Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) (3 page)

“I ain’t jealous,” Lawton said, making a face that said he was lying, obvious as hell. “I ain’t no kiss ass. I don’t got to impress anybody.”

“Well, you kind of need to impress your boss to keep working,” Eduardo said.

“Shut up,” Lawton said, blowing it off.

For a man who didn’t know shit, Lawton Evers sure did talk a lot of it. But that was just him, and I was used to it by now. I shook it off, and watched Laverne Dobbins make his way after the crowd with the rest of them, trailing behind, and I gave him a nod like I knew him or something. Very subtly, he nodded back at me before he disappeared. I thought that was cool.

I looked down at the factory floor and let out a breath, then blinked. Something was a little strange about what I saw …

Dust blows through the factory all the time. Not a ton of it, but it gets in. Wind brings it in through the loading docks, and big, heavy fans that keep the floor cool move it around subtly throughout the day.

All that dust that usually spread out around the factory floor was in a neat little berm around my feet, a little line of dirt circled around me in a rough ovoid like it had been drawn in by magnetism.

I blinked, staring at the phenomenon, like it was some kind of strange coincidence. I moved my hand toward it and the dirt moved
with me
.

“Ah!” I jumped in the air a little as I stepped back, and it followed. I caught the looks of Lawton and the others as they stared at me, waving my hand in the air and jumping like a fool, and I smiled. You got to smile at a moment like that. “I just shook hands with Edward Cavanagh and Cordell Weldon!” I said, weakly triumphant. I was lucky it had happened just then, because any other day, I wouldn’t have had anything else to cover my shock with.

“Yeah, yeah, we saw,” Lawton said, like he couldn’t even muster up the energy to rain on my parade. He went back to his work.

As for me, I just stood there until I was sure no one was watching. Then, very slowly, I lifted my hand and concentrated, and watched the dirt follow every single movement I made. Like I had … power … over it.

Power.

Metahuman power.

Whew-eee.

Like I said, I always knew I was gonna be somebody … special.

I left Minneapolis without anything other than my gym clothes, my wallet, phone, badge, and the Sig Sauer I had tucked into my waistband under my workout jacket. Okay, so I actually had enough to be getting along with. Frankly, the gun and the badge were enough for me. Western Union could always wire money from my accounts in Liechtenstein; I’d done it before in a pinch.

Still, flying off the campus in a rush was not my best planning ever, but by the time I realized that I was at least halfway to Atlanta and didn’t want to humiliate myself by turning around or chancing a conversation with Ariadne. I also didn’t really want to tell anyone else where I was going. Then my boss might have expected me to report in regularly or something.

I landed somewhere in north Georgia and bought some different clothes at a factory outlet mall. I tossed my gym clothes into a dumpster like Jack Reacher and took flight again, a little more slowly this time. The skies had been clear for the last few hundred miles, but I didn’t want to mess up my suit before I met with Detective Calderon.

This part could have been tricky if I hadn’t known exactly where Calderon’s office was. Fortunately, I had Reed’s file, and imprinted on the windblown pages was the department’s address. Okay, it was actually still tricky because it’s not like Google map view is designed for when you’re flying a thousand feet above the city. The roads aren’t labeled, so I had to sweep down and stare at them, then stare a little more, then hit a cross street. Finally I just gave up and looked for government buildings. Those are usually pretty easy to spot. I figured out the right one on my third attempt.

I walked into the police precinct where Detective Calderon hung his hat and took a slow look around the place. It wasn’t in bad shape, as far as police precincts went. It had new paint, probably very recent, and a quiet hum of activity that wasn’t too nuts for lunchtime on a weekday, but busy enough to tell me that the area it served wasn’t Mayberry. Reception was a little backed up, so I subtly butted in line. “I need to see Detective Marcus Calderon, please.”

The lady at the counter looked me up and down. “You look familiar.”

I paused. “I was on a reality TV show once.” That was technically true, in an annoying sort of way.

“Oh!” She looked me up and down. “Wait, are you Giada?” She frowned. “No, I’m sorry, you don’t really look like her, do you?”

“Not really,” I said. “Detective Calderon?” I flashed my badge.

She gave it a glance and then looked back at the line behind me. “Oh, he’s through there.” She waved at the entry doors past her. “Just ask anyone in there for help if you can’t find him.”

“Thanks,” I said, and started past the counter.

