Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) (10 page)

“What do you want from Augustus?” Momma asked, viewing me with increasing suspicion.

“Some kind of meta apprenticeship, maybe?” Taneshia asked. “Sounds dangerous.”

“Uh,” I looked at each of them in turn, “actually, I just stopped by because I said I would, kind of a thank you—and to talk to him about his new powers. See if I could help while CSI is digging up the corpses.” I frowned. Why did I have to keep conversationally discussing corpses? Was this normal? My money was on no.

Momma was frowning at me. “Well … I don’t understand. Could he help you?”

I stared back at her. “Help me how?”

“You know,” she said. “Work with you somehow?”

“Oh,” I said, taken aback, “obviously, as you can see by what happened today, my job can sometimes be inexplicably dangerous. I wouldn’t want to expose your son to—”

“Well, that’s a load of bull-crap,” Momma said and glared at Augustus. “You should go with her.”

“Weren’t you the one yelling at me for being a fool and charging headlong into danger not an hour ago when there were gunshots going off?” Augustus asked.

“That was different,” Momma said without missing a beat. “We didn’t know you were special then.”

Augustus looked daggers at his mother. “Momma!”

She patted him on the wrist. “You know what I mean, baby. You’ve always been special to me. But you should go help this girl. Look how short she is.” I frowned and looked at Taneshia, who was even shorter than I was. “Especially if they’re digging up bodies in our neighborhood.” She shuddered. “That is just downright creepy.”

“That was maybe the fastest turnaround I’ve seen since the time Malcolm Turner greased the cafeteria floor and told Mr. Davis that Sherice Storm was playing with herself in the corner,” Augustus said. “You went from telling me I was a liar and a fool and an idiot to—” He folded his arms in front of him. “What if I go with her and die?”

I felt like the spectator for the most alarming argument ever. “That is a very real danger,” I said. “People do tend to die around me.” This was all happening very fast. Augustus had been extremely helpful in the van explosion, but I was under no illusions about my ability to retain people close to me. They either died—like Zack, Breandan, my mother; they left—like Dr. Zollers, Scott, Kat; or they flat-out turned their backs on me and walked away—like Senator Foreman.

Or like Reed was going to.

“What if he could help you?” Momma asked. “What if he could save your life again?”

“Oh, so you believe me about that, now, too?” Augustus asked, still looking pointedly at his mother.

“Momma, this is dangerous,” Taneshia said quietly. Thank the heavens, a voice of reason.

“Life’s dangerous,” Momma replied sharply. “Nobody gets out alive, last I checked.” She turned her gaze toward Augustus. “All I hear you say when you talk about your future is how you’re going to ‘be somebody,’ like that means something at all in and of itself. I been telling you—your father told you—told you and Jamal both that you need to ‘be somebody’ someday. But you left off the last part of what we told you—that you need to be somebody you can be proud of. Somebody to be counted. Somebody who stands up for what’s right.” She looked at me. “We see a lot of things in the neighborhood. Some wrong things sometimes, but we live here. We love here. This is our home. You come here and you tell me someone’s killing people with lightning? Burying bodies in people’s yards?” She leaned forward on her couch. “Can my son help you find this person? With his powers?”

My mouth fell open and an answer came tumbling out. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Then he
should
help you,” she said and straightened up, like it was settled. Then she looked at him. “Provided it doesn’t interfere with his work.”

I found myself looking at him as he looked at me. “What do you do?” I asked helplessly, strangely reminded of my mother, but in a less threatening way.

“I’m a—” Augustus started.

“He’s in management at Cavanagh Technologies,” Momma said proudly. She launched into a description that I suspected had been repeated many, many times before, and I listened and nodded along, sparing only a look for Augustus, who seemed only slightly less embarrassed than he was proud at hearing her talk about him in such glowing terms.

“So how’s this going to work?” I asked her as I walked Sienna Nealon to the door. My mother had talked her ear off about how great I was for, like, thirty minutes. To her credit, she only looked glazed over during the last five, and it hadn’t exactly been thrilling stuff compared to a murder case involving a lightning-throwing person.

“You got a job, right?” she asked. I was almost used to her bloodied blouse by now. Almost.

