Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) (3 page)

“Are you prepared to storm the building and—”

“Is it likely Ms. Griffin will survive this—?”

“Lieutenant, have you thought about seeking help from either of the metahuman heroes here in New York—”

Jamie watched, her eyes wide, and she knew the answers before the reporters even finished answering the question. All thoughts of her meeting with the banker, her argument with Kyra, and her ordinary life were thrown out the window in a hot second, and Jamie Barton sprinted out the door, not even bothering to slam it shut behind her as she unbuttoned her blouse and kicked off her pants with metahuman speed, pulled her mask over her face as she vaulted into the air above Staten Island and launched herself toward lower Manhattan.

“Augustus?” I called again, hoping to hear his familiar voice crackle through the radio line. In its place I heard nothing but gunfire from the kitchen as the bad guys opened up on both Reed and the corner where I’d just popped my head out.

Kat was down.

Augustus was out.

Reed was pinned.

My little op had gone so far south that it was about to cross the Drake Passage.

This shit was just unacceptable.

“Keep your head down, Reed!” I shouted, not caring who heard as I pushed Wolfe and Gavrikov to the forefront of my mind. I launched myself into flight into the main hallway, my gun raised and ready. My opponent was ready, too, facing me from the living room arch where he’d gunned down Augustus, his weapon pointing almost right at me—

I shot at him and he shot at me. I did a sideways barrel roll in midair, some serious John Woo-type shit, unconcerned with gravity or a landing because I didn’t have to be. I watched his shots go streaking past, ready to paint my face if I’d been just a little slower.

I hit the wall sideways and upside down, using the bounce as an opportunity to go lower as I worked my way back across the archway toward cover again, spinning and firing like—like—

You know, honestly, I can’t think of anything I’ve ever seen in any action movie where someone did what I did. It was like rolling on the ground to put out a fire on myself, except without the fire, or the ground, and with shots flying all around me as I stayed head on with my opponent and gave him the smallest possible target to shoot at—basically just my face and shoulders.

I returned fire, the wild thumping of my heart and the insane movement making my aim beyond crappy. I blasted the wall to his right, destroying the patterned wallpaper with my shots. Some streamed past him into the living room behind, leaving their own marks on the far wall. My foe was dodging hard, lunging to my left with pretty damned good speed, and I couldn’t decide whether he was a human with incredible training or whether he was a meta of some sort—it was pretty close to the line and damned impressive either way because he was keeping his head about him like few I’d ever faced.

I heard his shots lance into the wall as I dodged back into the dining room, escaping a shot to the face by a matter of inches. This guy was good.

No, wait. His team was good.

This guy was great.

I didn’t have much time to feel a grudging respect since I was busy not getting shot in the head, but it was there, burgeoning in the back of my mind as I ejected my near-empty mag from my HK MP5 and slapped a new one in. I checked to make sure it was snug and then readied myself for my next move.

I needed to get to Reed, because he and I were the only ones left in this fight, and me trying to take on this enemy alone meant leaving my brother to get shot all to hell by superior numbers. That was bad, and I didn’t need any more guilt in my life, so I bolted for the door to my right that led to the kitchen, and flung myself sideways again, spinning through the air.

I counted eight men with guns in the other room, and they opened up as soon as they saw me launch into motion. I didn’t want to hold out too long, because dodging shots was guaranteed to end in … well, in my end, before too much longer. I hosed them down with my fresh mag as I entered the room, firing, and had the satisfaction of seeing four of them go down under my fire and a fifth get doused by Reed with a double tap to the face as I landed behind the kitchen island next to my brother.

“Oh, what a lovely day,” Reed said tightly as I glided down next to him. The rattle of gunfire against the other side of the island was gnawing at my consciousness, a grim awareness settling in that bullets could rip right through the wood partition between us and danger at any time.

“You’ve been watching too much
Mad Max
,” I said, listening to the fire die down a little. Some of them had to be reloading, and I dodged out and fired quickly, pegging one of them in the gut and disappearing behind the island again as a dozen rounds flew past in the space I’d just occupied. I kept an eye on the door I had just come through, figuring it was even odds whether my opponent from the living room decided to flank us or join his mates. “Two more behind us and one in the living room that could come either way.”

