Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14)

by Robert J. Crane

  I hung there above him in silence for a minute, cringing at what I’d just seen. “Friday?” I finally asked. “Are you all right?”

  He didn’t answer at first. Of course he wasn’t all right; he’d just plummeted to the pavement at high speed. I feather-glided down and crouched next to him, my worry escalating. “Friday?” I started to reach for him—

  “That … was … kittens!” he said, bouncing up, cracking his neck, and swelling his chest and muscles as he sprung to his feet. There was a little trickle of blood running down his lip, and he touched it with his finger and then licked it, grossing me out.

  “Stop saying that,” I said reflexively.

  “What? You didn’t like awesome, so you said ‘kittens.’ Now I like kittens and you don’t, so—I’m just thinking it’s because you’re a difficult person.”

  I stared at him, and strangely, my urge to kill was flat, even after that devastating personal assessment.

  Probably because it was true, Harmon said.

  “You’re not wrong,” I said and then waved him toward me as I headed around the corner of the mall. “Come on, let’s just go talk to Theo.”

  “Okeydoke,” Friday said, falling in behind me. We rounded the side of the mall quickly and then stepped onto the covered sidewalk out front. The place was clearly decaying, and in a decaying area. Weeds sprouted between the joints of the sidewalk, closed storefronts displayed prominent graffiti. Only three out of about twenty storefronts in the whole strip mall were even open—a lawyer’s office, a place with the name written in Spanish that I couldn’t decipher, and one that read, GYM in big letters on a sign that hung from the awning above us. It was the closest, fortunately, only about six doors down, and occupying what looked like a double storefront, as though they’d expanded when things around here had gone on the downturn.

  We came to the gym doors and I opened them up, popping inside to find a lady with dark hair behind the front desk. She said something in Spanish, and it wasn’t one of the five words I know: Uno, dos, tres, gracias and margarita, so I just nodded politely and said, “I’m here to see Theo.”

  She stared at me blankly for a second, and then nodded. “Si. Theo.” And she pointed to her left.

  “I’m here to get SWOLE!” Friday declared, and I turned back to see that he’d gone and inflated himself again, his body comically over-muscled to an extent that would have looked ridiculously out of place even in a Mr. Universe competition.

  The lady receptionist took him in with wide eyes, and I shook my head as I headed in the direction she’d pointed. “Come on, Bane, let’s just get this over with before someone calls the cops and reports you as a van committing a major parking violation.”

  “Whuuuuut?” Friday called after me as I headed round the bend into a free weight area. He trotted to keep up, having to dodge to keep from knocking over a bar that was already set up for someone to do some pretty heavy lifting.

  “Eyes on the prize, stupid,” I said, trying to get his pea brain focused on the task at hand. I noticed that this particular gym catered to a certain-ish ethnic make up, and spotting the black dude at the back of the gym working out with earphones in was kinda like playing a game of “Which one of these things is not like the other?”

  “Is that Theo?” I asked as Friday stomped along behind me, like a Tyrannosaurus rex in desperate need of an extinction.

  “How’d you know?” Friday chirped.

  “From your description combined with a general application of common sense.”

  “Yo! Theo!” Friday waved at him from halfway across the room.

  Theo perked up from where he’d been setting up the weights to do some serious curls. I mean, not as serious as my curls, but pretty good for most people. He wasn’t trying to load the weights so as to not out himself as a meta, but he was well within the realm of challenge for a normal human, a hundred or so on each dumbbell.

  While I was admiring his weights, kinda wishing I was doing some lifting of my own, Theo took one look at Friday and turned to bolt. He was about halfway through the large free weight room, fifty feet or so from the rear door marked by a green, faintly glowing EXIT sign when he took off.

  “You bastard,” I said and reached down, scooping up a free weight from a nearby rack and spinning once to hurl it like a discus.

  It shot across the room like a homing missile and caught Theo right in the back of the knee. It hit him just as he was about to take a step and it ripped his leg right out from beneath him. His body followed the sudden momentum and he got all tangled up and hit the ground, rolling into a rack of weights that rattled as they threatened to fall.

