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

by Robert J. Crane

  But for now, I would do something different. I would.

  Lights flashing, I followed Chandler through the night, the Grand Ole Opry playing in the background, the sounds of Miranda Lambert’s vengeful anthem fading into the back of my mind as I tried to figure out what I could do differently to help me survive the slow chiseling away of my sanity by these circumstances.

  CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

  Reed

  “What’s up?” Ben Kelly asked, answering the door after I’d hammered on it for a good minute or so. I was surprised he’d come so quickly; I was about to fly up to his window and get his attention—assuming he was even still here.

  I pushed past him into the warehouse, put a little pep in my step as I headed toward the stairs that led up to the offices. “I just had a thought, and I need to ask your boss about it right now.”

  “Uh, well, I was just about to lock up for the night, but sure,” he said, struggling to catch up with me. I was leaving him in the dust and it was easy as pie. Clearly, he wasn’t the meta saboteur, because he couldn’t have moved that slow at a run if he was.

  I blew right through the reception area where Ben’s desk sat, knocking only once on Logan Mills’s door before hearing, “Yes?” and taking it as my cue to entrez-vous.

  “Hey,” I said, leaving the door open for Ben as he huffed his way into the reception area, finally. “I need to talk to you.”

  Mills looked away abruptly. “I’m...busy at the moment. Maybe you can schedule something tomorrow—”

  “How long have you been broke?” I asked. Ben, now only a few steps behind me, physically gasped.

  The reaction from Mills was not quite what I would have expected.

  He chuckled. And looked me in the eye for the first time since I’d met him.

  I stared at him, not flinching back a bit.

  He stared back at me, and that little light of humor in his eyes died, blackening

  “Ben...” Mills said, gaze falling back to the floor. “Would you mind closing that door and getting back to locking up? I need to talk to Mr...” He looked up at me again, and I realized he genuinely did not know my last name.

  “Treston,” I said.

  “I need to talk to Mr. Treston for a moment,” Mills said. He was quiet, still. He looked at Ben with patient expectation.

  “Uh, Mr. Mills...?” Ben asked. I could tell he was struggling to figure out what he wanted to say there.

  “In a few minutes, Ben,” Mills said quietly. “Please. Go on.”

  Ben shut the door, face wild with curiosity as he did so, peering in until the lock softly clicked and the line of light coming from the reception area’s lights faded into nothingness.

  Mills remained quiet for only a moment more, then spoke with the gravity of a man who was tired in a way I fully understood. “How did you know?”

  “I was talking to my girlfriend a few minutes ago,” I said, “and she was mentioning how I’d been sullen and withdrawn lately. Depressed, I guess you could say? My business is failing,” I said, saying aloud to him something I’d been thinking but so damned afraid to vocalize. “Has failed. It’s over, however much I haven’t wanted to admit it to myself.” I looked down at his carpet, which was ugly and secondhand, I guessed. None of the furniture in his office was particularly opulent, actually. “It’s funny because I listened to your employees talk about you, and how you’re not acting like yourself. At least not lately. And I thought...”

  Mills nodded, not looking up. “You thought it sounded...familiar?”

  It was my turn to nod. “Yeah.”

  Mills was quiet only a moment more. “Yes. I’m broke.” He laughed mirthlessly, and it died just as quickly as it started. “Beyond broke, actually.” He steered himself to one of the chairs in front of his desk and hauled it around, nearly collapsing into it as he sat. “Up to my eyeballs in debt, and Lotsostuff—by my accounting, anyway—is worth...zero.”

  “Your company was valued in the billions last year,” I said. “With a freaking B, man.”

  He shook his head. “I never valued it like that. My accountants—the smart ones—never did. I mean, we hoped, right?” He tried to smile, but failed, his lips curving back down almost immediately. “Boy, did we hope. Investors hoped. Employees hoped—for a while, anyway. And I hoped. Hoped, and worked at it and kept the margins razor thin to nonexistent as we expanded our hold.” He shook his head. “Too low, in fact. I burned through cash at an alarming rate. Every time we’d open a new round of funding, thinking, ‘Yeah, this time we’ll make it to profitability if we just do X.’ And every time...we burned right through the money. So, yeah. I’m beyond broke.”

  “That’s why you aren’t negotiating with the workers,” I said. “You actually can’t afford to give them raises.”

  He shook his head. “No. I actually can’t. I can’t afford to pay them what I’ve been paying them, even, and my accountants told me that...years ago.” He raised his eyes to me, and they were...teary. “But hell if I was going to cut their pay. They work—worked—so hard for me. Seeing this place succeed? They poured their lives into it like I did, some of them.” His voice cracked. “You know what kills me?” He looked up at me.

  “Wondering what they’re going to do after you let them go,” I said, knowing exactly what he meant. I knew those feelings well.

  “Some of them have been with me for a decade,” Mills said. “Since the beginning. Theresa, I mean? From the start. Employee number one. My mom recommended her to me. This business is...it’s become who I am.” He ran fingers through his hair. “I have poured everything into it these last ten years. Everything. My life. Every dime I had and then some. I made promises to investors that I was going to make this work.” His voice cracked again. “I thought I could make it work.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “When everything started to go wrong for me, it was like...like a tsunami behind me, a flood trying to catch me. I thought if I could just run faster—”

  “You could get out from underneath it,” Mills said.

