Free Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) by Robert J. Crane Page B

groceries, pick up the kids from school, buy a hammer to address the nail pop in the bedroom.
    But Abner wasn’t the sort to deal with minor things, and he certainly wasn’t the kind to wield a hammer on a simple nail.
    “How long do you think it will be?” Nadine stared at her fingernails; they looked atrocious from her steady efforts to bite them down. Usually a manicurist would fix them, but that was another allowance cut.
    “Soon,” Abner said. “You know it’s best if I don’t talk timetable. And it would be better if you didn’t call me, even from a burner phone until—”
    “I know,” she cooed, intending to give him a thrill and nothing more. “I have to look like I’m innocent, like I’m standing here helplessly while the FBI and the SEC tear me apart every way they can.” Her face hardened, and the amusing idea of making Abner twitch with lust across the river evaporated in her anger. Another idea occurred to her. “If you saw what happened, does that mean you saw what Gravity Slut said to me?”
    Abner’s hesitation was obvious, though she wasn’t sure whether it was because he was still pondering her offhand come-on (which she meant nothing by except to tease him) or because he had some inkling of where she might go with this thought. “I saw,” was all he said.
    “I don’t like how she spoke to me,” Nadine said, bringing her thumbnail up to her lips and working it between her teeth, weakening it. She hated thumbnails, they were the worst, the hardest to sever. She usually worked on them for days before finally popping them loose between her teeth. “Like she was better than me.”
    Abner held his silence for long enough that Nadine was about to ask if she was still there when he finally spoke. “Would you … like something done about that?”
    “Can you do it without it looking like I was behind it?” She asked, then listened for the answer, canines clenched on that stubborn thumbnail.
    Abner cleared his throat. “She has accumulated … enemies … in the public eye. She’s a presence in the city—”
    “I don’t just want her public presence hit,” Nadine said, her voice rising uncontrollably. “She’s someone when she’s not this self-righteous ho-bag. She probably even has friends, or people who care about her. Not a boyfriend or husband, because she shows all the signs of needing to get laid, but … probably at least one person that cares about her.” For some reason, that thought burned Nadine.
    “Then you don’t want her Gravity Gal persona destroyed?”
    Nadine took the thumbnail out of her mouth and pushed at it with her index finger. “Of course I want it destroyed. But that’s not all.”
    “Oh?”
    “No,” Nadine said, and a small hint of perverse glee bubbled up at the possibilities. “I wouldn’t have stopped there for any other enemy, and I’ll be damned if I’ll stop there for her. Yes, I want you to destroy Gravity Gal. I want you to make it so she can’t show her masked face anywhere in this city. And then I want you to find out who she is when’s she not wearing that mask—and ruin her damned life.”

15.
Sienna
    I was pretty well starving by the time we defeated New York traffic and reached the precinct. I hadn’t even made it to my hotel yet, but it was after dark and I was ready for some food and, surprisingly, an early night. Flying on a plane takes it out of me, though I suppose not as much as doing it under my own power does.
    “I’ve got the video over here,” Welch said, directing me toward an office in the corner of a bullpen that was pretty sedate. My guess was that the night shift was mostly out on the town, doing their thing, because I only saw a half dozen guys milling around, a couple clustered in a corner with their heads put together around a computer screen. I got a couple looks, but they’d seen me come through before, so it was nothing out of the ordinary for them by now.
    The precinct smelled like a thousand other