Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  “Good deal. I’ll text you the address.”

  “I need a little time to get ready,” I said, massaging the back of my neck. Had it been the slightly unconventional events leading up to bedtime or was I a little more stiff than usual? “I mean, I know I’m superpowered and all, but I’m still a girl and it’s going to take me a little while.”

  “I’m married, so I kinda figured,” Burkitt said with a laugh. “My wife told me to give you lots of advance warning, but I was balancing it with not wanting to wake you up too early. I’m about forty minutes out given the traffic, so you have some time.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll just meet you there.” I hung up and got to work.

  I’m not much of a girly girl, but I had acquired minimum standards of appearance in the years since I’d first left my house. After starting at the FBI (this round), I’d taken those up another notch without even being asked. I’d finally caved to a very minimal use of makeup. After years of people seeing photos of me without it, I found a small amount of base makeup and a little eyeshadow went a long way.

  Once I’d dressed and done all that, I moved the chair out of the way of the door, switched off the under-door alarm and removed it, tossing it in my suitcase with a thump. My holster went on my belt, and lemme tell you something—finding a pantsuit with belt loops big enough for a sturdy enough belt to securely hold a gun holster? Not the easiest game in town. Fortunately, I did all my shopping with this in mind.

  These are the perils of being Sienna Nealon. You have to shop with violence in mind, always. Which was also the reason I’d discovered early in my career that dresses really didn’t work for me.

  I looked out my peephole before I opened the door, and exited by looking down the hall in both directions first before walking out. I was normally a cautious person, but Holloway—damn his eyes, and his hands, and every other gropey part of him—really had me on edge. It occurred to me that a year or two prior, if this had happened, Holloway might have gotten a broken jaw or ended up dead for the shit he’d tried.

  Clearly, I was learning, or maturing or something. I should have ruptured his testicles, though. That would have taken some of the starch out of his shorts.

  I was still raging in my head as I rode the elevator to the lobby, the quiet whir of the machinery outside the box like a mechanical soothing device, as though it were trying to calm me down. It was hard to believe after all the crap I’d been through in my life that a drunken co-worker trying to molest me would have this much effect, but here we were.

  My phone GPS informed me that the restaurant Burkitt had chosen was just across the way from the hotel. I exited onto a back alley that had a massive parking garage looming a few stories over me. This was, if I remembered correctly, the route our assassin had taken when she’d left. I eyed the parking garage, which had yellow crime scene tape strung like banners over all the entries and exits. CSI vans were still parked all over, probably making the parking situation around here even worse given that they’d completely blocked the ramp. I saw eight cars circle while I walked down the alley, and my adopted New Yorker heart felt a pang of pity for them. This was why I didn’t bother driving in NYC. Also, I don’t like driving.

  The alley was a little dingy, opening up onto Magazine Street ahead. Magazine was long, stretching for what seemed like an infinite distance in either direction, off into the horizon as far as I could see. It was mostly older buildings, too, with a real sense of history. One of the buildings was some sort of plaster or concrete on the first floor and brick the subsequent three, with latticed windows placed every few feet. The next building over was a pinkish white style that I thought of as colonial, or classic New Orleans, like it was a manor house plopped right on the corner, complete with wrought-iron balconies draping the second, third and fourth stories.

  Everything was like that—eclectic, some places with an older feel mixed with the occasional dash of newer ones. And balconies with wrought-iron railings seemed prominent. It had real charm, a classic sort of feel unique to this place.

  The air held a little chill as I crossed Magazine Street to that pink building with the balconies and railings. It had a restaurant sign proclaiming it the Ruby Slipper. I confirmed the name was the one Burkitt had sent me via text. The place was humming when I came in, and to my surprise Burkitt was already sitting about five tables back from the hostess station. He waved when he saw me come in, his back to the wall.

  “Hey,” I said as I walked up. He rose to greet me, and I gave him a good once-over as I did so. He was what the spy community called a “grey man,” someone who blended in so perfectly that they just disappeared, didn’t stand out anywhere. He was perfect at it, really, and if I hadn’t been looking for him, he’d have faded right into the background.

