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

by Robert J. Crane

My give-a-damn tank was empty. Months of this, isolated, alone, yelled at, ordered around. Cut off from my friends.

  I headed for the BMW and started it up without bothering to wait and give my statement. Metro PD could catch up with me later. Or maybe never.

  I threw the car in gear and executed a three-point turn, then burned off down the road, looking for the nearest freeway that would take me to Murfreesboro.

  I was done. With all of this shit.

  I was going to find the nearest road to Murfreesboro, and there I was going to find Reed.

  And then...

  I was going home.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Somehow, in the age of GPS and completely lacking one, I found the nearest freeway. Interstate 40, the sign read, offering me two choices: East to Knoxville, West to Memphis.

  I picked east, since that was the direction of Murfreesboro, and smoothly accelerated up the entry ramp, joining the steady but light flow of traffic on the Nashville roads. They weren’t empty, a dozen or so cars in the hundred yards in front of and behind me, glaring in the sunlight. But neither were they as full as the streets of New York I’d become accustomed to in the last few months.

  My hands cemented on the wheel, I thought about Reed. I hadn’t actually seen my brother in the flesh since Revelen. Since he’d fallen out of the sky to save me from an army of angry, killer mercenaries that were advancing on me with the illest intentions I could imagine.

  Sure, I’d talked to him since. In my dreams, at least.

  But I hadn’t seen him, hadn’t hugged him, since Revelen.

  Hell, I hadn’t hugged anyone since Revelen, I didn’t think. That probably sounded like a silly thing coming from a succubus, especially me, but the lack of caring human contact had been wearing on me. Almost two years on the run, the better part of another year now with the FBI...

  Yeah. I was done.

  The interstate was splitting ahead, and I blinked, trying to figure out which to take. The choices offered were I-65 South to Huntsville or I-40 and I-24 East to Knoxville. I realized I’d probably missed the earlier signs, because hell if I could recall if I’d seen one while I was in my reverie, thinking about Reed and how great it’d be to actually see my brother—

  I squealed tires moving over two lanes to the right in time to get on the ramp to I-65 South. Murfreesboro was definitely south of Nashville, so I was going with my best guess here. A quick glance at my speedometer revealed that I was going 85.

  Oops.

  I backed off that a little as I drove down the ramp and joined the steady traffic flow heading south. There was a lot of greenery here, and the freeways seemed to be cut into rocky hills, dynamited right through the terrain leaving the most curious strata of the rock bare on either side of the overpass above as I raced south.

  For a few minutes, I zoned out thinking of the near future. The last few months had been a strange routine, alien to me. Living in an unfamiliar city packed with people who alternately loved me and then disliked me was not an altogether pleasant experience.

  When I came out of my dazed thoughts, urban development had given way to tracts of seemingly wild woods on either side of the road. The occasional house peeked out from between trees as I-65 moved south over rolling hills. Ahead, I could see a mighty radio tower of some sort, taller and somehow fatter than any I could recall seeing before. It was distinctive in its diamond shape. It stood the better part of a thousand feet tall, but the oblong nature of it made it look like two mirror towers, stacked one atop each other with their squatter bases meeting in the middle. Heavy metal support wires hung off it in every direction, securing it against the winds in the area.

  I gave the tower only a little more thought as I drove south, scanning for signs of Murfreesboro. I passed a lot of local road exits in sequence: Concord, Moores Lane, Cool Springs, McEwen—

  Then I saw it.

  Murfreesboro Road.

  I let out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding as I changed lanes. The exit was still two miles away, but I was ready. If it was Murfreesboro Road, surely it went to Murfreesboro, right?

  Passing under a huge overpass with hundred-foot retaining walls on either side of the freeway to keep the Tennessee hillsides from sliding down onto the interstate, I caught sight of a panhandler standing on the side of the road ahead. He was just close enough to my lane to make me wary, but not enough that he was in danger of being hit.

