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

by Robert J. Crane

  He could just barely keep from rubbing his hands together as Jules watched it all unfolding. He was trying to gauge how far he wanted to push this thing. He wanted to make his impression, but didn’t want to kill anyone.

  This was probably about enough. Jules stepped out onto the stage and made the gesture to cut it across his neck. Leo was supposed to be watching.

  He was. The sound system died—not that it was transmitting the deathly sound—and the lights on stage went out, the audience lights rising instantly to full brightness.

  The sudden shock of light caught Brance’s attention, and he stopped singing, opening his eyes. Kid sang with his eyes closed a lot. He really got into the emotion of things. Jules might have found it admirable, if it had come from a singer who didn’t put their audience in indescribable pain, seemingly at random.

  But it wasn’t random at all, and Jules had figured that out. And he found the eyes closed thing very useful.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, flipping on the microphone. Leo had routed it over the loudspeakers, so he piped in across the theater. “That’s enough.”

  Brance was standing in the middle of the stage like he’d busted during the song. His mouth was slightly open, his eyes were fixed in place, starting to get a little red like he was holding back a good cry. He probably was, but Jules didn’t have time for that now. He pushed the microphone tip into his shirt and said, “Brance—go wait for me backstage. I’ll clean this up.” He tried to make his smile reassuring rather than predatory, which was definitely how he was feeling right now.

  “I—I just—” Brance started.

  Jules wasn’t in the mood to put up with his bullshit, and he couldn’t show weakness now. “Brance. Backstage.” He laid down that law like a parent of a mouthy teenager.

  Brance buckled, because of course he did. Looking like he’d just seen war—such a little bitch—he tottered off, passing Jules with a misty look in his eyes.

  Jules waited, watching, making sure Gil got Brance the hell out of here. He turned the corner and Jules felt comfortable at least opening up his speech. His audience was definitely still captive; none of them were going anywhere anytime soon. None of them were even able to stand, by the looks of it. “Well. Let’s hear it for my boy Brance. Wasn’t he something?”

  No clapping. Good. That meant everyone was picking up what he was laying down here. Or they were deaf. Hopefully not completely.

  He waited a few more seconds. He didn’t want to say too much where little bitch Brance could hear him. “I think you’re all starting to get the point here.” No answer from below. He could see them; some were bleeding from the ears, probably struggling to hear him. They wouldn’t be walking out; he’d have to have them carried. The faces below him, usually so composed, so serious.

  Yeah, there was fear there. These were men who’d been in gunfights. Men who’d fought the law, even sometimes. Done prison stints and faced all that entailed.

  But they’d never had their eardrums blown out from one guy singing on a stage, and in spite of the fact metahumans had come crashing into reality out of the comic pages however many years ago, most of the people in this room had never even passed one on the street, let alone had one come close to blowing up their head in a concert performance.

  “Here’s how I see things,” Jules said, starting to pace across the front of the stage. “Nashville is a big town. Big enough for all of us. Big enough we can do one of two things from here—one, get along. Increase the size of the pie, and we all take a bigger piece as a consequence.” He shared a grin with them. “There are things we can do with this power at our disposal that none of us could do before. Things we can get away with, things we can solidify control with, things we can reach our hands out for, past the cops, that we never could have without it.” He slapped his palm on his chest. “I can bring that to you. All you have to do...is unite under my banner. We’ll be able to avoid the heat in a way we never could before. Go below their radar in ways they can’t prove. Keep people afraid in ways they can’t describe, that maybe aren’t even against the law.” He smiled. “Because the law, even after years of trying to prepare—they ain’t ready for this. And if we move fast, they won’t be ready for us. We will create a whole new market. A whole new world.”

  “What’s the alternative?” someone—Charlie, he thought—called out from the audience.

