Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  Holloway stared back—for another minute, and that was all. “Fine,” he said, breaking off eye contact. “You want to win this pissing contest? You win. Cover yourself in piss.”

  “Why does it not surprise me that you don’t understand the difference between piss and glory? Get in the back,” I said, and he did, taking his sweet time to do so after stowing his gear. I watched him in the rearview the whole time to make sure he didn’t pull his gun on me. So much glory.

  I kept that eye on him the whole ride, realizing that next time I was going to pretend to be charitable and take the back seat myself. Really, though, my neck was just starting to get a crick in it from worrying he might frag me while he had a chance.

  13.

  Olivia

  “If there really was a guy named Troy McClure,” Veronika said as the cab bumped along Las Vegas Blvd, “and he’d really done a motivational film at one point called, ‘Get Confident, Stupid!’, I have to say, it’d basically be perfect for you to watch. Pick up some tips, maybe.”

  I blinked, trying to take in all of what Veronika had just said and coming up short on knowing who Troy McClure was—or wasn’t, based on the first part of what she’d said. “Why would I need a movie like that?”

  “Because you need confidence like I need to give Detective Norton a call later,” Veronika said. When she caught my puzzled look she just smirked. “You know what I mean?”

  “No,” I said, sure I didn’t want to know, either.

  “I’ll explain it to you when you’re all grown up,” she said. “You know, after you get that self-confidence problem solved. Not that it’d do you much good, since I can tell you play for the other team. Seriously, though, you should avoid dating until you get it ironed out, because any man who dates you is going to end up running over you and triggering some serious passive-aggressiveness explosions.”

  “I think we should stick to the case at hand,” I said, feeling my face threaten to spontaneously combust, and not from the desert heat. “Maybe go over the particulars—”

  “Okay,” Veronika said, a dusty vacant lot bouncing by to our left. “There’s a speedster in Vegas who tore up a convenience store. There’re your particulars. Now let’s get back to talking about why you think you suck.”

  I blanched. “I do not…suck.”

  “Not what I said,” Veronika said. “I said ‘why you think you suck.’ Big difference. I don’t think you suck at all. I think you have some serious self-loathing stuff going on there, though. Some twisted knots right in the middle of you.”

  “Thanks for the psychoanalysis,” I said. “Heavy on the psycho.”

  “Pfft.” Veronika dismissed me with a wave. “I’m the least psycho person you could meet. Here we are.”

  The cab pulled to a stop outside a hotel with a serious Italian influence. They had orange tiles on the roof of the square, European variety, and the stucco was all a desert sand color. My eyes slid over the sign out front: it was called the Toscano Palace.

  Air conditioners graced the windows. In the distance, to my left, past the empty lot, the Strip sat baking in the midday sun. Veronika looked at it, then the Toscano Palace, then back again. “What the hell is this?”

  I glanced at the Toscano Palace. “A motel?”

  “Rhetorical question, Brackett,” Veronika said. “Why are we staying in this pile?”

  “Reed said something about, uh, tightening the belt before I left,” I said.

  Veronika slid back her cotton jacket to reveal a tight, form-fitting skirt that hugged her lean hips. “Do I look like I need to tighten my belt?” She glanced down, and must have realized she wasn’t actually wearing one. “If I had a belt?”

  I shrugged. “It is what—”

  Veronika wore a pained expression. “Don’t ever say that in my presence again. I am not staying here. Come on.”

  “But—Reed paid for our rooms here,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes. “He didn’t pay for it personally, and he’s not going to be personally offended if you don’t stay here. I’m going to use my own money to check into a place a little more befitting my status as a metahuman superstar of law enforcement.” She flounced her way back toward the cab, flagging him down just as he started to move. She paused before putting her suitcase in the back. “You coming?”

  I thought about it. Going somewhere fancy with Veronika and paying for it out of my own pocket? Or staying in the place work had paid for—without Veronika.

