16.
Reed
Odessa, Texas was more or less what you’d expect when you think of Texas. I hated to say it, but most of the TV shows meant to depict Texas had been shot in California at one point in time, because saguaro sagebrush country looked more or less the same to the untrained eye. It was long stretches of what I’d call desert ground—kind of a sandy tan, with most of the greenery more of a deep brown, they were the main sign of life around here.
Other than, y’know, the town.
Odessa itself wasn’t too big. Wikipedia had estimates of a population of 160,000 or so. If they had a sign declaring that number, I’d probably missed it while playing on my phone. The Odessa PD had sent a driver for us at Midland Airport, and Angel and I had made our way here in the back of one of their cars. Well, I’d been in the back. Angel had been up front, twitching like she’d wanted to be in the driver’s seat until I had zoned out and started scrolling the internet.
Looking for news on my sister, of course.
There was no actual news, just a metric ton of analysis. It wasn’t like they’d caught her between my flight and my arrival. Police Scotland weren’t even saying anything, just keeping tight-lipped about whether they’d encountered her at all. Tips were pouring in, they said, and having been involved with the law enforcement side of those kinds of manhunts, I was reasonably sure they weren’t lying.
The problem with that kind of tip was that you got a lot of static. It seemed like everyone who had encountered a short, dark-haired girl in Scotland this last week would probably be calling, and the investigators would have to sort through which of them were credible leads, and which were fanciful farces. Usually that was made somewhat easier by tagging your target’s location at a given time and drawing concentric circles outward from that locale based on the time of travel it took to move from one place to another. That allowed you to eliminate a lot of the noise, because if they were in, say, Dallas at 10a.m. today on a Walmart security camera, and you got a tip saying they were in Honolulu at a pizza place with kids and a family at noon, you could pretty much write it off as bullshit if they were your average fugitive, because your average fugitive does not dare try and pass through TSA security checkpoints and the like while wanted. They’re restricted to ground travel, and Honolulu ain’t in the ground travel path from Dallas within two hours. Or ever, until they get around to building a bridge between LA and Hawaii.
What Police Scotland was bound to discover—if they hadn’t already—was that such a weeding out was not really possible with Sienna. She could fly at supersonic speeds, which meant if they got a tip that she’d shown up in, say, Vienna, Austria an hour after they’d caught her on security camera footage in Harrods in London, that was totally possible. Everything was possible, which meant you couldn’t toss away these probably useless tips out of hand.
I would have felt sorry for them, but I really, really wanted them to fail.
The cop car bumped to a stop, mid-morning sun blazing down above us. We should have been here hours earlier, but the flight from Eden Prairie had seemed to take forever, and the Midland airport seemed to be as far from the part of Odessa where this hostage drama was unfolding as possible. It might not have been, but with the Texas heat beating on us even inside the air-conditioned car, it sure felt like it.
“We’re here,” Angel announced, as though I were still in my electronically induced coma. She turned her head around, leaning an arm on the back of the seat to look back at me in my caged seating area.
I put my phone away slowly, calmly. No point in acting like I hadn’t done this a hundred times before. “Okay,” I said, and nodded toward the door. “Let me out.”
She broke into a half smile. “Time to free the beast.” And she got out of the passenger side to let me out.
The deputy who’d driven us looked at me with an air of uncertainty. I hadn’t said much on the trip, and he looked like maybe that had worked his nerves over, riding with two quiet metas for an hour in his car. “Just a figure of speech,” I said, trying to put him at ease. It did not seem to relax him.
Angel opened the door, and I said, “Thanks, Jeeves,” as I got out. She favored me with a scowl—it didn’t take much to get Angel to scowl; she was like the opposite end of her cousin, Miranda, being that Miranda—although not a smiler—didn’t scowl. Both of them seemed to take a lot of effort to move from their natural emotional state. Miranda’s was a kind of stoicism.
Angel’s…was most definitely not. Her natural state was irritation, and she let it show often. She didn’t shut the door for me, instead leaving it hanging wide, already walking away.
