Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Peter raised an eyebrow and took another back-of-head shot.

  “I want him to be stopped. I want to tell”—he almost choked on the word—“the police what they need to know to stop him.”

  Mel and Peter looked at each other, and Mel began making neat small shorthand notes. “Names and dates?” said Mel.

  “Names and dates.”

  “Then let’s start.”

  It took a long time. Dmitri was a tireless talker, who would not let Mel tape anything. Shorthand was all right, though, and for the next three hours Mel wrote as tirelessly as Dmitri talked, taking down names of nearly every crook, major and minor, who was working with his enemy Galya—phone numbers, fax numbers, details about what they were doing, numbers and illegal betting shops, legal betting shops that had been infiltrated by illegal “private entrepreneurships,” candy stores that were cash laundromats, supermarkets that were too, several big banks with “pliant” managers on the take, who falsified the cash transaction reports required by the IRS, or failed to file them altogether. The recitation went on and on.

  When Dmitri started talking about the businesses in Peter’s part of town, Peter’s eyes widened. Many protection rackets were in force: false invoicing was going on at the grocery around the corner where he liked to shop, the one with the really good cheese case, plus dry cleaners, drugstores…

  Peter shook his head as he moved slowly around the room, taking pictures of an old portrait here, a bodyguard there, half-dozing as he watched his boss, or the back of Dmitri’s head again, as he gestured earnestly. It was amazing how much expression the back of a head could have. And on and on, until Peter found himself unable to count how many businesses in his area were not on the take. And Mel just wrote it all down, nodding and asking a question every now and then.

  Three hours. Peter sat down, finally, unloaded his camera and reloaded it with fresh film, but it was a token gesture. There was simply nothing left to take pictures of in the room. A little while later, Dmitri sat back and fell silent.

  Mel sat back too, flipping through the pages of his notebook. Then he looked up. “How’s your security these days, Dmitri?” he said.

  Dmitri looked around him, waved confidently at the (admittedly, somewhat sleepy-looking) men standing around him. “I trust them with my life.”

  “You’re going to have to. You know how news travels in this town. It’s going to be a matter of hours before Galya knows I’ve been here. He’ll know what we’ve been talking about. After that—”

  Dmitri shrugged. “The Communists knew where I was, too,” he said. “I survived them. I’ll survive this too. This is important,” he said, leaning forward and tapping the coffee table again. “This is business. Galya is bad for business.”

  “He’ll be bad for you now,” Mel said. “Even if he doesn’t sneak up behind you one dark night and do you in, he must have some of the same kind of information about your doings that you have about his.”

  Dmitri laughed again. “Not nearly so much. He’s not a subtle man, our Galya: he doesn’t look behind things. I look to my future, and to the inevitability of betrayal—and so I make it as hard as I can. But we shall see. And you—what will you do with this?”

  Mel looked at the notebook. “Transcribe it first,” he said. “Then start fact-checking.”

  “You would check my facts?”

  Now it was Mel’s turn to shrug. “Dmitri, freedom of the press doesn’t mean we get to print just anything we like. It needs to be true, in all minor particulars as well as major ones. We just need to check. Money laundering is one thing: information laundering is another.”

  “Well, all right. But,” he checked his watch, “you should go now, yes?”

  “I suppose we should. I’ll be in touch, Dmitri. And listen—” Mel stood up. “If all this is as you think it is, you could be doing the city, the state—maybe the country—a big favor.”

  “It did me a favor,” Dmitri said. “It gave me a place to come and do business.” The glint in his eye was cheerful, and feral, and funny. “I scratch America’s back: it scratches mine. Da?”

  “Da,” Mel said.

  “And you, young Pyotr,” Dmitri said, turning to Peter. “Those pictures better be good. I have a reputation to maintain.”

  “These’ll be the best pictures of the back of your head that you’ve ever seen,” said Peter.

