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

by Michael A. Stackpole

  He nodded. “I need my ledger.”

  “Get a new one.”

  “But…”

  “You want me remembering that you sold me to the Zomboyz?”

  “No.”

  “Right answer.” I squeezed his face. “Be good.”

  I’m not sure which I love more: smart search engines or stupid people. I checked “Howard Leslie Plunkett” on the uTiliPod and the search came up empty. The Google did offer an option, however. “Did you mean Leslie Howard Plunkett?”

  Turns out I did. That turned out to be the name on the birth certificate of an actor. Tony Ramoso. And, like Becker, Tony hadn’t learned lesson one about how to lay low.

  If I’d known before how nice the penthouse suite was at the Excelsior, I might have rented it. Sunken living room, Italian marble tile and a window-wall that revealed the city in its glory, it probably was worth five grand a night. The lobster buffet was extra, as were the blonde and redhead entertaining each other on the couch. From their state of undress I gathered they were the finalists to be Tony’s costar in the new Puma series.

  I’m not sure who Tony had been expecting, but he answered the door very quickly. He’d half pulled on the trenchcoat he’d used as Mr. Big, but the fedora and silk mask still sat on the side-table. He made a half-hearted attempt to shut the door on me, but I shoved hard and he spilled back into the foyer and rolled down the steps to the living room.

  The girls didn’t notice.

  I pounced and dragged him back up the stairs. I pulled him into the bathroom and tossed him on his back in the tub. He stared up at the tap.

  “Here’s how this works, Tony. You answer my questions, you live. You lie and…” I produced a shock rod. He recognized it from earlier, “…you can guess how the rest of your evening will go. Upside, you’ll appear in the Emmy Awards’ memorial montage.”

  He moaned piteously. “It was all supposed to be a joke.”

  “This is why you’re not a comedian. Your sense of humor sucks.” I hit the button and the shock-rod hummed. “The woman will live, so you’re not looking at a murder rap. You have thirty seconds.”

  I started water trickling into his eyes.

  “Okay, okay. Last year I was researching a part. I started to hang with some criminals. Research. So I party with them and the next morning I wake up in a room. The walls were covered with digital prints of compromising pictures. If those got out, I’d be ruined. He promised to destroy the files if I played along.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “A voice. A shadow.” He swiped water from his eyes. “He told me that if I did that one thing, they would go away. But now there’s another thing.”

  “What other thing?”

  He shrugged, then exposed his left wrist. He wore a standard plastic identification bracelet with a bar-code. “That was waiting for me in 207.”

  I thought hard, but I couldn’t remember seeing it on his wrist earlier. It could have easily been hidden. “And?”

  “It’s to get me into an event. I’m going to be his mouthpiece.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. He was sending guys to take me. I thought you were them.”

  I had to think. No way I was going to pass myself off as Ramoso to his escorts, and I didn’t have a chase car to follow them. If Becker came through with the location and I had the bracelet, I could get in. I had to assume however Becker would flame out.

  But Ramoso clearly wouldn’t.

  “You get to the event, you call me.” I gave him the number. “Pretend I’m your agent.”

  “But how will you get in without one of these?”

  “Already got that covered, slick.” He bought the lie. It was a good question, but I’d figure something out.

  I hoped.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  I hauled Ramoso out of the tub. “Go.”

  He swept his hair into place, then set himself and answered the door. He collected his things and headed out.

  The girls didn’t miss him.

  I waited seven minutes, took the elevator down to five. I got out there, then took the stairs the rest of the way down. I came out through the lobby and immediately spotted one of the two guys waiting for me. I detoured into the bar, ordered a beer, tipped really well, then headed for the bathroom. They waited thirty seconds before they followed me, which gave me just enough time to crack a sink basin with a shock-rod and flood the bathroom floor.

  The fact that I was seated cross-legged on another sink gave both of them reason to pause. Which they did while standing in a puddle. I flipped a shock-rod into it.

  Two birds, one shock.

