76.
Sienna
I watched Jamie leap off into the sky, and I felt nothing but pain for her. She looked racked up, terrified of the circumstances she was in and of the fact her daughter was missing. I had a bad feeling about that last one, myself, and I didn’t even wait for her to sail out of sight before I had my phone out and dialing.
While I waited for someone to pick up, I looked at Scott, then Friday. She’d sent the big guy right into the grill of an oncoming FBI suburban, and the impact had not been pretty. The hood of the SUV looked like it had caught a battle axe the size of a motorcycle right down the middle, the engine hanging out of what was left. Friday was staggering in front of the SUV, wobbling on unsteady legs, so I guessed he was probably fine and that Jamie had released her anchors on him, since he wasn’t walking around with the SUV as a giant replacement for his mask. It would have been nothing but an improvement, I assure you.
Scott, on the other hand, was cratered in someone’s living room. She’d sent him flying like he’d been shot out of a giant slingshot, and I could see his feet sticking out of the wall. He seemed to be stirring, so I decided I didn’t need to check on him, either.
The fact that he had slept with Nadine Griffin might have had a little something to do with it, too, not gonna lie.
“Hey yo,” J.J. said when he picked up. “What’s up?”
“Trouble’s up,” I said. “Probably the murder rate pretty soon. I need to get a fix on Nadine Griffin.”
“So you can murder her?” He sounded not as uneasy about that as I might have thought.
“No,” I said, probably not sounding totally sincere. “She’s put this box around Jamie Barton pretty hard. Scott’s gonna be chasing Gravity Gal, and I figure while he’s doing that—”
“You can massacre his new girlfriend. Got it.” He hummed, typing away at a keyboard while I tried not to respond to his blatant misapprehension about my killing Nadine. I was totally over it. Well, I was partially over it.
Well, it wasn’t worth killing her over, at least.
“I have her cell phone—or at least the one she used to text you—as pegged at her office on Wall Street,” J.J. said. He threw in a dash of condescension when he next spoke. “I guess just trying her there would have been too much work, huh?”
“Time’s valuable at the moment,” I said, and hung up on him as I took to the sky, shooting off toward lower Manhattan.
I crossed the harbor, dodging a couple of helos doing helicopter tours. I saw people getting their snaps of me in. I posed, smiling and throwing a hand wave as I jetted past.
I found Nadine Griffin’s hole-in-the-wall office on Wall Street exactly as I’d last seen it, with … uh … well, with a gaping hole in the window. I looked around, stepping out into the bullpen, but there was no one here. Her stuff was all arranged around her desk, though, so I took a moment and nosed through it. Hey, you leave your window open, you should expect weirdos like me or Tinkerbell to drop in.
I shifted aside a handbag that was filled with some pretty prosaic crap to find a folder. I opened it up, hoping it might say something like, “Secret Plan to Destroy Gravity Gal and blow up the FBI,” but instead I found this:
Are you frustrated with your business failures?
Sick of being slowed down to a crawl while everyone else races past you?
Feel like you’re missing the key to success?
You probably are, but it’s not your fault! The secrets to wealth and success in the modern economy are closely guarded. But we at Success Planning Technologies have partnered with some of the most successful minds in modern business to bring you a plan for the modern age, one that takes classic, proven wisdom of the ages and melds it with cutting-edge strategies that will bring you wealth.
Welcome to the Balls Out!™ Success Plan!
Recognizing that fear is the most demotivating factor that works to hold you back, the Balls Out!™ Success Plan has captured the essence of Wall Street’s Alpha Male system of dominance. Stop waddling toward your goals with your pants around your ankles! Take them off and sprint toward success with the Balls Out!™ Success Plan!
And down at the bottom:
Endorsed by Nadine Griffin, the Queen of Wall Street.
My first thought was … are you shitting me?
I pulled out my phone and called J.J. again as I strolled to the women’s bathroom and threw the door open. I recoiled at the smell; apparently Nadine had embraced the Balls Out!™ method of trying to pee standing up or something. Either way, she wasn’t here. “J.J.,” I said, a millisecond before he could greet me. “Griffin’s not here. Can you find her on traffic cams or something?”
“Ah, no can do,” he said. “Cameras around the city are down. They’re fixing the damage from that cyber-attack. Sorry.”
“Sonofa,” I said as I hung up, frowning.
I heard something at the door to the receptionist area. I froze and listened. The door opened, and a guy in a grey jumpsuit came walking in with another dude right behind him dressed just the same.
“So he says to me, ‘Yeah, I can do that for you—for a hundred bucks.’” He shook his head, and the guy with him did the same, in sympathy. “Can you believe the nerve of that—” He saw me and stopped. “Can I help you?”
“God, I hope so,” I said, letting the bathroom door swing shut as I strode up to him. The embroidered nametag on his jumpsuit pronounced him “Mike.” “I’m looking for Nadine Griffin.”
Mike gave me a suspicious look. “You a reporter?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh, okay then,” he said, relaxing instantly, then stopped, a skeptical look popping back up. “Reporters have to tell you if they’re reporters when you ask, right?” He directed the question toward his buddy.
“I think that’s the police, when they are with a hooker and she asks,” his pal said, thinking it over.
“Well, I’m not a reporter or a hooker, though I can see how you would confuse the two of them,” I said, and we all shared a nod.
“I ain’t seen her today,” Mike said, apparently comfortably with that answer, “and we been here for—what, an hour or so, trying to get the window measured for replacement.” He glanced at his buddy, whose nametag introduced him as Mikhail, in what I’m sure was a really fun bit of naming synergy. “You?” Mikhail shook his head, too. “She’s not in her office?”
“No, but her stuff is,” I said. “Suggests to me she’ll be back, but I don’t have a lot of time and my message for her is … urgent.”
“You check the bar?” Mike asked, shrugging. “Because these Wall Street people? They drink like Beluga whales. She probably just nipped out to get a quick one.”
Mikhail tapped him on the shoulder. “It’s ‘drink like a fish.’”
Mike looked at me like, What a moron I gotta deal with, am I right? But he said patiently to Mikhail. “I know that. But a Beluga whale is bigger, see, so its water intake is going to be correspondingly larger—”
“Thanks, guys,” I said, and flew back through Nadine’s office and out of the building. I heard Mike swear behind me and Mikhail’s fingers dance across his chest hurriedly in what I’m sure was him crossing himself as he whispered a prayer. Now all I had to do was make a quick survey of my Around Me app to find the nearest bars …