Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14)

by Robert J. Crane

  “We can call your friends again,” Friday said.

  “Uh, no,” I said. “We need to keep them completely away from me now.” There was no way I was going to bring any more linkage between myself and them for the FBI to question. Jamal was savvy enough to cover his tracks thus far, I thought, but I suspected all my old friends would be under total surveillance now, if the FBI had any brains among them (and they did, in spite of Phillips being a serious downward drag on them in that regard). They’d be all over my friends’ lines of communication by now, and the quickest way to lead them right back to me would be to call Jamal or any other employee of the agency.

  After all, when they were escalating to the point where they were probably just going to shoot me the next time they got a chance, what the hell was listening in on my friends' conversations compared to that?

  “I don’t want to talk to Chase,” Friday whined.

  “Why not?” I bet this would be good.

  “Because, uh … we had a bad breakup.” He nodded, as though reassuring himself. “Yeah. Really bad. Epic. Makes Los Angeles last night look like a peaceful night in the Pacific Northwest.” He made a face like he’d tasted something bad. “But not like my last night in the woods in the Pacific Northwest, what with the getting shot by Greg and all.”

  “We have to go see her,” I said.

  Friday looked tinged with panic. “There has to be another way.”

  “There’s not.” Now I was going to dig in because I really, really wanted to meet Chase and hear how badly Friday had lied about her. I’d already estimated that no part of what he’d told me in those stories was true, but whatever she was going to say was bound to be entertaining, even if she didn’t have a key to open up this case.

  “Shit,” Friday said. “What about—”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t even listen to me!”

  “… Okay. Go on.”

  His eyes flitted around uncertainly. “What if we … uh … how about we … uhm …” His shoulders finally sagged in defeat. “Shit, I say again.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “finish your breakfast and I’m going to start looking for Chase on the internet—”

  “She’s in Billings, Montana,” Friday said, slumping down in his chair, his thin shoulders looking particularly pitiable given his posture. “Working in a lumberyard.” When I stared at him, he shrugged. “What? I cyberstalk her every now and again. I like to know how she’s doing.”

  “All right,” I said, trying to steel myself. We were going to have to fly to Montana, crossing Canadian airspace and a little of the US, too, though fortunately not much. Now was the time when we were going to find out how serious the US Government was about hunting my ass down. “Let’s do this thing.”

  “Can I finish my cereal first?” Friday asked, slurping another spoonful down.

  I just stared at him for a minute. “Well, yeah,” I said, “and you better have saved some for me. That Basic 4 is good stuff.”

  “I know, right?” Friday said. “It’s a real winner, and especially good considering that they changed the formula on Frosted Flakes so they taste like ass compared to when I was a kid eating them.”

  “Yeah, what did they do there?” I asked. “It kinda feels like they did something to the flake, and also maybe decided that much sugar wasn’t good for you.”

  “I think they actively started using ass as an ingredient,” Friday said. “Like ground-up squirrel ass or something. Maybe possum. I dunno.”

  “Well, let’s eat some cereal and then go talk to your ex,” I said, watching him squirm slightly as I tossed out that statement while giving him the benefit of the doubt. I could tell by the way he held himself he was going to make a correction pretty quick.

  “Maybe don’t mention that around her,” Friday said. “It ended so badly, you know … just seeing me is going to be hard enough on her. Better not to open up old wounds.”

  “Uh huh,” I said.

  “She took the breakup really tough,” Friday said. “Probably sat around eating some of those new formula Frosted Flakes, just to punish herself, you know. Once you’ve had the best, everything else tastes like broken glass, probably.” He took a bite and chewed self-consciously, mouth closed for once.

  “Friday,” I said as I poured my own bowl.

  “Yeah?” He shifted in his seat.

  “You’re full of shit.”

  His thin shoulders sagged again. “Yeah.”

