A sh tload of crazy powe.., p.14
A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers, page 14
“Well, you know, when you get fired, the law says you get to retain all your login details and can jump into your company’s computers any time, so—”
“Shut up, you know what I mean. You’re telling me you couldn’t hack your way inside?”
Reggie sighs. “That’s the problem with being at my skill level. I made it really, really difficult for anybody to penetrate our systems.”
“And you never put in a… a back door?”
Reggie looks away, and for the first time, Annie registers how exhausted she is. When she came into the house, and Annie wrapped her arms around her, the tension in Reggie’s shoulders was unbelievable.
“Never thought I’d have to,” Reggie says, more to herself than to Annie.
Annie is about to reply when Sandra-May cuts in. “I don’t understand any of this,” she says slowly. “Annie, you work in a removals company, si? Why does a removals company need a computer hacker?” Her eyes bore into her daughter. “What are you into?”
Annie’s eyes meet Reggie’s, both of them realising the same thing at the same moment. Sandra-May Cruz is a civilian, and she not only has no idea about Teagan and her abilities, but she has no idea about what her daughter actually does for a living. One of the conditions of their employment is that they never discuss their true work with anybody outside the team. That’s part of the reason they have the front as a removals company, so that they have a legit cover if anybody asks.
“Mom,” Annie says slowly. “It’s not what you th… what you thi… think.”
“Then what is it?” Sandra-May folds her arms. “I have a right to know.”
“It… it’s…”
“Annie, if you say it’s complicated, I am going to…” Sandra-May’s fingers hook into claws. She raises them to her throat, as if about to tear it out, her hands shaking. The fingers clench into fists, which she lowers to her lap.
From outside, the sound of children playing slips through the windows: a group of kids in the park by the Towers, blissfully unaware of what’s happening just across the street.
Reggie’s voice is gentle. “Mrs Cruz, I can promise you, we are not involved in anything to be ashamed of.”
“Then tell me.”
“… I’m afraid we can’t do that.”
Sandra-May shakes her head, then reaches down and grabs hold of her oxygen tank, pushing herself to her feet. “Me tratas así en mi propia casa,” she mutters as she walks away. Rocko springs to his feet and follows, casting a doleful look at Annie. “Mi propia hija.”
“Mom—”
“How many times, Annie?” Sandra-May wheezes. “How many times are you going to lie to me? Every time, you say you’re finished with it, it’s done, no more. And every time, you go right back. I cannot do this again, Annie. I cannot sit here and wait for a phone call to tell me that you are back in prison, or…”
Another of those hooked claw motions, not looking at her daughter. Without another word, Annie’s mother stalks from the room, her dog padding at her heels. A few seconds later, a door slams.
Annie stares after her. She wants to call her mother back, plead with her to stay, yell at her for not trusting her daughter. The number of choices crowds her brain, turning her pain up to eleven. She hunches over, desperate to rub at her burning side, knowing it would only make it worse. Her heart is beating too fast, her pulse thudding in her ears.
“Just breathe.” A note of urgency creeps into Reggie’s voice. “Just breathe, Annie.”
Her mind slips its tracks, flashing up the image of that baseball hanging in the air. Huge, white, rocketing towards her. You can’t aim that fastball. You haven’t practised enough. She’s breathing too fast, way too fast, she’s going to pass out—
“OK then – tell me about baseball,” Reggie says, her wheelchair squeaking on the worn wooden floorboards as she wheels herself over.
It’s such an odd request that it momentarily jerks Annie out of her own mind. “What?”
“You were saying the word baseball just now,” Reggie tells her.
When Annie gapes at her, her frozen shoulders give an approximation of a shrug. “Trust me, I’ve been through enough trauma to know how this works. Get it out. It will help.”
“We don’t have time. Teagan—”
“Two minutes Annie. Take two minutes, and tell me the story. After that, I promise we’ll go after Teagan.”
Annie is about to tell her no. Instead, the words that come out of her mouth are: “I used to play baseball.”