  He had a big poster board sign that said PANAMA CITY BEACH—his destination, I assumed—written in big, black letters on one side. As I looked at him, though, he flipped it over.

  DON’T DO IT, the sign read.

  I stared at it for a second, then looked at his face.

  Harry.

  I almost slammed on the brakes, but caught myself just in time.

  Don’t do it, he’d said.

  I was past him before I could stop, looking over my shoulder at his figure as he receded, disappearing into my blind spot and then visible in my rear view mirror.

  DON’T DO IT.

  I took the exit ramp to Murfreesboro Road because I was trapped into it by this point. A glance back in the rear view revealed that Harry was still standing there, though it looked like he’d rolled up his sign. He looked like he might have been turned toward me, watching what I was doing.

  Coasting, I looked forward. At the top of the exit ramp, there were two signs, two directions to go.

  To the left, and most obvious, the sign read MURFREESBORO.

  The right hand?

  FRANKLIN. Whatever the hell that was.

  The traffic light at the top of the ramp was red, a few cars in front of me stopped. I pulled into the center left lane, which was for the turn to Murfreesboro.

  Years. I’d spent years isolated, with only the occasional contact with my friends, barely any time with my newly discovered grandmother and great-grandmother. And it had been months since I’d had anything more than a dreamwalked conversation with a human being who gave anything other than a passing damn about me.

  Harry’s sign came back to me once again: DON’T DO IT.

  Ah, Harry. Harry and his warnings.

  Harry and his plan.

  My knuckles had turned white on the steering wheel. The light flipped from red to green. Cars started to move.

  “Dammit,” I whispered. “Damn...all of you.”

  I flipped my turn signal to the right and changed lanes, toward Franklin, leaving my ideas of going to Murfreesboro—of seeing my brother—behind.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Reed

  The fire was visible from the windows, smoke beginning to billow out of the warehouse structure. I wondered, dimly, if this was the section of the building that had suffered from the flooding a few days prior, and doubted it, though it was possible. Given how many prongs, wings, whatever this building had, it was entirely possible this was a new section of the building that was under the torch.

  Distantly I heard the crowd shout something through my enhanced senses. They’d caught sight of the fire, but I had no time to deal with their reaction. Not now.

  I swooped down, dropping with the wind beneath me, reducing the swirl. I plummeted, pillowing my fall about twenty feet from the roof of the warehouse. The fire was starting to break through, but it wasn’t burning up the roof structure—yet. I wondered how the fire alarms hadn’t activated, because I heard no ringing of klaxons over the roar of the flames below.

  “Shoulda brought Scott with me,” I mumbled as I dipped closer, trying to gauge the trouble I was facing. It wasn’t good; there was no clear source of water nearby. The building’s sprinkler system—if they even had one—was not engaged. Or at least it wasn’t making any difference, and there was no sound of water, which was hardly conclusive given the crackling roar of the flames.

  The rooftop was insulating me against what was surely a raging inferno inside. I didn’t want to dip any closer to the roof, though, if I could avoid it. A clear view of what was going
on inside would help, but—

  I was hardly reliant on my vision to develop a clear picture of what was going on inside.

  Funny little quirk that had happened to me since President Harmon had overclocked my Aeolus powers: I could feel air at great distances. The bigger the disturbance, the greater distance at which I could feel it. I could feel a hurricane brewing across the planet. I could feel a storm system that could produce an F3 tornado from across the country.

  And from twenty feet above the warehouse, I could feel the dry, scorching, hot air inside as the temperature rose.

  Air was my domain. My control was absolute in this arena, like a god of old.

  I drew a short, sharp breath—

  Then I blew the air out of that sector of the warehouse.

  Windows blasted free, residual glass showering the ragged weeds and scraggly grass that ringed the warehouse walls. The flames rushed out in a vortex as I excised the oxygen from the building, driving the fire out with it.