  “Come on, Shygal, what are you waiting for?” She smirked. “Can’t afford the upscale life? Because I think I’m going to the Venetian, which is an actual Italian-style palazzo. You in or out?”

  “I can’t afford that,” I said, shaking my head. I probably could; Reed had been paying me well for over a year now, but I had a feeling I’d see the prices and almost die, because the reality of my “success” had not set in, not remotely.

  Besides, Reed’s talks about cutting expenses gave me a little nervous quiver in my belly. What if I found myself doing secretarial work again in the near future? Then this past year—and my increased salary—would be a distant memory before I knew it, leaving me only with what I’d been able to save. Which was a lot to me, but hardly enough to retire on.

  Plus…I’d have to go with Veronika.

  “Live boldly, and for the now,” Veronika said, holding the cab’s door open. “C’mon, kiddo. Let’s go live the Vegas high life.”

  I looked down and shook my head. “No, thank you.”

  “You know, the meek aren’t going to inherit a damned thing,” Veronika said, slipping into the cab. “Because the earth is going to be used up before you get it. Last chance to live a life without regrets.”

  Of all the things I’d missed out on in my life, I didn’t think I was going to regret this. “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Kiddo, you should really work on not adding to your personal pile of regrets,” she said, slamming the door and rolling the window down. With a little wave through the window, her dark glasses reflecting the image of the Toscano Palace, off she went, rolling back down the street the way she’d come.

  I offered a feeble wave of my own as she cruised out of sight, then let out a little sigh once she was gone. “Whew,” I said under my breath, “peace at last.”

  14.

  Sienna

  The twenty minutes or so from the New Orleans Airport into the city was passed in a fairly pleasurable manner, except for my constant watching of Holloway in the mirror for a gun in my back. Burkitt turned out to be a fairly decent conversationalist, and though not a local, he’d been stationed here long enough he knew his way around pretty well.

  There were about ten New Orleans PD cars still sitting in the fire lane beside Hotel Fantaisie, the tower where the shooting had been staged. Next door I saw another building being worked on, a tower under construction at least half the size of Hotel Fantaisie’s fifty or so stories. The construction crane disappeared under Hotel Fantaisie’s portico as we pulled up.

  I popped out and waved over one of the local officers, not even bothering to flash my badge. He came over dutifully, maybe even a little excited. “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “Better now,” he said, oozing admiration. His gold name badge read ‘Brook.’ “You here to solve this thing, Slay—”

  “Just call me Sienna,” I said, heading after Holloway toward the massive revolving door into the hotel lobby. Burkitt, apparently, had decided to wait with the car.

  The lobby was huge, a theater-sized screen against one wall of the lobby bar. There was seating radiating out from that, a coffee shop tucked into a quiet corner, and one entire wall was taken up by a long check-in desk that had about thirty or forty stations.

  A local cop pointed the way to the elevators, over in the far corner, to Holloway, so I just followed him. The place was pretty quiet, only a minimal line for check-ins, a pleasant hum in the air along with the smell of coffee and—distantly—alcohol. I tried to ignore the latt
er as I trailed Holloway into the elevator.

  My ears popped several times as the elevator raced up, a lot faster than I was used to. We arrived at the 40th floor without saying a word to each other, and I gestured to let Holloway know he should get out.

  It wasn’t hard to find the room in question. New Orleans cops waved us in the right direction, and off we walked, Holloway once again in the lead, the occasional muttered, “Slay Queen,” making its way to me. I tried to smile at anyone I heard it from, but it was getting thrown around a lot. As far as superhero names went, it beat the hell out of ‘Gravity.’ I was pushing Reed to adopt the moniker ‘Hurricane,’ but he wasn’t going for it. Yet.

  Hurricane and Slay Queen. It had a good ring to it, I thought. Too bad mine was just a stupid internet meme that would probably last until Tuesday before it faded away.

