20.
Reed
The day was dragging, because there wasn’t anything else to do except call Peter every once in a while and let him know all the things I was working on doing for him. So I was doing that every hour or two, after having received his permission to do so, and offering food, and gently requesting—oh so reasonably—that he give us the youngest kid. Just the smallest. Make your life easier. Give us a sign of good faith, I would say, as I baked in the hot Texas sun, sweat rolling down my face in great rivulets.
And the answer was always, “No.”
Some thoughtful person who’d clearly been in Texas law enforcement for some time had set up a tent for us to hide under while we waited. It was just a simple canopy, but in the summer heat, the shade was appreciated by me and everyone else. Angel and I were sweating through our suits, and I had big ol’ beads dripping out of my thick hair every few minutes.
I wiped my brow with my shirt sleeve, admiring the new, translucent shade the white broadcloth had turned from absorbing all that moisture. It was not a trivial amount of sweating I was doing, and suddenly I wished Miranda had called Scott instead of Angel. He could have set up his version of a misting device, drawing moisture out of the air and blowing it over us to defray some of the life-choking heat.
But as Teddy Roosevelt said, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
I doubted he’d been standing in a suit in the sweltering summer sun in Texas when he’d said it, but anything was possible I guess. Those guys were crazy back then. They wore suits all the time, and everywhere.
“Getting close to the hour,” Angel said, a quiet, tense reminder to me that the moment was coming up for me to place another call to Peter.
We’d managed to identify him, finally, after a little more coaxing allowed me to get his last name out of him. Peter Upton, age twenty-six, a troubled lad with a troubled life. He had a rap sheet for petty stuff, but I hadn’t seen the kicker until Angel pointed it out to me.
Peter Upton was five foot six, and as near as I could tell he had all the brains to match his stature—which was to say, in both these ways, he was below average.
Every one of his prior convictions read like something out of America’s Dumbest Criminals. Robbed a liquor store, no mask, using a squirt gun—that was yellow. When the clerk laughed at him, Upton proceeded to beat the clerk with the squirt gun, giving the man some serious contusions. But the clerk did fight back, and ultimately drove Upton out of his store and into the arms of a police patrolman who happened to be driving by just as Upton ran out with the offending squirt gun, wild-eyed and slightly bloody.
That wasn’t even the best highlight in the reel, at least in my opinion, but it was pretty emblematic of Upton’s history. Dumb, easily angered, cruel when he thought he had power over others. He felt like my worst analysis of humanity, all the regressive genes rolled into one person and illustrative of the least favorable part of our natures. He’d kept a somewhat even keel so far in his dealings with me, but he was not bright enough to realize how dumb he actually was.
Which made him extremely difficult to deal with.
And somewhat sensitive.
“Yeah,” I said, stirring to wipe my forehead for the millionth time. I’d shed my suit jacket and so had Angel, who was sweating through her blouse. Honestly, Angel in a blouse and suit didn’t seem quite right to me for some reason. She was a tense, terse woman who would—again, I suspected—rather be wearing a tank top and boots than heels and a suit. It wasn’t that she didn’t wear them well—she did, and Isabella hadn’t taken my eyes away so I wouldn’t notice—it was that she didn’t look like she wanted to be wearing them, that she was generally stiff all the time she was in them.
Her bare, dark arms showed signs of sweat as well, little beads hiding on her biceps and forearm, companions to the ones that she, too, kept wiping off her forehead. “You don’t sound excited about this,” she said, not exactly bringing the thunder in the enthusiasm department herself.
“I’m not so sure stalling is going to work with this guy,” I said, giving her my heartfelt assessment. “He’s dumb, but I’m not sure he’s dumb enough to realize he’s being played. And he’s stubborn enough that I think he’s probably stuck in a mode where he just wants what he wants, no room for compromise in his head.”
“Dangerous profile,” Angel said. We’d worked together for a while, and I still had no real idea of her background. Her hiring had predated mine, brought to the team when Sienna had reorganized it after Harmon had torn us apart. Sienna had done so using Miranda as the guiding force through which she’d done everything, which made sense given that Sienna was on the run from the law at the time. I’d come in to a ready-made team, but it had included Angel as part of the bargain, hired by her cousin Miranda.
That choice by Miranda had made me curious. Angel’s performance these last few months had given me no cause to think her hiring had been motivated by nepotism. She was steady and did her job, kept a cool head in crisis situations, and didn’t gripe about stupid stuff like the heat in Texas on a summer day.
But I didn’t really know her, and it bothered me in moments like this, when she offered a hint of experience with this type of person, and then just shut it down before saying anything else. She looked away, maybe catching sight of my deeper ponderings about what was going on in her head.
“I think this guy is a Revelen-made meta,” I said, glancing at his file again.
“Oh yeah?” Angel was pretty non-committal about her reply, like she’d lost interest in anything going on here.
“Yeah. I was thinking specifically of that time he’d robbed the store with the squirt gun, since it happened last year.” I brandished the file. “Why not use your cop-car frying laser power instead of a yellow squirt gun?”
