“Come on, man,” I said. “You’re not stupid. You have to see—”
A police siren in the distance made Brance jerk upright as he swiveled his head in the direction it had come from. The Metro Nashville PD was closing the net on him, and it would be obvious to even the most casual observer what was happening.
Brance tensed to run.
“Wait,” I called after him. “This doesn’t get any better if you run. So far, it’s all been an accident. You discovered your powers in an unfortunate way. I can explain that. I’d testify for you. But if you run now...there’s no explaining that away, Brance.”
He stared at me across the distance, the dark shadows of the alley between us. His hands were balled into fists. “I just wanted people to hear me.”
I think they heard you loud and clear. I did not say that. But I agreed with the sentiment. Instead, I said, “I know. Maybe you can learn to control it.”
The sirens drew closer. He stayed tense, and I could tell he was still wanting to bolt like a rabbit staring down an eagle. “But I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said under his breath.
“I know you didn’t mean to,” I said, trying to head off that line of reasoning before it became a problem. “But you did.”
“I—” He started to say something else, but the squealing of tires interrupted his thought as a black car came to a halt at the end of the alley behind him.
Someone was hanging out the passenger window, arm waving. “Hey, you! Come on!”
I stared, and so did Brance. My brain needed a moment to process the fact that someone had driven a car into the middle of my chase scene and was now waving down my perp and offering him an escape.
“Brance, don’t—” I started.
It was futile. When he had no viable way to outrun me, Brance was willing to listen. Willing to maybe face the consequences of his actions.
But he looked at that car like a starving man looks at their last crumb of bread. I watched the change go through his eyes. He went from looking at his opportunity for escape, open and wide-eyed, to throwing a glance at me, wavering.
I could see the decision being made. His glance slid back, deal done in his head, and he sprang for the car.
The back door was flung open as Brance sprinted for it. He threw himself in and the wheels spun madly. I caught the flash of a green and white Tennessee license place with DAVIDSON written in the county box across the bottom, along with the 73H 36J that marked it.
I made it to the road in time to see the car take the next turn as Brance disappeared with his new friends. The sirens grew louder around me as I stood there in the dark night and stared after them, wondering what the hell had just happened.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Brance
“Woooooooooo!” the guy in the passenger seat howled like a wolf out the window as they hit the onramp for I-40 and headed east. They’d slipped out of the dragnet before the cops had managed to finish boxing him in, and Brance had watched the red and blue lights flash as they closed the loop six blocks behind him.
They’d escaped.
“Who are you guys?” Brance asked, settling back in his seat. The car was an older model Nissan Sentra, and from the backseat he could see it had close to a hundred thousand miles on it. His rescuers were in shadow, only visible in the lit instrument panels and occasional overhead lamp as they passed. Both wore suit jackets with collared shirts and jeans. The guy in the passenger seat was unshaven, working on a three- to four-day scruff across an extra-wide chin. One of his eyes looked bigger than the other, but maybe it was just the darkness. The one driving was bald and tall, a big slab of beef whose shoulder made it halfway through the margin between driver and passenger seat.
“I’m Gil,” the passenger said, then pointed at the driver. “This is Leo. Say hi, Leo. He’s a lion.”
Leo grunted, nodding. A passing street light gleamed off Leo’s shaved head.
“Why did you guys help me?” Brance asked.
“Leo and I have spent a little time at the unjust hands of the police, if you know what I mean,” Gil said, looking back and tossing Brance a smile. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, y’know?”
“I guess,” Brance said. That was a thought on his mind, too. He’d done a very short stretch back in Wyoming for dealing weed. If he was being honest, it was at least half the reason he’d run. He frowned. “Where are you taking me?”
“Just figured you’d be happy to get out of there,” Gil said.
“I...I am,” Brance said. “But I still want to know where I’m going.”
“We’re taking you to meet someone real quick,” Gil said.
Someone? That put a little fear in Brance’s heart. “Who?”
