Remember

  Out of the Box, Book 21

  Robert J. Crane

  Remember

  Out of the Box, Book 21

  Robert J. Crane

  Copyright © 2018 Ostiagard Press

  All Rights Reserved.

  1st Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, please email cyrusdavidon@gmail.com.

  CONTENTS

  1

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  44.

  45.

  46.

  47.

  48.

  49.

  50.

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Other Works by Robert J. Crane

  1

  Reed

  “They got her,” I said as I walked into the office, bare-chested, in the middle of the night. It was summer, and steamy, and I was sweating to beat the damned band. I’d just flown in from Maple Grove, Minnesota, to Eden Prairie, where our offices were. Even the brush of the wind hadn’t cooled me, in either mood or temperature.

  “Got who?” Augustus Coleman asked. Night still hung heavy outside the office windows, the wee small hours of the morning yet to give way to dawn. “What are you talking about?” He was standing behind the receptionist desk, and by his bristling demeanor and his wide eyes, I knew he knew who I was talking about.

  But like me … he didn’t really want to admit it.

  “Sienna,” Scott Byerly said, his usually tanned face pale, emerging from the hallway that led to our bullpen, the tight cluster of desks where most of our employees worked.

  “Bingo,” I said, pointing at Scott as I brushed a few long, stray hairs back over my shoulder and out of my face. “They got her.”

  “Who got her? The cartel?” Augustus asked, stepping around the desk. “Do we need to saddle up? Call in the cavalry? Mount a rescue mission?”

  “They got her,” Jamal, Augustus’s brother said, stepping out of the hall behind Scott, a phone gripped tightly in his hand. “The feds arrested Sienna.”

  There they were. The words I’d choked on when I’d gotten here, unable to bring myself to say them out loud.

  I sagged, standing in front of the door. “Yep,” was all I could say.

  “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” A crash came from the bullpen, and Guy Friday, Sienna’s uncle (yeah, I know, I have trouble with that one, too) shoved Jamal and Scott aside as he swelled from his normal, stick-figure size to an Incredible Hulk state of muscle and fright. I mean, height. He clenched a ham-like fist in front of pectorals the size of a hubcap, and said, “Let’s roll! We gotta get her!” His voice was hoarse and thick, and though he wore something that approximated a gimp mask, his mood was clear.

  “Where’s she at?” Augustus whirled on his brother, who was still standing there clutching his cell phone. “You can find her. You search, you locate, we destroy.”

  “You … want to destroy Sienna?” Scott’s eyebrow quirked up. Even in the middle of the night, Scott looked composed—suit smooth, shirttail perfect, his tie was even fixed in place. Perfect image of a yuppie at an office.

  “We destroy the people guarding her,” Augustus said, slowly, like he was talking to a child.

  “Those are federal agents,” Jamal said. “That would put us pretty definitely on the wrong side of the law.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time this year,” Augustus said, tension ratcheting to max in his voice. I didn’t think I’d ever heard him this worked up about something. Maybe when the last Beyoncé album dropped, but that was different.

  “Who else is here?” I asked, trying to get my wits about me.

  “Just us,” Scott said. “Everybody else went home.”

  My phone flared to life in my pocket, and I ripped it out, hoping it was—

  “Kat,” I said, answering it.

  “Did you hear?” Kat Forrest sounded … drained on the other end of the line. Stricken.

  “I was there when it happened,” I said. Even with me in Minnesota and her in California, the connection was immediate. This traumatic event—

  “How were you in Reno, Nevada, just now when a couple metas hit a cosmetics store in a robbery?” Kat asked. “Do you have precognitive abilities? Do I need to start calling you ‘son’?”

  “I’m not—what?” I shook my head, trying to clear the fog of events and figure out what the hell Kat was on. “I’m talking about Sienna being arrested, what are you going on about?”

  A harsh silence came from the phone. “Sienna’s been arrested?” A pause. “Where?”

  “Maple Grove, Minnesota. Not thirty minutes ago. They have her in federal custody.”

  To Kat’s credit … this time there was no pause. “I’ll be in Minnesota in three hours. Was … anyone arrested with her?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “And Kat … get Veronika from SF on your way in if you’re going private. And … whoever else is out there from our roster. Call … call everyone.” I shifted my instructions from her to the others. “All hands on deck. If they’ve ever worked with us, and we know they’re trustworthy … get ’em here. Greg Vansen. Taneshia. Gravity. Whoever we can call up.”

  “Yo, Reed,” Jamal said, stepping forward, “are you sure you’re—”

  “On it,” Kat said, and she hung up.

  I dropped the phone to my side.

  “Yesssssss,” Friday said, clenching his fist in front of him. “Let’s do this shit.”

