“I don’t …” She wavered, and a hint of that arrogance flared in her eyes, that all too familiar arrogance. “Why should I have to—”
I wanted to shake her. I wanted to snap open her stupid head, scream directly into her brain until she realized what she’d done, the damage she’d wrought to herself and others. I thought about pressing my fingers to her face, letting her feel the burn of a succubus threatening to rip her soul out of her body, but I wondered what good that would even do.
Instead, I twisted her so she could see Elliot’s body. “That’s why. And because if you don’t face the consequences on the legal side, you’re going to face the consequences of a firing squad of guys in black tactical vests that are heading up those stairs right now.”
That took all the fire right out of her, and she looked away abruptly, back to a commendable imitation of a ragdoll. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I’ll—I’ll go to jail. I … I deserve it.”
“Good answer,” I said, and grabbed hold of her. “Now let’s get out of here before they come and kill us both.” And with her under my arm like a Thanksgiving turkey, I flew out and up, trying to get out of sight so that I could pull off my next trick without any fatalities.
68.
Scott
He was having a hell of a time keeping the damned SWAT guys from drowning themselves as they flailed in the swimming pool, trying to get free. Every time they’d reach an edge he’d push them back, letting them tread water a little longer. Ultimately he was having to hold them up to keep them from drowning, and hold them back to keep them from getting free and causing more problems …
It was actually damned funny, and Scott was having the most trouble with not bursting out laughing underwater constantly. Not that it would hurt him.
“Scott!” The voice rippled through the water above, and somehow he knew Sienna was there. He rose up out of the inviting surf and found her there, hovering over the surface with June Randall clutched under her arm, tucked in like a football. June looked like she’d either been sunburned or cried her fair share, and based on her limp-as-a-ragdoll bearing, Scott suspected the latter. “She’s ready. She needs an escort to take her to the local cops, though.”
Scott stared up at Sienna, hovering a few feet above. “You sure about this?”
“Just do it,” Sienna said, and dropped June into the water unceremoniously, prompting a squeal from the girl and forcing Scott to catch her on a platform of water before she fell into the surf. With that, Sienna said, to June, “Remember what we talked about.”
June, eyeing the water column that was holding her dry and out of the surf, looked up and said, “I will.”
With a nod, Sienna launched straight up into the sky, and was out of sight in mere seconds, as though she’d never even been there.
“Well, then,” Scott said, giving June a cursory look, “let’s get you ready, shall we?”
69.
Sienna
It’s hard for me to hand off a good plan, because I’m always afraid someone is going to screw it up. In this case, though, marching June Randall through a free-fire zone and into custody was practically guaranteed to end with me being shot through the head again, so delegating to Scott seemed the prudent move.
I watched from up above, hanging out behind a nearby building as he marched her through the parking lot encased in a massive globe of water the size of a van. I couldn’t see June all that well within its barriers, but I knew by the shadow she was in there, trapped as Scott walked like a sheriff at high noon across the parking lot of the construction site and out onto A1A.
Local cops were lined up behind their cars, their perimeter established, lights flashing all up and down the street. You could have jumped from the hood of one cruiser to the next for about a mile without any trouble at all. I mean, I wouldn’t need to, because I can fly, but if you really wanted to win a game of hot lava, that would have been the place to play.
“I’m a federal agent,” Scott called as he got close to the perimeter of local cops, lifting his FBI ID high in the air. “I have the suspect in custody.”
I heard one of the cops, a portly guy with a mustache straight out of the seventies, say, “You ever seen anyone get arrested in a big damned ball of water?” His partner shook her head.
“The suspect is surrendering,” Scott said, still keeping his hands high in case there was a misunderstanding. “There’s no need for any violence.” I got a feeling that by the ripple of muttering that went up and down the assemblage of cops, not many people took that instruction immediately to heart. I couldn’t really blame them; June had just poisoned two cops and helped wreck a third only yesterday. And that was in addition to a lot of other people that had gotten hurt through her and Elliot’s little drive.
Scott started to bring the bubble of water down closer to the ground. “I’m going to let her out to surrender to you—”
“I thought you had her in custody?” that same cop with the mustache asked.
“You don’t want the glory of the catch?” Scott asked with a smirk.
“Federal boy turning over a prisoner?” Mustache’s partner asked with a snort. “First time for everything, I guess.”
He set the bulb of water down on the ground and rolled back the top of the dome, letting it melt away to reveal June standing there, her hands crossed behind her head. She knelt down slowly and the mustached cop came up just as slowly. I saw a pair of heavy duty metacuffs in his hand. Good to see he’d come prepared. His partner came a few steps behind, a syringe of what I assumed to be suppressant in her hand. Even better.
Mustache had her cuffed in a few seconds, and his partner administered the dose of suppressant a few later, without a peep from June. She took it all in stride, and I could almost hear the collective sigh of relief from the assembled police once the drug had a few seconds to sink in.
