Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) (20 page)

“He’s a poor bastard who probably doesn’t know what he’s in for, but thanks,” I said, straightening up. My entire spinal column popped as I readjusted it now that Wolfe had done his thing and healed it. The guy standing before me cringed at the sound. I cracked my knuckles and looked out the hole in the wall. “Did you happen to get the license plate for the truck that hit me?” I looked back at him after I was sure the truck was gone, and he was just shaking his head. “Oh, come on. There was a bank robbery down there. You didn’t think I dropped in from heaven?”

“I … what? No.” He was just shaking his head. “I have … noise-canceling headphones and my music was probably up kinda loud—”

“Right. Well.” I shook my head. It didn’t help clear it any more than any of the other times I’d tried. It was probably habit at this point. “Best of luck, guy. Sorry about your bathroom. And that your fan experience with me was probably shit.”

“Oh, no, it was, uhm … well, not everything I dreamed of, exactly, but—”

“Lemme just stop you right there, slick,” I said. “Bad guys to catch and all that. My suggestion to you—get a girlfriend on the internet. You strike me as the kind of guy that’s going to be a lot smoother online, and you can probably parley that into offline success with some time and practice.” His face was one scrunched-up mass at my rejection and subsequent advice. “Best of luck, dude,” I concluded. I rolled out the wall of his apartment and down to street level and the chaos that waited for me there.

My bones were still popping as I settled on the street, which was quite a mess. The sidewalk was clear, no surprise, but the cop cars that had been parked all along the avenue had been totaled by the garbage truck from hell’s out-of-control charge. I saw pieces of cars everywhere, and cops were running to and fro. The twisted wreckage of the getaway Expedition was still burning, but it had been knocked into the street by the barreling garbage truck.

One thing I didn’t see, thankfully, was body bags or anyone being worked on by paramedics, at least not urgently. That was usually a good sign.

“There she is!” someone shouted, and I turned to look in the direction of the speaker. They sounded pissed.

I looked over to see Forsythe, the NYPD asshole, striding over to me with his walkie-talkie in hand and a couple guys coming along behind him. I wanted to take that walkie and shove the antenna up his nose, then the rest of it, too, but when I saw who he had following him, I held off.

“Well, what do we have here?” Guy Friday rumbled through his mask as he sauntered up, bulked out and arms folded in front of him like he was Forsythe’s enforcer.

“Like you don’t know who I am, idiot,” I said, just letting it roll off the tip of my tongue. “Ugh. I just … uh, I was so hoping to leave town before I ran into you two again.”

Scott perked up at that. “You were going to leave the scene of a crime before speaking to the law?”

I leveled my no-BS look at him. “You’re not the law here, Scott. You’re a federal-level pain in my ass while I’m trying to help the state and city solve their problems.” My head twinged, that vein pulsing in the back. “I’m not … I was totally going to leave before this happened, and then Lieutenant Welch asked me to stop by before I left, but I met this …
idiot
,” I threw a hand toward Forsythe, who recoiled in outrage, “who is clearly the biggest idiot in the history of big fucking idiots—I mean, seriously.” I was looking at him through half closed eyes because the sun was entirely too bright for my taste. “You’re like when a dog poops on the rug, and you roll it up without realizing it, but then like three months later you unroll it and—surprise! There’s a turd. You’re the turd in this analogy, Forsythe. You’re a stinking, stupid, aged turd, flattened into shape by your time in a carpet—”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Scott said, all serious. Forsythe was sputtering behind him, struggling to form a cogent sentence under my withering fecal analogies. “Looks to me like she’s out of bounds here—”

“She is,” Forsythe said, all self-righteous and stupid. “I didn’t ask for her help on this scene—”

“How many times were you dropped on your head as a child?” I asked. “Lieutenant Welch asked me to come over here and handle this.” I looked for a rank on Forsythe and found nothing since he was plainclothes. If he was higher level than Welch, I got the feeling this might not end so well for me.

“I think we should take her into custody until we get this settled,” Friday said with something approaching glee.

“I think you really should not,” I said, “but then, what I think has never stopped you from making any of your other terrible life choices, so, why start listening to reason now?” I undercut it all with a layer of menace, because the idea that I was going to go quietly with Friday would have been laughable if it wasn’t so certain to result in terrible, terrible violence.

