In Hero Years... I'm Dead Delux Edition

by Michael A. Stackpole

  “Nurse says she should be okay. We’ll get these guys.”

  I nodded. I understood. “You want to take my statement now?”

  “No need.”

  Maybe I didn’t understand. “You already got them?”

  “Nope.”

  “But…”

  “When I said ‘we’ I meant you and me.” He smiled. Generously even, a bit of bemusement curling his lips. “I talked to my grandfather. He never liked you.”

  “I hear that a lot.”

  “But he said you were a scrapper. For a guy who…”

  “… who was just a Felix?”

  “Yeah, just a Felix, he said you were good. Needed some seasoning, and he saw to it that you got it. Never liked you, but wouldn’t be worried if you had his back.”

  Okay, so the original Colonel Constitution is senile. I frowned. “I’m still in the dark here.”

  “It’s simple.” Constitution began to pace. “There’s a war coming. Good versus evil, the whole deal. It’s the big one, the one you fought to hold at bay. And I’m lining up all the forces of good to oppose things. I’m getting good troops. Vixen just signed on.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I was talking with her when you called. She’d agreed because she realized something had to be done.” He turned toward the window and the illuminated skyline. “This city is at a tipping point. The Hall of Fame, Little Asia, the Haste murder, they’re all pearls on a string. Some folks don’t want to see the string, but I do. I mean, I don’t want it to exist, but I know it does. And it’s my job to see to it that the string doesn’t break the city. I have great troops to aid me, but I need more. I need you.”

  I blinked. “You’re joking.”

  “No joke. Look, all these kids, they’re good, they’re strong, but they don’t have seasoning. I’ve got lots of privates, I need some sergeants. I need squad leaders who can direct them.”

  “Direct them doing what?”

  “More of what we’re doing right now. Our sweeps have been rounding up gang members. The jails are stuffed. We’ve had to convert the Armory into a temporary holding facility. It’s a great leap forward, a successful surge, but I need more if I’m going to stabilize this city.”

  He turned, his eyes alive and focused elsewhere. “When my grandfather started out, this was a city you could be proud of. People were polite. They didn’t litter. They had respect. They believed in God and country and duty and made sacrifices for the good of all. We can be that way again. With your help, we will be.”

  “What does the mayor think of this little plan?”

  “Doesn’t matter. He’s a lame duck. It isn’t his city anymore. He doesn’t have the stones to save it.”

  “Looked like he had stones in Little Asia.”

  “He’s good at little problems. This is too big for him.” Constitution jerked a thumb toward where Selene lay. “The guys who did that are a symptom, and he’s ignoring the disease. I’m going to cure it, and I want you on my team.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “Oh, yes, we’ll win.”

  “Not with me on your team.” I shook my head. “I’d never join you.”

  He stiffened. “I see, then.”

  “What is it you see? If I’m not with you, I’m against you?” I laughed. “Idiot, if I was against you, I’d join you.”

  “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

  “The problem is that you think in black and white, good and evil. You wouldn’t know nuance if it slapped you in the face. Which it never would.” I stood and jabbed a finger against his chest. “Deep down inside you know you’re wrong. That’s why you’ve asked me to join you. You won’t admit it. You won’t look at the evidence and choose another path.”

  “There’s a lot of stuff going on here that you don’t know about.”

  “And my incentive to trust your analysis would be?”

  Before he could answer, the lounge door swung inward. It framed Grant for a moment as he gave Kid Icthy a glare that said, “Touch me and you’re a fish-stick.”

  Constitution snorted. “You’re another one. You call yourselves heroes, but you rest on your laurels. Cold, dead, old, musty, moldy laurels. You’re needed now, and you do nothing.”

  Grant’s hands balled into a fist and a half. “There may come a day when you have earned the right to say that to me, but it’s not today. You may have inherited a grand tradition, but it wasn’t you that built it. Now, go away, little boy.”

