Music: Out of the Box 26 (The Girl in the Box Book 36)

by Robert J. Crane

  Brance’s mouth fell open and hung there as thoughts spun behind his eyes, most of which were obvious to Jules. The kid wanted to argue, because he had hurt feelings. Ooh, hurt feelings! Jules didn’t care; he waited for that shit to pass.

  “I don’t want to give up,” Brance said, finally, and softly. “This is my dream.”

  “You think any of your so-called heroes that sang on that stage you’re so obsessed with—you think they didn’t have setbacks?” Jules kept his eyes forward. “You think people didn’t tell them no? Didn’t kick them out of bars? Reject them—”

  “That’s a little different than having a voice that hurts people—” Brance started to say.

  “Lots of voices hurt people, kid,” Jules said. A flash of his own father came back to him, yelling at the top of his lungs at Jules and his ma. “What you need to figure out how to do is get tougher. Learn some control. Because ninety-five percent of the time, your voice is fine. Something’s happening in that other five percent that’s messing everything up.” Jules simmered for a second, let Brance stew on that. “What are you thinking about when it all goes to hell?”

  Brance hesitated. “I...I don’t know.”

  “Is it a note you’re hitting?”

  “No.” Brance shook his head. “No, definitely not. It’s happened on songs that are radically different. It’s not a common note, or even a common range.”

  Jules had an idea. “Is it a feeling?” He looked over at the kid, who was staring back at him with his face all screwed up. “Something you’re thinking about when it happens?”

  “N-no,” Brance said, too shakily.

  There it was. Jules had it. Something was going on there. Something—or someone—that cropped up in the kid’s head, that was the trigger..

  But for now, Jules would let it rest. At least until he figured out what it was. He had a suspicion. He’d need to confirm it.

  Then he could pull the trigger anytime he wanted.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Sienna

  “You seem to have a knack for this policing thing,” Captain Parsons said, giving me a coy smile. “It’s almost like you’ve been doing it for a while, that teeny-bopper look notwithstanding.”

  “I am clearly but a spoiled trust fund baby with no one’s money to spend,” I said mockingly. “Just a girl making her way in the world with but her fists to lead the way.”

  Parsons chuckled. “I don’t quite think I believe that. Might have missed that part of your bio.”

  “Oh, well, you know those things are always completely accurate,” I deadpanned.

  Parsons’s look turned sober. “Seriously, though. These two have been dealing to kids—teens, I guess. They’re frequent flyers. This time maybe we’ll be able to keep ’em for a while. The big guy had a lot of Fentanyl on him.”

  “Good, good,” I said. “I’m not a fan of the hard stuff, especially not when it’s being sold to kids.”

  Parsons had a gleam in his eye. “So you want join us to bust people for pot possession later?”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Uh, no.”

  He grinned, clearly enjoying having pushed my buttons a little, but it faded quickly. “How about for something a lot more serious? Something with a real impact.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “We’re getting a warrant right now for a house not far from here,” Parsons said, watching his cops clean up the scene. The two cruisers with the dealers were already pulling away from the curb, taking our boys to jail. Parsons watched them go for a moment before turning back to me. “We have a guy on the inside who’s turned state’s witness. Sex trafficking and hard drugs combined to keep the girls compliant.” He pursed his lips in extreme distaste. “They’re moving minors up from Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. Maybe even points beyond. Catch the runaways, get ’em strung out and addicted, then—”

  “Yeah, I know how it works,” I said, looking away. Down the block, spectators were watching from beyond the police perimeter. No one was looking particularly at me, which was...new. Maybe I was unrecognizable like this. Or maybe they just didn’t think Sienna Nealon would be talking to Metro PD on a street corner in this neighborhood dressed like a tweener.

