Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) (23 page)

Augustus eyed me. “And?”

“And like the
Ghostbusters
motto says, ‘We’re ready to believe you,’” I said. “I want to find him, and I want him to talk, and I want to take his words and parlay them into a spear with which I can gut Cordell Weldon and Edward Cavanagh in a public forum.”

Momma’s eyes got wide with panic, and I’ll admit I’d forgotten she was there for a minute. “Oh, Lord, please tell me you’re not being literal.”

“She’s not being literal, Momma,” Augustus rushed to assure her. His eyes ticked back and forth in thought. “Probably. Probably not being literal.”

“Oh, Lord,” Momma said, and I worried for a second that she was going to collapse on the lawn. “Oh, sweet Jesus, deliver me from this, my hour of trouble.”

“Problem is now,” Augustus said, “how do we get to Darrick? Because I’m guessing after your conversation with him—if it went anything like the ones I saw you have with people—he’ll be about halfway to Memphis by now.”

“Hah,” I said as I pulled out my phone, “you underestimate my skill with people.”

Augustus just gave me a look. “I thought I was being fairly generous, to be honest. I know he drives a Corvette. He’s probably actually halfway to California by now.”

“Oh, shush,” I said as the phone rang. I had to hope that my persona non grata-ness had not been fully communicated to my own organization yet.

“Hey, Sienna,” J.J. said in that high voice as he picked up, “I heard you’re, like, on the lam or something.”

“Yes, I’m a veritable tzatziki sauce,” I said, getting a weird look from Augustus. “I need your help, J.J.”

“Of course you do,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “Thing is, I’m not supposed to help you. I’m supposed to transfer your call straight to Director Phillips.”

I stood there in the middle of Augustus’s lawn with the scorched-out remains of his house in front of me, stink of smoke heavy in the air. “And are you going to do that, J.J.?”

“Hellz to the no,” J.J. said. “As we speak I’m erasing all trace of this phone call from your records and mine, though, just to be safe. I don’t really
want
to lose this job, but if I get caught by the brainless trust around here, I so deserve it and have like, five way better offers lined up out in the private sector doing soulless work anyway.”

I thought about that for a second and just went ahead and bit. “So, why do you stay with the agency then?”

“Because sometimes I get to do really awesome things that aren’t really in the bounds of what is, strictly speaking, ‘legal.’ And my anus is just too tender and virginal to chance prison. So,” he said, “what exciting bit of almost or complete illegality am I performing today?”

“I need to find a guy,” I said. “His name’s Darrick Cary, and he drives a brand new red Corvette.”

“Uh huh, uh huh,” he said, and I could hear him pecking away at the keys. “Is Mr. Cary going to come to a black-licorice-bitter end?”

I frowned. “Black licorice isn’t really bitter. It just tastes like—I dunno, probably like your tender and virginal anus.” That one earned me another “WTF,” look from Augustus.

“I’m just asking,” J.J. said, “because if he’s driving a Corvette, they’ve got this security vulnerability that I can hack, and it could totally look like an accident when he plows into a telephone pole at sixty. Sometimes air bags just don’t deploy. It happens.”

“No!” I said, a little too fervently. “Ah … no, J.J. I appreciate the offer, but I don’t …” I lowered my voice. “Did you just offer to kill someone for me? Because that’s worrisome.” Worrisome? There might have been a time when I considered it awesome, actually. What was wrong with me?

“Technically, the velocity would kill him,” J.J. said, a little too breezy for even my taste, “but no, I wouldn’t do it myself. I’d basically send you an app that would let you do it with the press of a few buttons, thus keeping my hands mostly clean of human deaths. I kinda prefer to empower others rather than do it all for them. Teach a man to fish and all that.”

My head was spinning from the whole conversation and its implications. “Can you locate this guy for me or what?”

“I already did,” he said. “He’s like … hmm … two miles from your phone, to the east. I’m in his car’s system. Want me to send him into a brick wall at a gentle twenty miles per hour? Activate his windshield wipers and make him think he’s got a haunted … uhh … carburetor?” He lowered his voice like he was talking to himself. “I so do not know cars.”

“Just tell me where he is and get ready to apply the brakes,” I said and looked at Augustus, who was frowning at me. “But … gently.”

“Wow,” he said, “it’s like a whole new you, but okay! I’m ready to apply the brakes in a slow, methodical fashion when you say to.”

