Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14)

by Robert J. Crane

  Doing the mechanical maintenance on all these things, all his wonderful toys … it was practically a full time job, but Greg treated it as an aggressive hobby, demanding of his time. Sometimes he wished he could have a little more help on these things, but … well, it was probably better that Morgan kept to the house now. This wasn’t a fit place for nearly anyone, and certainly not someone tasked with the care of a child.

  “I thought I heard you come back,” Morgan said, appearing as suddenly as he might have if he’d wanted to. “You didn’t call.”

  “I took the SR,” he said, waving a tool at the black body of the plane. “Too high for cell phone coverage until I was on final approach, and by then …” He waved the implement again, trusting she’d take his meaning, which was that he needed both hands to fly the plane to a safe landing.

  “How much longer do you think she’ll run?” Morgan brushed her dusky auburn hair back, then folded her arms. She looked like she was anticipating something.

  “The program was canceled in ’98. I was able to acquire a modest amount of replacement parts and supplies, but … not too much longer, I expect.” He dropped the tool, setting it down with a clank in the massive box and shutting the drawer. Trying to perform even ordinary maintenance while conversing with Morgan would probably result in negligence on his part. It wasn’t as though he serviced this plane every day, and his hands weren’t as practiced at it as perhaps they should have been.

  “What will you do then?” Morgan asked.

  Greg frowned. He wasn’t quite sure where she was going with this. “I could switch to the Concorde full-time, I suppose. I managed to pilfer enough things to keep it running for another fifty years.”

  Morgan’s eyes flashed, and she moved past him to stroke the forward landing gear on the Blackbird. “You think you’ll still need to be flying all over the globe in fifty years?”

  Greg felt his face twist, unasked, into a hard frown of concentration. “The money doesn’t just keep flowing in if I’m not working, Morgan. As careful as I’ve been with our investments—”

  “I thought they were performing well.” Not accusation, but disappointment.

  “They are performing modestly well,” Greg said. “But not well enough that I would feel confident stopping work.”

  “What about doing something else?” she asked, breaking contact with the forward landing gear. “Something safer? Something … closer to home?”

  Greg made a gesture at the Blackbird, and the Concorde parked down the row. “I have taken measures to make certain that I’m never more than a short commute from home, you know that.”

  “Not when you have to fly around the world.”

  “I seldom work outside the US,” Greg said. “I’m home almost every night, and often for weeks at a time between contracts. I don’t understand where this sudden querying comes from—”

  “I’m worried about you,” Morgan whispered, stepping up close to him. She didn’t have to look up to look him in the eyes, and that did bother Greg from time to time. She actually looked down just a little bit, sometimes. “Did you know that Eddie cried for an hour after you left? After you blew up at him?”

  Greg let out a sigh of annoyance. “He was prattling on about that stupid idea of keeping lions as pets. Someone needed to disabuse him of that foolish notion before—”

  “He’s five,” Morgan said, finally breaking loose a little on him. His wife wasn’t the most emotional woman, but she let a little out now. “Five, Greg. Not fifteen, not twenty-five. Five years old. And he wants a pet.”

  “Perhaps a pet rock might settle him some.”

  “He wants something furry because he thinks it will love him in a way his father doesn’t,” Morgan said, and though she spoke without accusation, Greg felt a certain prick as the blow landed home.

  “I …”

  “I’m sorry,” Morgan said. “I didn’t mean to hit you with that. It’s just …”

  “You’re the one who picks him up,” Greg said. “I can’t help it if he’s weak.”

  “He’s a child,” she said softly. “You could take it a little easier on him.”

  “This is just a difference in approaches. Morgan, we chose these roles when we decided—when you wanted to have a family.” She deflated a little at his mention of her being the driver of that decision.

  “You miss the good old days before Eddie?” Morgan asked, and it was hard to tell whether she was nostalgic or hurting, perhaps, for seeing Eddie mentioned so casually, almost cruelly, as if he were an unwanted thing by Greg.

