Fluorescence: The Complete Tetralogy (81 page)

“Don’t hurt him, please!” she cried out.

“You don’t know what you’re messing with,” I growled.

“I
s that a threat?” the cop asked. Two more police officers
came up beside him and the front door crashed open.

“You don’t have anything on me,” I said. “I didn’t do
anything. Kareena! Tell them you were bullshitting them on the phone.”

“Shut up and put your hands up by your head!” the officer yelled. As soon as I lifted my hands, two more cops rushed in
behind and tackled me, grabbing my arms and bending them behind my back. One of them pulled my gun from my
belt and slid it across the hardwood floor to an officer on the other side of the room. They quickly patted me down even as
I tried to fight my way free. A pair of cuffs snapped around my wrists and I couldn’t pull my hands out from behind my back.

“Let me go! You don’t understand. Please!” I grunted and wriggled violently, trying to break away. “Let me go!”

“If you keep fighting… we will use the necessary force to incapacitate you.”

“Kareena!” Heat filled my chest as I summoned my fluorescence—golden light sparking to life inside me like a match being struck. My wrist felt warm. I channeled the light toward my fingertips. Just a little bit more and a portal would—

I lost control of my body. Hit the ground hard.

The room shook. Spinning.

I couldn’t think.

Every muscle in me was having a spasm. I didn’t know if I’d created a portal or not.

All I knew was that two metal barbs had pierced my flesh and were pumping thousands of volts of electricity straight
into my system.

Chapter 20

B
lurry surroundings. The cops scooped me off the floor
and hauled me across the room. My shoes dragged over the
brick walkway. Everything ached. Flashing police lights
blinded me. My head was spinning. My body tingly and weak.

Someone pushed my head down and I slipped into the backseat of a car. My hands were still cuffed behind me. I wriggled around, trying to right myself until I could sit up and look through the wire divider at the police officer in front of me.

“Hey. I have to get back to my daughter. This is a mistake. That girl lied about everything.”

“You have the right to remain silent,” he said stiffly. “I told you your rights already, but if you need to hear them again—”

“
No. No,” I replied. “I got it.” I’d heard them before.

I looked out the side window at the street. Nosey people
were lined up on both sides, gawking at us like we were
some kind of parade float driving by.

And I was the goddamn President.

What the hell was I going to do? Where did Kareena and Judas go? When did Jordan skip out on us?

Questions zipped through my brain. Mostly about what the hell I was going to do now and how I could get back to Lucy.

As soon as I set foot in that police station, I was gonna be hammered with felonies. Larceny.
Murder
. Prison for life, probably, even if they
didn’t
connect me to a scrap I’d
gotten into with a dealer way back. It was self-defense at the time, but now—six years later and still running from it—it looked
a lot worse on my record. They’d find something to pin on me. Some reason to take my little girl away.

Damn it!
They had my gun, too, and with my hands
cuffed behind my back, I couldn’t even try to make another portal. Not that I had the energy to. Every muscle ached from the
induced seizure I’d had from being tased.

“I’m not going to lie,” the cop in the passenger seat started,
“those were some damn good special effects you put on back there at that girl’s house. What are you? A pyrotechnic?”

I didn’t reply.

“Hey. I’m talking to
you
back there.”

“I thought I had the right to remain silent,” I grumbled.

The driving officer laughed. “He’s right.”

. . .

They pushed me down into a chair and one of the cops
sat behind the desk in front of it. He slid a flat electronic device out from behind his keyboard and handed it to the cop
standing beside me. He flipped a switch on the side and it beeped faintly.

“I’m gonna need a finger for this,” he said, reaching behind
me for my wrist.

So I gave him one.

“Smartass.” He popped me in the back of the head with his elbow and I grunted. “Don’t screw with me.”

“I don’t belong here,” I snarled.

“That’s what they all say.” He pried one of my fingers from my fist and pressed the tip against something cool and glass-like. Another shrill chirp came from the thing.

