Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  The place was very busy—they were having sales. Yet another reason to bring MJ here, I guess—before she finds out about it, and accuses me of having known about it and not telling her. He drove into the deepest level of the underground parking lot, and tucked the car into a shadowy corner. There he changed.

  He exited then, calmly enough, in broad daylight—spidering his way along the ceiling, upside down, totally unnoticed by people as they walked out or drove in. The Questar and his other valuables he had left hidden in the trunk of the car.

  Spider-Man scuttled along the ceiling to the parking lot’s entrance, and then went straight up and straight out, right up the side of the main building—twenty or thirty stories of hotel and offices. He concentrated on going up only in front of closed windows; no use in ruining some jet-lagged tourist’s morning by the sight of a super hero going about his business. There was a brisk wind coming in off the water; a seagull squawked, startled, as it passed Spidey while skimming past the plate-glass skin of the building.

  He shot a line of web up to the top of the Omni after a while, hauled himself up, crouched briefly at the very top, and launched another webline at the nearest skyscraper, across Biscayne. It anchored and he began to swing.

  It was amazing how relaxing it could be to fall back into the old routine. Building-corner to building-corner, swinging along, noting with amusement that Miami people looked up no more than New Yorkers did. There were fewer skyscrapers here, and they tended to cluster close. Most buildings here were low, as if people were reluctant to shut away the sun even though they already had so much of it. But he could still exploit the center of the city well enough to get a good look at the place—wide boulevards, traffic a little more easygoing, to his eye, than the standard New York brawl and rush of cabs and trucks. On a bright sunny morning, with the humidity not yet out of hand and the temperature still only in the 80s, it was very pleasant. Spidey smiled under the mask.

  On a day like this, he thought, it’s nice to be Spider-Man—

  That was when he heard the sound.

  It was familiar, and his grin got even broader under the mask. It was amazing how little real gunfire sounded like any of the sound effects in the movies, so much so that he wondered, sometimes, where they got those sounds in the first place. Bullets didn’t whine: they went “pff” past you, unless they hit something and ricocheted—and even then the sound was no Lone Ranger “wheeeeenng!” but a sharp brief scratchy sound. Rifles made a sound more like someone smacking a ruler on a wooden desk, and automatic weapons generally sounded more like someone backspacing repeatedly on an old Olivetti than like the “buddabuddabudda” beloved of comics letterers.

  Now Spidey heard rulers being smacked on desks, several of them, repeatedly, and fairly nearby, to judge by the way the echoes were racketing off the surrounding skyscrapers. He briefly consulted the memory of the city map in his hotel room. The sound was coming from over by North West Seventh and Flagler.

  Spider-Man swung over in that direction in a hurry, fastening his web for the second-to-last swing to the top of a building with an unusual sheared-off, diagonal face. He swung low past the front of it, catching the occasional astonished look from people gazing out through the glass, and dropped down thirty or forty stories to see what was going on.

  The situation was fairly serious. North West Seventh was blocked off by police cars to the east and west, about a building over in each direction. The sidewalk in front of the building to which he clung, and in front of the building directly across from it, was conspicuously empty. Across the street was a car, and from his high vantage point he could see a group of men huddled down behind it. Parked to the car’s right, slewed sideways and up onto the sidewalk, was an armored car, its back doors open and smoke wafting out of them.

  This was a scenario Spider-Man had seen often enough. Smoke bomb into the car’s air intake, force the crew out. The details would differ, but there would always be armed men waiting nearby, wearing gas masks and ready to jump into the car and drive it off. Not while I’m here, Spidey thought.

  He looked down and considered briefly how best to proceed. A hail of bullets was flying in several directions down there, the four men behind their car ruler-whacking and backspacing at great speed. Behind the police cars across the street and to either side, police officers crouched and returned fire, but with little effect.

  Spider-Man shot a line of web over to the top of the other building, swung over, and took care to keep himself high and out of anybody’s notice. Then he came up against the far building—a bank, as it happened—clung a moment, looked straight down. Only four men: he had wanted to be sure. He scurried down the face of the building until he was about ten stories above the men behind the car.