“You’ll see,” Gil said. “Someone who can maybe help you with your problem.” Gil turned around, conversation closed, Brance thought.
So he settled back in his seat, that feeling of unease doing nothing but growing as he waited and the miles started to pass.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Sienna
“He responded to the name Brance, so I don’t think it’s an alias,” I said to the officer taking down my statement. “Height was about six feet, maybe a little under, and the sketch artist’s rendition was close, I’d say. Eyes were a little higher than in the drawing, nose was a little smaller.” The cop wrote it all down dutifully.
I stood in the middle of a circle of flashing lights, cop cars all around me and more being added by the moment. An unmarked SUV came pulling up and disgorged Chandler and a woman, shorter than me, caramel-skinned, who looked to be in her late thirties or early forties. She wore a suit and struck me as someone who’d seen some shit in her time. The local cops parted and made way for her and Chandler. She led the way, right to me, and stuck her hand out when she got close. “Ms. Nealon. Ileona Marsh.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, taking her hand. She was cool and professional. “Chandler.” I nodded over her shoulder.
“Ileona is the Deputy Director of the TBI,” Chandler said, almost apologetically. “My boss.”
“Oh. Oh!” I pulled my hand back abruptly, keenly aware that I was not wearing gloves. “Nice to meet you, Chandler’s boss.”
“A pleasure, Ms. Nealon,” she said with arched eyebrows at my reaction. “Glad to have you working on this.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, looking back at the Metro officer I’d been speaking to. He’d already moved off with his notepad. “Wish I had some better results to deliver thus far.”
Marsh looked around the scene. “Seems to me you did all right.”
I shook my head. “I could have pursued more aggressively. I could have—”
She shook her head. “You’ve been doing this a while. You know what we do in a car chase when the perp starts to endanger civilians?”
“Break off,” I said. “Pursue as best you can, but break contact and don’t endanger people.”
She nodded crisply. “Seems to me you did that here. Trying to run down this getaway car on foot was a non-starter—unless you can do sixty on foot?” She glanced down at my boots.
“I’m not quite that fast, no,” I said. “But I slowed to make sure I didn’t get ambushed on a corner, even though I had a gut feeling he wasn’t that kind of danger—”
“There’s a whole lot of glass out on Broadway in the shape of what I imagine is your outline that disagrees.” She frowned, a shadow falling across her face. “He throw you out a window like witnesses said?”
I flushed a little. “Yeah. I think that was an accident, though. He kinda screamed and I went flying like a shot.”
“Accident or not, this Brance is dangerous,” she said, eyes sweeping the scene again. “Our big mistake in my view was not having you mic’d with a radio wired to Metro units in the area. That would have saved time on fetching you out of the bar and allowed us to coordinate better. That’s on us.”
“I have a brain; I could have thought of it, too,” I said. I couldn’t rem
ember a time when the people I was working with hadn’t landed on me like a million tons of rock after a perp slipped away. At least not since I’d been working for the FBI.
Marsh smiled. “You don’t get interfaced in with locals much, though, do you?”
I tried to think about it. I did usually tend to get stuck outside the chain of command in these sorts of situations. I’d gotten wired in during an assassination attempt in New Orleans, but otherwise... “Yeah, I’m usually out in the cold, but in fairness to them, I do tend to work alone.”
“Well, you’re not alone here,” Marsh said. “The TBI is at your disposal. You’ve got way more experience in this kind of thing than we do. Let us know what you need. Metro Nashville is generally easy to work with, so if you think of something, say it. If it’s within reason, we’ll make it work.” Her lips turned up slightly at the edge. “Mayor Brandt is very eager to keep you happy.”
No jurisdictional squabble on this? I raised an eyebrow, because it was just a tad unusual, at least in my recent experience. The various Bay Area PDs on my last case had been only mildly helpful and generally suspicious of my efforts; the New Orleans PD on the case before had been kept at arm’s length by my FBI badge or local politics. Probably more the latter. Cooperation wasn’t utterly foreign, but this level of enthusiastic effort at it was...different.