  “Yeah. But I couldn’t.” I drummed a hand against my thigh. “No matter how hard I worked, no matter how many contracts I accepted...the hole only got deeper.”

  Mills nodded along. “Same. Our profit margins have been screwed up since the beginning, but we had to cut some prices recently to stay competitive with the other big retailers. It killed us. Every order we fulfilled, trying to get people in the door by selling those at a loss, actually set us back because the other products didn’t make enough to offset the loss. So...” He smiled wanly. “Yeah. A hole. A crater, I guess, in my case. Not to minimize your own suffering.”

  “We all have our own struggles,” I said, “and none of them feel small to the person carrying them. Though...billions in stock value lost? Damn.”

  “Yeah,” Mills said in a whisper. “I feel really bad for the people who believed in me enough to invest in my company, because they’re the ones who are taking the hit. And I feel bad for my employees, because there’s not another job in Murfreesboro that’s going to pay them what I did.”

  I cringed. “Don’t you think maybe you should...tell them?”

  “I couldn’t even really tell myself,” Mills said. “Until just now. But you’re right.” He stood, his shoulders suddenly a little straighter. “Thank you.”

  I nodded. “Did you set that fire or flood that other part of the warehouse so you could try and get out from underneath this? I mean, I understand if you did—”

  Mills’s face got all screwed up. “Hell no. I was still working every hour of the day figuring out how I could get out from behind the eight ball. I mean, even after the flood, which—my insurance adjustor already said, I’m almost certainly not getting paid out on that, which means the fire is definitely not covered. I haven’t even bothered to call them—”

  “Someone’s pissed at you, then,” I said, my sixty/forty swing going to a ninety/ten, and definitely away from Mills.

  Mills�
��s shoulders slumped again. “Yeah, well, who can blame ’em?”

  “It goes a little farther than that,” came a muffled voice from outside the windows. I turned my head to look at the old, painted glass panes.

  “Hey, take a step back,” I said, trying to get to Mills.

  Before I could, the glass shattered before me, blasting into his office and showering us both. Stinging shards cut my hand, one laced my scalp—

  And suddenly there was a man on fire hovering in the middle of the room, blazing flames, the heat radiating off of him like a sun had lit in the middle of Mills’s office.

  CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

  Brance

  There it was.

  The antenna was coming up ahead, just where he remembered it, off the Concord Road exit from I-65. Brance took the ramp slowly, then hung a right, pulling over next to the historical marker sign that denoted the history of this place.

  WSM 650 AM’s antenna looked unlike so many of the modern antennas that made up the skyline of America. The strange, bowed-out, stretched-diamond structure marked it as different, worthy of notice. Brance had read up on it beforehand, of course, but when he’d moved down to Nashville he’d seen it for himself after a trip to the battlefields in Franklin.

  It reached up into the dark night, lit by navigational flashing strobes at the top and middle, and floodlights at the base. He could see the concrete slab anchoring it to the ground, and the dark steel cables securing it against the wind.

  There was a house-like structure close to the road, a couple lights on inside. He’d heard they’d transmitted live from in there at one point, though he wasn’t sure there was even anyone present now.

  Slamming the door to his truck, Brance took it all in. What was he going to have to do here?

  Well, he’d start at the house. Maybe there was some kind of override switch or something...

  CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

  Sienna

  “So we basically just found ’em squirming around, bleeding right here on the asphalt,” the Brentwood PD officer told us. He had the high and tight haircut that cops and military guys wore so commonly. “Sitting in a pile of shattered safety glass.”

  The suspects were getting treated by EMTs, and I hadn’t talked to them yet. I wasn’t sure I’d need to, either, even if I wanted to. Both of them had cotton balls tinged with blood hanging out of their ears. “You think they were breaking into his car, then?”

  The cop nodded. “That’s my guess. We got a lot of that around here. Car break-ins and retail thefts—shoplifting—are our biggest calls. We’ve had three car break-ins reported tonight, and when we checked out the car these fellas drove...” He pointed to a Honda Accord about a hundred yards away that was swarming with officers. “Well, let’s just say we found a couple items that have been reported stolen.”

  “Any idea what these guys heard?” Chandler asked, hands on his hips.

  “They’re not real receptive to questions at the moment,” the officer said. “And I don’t mean they lawyered up, either. They can’t hear us, so unless you want to teach one of them sign language...?” He shrugged. “All we could get out of them was there was a guy sleeping in the car.”

  Chandler turned to me. “This is well south of Nashville. Not a normal destination for Brance I would think, unless he lives in Franklin or something.”

  “Are there many places he could be living?” I asked. “South of here, I mean?” I shook my head, working it through. “No. Why would he be sleeping in his car if he lived near here? He’d just go home.”

  “He’s had a rough couple days,” Chandler said. “Maybe he’s tired. Overtired.”

  “I feel that,” I said. “But here’s what it suggests to me—he got clear of the dragnet back in town and he was so tired he needed a break before he did the next thing in his plan.”

