If I hurried…I figured I could make that in about an hour.
My heart sinking—at the cold, at what I was having to do to survive, at the general unfairness of the world presently—I steadied myself and started my long swim south.
16.
Reed
Odessa, Texas was more or less what you’d expect when you think of Texas. I hated to say it, but most of the TV shows meant to depict Texas had been shot in California at one point in time, because saguaro sagebrush country looked more or less the same to the untrained eye. It was long stretches of what I’d call desert ground—kind of a sandy tan, with most of the greenery more of a deep brown, they were the main sign of life around here.
Other than, y’know, the town.
Odessa itself wasn’t too big. Wikipedia had estimates of a population of 160,000 or so. If they had a sign declaring that number, I’d probably missed it while playing on my phone. The Odessa PD had sent a driver for us at Midland Airport, and Angel and I had made our way here in the back of one of their cars. Well, I’d been in the back. Angel had been up front, twitching like she’d wanted to be in the driver’s seat until I had zoned out and started scrolling the internet.
Looking for news on my sister, of course.
There was no actual news, just a metric ton of analysis. It wasn’t like they’d caught her between my flight and my arrival. Police Scotland weren’t even saying anything, just keeping tight-lipped about whether they’d encountered her at all. Tips were pouring in, they said, and having been involved with the law enforcement side of those kinds of manhunts, I was reasonably sure they weren’t lying.
The problem with that kind of tip was that you got a lot of static. It seemed like everyone who had encountered a short, dark-haired girl in Scotland this last week would probably be calling, and the investigators would have to sort through which of them were credible leads, and which were fanciful farces. Usually that was made somewhat easier by tagging your target’s location at a given time and drawing concentric circles outward from that locale based on the time of travel it took to move from one place to another. That allowed you to eliminate a lot of the noise, because if they were in, say, Dallas at 10a.m. today on a Walmart security camera, and you got a tip saying they were in Honolulu at a pizza place with kids and a family at noon, you could pretty much write it off as bullshit if they were your average fugitive, because your average fugitive does not dare try and pass through TSA security checkpoints and the like while wanted. They’re restricted to ground travel, and Honolulu ain’t in the ground travel path from Dallas within two hours. Or ever, until they get around to building a bridge between LA and Hawaii.
What Police Scotland was bound to discover—if they hadn’t already—was that such a weeding out was not really possible with Sienna. She could fly at supersonic speeds, which meant if they got a tip that she’d shown up in, say, Vienna, Austria an hour after they’d caught her on security camera footage in Harrods in London, that was totally possible. Everything was possible, which meant you couldn’t toss away these probably useless tips out of hand.
I would have felt sorry for them, but I really, really wanted them to fail.
The cop car bumped to a stop, mid-morning sun blazing down above us. We should have been here hours earlier, but the flight from Eden Prairie had seemed to take forever, and the Midland airport seemed to be as far from the part of Odessa where this hostage drama was unfolding as possible. It might not have been, but with the Texas heat beating on us even inside the air-conditioned car, it sure felt like it.
“We’re here,” Angel announced, as though I were still in my electronically induced coma. She turned her head around, leaning an arm on the back of the seat to look back at me in my caged seating area.
I put my phone away slowly, calmly. No point in acting like I hadn’t done this a hundred times before. “Okay,” I said, and nodded toward the door. “Let me out.”
She broke into a half smile. “Time to free the beast.” And she got out of the passenger side to let me out.
The deputy who’d driven us looked at me with an air of uncertainty. I hadn’t said much on the trip, and he looked like maybe that had worked his nerves over, riding with two quiet metas for an hour in his car. “Just a figure of speech,” I said, trying to put him at ease. It did not seem to relax him.
Angel opened the door, and I said, “Thanks, Jeeves,” as I got out. She favored me with a scowl—it didn’t take much to get Angel to scowl; she was like the opposite end of her cousin, Miranda, being that Miranda—although not a smiler—didn’t scowl. Both of them seemed to take a lot of effort to move from their natural emotional state. Miranda’s was a kind of stoicism.
Angel’s…was most definitely not. Her natural state was irritation, and she let it show often. She didn’t shut the door for me, instead leaving it hanging wide, already walking away.
I got it for her, because I’m cool like that.
That done, I followed her toward the nearby officer in charge. Angel was wearing one of those modern all-business kind of lady suits, with the grey skirt, blouse beneath for a splash of color, and a jacket. I was clad similarly, but the male version of it—dress shirt and suit, but all black and white because the contrast looked good on me (Isabella said so). Angel was wearing heels, not flats, which would have been a mistake for most people and most metas in our line of work, but…
She could handle it. It’s what she did.
The man in charge was evident by the fact that he was standing in the middle of the scene. He tipped his hat to Angel as she approached, then nodded at me, talking in a broad Texas accent as we came closer. “Ma’am,” he said, taking a lot more deference to Angel. He just met my gaze with a fair amount of the reserve you tend to encounter in law enforcement when your superior has called in some outsider to come paw up your turf. “Reckon you heard we had a problem.”
“Lay it out for us,” I said, and he beckoned us over to where a bunch of house plans were sitting weighted on an old Crown Vic-style police cruiser hood. I made my way to the other side so I could take a gander without anyone else standing in my personal bubble.
“Got a 911 call in the late hours of last night,” he said, putting his hands on the hood and then looking up at us, all seriousness. “Lady’s voice. She was ordering a pizza.”
“I remember seeing that on one of those domestic violence PSAs,” I said. “Not a bad idea.”
The sheriff seemed to think otherwise. “When my men showed up, we tried to take it easy, but this, uh…well, you know—”
“Metahuman,” Angel said stiffly. Her arms were already folded in front of her.
“A-yep,” the lawman drawled. “He opens the door and starts firing at my boys—well, and girls,” he said in a seeming concession to Angel, who did not look amused. “Blows up a squaddy—” he nodded at the ruin of a new police Explorer on the curb, still smoking “—and my people go running for safer cover. This chickenshit hostage-taking son of a bitch, he ducks back inside, and stays in there with the curtains drawn. We hear some screaming, try and establish contact via the phone—” all this sounded like standard operating procedure “—and he informs us not to come in, not to make a move, but to charter him a private plane so he can get away clean. And that’s it. No sound inside since, no demand for it on a timeframe, just…that.” The lawman finished, and straightened up, crossing his arms in front of him. Now we had three people standing, one at each point of the hood, not one of us apparently wanting to be here, and all of us with our walls up.