They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy Page 11

  The staircase by the kitchen went up to infinite and looking at it made me dizzy. I went up it on all fours like a drunk cat and almost dropped my pistol down the stairs three times. I spent fifteen fucking minutes going into five bedrooms until it was pretty damn clear Rosemary didn't sleep up there. I should have figured that out since the second floor didn't have garbage everywhere.

  The staircase got longer as I crawled back down it, and the ceiling tried to crush me, but I said, "Fuck you, ceiling," and pushed on.

  Ten minutes of commando creeping on my stomach and cursing Will put me at the master bedroom. Something smelled weird, but I tasted the carpet, and it wasn't that. It wasn't the doorframe, either.

  The white door to the bedroom had been left open about six inches, and I honestly thought I would be able to squeeze myself through it like that. Fucking acid. It didn't work, but I didn't make any noise when I accidentally bumped the door open, either.

  Red numbers glowed in the dark and zoomed toward my eyes and almost got shot. It was the clock beside Rosemary's huge sleigh bed, and it said 4:37. Jesus, what? I suddenly got scared it was four in the afternoon and she was faking being asleep to psyche me out. But it was dark outside. But what if she was mind-controlling me the whole time? Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

  Then I saw the alarm dot was 'on' on the clock. Jesus. Fucking. Christ. She was gonna wake up any second. Holy shit, I could feel it. And I just knew her closet had to be full of every type of gun there was, and she would make me kill myself with one of them. Or Run ALC was in the closet; that was where Tracey had put him. Shit, Rosemary was gonna kill me.

  I scrambled up to my feet and drew my purchase from the gun store in Wheeling: a 50,000 volt stun gun. At the side of the bed I whipped a corner of the covers back and dry stunned the ever-loving shit out of Rosemary. Right in her tribal-tattooed neck.

  She twitched, fell out of bed, her eyes rolling back for a second, then she was unconscious. I taped her up with an entire roll of duct tape and propped her against the wall beside the bathroom door. She had on long sleeve flannel pajamas, striped fluffy socks, some librarian-looking glasses she had fallen asleep wearing and a thick night guard in her mouth. Same disappointing outfit as every other good looking chick in the middle of the night.

  "Don't try anything with me," I told her when she came back around and I was feeling the material of her pajama sleeve. The word 'me' tasted weird. The ski mask itched because I thought about it. "I will fucking kill the fuck out of you if you try anything with me. In--with my brain. Mental shit, I'm not fucking kidding."

  "Okay," she nodded, testing the strength of the tape wound around her. "What do you want?"

  "I want to know where Tracey is. Starting right now, every minute you hold out, you get a finger--shot off." I caught myself; I had almost said burned off and blew the whole damn thing. Shit, was my ski mask still on? It started itching again, so it was.

  "Tracey?" Rosemary asked.

  "Tracey Miller. Don't fuck with me, Rosie."

  She nodded. "Okay, I'm sorry. Yeah, I know Tracey, but I don't know where she is right now. She's a teleporter."

  "And you're a remote sensor. Find her."

  "Tracey takes psy-blockers every day to block being found. Do you know what those are?"

  Shit! The clock beside the bed had gone to the next minute. I was supposed to blow one of her fingers off. The gun was about to fire on her. Shit. Fuck, I had overdone it. Rosemary was talking, but hell if I could understand her while her face melted. Shit.

  "Fucking Will!" I blurted out.

  "Don, are you all right?"

  "What?"

  "Are you okay?"

  I put a foot to Rosemary's shoulder to hold her against the wall and pressed the barrel of my forty-four to her right thigh.

  "I told you to stay out of my fucking head."

  Her eyes got bright, her face bent into a weird shape. Goddammit, Will, and your fucking acid.

  The weird face spoke. "I can't read your mind, okay? I think you took psy-blockers, too, right? I didn't read your mind, I swear. You've got a gun on me. I'm not going to do anything that might make you use it, okay? I want to help you."

  "How do you know me I am?" I asked the twisting face.