“Well...thanks,” I said, because I really couldn’t come up with anything else, snark or otherwise. It was hard to be snarky to people who were offering you more than you expected or asked for.
She nodded. “Chandler will give you my number. Call if you need anything.” She gave me a tip of the hat salute—minus the hat, because she didn’t have one—and strode off through the scene toward a local cop, who nodded at her approach.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” Chandler said, easing in now that his boss was gone.
“I don’t think I was in much danger, to be honest,” I said, watching Marsh talk to the cop. “She good, your boss?”
“Oh, yeah, she’s great,” Chandler said. “The field guys love her because she came up through the ranks, not admin. Twenty-plus years of experience. Started as a beat cop in Memphis and worked her way up. They call her the ‘Memphis Belle’ because she was a Miss Tennessee finalist back in the day.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Not to her face, though, right?”
Chandler laughed weakly. “I’ve never tried it, but I think she’d be okay with it. She doesn’t strike me as the type to flinch from her past. This is a woman who’s talked about her Officer-Involved Shootings in open meetings. Old school, Wild-West-type stuff. She’s drilled some perps, man. Quick on the draw. Hell of a shot.”
“Hmmm,” I said, notching a little more respect in the column of the Memphis Belle. A beauty queen who could—and would—shoot? My kind of boss. I tried to imagine Heather Chalke drawing and firing a service weapon and it ended with her accidentally blowing a perfectly manicured finger off. She’d never even worn a gun that I’d seen.
“Got any new insights into the perp?” Chandler asked.
“Yeah, shared ’em with the locals,” I said, nodding to one of the Metro uniforms passing by. “Witnesses basically had the description right. Told ’em a couple changes to make. Guy’s name is definitely Brance. He turned when I shouted it at him.”
“Yeah, but he might have turned if you yelled ‘Bozo!’ in a dark alley while chasing him down. Being chased by someone with a gun really focuses the mind on them and what they’re saying.”
“That’s not a bad point, but he didn’t deny his name.”
“Well, we’ve got no record of him,” Chandler said. “Every Brance with a Tennessee driver’s license is accounted for. It’s a thin crowd and no matches on the description.”
I hung my fingers in my belt loops as I looked up and thought. The night sky was dark, the street lights giving it enough of a glow to blot out any stars even though there wasn’t a cloud in sight. “So that means he’s either new in town or he doesn’t have a driver’s license, right?”
Chandler nodded slowly. “Seems like. Lot of new people in town, though. Nashville’s on a growth spurt.”
“Ma’am.” The Metro police officer who I’d given my info to crept up to us, as if afraid he was interrupting. “We ran that license plate you gave us.”
“The one on the getaway car,” I said, helpfully, to Chandler.
“Well, I didn’t think you were running random plates,” Chandler said. Oh, good, a smartass.
“It’s registered to a Michael Markham in North Nashville,” the officer said, “but was supposed to be for a 2018 Honda Odyssey. I ran the make/model of the Nissan Sentra, and it matches about a thousand cars in Tennessee alone. Assuming it wasn’t registered in another state, which—”
“Given that it’s bearing stolen plates, it could be,” Chandler finished helpfully.
“Thank you, Officer,” I said, and he nodded and dismissed himself from the conversation, leaving me alone with Chandler. “A car with stolen plates picks up our perp out of nowhere. That seem suspicious to you?”
“Little bit,” Chandler said. “But not in a good way.”
“So...” I said, coming to a conclusion, “basically...that leaves us with nothing to go on.” I folded my arms in front of me, noticing Chandler’s look of dissatisfaction. “We’re back to zero.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Reed
“So,” I said, “what’s up?”
There was a low roar of activity going on in Puckett’s Murfreesboro location. Someone up on the stage was picking on a strange four-string instrument that wasn’t a guitar but sort of looked like one. I felt like they were going to break into “The Ballad of Jayne Cobb” any second, based on the eclectic decor of the place.