“Were you on that one show where they match people up with the right diet plan—”

“No,” I said and slid through the door, glad to be leaving that conversation behind. I’d only been on one show, for a few minutes, and it had been pretty much against my will. They had used my likeness because I’m a public figure, but it had been a still frame picture of me during a phone call. I was still really annoyed about it, and it hadn’t done a ton to improve my image.

It just totally exposed what I had thought was a private conversation by airing it in public, that’s all.

The room I’d walked into was a crazy frenzy, a police bullpen like other ones I’d been to around the country and the world. Cubicles, police officers, and the strong smell of coffee. It was a universal thing. “Marcus Calderon?” I asked a patrolman passing by, and he pointed me toward the middle of the room.

There was a guy in a silk shirt with dark skin. He had his badge hung around his neck and was standing up while talking on a phone, gesticulating like the person he was speaking to was inches from his face. “Maurice, so help me God, if you’re lying to me on this, I’m gonna find you. I’m gonna come knock on your door—front and back, Maurice, front and back—and I know you’re an idiot, so I’m gonna knock on the front first, leave a big ol’ flaming—not even a little bag, but like a grocery bag, like a paper grocery bag, filled with like horse crap—I’m gonna light it on fire and just leave it for you on your front porch. Then I’m gonna drop ’round back and squat down while you’re dealing with that front porch situation, and I’m just gonna leave you a little souvenir for the next time you step out back to smoke, okay? Unscrew the lightbulb out your back door so you can’t see it coming. Squish! Maurice needs new shoes!”

I made my way over to him slowly. The hand gestures alone were screwing up my resolve to keep me from laughing.

“You know why I’m telling you this, Maurice?” Calderon asked. “Because now that I’ve told you, I’m going to have to come up with something
even worse
to punish you if you’re lying to me. It’s like my version of a promise, coming up with something worse than—yeah, you believe that. Believe that. Something worse. It’ll happen, if you’re lying to me.” He pointed his finger in the air, like he was sticking it into the face of an invisible man just in front of him. “Promises, Maurice. You believe me?” He paused. “Damn right you do.” He pulled the phone away from his ear, pressed the red button and tossed it back to his desk in a spin and looked right at me. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“More like investigated, if you’re dropping flaming deuces on the porch of your CI’s,” I said.

“CI?” He snorted. “Maurice is my brother-in-law. Idiot said he could get me tickets for the Falcons on the fifty yard line, lower deck, against the Titans this fall.” He stared straight at me. “Yeah. Now imagine how my conversations with snitches play out.”

“So much worse,” I said, and extended my hand. “Sienna Nealon.”

He looked at the hand with smoky eyes. “I know who you are.”

“That why you’re not sure you want to take the hand?” I started to pull it back slowly.

“Oh, no, I hear I could live a few seconds after shaking your hand,” Calderon said, “I’m just so honored to be in the presence of American royalty, that’s all. Just shocked. Especially since a year ago your office didn’t give me the time of day, and now—now, miraculously! Here you are, like two hours after I sent your people the file.” He folded his arms, made a little
hrm
noise.

I didn’t get too many of these jurisdictional squabbles. Most of the time, if they’d seen what metas could do, rank-and-file cops were relatively happy to get these cases off their desks. “You want me to leave?” I stuck my thumb over my shoulder at the door. I wasn’t trying to sound nasty, but I hadn’t had the best morning. I extended the rolled-up file back to him like an offering.

“My case still not good enough for you?” He looked at the file like it contained what he’d threatened to leave on Maurice’s porch. “I see how it is. You get a call from London, England, you’re there in about a minute, tea with the queen and all that—”

“I did not have tea with the queen—”

“—but a working cop in Atlanta’s inner city calls up with a story about killing going on that’s right up your alley, you just pass it on by.” He nodded his head, had his lips pursed. Attitude. He was giving me attitude. “Like I said, I see how it is.”

I felt my eye twitch a little at the corner. “Do you, now?”

“Clear as day.”

“Clear as out Maurice’s back door at midnight once you’ve unscrewed the lightbulb, more like.”

“Maurice is a gastroenterologist,” Calderon said. “Lives in the suburbs. That brother has a pool with ambient lighting all the way around. Looks like something out of the Caribbean. He can see just fine.” He blew air out of the corner of his mouth and put his hands on his hips. “Well, you gonna sit down or what?”