“Let’s go, hero,” I said, gesturing to Augustus, who warily stepped close to me. I threaded an arm around him like he was the little spoon and used the other to keep the phone to my ear.

“This is so awkward,” he said.

“Think about how I feel,” I said as we lifted into the air, “I’m face to back of the shoulder blades with you.”

“Are you flying?” J.J. asked. “Never mind, I see it on the scope now. Wheeeee! Flying! I’m pretending I’m right there with you instead of sitting in my office, wasting away under the command of morons who don’t like or appreciate me.”

“You got a plan for this?” Augustus asked as the wind whipped past us. I maintained an iron grip on his chest as we arced toward downtown Atlanta’s massive skyline. That cylindrical building right in the middle stood out to me for some reason.

“You know my plan,” I said.

“Find Darrick and make him cry until he tells you every seedy thing he’s ever even thought about?”

“Why mess with a strategy that works?” I asked, slightly amused.

“Ooh, sounds fun,” J.J. said over the phone. “He’s about eight hundred meters ahead of you, going down an alley.”

“This is not a man who likes to step into the light,” I muttered.

“That makes him smarter than the average dealer,” Augustus said. “Though his choice of car seems like a lightning rod for the police. That brother has to get pulled over all the time.”

“Then let’s make this traffic stop memorable,” I said, catching sight of the red Corvette moving below. “J.J … apply his brakes. Carefully.”

“Because you don’t want to hurt him, right?” J.J. asked. “For the interrogation?”

“Also,” I said, “it’s a really pretty car.”

I watched the Corvette come to a gradual halt, screeching a little as it jerked to a stop. I was only about fifty feet above him at that point, staring down into the car. I couldn’t see him, but I imagined Cary’s face as his car stopped responding to him. “Can you kill the ignition, J.J.?”

A hard laugh came through the phone. “I can switch his radio to play something appropriately eerie, too, if you’d like. You know, set him up for the intimidation to come.”

“Go for it,” I said and hung up. The Corvette was squarely in the middle of a long alleyway, buildings on either side. I dropped Augustus over the roof of one of them. “Stand back and watch,” I said, “that way you’ll have plausible deniability if anything goes wrong.”

“Plausible whaaaa—AHHHHH!”

I dropped him the last ten feet and he landed in a roll. Clearly he still wasn’t entirely used to his meta abilities.

“All right,” I said and altered my course to take me right in front of the Corvette—again. Then I cut out my powers just as I saw the door open and came smashing to the ground hard enough that the asphalt shook a little from my impact. When I stood, I saw Darrick standing at his door with his eyes wide open. Again. “Tell me what you know about that asshole Weldon,” I said without preamble.

Darrick just stared at me, open-mouthed. “Yeah. Okay,” he said, nervousness written all over his face, while the Halloween classic “Monster Mash” blared out of the Corvette’s speakers so loudly that they could probably hear it back in the neighborhood.

Damn you, J.J.

“See, the thing you need to understand about Cordell Weldon is,” Darrick Cary said, leaning against the hood of his car, “is that whatever he says he’s trying to do to help the ‘Community,’” he held up air quotes, “is really just cover for Cordell Weldon doing whatever he can to help Cordell Weldon. Any good for the community is secondary and takes a back seat to advancing his own interests. That man has ties, see. Ties to Heshie LeRoux—you know who that is?” I shook my head.

“Organized crime boss here in the ATL,” Augustus said. He’d climbed down a standpipe in a stubborn refusal to sit on the sidelines for this. Maybe he didn’t trust me not to break Darrick’s legs or something, I don’t know. Maybe he was just feeling chatty.

“If there’s a dirty deal being done in the Bluff, Cordell Weldon knows about it and has a piece of it,” Cary said.

“If that was true, why hasn’t some enterprising reporter made his name by blowing a big fat whistle on it?” Augustus asked.

Cary looked at him like he was stupid. “Are you out of damned mind? You know how fast Cordell Weldon can wreck a fool?” He snapped his fingers. “You’d get mashed before you even went to press. He has friends on all the editorial boards, and they all line up to kiss his ass. Not the left cheek, not the right cheek, but right in the middle, and they smile all the while and ask him if they can do it again.”

I exchanged a look with Augustus, who looked extremely sour. “I am familiar with the effect he describes.”