  “I’m watching you two.” He stared hard to emphasize that point, then swept out of the room. A snap of his fingers and his two attendants marched in lock step with him.

  Grant looked at me. “How is she?”

  “They want a neuro work-up, but they’re hopeful. Vicki can fill you in.” I scrubbed a hand over my face. “I can’t be here right now.”

  He rested a hand on my shoulder. “You can’t let Constitution get to you like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “His dream of a utopia that never was.”

  “You heard?”

  “He tried to recruit me two days ago.”

  I snorted. “So it took him this long to troll for Felixes?”

  “Don’t let that get to you, either. You’re better off retired.”

  “You know what is driving me nuts?” I hugged my arms around myself. “It’s the fact he’s right.”

  “He’s not.”

  “Yes, he is, Grant, but you don’t let yourself see it. You know, you told me that heroing is a game for the young, but you were wrong. It’s not a game at all, and when you define it as a game, you frame it so that the maximum number of people get hurt.”

  I pointed to the cityscape. “Constitution said it was a war out there, and he’s right. All the rules and the system, it may have been made to provide stability, but wars are not stable. Why do you think men have tried to establish rules for warfare?”

  “To limit war’s savagery.”

  “You’re smarter than that, Grant. The ‘rules of warfare’ do one thing: they to limit responsibility for acts of war, nothing more. The savagery always happens, by design or by accident. There is always collateral damage. Someone will always go and spray up a village. As sure as there is war, for every soldier who gets shot, there will be a dozen civilians who die.

  “So politicians make rules to save themselves. Someone does something that appalls you, you declare it out of bounds, a foul, a crime. You contain the responsibility so it doesn’t accrue to you. You make it so you can’t get blamed.”

  My eyes tightened. “And don’t tell me you don’t know that. Look at ordinary laws. There are only two reasons laws get passed: for convenience, and to get officials reelected–to make it look like they’re doing something. That’s it. Roaming gangs of murderers are inconvenient, so murder is illegal. Lowering speed limits, which would save countless lives, isn’t done because longer transport times are inconvenient for commerce. Outlawing peanut butter is all about pretending to address a problem–people failing to take personal responsibility for their actions–not about saving some prom queen from dying after her peanut-butter-munching boyfriend kisses her.”

  Grant shook his head. “You have a point, but you know there is more to laws than you say.”

  “You’re dreaming, Grant. Not only are laws established for convenience, they’re selectively enforced at the whim of politicians who seek to gain publicity. Celebrity law rules. If you’re a celebrity, you do rehab and community service while others rot in a jail. A superstar villain gets high-powered legal help and remains on the street while a petty thief does time.”

  “That’s part… that’s how things are done.”

  I laughed. “You were about to say ‘that’s part of the game.’ But my point is that it’s not part of a game. You were always one who did heroing on a grand scale, because you could. You could make a major difference when there was some grand tragedy. That’s great, but me, Puma
, Nighthaunt, we were all about smaller problems. We were about justice because sometimes the law, for whatever reason, didn’t administer justice. It wasn’t a game then, and it’s not a game now.”

  I looked up at him. “And by defining it as a game, you let yourself off the hook. You don’t have to assume responsibility, no more so than a kid with a peanut allergy. And, you know, you did your time. You paid the price. I get that. I respect it. You’ve earned your retirement, but I haven’t.”

  “And you think you can do something out there?” Grant spread his arms. “Who do you think you are? You got your ass kicked by a street gang, same as Nighthaunt did. If Constitution’s war is coming, you’re only fit for being a casualty.”

  “And now Nighthaunt’s a casualty. So’s Selene. I might as well be, too.” I gave him a last look, then headed for the door. “But before I’m a casualty, I’m tossing the board over. I’m breaking the rules. It’s not a game. Mr. Big knows it. I’m not going to let him win.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  I’d been right about the bottle. Nighthaunt had been incredibly clever and, as always, resourceful. Somehow I imagined Ethelred had actually done the work for him. It was absolutely perfect and had I not been looking closely, I would have missed it.