“What is going on here?” came a shout from behind me as Lieutenant Welch stormed onto the scene, taking in the destruction with a horrified look.

“Saved by the bell,” I muttered.

“Great show,” Friday said. “But don’t think this saves you from anything.”

“I was talking about you being saved, Bane wannabe.” I turned to Welch. “Will you please tell dumb,” I pointed to Scott, “dumber,” I moved my finger to Friday, “and El King Dumbass,” settled it right on Forsythe, “that you sent me to resolve this disaster?”

Welch twitched a little as he walked up, looking like he was vacillating between giving me a piece of his mind and backing me up in front of hostile forces. “Yes,” he said, voice strained, “I did.”

“See,” I said, turning with my full gloat on, head still feeling a little light from traumatic injury’s aftereffects. I waved my hands in front of my face. “Yeah. You got nothing.” I made a
PBTHHHHHH
noise with my tongue right in Friday’s face. I would blame the brain injury but honestly, it felt good.

“What is our status here?” Welch said, and I could tell by the look on his face he was probably regretting defending me.

“No fatalities,” Forsythe said, with enough strain of his own I thought maybe his kidneys were about to burst out of him like an alien hatchling. “A few injuries. Some property damage.”

“Yeah, no fatalities,” I said, rubbing it in. “Would you care to guess how many you would have had if you—you explosive diarrhea mountain shaped into a human being—were left in charge of this?” I held up my hand and made a zero. “It wouldn’t have been none. Asshole,” I added because it seemed—not appropriate, by any means, but at least warranted.

“Will you stop acting like a rogue detective from a bad cop movie?” Welch seethed, pulling me aside by my ragged t-shirt. “We have bigger problems right now.”

“Yeah, tell me about it, these idiots are following me everywh—”

“I’m talking about this mess,” Welch hissed. I looked over his shoulder; Scott and Friday were watching, and I knew they could hear every word. “Why didn’t you just let SWAT handle this?”

“SWAT wasn’t here,” I said, looking over his shoulder at Forsythe, who was watching me with his bottom lip stuck out in a pout. “I mean, they were here at first, then they were gone, so—”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Welch said, cutting me right off with a raised hand. He turned to Forsythe. “Where’s SWAT?”

“I don’t know,” Forsythe said, a couple degrees above a sulking little boy who’d just had his favorite truck taken away. “I was about to start looking for them when this lunatic unleashed hell—”

“And saved civilians, hostages, and oh, got you all the robbers—
alive
, I might add,” I said as I watched a cop dragging one of the robbers out of the bank in cuffs, tactical vest and garb stripped off. He had a rough look about him, a nice scar that stretched the length of his cheek. He looked at me briefly, then looked away, and I got the feeling he didn’t fear jail all that much. “You’re welcome.”

“I’m not thanking you for this!” Forsythe said.

“I don’t care about your petty personality differences,” Welch said, stepping between us with his hands extended, palm out, like he could separate us from brawling or something. As though I’d brawl with a tool like Forsythe. Murder, maybe, but brawl? Laughable. “How do we not have a SWAT team on the scene?”

“I told you, they were here,” I said, and pointed at the far corner where I’d seen their van. “But they left, because after I had my dialogue with Mr. Limpdick over there,” I pointed at Forsythe to make it obvious, “they were gone.”

“This makes no sense,” Welch said, bringing a hand up to his forehead. “SWAT wouldn’t just leave in the middle of a crisis.”

“And yet they did,” I said. “I scoured the air before J—uh, Gravity Gal and I got involved. They weren’t anywhere in a five-block radius.”

“Where did they go?” Welch asked, frowning and bringing his walkie to his lips. “A—”

“Big problem,” Jamie shouted as she slid down and came to a landing next to me.

“Oh, hey,” I said, blinking away my surprise, “I was totally going to come looking for you, but I got thrown through a bathroom window, propositioned by a geek, and—”

“Yeah, I’m glad you’re okay, too,” Jamie said. “Listen, I chased that garbage truck—”

“Why was there a garbage truck?” Guy Friday asked.

“Because it’s trash day and they were coming to pick you up,” I snapped at him.