  It would have been convenient if either one of them had the meeting’s address written down somewhere. No luck. I did snag a bracelet from one, then hauled them in utility elevators to the penthouse. I found all sorts of interesting bondage devices in the spare bedroom and made good use of them.

  The girls never noticed.

  Since Ramoso had sold me out to the goons, any call he made would be a trap. I was back at square one. Okay, one and a half, since I had a bracelet. I still had to assume Becker would fail to get the address, but his brother-in-law, Barry Halberstadt, already had it. That gave me one slender chance to learn the location.

  Rule two, if you don’t want to be found: turn off your uTiliPod. Barry Halberstadt’s uTiliPod showed up on the cellular grid on the lower east side. If I’d kept my uTiliPod constantly on and sucking data down from Capital City Cellular, I could have narrowed my search more easily. That would have left me open to tracking by the same method. Definitely a non-starter. I took a couple more sneak peeks while in a cab heading down there and refined my instructions to the driver. I got out about four blocks shy of where Barry’s uTiliPod had last been reported.

  I waited and watched. I picked up on people–singles, couples and trios mostly–looking around, drifting southwest. They were moving with purpose while trying to look as if they weren’t. They kept to shadows and slowed down as more people moved onto the streets. I flowed with the crowds and pretty soon we all ended up at a big warehouse complex from turn of the last century.

  Guys in masks with bar-code scanners scanned the bracelets. I was told I was a ten, so once inside I looked for a gate that had the number ten above it. My bracelet got scanned again, then I got handed a Mexican Wrestler’s mask. “Congratulations, pal.” A guy in an Iguana mask he shoved a mask into my hands. “You got a colorful one.”

  Looked like a phoenix, which I took as a good sign. I tugged it on and joined the masked masses moving into the rectangular warehouse’s heart. We’d entered through one narrow end. At the other they’d constructed a stage complete with a projection screen and a pile of speakers.

  Music began to play, pulsing and loud, all revival-techno and neo-trance. The throng wasn’t the sort of Euro-trash chic to have chosen that music, but they began to move to it, or in reaction to it. The notes drilled straight into the brain.

  Spotlights swept over the crowd and cameras hidden high in the shadows followed them. Masked faces flashed by on the big screen, a monster-mosaic. Fists pumped in the air and mouths opened in yells that didn’t rise above the music.

  Then Little Miss Dragon, clad in a green-scaled bodysuit, shimmered onto the stage. She bore a microphone and raised her hands to clap above her head. She danced and pranced, and I half-expected to see the rest of the China Dolls in a chorus line behind her. Then, just barely visible in shadows, Tony Ramoso tightened the belt on his trenchcoat.

  The music came down, but Dragon’s energy didn’t. “You know why you’re here. One man defies Capital City. One man to unite us. One man to make us invincible!”

  The crowd roared its approval.

  “He’s here tonight. The man with the plan to get all that we can!” She glanced back toward Ramoso. “I give you, Mr. Big!”

  The spotlights raked their way back along the stage. For a half second Tony Ramoso’s image appeared on the big scre
en. His head came up. He preened.

  Then the lights came forward again. From all around the warehouse they converged on one man. A Phoenix mask appeared on the screen. The crowd screamed.

  And right then, pinned in place by a dozen spotlights, I learned I was Mr. Big.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  It took me a second and a half to realize I’d been set up. Figuring out exactly how would take another five. Calculating the repercussions of everything would take longer–eight, maybe ten minutes.

  Maybe ten hours.

  But hours I didn’t have. Not even minutes. Not even seconds.

  Explosives blasted five holes in the roof. Corrugated tin, plywood and flaming tar paper rained down. A half-dozen ratlines snaked in from each. Capital City’s finest descended, sonic shotguns blazing away. Half of the cops hung in the air, the others landed on the catwalks and spread out.

  C4 II members leaped and flew through holes on the left. The Russians boiled through on the right. Little Miss Dragon ducked away from debris, shoving the startled actor aside. She saved Ramoso from having Colonel Constitution landing on top of him.