  “Which is...?”

  “Get out of town,” I said. “He probably figured it was a long drive, so...”

  “He took a nap first,” Chandler said, nodding. “Well, if he’s heading south, it’s a straight shot to Birmingham. From there—Mississippi, Louisiana, the Florida panhandle...there’s a lot of places he could go.”

  The cop’s radio crackled: “Trespassing reported at WSM Tower on Concord.”

  Chandler and I exchanged a look. “Eureka,” I said.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

  Jules

  The police scanner went off with the call about the WSM Tower, and Jules was left scratching his head. “What the hell is that?” he asked, directing his question almost as much to himself as Gil and Leo.

  “Dunno, boss,” Gil said. They were cruising down 65, heading for the shopping center after Nealon and her partner. “But I think it’s right up ahead here. Next exit or two.”

  Jules pulled his phone out and typed “WSM Antenna” into the search bar. The result came up a moment later.

  As soon as he saw the words “Grand Ole Opry,” he changed his mind on what to do.

  “Take us there.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE

  Brance

  “How do I get on the air?” Brance asked the empty room. The “house” on the antenna property was abandoned, dusty, looked like it hadn’t been occupied in forever. He didn’t see a single soul in here, just a bunch of machinery and equipment that was too complex for him to decipher.

  He stared at the combination of blinking and non-blinking lights on an instrument panel. Off to the side there seemed to be a recording studio, but the level of dust in that place made it seem unlikely it had been used since the Nashville flood.

  “What the hell do I do here?” Brance asked, still staring at the lights. They were red and green and yellow—

  And blue?

  He saw blue, and stared, the color casting a strange shade over a set of LEDs. It took him a moment to realize, no, it wasn’t the lights that were that color—

  It was the lights of a police car pulling up in the driveway outside.

  Brance didn’t even think about it. He sprinted for the door, busting through and out onto the flat field that surrounded the tower for a hundred yards in every direction. With a look over his shoulder, he saw two cars pulling up with flashing lights in their front windows, another behind them with roof-mounted flashers.

  “Brance!” a hard female voice shouted. He knew that voice. Had heard it before, in Mercy’s Faithless.

  Sienna Nealon.

  She’d found him.

  With nowhere else to run and nothing but open ground for a long ways in every direction, Brance sprinted all-out for the antenna.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO

  Sienna

  “He’s running for it,” I said, breaking into a sprint to follow. “Chandler, grab the AR-15 out of my trunk and cover me, will you?” I tossed my keys at him.

  Chandler fumbled the catch and the keys glittered in the headlamps of the cars. “Why would you do that?” he called as I ran into the darkness of the field surrounding the WSM antenna. “I hated cricket and baseball as a kid. You’re giving me flashbacks here.”

  “Find the keys, get the gun!” I shouted.

  “Yeah, yeah, warn me next time before you throw the sharp, sparkling, possibly blinding keys at my face with super strength? This is all I’m asking.”

  The house that sat on the antenna property looked like it had been built long, long ago, the door hanging open and the lights all off within. I didn’t know what Brance had been doing inside, but I suspected it was trying to get on the air. Whether he’d figured out a way to do so before we’d pulled up was an open question, and one that was worrying me as I tried to run him down.

  The grass reached to calf-height on me, slick and cool, wetting the bottom of my pants legs as I sprinted along. Brance was beelining straight for the antenna. Not the woods a few hundred yards beyond, not the fence to our right. Hell, he hadn’t even tried to go for the freeway to our left.

  He was going straight for the antenna, and that gave me a really
bad feeling.

  What if he had figured out a way to get on the air? What if he was just trying to make some final adjustment out on the tower and then he’d...I dunno...sing to half of North America, liquifying their brains in their heads. That seemed a long shot, but we really didn’t entirely know how his powers worked.

  I reached for my pocket as I ran, coming up with the earplugs I’d been carrying and squeezing them into my ears as I sprinted after him toward the antenna.

  The tower rested on a solid, several-foot-high concrete base. The antenna was the shape of an extremely oblong diamond, like a classic diamond shape had gotten caught, pointy-end first, in a black hole and stretched for the better part of a thousand feet. I could see red and white highlights on the metal in the shine of the spotlights that lit it against planes crashing into it in the dark.

  Brance hit the concrete support and leapt up, grabbing hold of the antenna and leaping between the latticework supports with metahuman strength. A normal person could not have made those jumps; they’d have been consigned to using the ladder on the side of the antenna. Brance had no trouble, though, and jumped on up like a spider who’d felt a tug on his web.

  “Stop, Brance!” I shouted over the muffling effect of my earplugs. I drew my HK pistol, lining up my sight picture.

  Brance leapt through the latticework of the antenna, disappearing—mostly—behind one of the big supports that gave the antenna its shape and structure. Safely covered by the metal beam from me shooting him, he continued to climb, and within a few seconds he’d made it a good fifty feet up.

  “Dammit!” I tried to circle around, but Brance was keeping a good eye on me. Just as I came around, he swung and leapt through the center, taking up cover behind another corner beam and blocking my shot. Evasive little bastard, but then, that had been my problem with him all along.