He hadn’t offered me a chair, but since I got the feeling that Calderon was a prickly personality—something I had maybe a little experience with—I knew how to deal with it. “Sure,” I said and then sat down on the air, using Gavrikov’s power to eliminate the downward force of gravity on me. I put my legs up like I was in a recliner and just sat there in mid-air, staring back at Calderon, whose eyebrow had risen involuntarily. “You want to talk about the case?” I asked, totally nonchalant.

I watched his lips purse, warring with each other until a smile won out. “Damn, girl, you can’t let anyone else win a round, can you?”

I smiled back. “Nope. Case?”

He made that
hrm
noise again and rolled his desk chair under him to sit down. “Your brother tell you the basics?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Girl gets killed by gunman, gunman gets struck by lightning. This was all a year ago?”

“Last April,” he said, pulling out a green legal file of his own with pictures that didn’t have the digital blur that marred my copies. “So, a year and two months later, we get these guys.” He pulled out much larger, autopsy-style photos of two bodies on morgue slabs, taken from above. “Kennith Coy,” he pointed me to the guy on the left, whose dark skin was marred horrifically along his arm with burns, “and Roscoe Marion.” He indicated the one on the right, who looked a little like the mob boss from the original Batman movie after the Joker had joybuzzed him. I could see bone and cooked flesh, and if I had had a weaker stomach, I might have felt ill.

“Any tie between these two?” I asked, staring at them.

“Not any obvious ones,” Calderon said. “Mr. Coy lived in the English Avenue neighborhood, Mr. Marion was a little south in Vine City. Coy was on parole—small stuff, repeated larceny charges—and Marion was a factory worker, no past history in his adult life. Not even a traffic ticket.”

“What else do you know about the attacks?” I asked, taking my eyes off the photos to look at Calderon.

“I can’t even prove these were attacks,” Calderon said, studying me evenly. “Last year, though, I had a witness on that one. These two are just a really nasty suspicion.”

“So they could have been legitimately hit by lightning,” I said, glancing back at the autopsy photos.

“We did have a rather heavy storm,” Calderon conceded, “but there’s no hint of damage on the ground from strikes anywhere else. I’m not exactly a weatherman, but … I don’t know, it doesn’t feel right.”

I nodded. “Agreed. This is how it usually happens, too.”

He looked up at me in surprise. “How what happens?”

“Kids with powers,” I said, “getting into trouble the first times. They start small, testing things out. Seeing what they can do. Then they push the envelope for their own gain—rob a convenience store, shoplift ’til they get caught. They start to develop this sense of invincibility—not like teenagers need much help in that department.” I feigned a light laugh that was matched by Calderon, though he had a little smile on that I realized was his very subtle way of reminding me that I wasn’t that far out of my own teenage years. “They get bolder. Start to think they’re special, that they can’t be stopped. Ego run amok, really, because they’re different and better than anyone else.” I leaned back again. “Sometimes local PD disabuses them of that notion, hard. Sometimes I get to. Either way, it’s probably like what you see; most people don’t just randomly commit murder at age eleven. There’s a build-up, a steady movement over the line, then over again. Metas are just better at getting away with it because they can outrun the cops.”

“Huh.” Calderon folded his arms, leaned back in his own chair to match my posture. “Seen that a bunch of times, have you?”

“More than I can count,” I said. “Most of the time I don’t get to them until they’re so far up their own asses that they’re beyond help.”

“Maybe if you’d come a year ago …” he suggested, not so subtly this time.

“And done what?” I asked. “I’m not much of a detective, to be honest. Don’t have the training. I’m apprehension. I’m the hammer. I’ve solved the occasional mystery, but I’ve also been fooled more than once by clever criminals who were smarter than the average. It’s my good luck that most criminals, especially the meta ones, lean hard on their brawn and make dumb mistakes because they think they’re better than everyone else.” I shrugged. “Give me some ego-fueled thief that’s hyped to be stealing because he wants to wear the fancy jewelry and drive the sports car and live the life, and I’ll knock him down every time.” I held up the file in my hand. “This guy, though? He scares me. He’s quiet. He’s playing a game that only he knows the rules to, and he’s not jumping off buildings and having lightning fights in the middle of the street while trying to take a bank vault. He’s been quiet for over a year, and no one’s heard a whisper of him the whole time?” I stared at Calderon. “CIs? Snitches? Word on the streets?” He shook his head. “That’s worrying. It means this guy isn’t knocking over armored cars for cash in his spare time, isn’t heisting casinos with a flash of lightning. He’s just doing his thing, whatever that is.”