Toxicity (Out of the Box Book 13) Page 14

  “Yep. Nice way to starve the investigation of oxygen,” she said. “Bad way to catch criminals, though, letting the trail go colder than the dead.”

  “So they’re probably using a credit card—”

  “Or multiples.”

  “—when they check in to hotels at night,” Scott said. Suddenly he was a little more awake about possibilities, that bitter nightmare of a sleepless night fading like a distant dream. “We might be able to track them.”

  “There’s a trail, at least,” Sienna said cautiously. “They could have fifty cards. They could have stolen some cards. They could have identity thefted some people and be using different ones every night, but …” She shook her head. “The ego on these two? I bet they’re not working too hard to cover their tracks, because up ’til now, it hasn’t been an issue. You find the card they’ve used, I bet you find a clear trail to every place they’ve stayed. Because they’re young, and they probably don’t have that many credit cards between the two of them.”

  “You sure? They give applications for those things out on college campuses like after-dinner mints at a fancy restaurant.”

  “Having never been to college and seldom to fancy restaurants, I’ll have to take your word for that. And since June and Elliot are in the same boat as I am in that regard—”

  “They probably don’t have a lot of credit cards,” Scott said. “Point taken. Okay. Well, that should be easy enough to check when I call the office.”

  Sienna nodded warily. “Didn’t Phillips or whoever hired you assign you to do any kind of training on basic FBI stuff?” Like this? he could tell she wanted to add.

  It didn’t sting much because the answer was simple. “Not really,” Scott said. “Phillips is a bureaucrat, he doesn’t know the investigative end of things from his own rectum.”

  “That makes it really awkward to poop, I’d guess.”

  “It was almost like he was more concerned with protecting his little fiefdom within the FBI than making sure we were effective,” Scott said with a shrug.

  “Knowing Phillips, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what he was doing,” Sienna said. “Because in his mind, covering his ass was way more important than sticking his neck out to try and deliver results.”

  Scott shrugged, and his phone buzzed as he was about to call the office. It was a Florida number, and he answered immediately. “Scott Byerly.”

  The voice on the other end was intense, professional, and to the point. He was off the phone less than thirty seconds later, and pushed his own plate back. No time for breakfast this morning. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”

  Sienna was up before he even asked. “Got a line on them?”

  “Yep,” Scott said, turning as she fell beside him. “Sounds like a couple matching our lovebirds just caused a stir in a hotel lobby in Gainesville. Looks like we might just have a direct line to getting that credit card number.”

  30.

  June

  She’d planned it out in the shower, with a few details added afterward by Elliot to make sure the plan flowed together. It had elements of risk, but hell, what didn’t for them, now?

  And besides … it let June get back to doing what she wanted, which was a welcome thing in her mind.

  “I’m not signing off on this,” she said sniffily, the bill for the previous night’s stay right in front of her on the lobby counter, the clerk eyeing her with surprise and a level of wariness on the other side. She was a young one, probably only a couple years older than June, but she had a sense of world-weariness—from working this type of job too long, probably.

  “Ma’am, there’s no additional charges on there,” the clerk said politely. “Signing is just a formality.”

  “But what’s all this?” June asked, not really caring about what she was pointing to—the taxes and ancillary fees at the bottom of the page-long receipt—so much as she wanted to argue.

  “Well, the state has certain taxes to cover—”

  “It’s outrageous,” Ell said with his customary reserve. “It adds so much to the bill.” It figured Ell would be genuinely pissed off about something they were only supposed to care about in the fiction they were spinning right now.

  The clerk just shrugged, looking pained. “I’m sorry. It’s the state. We don’t have anything to do with th—”

  “I want to talk to a manager,” June said, not really caring if she did or not. She was enjoying herself, but not enough to simmer and wait while a manager hauled their ass over here, especially if they weren’t in the building.

  “I can call one if you’d like,” the clerk said politely, “but she’s going to tell you the same thing I am. This is like sales tax—”

  “Sales tax?” Ell almost shouted. “It looks like a hell of a lot more than sales tax!”

  “But it’s not something we can do anything about,” the clerk said. Her name tag read “Marti.” June got the feeling this wasn’t the first time Marti had been yelled at by a customer. Not even close.

  “I want to talk to a manager,” June said, raising the volume of her voice and amping up the hostility. She was determined to fake her break before much longer, and she needed to act right to make it look genuine. “Right. Now.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Marti said, affixing a smile of politeness to her face. She showed no teeth now, but June had noticed them earlier. They stuck out a little too far and looked funny. Marti picked up the phone, started to dial—

  June looked at Ell, who nodded, and stuck out a hand, sending a blast of wind that ripped the phone out of the clerk’s hand and shattered it against the wall. Marti cried out in surprise, looking just about like Ell had slapped her.

  Ell looked a little stunned, too. He’d taken some coaxing to work up to the vitality of this assignment, but he’d finally caved on it. Now, though, he tried to compose himself rapidly, and stuttered out, “Th—that ought to show you!”

  Marti didn’t reply, too busy staggering back, trying to get away from them. June watched her, and figured the time had come for the coup de grâce, so she pulled out a small cloud of purple toxin and waved it in front of Marti’s face.

