Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  I hear more than actually see Raptor roll something in the back of his throat, but I duck as a jet of something wet and disgusting sails past my shoulder. Negator turns my way, heedless of the flying loogie, and I spread my arms wide in shrill panic.

  “Don’t let him fucking spit on you!”

  Negator’s masked brow furrows, and while he mightn’t understand the instruction, he knows at least to heed it. And heed it he does. Raptor hawks again and the wicked speculation sizzles past Negator’s face by a matter of inches, after which the nimble, almost monkey-sized opponent cavorts away as Negator sails in to swing a few punches.

  “What gives?” Negator asks, frustrated in the aftermath of hitting nothing but air. “Acid spit?”

  “Worse. The guy jizzes LSD.”

  “Holy shit.”

  The outbreak of chaos and the stampeding of the first lab rats to desert the sinking ship buoys a couple of the remaining doofuses to liberate the weapons of their betters, and suddenly I find myself on the wrong side of the room as a kid not much older than my daughter stands up in a look of almost drunken defiance and flicks off the safety on his easy-come Tec-9, pointing it right at Tessa as she alights on the ground and scans for threats like she’s been trained to do – and completely fails to see him.

  It’s my very worst fear as a superhero dad and I’m right here to see it.

  Maybe the guy doesn’t register. The light’s not great, and mine and Negator’s carry-on is a big distraction. Still, I bellow Tessa’s name, secret identities be damned, and she looks not at me but thankfully at the guy with the sidearm, but not in time to get the fuck out of the way as he fires a burst at her dead to rights.

  Zephyr 17.10 “Black And White Hell”

  WINDSONG WAVES HER arm like she has a magic wand or something, and a wind so sudden, fierce and powerful swirls unseen before her that it causes the half-dozen lead rounds to veer away by the narrowest margin, the bullets ploughing into the wooden support pillar by her arm instead of my dear darling daughter’s fragile flesh.

  “Motherfucker!” I yell without cue or caution.

  My electrical blast is more like a rectal probe as I light the guy up and leave him dancing long enough I fancy I see his skeleton glow. Then he drops to the ground out cold and I am vaguely conscious of Raptor passing by overhead, scuttling along underneath the roof beams, so I power across the room and slam into Tessa at the same time I hug her, both of us flyers, twisting her about as I renew my warning to a wider audience.

  “Don’t let that fucking guy touch you!” I say and point as Raptor flips down from a shadowed sconce to kick Streethawk in the chest with both feet.

  The ‘Hawk flies back, tipping over some boxes, then dodges a loogie and shoots a panicked, freaked-out and slightly offended look my way.

  “Just trust me,” I say again.

  What follows is comedy to make Charlie Chaplin proud as we big tough superheroes leap and jump and dive and scream like little girls as the one little mean green streak moves between us, still about the work of his masters as he creates sufficient chaos that the bulk of the lab workers escape.

  I drop behind one of those stacks of crates that would normally come toppling down at any moment, a devil-may-care attitude not of my own choosing as I scan about for sign of Raptor and note my ringing phone that I answer with a snap.

  “Zephyr, is that you? It’s Detective Murphy. Tiger Murphy.”

  “What an inconvenient or perhaps I should say fortuitous time for you to call, detective,” I shout breathlessly into the phone. “Seems like your pals at the FBI couldn’t muster the interest. I know you’re homicide and all, but I’m at a clandestine drug house outside of East Hackensack that could do with a half-dozen custody vans if you were so mindful.”

  “And there was I wanting to pick your brain about the death of Sal Doro,” she says. “Leave your phone on and I’ll ping your GPS. Stand by.”

  I nod to that rather pointlessly, shucking away the still connected phone as Raptor bounds over the tall stack of crates and lands right in front of me. Nearby, I can hear Mastodon screaming or crying or both, hands to his face as the lysergic throat cocktail does its sordid business.

  Before Raptor can repeat the trick with me, I grab him quick as a flash by the throat, powering up my right hand to punch his skull in if I have to.

  “Wait,” the lizard-tongued freak says quickly.