  On the back label, Capital City Spirits Distribution was listed as the authorized agent. Real company, real address, real computer address—part of the Haste empire. The phone number, however, didn’t match. When I punched it into a reverse directory, it gave me the Bluebelle Motel down in Devil’s Dump. It was no stretch to imagine that extension 207 referred to a room.

  I had a starting place. Two, actually, and one was on the way to the motel. I loaded up with two shock rods and filled pouches in a utility belt, all of which I hid under a nice, heavy coat which conveniently concealed my body armor.

  Then I went hunting.

  Rule number one, if you don’t want to be found: don’t use your credit card to open a bar tab.

  Becker hunched himself over a beer, tape on his nose and both of his eyes blacked. They’d stitched his left hand together. He’d not been changing the bandages–nicotine stains and a bright splash of yellow mustard made that much apparent. He’d let the cut get infected, too.

  His flesh was hot to the touch.

  And tender.

  Especially when I squeezed.

  His scream silenced everything in the place but the juke box and the click of billiard balls. He was screaming more from surprise than pain, so I squeezed again, harder, to get the right proportion of agony in there. He clutched at my left wrist, then grabbed for his beer bottle to break it.

  “You better be thinking of sawing your hand off with that. Not enough sutures in the city to put you back together if you’re planning anything else.”

  Becker froze, bottle upraised, the remains of the beer pouring into his right sleeve.

  A couple guys in the back started forward. One brandished a pool cue.

  I shook my head. “One step closer and I’ll shove that so far up your ass you’ll be puking toothpicks. You know Becker’s a skid-mark. Is he really worth a month in traction?”

  Becker’s acquaintances didn’t question my logic. Keeping his hand in the pincer-grip, I pulled Becker outside, then spun him into an alley. He fell over a trash barrel, then got up to run. A well-thrown shock rod clipped his heels. He careened off the wall and rolled onto his back. Blood trickled from a gash on his forehead.

  He held his hands up. “Please, don’t hurt me.”

  “Don’t hurt me more. Isn’t that what you mean?”

  “Yeah, no more, no more.”

  I loomed, my shadow blanketing him. “You know why I’m here.”

  “I won’t be you no more, I promise.” He made the sign of the cross to impress me.

  “That goes without saying.” I crouched and recovered the shock-rod. “Who sent you to sell those trinkets to Castigan?”

  “It was my idea.”

  I smacked him on the meaty part of his leg. “You know what? You need to try being me just for a bit longer. Try being that part of me that isn’t so stupid that I’d lie right now.”

  “I’m not…”

  THWACK. “Patience is finite and ebbing. I’ve got twenty years of frustration to work out. Want me to start now?”

  “I don’t know who. He sent Barry, my brother-in-law.”

  My eyes narrowed. “One of the Drunken Bandits.”

  “Yeah. Said he had an opportunity. He’d get me in, but I had to do something first. I had to go and I had to get you to take a swing at me.” He hugged his injured hand to his chest. “When the girl did me, Barry laughed. Said I was out, out of the biggest score ever.”

  “When? Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I cracked the shock-rod down on his foot. He yelped. “You know something, and you’re going to tell me. Then you’re going to get back into the score.”

  His eyes tightened just for a millisecond. “Really, I don’t…”

  “Wrong, you do. You know the when of it. Tell me.”

  My guess about the half he did know surprised him. “Okay, okay, it’s tonight. After ten. Barry doesn’t know where. He’s waiting on a call.”

  “So you’re going to call him and get back in.”

  “But I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. You’ve got new information.” I gently tapped his kneecap with the shock-rod. “Pass along the fact that Selene Kole didn’t die. That’ll get you in. When you learn where, you call me and let me know.”

  “I can’t. They’ll kill me.”

  “You’ll call. If you don’t, I won’t kill you, but you’ll wish I had.”

  “But how do I know she’s not dead?”

  “You were at the hospital getting your bandage changed, moron. Haste Memorial. Go. Now.”