  Dmitri roared with laughter. “Too bad you can’t do something about the bald spot. Hey?” He jabbed Peter in the ribs cheerfully. “Never mind. A long night, you did a good job. You get in the car, they’ll take you where you want.”

  “I’ll take the subway in,” Mel said. “If your guy just drops me near a D or F train, I’ll be fine.”

  Dmitri led them to the door, shaking his head and looking at them strangely. “You are a madman,” he said.

  * * *

  THEY went back into the garage, got into the limo, drove around Brooklyn for a bit, then stopped, presumably near a subway stop, and Mel got out.

  “All right,” he said to Peter. “You want to come back with me? Safety in numbers.”

  “Sure, why not,” Peter said, and went, for he wanted to keep an eye on Mel on the way home, unable to shake the notion that something untoward might happen to him.

  They went down the stairs into the subway station—

  —then straight back up the stairs on the far side of the station and across to where a couple of gypsy cabs were waiting by an all-night grocery for late fares. “This’ll do,” said Ahrens, hopped into the first cab, and told the driver, “First and Eighty-sixth, please.” They sped off.

  “Mel, would you mind dropping me off along the way?” said Peter.

  “No problem. Where?”

  “Which bridge are you going to take back?” he said to the cabbie.

  The man scowled a bit at the odd question, then said, “Probably the Williamsburg.”

  Peter thought for a moment. “Grand Street and Union Avenue, then.”

  The cabbie glanced at him in the rearview mirror and raised his eyebrows. “Not a very safe area, this time of night.”

  “It’s all right. I’m meeting somebody.”

  Mel looked at Peter with a half-amused, half-disapproving expression. “Does your wife know about this?”

  “As a matter of fact, she does.”

  “Okay, then. Suit yourself.”

  They got to Grand and Union, looking deserted and desolate under the yellow sodium glow, and Peter got out. Mel leaned forward to peer at him out of the still-open door. “You’ll be in tomorrow with those photos?”

  “Yeah. About noontime.”

  “Great! I’ll see you, then. Be careful.”

  “You’re telling me to be careful!” Peter laughed, closing the cab door. It headed away down the street and left him alone on the curb.

  Quickly and quietly he slipped behind a unit of stores on the corner, scanning the alleyway to make sure the alley really was as empty as it seemed. It was, and he got busy changing.

  Half a minute later, a long, slender strand of webbing shot up to hit a high-tension tower not too far away, and Spider-Man went scrambling after it, swinging onto the next building and heading after Mel’s cab. Just to be sure, he thought.

  The atmosphere of danger he had been feeling all evening had sharpened abruptly when he came out. It hadn’t been his spider-sense, but something else. Probably just good old-fashioned worry.

  The cab, well ahead of him by now, was indeed heading onto the Williamsburg Bridge. He went after it, sending webbing in a long shot toward one of the bridge superstructures, and swung in a wide, fast arc out into the night. They were exhilarating, these big jumps. Sometimes even working from skyscraper to skyscraper down the concrete canyons of Manhattan could seem a little constricting. Swing too wide there, and there was always a vertical solid surface sixty stories high to get abruptly in your way. The feeling of openness as he looped and swung between the structures of the bridge was like a breath of f
resh air.

  And all the time, he watched the cab. There wasn’t much other traffic on the bridge, except for a few cars heading the other way, toward Brooklyn. Two-thirty in the morning, so I suppose—

  His thought stopped at the roar of a fast-revving engine below him. He looked down and saw a white minivan go tearing onto the bridge in what had to be hot pursuit of Mel’s cab. Spidey swung lower as the van poured on speed, its engine bellowing in protest through a muffler whose packing had seen better days. There was a brief tire squeal as it changed lanes, then another burst of speed to bring it up alongside the cab. It changed lanes again—

  —and this time sideswiped the cab hard into the railing.

  Once, and there was a screech of grinding metal. A long tail of sparks went stuttering across the tarmac surface before the cabbie recovered and pulled away.