  I sat across from him a little uneasily, and he picked up on it right away. “I’ve got your six,” he said, faintly smiling. He must have seen me look over my shoulder, which I’d done to check the approaches to me from behind.

  “Thanks,” I said. He’d figured it out, probably because he was the same way I was. Lots of FBI and law enforcement types were; you don’t sit with your back to the door if you can avoid it. It’s a good way to get shot in the back of the head. By saying he ‘had my six,’ he meant he’d watch my back. It was nice gesture, but…

  “What’s good here?” I asked, giving the menu a glance. It was a double-sided, laminated card about as long as my arm. It was splashed with wild colors, hues of red and orange, and had items on it like Bananas Foster Pain Perdu French Toast, which set me to drooling just reading the name and description.

  “Everything,” Burkitt said, still wearing that sly smile. “So…you want to talk about the case?”

  “Anything break in the night?” I asked, still looking at the menu.

  “Other than Holloway’s hopes of not going to bed alone?” Burkitt flushed as soon as he said. “Sorry. That was—”

  “It was funny, actually,” I said, chuckling under my breath. “Thanks for that.”

  He brightened a degree. “I have a dark sense of humor. I have the worst time going to funerals, because I have all these amusing riffs that I want to make, but know I shouldn’t.”

  I looked up at him for a second. “Such as?”

  He looked like I’d jabbed in the solar plexus with a stick, frozen in place, thinking. “Well, now you’ve called me out on it and nothing’s coming to mind.”

  “Think about it and get back to me on it, then,” I said, putting down my menu as the server approached. She greeted me without a flicker of recognition, had a harried look as though she had been overworked all her millennial life, and asked if we knew what we wanted. I ordered coffee and the French toast I’d had my eye on, and Burkitt did the same. He waited a good ten seconds after she’d cleared off before he spoke again.

  “So…the case,” he said, easing back to that topic. “There weren’t any breaks during the night, no.”

  “I wish there had been,” I said. “Holloway’s fingers. Those should have broken during the night.”

  Burkitt chuckled. “That’s a good one. And brings an interesting point—why didn’t you shellack him? I mean, you could have—”

  “I don’t know if you know this,” I said with great deadpan, “but after a two-year fight to the top, I just managed to get myself removed from the FBI’s Most Wanted list and straight into a top position with the bureau. I figure assaulting one of their agents, my co-worker, no matter how richly deserved, would probably result in a negative performance review and possibly my return to fugitive status.”

  “You think breaking the hand of a guy who’s groping you unasked is going to get you back in trouble?” Burkitt’s face was completely devoid of anything, feelings-wise. I could not tell which way he leaned on this question.

  “Or something,” I said. “It’s a vaguely defined fear on my part, probably prompted by traumatic memories of my two years running.” He still said nothing, so I felt compelled to elabora
te. “It was not the best time of my life.”

  Burkitt looked down at the perfect white tablecloth for a second, then cleared his throat. “Do you know what my last job with the bureau was?”

  “Afraid I don’t,” I said, forcing a smile. “I should get better at this whole ‘detectiving’ thing. If that’s not a word, it should be, because ‘detecting’ is too ambiguous and ill-defined for what we do.”

  “I worked financial crimes,” Burkitt said, looking me in the eye for a few seconds, then back to the table, where he proceeded to straighten up his bundle of silverware and napkin. “Three years in that job before I came to the New Orleans office, which was…a year and a half ago?” He thought about it a second. “I was working on one case most of the time I was there.” Now he did look at me, straight in the eye. “Nadine Griffin.”

  A little chill ran through me. “Oh,” was all I managed to say.

  “We worked so long to build a case against her,” Burkitt said. Now that he’d gotten it out, he wasn’t looking down anymore, he was looking straight at me, and I felt a little like I was speared by his gaze. “Then our office gets bombed, and the US Attorney’s office gets shattered, and suddenly our case is gone. Years of work and it’s wiped clean in the course of a day.”

