Tormented (13 page)

I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at the screen that flashed “Sienna Nealon.” She was up north, and that meant shoddy phone reception, right? It was perfectly normal. And she was a big girl, she could take care of herself. A villain like Anselmo had way, way more to fear from her than she did from him.

“What’s up?” Augustus asked as he fell in beside me. I headed toward my car, but slowly, hesitant, mulling everything over in my mind.

“Probably nothing,” I said and hit redial. The phone rang went straight to voicemail once again. My hand went back to my hairline, to that same itch, and this time I found a little, lonely bead of sweat waiting. I rubbed it back into my hair as I put away my phone, letting it drop into my pocket like a ten ton weight that threatened to drag me down. “Hopefully nothing,” I amended, and picked up the pace back to my car. “Hopefully nothing at all.”

Brant got me another drink, which I took a quick swill of as soon as it was in my hands. I swished the sweet, fruity flavor around in my mouth, let it permeate my taste buds and waft up into my nose where it lingered before I dropped it down my throat into my wildly fluttering stomach below. It did not seem to put that particular part of me at ease with its arrival.

I sat on the stool with Sarah watching me carefully from one side while Jake drank his beer on the other as he studiously tried to avoid looking at me, both of them acting in the oddest sort of concert to ignore me and pay attention to me all at once. They were a strange couple, I thought, but probably well matched.

I took another drink.

“So,” Brant said, looking over the now-empty bar before letting his eyes settle on me, “do you want to talk about it?”

“Not much to say.” I took a sip this time. My nerves needed soothing. Work, alcohol, work, damn you. “I’m done with passively sitting back and waiting for this jackass to show himself.”

Brant paused, and looked uncertain when he spoke again. “How do you know it’s a him?”

“When it comes to villainy,” I said, “it’s usually a him. When the stats start to shift in the other direction, I’ll start to assume it’s a she when things go wrong for me.”

“Oh,” Brant said, “well, okay then. So long as you don’t think it’s me.”

“It’s someone close by,” I said. “They’re here on the island if they’re monkeying with my head.” I took another drink. “And tomorrow, I’m going to find them, and commence to skinning them for the rest of my vacation. In fact, I may need to take some additional time off just to do the job properly.”

“You could just take them to a taxidermist back on the mainland,” Jake said, smirking slightly. “Probably get the job done quicker. Or slower, since it sounds like you might be aiming for that.”

“I don’t get it,” Sarah said, shrugging, finally pulling her gaze away from me and having a drink of her martini. “You’re some sort of
ü
ber-hero. Aren’t you used to people trying things like this with you?”

“No,” I said. “I tend to send a very strong message against messing with me. People are mostly smart enough to avoid it, and it’s because they know that people who try it always come to a bad end.” Say what you want about my YouTube videos; they mostly got people to steer wide away from me.

“Sounds lonely,” Jake said, picking up his beer.

“It’s not so—” I stopped. I’d started to say it wasn’t so bad, but … “It’s all right,” I said, still not very convincingly. I had …

I blinked. What did I have? My privacy? Hah. I’d been exploited and betrayed on national television for ratings. Tabloids paid for scoops on me, ninety percent of which weren’t based even loosely on fact. Friends? Lulz. They were all pretty much gone, except for Ariadne, who I kept at a distance, and Augustus, my new best buddy—who was more of a co-worker. Romance? I’d had a couple of one night stands in the last year or so, but that didn’t exactly qualify as romance.

Hell, my last boyfriend didn’t even remember that we dated. That one was my fault, but still.

“You all right over there?” Jake asked, and I turned to see him looking at me, concern in his dark eyes.

“I’m fine.” I smiled faintly. “At least I’ve got my health.” I could see the shared looks around me, but I just didn’t have it in me to argue at the moment.

I picked up the glass and took another drink, hoping that maybe after a few more I’d bury this sense of growing unease, and maybe—just maybe—start to enjoy my time off.

Augustus and I came out of the top floor elevator in the agency with a destination in mind. We cut through the cubicle farm like men on a mission, like Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith (but without the sunglasses) and headed straight for the only man that could help us.

Also, I think I’m funnier than Tommy Lee Jones.

“Well, well, well,” J.J. said, spinning slowly around in his chair to face us with his fingers steepled, “if it isn’t the most improbable pairing I’ve seen since Wailord and Skitty.”

