Grounded (Out of the Box Book 4) Read Online Free Page B

“Promises, Maurice. You believe me?” He paused. “Damn right you do.” He pulled the phone away from his ear, pressed the red button and tossed it back to his desk in a spin and looked right at me. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
    “More like investigated, if you’re dropping flaming deuces on the porch of your CI’s,” I said.
    “CI?” He snorted. “Maurice is my brother-in-law. Idiot said he could get me tickets for the Falcons on the fifty yard line, lower deck, against the Titans this fall.” He stared straight at me. “Yeah. Now imagine how my conversations with snitches play out.”
    “So much worse,” I said, and extended my hand. “Sienna Nealon.”
    He looked at the hand with smoky eyes. “I know who you are.”
    “That why you’re not sure you want to take the hand?” I started to pull it back slowly.
    “Oh, no, I hear I could live a few seconds after shaking your hand,” Calderon said, “I’m just so honored to be in the presence of American royalty, that’s all. Just shocked. Especially since a year ago your office didn’t give me the time of day, and now—now, miraculously! Here you are, like two hours after I sent your people the file.” He folded his arms, made a little hrm noise.
    I didn’t get too many of these jurisdictional squabbles. Most of the time, if they’d seen what metas could do, rank-and-file cops were relatively happy to get these cases off their desks. “You want me to leave?” I stuck my thumb over my shoulder at the door. I wasn’t trying to sound nasty, but I hadn’t had the best morning. I extended the rolled-up file back to him like an offering.
    “My case still not good enough for you?” He looked at the file like it contained what he’d threatened to leave on Maurice’s porch. “I see how it is. You get a call from London, England, you’re there in about a minute, tea with the queen and all that—”
    “I did not have tea with the queen—”
    “—but a working cop in Atlanta’s inner city calls up with a story about killing going on that’s right up your alley, you just pass it on by.” He nodded his head, had his lips pursed. Attitude. He was giving me attitude. “Like I said, I see how it is.”
    I felt my eye twitch a little at the corner. “Do you, now?”
    “Clear as day.”
    “Clear as out Maurice’s back door at midnight once you’ve unscrewed the lightbulb, more like.”
    “Maurice is a gastroenterologist,” Calderon said. “Lives in the suburbs. That brother has a pool with ambient lighting all the way around. Looks like something out of the Caribbean. He can see just fine.” He blew air out of the corner of his mouth and put his hands on his hips. “Well, you gonna sit down or what?”
    He hadn’t offered me a chair, but since I got the feeling that Calderon was a prickly personality—something I had maybe a little experience with—I knew how to deal with it. “Sure,” I said and then sat down on the air, using Gavrikov’s power to eliminate the downward force of gravity on me. I put my legs up like I was in a recliner and just sat there in mid-air, staring back at Calderon, whose eyebrow had risen involuntarily. “You want to talk about the case?” I asked, totally nonchalant.
    I watched his lips purse, warring with each other until a smile won out. “Damn, girl, you can’t let anyone else win a round, can you?”
    I smiled back. “Nope. Case?”
    He made that hrm noise again and rolled his desk chair under him to sit down. “Your brother tell you the basics?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Girl gets killed by gunman, gunman gets struck by lightning. This was all a year ago?”
    “Last April,” he said, pulling out a green legal file of his own with pictures that didn’t have the digital blur that marred my copies. “So, a year and two months later, we get these guys.” He pulled out much larger, autopsy-style photos of two bodies on morgue slabs, taken from above. “Kennith Coy,” he pointed me to the guy