’s really particular about her sensory stuff—”

  “Not that,” Angel said, and I winked at her, which assuaged her worry not at all. But she took her hand off my shoulder nonetheless. Looking about as relaxed as a dog on a firing range, she followed me into the basement.

  When I came down the stairs, I found it just as fully carpeted and finished as I expected, pleasantly furnished with a nice sitting area complete with TV, a massage chair placed in front of a massive, multi-screen display. It was the height of luxury, and I plopped my ass down in the chair as Angel gave me a frown. “Okay, I’m done looking for you now, Cassidy,” I called. “I think you should come to me.”

  “No need,” Cassidy’s voice came from across the room. I blinked; there was a wall there—but as I watched, the wood paneling folded away, revealing Cassidy behind a thick membrane of distorted glass or plastic.

  I stared at her; she was at a computer display akin to the multi-screen dealie in front of me, tapping away at her keyboard and not giving me so much as a look through the barrier that separated us. I sighed and sank lower into the massage chair, picking up the corded remote and activating the shiatsu setting immediately, because I didn’t figure I had long.

  “Thanks for coming,” Cassidy said, and with a hint of distaste. “Normally I wouldn’t be quite so pleased to have you just strew yourself all over my furniture, but obviously these are somewhat special circumstances.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, dismissing her with a wave of the hand. “How long do we have?” The massage was going to town on my neck, discovering some knots which I’d long suspected but that had gotten much worse in the last few seconds.

  Cassidy turned to look at me, chair squeaking under her petite frame. “Two minutes, give or take.”

  Angel got it, too, I could tell by the look on her face. “She sold us out?”

  “Yep,” I said, leaning back. “Who is it? FBI or those cartel banditos?”

  Cassidy snorted. “You think the FBI could pay me enough to voluntarily wreck my own home? Please.”

  “Hey, I’ve got a big reward on my head,” I said. “It’s gotta be in the millions by now.”

  “A paltry five hundred thousand. Big for the FBI, peanuts compared to what Adoncia and her Tamaulipas Cartel offers.” Cassidy resumed her typing.

  “Who is this Adoncia?” I asked. Angel was watching for the answer, too, because while we had the general idea from her intel briefings, the specifics of why she was aiming to hunt us down? As elusive as I was to the FBI.

  “Normally, I wouldn’t give a brief on my current employers to someone I’m setting up for them, but, sure, why not?” Cassidy asked, trailing enough sarcasm that I wondered if she was going to cough up the info or not. “Adoncia Flores, age 28, head of the Tamaulipas Cartel for the last three years, since ascending in the wake of her lover—one Jorge Sanchez.” She spun in her chair to look pointedly at Angel. “Perhaps you’ve heard of him?”

  Angel gulped visibly. “Yeah.”

  “I think you can figure out the rest from there,” Cassidy said, spinning back and continuing to tap keys. “And if not … I don’t really care.”

  “Spoken like a true double-crosser,” I said, the massage feature kneading my calves, which were strangely tense given all the walking I hadn’t been doing lately.
I would have thought they’d have become more tender since I hadn’t been working out due to confinement in the apartment.

  “What are you doing?” Angel asked her, making her way up to the barrier and giving it a slap that reverberated through the sitting room area. Her stiff punches confirmed my suspicions; it was composed of the momentum-killing gel that we’d used in the Cube to subdue metas before suppressant became a thing.

  “Backing up to the cloud and logging out,” Cassidy said, and then spun around in her chair to face me. “You owe me for this one, too.”

  “Fuck you,” I said, as the shiatsu worked the muscles of my lower back on either side of my spine. “I don’t owe you shit for setting up an ambush for me. Other than maybe a punch in the face next time there’s not a gel barrier between us.”

  Cassidy took a second to process her reply. “I estimate a 99.9978 percent chance you walk out of this fine or with injuries healable in hours. That’s an eminently reasonable set of odds.”