Nope. Still weird. Who walks around in bloody clothes all the time?

“Yeah,” I said. “Six to two tomorrow. I mean, I could call in—”

“Nah,” she said, shaking her head. “Go to work, meet me when you’re done.”

“Okay. You got like a cell phone number I can call you on?”

“I—” she fumbled in her pocket and came out with an iPhone. “Looks like I still do, yeah.” She punched a button and summoned up her own contact, complete with phone number, which I dutifully snapped a picture of with mine for later. “Clever,” she said.

“Time saver and all that,” I said. “So am I like … your partner on this?”

She gave me a very guarded look. I got the feeling she wore it a lot. “Let’s call it an apprenticeship, since your mom kind of … talked me into it, and I don’t really have any backup at this point.” She dropped her voice to a level so low it was like she smashed through the floor for whisper and kept going. I was amazed I could hear it, because her mouth didn’t open at all, it was like it was all in her throat. “You sure you want to do this? There are easier ways to make your mark.”

“Mmmrawwwwmrmmmaaa—” I tried to do it like she did it then just went for a whisper instead. “You heard me before. I’m supposed to be somebody. I want to be a hero.”

“Heroes have short lifespans,” she said.

“Man, who wants to live forever?” I joked.

She just stared at me. “Most people would, I think.”

“Could you imagine living your whole life not standing up for anything you believe in?” I asked. “Just sort of … letting things pass you by unanswered? Like a whole bunch of dead bodies? Especially when you could be doing something about it?” I stared her down, saw her eyes move just a little. “Power and responsibility, right? That’s the problem with being powerless—you got no real responsibility, because what can you do? But the minute you got power … doesn’t it mean it’s time for you to step up and do what you can?”

“That’s sweet,” she said, a little condescending.

“Well, what do you do, then?” I asked. “I doubt you’re in government service for the money. You just like shooting people with fireballs and busting skulls?”

She folded her arms in front of her. Lady was like a stone wall. “Maybe I love it. Maybe a little too much.” She let out a breath and the arms unfolded. “Or maybe it’s the only thing I’m good at.”

“Well, maybe I’m good at it, too, and just don’t know it yet,” I said. I hesitated. “Not at busting skulls, probably. But maybe at, you know, solving mysteries. Helping the helpless and … whatnot.”

“Being a hero,” she said with a sigh. “All right, so the deal is, you follow along with me if you want. I’ll let you watch what I do. If things get hairy, you take a step back, though, especially if I tell you to. We run into lightning guy, you make a shield around yourself, as fast as you can. I don’t want to have to explain to your momma why her baby boy got bugzappered.”

“I’d be more worried about lightning guy at that point,” I said. “My momma would put on a full rubber suit and just drag that man’s ass across a thick carpeting for days at a time until he begged her to stop. They’d be calling him Mr. Ex-static by the end of—” I paused. “How about we call him Mr. Ex-stat—”

“No.” She was firm in her refusal.

“Everybody’s gotta have a name—”

“This isn’t the comic books,” she said, and the arms were folded again. “We don’t give people cheesy names.”

“Like Sovereign?” I teased.

“I didn’t name that jackhole,” she said. “He named himself a few centuries before I met him, and he did it as part of an orchestrated PR campaign to make himself look like a badass and also to hide who he truly was.”

“So you never thought about making a hero name?” I asked. “Like Fly Girl—or, uh … Super—”

“All the good ones are copyrighted and trademarked,” she said. “It’s actually a real minefield, I’m told by the government lawyers. They strongly advised that I not even try.”

“Wait, you’re serious?” I asked. “But … I was gonna be …”

“Don’t,” she said. “Just … don’t. Be yourself.”

“Well, that’s half the fun gone right there,” I said.

“Yeah, we’ll work on taking away the other half tomorrow,” she said, reaching for the door. She looked back at me, all seriousness. “I know it seems so cool now. Maybe you’ve seen my fights on TV, or you’ve watched …” there was a twitch in the muscles around her eye, giving her crow’s feet that smoothed out perfectly a second later, “… other metas who sell a glamorous lifestyle. Those fights hurt more than anything you can imagine, and every other meta except for …” she twitched again, “… that one—”

“Katrina Forrest, you mean?”

