Second Guess (The Girl in the Box Book 39)

by Robert J. Crane

  I could tell from how he drove, he was a reflex type. Like Angel. They were notoriously fast.

  “Let's talk, man,” I said, not daring to come any closer. This was another of those times when, if I'd had one of Sienna's much-beloved guns, I might have been able to do something.

  Probably not, though. I was a terrible shot and this guy was fast.

  “Nothing to talk about,” Rocky said. “I want a car. That's all. Get me a car. Right outside. Then I'm gone.”

  “You...you can't think that's going to happen,” I said.

  A second later...I wished I hadn't.

  Rocky's eyes flashed, and it was like I could see the hope drain out of him an ounce at a time. “Whatchoo sayin', man?” He cranked the hostage's neck, somehow trying to smash out the microns of distance between them. Her eyes were wide, but they went pained as he did so, and she let out a sharp cry that he drowned out with his words. “I better be able to get out of here. Otherwise something bad is going to happen to this lady. I want to talk to–”

  Something clattered next to him, making all of us jump – me, Augustus, Jamal, the hostage – even Rocky. He snapped his head around–

  It was a cell phone. Someone had tossed it from below, and it landed just next to his feet.

  “What's this?” Rocky asked, jerking the hostage around so she fully occluded his face. I couldn't tell what he was seeing over the rotunda's edge, but after a moment he pushed forward, away from the rail, like he was afraid trouble was coming if he stayed close to it. Which was smart, because that's likely where the sniper shot was going to come from.

  “Looks like a cell phone to me,” I said, keeping watch on him. There was a lot of strain on his face. He'd ratcheted up the internal tension several degrees since I'd kicked his hope in the jimmies.

  “They setting up a shot at me?” He whipped his gaze around, then dropped to one knee, forcing the hostage down with him. She screamed in pain and fear as her knees slammed into the ground. He scanned the railing, pulling himself lower to the floor, contorting, really, to remove himself from the line of sight of any sniper. “Good luck with that, losers!” he called to the unseen snipers, wherever they were. I thought they were still at least a minute out by my count.

  Rocky focused back on me. “Car, fool. I want it. Now.” He pressed the hostage's head down, and I could hear the popping of the cartilage in her neck over her whimpers. Her hair fell over her face; she was just past middle age, made up nicely. Tourist seeing the sights? Local partaking of high-class shopping and dining? Who knew.

  We'd be reading all about it in her obituary tomorrow, though, unless I did something fast.

  “Augustus,” I said.

  “Man, first I get my car messed up, then I have to give it to a criminal?” Augustus sighed loudly. “This job just keeps getting worse.” He took out his keys and let them dangle from his finger. “There better not be any more scratches on this thing when I get it back. My insurance don't cover acts of gods, you know.”

  Rocky stretched his fingers out, beckoning for him to toss them. “Where is it?”

  “Just behind the one you wrecked,” Augustus said sullenly. He looked at his keys in despair, then shot me a pleading look.

  I nodded. It had to be done.

  “All right, fine,” Augustus muttered, “take–”

  The cell phone that had been tossed next to Rocky went off, loud, jangling first notes of an opening riff that sounded...familiar.

  “Is that...Elton John?” Jamal was frowning at the phone, buzzing as it played its musical ringtone.

  “I think so,” Augustus said, his own brow furrowing in concentration. “I think that's...”

  “What?” Rocky's face was lit with anger, and he was vacillating between looking at us and at the phone, still ringing and approaching the chorus of the song. “What is it?”

  “It is Elton John.” I closed my eyes and let out a sigh. “It's...” I cringed, not opening my eyes for fear of what was coming next. “It's...it's...”

  “'The Bitch is Back,'” Augustus finished for me.

  “Who you callin' a bitch, bitch?” Rocky's voice rose in anger, but his attention was totally split by the musical phone. “What does this mean – gurk!”

  “It means what it says,” came a cool, familiar voice. I opened my eyes and found her – yeah, her – standing over Rocky, her fingers buried in his armpit right where the nerves that controlled motion were located. His choke hold had died the moment she'd grabbed him, presumably right after she'd vaulted up over the railing, quiet as a mouse.

