Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  “I’ve known Sal Doro since I first started out in this business,” I say slowly. “We were . . . friends.”

  “If you didn’t do it, you were still involved, however peripherally,” Crane says. “And no, not just because we found you at the crime scene.”

  “Sal called. Said someone was here. He was frightened.”

  “Had good reason to be,” Crane says. “Come with me.”

  We walk the plastic strips laid around the living room by the CSI guys and I follow Crane and Murphy into Sal’s home office. A lifetime’s bric-a-brac lines the shelves and walls including a number of big front pages and blown-up news photos hanging in crooked, slightly yellowing frames. There’s more than one of me, including an embarrassing shot of a nerdy-looking teenage Zephyr in the red-and-white lycra costume with the red cloak. I shake my head, sigh, forgetting for a moment the solemnity of the occasion as John Crane taps the empty-sounding open top metal drawer.

  “Plenty of files in these other drawers, but this top shelf’s been emptied. Recently,” he says.

  “So?”

  He slides the drawer closed so I can see how Sal labelled the different drawers with letters of the alphabet. The empty drawer is marked “X-Z”.

  “Shit,” I say after a moment. “Anything in there at all?”

  Tiger thoughtfully re-opens it and withdraws a lone manila folder. She peers at it a moment and says, “Xenomorph”

  “Shapechanger guy. Late 90s,” I say. “Fuck.”

  “Someone took every scrap of info Sal had on you,” Tiger says.

  “That worry you, Zephyr?” her partner asks. “Sal keeping detailed files on you?”

  “No,” I say, decisive, though my expression can’t help be a tad thoughtful. “He was a reporter. Specialised in parahuman affairs. Still, I gotta wonder what he had in there . . . and how much.”

  Crane stares at me a long moment, desperate, it seems, to play the hard man. Which is why it’s all the more disconcerting when he gives a dry laugh, looks to Tiger and backs off, sauntering out of the room taking the Xenomorph folder from her hand as he goes.

  I swap a look with the female detective, sense of foreboding getting grim.

  Zephyr 16.11 “Into The Wintering Sky”

  WHILE THE COPS are still about their business inside Sal Doro’s place, I overhear a burst of radio chatter telling me the FBI have caught wind of my involvement and are en route. I don’t recall dealing with any of those clowns since the wedding of the century, but given I’m yet to get any official comeuppance from letting the Ill Centurion, Tragedian, Raveness and Crescendo escape from White Nine the previous summer, I decide it’s a good time to make myself scarce.

  I simply wave to Tiger through the kitchen doorway and hurl myself out the broken window, free-falling for a second to unconsciously luxuriate in the friction as I slam towards the pavement, then I jet up and away, twisting like heat-seekers are in hot pursuit as I elevate across the city as icy sleet starts to cut down from an ever darkening sky.

  The disappearance of all Sal’s files on yours truly plucks an unpleasant chord, and the feeling continues to resonate as I edge closer to Mach to throw myself across the city and thus to the coast, hands parting the wet air as I angle north for Twilight’s island. There doesn’t seem anything in this except to take the bull by the proverbials.

  I clear the weather system before I hit Twilight’s island, the last stretch of the trip doing close to a thousand miles per hour and neatly blow-drying my costume as the sun comes out to play again, a remote and glittering orb with little interest in what we mere mortals do far beneath it. Landing hard on the turf where I normally do at Twilight’s place, I’m unperturbed by the return of the dime store Mafiosos who file out of their hangout inside the big guy’s rear gazebo-cum-greenhouse.

  The three of them just watch me with mixed emotions. I like to tell myself there’s a little bit of admiration in there for the ballsy way I stick it to their boss in a way they’ll never imitate. Truth is, I’ve probably got them in the shit too many times to mention, but that’s why they’re mooks and I’m me.

  Surprisingly, Twilight is on the north lawn of the mansion wearing a Chinese dressing gown over his grey body suit. He wields a golf driver as he pounds ball after ball off the cliffs into the surging Atlantic invisible far below. Another one of his “maids” – a Malay hooker in a French maid’s outfit and a see-through rain coat – stands beside him cradling a champagne bucket full of balls.