  "I recognized your voice, and you just said your friend's name. I get that you want to find Tracey, and I can help you do that, no problem. But if you pull that trigger, if you pull it, I'm not going to be able to help you."

  I pulled the gun away from her and took the hot mask off my face. It felt good to get it off. Fuck it, if I didn't have to hide who I was, I could get this shit done easier.

  Enough heat to make her amber skin flush went out from me. I could see it in shades of waving red.

  "Don, you don't need to do that," she was saying forcefully when I could hear her again.

  "What?"

  "Turn the heat off. Focus on me, okay? You're pretty messed up right now, right? What have you taken?"

  "Nothing, don't worry about it. Where's Tracey?" Why hadn't she answered me yet?

  "I don't know, Don. She makes it to where nobody can track her down. But let me go, and I can help you out. You have to undo me first."

  I leaned into the misshapen face with sunken, skull eyes in slow motion. It wobbled in front of me. "I don't have to do jack shit."

  "You're right. You don't. But a guy like you likes to do the smart thing, right?"

  "Fuck you. Like you know me."

  "You snuck up on a mind-reader, Don. That's pretty ballsy. And you got me. Look at me. You totally got me. But you have to keep on doing the smart thing, right?"

  I turned the heat up and set the carpet on fire about a foot from her. "The smart thing is to tell me what I want to know," I said. "This is a really nice house. It'll look even better on fire. And all this fucking garbage around will burn in an instant . . . wait. Wait, hang the fuck on. Did you say I was on psy-blockers?"

  "Yes. I can tell because I can't read you."

  "Bullshit."

  "No, I really can't. Are you saying you're not on them?"

  My head was starting to hurt with all this thinking. "I didn't take any psy-blockers," I told her in visible words.

  Her big, dark eyes searched mine. "Then why can't I read you?"

  I took a deep breath. I didn't want to shoot her.

  "Then don't," she said.

  Shit, I was talking out loud.

  "Rosie, Tell me how I can find Tracey, or I'll shoot you. You're turning into a fucking insect now, and I'm not liking it."

  Her head started twitching like a bug. "Am I?" she said with a bug mouth.

  "Holy shit, you look like a bug."

  Her head cocked to the side. "Untape me," the praying mantis said. "I can help you if you untape me."

  I leaned in close to her. "You look like a bug."

  "It's one of my powers," she whispered. "I'm about to lay my eggs and they're going to go everywhere."

  I looked at the floor and stepped back. "Oh, shit," fell out of my mouth. "What?"

  Just shoot her, someone said.

  My head went left. "What?"

  "Don, are you still with me?" Rosemary asked from the floor.

  I spun around and laced a ring of fire neck-height through the room. "Who's here, Rosie, you fucking bitch?"

  "Nobody's here, Don"

  You should shoot herrrrrr.

  "Fuck, shut up!" I roared, pulling drawers out of a dresser and throwing them across the room trying to hit the invisible thing, kicking clothes and whatever came out as hard as I could. I flipped the dresser over, and the bed caught fire, and I couldn't look away from the flames. The fire went up the wall. I could see people dancing in it. It had a woman's face in the middle of it, no shit, with fire for hair.

  A pair of duct-taped feet kicked my calf and pulled me back from it.

  "Put the fire out!" Rosemary yelled.

  I molded the flames in the room, brought them all together and squished the fire down to a
ball that went out.

  Kill her.

  "Get out of my head, Rosie."

  "Don," there was a strain of impatience in her voice, "I am not in your head. Okay? I can't control minds, all right? I can't do that. And I can't read you at all, in any way. Your mind is like it's not there to me. And I'm not calling you stupid or anything--"

  She kept talking but I couldn't hear it anymore. The walls were moving in on me, bulging and stretching to come at me. The floor moved around my feet. She was going to make me insane. Fuck, I had to leave. She was going to make me crazy and then kill me or sell me to Tracey, who would kill me. This was a stupid goddamn idea.

  I watched Rosemary, who still kept talking, but her face had gone black and her eyes were vibrating. She looked like a gray mummy. And the walls were still moving. And I suddenly felt very fucking cold.

  I got the fuck out of there and ran back to my truck, scared that Run ALC was running after me and would catch me.