  We settled into another long silence as we ate, me in hopes of what we’d learn from Chase, and him, presumably, in dread of seeing her again. I’d hung out with him for all of two days and he’d found all manner of ways to annoy the hell out of me. I couldn’t imagine what he’d done to a woman who’d worked with him for a decade.

  But I was willing to bet her reaction was going to be priceless.

  43.

  Augustus

  The production facility outside Vegas looked like a cross between a warehouse and a factory, the sort of thing you might drive by in any number of small towns in America, or maybe an industrial district in a city. It didn’t have belching smokestacks, just a couple pipes on the roof that let out a small cloud of steam into an unseasonably chilly Vegas day. I would have guessed it was twenty degrees above freezing, at least, but it still felt weird to have flown into Vegas and have this greet me instead of burning heat.

  “It’s the lack of humidity that makes it so bad,” Scott muttered, rubbing his fingers together as we pulled into the parking lot. The place was pretty full, but most of the cars were old and crappy beyond belief. I saw two bumpers being held on by duct tape, and a truck that was two tone because the bed that had been grafted onto the rear of the frame looked like it had come from a completely different model, and was navy where the cab was white. Both were dinged up like they’d been in a rollover crash, though.

  “Damned sure ain’t the heat,” Jamal said, stepping out, “because that’s gone missing like Augustus’s ability to speak after that time he ‘accidentally’ walked in on Taneshia in the bathroom.”

  “We were twelve and it really was an accident,” I said, shaking my head at him. “Now I walk in on her all the time. With permission.”

  “Head in the game, guys,” Reed said as we threaded our way through the parking lot toward an industrial garage door about thirty feet wide and equally as tall. “Also … geez, guy. I make Isabella keep the door closed. There are few things that kill the romance faster than an open door to the bathroom.”

  “You guys aren’t quite as bad at oversharing as Abby and J.J., but you’re getting there fast,” Scott said.

  “How do you want to do this?” I asked. “Calm and quiet, or Miley Cyrus style?”

  “Miley Cyrus—what?” Scott asked.

  “Wrecking Ball,” Reed said with a quick flash of a grin.

  “Ah,” Scott said as we reached the big garage door. It was partially open, probably about four feet off the ground, the corrugated steel looking like a symmetrical set of waves rolling down the door to the bottom. He ducked under it, taking a peek while the rest of us made a slower approach. When he didn’t get his head knocked off, I followed a moment later.

  The hum of industrial machinery reminded me of my last job, working on the factory floor at Cavanagh Technologies. I could see people walking around in plastic chem gear, masks on. “Looks they’re taking some serious precautions here,” I said.

  “Probably don’t want to accidentally create any superheroes that would lead directly back to them here,” Jamal said.

  No one was looking at us, and there wasn’t a security guard posted at the door. I knew why they’d left it open just after stepping inside, though; the heat that Vegas was lacking right now? It was made up for and more by the warmth in this place. I was sweating in seconds.

  “Still not sure about this,” I said, though it was obviously too late to just turn back now. “Maybe we should have rolled up the distribution network first.” I’d voiced this t
hought before and Reed had blown me off.

  Now he smiled, but kept his eyes front, looking for any of these chem geared figures to come at us. “I’ve got Kat, Veronika, Colin and Angel on it.” He looked right at me. “Taneshia, too, if she’s available. Ms. Estevez is coordinating with them.”

  “Sending in the B team,” Scott said.

  “Yo,” I said, “don’t call my girlfriend a B-teamer where she can hear you, all right? Friendly advice.” He nodded in receipt of the information. I think he got it; I wouldn’t have wanted to piss off his ex either. I turned my attention to Reed. “So you’re doing this all at once?”

  “Best we can,” Reed said.

  “Whose authority are we here under?” Jamal asked. “Not our own, I hope.”

  “I talked to Nevada about it,” Reed said. “Offered to do this pro bono and they accepted. Probably still a little sensitive after those metas tore up the Strip a few months back. They’ll be sending in their state police, but the perimeter is going up a ways back. I told them what happened with Augustus when he tangled these folks in Colorado.”