  “Setting up an ambush for me with cartel weasels and weaselettes does not count as a favor,” I said, turning my head to look at her as the massage chair worked on the back of my scalp. I kept an eye on one of the monitors behind her. A car pulled up outside and I could see Adoncia and Miguel get out. Such a sweet couple. Except probably not a couple.

  “This is your friend?” Angel asked, seeing the same thing I was. “Some oracle.”

  “‘There are no compacts between lions and men, and wolves and lambs have no concord,’” I said, the old Homer (the Greek poet, not the Simpsons’ dad) quote springing to mind.

  Cassidy turned around in her chair, her computer screens clicking off but the security monitors remaining on. “We do have a concord, though. Revelen. Call me when it goes down.”

  “I’m kinda lacking my old powers here,” I said as Cassidy grabbed a bag and started to head into an exit door built into the basement wall. “What makes you so sure I’m going to triumph?”

  Cassidy looked over her shoulder and shrugged. “You beat me.”

  “That was when I had powers,” I called after her. “And also, you’re really dumb for a smart person.”

  Cassidy stopped, turned around and looked back at me. “Oh, I almost forgot. This Adoncia? She doesn’t have Miranda.”

  I blinked. “Then who does?”

  Cassidy smiled sweetly. “I would have told you—if you hadn’t called me dumb.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have called you dumb if you hadn’t betrayed me into an ambush!” I called after her as she disappeared into the shadows beyond the door. “Damn.” The shiatsu was not helping to ease my stress given the coming confrontation.

  Because now our enemies were outside the house, on their way in to destroy us—and we’d have to confront them one way or another if we wanted to get out of here alive.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “She’s gone,” Angel said once Cassidy had vanished into the darkness of the basement tunnel. “What do we do?”

  I gestured to the stairwell where we’d entered. The sound of a door opening made its way down, footsteps thumping overhead as we sat in the basement, waiting. “Seems our friends have arrived.”

  Angel’s voice betrayed her tension. “Yeah. And you’re … what? Waiting for the massage to finish?”

  “I wish,” I said with a sigh, studying the ceiling. It betrayed a latticed look to it, with wide gaps between the lines that—so interestingly—coincided with the ones on the wall that had produced Cassidy’s barrier. “I know I just kinda came out of a vacay, but honestly, being on the run never tends to be very relaxing for me.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” Angel muttered. “Do we have a plan?”

  “I think so,” I said, and looked around me. Sure enough, right next to my chair was a remote that didn’t quite look like a standard universal one. I picked it up and confirmed that it did not go with any sort of electronic I’d ever used. It had buttons that said things like “Basement Stairs” and “Basement Hideaway.” “Jackpot,” I muttered as the sound of footsteps rang out on the stairs.

  I punched the buttons for “Basement Stairs” and “Basement Hideaway,” and watched a barrier drop just in front of Angel and I, cutting us off from the stairs. The one that had divided us from Cassidy slid up, giving us a clear exit.

  “Huh,” Angel said. “Guess maybe she is a fr—”

  “I’ve totally turned the tables on your dastardly ambush,” I said to Adoncia as she swept down the stairs. Her eyes weren’t quite glowing yet, but I was sure it was coming. Miguel was a step behind her. “Seems I’ve—”

  Adoncia blasted at the barrier between us, lighting it up with a ruby glow as her eye beams splashed against the gel pack. I’d seen this kind of contest before with other types of energy projection, and I knew how it would have gone with the extra-strength barriers at the Cube.

  These, though … looked smaller. They were meant to fold up into the ceiling of a residential building, after all. I made a mental note to ask Cassidy about her contractor in the event that I ever got clear of this mess and ended up building a house.

  The eye beam struck the gel-encasement and split through, red diffusing through the entire thing and making the whole damned wall glow as it bled off the force of her blast. It faded, and we were left with a view of Adoncia with her eyes still aglow, her lips split in a snarl of pure anger, and Miguel standing off to her side like the proper backup dancer/thug for hire that he surely was.