  I didn’t say anything. I’d been in New York when that had happened. They’d called Nadine Griffin the Queen of Wall Street. She’d done a lot of dirty things in her time. Insider trading. Fraud. Corruption. But right at the top of the list for dirtiest things she’d done, as near as I could tell, was paying a fixer to destroy all the evidence against her via a two-pronged assault against the federal offices where all the evidence against her was held. For that, she’d hired my great-grandfather’s later employees, Yvonne, AKA the Glass Blower, as well as ArcheGrey1819, who handled the cyberattack portion of the show.

  “So, all this happens and suddenly we’re screwed,” Burkitt says, still keeping the eye pressure on me, but smiling now. “Our whole case is gone. Physical evidence, digital evidence, everything. Down the drain, along with our field office. I was one of the last ones out.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “When Griffin’s house burned down,” Burkitt said, “and she went missing?” He chuckled, low and amused. “We thought maybe she made a break for it. I mean, she’s still a person of interest even now, did you know that?”

  “I did not,” I whispered, a little hoarsely.

  “Because you can’t clear your name by destroying all the evidence, no matter what she thought,” Burkitt said. “We were going to get her on something; the SAC had decided it after the shit she pulled. We were going to nail her on parking tickets if we had to. But then she goes missing for no apparent reason, and…” He shrugged. “I mean…we all had our suspicions, of course. Everyone ‘knows,’ at least as much as one can know without actually knowing…she didn’t come to a happy end, did she?” He leaned forward. “Because it was killing me, like, literally killing me. I couldn’t sleep at night thinking maybe she got away. Even now, two years later, I still wake up sometimes wondering if she’s on a beach somewhere, living the high life.”

  I was sweating a little. Was it hot in here? I mean, it was Louisiana, but it was October and 70 degrees. But it felt hot. “I’m sure she got what was coming to her,” I mumbled, looking away, away from his eyes.

  Burkitt sat back and took a nice, relaxing breath. “I’m glad to hear you say that. Really, I am.”

  “Well, I’m not pleased that I felt compelled to say it.” I did not look up.

  “I’m not recording our conversation, Nealon,” Burkitt said, looking around. “Hey.” I looked up, and he was looking me right in the eyes. “I’m not. I just…needed some closure on that. You didn’t admit anything, okay?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, but it was hollow and lies and bullshit and we both knew it.

  Burkitt just grinned. “Of course not. Still…” He exhaled mightily. “I’m going to sleep so well tonight. You have no idea.”

  “Look, Burkitt,” I said, trying to rally myself back to acting like a normal person, and not one guilty of murdering Nadine Griffin—which I actually was, since I’d dropped her, locked in her safe room, into Long Island Sound. “I don’t know what you think of me—”

  “I think you’re a person who’s so obsessed with justice that you get the job done,” Burkitt said. “No matter what.”

  “I was,” I said, and now I could look him in the eye. “That’s exactly who I was. I started doing what I do to protect people. But you can’t protect people if you can’t provide some kind of retributive justice, some incentive for people who want to do bad things to not do them. The worst of us, well, they don’t respond to that, and so I figured you have to take them off the board before they threaten innocent lives.”

  “Sure,” Burkitt said. “We all—or almost all of us—acknowledge that’s the case, when lives are on the line.”

  “Except…I wasn’t just acting when lives were on the line,” I said, trying to give myself a lot of space to deny, deny, deny in the event he actually was recording our conversation. “I did wrong. I broke the law. I embraced retribution over actually seeking justice. I used my badge, the shield of the law that I carried at the time, even when I was working privately for city and state police forces, to pursue people by any means necessary.”

  “I like that, personally,” Burkitt said, leaning forward again. “You worked in the field long enough to know that sometimes, justice just doesn’t get served by the system.”