“Except for that one, yes,” she said, twitching again, “either live and work just like normal people or they’re criminals working their way toward going to prison for a very long stretch. My life is not glamorous, and the hits you’ve seen me take on television and YouTube would kill even you deader than those fried guys in the van. This guy with the lightning? If he hits you, your heart will probably stop just the same as the last people he killed. You want to be a hero? Don’t. Don’t try. We’re going to take this slow. We’re going to investigate. People are apparently going to throw some resistance our way, judging by what we’ve seen so far. We will handle it carefully, not by rushing headlong, stupidly, into something that will get us killed.” She seemed to relax a little, like something was weighing her down. “I don’t want to get you killed. This is an investigation, not a ‘super hero saves the world’ story. So just … listen and take it slow and we’ll be fine.” Her eyes got hard. “And if I tell you to run, you damned well better do it. Okay?”

“Got it,” I said, just listening.

“All right,” she said. “See you tomorrow.” And she closed the door without another word.

I heard something behind me and turned back to see Taneshia standing at the entry to the living room. She was leaning, looking a little weary herself. “You sure about this?” she asked, like it hadn’t just been asked of me a few minutes earlier, like we hadn’t just covered it in exquisite detail.

“It’s all going to be good,” I said. “We got this. I’ll listen, and I’ll make sure to pull my weight in a fight.”

She looked at her feet for a second and started to shuffle forward. “You never were much of a fighter, Augustus.” She headed past me toward the door then paused and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Be safe,” she said, and the door closed on me for the second time in as many minutes. This time the sound seemed a whole lot … lonelier.

When I got back to the crime scene, the yard around Flora Romero’s house had been dug up a little more. Men in plastic suits were putting up tents and using small hand tools to excavate things. I saw bones, bones and more bones being slowly exposed, the layers of dirt being peeled back to reveal what someone had tried to hide. The smell of dust was heavy in the hot evening air, and the sun was on its way down somewhere below the houses to the west. It was a sticky feeling, and not just from the blood that was dried and crusted on my left side. Humidity had seeped in, making my skin feel like it was leaking just moments after I’d walked out of Augustus’s house.

Calderon was in the middle of the crime scene, in the thick of it all. The activity seemed to be mostly taking place around him, though, like he was a giant stone in the middle of a stream, letting it all wash by. He had a heavy walkie-talkie clutched in his hand like it was a lifeline as he watched things unfold.

“What are we up to now?” I asked, easing up beside him.

“We haven’t had a ton of time,” he said, “since you went to go inculcate the boy wonder in the ways of the superheroes, but …” He glanced at me and made a sucking sound with his tongue and lip that expressed concern, “we’ve found at least four skulls.”

“Wow,” I said. “Coincidence?”

“They look like they’ve been there about a year,” Calderon said, turning back to watch the investigators at work, “and when I came here to check out Ms. Romero’s accommodations in the wake of her death, I recall there being some yard work being done. Sprinkler system excavation, I thought, or maybe a sewer line being dug. Didn’t think someone was using it as a dumping ground for their misdeeds.”

“So what are the possibilities here?” I asked. “Flora was in on some murders, got killed for it. Flora wasn’t in on it but found out about them, got killed for it. Flora was an innocent victim and her place got used as a graveyard. Am I missing anything?”

“The bodies are unrelated to Flora’s murder,” Calderon said. “Unlikely, but a possibility, so long as we’re listing them out.” His fingers came up and rubbed the bridge of his nose, an expression of exasperation and fatigue that I was very familiar with. When I wasn’t doing it myself, I was often the cause of it in others. “It kind of hurts to be proven so right about this case, because the way we found out is just … so wrong.”

“If these guys were sent to stop me from finding the bodies,” I said, “then this was the most ham-fisted cover-up attempt ever. They actually led me right to what we assume they were trying to hide and hinted at something way beyond lightning man. This is criminal conspiracy.”

“Unless it’s just lightning man deciding to cool his thunder and outsource his murdering,” Calderon said. “I mean, we are spinning at this point, no idea which way true north is.”