Music: Out of the Box 26 (The Girl in the Box Book 36) Read online

  I stared down at the bailiff from the witness box, my right hand raised. “I do.” So help me, God.

  “Ms. Nealon,” said District Attorney Michaela Girard, a petite blond lady with her hair in a tight bun, face in a tight smile, patience on a tight leash—yes, everything about Michaela was tight. “Can you explain, for the jury, what you witnessed the night of September 27th of last year?”

  I glanced over at the jury box, where sixteen New Yorkers stared at me with various poker faces only slightly less friendly than Michaela Girard’s. Girard had coached me for this moment, and now all I had to do was not screw it up. I drew a short breath and let ‘er rip.

  “September 27th, sure. Surprisingly balmy evening. The AC in my apartment wasn’t working, so I was adhering to everything like Spider-Woman.” I paused, considering. “Spider-Lady? Whatever. You know the humidity is bad when I’m wearing a spaghetti strap top and sticking to the leather couch.” Someone coughed in the gallery. “Anyhoo, I was listening to a police scanner, and a call came through for a domestic not too far from my apartment—”

  “Can you clarify for the jury what a ‘domestic’ is?” Girard asked. Still tight. Woman was going to sprain something if she didn’t loosen up soon.

  “Sure,” I said, trying to display none of the uncertainty I was feeling here in my first jury performance in quite some time. “Domestic dispute. It’s what cops call it when people living together get into a squabble. It often involves physical violence.” I mimed a gentle punch in the air. “Usually it’s the dude doing the hitting. Sometimes it’s the woman. Notice I didn’t say ‘lady,’ cuz a real woman uses her mouth, not her fists, to express her displeasure.” I realized what I’d said and flushed a little. “Which I guess means I would not be Spider-Lady, in fact. Shocking, I know. Maybe Spider-Bitch—”

  Girard cleared her throat. “The, uh...domestic, if you please?”

  “Right,” I said. “I go to the address and I find the, ahem, defendant—” I shot a glance at the sandy-haired dude sitting behind the defense table with his lawyer, not deigning to look at me “—straddling his girlfriend, with his knuckles bloody and his lady’s face sporting a series of bruises and cuts. I beat the cops to the scene by, oh, two minutes, probably? And I, uh...separated them...until the NYPD showed up.”

  Michaela Girard’s entire body looked like it was holding enough tension that somebody could have plucked her like a guitar string and made her produce a decent note. “I see.” She wavered for a moment, clearly trying to decide how to approach that revelation. “And from there...?”

  “I assisted the NYPD in taking the defendant into custody,” I said, “and...that was pretty much that.”

  Girard nodded, not looking at me anymore. “And you are certain you saw the defendant, Mr. Ivanovich, hit his girlfriend Ms. Petruchoff?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “He punched her twice that I personally witnessed after I broke the door down. Both times to the face.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Nealon,” Girard said, and retreated to her seat. “No further questions.”

  There was only a moment of silence, and the defense attorney shot to his feet like his hamstrings were spring-loaded. “Ms. Nealon? Ernie Groves, attorney for the defense—”

  “Glad you cleared that up for me,” I said, “because I was really sure you were here representing the State of Ohio.”

  Groves blinked a couple times, brain not quite catching up with his mouth. “Why would the State of Ohio need to be represented in this courtroom?”

  “I just assumed that no one would want to sit next to your sleazeball, woman-beating client,” I said. “My bad, for drawing the wrong conclusion. Huge oopsie on my part.”

  “Ms. Nealon,” Judge Henry Rohrbacher rumbled from the bench. Rohrbacher was a large black man who looked like his appetite for taking shit was really low, as though even flushing a toilet near the man after dropping one would fill his quotient enough to send him over the top. “Stick to the questions.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” I said, trying to appear chastened. A couple guffaws came from the jury.

  “Ms. Nealon,” Groves said, adopting a very earnest, curious look, like a puppy seeking out bacon, “did you kick down the defendant’s door when you arrived at his apartment?”

  “Damned right I did,” I said. “I had probable cause to enter the apartment because I heard a beating going on.”