  “You see this?” June asked. “This is poison. You should be familiar with it, because that’s what you do here, isn’t it? Poison people? Piss them off? Make them mad while you’re protesting, ‘Oh, we provide a service.’ And then lying to them about how much it costs.” June sent the cloud toward Marti, halting it a few feet away. “I saw that look on your face. You’ve had people complain before about this bullshit, which you didn’t tell us about before we were signed in and staying, only after, when we were ready to pay. What if we were broke? What if we couldn’t afford it?”

  “We always tell people about it at check-in,” Marti said, back against the wall, staring in open horror at the purple cloud drifting toward her slowly. “I know I covered it with you—”

  “YOU LIAR!” June screamed, and hopped the counter, bringing the cloud closer. She’d give herself another few seconds, then she was going to be out of here, give Marti a chance to calm down and call the cops.

  “I’m not lying,” Marti said, barely keeping it together as the first wafts of purple touched her cheek. “I really did tell you. I’m sorry if you didn’t hear it—”

  “I’m not paying your damned lying bill,” June said. Credit to the girl; she was holding up a lot better than most would, sticking to her guns even now, in the face of threats that would make most people shit their pants. Death staring her down, and Marti was telling it like it was. Good for her.

  “Okay, don’t,” Marti said, eyes open behind those thick glasses. “I can’t make you.”

  “Good,” June said, pulling back the cloud. “So we understand each other.” She retracted the purple toxin into her hand and hopped back over the counter. “You stop screwing people over, you hear me?” Marti didn’t answer, just stared at her. “Come on, Ell,” she said, and made for the door. Ell grabbed the bags and followed.

  When they
were out, the very slight chill of morning air combined with what she’d just done causing June to ripple with goosebumps, Ell said, under his breath, “I think you scared the hell out of her.”

  “She didn’t have anything to be scared of,” June said as they hurried to the new car, not bothering to hide their path or steal a new one. “Not that she knew it.” She looked right at Ell. “You got the gun?”

  Ell tossed their bags in the back of the SUV and patted the small of his back nervously. “Lucky I had it on me when we changed cars at Disney, I guess, otherwise I would have left it behind.”

  When they were in the car, Ell starting it and putting it in reverse, gently backing out like a grandma—though not hers, Grandma Randall drove fast—she asked him, “Why were you carrying the gun, anyway?” He glanced at her, and she elaborated. “It just doesn’t seem like you.”

  Ell blushed as he took them out onto the main highway. “I don’t know. It felt kinda … gangster to have it, so … I did. I liked it.” His face darkened further.

  June just nodded, slightly impressed, as they headed off down the road. She didn’t care where they went, at least for the moment. All that was left to do now was wait.

  31.

  Sienna

  It took us a couple hours to drive from Orlando to Gainesville, an interminably boring drive during which I learned that a) Florida has actual hills, which put it slightly above Iowa in my estimation for interesting terrain, and b) Scott was sitting on a pile of resentment that would have made King Midas’s treasure hoard look like an amateur coin collector’s first Krugerrand. He did a good job keeping it in during the drive, though. I kept thinking he was going to blow at any minute, spew some vitriol at me like a whale clearing the blowhole after breaching, but he kept it to himself, antsy and squirming the whole way though he was.

  When we got to the hotel where the incident had occurred, we found one of those nice, modern places that seemed to have crept up along interstates after the fashionable death of the motel with exterior rooms. I liked hotels, with their interior rooms, better, just for security purposes. Most thieves saw a place where you had to cross a front lobby as something like a moat, and turned back. Anyone could kick down doors in a motel, and probably be gone before the cops showed up or anyone even noticed to call them, depending on how they went about their thieving. A lobby was a nice psychological barrier to crime, even though in practice a hotel was probably just as easy to prey on for a criminal with brains.

  This was how I viewed the world. Sometimes I caught myself, and thought, damn, I was paranoid.

  Then I remembered I was a frequent target of criminals looking to show off their badass bona fides, and immersed in the world of catching such scum, and realized that thinking any other way would be stupid.

  The front desk clerk seemed to be the sole witness to the incident, and she was being looked after by paramedics when we arrived. She didn’t look too badly off, but considering it had been a couple hours since she’d had the hell scared out of her by June and Elliot, and she hadn’t gone to the hospital, she was probably made of pretty stern stuff. She looked rattled but not shattered, which put her high in my estimation. I’d met a lot of people that would crumble under a lot less intimidation.

  “Marti?” Scott asked, taking in her steel name tag and introducing himself once we’d made it past the perimeter of local cops standing around, waiting to see if the criminals stupidly returned to the scene of the crime. It happens a lot more often than you’d think. “I’m Agent Byerly of the FBI, and I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Marti had the puffy eyes that signaled she’d cried a little bit in the wake of the incident, but that was pretty normal in these circumstances. It would have been a lot weirder if she hadn’t had an emotional reaction to being threatened by someone who could conjure a mysterious toxic cloud out of nothing, or a guy who could assault you with empty air. “Sure,” she said, and her voice was strong. Her teeth protruded a little from between her lips, but between that and her glasses, she had a kind of cute look, like a little bunny.