  “No idea you were the golfing type,” I call.

  Twilight looks back at me gloomily. Somehow he has a black eye again and I notice tape covering his knuckles. He wears two-day-old stubble that looks nearly translucent in the northerly light.

  “Neither did I,” he says.

  “Jesus. What the fuck have you been up to again? You’re a regular alley cat, Twilight,” I say.

  “That meant to be some sort of gay slur?”

  “Is it?”

  “I dunno,” he shrugs. “Sounds like it.”

  And he turns and whack goes another ball.

  *

  I TELL TWILIGHT I need to contact Frost.

  “Frost? Forget about it,” he says.

  “Don’t you mean fuhgeddaboudit?” I reply with a grin, but he doesn’t baulk.

  “No, I mean ‘Hasn’t that crazy skank caused you enough problems without you actively fuckin’ going after her’?”

  “She’s caused problems, yes, but she’s also the only person I know with the material to blackmail me,” I say and pause and look at him again – or I should say, I look at his broad back as he sends another golf ball into the grey infinity beyond us.

  “Apart from me, maybe,” Twilight says and drops the club.

  “Well, I was thinking that,” I say. “I didn’t actually say it.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  He looks me up and down and motions obliquely to the maid and she daintily grabs the golf club like it’s a dead rattlesnake and staggers away on her heels as primly as she can on the grass as a misty rain falls on Twilight and me standing unmoving like statues of the great men we are believed to be.

  “You been fightin’ the good fight, Zeph?” he asks.

  “Mostly scrapping with some jumped up hoods in the Bronx, somehow got themselves super powers,” I say, fearing Twilight looks bored. “Sal Doro’s dead too. That’s what sort of led to this.”

  “I can put the word out to Frost for you if you want,” he says and shrugs. “I guess technically she’s on my payroll. You know I don’t manage the day-to-day of that sort of thing.”

  “I guess it’s not an easy fit,” I say, jackal’s grin as I try to tread the twisting path between camaraderie and criticism. “Hard being a superhero type while also getting left in charge of your uncle’s criminal syndicate.”

  Twilight’s look is stone.

  “Well you remember what I always say, I’m sure, little buddy.”

  “Don’t fucking call me that.”

  “You remember?” he asks, one brow raised, and I nod.

  “You’re an antihero,” I say. “I know. I get it.”

  “Anything else I can do for you, Zeph?” Twilight motions around. “I mean, last time I checked I was only housing and damn near feeding you. Now I’m setting you up on dates. You want to bang one of my girls? Borrow some coin?”

  There’s not much I can say to his baiting because he’s right.

  On my phone there is a photo of a list I made in lipstick on a night that tasted of desperation, and getting somewhere solid to live was one of those burgundy-smudged dot points. Last time I checked I did OK with the whole finding-my-mother’s-killer thing, so I guess it’s about time I moved down the list.

  I give one last regard to Twilight standing there probably hoping I’ll take a crack at him, mindful of the deep and murky past we share. I give a fey smile that doesn’t quite reach my eyes and tip an imaginary hat and half bow, half retreat as I spin about and walk off a few
paces and do the crouch thing and blast into the wintering sky.

  *

  THE MOTEL HAS a better view over the city than most penthouses, but it’s more an aberration than deliberate design, so I am reassured there’s no huge bill waiting for me as I alight on the roof of the superstructure as the day darkens into dusk and the rain hammers down like revenge, the roof exit beside the cracked and junk-filled pool that was too expensive to maintain letting me into the dank stairwell carpeted to shoulder height in what smells like rotting sheepskins, a busboy in a little red cap, his sleeves rolled back to show fiery tattoos giving me a look of menace from pierced brows as I check the text from Streethawk and move down the line of scuffed doors dented from the frustrated ministrations of past jilted lovers.

  I knock and Loren lets me in looking agitated and ten years older than she should be. It’s hard not to squint at the wear and tear, though I don’t know if it’s the life into which she’s fallen that’s aging her so badly or the withdrawal from her powers.

