Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) (31 page)

Jamie closed the door behind her, feeling like she’d not only had the weight of the world settle on her today, but the weight of a few other planets as well. How many fights had she been in in the last couple days? Was it really only one? One and half, if she considered the idiot with the gun who’d tried to kill Nadine Griffin. Plus the fire, which was worth a couple of fights. Whatever they were, she’d used up most of her strength on them and didn’t feel like she had anything left.

It was like the universe she’d known had ended, and she was trapped in the black hole left in its wake.

Kyra’s door opened with a snap, some music pouring out. Jamie wasn’t sure it was really music, actually. Its defining characteristic seemed to just be LOUD. Kyra stormed into the hall, eyes alighting on Jamie, and Jamie could feel the anger even at this distance.

“What now?” Jamie muttered under her breath as Kyra stood there, eyes red.

“Were you even going to tell me?” Kyra asked.

Jamie’s mind went blank for a moment, then she raised the foreclosure notice. “About this …?”

“No, about your secret boyfriend!” Kyra said, going right to a shout. “Yes, about us losing our home! Melanie and her mom saw the notice. I was so humiliated. They asked me if you lost your car, too, and I had to laugh it off. I sounded like a total basic bitch.”

“It’s a mistake,” Jamie said. “All of it. I’ve paid the bills, so I don’t know where this is coming from.” She held up her phone. “This got shut off, too—”

“OMG!” Kyra screamed, and ran back into her room. “MY PHONE!” She slammed the door behind her and locked it. The sound of pounding, furious music seemed to shake the house from the inside.

“On the plus side,” Jamie said, “if her music ends up bringing the house down, at least the bank won’t have anything to foreclose on, I guess.” She made her way over to the stools next to the counter and collapsed into one, slapping her keys down. She eyed the one for her car. It was irrelevant now, at least until she ironed this out. She glanced at the notice in her hands demanding that she vacate the premises and realized that the one for her house technically no longer belonged to her. Her gaze lingered on the ones for Barton Designs and her office door, and she realized that they’d have to come off the ring, along with the one for the shed out back.

“I’m about to lose all my keys,” she said in a weary mutter. She looked over at the fridge. She wouldn’t even have a fridge soon. She stood up and shuffled over to it, opening it wide.

Empty. Utterly empty, save for a ketchup bottle.

“Kyra,” Jamie said, glancing at the sink to find the remnants of the last of her fresh greens and a bottle of salad dressing that was empty except for a few remaining drops of vinaigrette. She moved over to the cupboard, not having a lot of hope, and almost slumped in relief as she found a box of Saltines. They’d given all the canned goods away a week ago for a food drive, and she hadn’t been to the grocery store to replace them since.

“This whole thing is just … horrible timing,” Jamie said, taking the saltines and slinking back to the counter. She opened the box and found all of five crackers remaining within the white wrapper.

She stared at the meager offering for only a moment before ripping it apart and devouring the white, salty crackers within. They were slightly stale, but she didn’t even care at this point.

Her daughter was furious with her.

Her house was about to be taken away.

Her business was on its death throes.

“At least I’m still a hero,” she said, to no one in particular, but as her gaze settled on Kyra’s closed door, she wondered whether being a hero to strangers but an enemy to her daughter was really cause for any gratitude at all.

It was morning in New York again, and I was energized by the possibility of making today the day that Nadine Griffin found herself in a metal cell with a bunch of bars or Plexiglas between me and her smug face. I didn’t even care which of those it was, so long as there was a barrier of law and order between us, something that proved the system worked to protect the people from evil souls that just looked to exploit and damage them.

I sprang out of bed, all chipper and shit, and went over to my room’s mini-fridge. It had a spare SmokeShack burger from Shake Shack, because I’d made a foray out last night and ordered extra with my fries and shake; I didn’t want to face the possibility of the morning without something good to eat. It worked, and I felt happier as I pondered the morning conference call coming up, and the exciting idea of Nadine Griffin being imprisoned with a bunch of people who would probably like to hurt her (so that I wouldn’t have to).

It’s the little things in life, really.

