Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) (5 page)

And I heard it like it was a crack of thunder in my ear.

I looked into the dark beyond and could see a thin layer of an eye peering out. “Jamal,” I nodded to him as I started to pass.

The door opened a few more inches. “Augustus,” Jamal said, sticking his head out like it was February 2
^nd
and he was a groundhog. My brother looked left and right all fearfully, like I was gonna take his head off or something. Truth was, Jamal and I hadn’t had a fight in years. But we probably hadn’t had a regular conversation in a year, either. He was withdrawn, quiet. Jamal was a computer programmer, did contract work or something at a distance from his employer.

“What’s going on, brother?” I asked as I paused outside my own door. I didn’t want to ignore him if he wanted to talk. Part of me thought maybe he was heading out to the bathroom as I was passing and didn’t think he’d get caught checking. Oops. Now he might feel drawn into a real conversation with me, just to be polite.

I’m just kidding! Jamal never did anything to be polite. He was a programmer for a reason; talking to people was not in his job description.

“How are you doing, Augustus?” I saw Jamal fiddle with his glasses as he stood in the doorway, apparently resigned to talking with me.

“Just fine, just fine. How about you? Job treating you well?”

“It goes,” Jamal said. He had a narrow face, a skinny body. Jamal was always the brains of our family, but the dude had zero confidence—not in himself, not in his smarts. He talked in a hushed whisper almost all the time, made awkward as hell jokes that left people staring at him wide-eyed, not really sure if he was serious or not (he was). My brother was a nerd, of the type you find in stereo, if you know what I mean. (Stereo-type, get it? I’m a wordsmith.)

“That’s good to hear,” I said, nodding my approval. I was aching to get into my room so I could play around with my newfound powers a little more, maybe do some cleaning up, if you know what I mean—moving dirt around WITH MY MIND.

Yeah, it was still cool.

“Is she in there?” Jamal asked, nodding toward the living room.

“Yeah, she’s watching that new show she likes,” I said. “You know, the one with the—”

“I know the one,” Jamal said. His glasses caught the reflection of sunlight streaming in from the long, narrow, white-curtained window in the front hall.

“You been watching a little of that in your spare time?” I was totally kidding him here. My brother didn’t show much interest in women. Not that he showed interest in any people, really.

“Not really,” Jamal said.

“Because that Katrina Forrest girl is something else, if you know what—”

“Your boss stopped by your line today,” Jamal said, glasses flashing as he looked at me. “With Cordell Weldon.”

I blinked in surprise. “You see that on the internet?”

“I did.”

I nodded, a little enthusiastic that someone had caught my moment of fame—the first of many, I was sure. “Yeah, it was kind of a big deal.”

“You looked good,” Jamal said, and I blinked again. My brother didn’t go in much for compliments, even when he did finally open his mouth and speak to others.

I felt my chest swell out with pride a little. “Well, you know, I’ve been working hard for a while, and it was just nice to get a little recognition of the fact—”

“Mmm hmm,” Jamal said and adjusted his glasses again, a flash of reflected light hitting me right in the eyes. “Speaking of, I should get back to work.”

“Yeah, all right,” I said, feeling like I’d pushed the conversation past the reasonable point. “I’ll … uh … let you get back to it, then.”

He disappeared back into the darkness of his room without another word, the subtle click of the door shutting between us another reminder that my brother and I had almost nothing to talk about anymore.

“Hmm,” I said and shook my head. That was Jamal. And I had things to do anyway. I shut the door to my room and started to clean the place for the first time that I could remember that didn’t involve my momma threatening to beat me with a broom.

Flora Romero was described by her co-workers as one of the nicest, sweetest, gentlest people that the world had ever known, surely up for sainthood with Mother Theresa if the moment ever came. She’d not just worked at the homeless shelter I was visiting as a paid employee, she also volunteered extra hours without pay both there and at a local needle exchange, and possibly also had her hair braided every morning by the local birds in preparation for work while commanding a thundering musical performance in which she was the gentle, trilling lead vocal. I could practically hear her “I want” song, and it was centered around peace on earth and good will toward men.