Theresa Carson was the name of the older lady in the Lotsostuff overall that I’d been flagged down by in the crowd. She sat across from me now, a little smile curling the corners of her mouth, like she knew stuff—or probably lotsostuffs (terrible, but I couldn’t avoid it)—that I didn’t. Her two comrades sat on the other two compass points of the round table. The big black dude was Bert Wallace, and the squirelly white guy was Angelo Drake. I’d caught all their names—and a suspicious series of looks from Bert and Angelo when they’d introduced themselves before sitting down. The four strings were plucking along in the background, covering our conversation. Such as it was.
“Where do your sympathies lie in all in this?” Theresa asked, still giving me that small smile. Bert and Angelo glared on behind her, like I was going to jump her any second. Or jump her bones, maybe. Either way, they looked pissed off.
I looked sideways at the stage. I wasn’t sure how to answer that. My sympathies tended toward working people, and my brief introduction to Logan Mills certainly hadn’t engendered any great reason to change that up. “My sympathies lie in the direction of whoever’s not committing violence.”
“You’re an agent of the status quo, then,” Drake said, hyping himself up at my left. “Not a friend of the worker.”
“Cool your jets there, Trotsky,” I said, giving him a vaguely amused look. “This isn’t a glorious revolution. You’re fighting to move an $11-an-hour starting wage to $15 an hour. We’re not talking starvation here.” I looked Drake up and down. He was wiry, but hardly wire-thin. “Or, at least none of you look like you’re starving.”
“This isn’t about starving,” Theresa said, putting a wrinkled hand on Drake’s arm before he piped off again. He looked like he wanted to. “It’s about a company on the rise, one that we’re helping to build. It’s about getting our fair share.”
I shrugged. “I’m not unsympathetic. But it looks to me like you were close to rioting before I showed up. The cops manning the perimeter at Lotsostuff? They’re not management. Hell, I met management, and it looked to me like one guy—”
“It’s not,” Drake said. “There’s more than just him.”
“The company structure isn’t the issue here,” T
heresa said, again patting a soothing hand on Drake’s arm and getting him to throttle back a little bit.
“What is?” I asked. “Because if you’re really just fighting for a four-buck raise for new people starting—”
“It’s about a fair wage for anyone who works at Lotsostuff,” Theresa said, brow furrowing. “Logan Mills just did another round of funding a year ago. Private equity. Millions of dollars. And the company does millions in sales every year. We’re the sole warehouse that fulfills those orders. Some of us have been here since the beginning.”
“Okay,” I said. “So you’re unhappy with working conditions. With money. With—”
“With dignity,” Drake said again, and I caught a nod from Wallace, who I was beginning to think of as Big Bert, versus Lil’ Angelo. “Logan Mills won’t even answer our demands personally.”
“He hired a team of professional lawyers to negotiate,” Theresa said. “So we did a little negotiating tactic of our own—we organized into a union.” She put a wrinkled hand on her chest. “He didn’t like that, oh no.”
“So where does flooding the warehouse come into it?” I asked, doing a little frowning of my own. “Because, honestly? I’m with you up to there. Unionize? Sure. Collectively bargain on wages and working conditions. Right on, so long as you’re not beating up scabs. But the flood—”
“That wasn’t us,” Theresa said, and it was like a cloud rolled over her face.
“But we’re not exactly crying over it,” Drake said, chuckling under his breath.
Something about what he said and the way he said it nettled me. It wasn’t something that would have bothered me five years ago, three years ago, even. I wasn’t an activist, but I didn’t begrudge people a living or a chance to argue that their living wasn’t enough.
But this... “Hey, numbnuts,” I said before I could stop myself, “you realize that every dollar of merchandise that gets destroyed soaks up money that Logan Mills can’t use to pay you guys more, right?”
Music: Out of the Box 26 (The Girl in the Box Book 36) Page 13