  Her dark hair swirled around her, and a damned near evil smile twitched at the edges of my sister's lips as she ripped Rocky Thornberg from his hostage and lifted him high up over her head as he loosed a pathetic scream, kicking his legs uselessly against her superior strength.

  “It means the bitch is back, boys,” Sienna said, flashing the three of us a grin as she threw Rocky, bodily, into the tile floor hard enough to knock him out. “Did you miss me?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sienna

  “You didn't miss me, did you?” I asked, thirty minutes or so later, after the Bloomington police had shown up to suppress and cuff the guy I'd hurled bodily into the floor and we'd given our statements. We were waiting against the rotunda rail a little ways down from where the hostage situation had unfurled, and Reed was staring straight ahead toward the mall entrance. I was leaning over, looking at the police and security guards dotting the rotunda below. Their presence was sparse, but there, keeping a cordon on this area while the cops processed the scene. Elsewhere in the mall, commerce ground on, because even an incident like this couldn't hold back the flow of Minneapolis tourism for very long.

  Reed turned his head, very slowly, to look at me, arms folded across his chest, his ponytail swaying only slightly as he looked at me with very jaded eyes. He seemed to have lived a lifetime since I'd left, his levels of cynicism reaching Sienna-like heights. When he spoke, it was deadpan: “Oh, you're back? Hadn't noticed. Maybe next time you should make a grand re-entrance into a hostage situation to announce your return.”

  “I thought you might need a hand. I heard it on my police scanner app as I was driving in.” I held up my phone.

  Reed's brow furrowed as he stared at it. “If that's your phone...who called you?”

  “Lethe,” I said. “She's around here...somewhere. Presumably dodging the cops.”

  He bowed his head and shook it slowly, eyes closed. “And she can't talk to them...why exactly?”

  “She probably can,” I said. “But I doubt she wants to. You don't make it to three thousand or whatever her age is by getting involved in unnecessary situations with law enforcement, y'know?”

  “Very much so,” Reed said, quite clipped. “That's good advice, which I hope you will take to heart.”

  “Hey, man, I'm a long way from three thousand,” I said, settling back against the rail, mirroring his arms-folded posture. “I'm still sowing my wild oats and whatnot.” I caught a twitch at his eye and lowered my voice. “What are you so pissed about, anyway? I didn't kill the guy, and the hostage is fine.”

  He gave me a sidelong look of pure malice. “This was not a good way to end a standoff that shouldn't have happened to begin with.”

  I snorted, making a face to highlight the pure absurdity I felt was spewing forth from his mouth. “Agree, but I didn't cause it, and I ended it in the least violent way I could, given the circumstances. The dude took a hostage and threatened her with death. What would you have preferred I do? Stand back and let Augustus's car become a sacrifice to this loser douche?”

  Reed's jaw tightened and I caught a glimpse of the source of his frustration: he didn't have an ideal way this would have ended, not from where I joined the standoff. But my brother was way too stubborn to just admit that little truth. “Peacefully is how I would have liked to end it.”

  “He looked pretty peaceful to me,” I said. “You know, after I bodyslammed him.” I tur
ned to lean over the rail again. “Fitting, really.”

  Reed stiffened, and I knew he'd picked up what I was alluding to. “Because this was the exact site of the first Monday Nitro?” He didn't bother to turn.

  “I like how you got it right away,” I said, staring at the floor, three stories below. “I mean, I didn't plan this, but the synchronicity is just...” I made a chef's kiss noise. “Mwah.”

  He closed his eyes and slumped over, just as someone in heels came storming over to us. I heard her clomping long before she reached us. Her bearing screamed COP! and her face, tread and the storm clouds boiling around her told me she was not happy with any of this. Reed's posture further explained that she was the key reason he was mad at me, so I put on my best smile and decided to try to be amused by what was coming rather than be thorny about it.

  “I said to back off,” she said, wasting no time with trifles like introductions.