“—all the way to the Hudson, and the driver plowed it right into the river.” Jamie was soaked, her mask sagging a little from being waterlogged, and her Spandex dripping. “I went down to investigate and found the driver gone and the back open.”

“Oh, man, the EPA is gonna have our ass over this,” Welch said.

“I would consider the Hudson a lost cause if I were them,” Forsythe said.

“Like they should criticize. Did you see what they did to that river in Colorado?” I asked, parroting one of Reed’s favorite drums to bang on of late. “They’ve got zero room to get pissy about accidental pollution, the hypocrites.”

“There was no garbage in the truck,” Jamie said. “The back was open and it looked like something had come out.”

That produced a moment of silence worthy of a holiday. “Something?” Scott asked, getting his brain about him first. “Like what?”

“I’m assuming like a mini-sub of some sort,” Jamie shrugged, “since the driver was gone and he never surfaced and there wasn’t any sign of hidden scuba gear back there for—”

“What the—?” Welch muttered. “You’re telling me this bank job … they had an escape involving a garbage truck with a mini-sub in the back?” He chuckled lightly. “That’s funny. Completely implausible, but—”

Welch’s walkie roared to life. “Reports of an explosion at FBI headquarters in—” A siren blared behind us as a police cruiser started down the street to take a prisoner back to the precinct. “—perpetrators fleeing the scene in a garbage truck, reported—” The siren blared again, and I wished these idiots would clear the road so that the cop car could stop doing that. “—heading east on—”
Blare!
Dammit.

“Repeat that, dispatch,” Welch said, trying to put a hand over his ear, like that would help. “Where was the truck—” Another car started up and now their siren was blaring. “Dammit!” He looked like he was about to throw the walkie.

“Gimme,” I said, and swiped the walkie and shot into the air a few hundred feet. Once I was clear of the worst of the noise, I clicked the button and said, “Repeat that, dispatch! Where is the truck headed?”

“West on Chambers,” dispatch repeated a moment later, and I shot back to the ground and dropped the walkie back into Welch’s waiting hands. “They’re on Chambers, heading west. Wherever that is.”

“Ten, fifteen blocks, I think?” Welch offered, “North of here.”

“I know where it is,” Jamie said, and she launched into the air like she did. I followed a second later, but felt the tug of something grabbing me around the ankle as I took off, and looked down to see Scott hanging from my leg.

“What the hell?” I asked him as he stubbornly clung on, turning my pants into low-rise jeans.

“I need a ride,” he said.

“Get a cab! There are tons of them in this town.”

“If these guys just head-faked us here to blow up FBI HQ in Manhattan,” Scott said, the wind blowing his sandy hair out of its perfectly coiffed state, “then this entire case just went federal. So you can either drop it—and me—or you can get moving and we can try and catch this truck!”

“What the—this is just—this is shitty, I want to go on record saying!” I glared down at him, then lifted my leg and pulled him up before he inadvertently pantsed me. Probably inadvertently. Grabbing him by the lapels, I repositioned him so that he was on my back as we hung there over the street, and he snaked an arm around me just below my collarbone and another around my waist.

“Don’t get any ideas,” he said coldly.

I couldn’t really see him since he was on my back, but I snorted. “It takes a little more than flying around with you on my back like we’re the ambiguously heterosexual duo to get my motor running these days, thanks. Hang on.”

“You guys!” Friday shouted from below, and I could see him trying to scale the building’s facade like he was the Hulk or something. “Wait for me!” He swiped at a drainpipe that crunched in his hand and fell two stories to land on his ass.

I stared down at him. “I’m not carrying—”

“Yeah, no, just go,” Scott said, and I shot off after Gravity Gal before he changed his mind. I could only handle so many monkeys on my back, after all.

“How far from here?” Sienna asked as Jamie anchored herself to the top of a hotel and shot north on the channel, Nealon trailing behind. Jamie did a double take; there was a man with blond hair in a black suit on her back, that federal guy. She started to say something but shook her head and let it go. It wasn’t like Sienna might not have noticed him hanging on back there.

“I don’t know, a few blocks,” Jamie said, concentrating as she let loose of that anchor and placed another on the street below. She was a few hundred feet up now, and though it wasn’t going to be easy to distinguish Chambers street, it was worth a try while she was this high because, after all, who knew exactly where the truck was on it?