“What the hell?” a familiar voice said, at last, as Andrew Phillips stepped out of the command trailer just below me. The local PD captain had come out first, but there was Phillips, slightly more rotund than when last I’d seen him, standing on the steps of the trailer and about to wade right in and take charge of the situation.
We couldn’t have that now, could we?
I darted down and yanked him up into the air, shoving a hand over his mouth so he couldn’t protest. We were a few hundred feet up in the sky a couple seconds later, far enough away from the assembled cops that it wouldn’t matter anymore if he screamed, because there was nothing they could do.
70.
June
They cuffed her and drugged her, the pinprick pain of that shot in her arm unpleasant, but not nearly as bad as she remembered from when she got them as a kid.
But then again, she was experiencing bigger pains right now.
“So,” the mustached cop that had cuffed her said in a drawling voice, “all that and you just gave up, huh?”
“Yep,” she said quietly. She almost didn’t want to say anything at all.
“Got anything to say about it?” his female partner asked. She was an older lady, probably in her forties. She had eyes like a bird, watching everything.
June thought about it. She’d heard what Sienna said. About redemption. About being so far gone that maybe it wasn’t possible to come back. Something about that brought to mind that guy on the beach, the one with the daughter, the one who had yelled at June. His face had turned blue, and he’d choked right there. Had he made it? She hadn’t wondered until now if he’d lived. She thought so, mostly thanks to Ell blowing the toxin out of his lungs, but …
No more running.
No more hiding.
“I’d like to make a full confession,” she said, feeling the weight of those cuffs on her wrists. Maybe someday she’d see the end of this. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe the thought of Ell dying, or of that man on the beach … maybe those thoughts would wake her every night for the rest of her life, in whatever hard jail bed she was sleeping.
Right now … she wasn�
��t really sure she cared. All she knew was that her running days were over, and for some reason, in spite of the uncertainty … there was something almost reassuring about giving in to the inevitable. It wasn’t peace, but she felt like maybe, just maybe, it was as close as she could hope for at this point.
71.
Sienna
“Oh, stop being a pain in the ass,” I said to Andrew Phillips as I dropped him off—gently—on the roof of a condo building two miles down Daytona Beach and came in for a landing behind him.
“You just abducted a federal agent,” Phillips said, as flat and emotionless as if giving me his coffee order. (He tried that once. It did not result in coffee for him.)
“Add it to the list, then, Andy.”
He stared at me blankly and went for his gun. The dumbass had gone with an under-arm carry, and it took him forever to pull it. By the time he cleared the holster and his suit jacket, I had closed on him and had my hand around the barrel. I flared hot and he made a little scream of surprise, letting go of the pistol.
I turned his gun to slag and tossed it behind me. Even if it was useless as a pistol, he could still have conceivably used it as a club had he gotten hold of it, and I didn’t need any more head injuries right now. “Okay,” I said, “are you done trying to escape for now?”
“No,” he said, and tried to bolt past me for a small shack-sized outgrowth on the roof that led downstairs.
I snagged him by the collar and spun him around, right back to where he started. “How about now?”
He whirled around to look at me again like a caged animal, as though he might start pacing behind the invisible line I’d just established as his cage. “What do you want, Nealon? Because this isn’t going to help your case, holding me hostage.”
“I’m not going to hold you hostage,” I said. “Believe me, I have absolutely no use for you.”
He didn’t relax, which was probably smart. He just watched me, looking for an opening that his bureaucratic ass would be extremely ill-poised to exploit.
“Here’s the deal, Andy,” I said. “You know I didn’t do that crap in Eden Prairie for no reason. My life was at risk. Those metas you clowns turned loose came after me—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, a little too loudly to be convincing.
“That’s a lie.”
He didn’t try to argue past it. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? The government’s prosecuting you, not me. And you just keep giving them more reasons. Like this.”
“I’m public enemy number one. I don’t think they need any more reasons.”
“You destroyed the Javits Center,” he said.
“All the things I’m accused of, up to and including assassinating the president, and you go straight to destruction of property?” I glared at him. “What do you know? Actually know, not the made-up crap you’re feeding the people around you.”
He met my gaze. Phillips was not a guy who was easily intimidated, and right now, hard as it was to tell, he was pretty pissed off that I was holding him against his will. “It doesn’t matter what I know or don’t know. All that matters is that you have been charged with a series of crimes that you’re going to answer for.”
“You know I didn’t do any of it, don’t you?” Something about the thought was vaguely reassuring, even though he didn’t so much as blink when I asked him.
“I know what you’re charged with,” he said. “The court may consider leniency if you were to turn yourself in—”
“Listen, jackass,” I said, “I’m not going to the Cube for things I didn’t do. Because you’d be forced to try and restrain me, and I think you know from experience, I’m not really the restrained type, in any sense of the word. I’m out here. I’ve been steering clear of conflict with your people, and you’ve been continuously running me through the mud. All right, I got it. When Harmon was in charge, you had to follow his lead. Fair enough. Now that he’s not, though—”
“Now that he’s not,” Phillips cut over me, “if you think you’ve made things better for yourself, you’re even more delusional than you were when you thought you could run a federal agency. I think we all know how that turned out.”