  It’s also hard to shield her from my reluctant look and she gives me another of those world famous wounded deer frowns that would break my heart of it wasn’t already taped together suspended in a shitty second-hand diaper. I know it seems like a reinforcement of all the betrayal of lovelessness she identified in our time together – a diagnosis I never felt was really accurate, however much I failed to offer any better argument for why she gave so much and so freely of herself to me and the best I could manage was kind words and regular sex, my heart, quite literally almost, not really in it.

  The shame for me is that I let myself lure her to her near-death before realizing the woman deserved better – and sure as shit didn’t deserve Arsenal’s barbecue ambush. The agony clearly haunts her still and is as much a catalyst for this strange thirst of hers as anything, I realise in the nanoseconds it takes me to move into the room and for Loren to reclaim her position sitting on the edge of the soiled queen-sized bed, the TV tuned to what I mistake to be a cartoon channel when in fact it’s just a series of advertisements for a new nougat-and-acai berry bar endorsed by Swedish hero Thunderfall.

  “You didn’t have to come here,” Loren says. “Or come looking for me at all. You don’t owe me anything, Joe.”

  “Loren, I need you to explain what’s happened.”

  “What part of my life falling apart don’t you understand?” she asks, suddenly fierce.

  “That’s not what I mean. I can see you’re angry.”

  “I’m not angry, I’m –”

  “OK, you seem angry. I’m sorry. I don’t understand how you have your powers back,” I tell her, déjà vu like arguing with my ex-wife all over again.

  “Do I look like I have my powers?” Loren asks with a weak laugh, her arms raised.

  “It did earlier.”

  “Yeah,” she says, smacking her lips in dissatisfaction as she stares out the gap in the curtains over the city lighting up like the wonderland it might’ve once seemed to this girl hell-bent on escaping middle America. “That’s the Glow.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s hard to get. It’s a drug. Gives you powers. For a short while.”

  “I haven’t heard of it before,” I say.

  “Yeah. It’s . . . just been developed, I guess.”

  “And those other guys you were with, they had powers too?”

  “Those are my teammates,” Loren says.

  “You’re gonna have to explain that.”

  “We’re doing what we can in the barrio,” she says. “I’m done with high class hero-ing like you. I need the Glow. But I need to have a purpose too. Joe, when I close my eyes, I can still see Arsenal pointing that goddamn thing at me.”

  “Arsenal’s dead.”

  Loren blinks. “He is?”

  She stands, moving with her back to me at the window.

  “I’m not sure how I feel about that . . . how I’m supposed to feel about that.”

  “You ain’t supposed to feel any –”

  “Did you do it? Kill him?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Joe,” she says, turning around and shocking me all over again with how timeworn she appears. The glorious beauty I once knew is gone. Or seemingly. It hovers like a ghost awaiting the fuel of her departed powers. “Don’t bullshit me, Mr Zephyr. You like the heavy hand of justice when it suits you, and you’re not above dishing it out as you see fit.”

  “I took Arsenal out of action. Someone else killed him.”

  I stare at the curtains a moment, then force myself to meet her eyes.

  “What do you mean by ‘a purpose’?”

  “I’m a junkie, Joe. I’m not fooling myself about that,” she says plaintively. “I need the Glow and I need to be Seeker again. I don’t ever wanna go back to being this weak. But to do that, I have to pay. And if I’m going to pay for it, I want to put it to good use. To have at least a little part of my life back.”

  She explains in more of that little girl monotone how the drug helps normal people manifest powers, but once they’ve flared, they don’t last long and renewed doses only rekindle those powers instead of giving new ones. The process seems as random as a kid hit by lightning suddenly being able to fly and throw thunderbolts, but knowing what I know these days, I guess the lightning bolt was a freak occurrence necessary to trigger what was already latent in my genes from my mother Catchfire and this Strummer guy I am still yet to track.