  When I finally came down from it all and woke up in the bags of Will's crap in the back of my truck, the sun was up.

  I cracked a beer and sucked it down. Another one followed. I needed to leave. But after checking groggily around the truck, I realized I had left my fucking gun in the house. And the stun gun.

  I looked in the rearview mirror and leaned in close to it. "You're a fucking stupid-ass."

  Everything was bright as fuck as I hiked back to Rosemary's house. She shouldn't have been able to get out of the duct tape unless she was a telekinetic mover and I didn't know it, and if that was the case I would probably be dead before I made it up the driveway anyway. I needed my shit back and I needed Tracey. Maybe if I came at her in a calm way she would give me something.

  I stepped back through the hole in the back door. The house gave off a chill like the air conditioner had been running non-stop all night. Puddles of water were everywhere on the floor. I picked up my forty-four in the kitchen. The stun gun was on the floor nearby. With my pistol leveled and the stunner in my pocket, I approached the bedroom door across the soggy, squishing carpet.

  Whipping around into the doorway, gun first, I found Rosemary. She still lied on the floor, taped up just as I had left her, shivering. Water dripped from heavy icicles on the ceiling. The bed was a frozen block. Patches of frost covered the walls.

  Rosemary looked like she expected me. "At least move me to another room, please," she said.

  "What the fuck happened?" I asked her. "You do ice?"

  "No, you did it."

  "What? The fuck do you mean I did it?"

  "You did it." She breathed steaming, hard breaths that I could see in the cold. "It happened when you ran out of here last night. It's freezing in this room, can you cut me loose and bring me in the kitchen or something?"

  I kept the gun on her and walked smoothly across the wet carpet. "Are you fucking with my head?"

  "Oh my God," she said, a full body shiver shaking her. "Don, I can't read your mind! You're blocked."

  I stepped on what looked like a black billfold in the scattered underwear from the dresser I had gone apeshit on. I flipped it open with my foot.

  "Don't worry about that," Rosemary said.

  Inside the billfold, an icy SCEIA Agent badge and ID with the name 'Special Agent Rosemary Jaspers' and her picture stared back at me.

  "Yeah," she nodded. "Okay, yeah, that's real. And at three this afternoon, everything the security cameras all over my house saw this morning is going to be sent to SCEIA Headquarters in DC."

  I looked at her down the barrel of my gun. There wasn't a trace of bullshit in her eyes. She was a fucking Skee-Ay like Red.

  I shoved the pistol back in my pants. "Dammit, Rosie. I kinda liked you."

  Chapter 13

  Duty-Bound

  I dragged Rosemary into the kitchen by her feet and left her on the cold tile while I stepped out through the hole in the door for a smoke. Any minute, I expected helicopters to appear or somebody with a badge to fly out of the sky and hit me at Mach Two.

  The cigarette ignited with a pissed-off flare of fire, and I inhaled hard, punishing my tortured lungs. An old brown and black tomcat prowled the woods out behind the house. I threw a stick at it that went wide. The cat acted like I wasn't worth noticing.

  I had to change gears and start thinking about the best way to cover my ass again. Fuck the plan I'd had, now it was about spending minimum amount of time behind bars. In a few hours, security feed of me attacking a Federal Officer would be sent to the last place in the world I wanted to be known at. Minutes after that, Special Agents Red, DeltaBlue and probably Drashelle Parks or John Darcy would swarm the place and be right up my ass. And since I had used powers on a Federal Agent, Smythe's Law would be in effect, meaning they could beat my ass to a pulp unannounced since I could trigger a 'potentially catastrophic event.' Afterward they would get a review of the incident while I learned to eat solid food again.

  I chain-smoked another cigarette. The cat looked at me, sniffed the air in my direction and disappeared into the woods.

  "Well, fuck you, too, cat," I said in a slow huff of smoke.

  Near the tree line, looking way the fuck out of place from the cemetery of dead plants the rest of Rosemary's shit hole backyard was, stood a clean shed on a fresh-poured foundation. A brand new chain and lock hung around the door handles. I took a walk over and checked it out through the little window.