“Why not paint the squirt gun first so it looks like a real gun?” Angel asked, seemingly unimpressed. “This guy’s a moron.”
“Yeah, but if he had laser powers, he’s surely not dumb enough to forgo those in favor of a yellow squirt gun. And he assaulted the clerk with his fists. Damage wasn’t anything meta-like, given that the guy was bruised up and fighting back, no hospital visit needed.”
She nodded once, and it was clipped. “You’re probably right.”
I was used to a little more argument. “Hopefully this means he got his dose of the serum before we rolled up that meta-making operation.” I put the file down in anticipation of picking up the phone. “Otherwise…”
Angel got it, credit to her. “Otherwise someone’s setting up a new one.”
Yeah. That was a scary thought. We’d just started to see our troubles start to disappear, too. Meta crime was going down month over month since we’d crashed that party back in May.
No time to dwell on that now. I picked up the phone and dialed the house number. Wiped my brow of another round of sweat as I waited for it to ring.
It was picked up a few seconds later, and this time, the agitation in Peter’s voice was new—and obvious. “Hello?”
“Hey, Peter, it’s Reed,” I said breezily, trying to make it sound like all was right in the world. “I’ve got some great news—”
“Do you have my plane?” I could hear a baby crying in the background, loud, unmistakable. It was a terrible sound, and I wondered why I hadn’t heard it through the house. It wasn’t some small, sniffling cry like Elvira had been making, a little tension sprinkled with a lot of fear. It was top-of-the-lungs stuff, loud as you can get.
“Almost,” I said, realizing very quickly I needed to give him something. “That’s why I was calling you,” I said, trying to put on a smile so he’d hear it in my voice. “We need to figure out how you want to get to the plane.”
The baby wailed in the background, and Peter said, strained, “Just land it on the street.”
My mouth fell open, but fortunately he couldn’t see that. “Uh…Peter? We can’t land a plane just anywhere.” I looked up and down the street, which was a small and quiet residential one complete with light poles on either side every fifty feet or so. As far as emergency landing strips went, it was a poor one for many reasons, the poles being only one of them. The shortness of it—it was an angled cul-de-sac that was only a hundred yards long or so—being another crucial one.
“Yes you can,” Peter said, the agitation straining through in his answer, baby still crying in the background. “Get me one of those ones that does the up and down landing and takeoff.” He sounded like a caged beast, pissed off and wanting to get free.
I tried to translate. “You mean like a—like a VTOL—vertical takeoff and landing? Like a Harrier? A military plane?”
“Yeah, get me one of those,” Peter said. I could almost see him nodding, blissfully dumb, inside the house.
“Peter,” I said, trying to keep my voice in the reasonable range, “you have to understand—those are military planes. The one I was getting for you was a—well, a civilian one—”
“I know that,” he snapped, telling me that he did not, in fact, know that.
“And I almost have it,” I said. “But if you want me to get a military plane that can…take off and land here…” I was choosing my words carefully, because this conversation was heading in a bad, bad direction. “That’s going to…well, I don’t know if I can do it. The military doesn’t turn over its planes like an airline would.” That was a lie too, inasmuch as if I was going to cave and get him a plane (I wasn’t) it’d have to be a government plane of some stripe. Delta or Southwest was unlikely to volunteer use of a jet in a case like this, after all, and you couldn’t just seize their property without a court’s permission. But getting a military jet for this guy?
It’d be a cold day in hell before they’d turn something like that over, especially to some cowardly hostage-taker who wasn’t smart enough to drive a car, let alone fly himself anywhere.
“If you want that,” I said, “we’re going to have to start over again.” I looked at the sky above, and the sun was heading toward the far side of the horizon, though not nearly quickly enough for my sweating ass. “It’s going to be hours. Longer than it took this time.” Forever, actually, because no one was going to give this dickhead a Harrier or whatever that new plane was that did VTOL. Sienna would know.
Peter’s voice came back over the line now with a nasty tinge. “I don’t think you’re telling me the truth.”
“Oh, believe me, I am,” I said. “The military doesn’t loan out their equipment, Peter. They tend to be pretty protective of that sort of thing, try and keep it from falling into enemy hands, you know—”
“I want a plane,” he said, and the agitation in his voice was now laid bare, and it was terrifying. It didn’t contain a whine, or a whimper, or an ounce of awareness that the thing he was asking for was impossible. It was wounded anger, patience run out, and I heard the real threat in it about a second too late.
“Okay, we’ll get you a plane—I’ve almost got one, but it’s—”
The front of the house exploded in a blast of red energy that surged toward the cop car parked about twenty feet in front of me.
“Reed!” Angel shouted, and she was already moving, faster than me, faster than anything I’d maybe ever seen other than Colin Fannon.
It wasn’t faster than the speed of light, though, and that was the speed at which Peter’s laser traveled from out of the front of the house and into the cop car nearest me, where it hit and blew up the engine, catapulting me backward into the pavement and knocking me into the hot black of unconsciousness.