  “So,” I said, chilling in my massage chair, hands resting on my belly, “now that we’ve established that there’s a barrier between us preventing us from whooping each other’s asses … you guys wanna play a game of charades?”

  Adoncia’s fury faded, her eyes returning to their normal brown, and her lips tilted into a smile. “You really are a smartass.”

  “Well, my brain keeps healing itself every time I take a traumatic injury, so it’s not like I’m getting dumber, in spite of what certain people might say.” I tossed her a grin, keeping my right hand loose where it lay on my abdomen next to the other. I had a plan already in place, and now I was just killing time and hoping everything would line up properly.

  “We could leave, you know,” Angel whispered, meta-low. “The path to the door is open.”

  “But it comes out somewhere and I don’t think this barrier is going to hold up against one more eye blast,” I replied under my breath, hoping that the barrier would filter out our sotto voce asides. “And since they could just head right back up the stairs and out the door, they’d be on us before we got to the car. Just sit tight.”

  Angel probably didn’t like that, but she accepted it and fell back into silence.

  “You’re going to pay for what you did, you know,” Adoncia said. “To—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said under my breath, looking at the remote in my left hand again. “Do you accept major credit cards, or is it all cash and checks with you? For money laundering purposes, I mean. Because of your drug trade, obvs.”

  “You’re such a bitter little pill, aren’t you?” Adoncia just smiled.

  “I don’t think I’m the bitter one here,” I said. “Did I come chasing after you? No. Because I don’t have any unresolved issues as pertains to you, Adonkey-ass. My conscience is clear, and as far as I’m concerned, until you showed up and started blasting away with those laser eyes, I’d have been pretty content never to run across your sorry ass ever.”

  “Awww, but I don’t feel the same,” Adoncia said, still stuck in that smile. “There is unfinished business here.” She looked at Angel. “Do you know what we do to your kind? People who interfere with us?”

  “There’s so many options I’ve heard about,” I said, pretending to get pensive while I really considered a couple more options and waited for things to line up, “there’s the classic Tijuana tire fire, I know you guys go in for a good flaying—I mean, torture, brutality, you cartel folks get super barbaric—”

  “Someone who crushed a man in
her jaws maybe shouldn’t lecture the rest of us about barbarity,” Miguel tossed in.

  I smiled at him. “You just had to bring that up, didn’t you? For that, I’m killing you first, Mikey.”

  He got pretty surly at that, making a frown. I guess he didn’t like me anglicizing his name.

  “There’s enough barbarism in this room to go around, isn’t there?” Adoncia asked, so sweetly. “You do terrible things to us, we have to return them or else we lose face. It’s inescapable fate, you see?”

  “A whole lot of people have tried to ‘get me back’ for some perceived wrong I’ve done them,” I said. “And a whole lot of folks have thought they could get away with going after someone under my protection. Not a lot of them are still drawing breath. You sure you don’t want to just let this one pass? In the name of self-preservation?”

  “I would have maybe let it pass before,” Adoncia said. “But … I watch the news.” And here her grin grew wider. “You’re more of a criminal than I am. And now you’re powerless.” Her shoulders shook with silent laughter. “How could I pass that up?”

  “I don’t know, but if you were smart, you’d find a way,” I said, sitting up slowly. I studied them through the blurred gel wall between us. It was held in a heavy plastic polymer that kept it in on both sides, the gel contained in the middle doing the heavy lifting of diffusing force or energy pumped into it. Adoncia, however, had weakened it immensely when she’d had her little laser eye temper tantrum, and I could see the spot where she’d busted through on her side. The gel was still in place within, but I knew it could only take so much force, so much energy. I’d seen the results from the trials of the stuff, and it had a compounding effect the more you added in terms of volume.

  A one-foot thick gel wall could maybe stop a car driving at forty miles an hour, or a laser blast for five seconds. But if you brought the thickness up to two feet, it increased exponentially—you could stop a train going fifty with twice the mass, or a laser blast for twenty seconds. The converse applied; reduce it to half a foot, your results dropped precipitously.