I got it for her, because I’m cool like that.
That done, I followed her toward the nearby officer in charge. Angel was wearing one of those modern all-business kind of lady suits, with the grey skirt, blouse beneath for a splash of color, and a jacket. I was clad similarly, but the male version of it—dress shirt and suit, but all black and white because the contrast looked good on me (Isabella said so). Angel was wearing heels, not flats, which would have been a mistake for most people and most metas in our line of work, but…
She could handle it. It’s what she did.
The man in charge was evident by the fact that he was standing in the middle of the scene. He tipped his hat to Angel as she approached, then nodded at me, talking in a broad Texas accent as we came closer. “Ma’am,” he said, taking a lot more deference to Angel. He just met my gaze with a fair amount of the reserve you tend to encounter in law enforcement when your superior has called in some outsider to come paw up your turf. “Reckon you heard we had a problem.”
“Lay it out for us,” I said, and he beckoned us over to where a bunch of house plans were sitting weighted on an old Crown Vic-style police cruiser hood. I made my way to the other side so I could take a gander without anyone else standing in my personal bubble.
“Got a 911 call in the late hours of last night,” he said, putting his hands on the hood and then looking up at us, all seriousness. “Lady’s voice. She was ordering a pizza.”
“I remember seeing that on one of those domestic violence PSAs,” I said. “Not a bad idea.”
The sheriff seemed to think otherwise. “When my men showed up, we tried to take it easy, but this, uh…well, you know—”
“Metahuman,” Angel said stiffly. Her arms were already folded in front of her.
“A-yep,” the lawman drawled. “He opens the door and starts firing at my boys—well, and girls,” he said in a seeming concession to Angel, who did not look amused. “Blows up a squaddy—” he nodded at the ruin of a new police Explorer on the curb, still smoking “—and my people go running for safer cover. This chickenshit hostage-taking son of a bitch, he ducks back inside, and stays in there with the curtains drawn. We hear some screaming, try and establish contact via the phone—” all this sounded like standard operating procedure “—and he informs us not to come in, not to make a move, but to charter him a private plane so he can get away clean. And that’s it. No sound inside since, no demand for it on a timeframe, just…that.” The lawman finished, and straightened up, crossing his arms in front of him. Now we had three people standing, one at each point of the hood, not one of us apparently wanting to be here, and all of us with our walls up.
“Okay,” I said, since I was probably supposed to figure out what to say here. “There’s been no threat of violence if his demands aren’t carried out in a certain timetable?” I thought I’d heard the man right, but in a hostage situation this was pretty crucial stuff.
“No timetable,” he said. It was probably a sign of how he felt about us that he hadn’t offered his name.
I frowned. “That’s a little odd. Did he specify what he’d do if you didn’t comply?” The lawman shook his head again. “Have you called him back?”
Here, his expression darkened. “We were told by our higher-ups not to contact him again until you arrived.”
“Well, we’ve arrived,” I said, unfolding my arms. “When was your last contact?”
“Four, five hours ago,” he said. “Haven’t heard a peep from inside since then.”
“All right then,” I said. That wasn’t great news, but it wasn’t world-ending either. “Let’s give ‘em a call. Got the number?”
He handed me a cell phone after he’d already punched the number in. I pushed talk and held it up to my ear.
The sun beat down on me as I stood there, the black phone hot against my ear like it was about to explode. It was shaping up to be another Texas summer day, dry and fiery. My feet felt like they were going to melt their way onto the pavement, the soles of my shoes sticky against the rocky black aggregate.
“Hello?” someone answered, jarring me out of my heat-induced lapse into silence.
“Hi there,” I said. “My name is Reed Treston, and I’m working with the local police. Who am I speaking with?” Using my Grade A phone manners, like grandma taught me to.
There was a nervous silence, and for a second I wondered if the voice would answer. It was male, sounded young, cagey. “This is Peter.”