  Groves tried to talk over me, but I was speaking and reacting meta fast, so I got it all out before he managed to cut me off. It was funny to see the words pass him quicker than he could shut them down, and his face fell a little as he realized I’d actually sped up my speech. Not so much it was indecipherable, but definitely a quicker cadence. “Ah, uh,” he stuttered. “Have you often kicked down doors at crime scenes?”

  “Whenever I hear a beating going on, definitely.”

  Groves looked pained. “Objection, Your Honor. Speculation.”

  “If I may, Your Honor,” I said, before Rohrbacher even got his mouth open to reply, “if it pleases the court, I submit that I may be one of the world’s foremost experts on beatings, having dealt and received many, many more than the average person or law enforcement professional, and at an intensity that few could claim given my powers.”

  Judge Rohrbacher’s eyes flashed as he considered that, then looked at Michaela Girard, who had apparently been about to interject when I’d made my own case. “Overruled,” Rohrbacher decided. “The court recognizes Ms. Nealon is in fact an authority on...violent interactions.”

  “It’s nice to be recognized for your expertise,” I said lightly, causing someone in the jury to snicker. “Especially when I’ve suffered so very much for my craft.”

  “Ahem.” Groves shuffled over to his table and leafed through a notepad, a line of questioning he’d planned to engage apparently cut off at the knees. “Ms. Nealon.” He came back up, looking right at me. “Perhaps you can describe for us the time you burned a man to death.”

  Michaela Girard looked like someone had smacked her with an aluminum bat. Even the jury was silent.

  I pursed my lips, pretending to think about it. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

  Groves got a gleam in his eye. “Why, Ms. Nealon...are you saying you’ve burned more than one man to death?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “There was the guy who was going to blow up an LA neighborhood, killing all its inhabitants. There were several mercenaries who had guns pointed at me—”

  Once again my rocket-mouth had made a fool of Groves, spitting out all that before he had a chance to pick and choose what he wanted to play with. “Wait—no—the—no—ah—”

  “Or that one mercenary who—”

  “Objection, Your Honor!” Groves sounded like he was about to cry. “She’s talking too fast!”

  “No, you’re talking too slow, Groves,” I shot back before Rohrbacher could even draw the breath to answer. “I mean, really. Shouldn’t you have at least done the research on this burning thing so you knew which one you wanted to ask about? Sloppy.”

  “Sustained,” Rohrbacher said, giving me plenty of side-eye. Which I acknowledged, barely, out of the corner of my own. “Ms. Nealon, you are talking awfully fast.”

  “There’s just so much ground to cover,” I said, trying to sound innocent. “I like to be efficient. Also, I miss flying, so I try to replicate the sensation verbally from time to time. It’s fun. Nice breeze.”

  Groves just stared at me, and a little hint of frustration vanished as he pulled out what I’m sure he thought was a winning smile. “How many people have you murdered, Ms. Nealon?”

  I blinked, thinking it over. “None.”

  Groves’s eyes popped wide. “None?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Perhaps you’d care to explain your accounting on that reply,” Judge Rohrbacher said, leaning toward me from the bench. “Because I don’t think I believe ‘none.’”

  “Pretty simple accounting,”
I said. “He said ‘murdered.’ ‘Murder’ implies innocence of the victim. I have never killed an innocent person. The only people I’ve ever employed lethal force on are people that have in fact employed it themselves or were threatening to do so. Ergo, no murder.” I shrugged.

  Groves was trying to reply fast, but he just couldn’t keep up. “Your Honor, this is not a good faith reply—”

  “Ms. Nealon.” Judge Rohrbacher wasn’t even waiting for Groves to object. “Please answer the question without the semantic games.”

  Groves stopped mid-sentence and smiled, looking right at me. It was a look I was well familiar with by now; the look of a hawk about to swoop on a mouse. If self-satisfaction was electric energy, the man could have powered the whole of Manhattan for a couple years. Too bad he was mostly gas-powered instead of wind.

