“That concerns me a little bit,” Chandler said, nodding along. “I mean, who just randomly saves someone from...well, you?”
I raised an eyebrow to that. “Anyone with a decent heart, I would guess. I’m not exactly low-impact or merciful in my encounters. I believe ‘police brutality’ is the number one tag associated with my name on YouTube.”
Chandler shook his head, looking at the sketch. “Maybe, but I don’t know if I buy the premise that you’d pick up some random stranger being stared down by the world’s first superhero.” He shook his head again. “No, I think this is worse. I think whoever picked him up, they were looking for him.” Chandler glanced up at me. “I think it’s someone who has a plan for this guy. Maybe one that Brance doesn’t even know he’s signing up for—yet.”
“If so,” I said, staring at the sad eyes in the artist’s new rendering of Brance, “I hope we can get to him. Before it’s too late.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Brance
“That’s good, that’s good,” Jules said, arms folded in front of him as Brance hit the first high note on “Between the Devil and Me,” the often overlooked Alan Jackson classic. The older man was tall, with big arms, like he worked out, and a belly that suggested maybe he didn’t. Brance had a hard time getting a good read on Jules, other than that he seemed nice and had bailed him out of a real tight spot.
Brance had felt the ground fall from beneath him back at Mercy’s Faithless when his voice started causing all that chaos again. It had been like he’d dropped out of his dream and into a nightmare, complete with the night sweats that came when you woke up out of one of those hellish dreams.
But now that he was standing here in front of Jules, singing his heart out...
Well, it felt like he was back on steady ground again. At least for the moment, the older man had given him a measure of...what?
Reassurance. That was it. Standing there on the stage in Mercy’s Faithless, with Sienna Nealon staring him down, it had been like his dream—all his dreams, every last one he’d wanted and worked for, from leaving Wyoming to moving to Nashville to getting himself on a stage singing here—had all died at once.
Watching Jules nod his head in time with the music—okay, maybe a little off time, but still—was like watching his dream get life breathed back into it. Dream CPR.
And it felt damned good. Like telling his dad he’d been wrong after all.
Brance took a breath through the nose, taking in the stale air in the cool warehouse. His skin tingled as he launched into the chorus, hitting those notes and knocking them down one by one until—
“Oh! Whoa!” Jules’s eyes were squinted shut and he had a hand held up. His back was slightly bowed, and he started to wave the hand in front of Brance like a bullfighter flinging a cape.
Brance stopped. He’d felt it. A quiver in his vocal chords that had resonated through the roof of his mouth, tickled his uvula like an itch in the back of his throat. His whole head had vibrated just a little, actually. Weird. It had felt a lot more pronounced without the electronic bass notes blasting from speakers surrounding him like they did in Screamin’ Demons and Mercy’s Faithless.
Jules stood up straight again, his broad shoulders pulling back slowly to stick out his broad chest. He had a slightly pained look, nodding as he opened his eyes fully once more. “I think we found it.”
Brance put a hand over his mouth, then scanned over to the car, where Gil and Leo were both bent nearly double, looking at him tentatively. They had earplugs in, too, but didn’t look half as pained as Jules. “I think you were too close,” Brance said, feeling the flush in his cheeks. “I should have—”
“You’re fine, kid,” Jules said. “This is good.”
Brance blinked. He’d half expected Jules to yell at him, scream at him, tell him he was worthless.
“You sounded great up until you hit that note,” Jules said, nodding as he spoke, looking away like he was replaying the songs. “So I think our plan is this—we figure why it happens, and get you learning to control it. Because if you can figure out the trigger, you can stop pulling it. Right?”
“Right,” Brance said, nodding a little less certainly. “But...how do we do that?”
Jules broke into a broad grin. “How do you get to Radio City Music Hall, kid?”
Brance stood there, thinking. “Uh...I don’t know.”