  “When did you get a chance to do all this?” I asked.

  “When you weren’t looking,” he said, and stepped over to a steel staircase leading up to a catwalk above. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with here.”

  We all ascended, not bothering to walk softly because it was so loud that our footsteps couldn’t be heard anyway. Once we were on the catwalk, the production facility looked much more impressive—chemical vats that had looked like simple cylinders from the ground were laid out throughout the place, hundreds of gallons of chemicals brewing before our eyes, valves spraying and adding liquid to them. Giant booms whirred overhead, stirring the vats like a giant witch’s cauldron.

  “There is not even one of these vats where the chemical composition is close enough to water to enable me to control it,” Scott said, waving a hand experimentally around the cavernous room. “This is some seriously altered stuff.”

  “So … what now?” I asked.

  “Any of you guys ever seen The Untouchables?” Reed asked, looking out over the place with a smile on his face.

  “No,” Scott said.

  “Yeah, with DeNiro as Capone and Costner as Elliott Ness,” Jamal said. “Why?”

  “Because this … kinda feels like one of those old bootlegger raids for some reason,” Reed said, still smiling. “And it makes me want to shout—This is a raid! Nobody move!”

  His voice boomed out over the sound of the machinery and the chemicals percolating. Twenty guys in chem suits looked up to see who was shouting, and most of them froze right where they were, not a word said.

  “Man, I hope we’re in the right place,” Jamal said, “because otherwise, it’s going to be so embarrassing to explain why we’re busting up a Clorox factory.”

  “Nobody’s moving,” I said. “I think they got the message.”

  “Well, that was eas—” Scott started to say … but he didn’t get a chance to finish.

  A blast of blue plasma shot within inches of Reed’s face, and our fearless leader ducked back to avoid losing his face to it. A second later, a disc of red energy sailed through the catwalk in front of us, searing through the metal effortlessly and causing the whole thing to shudder, rattling as it started to twist under our weight, unmoored now that the energy burst had sliced through it.

  It held steady for a second, and then we all pitched forward as the catwalk collapsed, throwing us all forward—and headlong into a vat of dark, bubbling green chemicals.

  44.

  Sienna

  Billings, Montana, was looking surprisingly green considering how far north it was. When we’d flown through Canada, traveling at supersonic speed, there had been snow on the ground until well south of Calgary, where it had started to fade. I knew there were places elsewhere in the US where it was still on the ground, and was eminently surprised when Billings turned out to be green as a spring field instead of buried in ice and cold.

  It was still chilly though as Friday and I ducked out of the woods across the street from Burnham and Scannell Lumber Co., a rural lumberyard that was surrounded by its own product, waiting to be harvested. I watched a truck laden with tree trunks rumble in through the gate while I cast furtive looks at the tall trees that cloaked the lumberyard from a view of town. Seemed kinda silly to truck in trees when there were an awful lot waiting to be harvested right outside the chain link fence, but whatever. There’s probably a reason I don’t run a lumberyard. Other than all those pending felony charges, I mean.

  No one stopped us at the gate, probably because the lumber they had was pretty much all bound in huge pallets so that someone couldn’t just walk off with one. I mean, I probably could have, because I’m super strong and my shoulders are diesel as hell—

  Toot your own horn, why don’t you? Eve asked.

  —but most people weren’t jacked enough to just carry off a pallet of lumber. Friday and I just sort of wandered in, feet crunching in the packed gravel as I scanned the workers milling around here and there, looking for a woman.

  It didn’t take too long. Most of the workers were dudes, which was obvious by their builds, their jeans, their shoulders, their hair—I mean, I probably grossly generalized, but when my eyes fell on a short, small-framed figure working in the corner next to a buzzing saw that was bigger than my chest, running the conveyor that ran the logs through, I kinda figured, ‘That’s probably Chase.’ When I nodded to Friday, then at her, he nodded back, with enough reticence I knew he probably wasn’t leading me astray.