  “We could use someone to either be primary or go in through the back, cut off the retreat,” Parsons said. I could tell he was fishing. He was using good bait, too, because anyone who’d ever read about the nasty things sex traffickers did would have been hard pressed not to leap all over it with a fury and fervor. It wasn’t the type of reaction I evinced when thinking about the street-level prostitutes, addicts feeding their own habits, which was unpleasant, nor the high-class escorts, who mostly knew exactly what they were getting into.

  Sex traffickers preyed on teenage girls, got them hooked on the hard drugs, forming the type of habits that were nearly impossible to kick on your own, like heroin. Then they strung them along, selling them to men with promises of their next hit. I’d read the FBI reports in my ample downtime, and they’d turned my stomach.

  I looked back at Parsons. Yeah, I was well familiar with the horrors of what sex traffickers did. “Hell yes, I’m in for kicking down that door. Just say when.”

  Parsons didn’t even blink. “When.” He angled his head toward my car. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  I followed Parsons to a staging area a couple blocks from the house in question. I wasn’t sure where we were going to end up, but my question was answered when he stopped in a neighborhood north of the city filled with brand new townhouses mingled with the occasional old commercial strip or old house.

  “This is Germantown,” he said, leading me to a command unit, which was like a SWAT team truck parked in the middle of an abandoned parking lot. “Older neighborhood that’s really hot right now, turning over like crazy.”

  I frowned, casting one last look out at the neighborhood. “Is it my imagination or are all the old neighborhoods in your town being demolished for gentrification purposes?”

  Parsons let a thin smile slip out. “You’re not imagining it. A hundred people a day are moving to Nashville right now.”

  “Hm,” I said, mildly impressed. “You’re like the Austin of the Southeast.”

  He made a face at that. “I guess,” he said, and ducked into the command unit.

  There were a bunch of guys in SWAT attire, already geared up for the assault. I counted an even dozen, and they acknowledged me with polite nods but not a whole lot else. I understood that; when it came to kicking in doors, respect was earned, and even though my reputation might have preceded me just about everywhere, cops and military guys generally operated from a “trust but verify” operational footing. As in they’d see how I handled things before warming up to me.

  “I think you all know who this is,” Parsons said, strolling over to a small table in the back of the van with a house blueprint on it. “She’s here to try and make your job easier.”

  “Somebody ought to,” a grizzled older guy said under his breath.

  “This is Lewis Spencer,” Parsons said, nodding at the team lead, a dark-skinned man who caught my eye and gave me a quick nod.

  Spencer had a bearing that reminded me instantly of Roberto Bastian: no bullshit was allowed within ten meters of this guy. “Ma’am,” he said, with a hint of deference, and that was about all the indulgence I expected he allowed. He was leaning over like we’d caught him in the middle of a briefing when we walked in.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” I said. “What are we up against?”

  Spencer turned back to the blueprint. “Our informant says there are girls kept here, here, here and here.” He pointed to each of the various bedrooms on the blueprint, all toward the back of the house, plus two larger rooms, one at the front and one at the back. “Mattresses stacked almost one on top of another, curtains tacked to the ceiling between them. High-ups of the organization are brought in for visitations to the site, but it’s mostly a holding location for them, n
ot a brothel.” His lip curled in disgust.

  “Not exactly The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, is it?” one of the other cops observed. No one laughed. Everyone in the van had seen what sex trafficking looked like, then. Thinking about it sapped most of my desire to make a good joke.

  “Two entry points,” Spencer said, running a finger over the impromptu map. “Door here—” he pointed to the side of the house “—enters through the attached garage. The other is the front door.” He looked up, surveyed his team. “There are going to be girls everywhere. The potential for civilian casualties is high, especially because of some of the other details.” He straightened up, looking intently at the blueprint.

  “Because we needed more bad news,” that same grizzled jokester put in. Again, no one laughed, not even him.