“You were beset by an uncontrollable desire to kiss Cordell Weldon’s ass?” Augustus asked.

“This is a man with all the power,” Cary said, saving me from coming up with a suitably bitter reply, “and he can call someone racist and have everyone in the world thinking they’re a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in about two seconds.”

“That’s bullshit,” Augustus said. “Why doesn’t anyone in the neighborhood call him out on it?”

“Because just like everywhere else in the world, he’s turned on the money tap and let the green flow into the right pockets,” Cary said, clapping his hands together. “This is not some new type of scam Weldon is running. In the history of the world, this is the oldest racket in the book. He’s preying on the powerless, making speeches, stirring up shit, steering everybody in one direction while he veers his ass in the other while no one’s looking. You call file that sumbitch under Charlotte N.”

I stared at him blankly. “What?”

“Charlatan,” Augustus said, sighing. “You know anything about how he’s tied to Edward Cavanagh?”

“Cavanagh pays that man money,” Cary said. “Same tie as everywhere else.”

“But what does Cavanagh get in return?” I asked. “Assuming you’re right.”

Cary just laughed. “Something you governmental do-gooders never learn because you’re so busy being up your own asses about serving the people is … money makes the world go round. Love? Pfffft. I love my family, but plenty of young men around here love their families. That doesn’t put any food on the table or a roof over their head. Money does that. I don’t know for sure that there’s money passing back and forth between your boy Cavanagh and Cordell Weldon, but if you see a white man bringing his factory down into the Bluff rather than taking it Mexico or China, I would make my bet there’s money in there somewhere for him. That’s just the way it is, and you’re a fool if you don’t see it.”

I looked at Augustus; he looked at me. “The lowlife makes a valid point,” Augustus said.

“Don’t you get all high and mighty with me, Augustus Coleman,” Cary said. “We can’t all get jobs at your white master’s factory.”

“Why not?” I asked, just ignoring the insulting part of that statement. Augustus looked irritable about it as well.

“Some of us got priors,” Cary said. “Kind of makes it a little difficult to get a clean slate when the slate’s already dirty as hell, you know?”

“Yeah, spare me your bullshit,” Augustus said. “Some of us managed to keep out of the trouble you somehow steered your ass into.”

“Well, congratulations on having your no-stink shit together earlier in your life than I did in mine,” Cary said.

“If Weldon is somehow connected to supplying Cavanagh with warm meta bodies,” I said, “maybe they tested the suppressant on them during development?”

Augustus nodded. “Could be. If this stuff came out in secret, maybe that’s how they cooked it up. Found a couple of unregistered metas hiding, homeless, and rounded them up to be test subjects. That FDA approval is kind of hard to get, I guess.”

Cary’s looked like he was about to choke. “Did you say … suppressant? That shit that causes you people to lose your powers?”

“Yeah,” Augustus said. “What do you know about it?”

Cary blinked, and I could see him doing the calculus in his head about whether to say anything or not. I stared him down, and saw him make the decision quickly. “Someone asked me about it recently is all. Not related to your current line of inquiry. Please, continue arguing amongst yourselves.”

“I think we’ll make that decision,” I said, edging closer to him, “whether it’s relevant or not. Someone asked you about suppressant? Like wanted to … what? Buy some?”

“Yeah,” he said, backing away and into his car, his thighs bouncing off the hood lightly. “Maybe a little.”

“Who?” I asked. “People don’t just go looking for suppressant for innocent reasons. It doesn’t provide any kind of high—”

“How would you know?” Cary asked, looking a little defensive. “I’ve seen people smoke some crazy shit when they can’t get hold of—”

“Give me a name,” I said.

“These are my customers,” he said, protesting a little impotently. “I can’t—”

“Let me tell you something else you can’t do,” I said, cutting him off. “Fly without a plane. Want me to prove that to you?” I pointed up.

Darrick Cary looked at Augustus, like he was considering his answer long and hard before it came out. “Taneshia. Taneshia asked about suppressant. She … wanted to know if I could get my hands on it.” Cary bowed his head. “She wanted some real bad, and she was willing to pay to get her hands on it.”

I stood there, stunned, Darrick Cary’s admission still echoing in my ears. “Was she asking for it for herself or for someone else?” The question that popped out without me even having to think about it.