  "Bullshit," I muttered, almost letting my cigarette fall out of my mouth.

  I melted the chain and stepped inside. A high-polished red, white and blue motorcycle decked out with a waving American flag on the gas tank was parked in the middle of the shed. The thing was a monster of a chopper. On the back wall behind it was a workbench stacked with tools and new bottles of engine fluids, all of them still sealed. An empty pegboard had been propped against the workbench until it could be mounted. Three rolling red tool cabinets faced different directions against another wall, wrapped in plastic and unopened.

  And I had an ugly fucking feeling that I recognized that bike.

  I slammed the shed doors, threw my cig into the woods at that goddamn tomcat, took another look in the sky for helicopters and headed back into the house.

  As soon as I walked through the hole, Rosemary started her shit up. "Don, have a seat. We can figure all this out together."

  "Shut it. Not right now."

  "You're detaining a federal officer against her will."

  I stopped in the kitchen long enough to say, "You're already gonna charge me with that and a bunch of other shit I didn't do, so a few more minutes ain't gonna make any difference."

  She had a blue and white laptop in the living room on the coffee table. I Google'd up 'American Flag Chopper' and found what I was looking for right at the top of the first page.

  The custom bike was Agent Red's. I'd seen the damn episode of the TV show where they built it. He was parking his bike in Rosemary's shed; fucking poetry if I had ever heard it. I wondered how much time the judge would add for keying the gas tank. I kept that option open and headed back into Rosie's wet, thawing bedroom.

  I pried open the closet doors that were blocked by piles of clothes. Hanging beside the few things Rosemary had actually gotten on to hangers were men's clothes: a pair of jeans, a couple of button-up shirts, a beat-up Florida State Seminoles jersey, two pairs of fatigues, and the same kind of green fucking flight suit Agent Red wore. And next to that was what had to be his jacket: a worn-out brown leather piece of shit with a big American flag on the back and the Marine Corps logo sewn onto the right shoulder.

  Yeah. He was definitely banging her. It was a miracle she could still walk.

  I walked back into the kitchen wearing Red's leather jacket and tossed her badge on the floor in front of her. "Here you go. You probably want that right now."

  I pulled a chair from the breakfast table in the corner up to about six feet from her and left my gun on the table in reach next to a white notepad full of gibberish writing.
"So what's it like to fuck an American hero, Rosie? This is Red's jacket, right? That's his bike parked outside. You've got his stuff in your closet. I guess that means you two set us up in that bunker. You and him, working together, you lying your ass off to get us to do what you needed us to do for the bust, him waiting to come in and kick the shit out of us once we'd grabbed the evidence."

  "Don," she said slowly, "Let me go. I'll answer your questions the best I can, I swear. You don't need me like this. I'd be able to help you a lot more if you untied me and let me make some calls."

  "Uh huh. You gonna charge me with tying you up and breaking in here?"

  "I'm just an agent, I can't control what any prosecu--"

  I cut her off. "Yeah, then no, we're not gonna be doing that right now. And you are an agent and didn't identify yourself as one to me last night. You fucked up, Officer. A good lawyer'll get me off."

  Rosemary nodded. "Yeah, you're right. I didn't identify myself. You got me there. But you know I'm one now, so everything you do from here on out is a Felony. Red and I did not set you up in North Dakota. Tracey came to me with that job, and Red happened to be flying by. I didn't know--"

  "I'm gonna stop you right there because my bullshit tolerance is way low right now. Where is this fucking computer thing with the security camera footage of your house? There should be like a server or something that gets it all together to send."

  She exhaled heavily. "It's not here, obviously. It's off-site in a relay station in NSA headquarters."

  I took a slow drag on my cigarette. "What'd I say about my bullshit tolerance?"

  Rosemary shrugged her shoulders as much as the tape would let her. "Fine. Don't believe me. They're right there over at Fort Meade, practically around the corner. You could walk there they're so close."

  "If you say so. What sends them the camera feed? Matter of fact, where are all these goddamn cameras 'cause I sure as shit don't see any."