  There he paused. Two of the men were firing mostly forward; the other two were firing each to his own side. None of them was paying any attention to the space behind them, which they apparently thought they had secured.

  This was a mistake. Spider-Man considered his choreography for a moment—then dropped right down behind them, silently. The problem with being a stressed-out gunman, blazing away at everything you see, is that it’s very hard for you to hear someone coming up softly behind you and shooting a big gob of sticky web over your head—which was what Spider-Man did to the first man, the one on the left-hand side as he faced them. He pulled the man sharply over backwards. As he fell, another jet of web hit the gun. Spidey yanked it out of his hand, released the web, and let the gun and the webline fly off to one side, well out of reach.

  The man immediately to that robber’s right reacted to the sudden cessation of gunfire, turned openmouthed to see that his companion was gone, spun around staring behind him, saw Spider-Man, and sighted on him. The next jet of web caught this man full-face. He staggered forward, firing, and plate glass shattered, but it was no use—Spider-Man was already somewhere else, about twenty feet to the left. He pulled on the rope of webbing. The man went down hard, face forward, and Spidey shot another webline at the gun and fastened it down immovably to the concrete.

  The other two had noticed him now. One of them, a man in a T-shirt saying “Nuke the Whales,” whirled, firing an Uzi at him. Spider-Man bounced and rolled, changing course twice on the way toward him. He then shot web in two directions, one at the Uzi-carrier, to snatch the machine gun out of his hands and toss it over Spidey’s shoulder, the other at the fourth man, to web him and his gun solidly to the car. The one man still standing, the one who’d had the Uzi, jumped at Spidey.

  “Waste of time,” Spider-Man said softly, and simply decked the man in midair. Vectors add, after all; by his rush, the man added his own energy to the punch that would have hit him to begin with. He crashed to the ground, and Spidey looked down to see if he would move again. He didn’t.

  “It’s a dumb T-shirt, too,” Spider-Man said with some satisfaction. He stood still then, for uniformed cops were hammering toward him from all directions, now that the guns were silent. Casually enough, Spidey lifted his hands in a nothing-to-do-with-me gesture as they closed in on him.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, noticing that there were still a fair number of their weapons trained on him, “tell me if I’m wrong, but this looked more like a withdrawal than a deposit.”

  Some of the cops chuckled, but no one moved much until another man, one in a suit this time, came striding up to Spider-Man. He looked over the site, and then broke into a large grin. He was a big man, dark-haired, broad across the shoulders, with a big mustache over the grin, and a broad, intelligent face. When he spoke, another New Yorkish accent came out, or at least a northeastern one, so that Spidey began to wonder whether this state was entirely populated by refugees from colder climes.

  “Spider-Man,” he said. “Heard you were in the neighborhood. Didn’t think we’d have the pleasure.”

  “The pleasure was all mine,” Spidey said. “Detective—”

  “Anderson,” the detective said. “Murray Anderson.”

 
They shook hands. “Well, on behalf of the city of Miami and the department, let me thank you,” Anderson said. “Because I would have seriously disliked seeing any of my people get shot by one of these guys.” He looked around at the four men, whom his officers were detaching from various globs of web, handcuffing, and taking away.

  Another uniformed cop came up to them and said, “The guards in the van are coming around, sir.”

  “Good. Do me a favor. Run them downtown and take their statements—and have somebody from Medical come down and look them over. They might have some smoke inhalation.”

  “Right.” The cop went off.

  Anderson turned back to him. “Should I be thanking the City Tourist Bureau as well?” he said. “Are you here on vacation? Come to think of it, do super heroes get vacations?”

  “Not as such,” Spidey said, and laughed. “This morning I was on busman’s holiday, if anything. The trip is mostly business.”

  “Oh really? Anything we could help you with?”

  Spider-Man smiled inside the mask. “Well, since you asked…”

  “We don’t have to discuss it here,” Anderson said. “Always wanted a chance to talk to one of you guys. Come on, I know somewhere quiet.”

  * * *

  ANDERSON’S unmarked car was nearby. He drove them down Biscayne Boulevard to Brickell, and from there to Bayfront Park. Murray pulled up in the parking lot there, picking a spot where they could look across at the low flat green line of Key Biscayne, and, beyond it, to the Atlantic.