  I brought it up in a flaming tornado, beads of sweat breaking out on my forehead in the cool air. Not from the temp but rather the exertion. The fiery vortex flamed up, rising past me. It warmed the air around me, conducting heat as I launched it up, up—

  It ran out of fuel as I carried it as far as I wanted it to go, letting it settle like a flaming thunderhead above me some hundred feet. The waves of heat coming off it radiated down to me as I strained, keeping oxygen from rushing back in to the warehouse below. I’d created a zone as airless as outer space in a section of the warehouse where the fires had been lit. I needed to maintain that for about a minute, but my control was straining as I fought to keep the residual fires above me.

  The flames overhead petered out as my vision started to darken around the edges like I’d been pushed underwater. My brain slowed, fixated on the course of action. I had one job—keep the air out, keep the air out—

  There was a silent countdown proceeding in my head, and when it ticked past sixty I let the air in—slowly—to the blackout sector I’d created in the Lotsostuff warehouse. I funneled myself down to the window, peering inside.

  Blackened crates and cardboard boxes filled the space within, the concrete block exterior scorched from the fire. In the building’s rafters I could see the sprinkler system’s bones exposed, but not a hint of water dripping down.

  No sign of fire, either. I’d succeeded in starving it out. I took a long, slow breath, and—

  A blast of flame shot at me from within, a ragged gasp and a scream following it—

  I dodged down, trying to ignore the blurriness in my vision. I’d just exerted myself—madly—to put out this fire before it had consumed the whole warehouse. I didn’t think I had much left, huddled there under the warehouse window, trying to catch my breath, get my mind around me. My thoughts were slow, chugging along toward an inevitable conclusion.

  Someone—the metahuman who’d started the damned fire, I guessed—had just heaved a ball of deadly flame at me.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  Sienna

  Franklin, Tennessee was not what I expected.

  Picture a small American town. If you’ve ever been to one, you know what I mean—the classic Main Street ideal, but faded in modern times. Half the store fronts surrendered to time’s slow march. The other half filled with stores that were fighting against the slow wasting away of the good old days. I’d been to a hundred small towns like that, faded from glory.

  That wasn’t Franklin. At all.

  Franklin was that Main Street ideal with new life breathed into it. There was a sweet shop, a theater, a Starbucks and a bunch of local restaurants all sharing the same strip. It was like one of the touristy towns of the Oregon Coast but minus the draw of the coast.

  I’d parked my car in a garage a couple blocks off the square and just...walked. Because I had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, and no damned cell phone to buzz and give me someone else’s bullshit directives and guidance.

  I went into the sweet shop and got a little cake lollipop. Paid cash so Chalke couldn’t get a hit off my credit card and find me. Because screw the Director of the FBI, that’s why.

  When I got done eating my cake lollipop, I was still hungry. I ignored it and walked down the street under a big sign that said GRAY’S ON MAIN with neon lights unlit in the shining sunlight.

  This town could have been pulled out of the fifties, but the cars were all modern. There was a weird feeling of nostalgia surrounding me as I walked the streets, listening to the conversations of the tourists and fellow shoppers. Moms in yoga pants pushing strollers. Bearded hipster guys walking with their piercing-laden girlfriends.

  Small-town Tennessee did not look like I thought it would, at least not in Franklin.

  I paused to look at the historical marker in front of the church opposite Starbucks. I’d reached the clear end of walkable Main Street, with the pedestrian sidewalks giving way here to roads that looked like they were more meant for serious traffic. The end of downtown, then. Looking behind me, I could see the town square at the opposite end, with a statue atop an obelisk in the middle of it all.

  With a sigh, I started back the way I came. I still had no idea what I was going to do when I got back to my car. Maybe walk in the opposite direction for a while—

  The honk of a car’s horn startled me. A car with a LYFT emblem in the front window pulled to the curb on the opposite side of the street and—to my rather extreme surprise—Chandler popped out, waving at me. He waited until there was a break in the traffic and jogged across. Someone slowed to a near stop for him without honking, something that would not have happened in New York City. Hell, he’d have been lucky if they’d stopped at all instead of turning him into a hood ornament in their hurry to get on with their life.