  He puts his hands up as I snarl with dissatisfaction. Sensing perhaps I’m not going to go easy on him, while still in my clutches, Raptor runs up my body and flings his legs in a lock around the arm by which I’m holding him, throwing me off-balance and scampering free the same instant. We come up facing each other and again Raptor adopts the wait-and-see pose, prehensile tail wagging a finger of warning.

  “What is it?” I snap.

  “There’s too many of you,” he hisses. “I’ll go. No foul. Just back off.”

  “You think I’m gonna let you go, just like that?”

  “If you want to spend the next twenty minutes playing Snakes and Ladders, be my guest,” Raptor says sibilantly. “I heard you on the phone. Cops coming. You want the Toecutter’s daughter, not me, right?”

  I pick up a dropped package of Glow and hold it out to him like it’s the Arkenstone.

  “And to stop this shit,” I say.

  “So you should,” Raptor says, untroubled by the syllables as his quick tongue plays over his pebbled lips and black eyes flick to every corner of the room. “Stuff’s no good. Upsets the balance of power.”

  “Glad you can see it that way,” I say. “Shame it didn’t stop you helping them traffic it.”

  Raptor shrugs, mentally halfway to the door already.

  “Matters not,” he hisses. “Rots the junkies’ bones. A year on Glow and you’re done. Let them be done with it and we’re done with them.”

  He snaps his black-eyed gaze to the bundle in my hand and when I follow suit, he’s gone, seemingly replaced by the clarion call of sirens wafting on the night air.

  I turn over Raptor’s words much like the kilo of Glow in my hand, backing off after a moment and almost walking straight into Seeker, Gaslight and Rocky.

  “We followed through on our end of the bargain,” Loren says.

  “You can close this place down, but the cops don’t need all of that,” Rocky says.

  The trio strain at invisible leashes, but my eyes are only for Loren, a sad look on my face as Raptor’s warning plays over and over again in my mind – and yet the sheer pointlessness of it all is too much for me. I toss her the key and she catches it, the three of them immediately backing away.

  “That stuff is bad for you,” I say.

  “No shit, Joey,” Seeker replies.

  She turns to her pals. They nod as one. Hell, they’re practically gone already – and gone before I can finally untie the sudden knot in my tongue and really warn Loren about what she clearly knows in one form or another already.

  That stuff is going to kill her, even if she thinks she can’t live without it.

  *

  AS THE CRUISER doors slam and the first cops start into the warehouse barking orders and waving away their impotence with drawn guns, I walk through the ruins of the drug operation and into the control room at Negator and Streethawk’s unspoken behest.

  There’s a couple of swivel seats on their sides, some porno mags and a bank of cheap security monitors. It only takes a second to realize not all of them are hooked up to our present location.

  On the screen on the top left, Twilight hangs by his wrists in a black-and-white hell, the bulk of his body straining off the edge of the frame. Going by the look on his lantern-jawed mug alone, exhaustion has chewed the edge off his distress. There isn’t much detail to the scene except a glimpse of bare brick wall etched with what’s clearly a magickal circle. I can’t see any actual restraints, which again makes my intuition prickle.

  “We need to find him,” I muse aloud to the others.

 
“What about this Danica woman?”

  “We’ll find out what we can,” I say to Negator. “But if they bushwhacked Twilight, chances are he’s the one who knows what’s what.”

  “He doesn’t look like he knows what’s what,” Streethawk opines.

  I stare at the man-god on the tiny screen and suppress a quiver of violent fantasy rage, thinking for a moment I might just leave the piece of shit to rot wherever he is.

  “How those bygones going?” Negator jokes.

  I shake my head, dismissing the elephant in the room of my own thwarted vengeance, looking instead back to a faintly bemused Streethawk.

  “We need to find him,” I say.

  “I can’t tell you where he is, but I can follow the trail and lead you there.”

  “It’s a big city.”

  “Then I’m gonna need some wheels,” he says. “And I don’t mean that damn bus.”

  I nod, challenge accepted, and we roll out of the room as Tiger and Crane sweep into the crime scene like the royalty of police they are.