“Practice,” Jules said, grinning. “Practice. Come on. Hit it again. We’ll do this all night if we have to. For weeks. We’re going to get you ready to be a star, okay? Whatever it takes.”
CHAPTER FORTY
Reed
“Well, well, well,” I said, moseying over to Harry Graves, who leaned against the front of Puckett’s like he owned the place, “if it isn’t my wayward benefactor.” I cocked my head, feigning pensiveness. “Or is it malefactor?”
Harry didn’t register an iota of surprise, but then, he wouldn’t. The bastard could read my every word out of the probabilities before I even spoke them. “‘Malefactor’ would suggest I’ve got bad intentions for you, Reed. I don’t.” He smiled a little wider, probably because he knew how grating I found it.
“You know what I find interesting about you?” I gave him what I hoped was an aggravating smile of my own. “You know exactly how I’m going to react to everything you say, but you give no damns about ingratiating yourself to me.”
“I’ve only got so many hours in a day, and you’re a naturally suspicious individual, Reed, so...” Harry shrugged, as if any of that was supposed to mean something to me.
Wait, what was that supposed to mean? I asked him, affixing a few crude words to the question.
Harry’s smiled moved from annoying to infuriating, and now I could tell he was trying to get my goat just for the hell of it. “It means regardless of what I say, you’re going to choose to be annoyed at me and question everything about this entire endeavor.”
“If I’m annoyed at you, Harry,” I said, glaring him down, “maybe it’s because you’ve got me running blind into some labor dispute without telling me a damned thing about what’s actually going on here beyond vague warnings about calamity.” I paused, thinking about it. “Actually, I don’t even know if it’s calamitous. Someone could be poised to lose a toe based on the vagueness of your warnings, and I’m down here working it anyway.” I steamed for a second and he let me. “Are you jerking me around for shits and giggles?”
Harry gave a one-shoulder half-shrug. “I guess you won’t know until you see where it goes.”
That just about launched me off the ground. “Are you freaking kidding me?”
“Not really.” He fixed me with a solid, if slightly lazy gaze. “There’s trouble about to happen here, whether you want to believe me or not. I’ve seen it. The probabilities for clearing it without you here...well, you could do some good. If you wanted to”
I just glared at him. “You got anything else for me? Like maybe some actual idea of what’s going on, where to look? You know. Useful stuff when you’re on a case where mayhem is apparently in the offing.”
Harry just broke into a wider smile. “Nah. I’m only here to listen to you complain for a few minutes before dropping an enigmatic hint and disappearing, so you can flounder on your own and curse my name for a while longer.”
“You sonofa—”
“Oh,” Harry said, holding up a finger to pre-empt my tirade. “You know how people say, ‘It’s not about you’? Well, this is totally about you, Reed.”
I was about to tear off a piece of my mind and give it to him good when a horn honked behind me so loudly that I turned, afraid a car was about to run me over.
It wasn’t. Some guy was parked up the street, and got out of his car to motion to a girl who was walking with a gentle, drunken sway as she made her way out of Puckett’s. The music wafted out onto the street behind her as the door slowly swung closed.
I turned back to give Harry that piece of my mind—
But the bastar
d was gone.
“Figures,” I said under my breath as I swept my gaze along the street, looking for him. Disappeared, just like he said.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Sienna
“So what time do you want me at the office tomorrow?” I asked Chandler as we rolled along I-24 toward my hotel. I’d hitched a ride up to TBI Headquarters with him from the scene on Broadway, and now he was dropping me back on his way home for the night.
“Mm,” he mouthed a noise, keeping his eyes on the darkened highway ahead. Overhead lights seemed to blink on and then off for long stretches as we passed them, the car ceiling cutting us off from one and casting Chandler in darkness again. “Whenever you feel like it.”
“You’re just so damned reasonable,” I said. “Come on, man. Our perp just got picked up by unknown subjects. This could be building to a crisis.”