I stopped just inside J.J.’s cubicle. “I need—what the hell did you just say?”

“It’s a Pokémon thing,” Augustus said. “Don’t even ask.”

“Right,” I said, looking back to J.J. “I need help tracking fugitives.”

“I know, I know,” J.J. said and spun back to his computer, which had a live surveillance feed from the elevator banks pulled up in the corner. Huh. So that was how he knew to spin around like that and do his little intro. “But I got problems, man. I can’t get the cameras of the world to eat out of my palm like they used to, at least not around the area where your friend Mr. Serafini is. There were just a few outages in critical places, enough to mask him from me. I can’t see where he came from or where he went.”

“How does that even happen?” I asked, taking a few steps forward and leaning over to look at his screen, which was pointless because the only thing I understood on it was the live feed from the camera back at the elevators.

J.J. typed some gibberish into a small black box, then hit enter. I watched it disappear. “I’d tell you I don’t know, but we both know I do. Anselmo’s got a guide, and she’s pretty damned good. She’s barely having to do any work to steer him clear of the monitors that are out there, and she’s shutting down the few cameras that she needs to in order to help him evade.” J.J. shrugged. “I can’t even get a good read on where she’s coming from yet, because her IP addresses are being masked. I’m getting everything here; she could be in Austin, Texas, Melbourne, Florida, Calabasas, California, Billings, Montana—”

“Okay,” I said, trying to cut him off before he listed every municipality in the U.S. “What can you tell me?”

J.J. froze. “Who said I could tell you anything?” He did not look up.

“That’s like an admission of guilt,” Augustus said. “Why don’t you confess now?”

“Well, I didn’t do anything wrong,” J.J. said quickly, “but I might have pursued some of those IP addresses to see what other traffic was generated from them, and I might maybe have discovered an email address that’s coupled with them.” He looked a little guilty. “And I might have hacked said email address and looked at what had been sent out—”

“You’re allowed to do that,” I said a little dryly, “we’re the government.”

“Well,” J.J. said and tapped on his keyboard to bring up something in his browser. “I’ll spare you reading all these emails in the ‘Sent’ box, because I’ve already parsed them and basically they’re variations on a theme—this so-called ‘Brain’, as we’ve gotten to know her, has been feeding every major news network and gossip rag in the U.S. stories about Sienna that are … well, they’re pretty much calculated to make her look like crap.”

“She doesn’t need help,” I said. I started to fumble for my phone. “Which reminds me, I need you to find Sienna for me.”

“That’s easy,” J.J. said. “But seriously?” He clicked on one of those emails on his screen. “This is a smear campaign. Some of this stuff is taken out of context just to make her look bad, some of it’s demonstrably false, and the rest is just … well …”

“True?” I asked, letting out a sigh. I felt suddenly like J.J. had drained the energy out of me.

“You could be a little more supportive of your sister,” Augustus said.

“Some of it’s true,” J.J. said, “but it’s slanted like an old church roof.”

“Yeah,” I said, and stood up, rubbing at my eyes. “Okay. Can you give me a location on Sienna’s cell phone?”

“Hmm,” J.J. said and messed around with his computer for a minute, opening up a program. “Looks like it’s offline at the moment.”

“Figures,” I said, sighing. “She’s gone off the grid.”

“Well, wouldn’t you?” J.J. asked, spinning his chair around to face me. “After what happened?”

“No,” I snapped. “I wouldn’t.” I ignored the gnawing sense of doubt I felt in the pit of my stomach. She was fine. She’d just turned her cell phone off because she didn’t want to even deal with the remote possibility that Andrew Phillips might call her back to work for an emergency. Not that he would. The suspension was pretty damned set in stone.

“I would,” J.J. said. “I wouldn’t answer anyone’s phone calls, not even yours, bro.”

“Hell no,” Augustus agreed, “I’d thunder my ass out of here like a herd of buffalo.”

I shot him a look that said he was not helping.

“All right, well,” I said. “Would you mind tracking her down by her hotel reservations and giving her a call?”

J.J. shrugged, spun back, and fiddled for a minute. “She’s staying at a cabin place on Bayscape Island. I’ve got the phone number here, but it says the office is closed outside of certain hours.”

“Did you pull that out of her email?” Augustus asked, looking alarmed. “I am not using the company email to make my plans, that is for sure.”

