Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  “You’ve got me. Maybe they’re taking big old guns away from terrorists and cooking them?”

  “Best use for them, maybe. Don’t think I need that much fiber in my diet, though.” She put the menu aside for later perusal. “Junk mail, junk mail, you may already have won…”

  “Oh, sure,” said Peter. “What’s the prize in this one?”

  “A trip to Miami, if you go see one of their condos.”

  “Too humid this time of year,” Peter said. “Too many super villains.”

  “Yeah.” MJ continued going through the pile. “Junk mail, junk mail, I can’t believe trees are dying for this. Oh—phone bill. Two of them.”

  “Two? I thought we paid the phone bill last week.”

  “No, these are for the cell phones.” MJ smiled as she opened the first one. She had bought a matching set of cell phones for the pair of them in Florida. Each had approximately a hundred functions, only two or three of which Peter understood. He had found that his phone was one of those instruments of the technological age that was actively dangerous if you didn’t know how to work it. And he was embarrassed to find that—while he could manipulate cameras and web shooters and spider-tracers with the greatest of ease—he could not for the life of him get the hang of the cell phone. Once he had tried to use the phone’s “number scratch pad,” and had wound up destroying its entire “address book,” which had taken him hours to install. Since then, Peter had resolutely refused to touch any buttons on the thing except for the dial pad and the “accept” or “hang up” buttons.

  MJ unfolded the first bill. “I’ve used mine about five times this month,” she said, “and you’ve used yours maybe three times, if I’m any judge.”

  “I called the weather once,” Peter said, “and once I called for a pizza. Everything else was incoming.”

  She smiled, then took a look at the bill. Her mouth actually fell open, assuming the position at which Aunt May used to warn Peter, “You’d better shut that or a fly will get in.”

  “What the heck—?” She said it in a tone of voice that suggested that “heck” was not the word she really wanted to use.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “They’ve given us somebody else’s bill,” she said and walked over to the tub, holding the bill between thumb and forefinger as if it were a recently deceased rat. “Look for yourself.”

  He looked. The first thought Peter had about the bill was, That’s a bit long, isn’t it? There were several pages to it. The second thought he had was on looking at the total at the top of the first page, “balance payable,” it said, “$4,689.72.”

  Four thousand…

  Peter looked at MJ in total bewilderment. “They’ve made a mistake,” he said. “It can’t be your bill. What’s the other one say?”

  “Hm—” She reached for the other envelope, which she had stuck up on the towel shelf with everything but the junk mail she hadn’t yet thrown away. She ripped it open, unfolded it. “Twenty-three dollars and eighty cents. Twenty of that is just the rental for the number—”

  They both looked at the other bill. “Four thousand—! It’s just a mistake,” MJ said, riffling through the six or seven attached pages, all covered with very small print. “CellTech’s computer must have had a fit or something, that’s all. They can’t make me pay this. I didn’t make any of these calls. There’s not a single number I recognize.”

  Peter twitched a little, under the suds. “Some of these cell phone companies,” he said carefully, “can be a little sticky about billing.”

  “They can stick all they like,” MJ said, laughing, “but I’m not paying this. I didn’t make any of these calls.”

  “Better call their helpline and tell them that the computer’s barfed all over your bill,” he said. “If you like, I’ll—”

  “No, I can handle it myself, no problem,” MJ said and headed out into the kitchen. “By the way, what do you want for breakfast?”

  “Oh, just some toast. I’ll get some coffee later.”

  “Right.”

  * * *

  HALF an hour later, Peter was out of the tub, shaved, dried, and getting dressed in their bedroom—and becoming more and more determined to put off going into the kitchen for as long as he could.

  MJ was still on the phone. He had heard one loud cry of, “What?” and another of, “But, you can’t—that’s—it’s, it’s not fair!” and another of, “But I didn’t! I’ve only had it—”

  A long silence had followed that. Then came a quieter tone of voice that Peter knew, and didn’t hear often: the sound of MJ being very controlled, and probably politer than she needed to be. It was a tone of voice which suggested that the person on whom she was using it had better never run into her at a social occasion or things would turn quickly antisocial.