  “Yeah, you were told to get back to your farm, peasant,” I said with deep amusement, prompting my brother to open his eyes and fire off a glare at me. “What were you thinking, letting bad guys get away to take hostages?”

  Reed clenched his teeth and tore his remonstrative look off of me and shifted it to her, where he lightened his tone by at least fifty percent. “We just followed him here. We didn't prompt any of this. Thornberg got into a confrontation with a security guard that set things off. We weren't even on the floor when it happened, Lieutenant Mann.”

  Lieutenant Mann glared suspiciously at him for a moment, then shifted her attention to me. “What are you doing back here?”

  I blinked in mock surprise. “I didn't know I wasn't allowed to return to my home state...?”

  She gritted her teeth. “Fine, I said that wrong. How did you get involved in this? Did he–?” She jerked her head at Reed, not bothering to finish.

  “I did not–” he started to defend himself.

  “There's a little thing called a police scanner app,” I said, flashing my phone at her. “I was just coming back into town and heard some angry, possibly constipated person on the dispatch radio – I think it might have been you, actually – and I came running. To help, you know, with a metahuman situation.” I made a show of checking my fingernails, then rubbed them against my T-shirt, purely to be an asshole. “Because I figured the State of Minnesota would care enough to send the very best – a seasoned FBI agent who has best-in-class experience resolving metahuman criminal incidents.” I shrugged. “But I'm sure it would have all worked out perfectly if both Reed and I had just...walked off or whatever.”

  Lt. Mann punched a long, thin finger with chipped red polish toward me. “If you hadn't gotten involved, we could have kept our distance and let this situation resolve itself organically, without forcing the suspect into a corner.”

  “Yes, I'm sure your multi-time felon was definitely going to just run off and give up his life of crime if you just let him go this once,” I said dryly.

  Her eyes narrowed at me. “How did you know he was a multi-time felon?”

  I rolled my eyes. “You think it's my first day on the job? I've been dealing with criminal apprehension for almost a decade now. The guy dropped below the railing to avoid snipers when I tossed up my phone. No rookie criminal does that. This wasn't his first rodeo, and whatever he did to prompt the chase? Isn't even close to the worst thing he's done.” I finished by folding my arms across my chest. “Some people are just bad, and this guy? He's one of them.”

  She looked back at me, and a small smile crept across her thin lips. “'Some people are just bad.' I couldn't agree more.” She looked me up and down once, and her meaning was obvious.

  “Can we go?” Reed asked, fully catching her meaning but sounding so wearied, and not bothering to fight back on my behalf. Ouch, bro.

  “Get out of here,” Lt. Mann said, waving a hand at us. “I'd tell you not to leave town, but...”

  “But what? You actually want me to leave after saving your bacon from having a hostage get killed on your watch?” I shrugged. “No skin off my nose. Later, L.T.” I flicked her a single-finger salute.

  Reed dragged my hand down before the lieutenant could see it. He pulled me along the railing, past the cracked tiles where our bad guy had come to rest after I'd thrown him. His eyes flitted over them for a second before pulling me past it and under the police tape. “You're in a mood today.”

  “My homecoming just got marred by some asshole cop who believes in this newfangled idea of letting criminals go. I'm sure that's the path to societal peace,” I said, trying to shake off my annoyance at Mann's attitude. “Plus, my brother's panties are fully twisted, which is not helping.”

  “I do not wear panties.” He dropped his hand from mine, but we were both still heading in the same direction, both of us picking up steam as we walked away from the crime scene. There was a crowd gathered, including reporters, but our path – and our metahuman pace – had gotten us out of the cordon on the opposite side from them, and I could see them struggling through the crowd in our direction out of the corner of my eye.

  “It's really more of a metaphor,” I said. “You know, for you turning cold on me suddenly.”

  “Yes, it's a real mystery why I got snitty after you smashed my perp into the tile.”

  I glanced back subconsciously at the cracked tiles. “Who cares about flooring? Of all the damage we've done in our careers, that's gotta be on the low end. I mean, did I hear Augustus say something about his car getting messed up...?”