J.J. clicked his mouse, and the sound of a phone ringing filled the cubicle. It rang four times before a female voice answered with a recorded message. “You have reached Bayscape Cabin Rentals. Our office is currently closed …”

“No love there,” J.J. said, and clicked to an alternate screen. He shrugged. “I got nothing. How urgent is this? You want me to leave a message?”

“Yeah, tell them to tell her to call us,” I said, and started away. “Maybe inform local law enforcement she might be in danger, too? Tell them we’ve had a credible threat against her. Nothing too urgent, just … let her know to be on the lookout because Anselmo Serafini threatened her.”

“You think the man’s bitter because she ruined his rugged good looks?” J.J. asked. His eyes flitted about as he considered that. “Of course he is. Never mind. Rescinding the question.”

“Just make sure you get the message sent,” I said, and started to leave J.J.’s cubicle behind. I checked my phone as I walked to the elevators, listening to the ding as I pressed the button to find the one I’d ridden up was still here, waiting for me.

“Where are you going?” Augustus asked. He was walking a little slower, his fatigue showing. I understood that; it had been kind of a long day.

“There’s a place in Eden Prairie I go to sometimes,” I said. “It’ll put us closer to the cities in case something breaks with either Cunningham or Serafini, and the bartender there is a friend of mine.”

“Nice,” Augustus said. “Fifty people die at the airport this afternoon, your personal nemesis comes to town vowing revenge, your sister is one of his targets and she ain’t answering her phone, but you want to go to the bar.” His hand came up and he smacked himself in the forehead. He was probably going for a theatrical thing, but my guess was he’d forgotten he had meta strength, because he looked like he’d over done it by the way he blinked his eyes. “Well … I was going to say your actions didn’t seem all that bright, but since I just humiliated myself that way, I guess I’ll reserve judgment.”

I chuckled. “You’ll get used to the powers. Come on,” I put a hand on his shoulder and steered him into the elevator, “there’s nothing else we need to be doing at the moment. Let’s blow off a little steam while we wait for something to happen.”

I strolled into my favorite bar like I owned the place, Augustus following a little more cautiously behind. He looked like a good stiff drink would put him out, so I vowed to make sure he took it easy tonight, because who knew if Benjamin Cunningham was going to make an ass of himself in the middle of the night? I might end up needing Augustus’s help, and him being tanked wasn’t going to be of much help, that was for sure.

I bellied up to the bar, dodging around the wooden tables and ignoring the bright pink and blue neon that gave the place one of the strangest color palettes I’d ever seen in a bar. It wasn’t exactly a working man’s joint, that was for sure. Being in Eden Prairie, it tended to cater mostly to the yuppie crowd, young singles and marrieds that were looking for a little action in their evening but didn’t want to brave the drive to join the downtown scene in Minneapolis.

I understood that desire. Downtown was a zoo. This was more like a petting zoo. But, uh, with a lot less petting. Then again, I thought as I looked at a young couple lip-locked a few tables away from the bar, maybe not.

“Charles, my good man,” I said as I plopped down on a stool directly in front of the big, shiny, oaken bar, “a round for me and my friend.”

The bartender, Charles, had a dark beard and dark, long hair wrapped in a ponytail behind his head. He was wearing all black, as was appropriate for a bartender in this place, and he nodded to me with a friendly smile. “Coming right up. What do you want, Reed’s friend?” he asked Augustus.

Augustus got up on his stool a little more cautiously. “Diet Coke,” he said, and then looked at me. “Reed’s friend isn’t twenty-one yet.”

Charles grimaced. “Got it. No liquor for this man.” He looked to me. “Whiskey and Coke for you, and a Coke and Diet for your friend, coming up.”

“Gracias, Charles,” I said and spun my stool in a slow roll so I could see the rest of the bar real fast. Place was mostly empty, as it tended to be in the evenings on weeknights. Weekends it got a little nuts, but during the week I had a feeling they broke even at best on their burgers and beers. “So … what you think?” I asked Augustus.

“I think it’s been a long day,” Augustus said, not spinning to join me. I leaned against the bar while he sat hunched over it like an old-timer protecting his booze. Which he did not have any of. “And I think this is a peculiar way to end it, given we’ve got two threats rolling around that we haven’t tracked down and we still haven’t been able to get ahold of your sister.”