  Finally, he heard her hang up, very softly. To Peter’s educated ear, the quiet little click sounded like a bomb detonator going off. Not too quietly, and he hoped not too casually, he made his way into the kitchen.

  The toast had come up about ten minutes ago; it sat cold and forlorn in the toaster. It wasn’t so dark that redoing it would ruin it, so Peter pushed it down again and walked through to the little table between the kitchen and the dining area where MJ was sitting, the cell phone off to one side, and staring at the bill.

  “So what did they say?” he said.

  She looked up at him bleakly. “They say we have to pay it.”

  “But they weren’t your calls,” Peter said.

  “They weren’t my calls,” MJ said, “but it looks like I’m responsible for them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “According to the lady I talked to—she was really very nice, she was good to me, but she couldn’t help it—my phone was probably cloned.”

  “Cloned—someone stole the number, you mean.”

  She nodded, looking morose, and sat back in the chair. “There are people who wait near the ends of bridges and tunnels with scanners because when you come out of there, when you lose the shielding effect, the phone broadcasts its ID number to the system—its PIN number, more or less. Tells the cell phone network where it is. That’s an easy time for them to steal your number. People wait with their scanners for cars to come out and record as many numbers as they can. Then they put them into ‘blank’ phones and start making free calls. Free to them, anyway.”

  MJ scowled at the table. “I’m so angry, Peter. It’s not like I don’t know about this, like I haven’t heard about it. When I’m in a cab and go into a bridge or a tunnel, I usually make sure the phone is off. I’m pretty careful about it. But just one time I must have been in a hurry, on the way to a job or something, and I must have forgotten—”

  Peter shook his head. “Hon, you can’t remember everything. We’ve had a fairly lively time of it these past few weeks. It’s only natural, when you get home, you relax, you forget something—” He sat down by her, took her hand. “Don’t look so tragic!”

  She looked at him sidelong and gave him a lopsided smile. “Whatever you say,” she said, “just don’t say, ‘It’s only money.’ Think about it, Tiger. What have we got in the bank?”

  “I guess a little less than—”

  “Five thousand dollars, yes. That was going to last us a month or two—maybe more if we stretched hard. It was going to buy us some time to get a little bit ahead. You know how it is when you start a new job—it takes a little while to get the accounting department straightened out, they take a little while to get the check cut.” She shrugged. “Well—”

  She looked at the bill. “The due date on this is two weeks from now.”

  “You don’t think you could make that much money in two weeks, do you?”

  She looked at him. “Not after taxes, no. Probably not. Hand work tends to happen only a couple days at a time.”

  Peter shook his head. “It’s just wrong, though. They shouldn’t be able to make you pay it. They’re not your calls!”

  “Apparently they
can,” MJ said. “The law in New York at the moment is that there’s a ten-day window during which you can inform them that your number’s been cloned: if you do it within ten days of the first ‘spurious’ call, then they won’t charge you.” The grin she gave him now was much more lopsided. “The problem is, it’s a catch-22—how do you know your phone’s been cloned until you see the bill? If you’re lucky, and it happens at the bottom of a billing cycle, you’ll do better, but—” She shook her head.

  “But there has to be some way that they can establish that these aren’t your calls.”

  “Not yet,” MJ said sadly. “Not for us. We haven’t had these phones long enough to establish a billing pattern for either of us. The lady I was talking to said that the only way not to be liable for the cost of the bill was to produce concrete proof that the phone had been cloned. I don’t know how we would do that. The lady said that you would have to have the phone’s number turn up in an ongoing criminal investigation. If they’ve actually caught some crook using it, and found your number in his phone, then naturally they’d let you off.”

  “Oh, jeez,” Peter said. The odds of this seemed poor.

  In the kitchen, the toast popped up. He ignored it. MJ sniffed. “It’s burned.”

  “It’s burned? I’m burned! I’m not going to give them four thousand dollars of our money when we didn’t use their service!”