  I’m still getting my head around what Loren’s telling me when there’s a couple of loud raps on the door and Loren freezes with a guilty expression. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle and I turn at the waist to shoot the door a baleful look.

  “Come in,” I say.

  And in walks Loren’s dealer.

  Zephyr 16.12 “Up And Walking”

  AT FIRST I think Bono has walked into the motel room. The guy is broader in the body, but he has the slicked-back dark hair, broad chin and yellow-tinted sunglasses completely unnecessary in the dim lighting. A fur coat reveals plenty of bling, and on his right hand he wears one of those immense pieces of jewelry I’m loath to call a ring. It’s more like a diamond-encrusted knuckle duster. But it’s the muscle with him that rings my warning bell: none other than Cosa Nostra-employed villain Gravitas – another one technically, somewhere on its corrupt family tree, on Twilight’s payroll.

  “Well well,” I say as the duo saunter into the room, a glimpse of several more mooks outside.

  I meet Gravitas’ eyes, the heavyset guy in a thick jacket, anonymous fatigue pants and GP boots, face mask set with eyepieces that suggest infravision and a bunch of other sensory enhancements.

  “Last time we tussled you ended up in White Nine. I’m surprised to see you up and walking around.”

  Gravitas doesn’t say anything. The bozo with the bling saunters up close, a few inches shorter than me, and looks up my nose like some manner of hyper-evolved rodent.

  “Friends in high places,” the guy says with no apparent sense of irony at all.

  He snaps off the contact and turns to Loren, opening his arms for a hug like a creepy uncle. I’m appalled to see Loren sheepishly slide from the bed towards him.

  “Who’s my girl, huh?”

  “Loren,” I say. “Please back the fuck away from this guy before you get hurt.”

  “You gonna hurt her?” the drug dealer asks.

  “No. I’m going to hurt you.”

  “No one threatens the Leech,” the guy snaps, clearly lost to his own hubris.

  He says it in that way that always makes me think people actually want me to smash them, though that interpretation might say more about my pathology than the Leech. I pull Loren directly out of harm’s way only to have the sunglasses-wearing Mafioso give an uncharitable grin and slap his hand into the middle of my back.

  It feels like a bee sting, accompanied by the crackle of what feels like my own powers triggering, some kind of manic self-defense response which coincides with my suddenly wo
ndering why anyone would want to call themselves a leech.

  With Loren thrown onto the bed like some dime novel damsel, I swivel ready to give this piece of shit what he’s so clearly asking for, but even as I wind up my fist and drink in every inch of his slimy gleaming smirk, the inert ceiling fan reflected in his yellow specs, something feels outright wrong and I pause at the fulcrum of my punch and scowl, maybe even voice my confusion aloud as Leech’s grin widens and his fist crackles with an eerily familiar charge as he socks me with my own powers.

  The punch takes me in the middle of the sternum, blowing me back across the room and basically turning the in-house television to dust, chunks of plastic and wiring disintegrating under my weight as I struggle to right myself.

  My powers aren’t gone, just lessened – like this Leech wiseass has siphoned off about half. There’s strength in my fists and power in my veins, but it’s not what I’m used to wielding. The realization only deepens my scowl.

  I see Gravitas slow to the party, pushing off from his arms-folded position inside the door to throw his hand wide in a move where I know what comes next if I’m not quick enough.

  And you know what?

  That’s right.

  I’m not quick enough.

  *

  THE WEIGHT OF the world is on me. The worst thing is having to watch Gravitas’ smug grin as he slowly applies the vice hold from the other side of the room, doubling, tripling, quadrupling the pull of the Earth’s gravitational field on me and so on, until the floor beneath me starts to crack and suddenly, weighing a few dozen ton, I fall through the buckling floor and into the empty hotel room below.

  It’s just a momentary pause in my transit. On impact, the floor of this room starts to groan too, wheezing like an old man getting up at midnight to change his piss bags. A second later and there’s another catastrophe as I plunge through and down and its only my remaining powers that save me from getting cheese-gratered to death as I smash into the next and subsequent remaining floors of the building.