I set up for my morning videoconference call, humming quietly to myself as the sound of honking horns filtered in even through the window. I tapped a finger on my phone screen. I’d read through all my favorite sites last night while I was killing time, and I still hadn’t bought into using Netflix via my phone, so I was running low on ideas for ways to kill time when the conference started (thank goodness).

Reed popped up first, followed by Ariadne a second later, then J.J. I hit the center square, wearing a slightly creepy smile that I immediately struck from my face, but not before Reed noticed, his eyebrow rising in response to it.

“Good morning,” I announced, probably too happy.

“It’s
a
morning,” Augustus said from somewhere behind Reed. “Don’t go getting overexcited about it.”

“He seems in a good mood today,” I said.

“We caught a bad guy last night,” Reed said. “Late, late last night. Low-level meta with the power to make people forget what he looks like. Creepy effect, by the way, like you’ve been looking at a Dick Tracy villain.”

“Is Dick Tracy still a thing now?” Ariadne asked, her brow lined in concentration. “Because that was old when I was a kid.”

“Jamal says hi, Augustus,” I said, hoping my words would reach him through Reed’s phone.

“What were you doing talking to him?” Augustus said, slipping bleary-eyed into view.

“Consulting,” J.J. announced. “I take it he got ahold of you, Sienna?”

“No, I just psychically determined he’d probably want me to say howdy to his brother,” I lobbed back gently. “So, the Texas team seems to be one for two this morning. Any word from Cali?”

“Not that we’ve heard here,” Ariadne said. “And it’s all quiet on the Midwestern front, with our security team on standby in case they need to deploy to back any of you up.”

“Highly unlikely we’ll get the chance to use them where I am,” I said. “Or, where Kat is, actually.”

“Hampton says they’re on standby anyway,” Ariadne said. “If needed.” She tried to play coy. “And … if I may suggest … based on the events I saw out of New York yesterday—”

“Yeah, it wasn’t good,” I said. “Any idea of a death toll?”

“The buildings were mostly evacuated when the word got out,” J.J. said. “So … surprisingly minimal. A dozen deaths, I think, mostly at FBI HQ.”

I’d been avoiding news coverage, because seeing things I had been powerless to prevent tended to affect my emotional state in unfortunate and unpredictable ways. I’d once had a bad crying jag after a lunatic meta had walked into a school in Oklahoma and done horrible things. I didn’t like to talk publicly about my emotional states, but if I let myself feel too much, I tended to go through a predictable pattern—disbelief that it could have happened, unquenchable fury, daydreams about inserting myself into the conflict before it became a tragedy, revenge fantasies—all manner of fantasies, really, including ones where I’m the hero who saves the day—followed by crushing sadness and then a reluctant willingness to move on to the next thing. I could hold off the cycle if I was in the middle of a case, or ignore it completely in some cases, just by shutting out the news.

I had a feeling that what had happened here, in New York, while I was trying to stop the bank heist … it was probably going to get to me later, so it was fortunate that very few people died. That news did not, however, make me any less gung-ho about shoving Nadine Griffin into a slightly more populous and sapphic version of how I’d spent my youth.

“Did I miss anything?” Kat asked as she beeped onto the line. She wasn’t bothering to look put-together today. In fact, she looked kind of haggard.

“Good grief,” Reed said when he saw her, “did you have a run-in with that criminal meta?”

“What?” Kat asked then peered at her screen. “Oh. No, I just … Miley Cyrus had a party last night and it went until really late, like … I just got in an hour ago, and I was asleep, and then my phone beeped me awake so I could be here with you lovely people.” From the tone of her voice, I guessed that “lovely” meant something else. “Can we please account for the fact that not all of us are living on East Coast or Central Time now? Pretty please?”

“No,” I said, “because some of us have very, very important things to do with our day and can’t be bothered to interrupt them at the crack of noon to conference with you. Learn to love the dawn, Kat.”

“It’s not dawn here,” she moaned. “It’s the crack of dark, okay?”

“If I’d waited until noon to do the conference call yesterday,” I said, “I would have missed out on a very important break in my case, and a lot more people might have died.” I left out the part about how Gravity Gal kind of did most of the heavy lifting in the bank job, because let’s face it, if I hadn’t been there, she might not have acted with as much urgency. I was important, dammit.