  “Theo!” Friday said, and he turned to me with mouth-gaping astonishment. “What did you do that for?”

  “Oh, shit!” I said. “I saw him bolt and I just forgot—shit. See, this is the problem with not being myself.” I fluffed my jet-black hair, so very un-Sienna, by several shades. Also, my attire was urban hipster all the way, down to the plaid flannel shirt and old work boots. “I lose the intimidation factor that causes people to freeze in place in fear.”

  “I think he’s intimidated now,” Friday said as we picked our way between weight sets to Theo, who was rolling around, clutching his knee and moaning. Friday knelt down next to him. “Theo, it’s me, Bruce. You okay, buddy?”

  Theo had his eyes pinched tightly shut until Friday spoke, then he opened one a slit to look up. “Bruce? Bruce who?”

  “Bruce Springersteen, man,” Friday said, but that only prompted Theo to raise his eyebrow a little higher. “You know … from Desert Storm?”

  “I was never in Desert Storm,” Theo said, still grimacing in obvious pain. Then he stopped, his eyelids fluttered. “Oh. Shit. You mean—oh, you’re that idiot from when I was with that sketchy, supposed spec ops group that took on any meta they could get their hooks into?”

  I looked down at Friday. “This explains a lot about how you got hired.”

  “What?” Friday almost bellowed. “We were totally elite.”

  “Elite nothing,” Theo said, still holding his knee. “We were a bunch of posers except that one guy.” He hissed through gritted teeth, stretching his leg. “What was his name? Gary?” He looked right at Friday. “You know, I didn’t even recognize you without the mask. You just looked like another one of these jokers I owe money to, come to collect.”

  “Good news, we’re not here about any money you’re owed. Bad news …” I eyed his leg, “… I might just have broken your leg anyway.”

  “Well, I think they’re aiming to kill me at this point, so a leg’s not so bad,” Theo said, eyeing me warily. “So long as you stop there.”

  “Yeah, I’m done,” I said. “Sorry. People run, I get this automatic instinct to stop them. It’s reflexive, you know, like a dog chasing a moving car.”

  “Well, then that outfit that hired us back in the old days would just love to get their hands on you,” he said, then paused. “Wait … are you the girl that was working with us?” He looked me up and down. “No. You’re too young. Too pretty, too.”

  “Sweet talker,” I said. “I already told you I’m not going after that other leg, so you can lay off the flattery. Unless you want to keep going, because I’m not going to throw a weight to stop you.” People never complimented me anymore.

  You’re incredibly vicious, Wolfe said.

  I told you repeatedly that I like your newly toned shoulders, Eve said.

  I admire your ability to destroy your relationships with the people you care about most, Harmon said. There’s no one else I’ve met who can truly salt the earth in a relationship as well as you.

  Thanks, dickweed, I said. I’m working on that, you know.

  Yes, and you’ve made marvelous progress, Harmon said. How long has it been since you talked to that brother of yours?

  “Soo …” Friday said conversationally, “… how’ve you been? Other than the debt to mobsters problem, I mean.”

  Theo was almost done nursi
ng his injury, and the gym was kinda settling back to normal after the initial rush of people heading for the door to get the hell away from our little altercation. “All right, I guess,” he said. He sucked air between his teeth painfully. “Can’t complain. You know, other than that thing with the owing money.”

  “Got a job?” Friday asked.

  “Bouncer at a club on weeknights,” Theo said. “You?”

  “I was working for the government for a while,” Friday breezed, “but I kinda had a falling out with my boss’s boss, so I told them to stick it and bailed on that shit. Crappy job anyway.”

  “Pay good?” Theo asked.

  “Decent,” Friday said. “Better than we got back in the old days.”

  “Yeah, nobody paid nothing back then,” Theo said, “unless you were like—well, you know. He was raking it in, I bet.”

  “You talking about Greg?” I asked.

  Theo looked at me like I’d sworn at him, except I doubted he would have been nearly so offended if I had. “Yeah, that was his name. I’ve been trying not to say it these last few years, guess I forgot it somewhere in there.”