  “How the hell did you find me?” I asked, frowning as he hopped up the curb. He was smiling, only a little winded from his hurry to cross the street.

  “We have a GPS tracker in your BMW,” Chandler said. “I mean, BMW put it in; it’s not we like we’re sinisterly going, ‘Hahaha, let’s track her.’ But when you disappeared from the, uh—”

  “Sex trafficking house,” I said, unabashed by what it was.

  Chandler’s eyes flitted around like he was seeking escape. “Uh, yeah, that. Anyway, I was pulling up and I saw you leave. When I called you, your phone buzzed from the ground nearby.” He patted his coat pockets until he came out with my phone. “Once I realized you’d lost it, the Memphis Belle authorized a trace, and I followed you out here to get it back to you.” He finished with a smile. “Also, we have a very tiny break in the case to discuss.” He offered my cell phone back to me.

  I stared at the cell phone. The screen was cracked across the front, probably from my dropping it like a mic. I hesitated before taking it, reluctance playing across my face.

  “What?” he asked, looking at the phone as though it might be a bomb.

  “Nothing,” I said, taking it from him and pocketing it. I wanted to take it and throw it over my shoulder, hit the garbage can on the corner behind me in a beautiful three-pointer.

  I didn’t, though.

  Chandler was staring at me in serious concentration, his perfect, slicked-back black hair ruffled by the gentle breeze blowing through Franklin. “I know a place near here that’s really good.” He chucked a thumb over his shoulder. “You want to get some lunch?” He eyed my pocket for a second. “We could drop off your phone at the car first, if you’d like?”

  I pursed my lips. I was hungry. “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  “What the hell is a brisket nacho?” I asked, looking at the menu.

  We were at a place called Puckett’s, right in the middle of downtown Franklin, and the menu was interesting if somewhat close to indecipherable for a northerner like me. It included items like Fried Green Tomatoes, which sounded good, as well as Nashville Hot Chicken (which after my experience with the Hot Chicken tacos also sounded
good).

  “You’ve never had brisket?” Chandler’s eyebrows almost touched that wave of black hair that sat crested above his forehead. He waved down the server. “Brisket nachos, stat.” The server just smiled and disappeared to put that order in. “Brisket is the chest muscle of the cow.” Chandler pointed at his pectoral, hidden beneath his blue dress shirt. “They use it every time they get up or lie down, so it’s really tough. Cook it too quick, you end up with a chunk of shoe leather. But if you cook it low and slow on a barbecue or a smoker, it comes out melt-in-your-mouth tender.”

  My mouth watered from his description. “Mmmkay. I would like some of that.”

  He reached over to the condiment holder in the middle of the table and pulled out a squirt bottle of barbecue sauce with the restaurant logo and signage that further read, Memphis Style: Sweet, No Heat. “This. This is the perfect accessory.”

  “For nachos?” I took my eyes off the menu long enough to sear him with a skeptical look.

  “Trust me,” he said, and planted the bottle between us like a flag. “If you like a little more spice, there’s a Texas Style sauce, too.”

  I shook my head and turned back to the menu, trying to narrow down my entree. I was puzzling what a “Meat and Three” was when Chandler spoke up.

  “So, uh...you want to talk about it?” He had already put his menu aside. Home field advantage.

  I let my eyes continue to play over the menu. I decided not to bother with playing coy. “Kinda sorta not really.”

  “I hear that,” Chandler said, and apparently took my cue, falling silent.

  The server dropped off sweet tea, a drink I was well acquainted with from my occasional previous cases in places like Atlanta. I counted myself lucky that metahumans didn’t suffer from ailments like diabetes, because Southern sweet tea was an almost certain trigger for Type 2.

  “So...country music,” I said, giving Chandler an experimental glance.