  “I...” I tried to formulate a reply but failed. My brain locked, and I worked on my answer. There wasn’t going to be a good one, not here, not with this question. Mostly because I didn’t actually know how many people I’d killed over the years. “Uhm...I...ahhh...” And so I turned into a stammering mess, looking like I was doing the arithmetic right there. Which I was not, because there was no way for me to calculate this answer on the spot.

  I looked at Judge Rohrbacher. There was not an inch of give in the man’s eyes. I looked at Girard. Her gaze was on a notepad in her lap, probably trying to figure out the next move after this humbling bomb of a question blew up her key witness.

  Groves was all triumph. Seriously, if I could have punched him right then, my uncountable murder number would definitely have gone up by one. Maybe two, because I wanted to hit him so hard his client—the nearest person to him and also a scumbag—would die from the concussive force of the impact.

  Which brought my gaze around to Mr. Ivanovich. Who did not look back at me because, well...

  When I’d found him battering his girlfriend, I’d hit him twice. Enough to stop him, I’d told the NYPD officers at the scene. Which was true.

  It was also hard enough that I’d blinded him permanently from the impact of my fist to his skull. Oh, he wasn’t brain damaged, exactly; he could still speak and think just as he had before. But I’d hit him so hard the fluid concussion in his brain had torn his optic nerves. And he’d been lucky I hadn’t done worse, because seeing the state of his girlfriend had put me in an immediate killing mood.

  “Uhh...” I said. “Uhhh.” There was no answer to this.

  No way out.

  Except...

  Footsteps in the hall outside the courtroom sounded through the quiet of the silent jury, attorneys, judge, court reporter and a pathetic shell of a defendant. I could even hear them over the steady rhythm of my own guilty heart.

  The doors burst open and a winded cop in NYPD blues was standing there, radio mic in hand, breathless, but managing to cough a few words out as he looked right at me in an utter panic.

  “Hostage situation. Midtown. Biridelli Theater.” He pointed out the door.

  The silence of the courtroom hung for just another moment. “Sorry,” I said, speaking up before anyone else could. “Call of duty.”

  “Ms. Nealon—” Judge Rohrbacher straightened.

  But I’d already vaulted out of the witness box and was sprinting toward the open door, hurdling over the railing without waiting for the judge’s reply. I was out the door in a hot second as the courtroom behind me dissolved into a wash of chaos at my exit.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Reed

  Eden Prairie, Minnesota

  “Just bottom line it for me,” I said, rubbing my temples. I sat at my desk, Miranda Estevez across from me and another, almost as familiar face staring back from next to her.

  “You’re still deeply broke,” Ariadne Fraser said, her red hair catching the room’s dim fluorescent light and magnifying it somehow. She didn’t show any grey, and her only wrinkles were hints of crow’s feet around her eyes. She slid the packet of papers in her hands around and slapped them onto the desk in front of me. “More broke than ever, in fact.”

  I stared at the indecipherable numbers printed on the spreadsheet she’d just slapped on the desk blotter. There were a lot of zeroes in there, ones with no numeral in front of them. I couldn’t help it; I broke out in an impish smile. “Probably doesn’t help that I had to hire you as a consultant just to tell me that, does it?”

  She shook her head, no hint of amusement in her bearing. “Miranda could have told you for cheaper.”

  “Not for much longer, I can’t,” Miranda said, shaking her head. “In-house counsel is the next cut you’re making.”

  “Then who’s going to tell me which laws I can freely break and how much destruction and mayhem I can cause before trouble comes my way?” I asked, trying to hide that sinking feeling in my guts by making jokes. Of course, I often made jokes when I didn’t have that sinking feeling, but here they seemed to take on a particular poignancy, in much the same way my ship was apparently taking on water.

  “I suggest you consult an attorney on an as-needed basis,” Ariadne said. “Looking at these numbers, there’s a considerable amount of bloat still weighing you down. I mean, your office expense seems ridiculously high for what you’re getting...”

  I shrugged. “Rent gets higher when they find out you’ve blown up your last, uh...several...locations. And that insurance doesn’t necessarily cover the damages.”

  “Be that as it may,” Ariadne said, “personnel is your biggest expense. Payroll, I mean. If you want to remain afloat—”

  “Well, I don’t want to sink.”