  “Tiger,” MJ said, “unless we can find some way to prove the phone was cloned, we’re going to have to. Otherwise this is going to trash our credit rating. We’ve got enough trouble keeping that straight as it is, and without it, we’re sunk. We could take them to court, but who’s got the money?”

  “Yeah,” Peter said.

  MJ reached out across the table, sighed deeply, and smiled at Peter once more. This time it was a much more normal smile, but there was a sense of it being applied, like makeup. “I’ve got to start thinking about going,” she said, “They’re going to be ready to start shooting in about half an hour, and I can’t take the chance of getting caught in traffic.”

  “What’re we going to do?” Peter said.

  MJ shook her hair back and looked noble and brave. “We’re going to stall,” she said, “until I can find out whether we really have to pay this thing. If we have to pay it—” She shrugged. “We’ve been worse off before.”

  “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to be worse off again,” Peter said. “There’s nothing hot coming up at the Bugle that I know of—I’m not going to be able to be of much help to you.”

  “Just knowing that you’re thinking of ways to be of help to me, to us,” MJ said, “makes me feel just fine. Come on, Tiger. Fresh toast for you, and then I’m going to go.”

  She got up and made him fresh toast, and put on fresh coffee, and the more she was kind to him, and thoughtful, the more Peter began to stew and fret as well. By the time she was ready to go out, still just in her T-shirt and jeans, and (a new development) with her hands covered with the kind of white cotton gloves that commuters used to read the New York Times on the train, for his own part, Peter was so angry he could hardly speak. “You going to the Bugle later?” MJ said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, give ’em my best. When’ll you be back?”

  “By evening, anyway,” Peter said. “Today is just a mooching-around day, to see what’s going on, which editors need a photographer. After that, I might do a little night work.”

  She nodded, recognizing their code for web-swinging. “Okay. I won’t wait to eat dinner if you’re not home when I get back.” She picked up her cell phone, looked at it with an expression of tremendous annoyance, and dropped it into her purse. “You know the number,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Peter said, for a moment allowing the same annoyance to show. “So does someone else. Let me know if your schedule changes. I’ll call if mine does.”

  “Gimme a kiss,” MJ said.

  Peter drew her close, and for several long warm moments, even the thought of the phone company was drowned out. When she let him go at last, Peter said, “It’s a waste, them only using your hands.”

  She waggled her eyebrows at him. “They have other uses,” she said, “as you’ll doubtless find out when we’re both home again tonight. Bye, Tiger.” And she was off down the hall.

  He watched her for a moment, then shut the door quietly and began to pace a little bit, looking across the room at where his own cell phone sat. It’s not fair—not in the slightest. There has to be something we can do. Something I can do—or that Spider-Man can do….

  Peter went over to the window that looked uptown and stood for a moment. Spider-Man certainly had various friendly police contacts here and there; it had often been his pleasure to do one cop or another a good turn, and they had done him some in the past as well. Unfortunately, there is a basic flaw in the logic here, he thought. Spider-Man’s contacts weren’t guaranteed to do Peter Parker that much good, especially since to get this particular problem solved would involve showing MJ’s phone bills to the police. That would raise just too many questions leading, if he wasn’t careful, to the question of his secret identity. No, Peter thought, that’s not going to do it—at least not directly.

  He looked out over the roofs of midtown. A brief taste of freedom, of something just a little like security, and now it was gone. Ten million people out there—certainly there couldn’t be more than a million of them who were crooks. Probably a lot less. It just seemed like a lot more. Turn your back for a minute, and you found them in your soup. What still staggered him was the injustice of it all—that the phone company could recognize theft as coming from one specific direction, but hold you responsible for it in the next breath, even if you weren’t. Though they would probably say that she was careless, she wasn’t careless.

  Peter stalked back and forth in front of the window, getting more furious—and then sighed. Standing here being angry did no good, but there were things that would. He’d go in to the Bugle, see what work was around. And then, later—well…

  He couldn’t do anything about the phone company, but the crooks—that was something else.