  “Can you describe the people who attacked you?” Scott asked, sounding like the very model of sensitivity. What a charming gentleman, I would have thought if I hadn’t known about the wellspring of rage that he was presently keeping stuffed inside like he was a prized Thanksgiving turkey.

  “One was a guy, one was a girl,” she said. “She was thin, strawberry blond hair. Freckles. She looked like the trailer trash I went to high school with.” Marti’s ancillary assessment confirmed for me that she was probably more pissed than scared at this point. Some of that was probably even aimed at herself for not resisting, which was completely normal for a victim in these circumstances. “He was … I dunno. Unremarkable,” she said it like it was an insult, “hair with shaved sides, all pointed forward like a rhino horn or something. Average. Pretty normal-looking guy.”

  “Except for shooting air out of his hands?” I suggested, then shushed myself when Scott sent me a look reminding me that I needed to blend into the background.

  Marti barely took notice of me as she replied. “Except for that, yeah. He shot the phone right out of my hands with wind. I’ve never seen anything like that.” Her voice turned hushed, awed. “I mean, I’ve seen it on TV, but …” She shook her head, eyes fixed in the distance, looking slightly stunned.

  “It’s different when you see it in real life,” Scott said soothingly. “Like a movie jumping off the screen in the theater.”

  “Yeah,” Marti said, nodding along slowly. “Crazy.”

  “Do you know their names?” Scott asked.

  “I know hers,” Marti said. “It was on the card, on the receipt. June Randall. I checked them in yesterday,” she added, as though that was some pertinent detail.

  Scott and I traded a look. “Do you know where they’re going?” Scott asked.

  “No idea,” Marti said, shaking her head. “They didn’t say.”

  “Sir?” A patrolman came walking up to us as a cop car squealed out of the parking lot followed by another. “We just got word of a bank robbery about five minutes away. Sounds like it might be our couple.”

  I blinked. They’d done this thing, here, in the hotel, some two hours ago. But now they were robbing a bank five minutes away?

  Scott frowned. “When did this start?”

  “911 call came in two minutes ago,” the cop said, hands on his belt, apparently itching to get moving. Another cop car burned rubber out of the parking lot. “It’s still ongoing, we think. Caller’s inside an office in the bank, hunkered down. Said the male suspect blew a desk over with his hand.”

  “That’d be them, then,” I said, still frowning. What, had they gone out to brunch before robbing the bank?

  “Give me the address,” Scott said, pulling out his phone to punch it into the GPS.

  “You can follow us over there, sir,” the cop said as another couple cars queued up, sirens wailing.

  “Yeah, why don’t I do that,” Scot said, and we started toward the car at a run.

  “This is weird,” I said when we were halfway there. “What’s up with the delay?”

  “This is a college town.” Scott shrugged. “Lots of things to do. They might have gone to see a movie and wanted to knock over a bank after.”

  “Maybe.” That wasn’t an unreasonable point. Based on their behavior thus far, June and Elliot weren’t exactly megabrains. I stopped just before getting in the car. “I think I should fly over.”

  Scott’s head whipped around. “Are you crazy?” He glanced at the rapidly dwindling number of cops around us. “You think no one’s going to notice that?”

  “If we wait, they could be gone,” I said. “I think the last confrontation scared them. They’re probably grabbing cash and getting the hell out of there in a hurry.” Something about that didn’t sit right with me, either. But …

  … they couldn’t have actually wanted to run into us again, could they?

  No. That
was crazy, bordering on suicide. They’d barely gotten away last time, and I’d seen the depth of panic in June’s eyes as it hit home for her how close she’d gotten to danger that round. Coming back for another willingly?

  That was crazy.

  But … maybe not out of the realm of possibility. She damned sure wasn’t happy with the pursuit, and she didn’t seem too pleased about the cops in general.

  “I’m going,” I said, looking around. There was a corner of the hotel about fifty yards away, perfect for me to nip around and drop my disguise. I could ditch it on the roof or in someone’s backyard as I passed, and be at the bank in less than a minute.

  “Don’t—” Scott said, but it was too late. I was already running.

  This had gone on long enough, and now June and Elliot were acting increasingly unpredictable. It was time to end this, before someone really got hurt.

  32.

  June

  The bank wasn’t locked down, because June didn’t want it to be. The little crowd of customers was huddled over in the corner against the wall, under a big panel window with the blinds shut. They’d be visible from outside, through the main entry, but no one could see them or anything else past the narrow entry of the lobby. All the shades were down, the first thing she and Ell had done when they’d come in, after pronouncing that this was a robbery, and that everybody needed to be cool if they wanted to walk out alive.

  Ell was pacing nervously, behind the counter, getting the tellers to part with the last of the cash. He was getting a pretty good eye for the dye packs and marked bills by this point, and he was quietly instructing the tellers on what not to give him. He was the only one talking in the whole bank; the two tellers were just nodding at his commands, following along meekly, and the customers were mostly quiet, only one of them sobbing profusely.