“It could, you’re right,” Chandler said. “But it’s still building, and we’re pretty much clueless, in the most literal sense, until something breaks.” He sent me a friendly glance. “That’s all the grunt work, shaking the bushes. You can leave that to us. You’re the superhero, after all. Let us little people do our part.”
I didn’t know quite what to say to that, so I lapsed into a silence as he took the downtown exit. “So...I guess I can just wander around downtown, then. Maybe hit Broadway and do some inquiries of my own.”
“Sure, whatever you want,” he said in a noncommittal way that left me wondering if he actually cared what I got up to.
“Okay,” I said. We slid through the downtown area. I caught a street sign that read “Deaderick” as we funneled toward a courthouse. We turned at a T intersection beneath the high building with its immense columns, and kept going, passing a Roman-style building that had to be the state capitol, seated high on a hill. Some modern government office complex stood nearby, then we passed a giant crater of a building site where something was being constructed out of the earth. Ahead I could see that train station building, and then we took a left turn, giving me a clear view of a domed arena.
My phone buzzed and I looked down. I had a text message, one long wall of words from Director Chalke that caused me to frown. I unlocked my phone and started to skim it as Chandler piped up again. I didn’t entirely hear him because my heart had started to thunder and my pulse was quickening.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to here,” Chandler said, keeping his hands loosely on the wheel. “We know we called you in on something that looks a lot less dire than your usual business. So, you know, you can just take this as a break between now and when you head to DC.” He glanced over at me as he pulled the car to the curb next to my hotel. I must have been making a face, because he frowned. “What?”
I debated on whether to say anything, but ultimately, I’m not that good at bottling up my feelings, especially when they’re raw anger. I held up my phone, stopping myself just short of violently throwing it out the window. “The FBI has unlocked my apartment in New York and let movers in without my permission. They’re packing the rest of my shit and bringing it to DC for me.” I pursed my lips tightly. “When I leave here, I’m to report straight to Washington.” I squeezed the sides of my phone, feeling like crushing it in my grip so as to ignore this particular missive.
“They...they just opened your apartment and took your stuff?” Chandler asked, his mouth slightly agape. “Without even asking first?”
“Yep,” I said, every muscle tensing, a seething sensation blanketing me. “And that’s just paragraph one.”
“How many paragraphs are there?” Chandler asked, looking at my phone as though it were about to explode. Or maybe he thought I was, which was not far off the truth.
I looked back at the message. “I don’t know.” I skimmed the missive again. “Paragraph two highlights a very direct order: I am not to work with the DC Police like I did the NYPD, to help them with any non-federal crimes—”
“Oh, did you like doing that?” Chandler asked.
“Hell yes,” I said, closing my eyes for a moment. “Stupid as it sounds, I like policing. I like stopping bad guys and even not-so-bad guys like Brance who are making some bad choices before they become ‘bad guys.’ So, needless to say, there will be no more of that, because I’ll be working on FBI assignments only from here on out.” I sighed. “Which is a real shame, because I like being in the middle of whatever the biggest trouble is at the moment. Sitting back at the office doing nothing? Kills me.”
Chandler nodded along. “Interesting.”
“Yeah, it’s super fascinating,” I said, shutting off my phone. “The rest of this is just more of the same, and I’m sorry I’ve dumped this on you, and I’m sure you’re sorry you asked—” I fumbled for the door release.
“I find it all very interesting, actually,” Chandler said, brushing my arm as I tried to flee the car with my emotions—rage, basically—before he could tell me I was being stupid or boring. Which he didn’t. “I’m sorry they did that to you.”
“Yeah,” I said, paused in the open door, my hotel’s lights shining down from under their entry portico. “I doubt they are, though, so I wish they were you.”
“Does it say anything else interesting?” Chandler asked.
“You don’t have to worry about this, Chandler—Chandrasekhar,” I said, amending it.