  “What, is he like Voldemort?” I asked. “Is he going to appear if I say his name? Because that would actually explain him better than any other theory I have right now.”

  Theo looked around like he expected exactly that. “Man, I don’t know. He could, though. That dude …” He stopped scanning the room and looked around. “… That dude was crazy. The things he could pull off … I ain’t never seen nothing like that.”

  “About that,” I said, getting to the point, “Friday—err, Bruce here … says that back in the day, you took off your blindfold when you weren’t supposed to. Saw something that Greg didn’t want you to see.”

  Theo stiffened up and started looking around again, full blown paranoia setting in. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “How much would it cost for you to suddenly, unexpectedly, realize what I’m talking about and cough up the story I need?” I asked pleasantly.

  Friday frowned, squinting at me. “Wait, are you offering to bribe him?”

  “He’s not a cop, Friday,” I said, “so it’s not a bribe. It’s a cash payment in exchange for him telling us a story. I’m paying him to be a storyteller, like in the days of old when humans sat around fires and gave the guy with the good stories a piece of meat in exchange for keeping them distracted from the reality of their shitty lives and inevitable deaths in their twenties at the vicious jaws of nature.”

  “Ohh,” Friday said, nodding. “That makes sense.”

  “How much you offering?” Theo asked. He wasn’t cradling his leg anymore, and his attention was wholly on me.

  “How much do you want?” One thing I knew about negotiation with small-timers who were desperate: they either never want as much as you would think they would, or they ask for the whole damned world and you can grind them down to a reasonable amount. Theo, tragically, struck me as small-timer all the way, a victim of circumstance and an intellect that was probably only marginally more impressive than Friday’s. Like that was some kind of accomplishment.

  “A thousand bucks,” Theo said. “Cash. Right now.”

  “Five hundred,” I countered. I had the thousand, having picked up a packet of cash at the safe house when I’d grabbed my new phone, but if I caved immediately, he’d think he’d been taken advantage of, get greedy, and immediately ask for more. Which would prompt me to threaten and possibly beat him for going back on our deal, doing no one any favors.

  Theo’s eyes darted as he considered my offer. “Eight hundred.”

  “Seven fifty,” I said, “final offer. And maybe I’ll pay for a meal at the Mexican restaurant around the corner.” I’d seen it when I came in for a landing. It looked festive. And they probably had margaritas, my favorite Spanish word.

  “Deal,” Theo said, and offered me a hand. I yanked him to his feet quickly, before my powers had a chance to work on him, and he put a little weight on his leg, testing it. It didn’t collapse. “Why are you guys coming around now, looking for info on Greg?”

  “Because he’s trying to k—” Friday started to say, and I smacked him in the kidney hard enough to make him shriek and bend backward, writhing through the pain on his tippytoes.

  “Because I want to hire him,” I lied, watching Theo for reaction. He hadn’t been looking at Friday when I’d swatted the dumb bastard; the last thing we needed was a fearful Theo hearing the words, “Because Greg is trying to kill me!” and deciding to go back on our bargain. Theo stared, perplexed, at Friday’s contortions. “He’s passing a kidney stone right now,” I said to explain it away.

  Theo seemed to take that explanation in stride. “All right, let’s go eat and have a talk.” He didn’t look super pleased about the deal, but then, he was caught between a rock and a hard place. He didn’t really want to tell us what was going on with Greg, but clearly, being in the ranks of the economically disadvantaged had put a few screws to him as well. He motioned toward a back door to the gym, the one he’d been headed toward when I took his leg out from under him.

  “After you,” I said, and as soon as he turned his back, I grabbed Friday’s ape-like head and pulled it close to me, as though whispering my dreams into a seashell before casting it into the ocean. “Say nothing.” And I let him go, following after Theo in hopes to get some damned answers about this magician meta who’d been troubling me all day.

  28.