  “We need to cut some more people,” Miranda said, and boy, did that take the air out of the room. Not literally, because that was something I did, but...close. “Starting with me.”

  “Miranda...” I said, slumping my shoulders. “I don’t want to—”

  “Forget it,” she said, making a cutting gesture at shoulder-level. “I’ll be fine, okay? I came from a high-priced firm, only took this job because your sister needed someone she could trust to handle the start-up phase until you came on board.” She smiled thinly. “Well, you’re on board now. And you really don’t need me all that much, at least on an ongoing basis. I’ll head back to a law firm that’ll pay me twice as much, and you can call me if you need something, okay?” Her expression darkened. “As long as it’s not an everyday thing.”

  “What if we got a ton of business tomorrow?” I asked, trying to seize a thin hope. “I mean, these things always seem to come in gluts—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Miranda said, shaking her head. “The work you do, it takes sixty days before most of your clientele—the government agencies, state and local—pay out. You’re already this far behind—” Ariadne obligingly leaned forward, flipped to a page and showed me a number that made me feel a little sicker “—and even if you got five jobs today—”

  “I won’t be able to make payroll this month,” I said, cold, hard, brutal truth kicking its way through at last. “Or next.”

  “You got it,” Ariadne said, and a tight smile flashed on her lips, wan and pitying. “You’d struggle to survive this year even if you manage to pick up five jobs a month between now and December.”

  “Which is a near-impossible pace lately, especially given how few people I’m going to be left with,” I said, mouth drying out. “Damn.” I let my hand drop to my side and stared out into the bullpen. “We’re cooked.”

  “It’s an unenviable position,” Miranda said.

  “Which is why you’re bailing out?” I asked, a little coy.

  She gave me a faint smile. “These are the perils of being the boss. You get all the glory when things go right and you also get the kick to the teeth when things go wrong.”

  I let out a low, whistling sigh. “Well, Miranda...thanks for—”

  “You haven’t seen the last of me, Reed,” she said, rising. “I’ll be back to help over the next couple weeks as you wind things down. I have my feelers out on a job back in
Houston, so I won’t be here forever, but...” She glanced down at the sheet in front of me. “Angel is still on there. She’ll stay at half pay. She’s right on the borderline of what Ariadne and I deemed ‘essential’ personnel.” Her lips became a thin line. “I’ve hinted to her what’s going on, because I suck at keeping secrets from her. I mean, she’s basically like a sister to me, so...”

  “I’ll keep her if she’s okay working for that,” I said, looking at the line next to her name.

  “It’s still more than she’d make at just about any other job short of running a massively successful restaurant,” Miranda said. “And she likes the work.”

  I nodded slowly. “Well...okay then.”

  “Okay then,” Miranda said, and went for the door to my office. “See you tomorrow.” And she was gone.

  I stared at the sheaf of papers on my desk, deciding whether I wanted to flip any farther in the stack. “These cuts, Ariadne, they’re...” I looked up at the older lady in front of me. “Scott and Kat are already working for free. Eilish and Olivia aren’t doing much better. How am I supposed to break it to Augustus and Jamal—”

  Ariadne nodded. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But this is why you hired me.”

  “Yeah,” I said, pushing at my hairline, as though massaging my scalp would make this headache—or this catastrophe—go away. “And it wasn’t to nod and tell me I had no money problems.”

  “Good,” she said, “because you have a heaping pile of money problems.” She glanced toward the door. The offices were pretty quiet; Augustus and Jamal were home in Atlanta, Eilish had gone home for the night. Kat was in LA. The only people I could see out in the bullpen were Angel, and Olivia Brackett. “I know this is probably disappointing for you—”

  “Yeah,” I said, my thoughts stirred back to the people who worked for me. Scott Byerly popped his head up in the distance, and I heard him say something that prompted a round of laughter from those in the bullpen, but hell if I could hear it over the throbbing in my skull. “I mean, cutting Casey is fine. We don’t really need a receptionist. But J.J.? Abby?” I gave her a pained look. “J.J.’s been with us forever. You know that, Ariadne.”