“That the one that got Augustus?” Reed said with nervous tension.

I didn’t look at him as I answered. “Yep,” I said tonelessly.

“We still haven’t cleared the upstairs,” he said, like I’d forgotten.

“I’ll just nuke the house, we’ll call it good,” I said.

“And if there are hostages?” Reed looked at me in disbelief. “Civilians?”

“Then it’ll be a PR nightmare, of course, but at least I won’t be in charge of cleanup.”

Reed gave me one of his patented big brother looks, unamused at my little joke. “That’s just what we need right now. Like the Federal Government isn’t looking at us suspiciously as it is.”

That was a fair point, though I wouldn’t have admitted it to my brother. Feeding him in that way was dangerous, because he already thought he was right all the time as it was. No one likes a know-it-all. “Let’s save the debate for another time,” I said, since we had at least three guys with guns in the vicinity with hostile intent and two of our team were already down. There’d be plenty of time later to dwell on the fact that the government had filled my old job about two seconds after I left with some mysterious new head of a task force that had been absorbed into the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

And trust me, I was spending some time dwelling on that. Had been for weeks. Stewing, even.

The sharp rat-a-tat of fire behind me jerked me out of that rabbit hole before I could go too deep down it, and I raised my gun. I had at least fifteen rounds left, which was enough to deal with these three chuckleheads if I could get a clear line of fire. “Go on three,” I said to Reed, and he nodded. “One—”

And we went, because the whole three thing was just a distraction. The guys shooting at us were just a few feet away, after all; they could hear us. I flew out in a spin again, and I saw the nearest bad guy’s eyes widen as I planted a round between them—
pop pop!—
and he was out. I turned my weapon toward the other in time to see him train fire on Reed. I heard Reed grunt and heard the wet slap of rounds hitting my brother, then fired as I stabilized in my arc of flight long enough to draw a bead.
Splat
, I nailed the guy in the side of the head and liquid splattered everywhere.

“Now for the—” I spun, my legs twisting as I came back to the ground in time to see the last enemy—my worthy foe from the living room—come around the corner. He was firing at me and I was forced to pirouette, his shots racing by me as I did my best impersonation of a paper cutout turned sideways while I raised my gun. I fired the HK one-handed and blasted him across the chest, halting him before he could nail me with a shot.

I grinned at him, watched his face go slack in disbelief. He had a strong chin, and wide eyes, and he forced a smile as he looked down. My eyes followed him, and I saw the grenade clutched in his hand, pin pulled.

I didn’t even have time to summon Gavrikov to the fore of my mind before it went off in his hand, the explosion blotting out my vision.

The Queen of Wall Street was feeling the loss of her crown more acutely now that she’d had a loaded gun to her head for the last two hours. She was watching the television in the corner of her office with one eye and the pistol that was squeezed against her temple with the other, her hands shaking and not from the coffee or the whiskey.

“We are dealing with this situation like we would deal with any others,” Lieutenant Welch of the NYPD said on the screen, smug and tight, glorying in her fall. “Ms. Griffin’s legal status has no bearing on our handling of this matter. Our goal is to resolve this peacefully—”

Yeah, right
, Nadine thought, the metal barrel of the gun being squeezed tight against her temple giving her a headache. It wasn’t the whiskey, no, nor the coffee; it was definitely the gun. Not her fault but his, this intruder, this vulture after another piece of her flesh. As though there weren’t enough of those already.
You’re definitely handling this like you would if it was a sweet, innocent twelve-year-old with a gun to his head.
Oh, no, wait. You would have already paid this maniac if that were the case.

“I don’t think they’re gonna come through for you,” Joseph Tannen said, almost crowing. Something Nadine had figured out in the last two hours was that Joseph Tannen was crazy as hell and that he had the worst breath she’d ever smelled, pouring through her hair like stink released from a bottle, stirring the strands against her shoulder and caressing the back of her neck roughly, like that ex she hated.