And I had a first name. It was progress. “Peter, how are you doing in there?” I lowered my voice to a calm octave, trying to be all soothing and pleasant.
“Fine,” he said, short, clipped, to the point. He didn’t sound greatly agitated, but there were definitely a few things on his mind.
“That’s good,” I said, trying to be smooth. “We’re all rooting for this to turn out well, you understand? We don’t want anyone to get hurt—and that includes you. All right?”
He seemed to ponder that one for a second, then to take it onboard. “Okay.”
“So…Peter,” I said, repeating his name as often as I could to try and establish familiarity and rapport, “I talked with the Odessa PD officer on the scene, and I took over. I’m in charge now, okay? They’re backing me up. And he kinda suggested what you want, but he was a little vague about it.” I tried to adopt a conspiratorial, “he’s over there, and it’s you and me against him,” kind of tone to put us on the same side. “I don’t know what exactly he said to you, but I want to know exactly what you want, so I can get to work on that for you, because—again—we just want this all to work out and nobody to get hurt, okay?”
“Okay,” he said again, and the wheels were turning really slow in this guy’s mind. I tried to keep my voice even, but either he was on something, drug-wise, that was slowing his cognition, or he was flat-out dumb. It could have been either, and both were worrying.
“So…what do you want, Peter?”
Peter was quiet for a few seconds. “I want to get out of here. I want—I want a plane. To get me out of this country.”
“Okay,” I said, once I’d allowed a few seconds to be sure I wasn’t going to end up talking over some request he made after a brief pause. The last thing I wanted to do was cut over this guy. I needed to listen, full, attentive, and long. It was amazing how many times you could actually talk someone out of doing something stupid just by listening to them. “We can do that,” I said, giving him a little of the can-do attitude. “I will need something from you in return though, if that’s all right.” Gentle. Conciliatory. “And it’s not tough; you don’t have to really do much—I just need to talk to the people in there with you, and make sure they’re all right.” I hesitated, and went for the gusto. “Are they all right, Peter?” I asked as non-judgmentally as possible.
“Yeah, they’re fine,” he said, and a mild hint of agitation cut through in the strain of his voice. It wasn’t a terrible amount, but enough that I found it…worrying…that it came out when I mentioned there might be harm to the hostages.
“Okay, good,” I said, trying to sound relieved, which was not hard. “Can I talk to one of them, please, Peter?”
He chewed that one over. “Yeah, okay,” he said, and then went silent.
There was a sniffling on the other end of the phone, and then a voice, female and cracking with fear, said, “Hello?”
“Hello,” I said, trying to keep pouring on the soothing. “This is Reed Treston. I’m outside, with the police. Can I ask your name?”
“Elvira,” she said.
That one took me aback. “Elvira?” I mostly repeated it so that I could confirm I got it right, and would have done so even if she’d said, “Jane.”
“My mom was a fan of—never mind,” she said, sniffling. “Elvira, yes.”
“Okay, Elvira,” I said, almost a whisper. “Is there anyone else in there with you besides Peter?”
“My kids,” Elvira said, voice straining as she held back a tide of emotion.
My stomach plummeted like an elevator in the Empire State Building with the line and brakes cut. “What are their names and how old are they?” I asked, fighting off the emotion that threatened to creep into my voice. I needed to keep that at bay, because if I didn’t, if I let feelings infect me, it had the potential to damage my discussions with Peter. Because it was really tough to talk to someone with decency and respect when they were a chickenshit who took kids as hostages.
“Elijah is six,” she said, sniffling a little. “Barry is four. Annie is two.”
“Elijah, six, Barry, four, Annie, two?” I repeated it and watched as Angel jotted it all down. She’d been listening in and taking notes all throughout my conversation. “Is there anyone else in there with you, Elvira?”
“No. Just us and Peter.”