“Marvelously, compared to what you’ve done,” I said. “Let’s do numbers. How many metas work for you again? After you fire Scott, I mean? And how many men did you just send into a situation where they got their asses kicked? How many state lines did Elliot Lefavre and June Randall make it through before you actually decided to get off your butt and start treating them like a federal case? How many meta incidents are state and local governments having to farm out to private contractors—” I meant my little organization here, of course, “—because you don’t have the manpower, the expertise, or the inclination to help with them? How many times did headquarters get destroyed on your watch, oh brilliant administrator? Because I count two. And finally … how many most-wanted fugitives are standing in front of you right freaking now, with you unable to do a damned thing about it?”
He burned quietly in front of me.
“Yeah,” I said. “That wouldn’t have happened when I was in charge.” I just shook my head at him pityingly. “I’d tell you to stay out of my way, but we both know you’re too dumb to heed my advice. I’m not a threat to anyone but the same people you’re supposed to be chasing.”
“You can’t really believe we’re just going to let you wander around out there, doing whatever you like,” Phillips said. He never knew when to shut up, either. “That’s not how this works. The noose will tighten. It has to.”
“By all means, keep dedicating all your limited resources toward catching me,” I said. “The last president tried it, throwing entire teams of metas, my friends—telepathically brainwashed, I might add, drones, planes, missiles … everything he had, basically.”
It almost worked, too, Harmon said.
“You could see how that goes,” I said. “Or you could stop wasting my time and yours and get on with the business of actually, I dunno, policing people committing crimes that you know are happening rather than the made-up ones I’m charged with that you apparently know didn’t happen.” He flushed a shade of pink. “Up to you, really. But don’t be surprised if someday soon, your failures become so flagrantly obvious, and your successes so distant that even you can’t keep your job any longer. Best of luck, Mr. Phillips.”
And with a friendly wave, I stepped off the roof and shot off into the distance, leaving him there to find his own damned way down and back to the police cordon.
72.
Scott
The paperwork was going to be a nightmare, Scott realized, and wondered if turning June over to the locals might mitigate his part in any of it. “I’m out of here soon, anyway,” he murmured to himself as he lurked outside the command van, keeping an eye on June. She was sitting, head down, in the back of a police cruiser, for the time being. She’d been in there for about an hour and hadn’t shown any sign of wanting a fight.
A car came squealing up and disgorged Andrew Phillips, so furious that Scott fancied he could almost see a wavy cloud of steam forming over his scalp. Scott watched him with barely disguised amusement; Sienna had made it plain she wanted to have a conversation with him, and Scott had a suspicion he knew how well it would have gone.
“Do you know what just happened to me?” Phillips came stomping up, the perma-frown on his face so tight that it would have taken liters of Botox to relax it.
“You took your first Uber?” Scott tried to hold in the smirk. It was hard. Phillips had never been anything other than an ass to him.
Phillips got right up in his face, shaking a fat finger. “You listen to me … you’re done.”
Scott looked back at the special tactics team, some of whom were still drying out from the soaking. “I suppose you’ve got your new boys now … the, uh … wave of the future.” He kept a straight face while delivering the pun, but not easily.
Phillips’s face contorted. “I
may not be able to prove you attacked them … but I won’t forget this.”
“It’s okay,” Scott said, “I was going to resign anyway. And, judging by how quickly you drive people away, your new team of badass strongmen will last about six months before they realize you’re an assclown and resign, too. So … enjoy.” He waved at the driver of the car that had brought Phillips, trying to flag him down before he drove off.
“We’ll be watching you,” Phillips said, as Scott pulled open the car’s door. “If you’re helping her … we will eventually prove it.”
Scott just shot him a smile. “How? You just lost your last investigator, dumbass.” And he got in the car, giving a little wave as he drove off, putting an end to another chapter of his life.
73.
Sienna
“Hey,” I said as Scott walked into the hotel room where I was waiting for him. I’d showered off, changed into something very un-Sienna in preparation for losing myself in America again. Ahh, the glamorous life of a fugitive. “How’d it go with Phillips?”
“My days of government service are over,” he said, wandering in to lean up against the door frame to the bathroom, his tie loosened and his collar wide open. It was a much better look for him than the buttoned-up facade he maintained while a stooge. “Again, I mean.”
“Just as well, the culture in that place had gotten pretty crappy,” I said as I carefully applied eyeliner. I had to be extra, extra careful, even with my meta dexterity, because I had almost no experience applying the stuff. “Or so I hear. Obviously I haven’t worked there in a long time.”
Toxicity (Out of the Box Book 13) Page 24