  “You were a good partner to me when we worked together,” he said, and Morgan casually brushed her hair back, stroking it self-consciously. “Working alone is … more solitary. Perhaps less enjoyable, though it still has its perks.” The quiet was a benefit, he thought, away from the decibel level that Eddie brought to any room he entered. “We have different pressures upon us now. I wouldn’t wish to be in charge of Eddie’s day to day care and I doubt you’d want to take up the job again, working without me—”

  “I wouldn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “I’d rather you not be doing it, either.”

  “It pays the bills,” he said, understating it.

  “It gets you out of the house, away from us, and gives you something to do,” she said quietly.

  “Not away from you,” Greg said quickly.

  “You always told me you wanted to be a father.”

  “I always did,” Greg said.

  “Until you had a child and realized it wasn’t like in the movies? That it wasn’t all love and sweetness and good parts? That it’s exhaustion and cleaning up vomit in the middle of the night and—”

  “And having to listen to inane talk of ‘bottle flips’ and Minecraft and heaven knows what else, yes,” Greg said. “I found it easier to relate with Eddie when he was a baby, and his primary mode of communication was cooing and filling a diaper.” He looked toward the exit door at the far end of his workshop. “I understood the basic needs—fill his belly, empty his diaper, put him down for a nap. Perhaps hold him for a while. I don’t love that, but I understand it—” Greg’s emotions burst out in a flare of anger. “But this—these things that he does now—the craven, desperate attention seeking—”

  “He loves you, Greg,” Morgan said. “He wants your approval. Your notice.”

  “Well, he’s not going to get it like that,” Greg said. “How can I approve of such stupid frivolity? Lion pets and other such idiocy? You know what he told me last week? That he wanted to be Iron Man when he grew up. As though that’s a career choice you can educate yourself toward—”

  “He’s a child. Try to show some understanding.”

  “I don’t understand, Morgan,” Greg hissed. “He’s gone beyond my understanding now. He makes no logical sense. When I was his age, I wanted to be an engineer, like my father—”

  “Well, we can’t tell him what you do,” Morgan said.

  “What we used to do together,” Greg said.

  Morgan sunk slightly. “I asked you to find another line of work when I left.”

  “Nothing pays like this,” Greg said. “Nothing I can do. There is no other out for me. You want to live in this house? Send Eddie to these schools? Not accumulate enough debt to bury us over our heads? This is what needs to be done.”

  “You haven’t even looked,” Morgan said. “Maybe the government—”

  “They pay peanuts, comparatively,” Greg said.

  “Compared to the field where you have to kill people,” Morgan said. “Kill them. For money. Snuff out human lives in exchange for cash—”

  “You weren’t this sanctimonious when you were in the thick of it with me. And you know damned well we didn’t kill any innocent people, Morgan.”

  “We killed them when they were doing innocent things, though,” Morgan said. “Don’t you remember that man in the park? Who had a brain aneurysm, unexplainable?”

  Greg resisted the inclination to smile. “How c
ould I forget? It was some of your finest work. He was a drug lord, if I recall. Looked like natural causes.”

  She stared at him like she was examining a bug. “You sound like Sam, so proud of doing it that way.”

  “You used to be proud of a job well done,” he fired back. “Comparing me to Sam, though … that’s low.”

  “It felt right,” she said. “I’ve changed. And if you have, it’s because you’ve gotten colder, darker. Like—”

  “Don’t compare me to Sam again,” Greg said, raising his finger to point at her. “I’m not like him. Which is why I don’t work with him anymore.”

  “None of this has turned out like I hoped it would,” Morgan said quietly, look up, high above them, to the ceiling somewhere in the distance.

  “Life never does,” Greg said.

  “Spare the philosophical bullshit,” Morgan said. “I should have known it would go this way, as hard as I had to fight to get you onboard with even having Eddie—”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t ready to give up the life I’d grown accustomed to,” he said, temper rising.