“Okay,” I said. “I just need you to hang on, Elvira. We are working on this, okay? We are going to do everything we can to make Peter happy and settle this problem so everyone’s okay. All right?” I wanted to end on a peppy note, give her some hope, because people without any hope tended to do desperate, terrible things. That went for Peter as much as it did for her. “You can hand the phone back now, okay?”
“Hello?” I heard Peter’s rough voice again.
“Hey, Peter,” I said, “thanks for making that happen.” I complimented him on his can-do ability to be in charge, because that kind of thing worked wonders on a man’s ego. “I’m gonna go talk with the sheriff and get things rolling for you on that plane, okay? It’s probably going to take a while, though, because—I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with the airlines before—” I threw in a fake chuckle “—but they’re pretty particular about people asking to borrow their planes.” I hoped he wouldn’t dive too deep on this lie, since the government owned plenty of planes we could probably easily commandeer, but he didn’t seem the deep-thinking type. “But I’ll get to work on that right away, see if we can cut through some of the red tape for you.” Everything was for him, and I’d throw this in over and over again in our conversations, because I wanted him to see me as his advocate, on his side. I was working for him, fighting the man for his benefit!
Fearless, tireless, against all odds, I’d be working into the late, late hours trying to answer his needs. And it would go into the late hours too, because my job was to keep him from doing anything stupid while we waited for him to go to sleep so we could take him unawares. Or wear him out so he’d surrender without hurting anybody.
I glanced at the scorched squad car. Yeah, making sure he didn’t hurt anybody was very important.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Peter?” I asked. “Anything else you need? Food? Drink? Anything? Gatorade? Steak? It’s Texas; we can get steak a lot easier than a plane.”
“No,” he said, and it was a pretty snap decision. “I’m good.” He sounded…mild. Not like he was aiming to cause a shitstorm, but not embarrassed about it either.
Humility and the capacity to see that what he’d done here was breathtakingly wrong would have been preferable, but I’d take quiet acceptance and be happy with it now, because it beat the hell out of him getting belligerent and throwing around threats. Besides, the fact that he’d shown some grace meant that now I could get on to making my eminently reasonable request for a fair exchange considering all the wonderful things I was about to go and do for Peter.
“All right, just one thing then, Peter,” I said, right before I sensed he was ready to hang up. “I’m going to go do this for you, but in return…I need something. And…really, it’s no big deal. I just need to show the Odessa PD, and you know, the other people out here—” the cops, the governor, whatever authority Peter most identified as his antagonist—guys with man-buns, maybe “—what a good guy you are.
“Peter,” I said, trying to build up to it, “can you let the kids go?”
The answer came back in a half second, flat and firm, devoid of emotion. “No.”
I drew a deep breath. It was a big ask, and I decided to explain. “Look, Peter…I get that, I do. But these are kids, man. They need diaper changes.” I heard no agreement, which I suspected was a tacit kind of agreement. “They need food, naps—you don’t want that kind of trouble, do you? Crying, whining kids? Because they’re gonna do that. We just want to make sure they’re safe, and that everything goes as easy as possible. You keep Elvira in there, and you’ll still be safe. We want this to end with everybody okay, right? But the kids…come on, Peter…you don’t need the kids. They’re going to be more trouble than good for you, don’t you think?”
Presenting it as a question was part of trying to change his thinking. I’d listed out the bad points, obviously, and glossed over the good—that cops were terrified of shooting into a building where there were kids, because the potential for disaster was enormous. No one wanted to take the chance for a stray round offing a kid, not even the hardest hardass.
Peter seemed to think about it, like he was weighing my points. “No,” he said again, still flat. “Get me that plane.”
And he hung up.
“Shit,” I said, taking a deep breath. I looked over at Angel, and her face was frozen. She’d heard. Maybe even suspected what I did. The Texas sun was still beating down on me, but it had nothing to do with the sudden sweat I found breaking out—on my lips, on my forehead, and everywhere from my scalp on down.
Peter was determined and not all that bright. He also had hostages, including three children, and a complete unwillingness to surrender even one of them.
This…was a formula set up for complete and total disaster.