Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) (29 page)

He looked at my hand for a long moment. “She was my girlfriend,” he said and took my hand. I pulled him to his feet. “She was my first girlfriend, Augustus. And your boss and his thugs killed her.”

The wind picked up and blew smoke between us all as we stood there staring at each other. I looked at Sienna; she looked back at me and then at Jamal. “We should probably get out of here,” she said finally. “Unless you want to try and explain what’s going on to a very unsympathetic police force.”

“We’re sitting in the middle of a meta warzone,” I said. “No, I do not want to try and explain this to the police, because anything I say is probably going to be used against me since I buried at least three people during this fight.”

“Grab your brother,” she said, “and hold on tight.”

“We need to get Taneshia,” I said. “She’s around the corner. She’s hurt.”

“Fine,” Sienna said and grabbed hold of me as I threw an arm around Jamal. “Any idea where we should go?”

“Where’s Momma?” I started to ask in a panic, remembering now that we had no place to go, really, because our house had been burned down.

“I got her out,” Jamal said. “It’s why I was late joining the fight. I got her five streets away. She’s at Mae Grubb’s house.”

I felt my feet leave the ground and Jamal followed behind a moment later. “Great,” Sienna said. “One less worry on the mind. But that still doesn’t leave us anywhere real convenient to go, unless you want to have what’s bound to be a super interesting conversation right in this Ms. Grubb’s house?”

“I know where we can go,” I said and looked at Jamal. “I think Flora Romero’s house is still empty.”

He looked at me, and the sun hit his glasses right when we broke free of the smoke. There might have been just a little extra reflection behind the glasses, though, the first time I could really remember seeing any emotion from my brother in … years. “Yeah,” he said. “Flora’s house is empty.” He pushed his lips together, and they twisted as he turned his head to keep from looking at me.

Flora Romero’s house was an empty mess of broken windows and scuffed up floorboards. Plywood hung in place to cover up some of the worst, most shattered windows, and the glass was spread all over the floor in the kitchen.

The four of us were arrayed around the living room at the back of the house, staring at each other in the darkness as the light of day faded and the sound of sirens filled the air. Jamal was looking surly at me, Augustus looked pissed at Jamal. I was shooting occasional looks at Taneshia, who was unconscious on the floor in the corner, on her face, with a nasty wound in her back.

“Well, this is fun,” I said.

“Yeah, a real barrel full of monkeys,” Augustus said.

“What are you so sour about?” Jamal asked, voice extremely quiet.

“Uh, let’s see—my boss is apparently trying to kill me, my girl—” He froze and looked at Taneshia. “Uhh … my friend has been seriously injured … my brother’s a killer, we probably got the law after us, which is a first for me, and … oh, yeah, we still got no idea why any of this is happening. Pick one of those and it’s a bad day. Throw in our childhood home getting torched right to the ground, and it’s a full-on winner, man.”

“That does suck,” I said. “But hey, at least Momma made it out alive.”

“Yeah,” Augustus said, “now she can kill me and Jamal both when she finds out he’s a murderer and I got our house burned down. Yay. Now it’s the best day ever.”

“You didn’t get the house burned down,” Jamal said, and pointed his finger at me. “She did.”

“Me?” I asked, feeling a little dumbstruck. “I wasn’t even there!”

“They were trying to draw you out,” Jamal said, looking at me.

“Well, that was dumb,” I said. “But then, they’ve been playing this dumb the whole time. We would never have dug up Flora’s yard on our own,” I waved my hand toward the yard outside, still in its excavated state, “if those mercs hadn’t ambushed me there and Augustus forced the issue by turning up bones.”

“They only ambushed you because I tipped them off you were going to find something,” Jamal said.

I blinked. “Well. I guess we’re the dumb ones, then.”

“You did what?” Augustus was on his feet, only a thin veneer between him and full rage. I was feeling a little nonplussed myself, but controlling it better than him.

“I tipped off the next link in the chain I was following that Sienna was investigating Flora’s house,” Jamal said. “It had taken me to Roscoe and Kennith—”

“Whom you killed,” I said. “Why was that, exactly?”

“They were working with the bad guys,” Jamal said, sullen. “Joaquin Pollard got paid by Kennith Coy.”