“Idiot,” she said. Her patience and niceties had been exhausted about fifteen minutes into this—and she’d never had much to begin with. “That means you’re going to die, too.”

“I dun care,” Tannen said, and he sounded like he truly didn’t. That caused Nadine a worried roll of her eyes, almost as much for the pathetically stupid way he spoke as for the suggestion that she was going to die and leave an ugly corpse behind. She almost gagged on the injustice of it, because this wasn’t how her story was supposed to end. She had deals. Plans. She had a sales success system that was going to help bridge the money gap for her until this legal battle cleared up and blew over. It was just waiting for approval, and it was the most deliciously ironic thing, her nastiest slam against the Old Boys.

She called it the Balls Out™! Success System. It fit.

“What’s this?” Tannen asked as the reporters on the screen went breathless again. “Oh, looky. Heroes.”

“It’s one hero, moron,” she said, sagging. She’d figured out early on that Tannen didn’t give a damn if she called him names. That gun in his hand seemed to give him a feeling of boundless security she couldn’t even dent. Either that or he viewed her as subhuman scum. She didn’t really care which, because she certainly viewed him through that microscope, like any other fungus or intestinal parasite. “It’s … Captain Frost.” She rolled her eyes again, involuntarily.

And it indeed was. “Captain Frost!” a reporter shouted at the square-jawed, overmuscled loser on the screen. “Captain! Are you planning to intervene?”

Of all the dumbass things that had happened since the day President Harmon had gone on TV to announce that superpeople were real, the arrival of not one but two of them as New York’s very own meta superheroes over the last few months ranked right at the top. Nadine could get behind government task forces with metas on them, but the idea of these do-gooders flying around New York with nothing but heroics on their mind …

It was just stupid. But at least this Captain Frost had figured out how to monetize it.

“I’ve done a little informal survey,” Captain Frost announced, his voice loud and confident, “on Twitter and Facebook, and it looks to me like the people of New York are pretty content to watch Nadine Griffin—just another Wall Street fat cat with her hand caught in the cookie jar, twist in the wind.” Frost grinned broadly, with rows perfect white teeth like he had just had them bleached. “I think this is just justice being done.” There were some hoots in the background, and someone started chanting, “Frost! Frost! Frost!” as Frost stopped to smile at the onlookers.

“Idiot,” Nadine muttered.

“They aren’t fans of you,” Tannen opined.

“Thanks, ass,” Nadine replied as Frost motioned for the crowd to quiet down. “Lacking any self-awareness at all, I guess I didn’t know that.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t tried to be the female Madoff,” Tannen said.

“I’m not—” Nadine flushed. “Madoff stole from his own clients in Ponzi scheme, okay? I didn’t do that. I made my clients money.”

“And also stole from them,” Tannen said flatly.

“Allegedly,” Nadine said. “What do you even care? Were you a client?”

“Nope,” Tannen said. “Just an average Joe sick of seeing you assholes get away with murder.”

Nadine’s eyes narrowed before she could control her reaction, a sudden burst of chill rolling down her. “I haven’t committed murder.”
Yet
.

“Nah, your crimes are just daggers to the heart of people who saved their money and trusted you,” Tannen said, pushing the barrel deeper into her temple.

“And your crime is to try and extort the people of New York by putting a gun to my head and hoping they’ll see enough value in keeping me alive to pay you for it.” Nadine held her head surprisingly high considering she was in danger of losing it. “At least I—allegedly—stole from rich people. You’re stealing from everybody, including the middle class and the poor.”

“
You
could just pay me and I’d leave,” Tannen said coolly, rolling the barrel around the side of her head painfully. “Then only the rich would take the hit, see.”

“They impounded my money, moron,” Nadine said irritably. “Locked down all my accounts. Seized my homes, my cars, my yacht—” She cut herself off, furious. “And besides, you have no way out of here even if I had millions to give you. You’d walk right out into the loving arms of the NYPD, and they’d arrest you even if you don’t kill me—though it’s kind of a toss up whether they’d be madder if you did or didn’t do it. I couldn’t say which would get you better treatment—”