  Twice, and something gave. It was the railing, lengths of metal popping free of their sockets like pins in wet clay and tumbling down toward the waiting river. Spidey swung down, shooting webbing from his free hand at first one support, then another. More webbing slapped against the shattered railing as the cab slewed to a teetering stop right on the edge, and as he hit the bridge and bounced, he sent a final jet across all three strands to give them a common anchor, pulled everything as tight as he could, and turned, gasping to see what would happen.

  The web stretched, and the cab tipped over sideways.

  Then it stopped stretching, and the cab caught. The minivan, whose driver had slowed to watch, gunned its engine and accelerated away on over the bridge. Even though the web was holding for now, Spidey clambered hastily up the bridge support and shot a couple more lines over the cab.

  Okay, spider-strength—do your stuff!

  Then he heaved, and heaved again. The cab shifted, bouncing in the hammock of web strands that surrounded and supported it, then slowly leaned back toward the bridge and dropped with a crash onto all four wheels again. There was a burst of noise from inside: two voices, one yelling, the other swearing. Which was which, he couldn’t tell.

  Anyway, Spider-Man didn’t have time to attend to them right now. But anyone capable of that much foul language at such a volume couldn’t be much hurt. As he webbed away down the bridge in pursuit of the white minivan, he saw Mel stagger out of the cab, stare at the webbing, touch it, and then gape around in all directions but the right one in an attempt to see what had happened.

  At the other end of the bridge the minivan had gone lurching off at the first exit, swinging around onto the approach road so as to recross in the opposite direction. Spider-Man took himself up one of the supports and out of sight, watching in case the side or rear door opened to reveal the muzzle of a Kalashnikov. If they did, he could web either or both doors shut too fast for a gunman to react.

  Mel watched it approach and shook both his fists in a rage as it drew level, then ducked as a hand came out of the driver’s window with a pistol in it. The gun barked a few times, a quick volley of badly aimed shots from the wildly swaying vehicle that spanged and ricocheted most impressively, but came nowhere near him.

  The van had no plates, and there was no point in Mel bothering with it any further. He turned back toward the cabbie and began waving his fists at him, instead.

  Excess tension, Spidey thought. Wonderful thing. He watched the white van roar away beneath him and back toward Brooklyn. Now then, he thought, and went in pursuit.

  It led him on a merry chase, all the more so because he was taking particular care not to be seen. It was a bit of a trick as they got off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but he managed it, and followed the white van south. After a mile or so the driver plainly decided he was safe, because the van slowed right down, almost too much in Spidey’s opinion. Any vehicle being driven that carefully was as likely to rouse a traffic cop’s suspicions as one being driven too fast, particularly this late at night, and though they hadn’t used an AK-74 in the drive-by, that didn’t mean there wasn’t one inside.

  At one point, near Flatbush Avenue and Church, it actually pulled off into a side street while two men jumped out and used cordless electronic screwdrivers—he could hear the thin whine—to bolt New York plates back onto the front and rear of the van. Spidey took a careful mental note of the numbers; they probably belonged to another car, stolen or otherwise, but then again they might prove to be some kind of help. The van started up again, and so did he.

  At Foster Avenue the van veered sideways, then after a few long blocks turned south onto Ocean Parkway. Aha! Spidey thought, for down at the bottom of Ocean lay Bensonhurst, and after that Brighton Beach and Coney Island.

  Russian country.

  He swung from building to building, keeping up the best speed he could and grateful that, even at this hour of the morning, there was enough traffic to keep the van from simply blasting out of sight and losing him. They headed into the depths of Bensonhurst, turned briefly toward Ocean Avenue, then headed down a side street. There the van pulled up in front of a brownstone, turned its lights and engine off, and sat quiet.

  Hmm, thought Spidey. Are we waiting for someone?

  Farther down the street he could see an apartment building with an underground parking lot, and suddenly he began to wonder. Hurriedly dropping from his vantage point on the roof of the brownstone, he landed on the roof of the van. There were muffled exclamations from inside, but nothing that worried him particularly.