“No, really, Chandler’s fine,” Chandler said. “Though you totally nailed the pronunciation. Well done. But seriously—I know this probably sucks for you. You’re in a strange city, bad things are happening back home—hell, you don’t even have a ‘back home’ right now. Your bags got waylaid—”
I’d forgotten about that. Guess I’d be wearing the same clothes and underwear tomorrow. Good thing I didn’t have to show up to the office early. Or I suppose I could do a Walmart run in my borrowed BMW.
“So anyway,” Chandler said, “if you want to talk...you can give me a call.” He nodded at my phone. “I’m sure you’ve got other people you could talk to and all, but still—offer is open.” He smiled sincerely.
“Thanks,” I said, and meant it. “But you’ve done enough.” I got out and closed the door carefully. Chandler gave me a little wave and drove off as I turned to head into my hotel.
The lobby was a sprawling, expansive affair, lots of couches and seats where people were talking, even at this hour. I headed for the elevator bank, which was just past the seating area and the hotel bar, giving only a cursory glance to the crowd inside in the name of my personal security. I was always on the lookout for people who were on the lookout for me, and as soon as I stepped in I caught a pair of eyes that caught mine and wouldn’t let go.
I slowed my pace, then snuck a glance, wanting to see dead on, clearly, who was watching me. It could be just a tourist who was staring at my famous face, or someone who wanted me dead, and I needed to at least look at them to be sure—
It was neither.
“Sienna!” Mayor Clea Brandt lifted her hand, waving me over to a table that contained her and two other people. One was an older man, tanned, with greying hair. He looked vaguely familiar, and I thought I recognized him as Tennessee Governor Henry Boggs.
The other...I knew immediately and familiarly.
I took a slow walk across the lobby and found them all already standing to greet me. Mayor Brandt, Governor Boggs...
And former Senator Robb Foreman, who met my gaze with cool amusement and a dash of—was that pleasure?—at seeing me again.
My former boss.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“Sit, sit,” Mayor Brandt said, scooting over so I could plop down next to her, Governor Boggs and former Senator Foreman sitting across from us in the hotel lobby bar.
“Can I get you something to drink, Ms. Nealon?” Governor Henry Boggs asked in a pleasant Southern drawl. He wore a wide smile under perfectly styled grey hair with the occasional dark-rooted strand blended in. “Whatever you’d like.”
“Uh, water,” I said, as Robb Fo
reman extended a hand to me. I took it and let him shake it for a second as he continued to smile while the Governor of Tennessee bustled off to the bar to get me a water.
What the hell was happening here?
“How was your first day in Nashville?” Mayor Brandt asked, the perfect image of a sweet grandmother as Governor Boggs came back and set a tall glass of ice water in front of me. With a straw. Perfect.
“I hope our state is treating you right so far,” Governor Boggs hastened to add.
“Uh, yeah, everything is just great so far,” I said, trying to get my brain to keep up with what was going on here. Which, if I wasn’t mistaken, was a charm offensive by the mayor of Nashville, the governor of Tennessee, and a former US senator of my acquaintance. “We had a little snafu earlier—”
“Heard about that.” Mayor Brandt nodded. I found it interesting she was taking the lead on this, with Governor Boggs seemingly deferring to her. He appeared quite content to sip on his old fashioned while nodding sagely and hanging on her every word. “Seemed to me based on the Metro PD and TBI reports you did everything you could.”
“Well,” I said, “I could have maybe ended it if I’d overstepped my bounds a little more.”
“I, for one,” Robb Foreman rumbled, low and amused, “am pleased that you didn’t shoot a man down in the street like a dog for hitting a few bad notes.”
Mayor Brandt let out a cackle of glee. “If that was the criteria for shooting people, Broadway would be like the Wild West, people getting gunned down every which way!” That set the Governor off, too. Foreman just smiled.
“Still,” I said, “I’d liked to have wrapped it up for you a little more neatly than what we have. Which is no clear line on the suspect, no idea who helped him, and no clue what their next move is.”
Music: Out of the Box 26 (The Girl in the Box Book 36) Page 15