  “You were ready at the time,” Morgan said. “But now that you know what you’re in for, now that things have gotten tough, it’s like you’ve withdrawn. We truly are on different roads now. And we’re getting farther apart all the time, Greg.”

  Greg just stood there, strangely frozen. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  She stared back, unmoving. “What you’re doing … the way you’re becoming? It’s carrying you away from us.”

  “I’m home every—”

  “Stop being so damned literal about everything!” she almost screamed at him. “I’m not talking about how much you’re physically present. I’m talking about how much you’re mentally present. About how you’re not here—really here—for Eddie. About how little patience you have for him, because your patience is all spent in other activities, or maybe because you’re simply not choosing to understand your own child the way you try to understand the people you hunt to their deaths.”

  “What do you want from me?” Greg shouted, all the frustration finally boiling over in one exquisite explosion of emotion. He preferred to keep these things contained under at least a veneer of control, but Morgan seemed to encourage this—this hemorrhage of emotion, as though emotional incontinence were something to be gloried in rather than abhorred.

  “I want you to be a family man first and an assassin—not at all, probably. It’s not good for you. You cheapen human life—”

  “We used to—cheapen it together,” he finished lamely. It sounded stupid even to his ears. “We used to be in this together, Morgan.”

  “I’m not with you on this anymore,” she said. “What we did … Greg, it was … we took other people away from their families. With some distance … it gnaws at me. Every day. And I’m not saying we turn ourselves in or anything, but … I wish you would stop.” She lowered her voice. “I don’t ever want you to be like Sam. To enjoy it like Sam does. And because it seems as though it’s an escape from your life and your problems here … it feels like you’re starting to.”

  “Do you wish the money would stop coming in, too? Do you wish we would lose our house? That we would have to move to—to a shitty school district and—and—” he started to stutter, “—and live in a shack and—”

  “Is that what a human life is worth to us?” she asked quietly. “It’s okay for us to live in a lovely slice of the American dream—four bedrooms, two baths, manicured lawns—and all we have to do is commit a blood sacrifice for it every once in a while. Execute a few people a year, and it’s all taken care of. They die so we can live in luxury. You like equations, Greg—how does that balance strike you? Is X worth Y? Their death worth our life of luxury?”

  There was something in Greg’s chest like a slow grinding of metal on metal. “I don’t know how else to provide—”

  “Then maybe this isn’t worth being provided, if that is what you have to do to get it,” Morgan said. “If you’re going to pay to finance our lives with other peoples’ blood … I don’t think we should live like this. Not anymore. If that’s the sacrifice in order to keep you from having to—to murder others—then let’s just make the trade. Yes, we’ll move to a smaller house. Yes, we’ll probably be in a less impressive school district. Oh, no. Our little suburban dream won’t be flawless—except it wasn’t to begin with because we’ve been cheating, we’ve been building our perfect little lives on the wreckage of other peoples’. Greg, we can’t—I can’t live like this anymore.”

  “You need to stop this,” Greg said, waving a finger at her. “This is—it’s like a disease, this emotion you’re grappling with. It will spread. You say, ‘We can’t do this anymore’, today. But tomorrow, after I give up this—this work—it’ll morph. ‘We need to atone’, you’ll say, because these thoughts, unchecked, will metastasize. And soon, you’ll be saying we need to confess. To go to jail for—”

  “I’m not saying that—”

  “Not yet—”

  “I am not—don’t you see what you’re doing?” She sagged. “Don’t you see the toll this is taking on us? You don’t get lighter and happier as the years pile on, Greg. Eddie should be a bright spot in your life, but your soul—your mind—they’re all tied up in dark business, and it’s eating you alive. You can’t kill people during the day and just—leave it out here at night to pick up tomorrow morning. You carry it with you, always. Everything except the guilt, apparently.”