  “Pretty spot, Detective,” Spider-Man said.

  “Call me Murray. Yeah,” he said, leaning back in his seat and grinning, “I’ve sat on stakeout a lot down here. Now. What can I help you with? You strike me as a man who may have some kind of problem, seeing you’re out in uniform—” he smiled “—so far from home.”

  Spider-Man thought for a moment, and then said, “Among other things, I’m investigating certain… anomalies in security up at Canaveral, at Kennedy Space Center.”

  To his surprise, Murray nodded. “Word does get around fast, doesn’t it?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Oh, they’ve had some problems recently. Something went missing, some days back—something they were taking delivery on, that should have gone on the shuttle. It vanished.”

  “The Cape,” Spider-Man said carefully, “has been saying it hasn’t had any security problems.”

  “They’d hardly broadcast it if they did. I know that’s the official line. But we have our own sources up there. Some of the people in security, meaning only the best, make sure we find out things that we need to know about. Even if their bosses don’t necessarily like the idea. We’re all on the same side, for cryin’ out loud.”

  “What happened, exactly?”

  “Something jumped up on one of those big delivery barges they’ve got there. Decked a bunch of people, hurt some of them pretty badly—busted some arms and legs, poked a big damn hole in the barge—then took this object, jumped back in the water with it—was gone. They did everything up to and including drag the Banana River, but there was no sign of what was lost.”

  “Any reports of what this person looked like?”

  Murray laughed, just a breath. “‘Person’—that’s not what the APB says. Six foot two or higher. Massive build. Green. Claws. Fangs. Tail,” Murray said, with emphasis. “Not many perps down here answer to that description. And no ‘persons.’”

  Spider-Man nodded. “It’s the Lizard,” he said.

  “No kidding.” Murray looked delighted but also concerned. “But he’s crazy, though, isn’t he? I thought.”

  “If you mean he doesn’t have any control over himself,” Spidey said, “yes, that’s right.” As far as I know.

  “Hey, a super villain on my turf!”

  “He’s not much of a villain, really,” Spider-Man said. “Not in the classic sense.”

  Murray nodded, said nothing for a moment. “It wasn’t accidental, then,” Spidey said, “that I ran into some of your colleagues looking specifically for him, the other night?”

  “Nope. The APB’s been out for days. Now that there’ve been a couple of sightings, everybody’s looking. Those who want to catch him, anyway.” Murray’s look was sly, and suggested that not everybody would particularly want to find the Lizard without ample backup on hand.

  “What exactly was it that he took?” Spidey said.

  Murray shook his head. “Our sources haven’t been willing to say.”

  It was all very confusing. Theft—the Lizard shouldn’t be capable of it. Unless Curt has managed to achieve some measure of control over him again. But that seemed very unlikely, given that he’d shown no sign of being conscious of his inner humanity, or even capable of being reasoned with, the last two times they’d met. Just that mindless rage.

  “I have to say,” Murray said, “that a little of the, shall we say, edge of immediacy has gone off the issue of the Lizard at the moment. We seem to have a bigger problem.”

  Spider-Man looked at him. “Venom.”

  “Venom,” Murray said. “Now, that is serious trouble—somebody in full control of his faculties, and crazy as a jaybird. Or worse, crazy like a fox—and very unpredictable, especially to members of my fraternity. We’ve heard enough reports of what happens if you get between him and somebody he’s chasing.”

  “At the moment,” Spider-Man said, “I think that’s probably me.”

  “Well,” said Murray, “I was going to mention… You might want to be careful about the height of your profile for the next little while. You want to limit the collateral damage, you might say. To innocent bystanders—if Venom catches up to you.”

  “Oh, believe me,” Spidey said, “the bystanders are high on both our lists. Possibly the only good thing I can say about Venom.”

  “And you’re sure it’s you he’s after.”

  “I think so,” Spider-Man said.

  “But you don’t sound certain.”