  He looked hopeful. “I call you, then we’re even?”

  I laughed the way I used to.

  He grew pale.

  “We’ll never be even.” I lifted his chin with the tip of the shock-rod. “But, if you’re lucky, I may forget just how much you owe me.”

  I took the CRAWL to Devil’s Dump. Every other passenger looked like he might be heading to whatever was going on at ten. A lot of them gave me hard stares. I raised them with completely insane stares, at once intense and slightly unfocused. They couldn’t be sure if I was challenging them, or just seeing right through them, but no one decided to press the issue.

  In part I was looking right through them. Someone had been pushing me, testing me. He wanted to see if the retirement thing was true or not. When he didn’t get the answer he wanted, he defaulted to the one-percent-solution. If there was a one-percent chance I wasn’t retired, he dealt with me as if it was a one-hundred-percent certainty that I was acting against him.

  The thing was, I’d passed every test with flying colors. I’d not brokered any information. I’d not taken a punch at Becker. The most aggressive thing I’d done was train at Grant’s place, but anyone who knew me enough to assess me as a threat should have known I was useless without intelligence.

  But Mr. Big thought I knew something. I’d been bugged. He’d heard my conversation with Nighthaunt. He had to assume I’d feel some obligation to avenge Nighthaunt, and he couldn’t know how much information Nighthaunt had given me. He had to treat me as a huge threat.

  The funny thing was, if he’d not pushed, I’d not be after him. More importantly, if he’d popped me into the vault instead of Selene, he would have eliminated the threat. Picking Selene was meant to torture me, and that meant a personal angle was complicating things.

  And personal narrowed down candidates.

  Taking the fire escape up to room 207 and breaking in wasn’t difficult. I popped the closet’s secret door and hit paydirt. Mr. Big’s uniform hung there, or a version of it. This one hadn’t been used for a bit. A pocket torch revealed a couple hairs on the lapel–black and gray respectively. More importantly, however, the shoes yielde
d two-inch lifts, accounting for a chunk of Mr. Big’s height.

  But in that suspect pool, someone with black and grey hair who uses lifts stood out. Greg Greylan. No love lost between us, that’s for sure. He could have struck at Selene to punish her for helping me.

  Then it hit me. After the memorial service he’d let it slip that Nighthaunt and I had talked. He covered himself well, but it had been a slip.

  It all began to cascade together. Redhawk had worked to make the city safe and never got the acclaim for it he should have. He’d moved into politics to eclipse Nighthaunt, then term limits rejected him even though he’d done nothing wrong. By engineering a crisis, he could show the city how much it needed him. If he saved it, they’d get rid of term limits and he’d reign for longer than any old Tammany boss ever had.

  I put everything back as I’d found it, even though I knew Redhawk would never return. I headed out and down to the lobby, then kicked the cage door in, surprising Bennie big time. I cut him off from the only exit. Desperate, he came at me, fists clenched.

  I grabbed him by the throat, spun, and slammed him against the wall. Cracked plaster trickled to the floor. He’d have followed it, but I pinned him there.

  Nose to nose, I snarled at him. “Room 207. Who?”

  Bennie’s face grew purple, so I eased off on the pressure. “Rent or use?”

  “Both.”

  “Rent and use was one guy. Name’s in the book. Last one to use it, though, that was 217.”

  “Explain.”

  “Earlier today. 217 came in, said he was expecting a call. Told me to route it to 207. I asked. He confirmed. Call came in, I sent it to 207.”

  “Show me the book.”

  Bennie’d written a lot of stuff down in a ledger book. The hero hideout package was only half his business. The info was useful, since most of the criminals weren’t any smarter than Bennie. Greg had played it coy when renting 207. He listed himself as Jon Dough. The other guy, the one who took 217, listed himself as Howard Leslie Plunkett.

  “You got a number to call if someone asks after room 207?”

  He shook his head.

  “You do now.” I gave him my number. “Anything, got it?”