“Kennith Coy was on parole,” I said. “He was working at a tire shop.”

“Which makes a good question how he ended up with ten grand in his bank account that made its way to Joaquin, doesn’t it?” Jamal asked. “You know what he said when I asked him?”

“Before or after you blasted him to death with a bolt of lightning?” Augustus asked.

Jamal’s expression hardened. “The man didn’t talk after death, fool. I asked him before I let loose on him. He said I shouldn’t be asking questions that were too big for me. And then he pulled a gun, so I lit him up.”

“Really?” I asked. “Where did the gun go?”

“I don’t know,” Jamal said. “Didn’t matter. But I assume some stooge of Cavanagh’s or Weldon’s picked it up since it could probably be tied to them. They own the police force in this town.”

“How’s it going to get tied to them?” Augustus asked.

“That big dude,” Jamal said, “the one that works for Cavanagh. He’s the point man on all the ugly illegal dealings.”

Augustus blinked. “Laverne?”

I stared at Augustus. “Tell me he’s got a back-up named Shirley.”

“Surely you must be joking,” Augustus said.

We both had a nice chuckle while Jamal stared at us like we were idiots. “I bet he gets that one all the time,” I said. “Still, if Kennith Coy was a bagman or a money fronter, what about Roscoe? He was just a factory worker—”

“He was working in Cavanagh’s new bioresearch facility,” Augustus said. “What was he doing there?”

“Experimentation on human test subjects,” Jamal said. “Like the residents from the shelter that Flora found out were missing. Cavanagh was pulling them off the street, figuring they wouldn’t be missed.” His jaw got tight. “And he was right—except Flora. Flora missed them, and she went looking. Found something, too. Found out enough that someone got touchy about it and sent Joaquin Pollard to kill her.”

“If you knew it was Cavanagh all along, why didn’t you just kill him instead of Roscoe and Kennith?” Augustus asked, surly.

“I didn’t know it was Cavanagh until today,” Jamal said. “Roscoe and Kennith didn’t give me squat. I had to do the research to trace things back. I still can’t prove it. But Roscoe said something to someone that ended up online and I found it in an email—”

“In a random email, somewhere on the net?” I asked.

“Yes,” Jamal said.

My eyes narrowed at him. “That’s some serious hacking.”

He held up a hand and his fingers crackled. “I haven’t exactly been idle in the last year. I can use my powers with brute force, but there’s some other stuff I can do, too. Finer things. Manipulate 1’s and 0’s. It’s taken a lot of practice, but it’s been worth it. I found the link that tied Kennith and Roscoe to Pollard and the experimentation, and then went to question them both. Kennith tried to get fresh with me, pulled a gun. Roscoe … he was a whole other thing.”

“Yeah, well, don’t leave us in the dark,” Augustus said, then froze. “I didn’t mean to do that pun, I swear. And I talked to Roscoe’s wife. He was a decent dude, had his shit together—”

“He was a damned cruel, torturous bastard,” Jamal said, teeth practically grinding. “You know why they picked him for the job? Because he didn’t care what happened to other human beings. Roscoe Marion enjoyed watching other people suffer. It’s all over his electronic record. You know what he did in his free time? Watched bum fight videos and worse. Cavanagh’s people figured out Roscoe had a mean streak, and they put him in a place where he could use his sadism to their advantage. The email I intercepted? It was to a friend of his, reaching out with a possible employment opportunity because they were looking for more sick sons of bitches to be lab techs.”

“This is off the scale crazy,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “You’re telling me one of the biggest big shot billionaires is running a torture-porn style operation for the homeless right in urban Atlanta, backed by one of the most connected figures in local politics … and no one’s tumbled onto that until you and your homegrown, baby lightning computer hacking investigation?”

“You came down here looking for me,” Jamal said. “Think about that. Flora’s death would have been written off as a robbery gone wrong. The Bluff—Vine City and English Avenue—is the fifth-highest rated neighborhood for crime in the entire U.S. These men prey on the weak. The nearly invisible. And they’ve got an operation that’s stitched up tight. So tight because guys like Laverne, Cavanagh and Weldon? They don’t leave loose ends or things to chance. They even buried their dead in Flora’s yard because, hell, no one was going to look there, and if they did, it wasn’t going to lead anywhere but to Flora, really. Only someone with the ability to parse the darkest corners of the net would ever be able to dig up a fraction of a trail.” He shook his head. “You could spin your wheels here for months, knowing it was Cavanagh and Weldon at the center of it, and you wouldn’t even have enough to get a reporter to publish a piece faintly suggesting they had anything to do with it.”