After ten minutes of talking to people around the shelter, I realized that Flora Romero was pretty much my exact opposite number; everybody loved her, everybody liked her, and I guessed there were buckets of tears shed on the day she died because I saw more than a fair few shed right in front of me while talking to people about her. I’m not saying emotion makes me uncomfortable, but—oh, hell. Yes, I am. Visible displays of emotion make me uncomfortable, and about ten times in the last five minutes I had wanted to fling myself toward the ceiling at full force, smashing through and rocketing into the sky until my eardrums popped and I couldn’t hear any more whiny whimpering. Until my super-healing fixed it, I guess.

I didn’t do any of that, of course. This was a serious bit of business, and I was a serious person, blah blah blah. I held my tongue, watched the older lady in front of me wipe a tear with her sleeve, and controlled my grimace as best I could. “She was just the best of us,” Yasmine Colon said, her brown eyes blurred by the heavy amounts of water and slightly running mascara.

“Did she have a boyfriend?” I asked. I had a few questions on my agenda that I’d been asking of the three people I’d talked to so far. Coverage, just in case one of them knew something the others didn’t. Yasmine had been pointed out to me as someone who knew Flora best, though, so if I didn’t get something unique from her, there might not be anything to get.

She looked at me blankly, and a little droplet ran down her cheek as she blinked a couple times. “I don’t think—wait, wait. Yes. She talked about a boy she’d met. A couple days before she died, she mentioned him.” Her lips pressed into a hard line and she welled up again. I only narrowly avoided taking a step back. “She seemed so happy, like she was falling in love.”

Finally, maybe all the tears I’d had to witness were going to be worth it. “Do you remember a name?”

I could see her agonize over it, trying to snatch up a memory of something almost insignificant from more than a year ago. “I don’t, I’m sorry. It was so long ago. I’ve tried to forget.” She sniffed.

“Fair enough,” I said, then switched tacks. “Did you ever know a man named Joaquin Pollard?”

She shook her head lightly, her chin jiggling a bit as she did. “I don’t think so. Was that her boyfriend’s name?”

I stood there for a second, pondering that one. If Joaquin Pollard was her boyfriend, him killing her would have been … well, a fairly standard event, sadly. The motive wasn’t a hundred percent clear in that case, though. “Did she show up to work with any unexplained bruises, looking like she was hurting at all, before she left?” Usually boyfriends didn’t leap straight to murder, I didn’t think. There was a buildup of abuse first, a pattern, though it was possible he’d just decided he was done with her and killed her.

“I don’t think so,” Yasmine said, “but …” She frowned and just stopped.

“But … what?”

“Things were crazy just before she died,” Yasmine said. “She and I didn’t have many chances to talk in the weeks before she died.”

“Crazy how?” I asked, applauding myself for my Columbo-like persistence. Or something. (I’d never watched
Columbo
.)

“Oh, just the usual turnover at the shelter,” she said, waving it off. “We had a bunch of regulars that left around the time that Flora died. Just picked up and moved off.”

Now it was my turn to frown. “Is that normal?”

“Oh, yes,” Yasmine said. “I saw on the news that some might have moved to Colorado because of the legalization. We get a few people that are badly ill, need the pain relief.” She paused then shrugged. “And some just like it. Anyway, others moved on. That happens.” She took a breath, composing herself. “We’ll see people for years, get to know them, and then one day they’re gone and we never see them again. It’s hard not to get down sometimes, seeing all that we see. Flora, she was a special girl. She never let it all weigh her down. She had that quality of—of effervescence. She never got down.”

I heard that bit echo in my head, about how it was hard not to get down sometimes, and I pictured in my head the morgue shots I’d seen this morning of the two guys that had been killed by lightning. I’d seen so many dead bodies in my time, they were just a couple more on the pile. I took a deep breath. “Thank you for your help, Ms. Colon.”

“You’re welcome, dear,” she said, all matronly. I wondered if that was how Flora Romero had seen her, too. I felt a little more weight settle on my shoulders. “I am a little curious why you’re here asking about her now, though. When she died, they said the man who killed her died a few minutes later from a freak lightning strike.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She stared at me then snapped into comprehension. “Not a freak lightning strike.”