The corners of Reggie’s mouth quirk upwards. “I figured.”
“My dad used to play himself, in one of the minor-league teams. When he was younger.”
“Go on.”
“He used to coach me, you know? I couldn’t have been more than ten, but he was really hard on me. I was a pitcher on a team out in Compton, just Little League stuff, but…” Amazingly, she finds herself smiling. “I was pretty good, I think.
“There was this one game, though, out in Reseda. I was talking to my friends the whole time, and wasn’t playing too well. The, ah, the other team had this hitter that I couldn’t handle. He read all my fastballs like they were moving at ten miles an hour. Home-run city, except for one time he bunted for a base hit. And on the way home…”
She almost stops herself. Almost shuts it down. Speaks anyway.
“My mom and dad were driving me home, and he kept saying how disappointed he was, how I wasn’t ready, that I needed to practise more. And I’m sitting in the back seat, and my mom is telling him to lighten up, because I’m just a kid, you know? And were at the lights and my dad just…”
Annie swallows. “He just hits her. Straight reaches across the car and cold-cocks her. She goes down, and he does it again, and I’m just sitting there staring at him.”
“Oh, Annie.”
“And then the light goes green and he drives off. Like nothing happened.” Is she really telling Reggie this? It’s something she’s never told anyone. She once mentioned to Teagan that her dad was abusive, but she never went into the specifics, and Teagan never asked.
“Did he ever hit you?” Reggie says quietly.
“Uh-uh. Always my mom. Never touched me, only her.”
“He’s not around any more, is he?”
“What? Oh, no. Son of a bitch got himself killed in a car crash, back in ’03.”
“I’d say I’m sorry to hear it, but I don’t think I am. I’ll tell you one thing though.”
“What’s that?”
“You haven’t stuttered or missed a word once since you started talking.”
Annie opens her mouth to protest – then blinks. Reggie is right. And amazingly, the pain in her side has dialled down. There are still electric shocks zipping up and down her arms, and she’s still nauseous and lightheaded, but…
Reggie taps her chair. “That’s one thing I learned early on. You hold that stuff inside, honey, it eats away at you. You feel better?”
More than that, Annie wants to keep talking. She wants to tell Reggie how she started spending less time at home, and more time with her friends. Or people she thought were her friends. She wants to talk about how she went from keeping lookout to moving packages to making sales herself. About how it helped her build her Army, her huge network of contacts across Los Angeles. The contacts that help to make a name for herself in Watts and then Compton and then North Hollywood and East LA and Skid Row. Crips and Bloods, MS 13, Black Dragons, Vatos Locos, Hells Angels.
She wants – needs – Reggie to understand that the reason her mom is angry at her is also the reason she is so damn good at her job. She never wants to go back to prison again, but if she can’t convince her mom that isn’t going to happen, then maybe she can convince Reggie. At the very least, she can do that.
Except: the words won’t come.
“Listen,” Reggie says gently. “Your mom might be right.”
“Oh, come on…”
“No, hear me out. I’m not saying we should involve her, not at all, but… what are we doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
“We need to consider the possibility that Moira is ahead of us on this. She may already be following up what happened in your hospital room. If we do this, we could end up causing more problems than we solve. And if Moira finds out that I’m involved, I might be risking a little more than just a slap on the wrist. China Shop is still top-level classified, in case you’ve forgotten, and she’s revoked all my clearances.”
“Are you sssss-seriously suggesting we back off?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What are you saying, Reggie? Because it sure as hell sounds to me like you’re saying we should sit here and twiddle our g-g-goddamn thumbs.”
Anger flashes in Reggie’s eyes. “I said nothing of the sort.”
“These people? Teagan’s brother and sister? They fucked with us. They ran us r-r-ragged all over LA, almost got us killed a dozen times. Jesus, Reggie, they took you hostage. Do you not remember that? And yet here you are, telling me we should hang back, let the authorities handle it, stay out of everyone’s way. After everything they did to you”
“I am not—”
Reggie’s looks away. When she next speaks, there’s a coldness to her voice that wasn’t there before.