  “I’m glad you asked,” Jules said, because hell if he would have advertised a second point if he didn’t intend to use it. “Option two is that you don’t get on board with this program. You decide...‘Hey, that Jules, he’s full of shit. Hell if I’m going to go along to get along, even for a bigger piece of the action.’”

  Jules just waited a second, smiling like the shark he was. “Maybe you think...‘I can whack Jules.’ But lemme tell you something—I’m going to be a lot harder to get than you think. And when I come back at you?” He shook his head, still smiling. “What the cops find of you? You’ll have died screaming—just like this.” He waved a hand in front of the stage. “Hours will feel like days, am I right? Days will feel like years. I don’t know how long you’ll last, but I’ll make it go for a long time. It’s a little different than what Charlie does—” he waved out to Charlie in the audience “—but I promise...it’ll be unique in how it feels for you.”

  “Boss,” Leo’s voice broke over the loudspeaker, “sirens coming from outside.”

  Shit. Jules hadn’t anticipated that, but it had always been a possibility some annoying neighbor would dial 911 when they heard the screeching out on the street. “Gentlemen,” Jules said, “I think you all should seriously consider my proposal. I’ll expect your answer within...oh, a day.” His expression darkened. “After that? Well...” He made a hand motion beside his ear. “You’ll be hearing from me.”

  With that, he dropped the mic, and off the stage he went.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

  Sienna

  “Gunshot microphones in downtown Nashville picked up some sort of sonic anomaly from the Ryman Auditorium,” Chandler said, voice crackling over my cell phone. “Metro is on the way, but I figured I’d give you a shout in case you wanted to run down there.”

  I sat on a stool, live music playing behind me. I was down on Broadway. Again. The lights were low, some people were dancing out on the floor between me and the band on stage. The bartender was looking at me with stern disapproval for answering my cell phone in the middle of the show, I assumed. Like anyone could hear me in the middle of all this.

  “Got it,” I said, smacking my lips together. I’d kind of been enjoying the atmospherics of this place. It had been a long day, and boy, did I feel it. After dropping off Chandler and getting some dinner, I’d found myself drawn here like a moth to a big ol’ bonfire. The stress had been eating me alive, and I was still ignoring stupid Chalke’s calls. Not that she’d made one in the last couple hours. “I’ll head that way,” I said, coming to a decision.

  Well. Two decisions, really.

  “Heading that way myself,” Chandler said. “Save some for me.” And he hung up.

  Save some of what, I wondered? With a slow exhalation, I stood up, leaving my stool behind. I gave one last, longing look at the shot of whiskey that was poured and waiting on the bar. The one I’d been contemplating, deeply, for the last twenty minutes.

  And then I walked away, leaving that addiction behind in favor of my other—maybe slightly less healthy—one.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

  Reed

  I sensed that avoiding Yolanda’s annoying ass was going to be a constant endeavor, so I stayed airborne for quite a while, riding the breezes across the clear blue Middle Tennessee sky for several hours as the sun started to move toward the horizon. The sky had picked up a pink cast, the clouds tingeing with its fading glare, giving me a hell of a view of the impending sunset.

  Keeping the natural breeze down so that the falling temperatures didn’t get to me wasn’t difficult. My jacket kept the very slight chill
at bay, and the waning sunlight kept things warm enough, around seventy degrees, that I didn’t feel too cold.

  Below me, it looked as though the protesters were feeling the prolonged exposure to coolness, especially as night started to fall. Jackets began to come out, heavy ones, too. I chuckled to myself, thinking none of them would have been prepared for a Minnesota winter. It had been twelve degrees when I’d left, and we were in the bitterest part of the season.

  I caught a wave of motion beneath me, Theresa signaling to me from the edge of the crowd. I slowly drifted down, not wanting her to think I was at her instant disposal. When I got to about ten feet, I asked, “What’s up?”