  But instead of webbing the doors shut from the convenient position of the roof, he jumped to the ground before applying his own brand of external lock. It was just as well. Even before the occupants realized that they couldn’t get out, some smart guy emptied half a clip of full-auto through the roof, right between where Spidey’s feet had landed.

  There were a couple of metallic squeaks and clatters as the doors were tried, then another three rapid shots turned the laminated windshield into a piece of sagging modem art. It was shoved from its frame, and people started climbing through the hole.

  “Oh no,” said Spidey in a disapproving voice, and started webbing them as fast as they got out. Their gunfire was what newscasters would usually call sporadic; it made an encouraging noise but otherwise didn’t do much good. One after another, as though there were a stamping-press inside, the van emitted big men in dark clothing, and one after another, as they emerged, Spider-Man hit each one with a generous squirt of web fluid.

  This resulted in the utterance of several words like svoloch and chyort—which Spidey assumed to be some manner of Russian swearword or other—as they cut themselves on glass, or kicked each other in the soft parts before they realized that there really was only space for one to get out at a time, and they swore even harder when they found themselves trussed securely by the lengths of webbing.

  Four of them, finally. It had seemed like more. When people stopped climbing out of the van, Spidey carefully peered inside in case anyone else had seen what was happening outside and decided to stay under cover. No; it was empty.

  But on the back shelf of the van were four cell phones.

  As he looked at them, and a grim smile spread across his face beneath the mask, one of the phones began to ring. The men lying webbed on the ground all glared at him, and one of them growled something that sounded like “prokleenyesh sookeen-sahn…”

  “Yeah, yeah, army boots to you too,” Spidey said as he reached in and picked up the phone. He tapped the reply button, and a voice that seemed too big for the little handset speaker started yelling at him in Russian. “I’m sorry,” he said in a fair imitation of the annoying CellTech voice mail, “but the party you are calling is all tied up right now.”

  That’s a joke so old it appears in cave paintings, he thought ruefully, but what the hey? Besides— he glanced at the well-webbed Russian hoods lying at his feet—how often is it true?

  There was a long pause at the other end of the phone, and then laughter. It was a shrill, high-pitched, and unpleasant sound that could never be a genuinely merry sound like Dmitr
i’s guffaw. “Who is this?” said the voice at last, speaking in good though accented English.

  “Spider-Man,” said Spidey, just to see what the reaction would be. It was more laughter, even more shrill, even less pleasant, and on a hunch he said, “Galya?”

  “Oh, very smart. Mister Super Hero. You have been talking to Dmitri Il’yevich, have you not? That was a bad mistake. And somebody else has been talking to him. That reporter—”

  “Who your people just tried to kill.”

  “Yes, well, if they missed him this time, they’ll get him some other day. Or someone else will. He doesn’t make a lot of friends, your Mister Ah-rens.” He pronounced the name in two distinct syllables. “Not that he will matter in the long run. Or you.” There was more laughter. “After all, in a hundred years, who’ll know the difference?” He laughed harder. “Or in a hundred days.”

  Then the line went dead, and a moment later Spider-Man was listening to a busy signal. He looked at the phone, thought about dumping it, then decided not to and secured the phones in a pouch made of webbing—but only after using one of them to call 911 and report automatic gunfire just off Ocean Avenue. The lights of the first blue-and-white were already riding their siren wail toward him along Ocean Parkway as he webbed away.

  But he was unable to get rid of the sound of that laughter, the sound of a man who didn’t have a care in the world—even about being caught in the act of attempted-murder-by-proxy. Who didn’t care about anything because he knew that it wouldn’t matter in a hundred days.

  Whatever that meant.

  * * *

  ELSEWHERE in town, inside a huge apartment—a nearly unfurnished place where the curtains were kept closed all day—a big-shouldered, broad-bodied man sat behind a large desk, going through some paperwork. In front of him on the marble floor stood a slender red-haired man in a black jacket; not quite standing at attention, but giving that impression anyhow.