  I’m loathe to admit it, but Trey was magnificent. He landed in a crouch, his shield brandished protectively, then stood tall and proud. He pointed directly at me and snarled. “Your reign of terror is ended!”

  I’ll admit it, my loose flesh tightened.

  Spotlights converged on him. He lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes. It was his time. He was in his element. It was his bid for immortality, and he was going to grab it with both hands.

  Then the stage exploded beneath him.

  It wasn’t a big blast. It only knocked him back about ten feet. He landed awkwardly. His left leg collapsed. Definitely broken–not as bad as Blue Ninja’s, but where his leg was supposed to be straight it wasn’t. He made an attempt to get up, then sagged back.

  That’s all it took to embolden a bunch of ruffians. They surged onto the stage, jostling each other like hungry puppies fighting for a teat. The second they reached him, the stomping began.

  Constitution’s support troops turned their fire on the stage. Their shots knocked thugs flying. It looked for a second as if their superior firepower would win the day. The crowd outnumbered them, but couldn’t touch them, which gave the good guys a decided advantage.

  Then a series of explosions rippled through the catwalk. Bolts sheered. Catwalk panels tipped and swung free, scattering cops like seed from a farmer’s hand. Some cops fell into the crowd. Others hit a bare patch of warehouse floor and landed harder than Constitution. A couple of C4 II members dropped as well. Superball bounced high, but missed a grab at a rafter and descended into a crowd.

  Mr. Big’s staff had traded their scanners for weapons and started shooting at the cops still clinging to dangling steel. Looked like they were using rubber bullets at first, but rubber doesn’t ricochet that way. The cops were shooting sound, but the thugs were pushing metal. Gang members swarmed up to the catwalk level, going straight at the few cops who’d not fallen.

  The tide had turned inside a minute and a half, and the undertow was dragging Capital City’s finest to oblivion.

  Constitution and his people had been set up, too. They’d been tipped, then ambushed. Wheels within wheels there–planning worthy of my father. Someone had worked hard to crush C4 II, and I was willing to bet the battle here was only one tiny part of events going down in Capital City.

  Data points swirled into a mental blizzard. Order was slowly pulling itself together out of mental chaos, but the external chaos wasn’t helping my concentration. I needed time and space to think. The real Mr. Big just had us all reacting–allowing him to maintain control.

  If there was one good thing about being exposed as Mr. Big, it was that none of the gang members came after me. Added bonus, they were picking off cops who were making runs at me. That bought me just enough time to escape.

  I shucked my jacket and pulled a small silver sphere the size of a golf-ball from a pouch. I flicked a small switch and heaved the thing at the stage. It bounced once, clicked up off Constitution’s shield and exploded at head height with a loud bang and bright flash. It scattered the gangsters and sent Constitution rolling–a result that confused the forces of law and disorder both.

  I popped a grapnel up and caught it on the edge of a hole in the roof. I hit the button on the guide-rod and rocketed up through the firefight. Swinging up onto the flat roof, I released the grapnel and sprinted to the edge. On the way I tore the barcode bracelet off my wrist.

  I flipped it over and ran my thumbnail along the back. Small bump. RFID chip. The scanners read a signal from it, marking me. Mr. Big had figured out the likely candidates I’d snag a bracelet from and made sure their bracelets were all tagged specially. Once I was in, he had sensors tracking me. The mask was just window dressing.

  Or does it have a chip, too?

  I tossed both away.

  Exploding bricks peppered me. Without looking back, I dove from the roof. I flipped the grapnel back up into the air. It found purchase on the next warehouse, swinging me away before I hit pavement. At the top of the arc I released, flipped and landed below the edge of that roof.

  “You’re not getting away!” Superball sailed high, his arms still flaccid ribbons from his having slingshotted himself toward me. He made a grab, but his arms just flailed. I ducked, then kicked, catching him where his kidneys should have been. That knocked him off course. He bounded off the roof again, heading toward the river. I went the other way.