  “Just wanted to talk,” she said. Her bodyguards, Angelo and Big Bert, ever in attendance, were hanging back a bit, on the edge of the crowd. Both were watching me with their usual level of suspicion. I wondered if they’d appointed themselves her watchers, or if she’d somehow convinced them to do it. The whole thing reeked of a grandeur I didn’t see in attendance here. Lotsostuff had maybe five hundred employees, and only a hundred were present at the protest at any given time. I’d yet to see any potential threat to Theresa other than the Murfreesboro cops, and they sure didn’t seem dangerous. “About the fire, earlier.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Talk.”

  She twisted her lips a little. “What do you think happened there?”

  I couldn’t pass up the chance to be sarcastic. “Well, when an object becomes heated to its flash point, it catches fire—” It was a family trait.

  “I know that much, smartass. But who do you think started it?”

  I stared down at her, deciding how best to answer. Tired of being here, tired of floating endlessly in the air above a protest that was going nowhere, where almost nothing other than an attempt at arson had happened, I settled on leading with the brutal truth. Like a hatchet flung between the eyes. “Well, I’m about sixty/forty on it being Logan Mills or your people responsible.”

  When I said “Logan Mills,” she’d brightened into a smile, but when I’d dropped the hammer by mentioning it could be her people, it had turned into a scowl immediately. “Why would you go and think something crazy like that?”

  I chuckled. “You’re leading a protest that’s pushed up against the cops in an unfriendly way a few times. Not because your people hate cops, but because the cops are standing between you and your object of ire, the Lotsostuff warehouse. I don’t need an active imagination to guess that if the cops weren’t here, your people’s intentions for the warehouse wouldn’t involve giving it a nice cleaning and maybe some paint retouches.”

  All her good humor had vanished like the sun over the horizon. “I can’t believe you think we’d do that.”

  I shrugged. “I’m sure Logan Mills would say much the same about my suspicions of him, and hey—I gave you the benefit of the doubt. You’re the forty percent.”

  “We just want fair wages and fair working conditions,” she said, still gazing up at me irefully. “Now, we got every right to protest—”

  “No argument there.” I tried not to be patronizing, but...I was so tired of hanging out overhead like some sort of avenging angel who wasn’t actually doing any avenging. “But like I said, if the cops weren’t here, or I wasn’t, I don’t believe for a minute it’d be a totally peaceful protest. Your people have some anger issues.”

  “We got good reason.”

  “Also known as ‘motive,’” I said. “And people in crowds? Not known for their calm and measured approach to things.”

  “Well,” she said, clearly trying to scale back the anger, “I think I know what you ought to be doing right now.”

  “This should be good,” I muttered under my breath. “Please, do tell.”

  She licked her lips, then beckoned me closer. As though anyone could hear me over the dull roar of the protest. They didn’t seem as loud as they had first thing in the morning. Maybe they were wearing out. Still, I flew a little closer, and she said, “I think you ought to fly up there and talk to Logan Mills.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yep,” she said. “I’ve known Logan a long time. He may seem all forbidding and implacable now, but I knew him when he was knee-high to a cricket. You can put the fear of God in that boy, and he’ll probably tell you everything about what he did.”

  I frowned. “You mean...?”

  She looked around. “I bet you give him a little wind blast or whatever, you could get him to confess to burning his own warehouse.”

  I nodded slowly, not bothering to explain that I’d had him pinned to the ground earlier and he hadn’t exactly looked like he was breaking. “Tell me, because I’m curious—why do you think he’d burn his own business?”

  “Ain’t it obvious?” She favored me with a crooked smile. “The insurance money. We done shut him down. But he’s still greedy, and he don’t want to make a deal. He can’t find enough scabs in this town to run the place without us, so he burns part of it down, collects the insurance. More money for him.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her, because she’d just reminded me of something. “One problem with that. The fire was started by a metahuman.”

  Theresa stared at me dully. “So?”