“You know what Teagan’s sister did? Around the time she was chasing you down the LA River? I was still at the office, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, and she called me.”
“She what?”
“I didn’t know it was her at the time. She said she was an agent.”
“Like… like an agent for actors?”
In her spare time, Reggie is a theatre actor, performing in a troupe made up of people with disabilities. Annie has been to her shows once or twice, at a playhouse in Anaheim.
“Somehow, she knew,” Reggie says. “She wanted to take me out of the picture, and she knew exactly how to get in my head. She told me that she thought I might be good for a part in a movie, and I have to admit, she was pretty convincing. I think part of me always knew it was a lie, but I was… distracted. Not performing at my best.”
She looked out the window. “The acting I do? The performances? That’s personal. It’s mine. And she used it to mess with me. One way or another, she’s going to pay.”
Annie finds she can’t look at her friend. It sounds like such a small thing: almost mischievous. Pretending to be an agent, offering Reggie a part, making her think another path was open to her. But it’s not small. The cruelty of it almost takes Annie’s breath away.
“I don’t understand,” she says eventually. “They did all this shit to you – to us. And you don’t want us to go after them?”
“I can’t go after them if Moira throws me in prison for compromising her investigation. Or whisks both of us off to a black site.”
“So what—?”
“We have to do this smart. We dig up as much intel as we can, from here, and we wait. Eventually, someone from the team is going to make contact, and when that happens, you – not me – can tell them what we learned.” She makes an amused huffing sound. “After all, you’re still part of the team, even if I’m not.”
“I don’t like this.”
“Well, I’m not such a big fan of the whole situation either, but—”
“No, I mean…” The clarity she felt from Reggie’s impromptu therapy session is starting to fade. The pain is coming back, the electric shocks, and she has to push past them. “This doesn’t feel right. Tanner would have left word at the hospital for them to call her if I woke up. She would have wanted to talk to me about what happened, right? So why hasn’t she gotten in touch? And even if she didn’t, what about Africa? You’re telling me he wouldn’t have reached out?”
“You’re jumping at shadows,” Reggie says. But she sounds unsure.
“Nobody at the office. Nobody answering their phones. No contact whatsoever. Something is wrong, Reggie. And didn’t you think it was weird that T-T-Teagan didn’t reach out? Try call you or whatever?”
“Last time I saw her, she looked like she was going to pass out. I have never known anybody who needed a hot and a cot as much as that girl. Honestly, I thought she could use a couple of days to get her head together.” She chews the inside of her cheek. “Look: we’re going round in circles. We don’t even know if it really was Teagan who got arrested.”
“Massive car chase through the middle of LA ending in a huge crash and police custody and you’re telling me that it’s not Teagan?”
Reggie smirks. “I guess not.”
Sandra-May has shut herself in her bedroom, but her laptop is on the kitchen counter. Reggie can’t use it with her disability, lacking enough fine control in her hands to work the touchpad and keyboard. Annie drives, working at her friend’s direction to find her way into the servers of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. The city has thousands of cameras installed at intersections, which only trigger if someone runs a red light. Hard to have a car chase without that happening.
It’s not long before they find Teagan’s black Jeep, speeding through an intersection. This time, Annie can’t help smiling.
“Look,” Reggie murmurs. “Her Jeep wasn’t the first car to activate the camera. If you go back…”
With a little prompting, Annie does so. A few seconds before Teagan’s Jeep appears, there’s a Ford pickup truck, blasting straight through the intersection. Annie can’t get a clear view of the occupants – the camera resolution just isn’t that good. But she can pick up the plate: 8JGO957. There’s a massive scratch down the side of the car, a huge slash of scraped-off paint
“Has to be them,” says Reggie. Next, she has Annie jump onto the LAPD systems. But here, they hit a dead end. There is an arrest report for Teagan, and a record of the crash… but 8JGO957 isn’t on their systems.