  I made my way over, Friday trailing farther and farther behind me as we went. The air was heavy with the smell of pine, sun catching little motes of wood dust that floated around us. When I was almost to her, Chase seemed to detect my presence in spite of her heavy ear protection and thick plastic goggles. She stiffened and turned to look at me.

  She stared at me for a second, and I stared back at her. She looked serious as hell, scowl deep, her hair tucked back under a hard hat. But she also looked really familiar. “Oh. Hey,” I said, “I know you—”

  She spun all the way around, adopting a fighting stance, and stuck her right arm out. A long, red blade of energy like a freaking lightsaber popped out as though she had bound the handle to her wrist. She stood there, energy blade humming like an amped-up fluorescent light, and said, “Yeah, I know you, too, Sienna Nealon. The whole damned country is looking for you after last night.”

  “I didn’t do what they said I did,” I said.

  “Wait, you two know each other?” Friday asked, catching up at last.

  Chase squinted at him. “Bruce? Is that you?”

  “Hi, Chase,” Friday said, sinking back, one leg set like he was going to run if she said a cross word at him. He looked at me. “How do you two know each other?”

  I looked back at Chase, who was still giving me the death eye. “We, uh, had an encounter in the US Virgin Islands a few months ago.”

  “She kicked my team’s ass, my ass, and killed my principal,” Chase said, glaring at me.

  “Principal?” Friday asked. “That's so kittens, I didn’t know you were a schoolteacher!”

  “I was bodyguarding,” Chase said acidly, “and she killed the body I was supposed to be guarding. It’s why I’m working here now; tough to get work as a bodyguard when your last job ended in your boss getting killed.”

  “I totally did not kill him,” I said. It was true.

  “This is so cool,” Friday said, gushing over the saws ripping like a kid, “my two favorite ladies know each other already! Small world, right?”

  “So Disney would have you believe,” Chase snarked.

  I was stuck on something else. “I’m … one of your favorite ladies?” I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.

  Chase favored us both with a look so sour it would have puckered a stoic’s lips. “If your standards have fallen to the level where you could consider that a compliment, there’s some
thing seriously wrong with you.”

  “Hey,” I said, violating a cardinal rule of not being stupid by forgetting that anything Friday told me was probably bullshit, “you’re the one who dated him.”

  If I’d thought Chase’s eyes were furious when she’d seen me coming, that was nothing compared to how flamingly pissed off she got now. “Is that what he told you?” Her growl was harsher than the saw shredding its way through solid wood.

  “I—no,” Friday said, already shaking his head madly. “No, I never said that.”

  “You liar,” Chase said, and she started to make a threatening move on Guy Friday, like she was going to decapitate him with that energy blade.

  I interposed myself between them, holding up a hand to stop her. “Wait, wait. We’re not here to fight. In fact, we’re really just looking to get a question answered and we’ll leave.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “A question? Really? And then you’ll get out of my hair?”

  “Like we were fleeing from a Medusa,” I said. “Promise.” I could tell she was feeling skeptical, so I just launched right into it. “See, the thing is—uh, Bruce here is being hunted by one of your old teammates—”

  Chase stared at him, hard. “Is it Greg?”

  Friday still wasn’t daring to look at her in favor of his shoelaces. I guess he was capable of embarrassment after all, something I wouldn’t have guessed. “Yeah.”

  Chase softened just a touch, losing that jagged edge of anger, her body language suggesting that she might not rush him at any second. “What’d you do?”

  “Nothing that I know of,” Friday said, shrugging expansively. “I haven’t seen the guy since Afghanistan.”

  Chase rolled her eyes. “We never went to Afghanistan. They said they were thinking about deploying us there, but we only ever ended up on that weird training op in the Arizona desert.”

  “Whatever, you know what I mean, clearly,” Friday said, now refusing to look at me.