  *

  “FANCY FINDING YOU in the middle of a crime scene yet again,” Detective John Crane blurts as I shoulder past a few beat cops only now holstering their unneeded weapons. “Trouble follows you like a bad smell, Zephyr – you and your colorful friends.”

  Crane stops at his own statement as he comes face-to-face with Negator. The free but not exactly reformed one-time villain stops, drawing himself up to his full height, a match for the lanky plainclothes cop, his beaky midnight blue mask a sardonic commedia dell’arte visage compared to Crane’s graven features. After a beat, Negator merely nods, gives a sarcastic smirk and slides off to one side leaving me to play diplomat.

  I guess you could say we’ve got our own good-cop, bad-cop thing going.

  “And I didn’t think there was a need for homicide cops when no one’s died,” I tell Crane and shrug, mock earnestly, looking around like an innocent bystander. “Still, you want to tell Commissioner Journey how we saved the taxpayer a bunch tonight, busted a drug syndicate your guys didn’t even know about, and took a heap of perps off the street –”

  “Or put them in hospital.”

  “– or put them in hospital for a month or two, whatever, you know, you can thank us any way you want,” I say with my usual brusque finish. “A civic parade really shouldn’t be out of the question.”

  “Oh, pull your fucking ego out of your ass, Zephyr.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense, detective,” I answer.

  Tiger Murphy literally brushes her partner aside with a scornful frown, channeling her inner saint to manage a beatific smile accompanied by a deep breath.

  “Zephyr’s right that we’re a bit out of our territory here, John, but I think we can all agree this is a good outcome for the city regardless of the . . . unorthodox methods used.”

  “Let’s call a spade a spade here, Tiger, and say ‘wanton acts of unlawful vigilantism’,” her partner replies.

  My abrupt laugh doesn’t do anything for Crane’s complexion and Tiger steers me aside, me more than happy to stroll through the half-smashed crime lab with the comely lady cop, tempted in fact to offer her my arm like we’re just on a midnight stroll of fin-de-siecle Paris by gaslight. The moment we’re away from Crane though, Tiger’s expression hardens as she rounds on me with a snarl as convincing as her namesake.

  “How about more than five minutes’ head start next time, Zephyr?”

  “Look, I told the FBI and they couldn’t deal –”

  “Drug-running in Atlantic City is city police business, not Federal,” she snaps. “Better to call a homicide cop to collar drug dealers than call in the Feebs, OK?”

  “They sort of have me by the balls on this one,” I shrug. “Actually, it’s a bit more like one of those leash-on-an-Arab-strap contraptions, if you get my gist?”

  “A vivid image.”

  “I would rather it was your hand on the leash than –”

  “OK, let’s cut it out, Zephyr. I didn’t think I could ever bathe enough to get over letting you sleep with me last time, so enough with the superhero charm.”

  “We . . . had sex . . . before?”

  Tiger stares at me. Edit: Tiger stares daggers at me.

  “I’m just going to walk away now,” she says, “and be grateful I have a serious collar I can take back to my superiors while I forget about the major fucking insult you just paid me. Thanks a bunch.”

  “Hey, I remember.” Admittedly a little late.

  “No you don’t,” she snaps. “I’m a detective, Zephyr. I can tell when you’re lying.”

  “But I’m wearing a mask.”

  Tiger sighs deeply and starts to walk away, unfortunately with me tagging along behind.

  “So how was I? Everything you’d imagined.”

  “Fuck you and, um, oh yeah . . . fuck you,” she says.

  “I always wondered why, when I imagined getting it on with you, it felt so believable, you know? I guess even I don’t sometimes realize when I’m remembering instead of, you know –”

  “What? Just jerking off?”

  “Look, Tiger, I’m sorry about that. And, uh, I need to requisition a vehicle.”

  Murphy grinds to a halt again. This time we’re alongside the collected stacks of kilo doggy bags, underscoring my/our usefulness to the whole operation. A cute scowl crosses her Irish features. And I am fond of the Irish, as you may recall.