  The crime scene’s door was open, and a detective was standing at it, waiting. He was the very model of a cop show detective, in his fifties, had the associated gravitas, and a face that suggested he’d spent more time scowling at perps than smiling at his kids or wife—if he even had them anymore. I noticed when he raised his hand to point at something inside the room, his left ring finger was bare. Divorce, I would have bet. I felt like I saw that a lot from cops of his approximate rank and age.

  He acknowledged us when we got close, though I would have bet he got word of our arrival radioed to him by Brook or one of his fellows before we’d even left the lobby. “Parsons,” he said, extending his hand to Holloway, “NOPD.”

  “Holloway,” my “partner” said, pumping Parsons’ hand once.

  “Hello,” I said, trying to sound a little gruff, taking his hand lightly and giving it one good shake. “I’m Johnny Cash.”

  Parsons chuckled and motioned us to follow. “Through here.”

  The hotel room wasn’t particularly impressive for such a fancy hotel. It had a low ceiling, only about eight feet or so, but the windows spanned the whole wall. A circle of glass had been cut out of the middle of it. I gauged it at probably a foot in diameter.

  “Glad you came here first, though there’s not much to see,” Parsons said, looking over the place like it was his own personal fiefdom. “Assassin took the glass with them. No fingerprints on anything, like their hand oil didn’t exist.”

  “Chance for DNA?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Parsons said, “maybe. But we’ll get theirs and that of every other person who’s stayed in this room for the last six months, plus from the cleaning staff.”

  I’d had some basic forensic courses at Quantico during my crash course month, and that jibed with what I’d learned. “Powder residue?” I asked.

  “Not sure yet,” Parsons said. “We’re removing the window and taking it in, which means we’ll get residue from the outside, but it doesn’t look like she left any prints behind on the inside.”

  “You’re sure it’s a she?” Holloway asked.

  “We have surveillance film of her,” Parsons said with a nod. “About 5 foot 6, medium build, lean, but she’s got some curves, so…” He shrugged. “Yeah, we’re pretty sure.”

  “Hmm,” Holloway said. “Not a typical MO for a woman. Using a sniper rifle, I mean. She’s a frosty bitch. Literally, if that bullet was made by her.”

  “Not a lot else to see here,” Parsons said, nodding at the bed, which had been stripped. “She took her bedding with her in her suitcase. Same with the towels—”

  “Man, they are going to ding her credit card for all sorts of incidentals,” I said, then looked at him. “Speaking of—”

  Parsons just shook his head. “Credit card was in the name of ‘Betty Page.’ Address is here in New Orleans, but it’s total bunk, just like the name. No one’s heard of a Betty Page on that street.” Parsons blinked. “Not this Betty Page, anyway.”

  “It’s been a long time since Bettie Page’s heyday; they could maybe be forgiven for not having heard of the other one, either,” I said, looking over the room. “This really is a dry hole, isn’t it?” I walked over to window, looking down, trying to get a sense of where she’d been shooting.

  I found it pretty quick, and it was a long ways off. “Oof,” I said, peering down. It was a pretty good shot she’d made, even accounting for the miss. I’d done a little sniping practice in my time and I probably would have struggled to make this shot. In sniping you dealt with factors like windage and bullet drop that I’d never learned to account for. If she’d actually hit it, at this distance, it’d suggest she was pretty good. And by the account I’d heard, she’d have made it if not for a last-second movement by the governor.

  That made our assassin very, very dangerous.

  Holloway eased up at my shoulder. I cursed myself for losing track of him while I was looking over the scene. He could have taken a shot at me and I wouldn’t have realized it until my brains came exploding out my forehead. I eyed him sideways, but he didn’t seem hostile—for now. “Decent shooting except for the miss,” he said.

  “Mmmhmm,” I said, making way for him to move up to the hole in the glass and line it up for himself.

  He did, and grunted with what I think was grudging respect.

  “You ever make a shot like that?” I asked. “In Afghanistan?”

  He bristled. “How’d you know?”

  “You answer requests by saying, ‘Copy that,’” I said. “Army?”