  Good choice. A series of warehouses lined up neatly with nary a wino’s-width separating them. Crossing from one to the other was more a case of running hurdles than it was long-jumping. I went down once, skidding in gravel, then cut southwest and leaped to a smaller building.

  I crouched there beneath a pigeon coop. A police helicopter fluttered overhead and a spotlight raked the roof, but wasn’t looking for me. The aircraft continued on toward the big warehouse and hovered. Prowl-cars sped in that direction, sirens screaming. Lights came on throughout the city. People silhouetted themselves in windows, occasionally lit by red and blue flashers, then returned to the world of Murdochs and Superfriends.

  Huddled there, the pigeons’ soft cooing a contrast to my harsh breathing, I got my thinking time. It struck me as appropriate to be beneath the coop. I’d been a big pigeon. We all had. Mr. Big had played his hand perfectly.

  Mr. Big had set me up to be Mr. Big in Redhawk’s eyes. That’s the only explanation for his reaction at the memorial. And Constitution’s saying the mayor’s opinion of hiring me didn’t matter suggested animosity there. Constitution had been ambushed, which meant Mr. Big had been talking to him and tipped him about the meeting.

  So Mr. Big was playing all three of us off against the other. The ambush engaged C4 II, and the sound of distant explosions heralded other attacks. Mr. Big divided. He conquered. He rendered Capital City defenseless.

  And his strike at Selene meant I’d not be thinking straight. I’d rushed right into his trap. I figured myself clever because I’d infiltrated his meeting. If I hadn’t done the leg work, he’d have sent me a FedEx package with instructions.

  And the way I was thinking, or the lack of thinking, I’d have walked into the trap anyway.

  Everything began to slot together. Redhawk could be trusted. Likewise Constitution, but he was out of it. If Redhawk could rally the city, he might be able to prevent its utter collapse.

  But he’d need help doing that. Mine. And I’d need his help to finish Mr. Big.

  With half a plan forming in my brain, I went over the side and rode a line to ground level. The sky flashed twice and the sound of more explosions echoed through the streets. I couldn’t tell direction, but no way it was good.

  No silver lining in this cloud.

  That’s when Vixen nailed me with both feet. I bounced off a brick wall and sprawled in the street. I kept rolling, avoiding her next two attempts to stomp my heart through my spine, or
vice versa, then spun to my feet and faced her.

  “I’m not the enemy here.”

  “You’re insane, just like your father.” She pointed back at the warehouse, part of which appeared to be burning ferociously. “I saw. I know what you are.”

  “What I am is a patsy. Same with the Colonel and Redhawk.”

  She came at me fast–too fast and too predictable. Her foot flashed out. I blocked, stabbed a stiff-fingered hand into her hamstring, then danced back, giving her room to retreat.

  She pulled back for a second, but didn’t rub her leg. “You don’t have me fooled. Not like my mother. Before I left the hospital, she told me not to let you do anything stupid.”

  “She’s awake?”

  “Yep. Groggy. Doesn’t remember anything, but I know what happened.”

  Fury made her fast. A low kick raked a shin. I took it, then blocked the leg sweep with my hip. Vixen tried to spin into a scissors-kick that would snap my right leg. I struck out, driving the heel of my hand into her breastbone. That dropped her clean on her back.

  I withdrew out of her range.

  She rolled to her feet and raised her fists. “You bastard.”

  “We’ve covered that ground before.”

  She spat. “You played us all. There were no thugs in the shop. You broke my mother’s arm, then tossed her in the vault yourself. She’d figured things out and you had to eliminate her.”

  “You can’t believe that.”

  Her eyes tightened. “Only thing that makes sense. If it was to get to you, why not just kill you?”

  Something clicked in the back of my head. “It punishes your mother and takes you away from me.”

  “I was never yours.”

  “But Mr. Big never knew that.”

  Vicki danced in and clipped me with a roundhouse kick. I could have stopped it, but the counter would have destroyed her knee. I spun away, my right eye already beginning to swell, then ducked beneath another kick. I blocked a third. Her fourth caught me over the ribs and sent me flying.