“There’s a lab,” I said. “There’s got to be some proof in the lab.”

“There might be,” Jamal agreed. “But as near as I can tell, there’s nothing that links Cavanagh to that lab. The payroll is done through a separate company that doesn’t co-mingle funds with his, that isn’t traceable to him as an owner, that he’s never set foot in—”

“Yet the press seem to know he’s in the biotech business,” I said. “That he developed the suppressant.”

“Yet another shell corporation,” Jamal said. “But that one you can trace to Cavanagh. The lab that developed it is in … Arizona or something, I think. Not Atlanta, for sure. He owns, like, fifty percent of it through a holding company and another forty-five percent through a fund he’s the primary investor in. Still, the water’s muddy enough he could deny he knew anything about it, and if the press was feeling charitable about him—which we know they always are—they’d give him a pass.”

“So, what was he developing in the secret lab that he needed meta test subjects for?” Augustus asked.

“I don’t know,” Jamal said. “There’s no internet record or footprint for that site. The place is a black hole without so much as a telephone connection, and they generate their own power. My next step was to gain access, but …” He waved a hand in the direction of their home. The smoke clouds were still visible on the horizon. “This happened. Kinda distracted me. I was going to do it tonight.”

“You know they’re going to be on red alert now,” I said. “We’ve gone and stumbled right through the middle of their sandcastle city like Godzilla through Tokyo.”

“You can tell how pissed they are because of how hard they’ve pushed back,” Augustus said. “I don’t even want to know what the Atlanta news is saying about us now. They probably know we were in on the throw-down in the street back there.”

“Fleeing the scene might not have been the best move,” I agreed.

“There’s no way Atlanta P.D. or the feds were going to let you walk out of there,” Jamal said, shaking his head. “At minimum, they were going to send you home. You’re causing too much stir. The White House is freaking out right now. You should hear the phone calls back and forth between the chief of staff and your agency. I had to turn down the volume on my computer.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s a neat trick. Can you listen in on Cordell Weldon’s incriminating phone calls?”

“I did try to listen in on him, actually,” Jamal said. “Since I started, he’s said nothing out of bounds, but he did work really hard to bring every legal kind of trouble down on you after your visit. Keep in mind I was only listening for a few hours, and … now all my stuff is burned.” He shook his head. “We’ve got nothing unless there’s something in the lab, and I doubt there is. You don’t go to the trouble of setting up a giant black site like that without taking the precautions of making sure it can’t be tied to you.”

“How’d you get Taneshia involved in this?” Augustus asked.

Jamal smiled faintly, but it faded quickly. “She introduced me to Flora. Helped put me on the track of Kennith through Darrick Cary—”

“That little weasel,” Augustus said. “He didn’t think to mention that.”

“He noticed Coy had some serious bank for a parolee,” Jamal said. “Taneshia was close with him and his lady, used to babysit their kid sometimes. Once she overheard Cary mention something about how Coy had suddenly come into a boatload of money. This was a few months back. It was enough to get me digging. I think she threw it to me to keep me from sulking, but … it turned into something.” He spoke with quiet resolution. “She didn’t know what I was going to do. Hell, I didn’t know what I was going to do when I set out to talk to him and Roscoe.” He lowered his head. “I just … they both … I miss her so much, and Coy, in particular was just … such a prick about it. I knew he knew something, but I don’t really have good control over the bigger bolts. I’ve been working on the fine connections since I learned about my powers, and so when he drew on me, I just let him have it. Afterward, I was … shaking, enraged. I went after Roscoe and … that didn’t go so well either.”

“I think you might be understating that,” Augustus said.

“So we’re at an impasse,” I said. “Without going into the lab, we’re stalled.”

“We go into that lab, we’re probably going to be just as stalled,” Augustus said. “I mean, can we even bring the law down on that place?”

“Sure,” I said. “Someone breaks in and dials 911 from inside the building—”

“No telephone lines,” Jamal said.