Annie is tired now, fatigue building behind her eyes and in her numb fingers. In contrast, Reggie sounds more alive than she has since she got to Watts. “This is the LAPD we’re talking about. Maybe they haven’t gotten around to logging it – it might just be on some detective’s notepad still. But it doesn’t matter; we still got ’em.”
“Plate ain’t real.”
“Guaranteed. And chances are they’d have ditched that vehicle by now.”
Annie clenches her fingers. “Which leaves us nowhere.”
“Not necessarily. There are some systems we can access that might—”
“If the cops didn’t arrest them and they got away, they won’t be triggering any more cameras. Who knows where they could be?”
“We don’t know. But if I can look at traffic patterns, maybe cross-reference with their direction and what we know already…”
“Better idea.” Annie sets the laptop down, looks around. “Where the hell is my phone?” Too late, she remembers that it’s still lying in the park where they fought Chloe and Adam.
“I think you lost it. What are you doing?”
“I need to make some calls.”
Ever since she popped awake in that hospital bed, Annie has felt like she’s been playing catch-up. Like events are happening too fast for her to keep track of. It’s starting to piss her off.
The anger is something to hold on to, an ice floe in the dark ocean. And if she’s going to do something about it, she can’t just sit here and be Reggie’s hands. She’ll go insane.
“I’ma find these assholes,” she tells Reggie, snagging her mom’s phone. She pulls up her contact list on the laptop, the familiar names jumping out at her. Old friends. Old enemies. “Time to put the word out. If they’re still in LA, they don’t get to leave.”
TWENTY
Teagan
I admit, I lose track of things after we leave the pool.
Maybe it’s the adrenaline pumping around my system. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m soaking wet and shivering, hair plastered to my scalp. Or maybe it’s the fact that my knee hurts like hell, because Tanner and Burr make us move crouched over in a stupid roadie run position. Either way, I don’t pay much attention to where I’m going.
At some point, we climb a set of dimly lit fire stairs, the concrete beneath our feet cracked and mouldy, the air smelling of dirt and cigarette smoke. We don’t run into any more terrorists, which is good, I guess, but…
Terrorists. Is that what they are? It’s such a loaded term, one that I don’t know if I’m comfortable with. Problem is, I don’t have a better one. I can’t call them hostage-takers, because for all I know, they may have murdered everyone in that ballroom. Criminals doesn’t seem quite forceful enough. Evil-doers? Too comic book. I could probably get away with assholes, but it doesn’t seem right somehow. After all, Tanner is kind of an asshole herself. So is Burr. So am I sometimes.
Assholes or not, Tanner and Burr keep us safe. At some point, they lead us out onto the third floor. As far as I can tell, they picked it out more or less at random. More soft lighting, more frothy vases. Plush carpet underfoot. And it’s quiet, with no screams and gunshots at all. We could be in another world.
“Clear,” Tanner murmurs.
“Hold,” Burr replies, pointing. There’s a T-junction ahead. He sidles up to the corner, gun held low, then sneaks a peek. “No hostiles. One body.”
Behind me, Africa lets out a low, shaky breath. He hasn’t said a word since we left the pool.
Once we’re around the corner, I don’t really want to go near the body, but Tanner and Bur lead us there anyway. And when I get close, I let out a low, shaky breath of my own.
It’s Gerhard.
Jonas Schmidt’s bodyguard.
He’s sitting against the wall, head on his chest. His blood soaks the hotel carpet.
My mouth has gone very dry. “That’s…”
“Yes,” Tanner says quietly.
“He was with Mister Germany,” says Africa quietly.
“Yes,” she says again.
I swallow, which does nothing to relieve my dry mouth. “Does that mean that Jonas…?”
No. I won’t even consider it. He was probably taken back down to the auditorium. Or…
“We need to keep moving,” Burr says.