“Nope,” I said, turning to walk down the hall of the shelter. It was plastered with PSA-type posters advertising different programs. “Just a freak. Like me.”

“You shouldn’t call yourself that, dear,” she said, her voice chasing after me. “People have been talking about seeing you in the sky all day. The news is reporting on it. It’s very exciting.”

I could see the bright sunlight streaming out of a door only a hundred or so feet ahead. I could be there in a second if I chose to, if I just left everything behind and shot for it. I wanted to; it was a call in my blood, but I didn’t. Because I had a responsibility not to act like a total jackass everywhere I went, blasting papers off desks and knocking posters off walls as I blazed along so fast I would stir whirlwinds behind me with every movement.

Responsibility. Phillips. Reed.

Yeah, it was hard not to get down about everything sometimes.

“I’m glad people are excited,” I said, coming up with the only positive angle I could think of as I moved, slightly faster than human, toward the exit. “But if I were them, I wouldn’t be so excited to see me coming.” I made it to the door, stepped out into the light, and paused there for just a second. “I’m not bringing anything else to their lives but noise, the occasional sonic boom as I fly by.”

And I took off before Yasmine Colon could offer any wisdom in reply, darting north a hundred feet above the street, heading toward my next destination, and thinking all the while that anyone who saw me coming would actually be much wiser to fear my approach than to be excited—because I couldn’t recall ever bringing anything but death and pain to anyone caught up in my wake.

My eyes were stinging a little bit as I took a turn toward my next destination: Flora Romero’s last residence. I doubted I’d find anything there since she’d lived alone and her place had probably gone up for lease to someone else months and months ago, but it was worth a look, and it was pretty close to where she’d been killed in any case, which was another point of interest on my tour.

I slowed my flight a little, letting the heat of the sun work on me. I’d ditched the suit coat after the police station and was a lot happier for it. Honestly, in this weather I’d rather have been working in shorts and a t-shirt, but I had a sense of propriety and a preference for frumpiness that didn’t allow for me to do that. I wasn’t exactly tall and willowy, as had been noted on more times than I could count by various commenters on the internet by this point, so I figured it was best I just kept as covered as I could, even in swelteringly hot conditions like this. My arms were bare, though, and that felt damned good.

Something about Flora Romero’s story was getting to me. I’d investigated a few murders in my time, and yeah, there was this tendency to sanctify the victim afterward. I call it the eulogy effect, but someone else probably has a better name for it. It’s the idea that you don’t really want to speak ill of the dead, because if you were the one dead it’d be kind of shitty for someone else to speak up during your eulogy and go, “Yeah, he was a broke-ass drunk that was mean as hell even when he was sober, he owed everybody money, and he’d have stolen a nickel from his mom for a pack of smokes.” No one wants their foibles aired, and certainly not after death. We all imagine our funerals and think of the nice things people would say, things that they would never say in life. I dunno. Maybe that was just me.

I’d been listening to a lot of people talk crap about me lately, though. Lots and lots. I’d had a lot of—in my view—unfair comparisons to another metahuman who had jumped full into the spotlight recently. It was enough to drive me bat-crap crazy, too, because I was still full on fighting the fight and she was … not. It’s a lot easier to talk sweetly about a celebrity whose sole focus is fashion and trendy causes and all that rather than someone who has to get her knuckles bloody single-handedly taking apart a crew of Russians and mercenaries in a hostage crisis. Without powers.

And, oh, had they talked, those heads on television whose sole purpose was to fill the air with opinions enough to cause the sturdiest tree to die of CO2 poisoning. “Sienna Nealon is simply a vicious savage, a product of a bygone age.” “She’s not an appropriate face or voice for our government, and she shouldn’t be representative of a minority group like metahumans.” “She’s a thug, plain and simple. She should be in jail, and the people she’s put in jail should be free.”

I’d give you their contrast with the flavor of the month who’s making me look like Himmler-with-a-machete by comparison, but I think I’d develop diabetes if I tried.

It had been six months since the incident with the Russians on the campus, with Simmons and the YouTube video beating that had hung around my neck like a millstone, and after every single news cycle, when things would get slow, there would be another five minute comparison hatchet piece talking about how much I sucked and how much Katrina “Kat” Forrest ruled.