  Peter went to get his keys and got ready to head out.

  TWO

  NIGHT fell and turned the city golden.

  Spider-Man knew that light pollution was a problem. He knew that the sodium-vapor lamps that lit New York City streets made astronomers crazy, blanking out the frequencies of light that they were most interested in. But when he stood in a high place, as he did right now, and smelled the cold sweet air—well, sweeter than it was in the daytime, when the sun baked the ozone stink into everything—and when he looked down at those luminous golden pathways between the buildings, all traced with ruby and diamond light, he loved the sight and he wished the people at Hayden Planetarium could find something else to complain about.

  He stood at the corner of the roof of the Met Life building and looked northeast. It was a good vantage point, and a good place to jump off from suddenly if you needed to. Plenty of skyscrapers as tall or taller were just north of him: the heart of midtown, his favorite playground. Just west was the unique design of the Flatiron Building; to the north, the traffic lights of Park Avenue, all red and green down the central mall.

  Spider-Man stood on the gravel, looking down. He had spent the early part of the evening web-swinging. It was amazing how much frustration you could work off that way. The wind in your face—well, against your mask, anyway—as you snagged the corner of a building with webbing, swung down, whipped around, got a grip on some wall of empty plate glass, scurried up it, then launched yourself out into the void again. Not even riding a line of webbing, just counting on the spider’s leap to take you across the gap to the next building. It was exhilarating and a great way to keep an eye on things without being seen. Only rarely did New Yorkers look up, unless a helicopter crash or an alien invasion was happening over their heads. Mostly their attention was at their own level, or below. So was Spider-Man’s, but for differen
t reasons.

  He was watching pickup trucks, and had been for some days just before he went off to Florida. It was a feature on the news that had started him on this particular avenue of study, a story that made it plain how hot “ram raiding” was becoming in New York.

  It was uncertain where the art had originated. Some said it was first practiced in the densely packed, small shopping malls of midlands England. Others said it had been invented in the Midwest, or among corner mini-malls of Los Angeles. Wherever it originated, it was entirely too attractive a method of crime for those who were properly equipped.

  The proper equipment tended to stand out: you needed a four-wheel-drive vehicle, or a pickup, or a combination of both, some chains, and several willing accomplices. The idea was that you rammed the back or front of your truck, whichever was more convenient, into a store, and then you jumped in and robbed the place, tossed your loot into the truck, and drove away. Other forms of ram raiding were slightly more opportunistic. Those with a tow point on the back of their truck and enough chain would back their truck up to a store’s security shutters, or the post that anchored the shutters, fasten the chain to the shank that secured the post, and drive away at top speed, usually taking the post out. The crooks would then quickly return, loot the store, and flee.

  Spider-Man stood there a moment more, breathing the mild summer night’s air, and then sprang over to the other side of the roof; there he looked down toward Twenty-third Street, shot a line of web across toward the Park Avenue South corner, and swung out into the night, heading downtown. Ram raiding, he reflected, did have its dangers. You might chain something to your fender and drive away and have your fender come off. This could be embarrassing, especially if your license plate was still attached. An NYPD detective of his acquaintance had told him about how one group of ram raiders decided to steal the cash machine from a bank. They wrapped their chains around the machine and pulled it out of the bank’s wall, but the bad guys had failed to notice that the back entrance to the Fourteenth Precinct was directly across from that particular branch of Chase Manhattan. While the crooks got busy securing the cash machine to the back of their pickup, some of the bemused cops who had been watching the raid from inside their offices came strolling outside, crossed the street, and arrested the guys—only to have one of the crooks explain to them, absolutely straight-faced, that the object chained to the back of their truck was in fact a washing machine. One cop laughed so hard that he tore a newly repaired hernia and had to go back three days later for keyhole surgery. Other cops, unchaining the machine, made god-awful jokes about “money laundering” as they took the crooks and the cash machine across the street. Spidey considered this yet another example of how absolutely anything can happen in New York, no matter how absurd you think it is.