  “So there’s no insurance money,” I said. “‘Acts of gods.’ Insurance companies don’t pay for damages caused by metahumans.” I shrugged. “So if he flooded and burned his own warehouse thinking he’d make a buck? He’s probably not going to, at least if his insurance company takes my word for it on the meta with the fire, and draws the logical conclusion from the mysterious flood outside of the flood plain.”

  That clearly had not occurred to her, because she paused, thinking it over. “Well, that don’t seem right.”

  “And yet it is,” I said.

  “Well, he must have thought he could get away with it, then,” she said, and it was a little fun to watch her try to scramble to adjust her logic to fit with her preferred conclusion.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but honestly, I think my sixty/forty just switched to the other direction.” I gave her a tight smile as I flew back up, because I sensed that conversation was going to go nowhere fast after I’d dropped that bomb on her.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

  Jules

  “That was a mic drop moment,” Jules said to himself as he stepped into the wings. The sirens were blaring in the distance, and he had a little urgency in his step. Needed to get out of here, with Brance, before the cops showed up.

  How had they found him? Hell if he knew. Maybe it wasn’t so muffled in here as he might have hoped. Busybodies were gonna busybody, he figured. Concerning himself with how the cops had found him didn’t concern him so much as making sure he was poised to survive their arrival.

  Turning the corner into backstage, he almost plowed into Brance. “Hey,” he said, not slowing down. They needed to move, after all. He reached out for the kid’s arm, intent on snagging it like hooking a line—

  And Brance pulled away from him.

  Jules paused, stopped. The kid’s eyes were red. Had this little bitch been crying? Of course he had. “What?” Jules asked, trying to home in to what the kid’s concerns were. Give him an opening to get his bitch-ness out.

  “You did this on purpose,” Brance said, and his voice was choked and hoarse.

  Gil lingered behind the kid, shrugging. “He wouldn’t go to his dressing room like I told him.”

  Jules kept from blowing up at Gil. And you couldn’t make him? Who was the little bitch here, again? “Listen, kid—” Jules started.

  Brance stepped away from him, making it quite obvious how he was feeling. “You used me.”

  “Kid, we all use each other,” Jules said, holding up a hand to calm him, like warning off a dangerous animal. “I was going to do some good for you, you did something for me—it’s a medium of exchange.”

  “You didn’t tell me you wanted me for what my voice could do,” Brance said softly. Oh, boy, did this kid sound betrayed. Like Jules had kicked hi
m square in the balls and laughed while doing so. Which would be fun.

  “I actually did,” Jules said. “You got a hell of a voice, kid. You can make a lot of money with it.”

  “Your way?” Brance croaked. “By hurting people?”

  There was a strain pushed onto Jules as the sirens closed in, got louder. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat. And you gotta work with what you got. You? You got a hell of a voice. I mean that on multiple levels. You sing good, and you got that other thing you can do—”

  “Hurt people,” Brance said, and boy, was it obvious the little bitch was feeling it right in his soft little heart.

  “Those are gangsters,” Jules said, pointing back to the stage. “The roughest, the toughest. Nasty bastards. They know the game. You didn’t hurt them worse than they’ve ever been hurt before. You just did it in a different way that shocked them because they weren’t psychologically prepared for it. If you had to pick an audience to hurt, they were the ones, because they at least deserve it.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” Brance whispered.

  “But you did,” Jules said. “You’ve hurt a lot of people, kid. Innocent people who just wanted to have a drink and listen to some music. You were holding so tight to your dreams, you didn’t care who got hurt in the process. You’re only mad now because you feel like I didn’t tell you the whole truth. Which I didn’t. For your own good, I might add.”

  “How is this good for me...?” Brance asked.

  “This is a path,” Jules said. “You want to be a singer? I can help make you a star.” In the criminal underworld, anyway. “It’s real simple. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. I get what I want, I have the money and the means to help you get what you want.” Jules gave him that smile. “I mean, look...you already sang at the Ryman and you’ve known me two days, kid. Imagine where you could be in a year.”