  “Our informant suggests that these thugs are heavily armed,” Spencer said, looking about as serious as I’d ever seen a cop look. Which was pretty serious. “They’ve had some trouble before—some local rivals came around and hit their bank roll a few weeks ago—so now there’s firepower at the front door and it’s reinforced. Same drill with the rear door, which is not actually a rear door. It leads into the attached garage, and you can enter the house from there. Both are steel, with reinforced door stops. Same goes with the front door.”

  Someone groaned; I couldn’t blame them. Kicking it down would make a hell of a lot of noise, and not be quite as easy as a normal wooden door.

  “I can get in the front myself,” I said, looking down at the blueprint. “That’ll distract them. Then you guys hit them in the back and extract the girls while I keep them occupied up front.”

  “What about the bad guys?” Spencer asked. His eyes were still searching me.

  I glanced over at Captain Parsons, who’d been watching all along. He just shrugged, like it was of no consequence.

  “Well,” I said, making a show of looking down at the blueprint, “I guess that depends on how they play this.” And I tried not to smile.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Reed

  I stood around and watched a protest edge gradually toward becoming a riot, and I was bored.

  The crowd was doing its roiling/raging thing, the small flood of people in Lotsostuff overalls rolling like a tide. I watched them from the side, keeping an eye on them with one eye and the wary Murfreesboro cops lingering next to the gate every once in a while just for variety. At the head of the crowd I could see Theresa Carson, raging harder than any of them, her grey hair flashing under the sunny sky.

  The cops, again, didn’t seem too pleased to be here. Occasionally I’d float up into the air to remind the crowd of who I was in case they decided to get out of control and to take a glance at what was going on over the fence at the Lotsostuff warehouse.

  Nothing. Nothing was going on at the warehouse. At least on the side I could see.

  I had a clear view into the executive suite, such as it was, when I flew up into the air. It appeared utterly abandoned every time I looked, leaving me to wonder if Logan Mills was on the premises today or if he’d decided to take a day off. I wouldn’t blame him if he did; this crowd certainly did a fine job of maintaining their enthusiastic irritation for him on day two of this spectacle that I’d witnessed.

  The crowd of protesters was in the middle of an interminable chant of, “Mills! Mills! He’s a shill!” I’d settled back on the ground a moment before, questioning why I was here and why my various life choices had led me to watch a damned labor dispute (curse Harry Graves right to hell) when I saw someone not in a Lotsostuff overall snaking his way slowly through the crowd toward me.

  There was a camera phone in his hand, and the guy was wearing jeans and a trucker cap with a mesh back that had Boise Noisy written on it. He was snapping pictures as though he was a real photographer, or as real as you could make yourself look using an iPhone as your equipment. He was trying to play it casual, talking to people as he wended his way through the crowd. Theresa nodded at him and he gave her a short wave, then took a picture as she got back to chanting.

  He broke free of the crowd, and I gauged his intent was to come over to me. He didn’t disappoint, taking a couple pictures of me from a distance and then making a slow approach, hands by his sides and clearly visible, as though I were the type always looking for threats from every direction. With him now looking right at me, I recognized him.

  “Hey,” he said, coming closer. “I’m—”

  “Alan Kwon,” I said, peering at him. He had a thinly traced goatee, and he smiled when I said his name.

  “You know me?” he asked, sidling over, pace quickening just a little.

  “I’ve followed your work,” I said as he closed on me. “You’re one of those new breed of independent reporters that crowdsources your funding.”

  He pocketed his iPhone, nodding. “Yeah. I kinda have the best gig ever for someone like me. People pay me on Patreon and I just go out and cover whatever story interests me.”

  I nodded along. “I saw your reporting from Yemen. Not to go fanboy on you, but you’re braver than me.”

  “Yemen wasn’t even the craziest thing I’ve seen this year,” Alan said, offering a hand for me to shake, which I did.

  “Well, this has to be a bit of a come-down after covering foreign wars,” I said, turning my attention back to the crowd. They’d switched chants again, Theresa leading them in a repetition that had, at its core, the words, “Hell no! We won’t go!” paired with something else I didn’t want to waste the time trying to decipher.