  “I don’t feel guilt because I choose not to feel guilt,” Greg said, lowering his head to stare at the hard metal floor. It had a speckled sort of sheen. “Anything you feel is an emotional, chemical reaction to stimuli. This remorse, for instance. You could shut it right down if you wanted to badly enough. We used to talk about this all the time when we worked together—”

  “And it was always your philosophy, not mine,” she said. “But assuming it’s true … how do you explain the emotions you display when you blow up at Eddie? Shouldn’t it be easy to account for nonsense from a child and just … adjust your parameters for it?” She said every word with dripping sarcasm. “So it doesn’t smash the emotions of your son?”

  “It’s better that he learns to live with disappointment now,” Greg said after a few seconds. “To understand the importance and rigor of controlling himself. It’s good … training for life.”

  “Sadly … I think you really believe that,” Morgan said, and she folded her arms in front of her and backed away, leaving him to his maintenance and repair, alone as ever.

  27.

  Sienna

  East Los Angeles was looking pretty dusty and worn as the sun was heading low ahead of us. The sunset caught on a glassy building in downtown LA and gave me a good reflected glare in the eyes for a few seconds until I altered my course to compensate for it.

  Friday was still dangling limply from my grasp, trying desperately not to talk to me, like that was some kind of punishment for me.

  I didn’t want to drop him to check my GPS, so I slowed my pace, trying to work out where my destination was from the overhead map I’d studied briefly before setting out on this quest. I was usually pretty good with this sort of thing, spatial memory, but using a GPS was quicker. Still, for the occasions when my passenger was obnoxious but finally silent, and I didn’t want to break the equilibrium, it seemed acceptable to try to go on memory for a bit before yielding to checking my phone.

  Once I’d circled East LA a couple times, I was pretty sure I’d locked on to the general area of the gym that Jamal had flagged as Theo’s current location. I couldn’t check my phone to be sure Theo was still there, but that was okay, because I had his residence address too in case he wasn’t at the gym. That would require a little more GPS work; residential neighborhoods were much less differentiated on overheads than strip malls and the like.

  “Ah ha,” I muttered as I caught sight of a long, L-shaped mall that looked a hell of a lot like the one I’d set as our
destination. I steadied us as I flew in overhead, preparing the swift descent that was always required to keep my visibility to a minimum. Jetting toward the ground at a couple hundred miles an hour to come in for a landing behind a commercial building carried its own risks of sighting, but more acceptable ones than slowly drifting to the ground like a feather on a breeze or something.

  Friday was still being quiet, and I took that as a personal challenge now that we were almost there. I set us up, prepared to drop into the weed-choked parking lot sandwiched between the mall and the high fence behind, only a few employee cars to mark its use. The front parking lot wasn’t close to full either, but I didn’t really care about that. The fewer people, the less likelihood there was of me getting spotted and phoned in to a police force that was probably nominally still looking for Sienna Nealon.

  I turned headfirst and accelerated toward the ground, clutching Friday under the arms. My fingers and wrists were cramped from holding his ass up a lot of the day, and as we shot toward the earth, he went limp in my grip for a second. I heard a snort from him and realized …

  That son of a bitch had gone to sleep in my arms.

  He woke with a jerk and became aware of our descent about a second later, letting out a long, loud, girlish scream that hit an upper register that would have sent a banshee running in the opposite direction. “Shut up, you idiot!” I shouted into his ears as we rocketed past the roof of the mall and I applied the brakes.

  Friday started to writhe in panic as I slowed us from a couple hundred miles an hour to zero in the space of a couple seconds, and he escaped me about ten feet from the ground and headed straight down, fall uninterrupted.

  He took the landing in a big old bellyflop, swelling as he struck the pavement. I actually felt bad for him as he smacked into the asphalt in a slap that was only just quieter than a gunshot. He bounced about a foot and came back down, neck snapping back from the impact. He crashed again and stayed down this time, splayed out on the dark pavement like a suicide jumper who’d taken a dive from the top of a skyscraper.