  “Hell yeah,” Augustus said, nodding. “Going full rogue up in this place.”

  “Reed,” Scott said. “I … know you must be feeling rocked right now, but … what you’re talking about …”

  “I’m not talking about anything—yet,” I said. “I’m just calling up all hands.”

  “Well … some of us are getting an idea about the direction you’re heading on this,” Jamal said, looking at his brother. “And those of us not immediately on the bandwagon … are getting alarmed.”

  “This is a federal crime you’re talking about,” Scott said, meta-low, so no normal human could hear us without aid of some sort of noise-magnifying microphone. And hopefully there were none of those in the area. Jamal kept our office free of bugs. “You want to break Sienna Nealon out of prison?”

  “Jail, technically,” Friday said, and everyone stopped to look at him. “You only go to prison after you’ve been sentenced.”

  “She needs a lawyer, Reed,” Scott said, stepping closer to me, looking me dead in the eye. “She needs to fight this the legal way, first.”

  “Miranda’s trying to get to her right now,” I said, “but you know how this is going to go. Come on, Scott! We deliver criminal metas to the law for a living! They’re not being tried in traditional courts, with traditional protections!” They were tried in shadowy meta courts, where limited amounts of information about the case were made public. It was a fairly new development, something that had come after the Supreme Court decision a couple years ago, and one I was not—as usual, lately—happy about. “Mark my words,” I said, “she’s going to get railroaded.”

  “How’d they get her?” Jamal asked, finger touching the charging port of his phone. Probably scanning the internet for information. In fact, he probably already knew the answer, and was asking it for the benefit of those around me.

  It was a bitter damned pill to say it out loud. “She surrendered.”

  “Whoa,” Friday said.

  I saw the stiffness, the fight, go out of Augustus. His shoulders slumped by a half inch. “Surrendered?”

  “She was cornered,” I said, still hot for said fight. “She’s been on the run for two years, she’s not invincible anymore, she’s—”

  “Reed,” Scott said, deathly quiet. “This is … we can’t …”

  “We can,” I said, and I strode past him. “We will. Get everyone here. If you don’t want to come with us, Scott … you can stay here or go home—I don’t care which.”

  “Reed,” he called after me. “This was her choice, man. You can’t—� �

  “If it were any of us locked up,” I said, stopping at my office door and whirling on him where he stood on the other side of the bullpen, surrounded by the other three, “she’d already be halfway through the damned prison walls to spring us. Don’t tell me what I can’t do for my sister.”

  I slammed my office door, knowing that it wouldn’t keep any of them out if they were determined to continue our argument. None of them came, though, and I sat there, cold leather of my office chair against my bare back, as I waited for my pieces to arrive, to move into place …

  So I could get my sister out of jail.

  2.

  Sienna

  “… Sienna Nealon … how do you plead?”

  The magistrate of the metahuman crimes court—or something like that, it was another of those useless government acronyms I didn’t bother to try and keep track of—was speaking to me. I’d lost track of what she was saying in the midst of her reading off the umpteen billion crimes I’d been charged with. I’d zoned out somewhere around the eight hundred and twentieth count of arson. Had I really burned eight hundred and twenty things in my life?

  Seemed low.

  The magistrate was a tough, upright woman in her middle-fifties. Her eyes, which could cut through steel or any teenager’s pretensions of being a badass, fell right on mine. “Ms. Nealon … are you still with us?”

  “I’m strapped upright to a freaking gurney, bound hand and foot, and have a Hannibal Lecter mask over my face,” I said, the mask interfering with my ability to speak. I belted it out for the cheap seats anyway. “Where the hell else would I be? Other than in my own sweet little lollipop fantasy world where they’re currently fête-ing me for stopping a dangerous drug cartel from abducting an American citizen and torturing her to death while guarding their illicit hideout with mercenaries carrying as many illegal weapons as crimes you just read off.”

  “Ms. Nealon, if you don’t change your tone, I’m going to cite you for contempt of court,” the magistrate said. She was, apparently, not playing around.

  “Oh, gosh, I’d be in real trouble then,” I said. What the hell else were they going to do to me? Tack another thirty days onto my sentence? I wasn’t listening during the “murder” reading, but if we were just going by tonight, they’d probably charged me with a couple hundred.

  The magistrate tore her eyes off of me with great difficulty, like pulling a serrated knife out of a wound where it had gotten stuck (yeah, I’ve done it, don’t ask—and boy, do I sound like I deserved to be here). “Counselor … do you have anything else to add?”

  She was asking the prosecution, because I didn’t have a defense attorney present. I’d asked for one. They’d ignored me. I was strapped to a gurney, powerless, so there wasn’t a lot I could do besides making cutting remarks and asking again for my lawyer.