  “Guys in tights don’t requisition vehicles, Zephyr,” Tiger says. “Give me your intel and I will tell you what I can do and if I can make a call.”

  “This raid was only phase one in a bigger plan,” I tell her.

  “I need to know the rest of your plan then.”

  “When I know what it is, I’ll send you an MMS.”

  She stares at me somewhere between incredulity and (if I’m not mistaken) overwhelmed by the power of my awesomeness. Or something. She emits what might be a long sigh from other women, but from Tiger sounds instead more like an electric kettle coming to boil if you’re talking about an electric kettle designed by Think-Tank or Dr Destruction.

  “OK, how about just a motorbike?”

  Zephyr 17.11 “Labyrinthine”

  I DON’T KNOW if it’s all Streethawk’s Village People fantasies come at once or if he is just beholden to the vicarious thrill in riding a police motorcycle at full speed across the city’s streets. I may have implied that we were stealing it to give him a little bit more juice for his cop fantasies. Either way, Negator and I follow in the air several hundred feet off the ground as a brittle snowfall renders the scenery all nostalgic and shit, sugar-coating the drab and dreary factories giving way onto industrial units giving way onto clustered trailer homes in turn giving way to the outer suburbia that sweeps like an architectural virus all the way south to Staten Island.

  My daughter Windsong was pissed to be dismissed so easily for the evening. No way in hell am I going to let her come with us into the middle of a completely unplanned shit-fight, especially if there’s dark magic involved. The argument that she had to stay back and “look after Uncle Mastodon” didn’t fly, however much it was needed. The poor old bastard was off his gourd after inhaling a prime dose of Raptor’s best shit. I would’ve almost expected the old man to hand me his credit card for the pleasure if only he wasn’t so busy shrieking about “man-bats” and “centaurs” and crying for his mother and explaining that “little people are scratching in my anus”. I guess that’s one ride you don’t necessarily want to buy a ticket for.

  Streethawk steers the machine south, unerringly guided by his deep neural connection to the city that makes him invaluable back-up in almost any shit-going-down situation from South Maine to the outer environs of Atlanta. When he hand-waves us down and slows the bike a quarter-mile from a secluded, high-walled estate, three hours have elapsed in the night and I’m ravenous, yet again a million miles from one of those Gunga Diner-cum-Starbuckses when I need one. Negator and I drop beside the p
olice bike as Streethawk leans the beast against a two hundred-year-old stone wall festooned with ivy and a living carpet of lichen.

  “Rich part of the city,” I tell him, breath coming out in plumes.

  “Not really part of the city, either,” the ‘Hawk answers. “Or at least that’s what it’s telling me, so my role ends here.”

  “Really?”

  “Your gal-pal’s in there,” Streethawk gestures beyond the wall obscuring our vision of the presumably palatial estate. “Go get ‘im.”

  “You’re not coming?” Negator asks.

  “Me? I’d be about as much use in there as. . . .” His words trail off and his eyes cloud over as he shrugs. “Yeah OK, I guess I’m kickass wherever I go, but I’m not going in there. Not blind.”

  “Blind?” Again, Negator.

  “Don’t make me explain it, dude,” the ‘Hawk says. “Just trust me when I say after half a lifetime attached by a psychic umbilicus to the city, I’m not comfortable going solo.”

  “Aaaand he explains it,” I say, a quick showman’s grin, then metaphorically dust my hands off. “If you’re not coming with us, maybe you can try and get a head start on locating Danica Azzurro. That would be handy.”

  “I look like a fuckin’ auto-teller to you?” he says. “Shit. Give me a few hours.”

  I pause a moment, squinting at him. “That quick? I thought it took you months to track down Loren?”

  “Yeah, well . . . It wasn’t quite the same urgency,” he says.

  I stare a moment longer. Streethawk shrugs.

  “And I forgot.”

  “OK, great. Thanks for the directions. Happy trails, asshole.”

  The ‘Hawk only laughs.

  “OK, good luck, hombres. I’ll be interested to find out how this one ends.”

  I take a deep breath and nod. “Me too.”