  “I know,” I said. “But let me tell you the other thing I learned over the last two years—it sucks when someone takes the system and uses it against you almost the exact same way you’ve been abusing it. I got depowered and strapped to a gurney and paraded in front of a show tribunal so banana republic that even the most power-mad, self-justifying dictator would have had to take a deep breath and go, ‘Wow. That is a seriously corrupt system right there.’ I got the full flavor of what happens when you put aside all the protections of the law to come after someone, throw out all the rules and toss the damned kitchen sink at them. And I hated it.”

  Burkitt sat back, looking a little impressed. “So, your time on the run made some kind of convert of you? As to the righteousness of the system? Which you admit was perverted against you?”

  “In a way,” I said. “I want to believe. That we can do good, that we can stop the bad guys without becoming them. That I don’t need to go out there and be the furious hand of brutal justice that I, um, occasionally might have been in the past. I want to believe that now that there are actual laws governing metahuman behavior, we can police the right way.”

  Burkitt kind of smiled under the smoky gaze he kept on me. “Nadine Griffin wasn’t a metahuman, and she got away with—literally—murder. We haven’t been able to pin anything on her. Not that she’s a huge priority at this point, being ‘missing’ as she is. But there’s just nothing to go on.”

  “Maybe Nadine Griffin is the exception that proves the rule,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Maybe she’s the sacrifice we have to make to do things the right way. I lost my due process rights; they got trampled all to hell when someone weaponized the system against me and ditched all those protections that we’re all supposed to have. That’s what I was doing to people like, uhm, you know. People. Vague, undefined people who I will not admit to—”

  Burkitt waved a hand. “Let’s just assume for purposes of our conversation that you’re talking about those people you were pardoned for back in the days before the truth about metas came out.”

  Thanks for the cover, I didn’t say, but he could probably see the gratitude in my eyes. “That’s exactly who I’m talking about,” I said, and again, we both knew it was bullshit. “We have these rights for a reason. We have that whole ‘let a thousand guilty men go free rather than imprison one innocent’ idea for a purpose. I’ve been on the receiving end of drone surveillance and airstrikes, been shot
at without warning by FBI agents, had the entire military and law enforcement apparatus of the US after me at various points, had Spec Ops guys try to bag and drag me in a foreign country—” Burkitt raised an eyebrow at that one. “Every single tentacle of the US government that could be used against me, they’ve used against me. A shadow justice system and courts. A particularly nonconforming prison. I could go on all day.”

  “And you think because of your experience,” Burkitt said, “the heinous criminal scum you deal with don’t deserve this kind of treatment?”

  “Some might,” I said. “But I want to believe in a system that affords them every chance—which I never got. I got railroaded for things I didn’t do, and the system worked against me because it was stacked against me. Not because of evidence, but because the people in charge decided to do it that way. I don’t like that. If they got me on evidence, okay. Fair and square, it’s done.” I sat back in my chair. “But they didn’t. And it burned.”

  “Not many criminals would take their arrest with such magnanimity,” Burkitt said, still smiling. “Most of them would feel the burn regardless.”

  “It doesn’t matter how they take it,” I said. “This isn’t about them, not really. It’s about us. It’s about the eye of the government, which is not all that different from the Eye of Sauron, turning on someone who doesn’t deserve it. Having been the recipient of the attention, the attacks, the injustice…that’s not the way it should be. And it terrifies me that it just might fall on someone who truly, truly doesn’t deserve it.”

  “That does happen sometimes,” he said, looking down at the table.

  “Then they deserve a chance,” I said. “And that’s why I’m here, now. Because I want the bad guys to face justice—but the right way. The way it wasn’t done with me.” Now it was my turn to look at the table. “Hell, that may be the only reason I actually agreed to take this job at all, in spite of the pressure. To prove to myself that it could be done the right way.”

  “Wow,” Burkitt said after a few seconds of silence. “I think I actually feel inspired by that.” He sat up a little straighter in his chair. “Like you just washed away some of the cynicism that’s been clouding my eyes for the last couple years. Huh.” He shifted, as though something uncomfortable had just happened between his ass and his seat. He put his hand in his jacket pocket and came out with his cell phone, staring at the screen for only a moment before he looked up, and before he even said anything, I knew breakfast was over.