  Reed stiffened tighter, increasing his pace again as he pushed through ahead toward the exit. Augustus and Jamal had headed this way when the cops had turned them loose a few minutes earlier. “We do not need to be causing havoc right now,” my brother said under his breath, not deigning to look at me.

  “This was about as havoc-light as metahuman policing gets, dude,” I said, tossing a look over my shoulder. The press had broken free of the crowd and were shouting my name, but were still a hundred feet or more from reaching the doors we'd just burst through. I pulled out my cell phone and texted Lethe, one-handed, as I broke into a run to follow my brother: Meet us at the office. She knew the address.

  “I don't want to argue with you, Sienna!” Reed said, meta-low but still quite forcefully, putting the lie to his statement.

  “Not now or not ever?” I asked. Squealing tires ahead heralded the arrival of a slightly dented Honda Accord.

  “Later!” he shouted. The reporters were on the bridge behind us now, but he'd reached the steps and leapt down, ripping open the Honda's door for me.

  I jumped in and he followed, slamming it behind us as Augustus hit the gas and peeled out. A cavalcade of reporters surged down the half dozen steps from the bridge and into the garage behind us, waving hands, shouting questions, and getting generally nothing for their trouble, not even a shot of me, because I sank down in the back seat.

  Reed, next to me, just looked daggers straight ahead. He didn't speak for a while after that.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Don't want to get in the way of this high quality sibling feud,” Augustus said, once we were safely back on 494 heading west, “but I do want to say – welcome back, girl.” He turned his head and smiled. He'd shaved his head since last I'd seen him.

  “Thanks, Augustus,” I said. “The lack of hair looks good, by the way. Very smooth.”

  “Good to have you back, Sienna,” Jamal said, gracing me with a smile. He had his computer on his lap, the screen sporting some cracks that led me to suspect they'd had a rough ride getting here.

  “Nice to see you, too, Jamal.” I turned expectantly to my brother, whose eyelids fluttered as he vented his excess irritation like radioactive waste. But more twitchy.

  “I am glad to see you,” Reed said at last, leaning sideways to put an arm around my shoulders. I leaned in and put my head on his chest as he gave me a squeeze. He leaned down and kissed the top of my head, producing a tickling sensation in the pile of matted hair I'd hurriedly
(and somewhat unsuccessfully) pulled back in a ponytail. “Just...surprised and...”

  “Yeah, you forgot how much fun it is to work with my 'wrecking ball' style,” I said. “It's okay. A real artist is never appreciated in their own time.”

  Jamal spoke into the vacuum of silence that followed. “Does...does that mean, like, corpses are your canvas...?”

  “That makes me sound kind of like a serial killer so let's just trot past that analogy,” I said, Reed frozen in stillness mid-hug. We broke, and he closed his eyes, shaking his head slowly.

  “I really didn't think you were going to make it back today,” Reed said, opening his eyes and turning to look at me. I'd forgotten how coffee brown his eyes were. “Figured you'd come rolling in tomorrow.”

  “Well, Lethe and I thought about staying in Chicago for a day,” I said, “but then I found out that they still hate me there.” Augustus partially turned to look at me, curious. “Because I destroyed Soldier Field last time I was there. Apparently sportsball fans in that town hold a grudge. On the plus side, I hear they still raise toasts to my health in Green Bay, Wisconsin, so I'm probably assured of a warm welcome if I ever visit there.”

  “Until you destroy their stadium,” Reed said, “which I should warn you is in fact recognized as a religious temple in Wisconsin. People make pilgrimages and everything.”

  “Such a quaint religion,” I said. “So...didn't know you guys were going to actually have a job today or I wouldn't have stopped for breakfast in Beloit.” I put a hand on my stomach and mimed a burp. “Actually, I shouldn't have stopped in Beloit anyway. For so many reasons.”

  Reed chuckled, breaking out of his moroseness for the first time since I'd seen him. “It is not counted among the great tourist stops in America. Where's your grandmother?”

  I checked my phone. Nothing there. “Somewhere behind us, I presume. She doesn't really text back. Probably because she's of the very old school.”