  “I think it’s an interesting story,” Alan said. He had his phone out again, fiddling with the settings as he brought it up, recording a video of the crowd while we talked. “You’ve got a right-to-work state here, a non-union shop—at its root, it seems like a typical story of a big start-up corporation against the plucky work force that’s put them in the position they’re in, disrupting the e-commerce market with rock bottom prices.”

  He stopped talking, and I waited a second for him to finish the thought before prodding him. “But?”

  Alan paused, finishing his video and hitting the stop button before turning back to me. “I feel like there’s more going on here than just that typical setup, though. I mean, the company won’t even make a statement. At all. Usually a PR flak would at least issue a press release. Boilerplate, you know, when asked for comment?”

  “I guess,” I said, not really knowing...anything about these types of situations other than some basic, surface-level stuff I’d read in the papers in the past.

  “So, why are you here?” Alan asked, flipping his phone around in his hand so that the bottom was facing up. “Oh, do you mind if I record this?”

  “I’m not giving an interview,” I said, waving him off. “I was just talking.”

  “Damn,” he said, smiling as he shut off his phone. “Worth a try. My patrons would love to hear from you if you ever change your mind.” He pocketed the phone. “But I’m cool with just talking, too, since you and I are some of the only people here not to rage against the corporate machine.”

  I frowned. “You’re a journalist. Don’t you, y’know...have some sympathies toward these guys raging against said machine?”

  “Hey, I’m all for a living wage,” Alan said, throwing up his hands like I’d attacked his orthodoxy. “But I’m here to cover this as a reporter. That means I go where the facts are. So far, what we’ve got is a dispute over worker pay in which someone has destroyed part of the warehouse, rendering—well, I don’t have a number for the damage, at least not from Lotsostuff. The police put the losses in the millions.” He shrugged. “It’s not violent—yet—but my sympathies aside, I’m interested to see where this goes.”

  “I don’t love the direction it’s going myself,” I said, focusing back on the crowd, and Theresa, with her chanting. They’d switched to another one, but I was tuning it out. “I just wonder why Mills isn’t at least coming to the table to talk. It seems like it’d be a decent way to calm t
hings down.”

  “You think he’s playing hardball?” Alan asked.

  “Hell if I know,” I said, then I lifted a couple feet off the ground. Beyond the crowd, I could see another car pulling in, and a young lady got out, a blond ponytail visibly flashing in the sunlight.

  Alan craned his neck, but I doubted he could see as well as I could, so I gave him a little boost with a tornado under his feet. “Whoa!” He looked like he almost shit himself before realizing he was walking on air. It took a second of him high stepping like the ground beneath him was on fire before he composed himself and looked up at me. “Cool trick.” His voice shook a little, but he managed to get himself together enough to look across the crowd where I was. He frowned. “Oh, great.”

  “What?” I asked. The blond lady was making her way through the crowd, taking pictures with an actual camera.

  “I’m not the only reporter on the scene anymore,” Alan said with a sigh. “That’s Yolanda Biddle.” His lips twisted in distaste. “She’s a reporter. One of the few actual reporters employed by Flashforce.net.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Sienna

  I had a Kevlar vest strapped on under my flannel shirt, which was loose and allowed the spaghetti straps of the tank top I’d worn during my fentanyl buy to display a little of my cleavage. That was not a normal look for me, but since I was heading up to a sex trafficker house at a slow stagger, I was willing to make some compromises. For the job, you know.

  I strolled up to the door, acting like the drunk I’d once been and giving it a good hammering with my palm. Slung under my overshirt was the Remington V3 Tac-13, a shotgun that was only about the length of my arm from elbow to fingertips. It was paired with the HK VP9 on my hip (sixteen rounds) and the little Sig Sauer P365 in the holster on my ankle (thirteen rounds).