  “The prosecution asks for no bail,” the prosecutor, a mid-fifties guy who might as well have been the magistrate’s husband, said. “We believe the defendant is a flight risk.”

  “Let the record show,” I said, projecting my voice past this silly mask, which was pointless, because they’d drugged my superpowers out of me, “I can no longer fly.”

  I bet that would have killed in front of a different audience, one with fewer sticks lodged in their anuses. Unfortunately, here in this meta court, apparently my entire audience was suffering the wood-butt affliction, because I was greeted with silence.

  “So ordered,” the magistrate said, “no bail.” And then she thumped her little gavel, like that was supposed to be some sort of punctuation on her haughty pronouncement.

  “Bummer,” I said. “I was looking forward to chilling at that home I no longer have while I wait for this trial to start up. Maybe catch up on the new season of Orange is the New Black … pick up some tips.”

  The magistrate just glared, but apparently she, too, had realized the pointlessness of adding a stupid contempt charge on what was already bound to be a life sentence, even for little old me and my five-thousand-year lifespan. “Would you like to enter a plea, Ms. Nealon?” the magistrate asked.

  “Well, I’d really like to consult with my attorney before painting myself into that particular corner,” I said.

  The prosecutor snickered. The magistrate looked amused. Based on their reactions, they were not only married but sharing a brain.

  “You’re not the trial judge, are you?” I asked, watching the little undercurrent of amusement between the two of them. “Because ideally, I’d like an impartial arbiter of justice to do that sort of thing. It’s an old-fashioned idea I have about justice, that it should be blind.”

  The magistrate cleared her throat. “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Ms. Nealon, but I’m the magistrate in charge of overseeing all metahuman trials in the Eighth District.” She looked at paper on her desk. She’d probably printed out a tawdry novel for when things got boring in the courtroom. Well, I could pretty much guarantee the content of my trial was going to be exciting.

  “Oh,” I said. “In that case … you’re welcome.”

  That got her cold eyes off the paper and back on me. “For what?” she asked, pure ice in her tone.

  “I’ve sent you a lot of business over the last few years,” I said. “Just figured maybe you were grateful for your job.”

  A spark of heat flared in her eyes, but she didn’t bother to address my dig. Or say thank you. “Your trial is set for three days from now—”

  “Geez, the discovery process is going to be short,” I said.

  “You’ve had two years to conduct discovery,” she said, and a haughty smile of self-satisfaction broke out on her face.

  “Maybe for the earliest crimes on the docket,” I said, “but for the stuff you’re charging me with from tonight, I’ll have three days.”

  “That seems sufficient,” the magistrate said, turning back to her printed-out novel, apparently done with arguing with me about appropriate timeframes to prepare my defense.

  “The ballistics aren’t even going to be back,” I said. “Autopsy reports. Hell, reports from all the cops who showed up to the scene. You want to charge me with—”

  “If you can tell me what crimes from this evening you’re being charged with,” the magistrate said, tearing her gaze up to me again and—yeah, again—smiling, “I might be prepared to listen to this argument. Failing that … your trial commences in three days.” She looked to the prosecutor. “You have a motion for change of venue?”

  The prosecutor smiled tightly. “Yes. Rather than haul the defendant down here to Minneapolis every day for trial, and deal with the zoo of press and spectators, the prosecution requests a special dispensation to try her in the facilities of the metahuman prison known as the Cube. With no audience.”

  “Uh … wow,” I said, “This is interesting. You’re not even going to bother to let the public observe my trial? And you’re going to make the jurors drive down to Young America, Minnesota, every day for … however long this lasts?”

  The magistrate giggled. Girlishly. And my last hope kinda died in that moment. “This is not a jury trial,” she said, once she’d regained the minimum level of composure required not to be a huge asshole while putting the screws to me. Near thing.

  “Oh,” I said, finally getting it driven home to me once and for all. “So … you hate me and you’re going to deny me a lawyer, a public hearing, you’ll be personally overseeing my trial and … I’m assuming here, but clear it up for me … passing sentence once it’s all over?”

  “We’ll consider allowing you the benefit of counsel,” she said, back to reading.

  “But I’m bang on with the other stuff?” I asked. “Cool. I guess it’s a death sentence for sure, then.”

  One day I was going to learn to stop pissing off people who tried to lord their control over me. But not today. “Ms. Nealon—” she said, lighting back up—and actually standing up.

  “I mean, I thought the trial feature in Starship Troopers was kinda cool because it was so fast,” I said, because … why the hell would I shut up now? Was there clemency in my future if I just piped down? Hah. “But now I’m starting to see why the ‘speedy trial’ feature of our criminal justice system isn’t usually done in five minutes, with a burger and fries. I’m supposed to have rights, you clowns—”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26