A fingerprint scanner?
Not one I’d ever seen before.

“Looks like they’ve got you pinned for larceny here and that you’re a suspect in a homicide case in New York,” the cop behind the desk read. “And those are just the things we do have you for. This isn’t even counting the kidnapping in NYC. We heard a story about some guy there trying to steal someone’s child and all three witnesses swore he had yellow
light coming from his chest. Sound familiar? We thought that
precinct was trying to get attention, but I guess it wasn’t a load of crap, after all.” He took the scanner from the other cop and
pushed a button that released a USB adaptor. He plugged it into his computer and started typing something on his keyboard.

“
You must enjoy being in jail. You have a lot on your record,” he said, leaning
closer to his monitor and scrolling down the page. “David—”

“I know my name, damn it.” I shifted in the uncomfortable metal chair. “So what are you going to do with me?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On what else we find out when we run that shiny, limited-run gun of yours
.”

Shit…

. . .

I did not have time for this.

They set my bail at thirty grand.
Thirty. Freakin’. Grand
. I can’t remember a time I had more than a couple hundred bucks on me, let alone thousands of dollars in loose cash.
A lot of people don’t even make that much in a year. I sure as hell didn’t.

I scuffed my feet against the concrete floor of my
claustrophobic temp jail cell and shuddered. It was cold and nasty, but it wasn’t supposed to be comfortable. The odor
of B.O. and vomit kept wafting through the air.

“Where did you say you were from again, José?” a man
in the cell across from me asked, slurring his words
together.

“It’s David,” I snapped. “Shut the hell up and leave me alone. Unless you want the crap beat out of you when I get out of here.”

It didn’t help that there was some drunk-ass guy in another cell wallowing in his vomit-soaked shirt and pants who had been asking me questions since I’d arrived. That, and
I must have had a name change every ten minutes. Pedro. Mario. Javier.

Jesus.
I’ve gotten wasted and said and done some stupid stuff in my time, but this guy was so far gone, it wasn’t even funny. At some point, though, he muttered something about
his wife kicking him out, and for a moment, I felt a little sorry
for him.

A little…

The cops said they’d move me to another jail in the morning, but that wasn’t soon enough for me.

A
wanted man in three states. One allegedly, but only because they couldn’t actually prove they saw me glowing back at K
areena’s house, which meant they couldn’t pin me 100% for the kidnapping either.

I couldn’t believe Kareena thought it would actually be
okay to call the cops and make up a fake story. She was smart
most of the time, but this afternoon, I lost all respect for her.

What kind of idiot was I to develop feelings for a brat like that? She didn’t care what happened to me. If she did, she’d have asked before cooking up a half-ass-baked plan.

I’d overheard one of the other cops verifying that they couldn’t find the girl at the scene. One of them even went so far as to claim he saw her disappear into thin air.

Either my portal worked or Judas got her out of there. Either way, she was safe, hopefully. I really shouldn’t have even been thinking about her.

I should have been worrying more about Lucy than the woman who betrayed me.

. . .

Someone rapped on the bars of my cell.

“Hey, Pyro.” It was one of the cops who had brought me in. Officer Kenneth, I think. I didn’t look up when he walked over. I’d just woken up and was sitting on the edge of my bunk, irritated and antsy from the crappy sleep I’d endured.

“Hey. I’m talking to you,” he said, raising his voice.

“Name’s not Pyro.”

“Yeah, okay, smartass. There’s someone here to see you.”

I lifted my face. A middle-aged woman in a dark pantsuit came in behind him with a small black briefcase dangling
from her hands.

“Are you a lawyer?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at the
stuffy-looking woman. She had short, layered, and
highlighted brown hair and a pair of glasses tucked into her shirt collar.

“I’m afraid I’m not,” she replied, approaching the bars. “I’m Doctor Sasha Cortez. I’m a biologist working with the city forensics department.”

“And you want…?”