“I heard Gravity Gal did most of the work,” Reed said, never one to be deterred by facts that might make me look worse. He was wearing a grin, of course.

“I carried her across the harbor, okay?” I puffed up to defend myself. “Without me, she and Scott wouldn’t have even laid eyes on the
Tirragusk
before it blew up.”

“That the boat?” Kat yawned.

“Ah, yeah,” I said. “How’d you know?”

“Because
‘Tirragusk’
literally means ‘boat’ in Shervich, which is the language they speak in Canta Morgana and Revelen and the surrounding area.” She sounded bored as she spelled this out for us.

“Kat speaks multiple languages?” Reed asked.

“
Yeb tvoyu mat
,” Kat said, looking unamused. “That was Russian for—”

“I got it,” Reed said.

“I’m not stupid, you know,” Kat said. “I know a lot more than people give me credit for. I was the top of the class in trig back at the Directorate, remember?”

“There were like three of us in that class,” I said. “And I’ll be honest, I didn’t try very hard because I was a little more focused on the survival-based aspects of our training. Something about meeting Wolfe must have awakened an instinct in me.”

“Still,” Kat said, pointing at her own head, “I’m not stupid. Just … put that on the record, okay?”

I looked at the other participants in the conference call. “Reed,” I said, once that moment had passed, “are you and Augustus on your way up to Austin today?”

“Yeah,” he said. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to find evidence of Nadine Griffin’s involvement in this whole mess and use it to pin her to a wall like a tail on a donkey.” My phone buzzed, and a message notification popped up with a picture that looked like—“What fresh hell is this?” I muttered.

“Glad you realized that using a ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ metaphor for catching a criminal was somewhat inappropriate before anyone had to say anything about it,” Ariadne said.

“Huh?” I pushed the button to send the conference call app to the background of my phone. “Oh come on, you know I wasn’t talking about that. Because when has something being inappropriate ever stopped me from saying it?” I clicked the messaging app and noted that the text I’d just gotten was from an unknown number. Stupid small screen had made the preview tough to figure out, but it looked like clouds and a human being in there, somehow.

“Never,” Reed said, beating Augustus by a half second. “Too slow,” Reed said with a smile.

“Dammit!” Augustus said.

“What are you doing, Sienna?” Ariadne asked.

“I got a text—err, picture message from someone,” I said as I clicked on it. It popped up obligingly, and it took a few seconds for what I was looking at to really sink in. “Oh,” I said at last.

“‘Oh’ what?” Kat asked.

I stared at the picture, and the message attached. “Look what I woke up to this morning,” were the words in the message.

The picture was of Nadine Griffin, smirking, next to an unconscious and shirtless Scott, who was in bed next to her.

Nadine was already in the cab when she sent the picture. She hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near her house for this, especially since the reaction was unpredictable. No, she had it in her mind to leave for a while, to vacate the premises in case Sienna Nealon turned up furious. She might even spend the night away from her house, check into a hotel in Westchester County or in the Hamptons, maybe, somewhere she could lay low for a little while.

She was on her way into Manhattan right now, though, a little smile perched on her face. It wasn’t there just because she’d gotten laid last night after a short, self-imposed drought—though he had been reasonably good, that meta boy, once he got into the groove. No, she was smiling because she was calculating the effect of her morning-after bombshell on the intended target. She’d taken the selfie very carefully, trying to avoid any chance of Scott waking up and asking uncomfortable questions. Finding Sienna Nealon’s number after that had been easy; stupid Scott didn’t even have a password on his phone. Pretty, but not too bright.

Today, Nadine had a plan to dart around a little—first a trip to the office to drop a couple things off, then visit a few sights, do some window shopping, lose herself in Manhattan. She had errands to run. She’d just take care of her business, and maybe cast a few darts via text toward Sienna, see how that worked out. She suspected it’d go well.

Yes, it was going to be a good day, she sensed as the cab entered the midtown tunnel. And as long as she kept moving, she’d get the full enjoyment out of this little game she was playing, with none of the nasty consequences. And pretty soon, the Department of Justice would remove itself from her back, she’d get her money returned, the SEC would get its nose out of her business, and she’d be back in.