  “No,” Spider-Man said, “I’m not. Venom doesn’t do things without a reason. They might not be what you or I would consider sane reasons, but he has them. These two little escapades—that guy in the skyscraper, and the people on the beach—”

  Murray frowned. “We haven’t yet released any information about Venom having done it.”

  “I know what scenes look like after Venom’s been there,” Spider-Man said. “A crime scene that looks like that one did, paired with a definite sighting of Venom a day later—the coincidence is too big.”

  “You sound like you have inside info.”

  “No, I just know Venom,” Spider-Man said, and shuddered just a little. “Too well.”

  “Either way,” Murray said, “the modus for these crimes isn’t clear. Our one witness has been hard to get anything out of. The doctors say he’s in traumatic incurse, whatever that is. Mostly it seems to mean that he can’t do anything but stammer. And as for the bank executive—” Murray shrugged. “There seem to be some smuggling connections; they’re being followed up. But the guy’s very white-collar, and whatever tracks he might have left are well covered. So…” He shrugged, and looked out across the bay.

  Spider-Man gazed out too, for a moment, and watched the boats go by. “Did you hear about his last appearance in New York?”

  “A little.”

  Spider-Man told Murray something about the CCRC connection on which he and Venom had stumbled when they last ran into one another—the smuggled radioactives and so forth. “It’s a name we know,” Murray said, “but not for hot stuff. Or not from that kind of hot stuff, anyway.”

  “Oh?”

  “DEA has been investigating them,” Murray said. “We’ve had a few liaison meetings with them, and the Coast Guard. Again, the trail is very well covered, and they haven’t been able to pin anything really conclusive on them. A lot of talk, a lot of rumors, but no smoking gun, as yet, nothing concrete. Then this vice president in charge of buffed nails at this German bank gets attacked
by Venom, and even the DEA has to start asking itself, why him? Why out of the blue? So the investigation will heat up again now. There’s a little annoyance,” Murray added, “in the Department at the moment. My department, you understand. Venom brought some barrels along to the scene, the second one. DEA came in and confiscated them.”

  “Barrels,” Spider-Man murmured. There had been a lot of barrels of toxic waste stowed around various CCRC buildings and caches in New York. “Something radioactive?”

  “I truly don’t know,” Murray said. “They just came in there and took the stuff before there was anyone on the scene really senior enough to stop it. Jurisdiction problem. Messy,” he said, and chewed his mustache reflectively for a moment. “You think they were nuke stuff?”

  “Could have been,” Spider-Man said, “but it’s a wild guess at the moment. I’d have to see them.”

  “Tough to do,” Murray said, “unless you want to break into DEA HQ and try.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “And another thing,” Murray said, shifting in his seat. “They’ve sold that bank.”

  “Who?”

  “CCRC, if I understand the scuttlebutt correctly. The ownership is incredibly convoluted, of course, there are about eight shell companies involved. But the German bank’s parent company divested itself of them two days ago. And the ‘parent’ is a ‘child’ of CCRC. Apparently the rumors about shipping illegal stuff didn’t bother them—I’d bet every big bank in this town has such, sooner or later. But this was apparently too much for someone several corporate levels up. Sold.” Murray made a “skrit” noise and a throat-cutting gesture. “To some Arabs, I think. Just like that.”

  Spider-Man digested that. “What were these rumors?”

  “Mostly about illegal shipments coming into the Miami area. Other materials going out again. But no one knew what.”

  “Where was the cargo supposed to be going after Miami?”

  “That,” Murray said, “was the peculiar thing. They weren’t going anywhere, at least nowhere that could be traced. We do get, from the DEA, estimates of what’s coming into the U.S. from the so-called ‘southern gateway.’ That’s the whole stretch of land and water between here and the Leewards, every month. They’re rough estimates, of course, but these shipments, whatever they were, would come in, and there would be no sudden jump in the local market, the way there almost always is.” Murray chewed his mustache again. “If someone was caching contraband for later use,” Murray said, “that would fit the picture. But they almost never do that. Too much chance of the stuff being found, by the competition or by us, and then their investment’s shot. In any case, DEA, and police all over the state, are watching for any large sudden movements of merchandise. It’s all we can do.”