  He nodded. “Airborne. Most amateurs would struggle with it, but it’s hardly impossible.”

  “Metahuman powers give you a boost,” I said, looking down, down, way down—over the Harrah’s Casino between us and the nondescript, government-style building by the shoreline. New Orleans had a definite feel to it, very different from any other city I could recall being in, at least in the US. It almost had a more European vibe in a way, in regard to the older buildings here. “They make it easier to steady your hand, give you more precise muscle control.”

  He nodded along. “I’ve heard that. The right rifle makes it easier, too. Could you make this shot?”

  I shook my head. “Not reliably, I don’t think. But I’m more practiced with small arms and shooting out to a hundred, two hundred yards. I trained for combat, not this sort of distance killing.”

  “Distance from target suggests dispassion,” Holloway said. “A desire to maintain that space, give herself room to maneuver, escape. It’s a professional job, not a personal one where she wants to get up close and see him suffer.”

  I shook my head. “That’s dime store psychology. I don’t think we can assume anything.”

  “Just a working guess to start from,” Holloway said. “I’m pegging this as a professional assassination. A political hit with a reason behind it.” He looked over at me. “You disagree?”

  “I neither agree nor disagree,” I said. “I’m not ruling anything out—yet. I want actual evidence before I rule out any motives.”

  He made a face. “Doesn’t look like there is much evidence.”

  I looked down, below, at the scene that was waiting, far in the distance, where the governor had been when he’d been shot at. “No,” I said, “it doesn’t look like there’s any at all.”

  15.

  When we were done in the hotel, we headed down to the scene of the shooting. Wind blew off the Mississippi river, ruffling a banner strung across two posts declaring FERRY GRAND REOPENING. Crime scene techs in suits were combing over the area, which seemed like a waste of time to me, but gave the abandoned area the look of a post-apocalyptic biohazard outbreak zone.

  The scene had been a hell of a lot less controlled, at least at the outset, what with a crowd of spectators trampling their way out of here after the shot was fired. The ground was upturned, trampled, what little grass there was having been annihilated in the exodus. It was mostly concrete, fortunately, though even that was tracked with mud.

  “Bullet impact was over here,” Detective Parsons said. He’d brought us down, and was pointing at a shattered piece of pavement just beyond the lect
ern. There was nothing there other than a little damp residue where the purported ice bullet must have shattered and melted.

  “You get a sample of this?” I asked, already pretty positive I knew the answer.

  “For whatever good it does,” Parsons said. “Lab might be able to trace where it was made if the water has any distinctive local elements to it.”

  I nodded. “The type of meta that controls ice? They can make it out of thin air by freezing the moisture. I wouldn’t expect they’d bother pouring a cup out of the tap, but you never know.”

  “What’s the name for this type?” Holloway asked.

  “Jotun, I think,” I said, a little hesitantly. “The first of them I met was literally called Jotun by older metas, and he was known as the frost giant of Norse legend. Patient zero for this type, near as I could tell.”

  “You think they’re related?” Holloway asked.

  “I doubt it, but maybe,” I said, shaking my head. As far as I knew, Old Bastard Winter didn’t have any relatives, though my knowledge of him was hardly comprehensive.

  “What happened to that guy?” Parsons asked. He sounded genuinely curious.

  “Died during the war,” I said, trying to close that particular topic of conversation. I caught a flicker in the way he looked at me after I answered, and I sighed. “I didn’t kill him. It was the other guys.” He relaxed a little, though I don’t know why. It wasn’t like I hadn’t racked a prodigious body count regardless of whether I’d done in Winter.

  “Well, that’s worth a look, genealogy-wise,” Holloway said, staring at the hole in the pavement like it held the secret of life.

  “To rule things out, sure,” I said. “But it’s a lot more likely this assassin was bottle-born.” Parsons sent me another curious look. “Product of the artificial serum that unlocks meta powers in normal humans who aren’t born with them.”

  “What’s the difference?” Parsons asked.