“I’m here for some samples I can take back to the lab for analysis. I was told by the department that you were seen glowing at the scene yesterday. Is that right?”

I shrugged. “Does that sound normal to you, Doc?”

“Well, no, but…”

“They didn’t see shit.”

“Regardless of what they think they saw, we’ve had two
different accounts from over six witnesses who say they’ve seen you glow with some kind of yellow light. Whether it was a trick or not, that’s what I’m here to investigate.” She crouched down in front of the cell so she was slightly lower than
eye level with me. “David. Can I call you David?”

I nodded.

“David, I’m not the bad guy here. I’m a biologist trying to do my job. Can you cooperate with me, please?”

Sasha sounded like she’d done this before and was just going through the motions like she would with any suspect.

But at the same time, she was right—she wasn’t the bad guy.

I was.

“Yeah. Alright.”

Officer Kenneth unlocked the door and slid it open to let Sasha in. “Don’t try anything stupid,” he warned.

I laughed to myself. I could have grabbed the doctor by the throat and have broken her neck if I had wanted to.
If
.

She opened her box and laid it beside me on the bunk.

“I need your arm,” she said as she rummaged through her things for a pair of gloves, a rubber tourniquet, and a syringe
. She slid the gloves on.

Better yet, I could use the syringe to pierce her throat. Take out an eye and then relieve the cop of his gun.
Could.

This precinct wasn’t used to guys of my caliber, apparently. It made me feel sorry for the doctor. Officer Kenneth was putting the doctor’s life in danger by allowing her to get close to me without making sure I was properly restrained first.

I laid my arm out on my thigh with the sensitive inner
flesh facing up and she tied the rubbery strip around my bicep.
She wiped the insertion spot with an alcohol pad.

“Relax your arm, please,” she said, tapping the spot she was about to aim for.

I grimaced as the needle pierced the thick scar tissue of my inner arm.

The blood collection tube began to fill. “I see you’re no stranger to needles.” She looked me in the eye briefly and then untied the tourniquet.

My jaw tightened. I had scars from my days of shooting up. They weren’t something to be proud of, but they were obvious if you knew what you were looking at.

“I’ve been clean for a while,” I replied. “I’ve got a daughter
to worry about now.”

“Oh?” Sasha withdrew the needle and capped it. She tucked
a piece of gauze over the mark. “Bend your arm, please. Hold it there.”

I shook my hand to drive off the tingling sensation.

“How old is she?” she asked, swiping a piece of bandage tape over the mark.

“Five.”

“Just at the age when you can actually start taking them places, huh?” She smiled. It seemed genuine and I cracked a small one myself, chuckling at the irony of her words.

“Yeah. You have no idea,” I replied.

Chapter 21

S
asha packed the syringe carefully back into her case and
took out a plastic bag with a label on it.

Officer Kenneth tossed a plain white t-shirt at me through
the doorway. “Change your shirt.”

I caught it. “What? Why?”

“I was getting to that,” Sasha said, wrinkling her lips to
the side and shooting him a dirty look. “You could have given me two more seconds.” She looked at me again. “We need your shirt to test for flammables or chemical residue from whatever it was you did back there that made you glow.”

I reached behind my neck for my collar and began pulling my shirt over my head. “I seriously doubt you’re gonna find anything on here,” I said. “But if your police friend wants to see the goods that badly.” I flashed a smirk at the officer and his nostrils flared.

“Shut up!” he barked.

“Please stop!” Sasha tucked my shirt into the plastic bag and zipped it closed. “Christ, you two.” She walked over to the cell doorway and turned. “You’re from New York, right, David?”

I nodded.

“Then let me put this into words you’ll understand. Behave
if you want a chance in hell at making it to court in once piece. They’re sending you to Pembrook Detention Center later today. That place is a shit hole compared to this slice of
heaven. It will do you some good to make friends while you’re there.
If I were you, I’d start appreciating the last few hours you’ve got here.”