  Augustus

  “Jamal?” Reed called across the bullpen. We’d all scattered after the meeting, heading back to our desks to tug our own individual threads. Reed’s question was not a question; it was a request for an update, and we all knew it, our heads down as we pretended to work but listened in. Most of us were metas; it’d be hard not to listen in to a shouted conversation.

  “She’s not answering,” my brother called back. Like he couldn’t have just spoken at a normal volume and had everyone hear him anyway. We followed weird formalities.

  “Let me know when you get her,” Reed said, and turned his attention to J.J. and Abby, in their shared cubicle just across the way from mine. “J.J.?”

  “Reed, don’t bleed,” he said, and I wondered why the hell he would say such a thing before remembering they had some kind of joke about name rhyming between them. “I got no twenty on Cassidy so far. She’s a smart girl, y’know. Good at hiding her footprints. Might want to put Jamal on that and me on dialing Sienna, you know, smarter division of labor—”

  “I’ve got a location on Ellis,” Abby said, and you could have heard a pin drop.

  “You … found the smartest woman in the world?” J.J. asked, and I wondered if he was going to insult his girlfriend and get himself kicked out of bed for a year by expressing skepticism. Fortunately, for him, he didn’t: “This is why I love you!” he exclaimed with pure joy.

  “Well, that and the thing with the—”

  “No one else needs to hear about that,” J.J. said quickly, saving us all from a potentially very disturbing detail of their love life.

  “Cosplay and fantasy are very natural things,” Abby said matter-of-factly, ending the stay of execution for those hoping to maintain the good-hearted fiction that those two never knocked boots. “Costumes—”

  “Please stop,” Jamal said.

  “You need a girlfriend,” Jamal,” Abby said pityingly. “I know someone I could set you up with. If you’re interested.”

  “You know what I’m interested in?” Reed asked, sounding like a boss from a fifties sitcom that had lost patience with the banter. “Cassidy Ellis’s location and nothing else. Just the facts, none of your personal business.”

  “Reed’s an old school stoic like that,” J.J. said.

  “Am I an old school stoic, too?” Scott asked. “Because I’m cool with not oversharing personal stuff.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Veronika is for,” I agreed.

  “Cassidy. Ellis.” Reed said again.
>
  “You’re not going to believe this,” Abby said.

  “I’m willing to believe anything if it keeps us on this conversation instead of the one that keeps rearing its ugly, cosplaying head,” Jamal muttered so that only us metas could hear him.

  “—but it looks like Cassidy is right here in the Minneapolis area,” Abby said. “She’s in Richfield. Twenty minutes away.”

  “I’m on this,” I said, barging for the door.

  “I’ll go with you,” Scott said, jumping to his feet.

  “I’m the captain, I get to go on the damned away team—” Reed said.

  “—I am not staying behind here,” Jamal said, snatching his coat and barging for the exit.

  “Oh, wow,” J.J. said as we all fled for the exit, “who would have thought all it’d take to get a bunch of big, strong, badass meta policing dudes to flee was to just talk about naughty stuff?”

  “I figured that one out a while ago,” Abby said as the four of us turned the corner into the reception area. Still, I could faintly hear the squeak of one of their chairs, and the smack of someone’s lips on a cheek as Abby sighed, “Alone at last.”

  “Who wants to drive?” Reed asked, stepping up his pace and throwing up the front door for us. The receptionist, a local girl named Casey, looked at us quizzically as we all practically threw ourselves out the front door like a bunch of clowns piling out of a little car.

  “I got this,” I said, motioning toward my black Mercedes E300, parked in the front row.

  “And you gave me shit about a Ferrari,” Scott said as we made our way to the car.

  “I’m willing to declare a blanket forgiveness for all shit given provided we all never talk about the geek sex horror that we nearly witnessed back there,” I said.

  “Agreed,” Scott said, entirely too quickly, as I stepped down into my driver’s seat.

  “Witnessed,” Reed agreed.

  “So sworn, or whatever,” Jamal threw in.

  Once we were all settled in, I let the uncomfortable silence hang for just a minute before popping it with a kinda obvious question. “None of us has the address, do we?”