Jack nodded, before hobbling down stairs with Gypsie-Ann. His leg was cramping and it felt like the improvised bandage was soaked through, but he didn’t have time to get the thing redecorated.
“What a honey,” the reporter muttered, her cheeks an unfamiliar pink.
“One more thing,” Harry called over the banister above. “I have to say — Louise accepted a lift from a pretty dodgy-looking chap.”
Jack froze. “What? When?”
“When she left here. Out the front.”
“Taxi driver?”
“Didn’t seem that way. Drove a yellow Plymouth, though, so maybe it was unmarked. I think it was a ’38, registration BBP589, and one other thing — he wore a particularly tasteless red hat. Good night.” Harry’s door slammed.
At the same time, Jack had entirely stopped breathing for several seconds, and then he fell down onto a step. Turning straight back, Gypsie-Ann crouched before him.
“The guy in the rouge feutre you were telling me about?”
Panting now, trying desperately not to panic, Jack thought about all the angles this might not be — but kept returning to the one it probably was. “Maybe, if you’re talking up the man in the red hat.” He swallowed hard. “Likely. Too much of a—”
“Coincidence?”
“Yeah.”
So wrapped up in heroics that Jack hadn’t done what he’d promised the Professor — look after Louise. Too scared anyway to talk to her after the fight. Jack knew he would live with both failings, and the personal inadequacy, the rest of his years.
“God. Then they have her.”
“Who’re they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wright and his cronies?”
“I don’t know! Bloody hell…What if something’s happened? What’re they going to do with her, Gypsie-Ann?” He felt paralyzed, rended.
The reporter leaned in close with her beak.
“We don’t know anything yet. Nothing. You hear me? But we can’t sit here bunting hunches all night — are you coming, Jack? Move it, mister — you and that busted-up leg.”
#166
Gypsie-Ann decreed that the two of them needed to regroup with the other Equalizers to nut out a ‘team response’, even if it was against her better judgement.
“Don’t forget we’re in this together, Jack,” she said as she drove, eyes narrowed. “Strength in numbers, and all that jazz people tend to waffle on about.”
“What if the Brick isn’t okay?”
“Let’s deal with everything as it comes. And you really need to get PA to look at your wound.”
“I’m fine,” Jack muttered.
“I don’t care.”
When they arrived at Timely Tower, the clock said it was after midnight and the building was minimally lit. Having pushed through the big glass door, the two of them were intercepted by a security guard Jack had never seen before, a man younger than the usual breed, animated and bearing a smile.
“Excuse me, sir,” this guard said, as he came close. “Southern Cross, right? I recognize you from your picture in the paper. I’m Ford Davis.”
Jack nodded, thoughts plumbing elsewhere, but Davis handed him an envelope that smelled of citrus.
“There’s a young lady in the penthouse — she came earlier this evening. Said she’s a friend of yours and asked me to give you this. Didn’t do the wrong thing allowing her up there, did I?”
The guard appeared nowhere near as contrite as he pretended, and he winked at Jack while the Equalizer tore open the letter.
The note inside was short — and sweet. ‘I’m so sorry, Jack’, it said in Louise’s elegant hand, albeit a little shaky. ‘Upstairs. Let’s make up.’ Jack read the words a second time, his heart beating fast, and then smiled too. He breathed out, relieved.
“She’s here. She’s safe.”
“You-know-who?” Gypsie-Ann inquired, a suspicious eye on the uniform before them with his eager-to-please expression.
“Louise. Yes.” Already looking over at the elevator doors, Jack nodded. “She’s waiting.”
“You want me to come? Or have I become a third leg?”
“I think we can talk about everything tomorrow,” Jack said in a vague voice while he gazed up at the ceiling, still milking that silly grin. “With PA and the Brick, I mean.”
“Oh, sure — why be rash today, when you can put off everything to the morrow?” Still, the reporter remained leery. “Are the other Equalizers back yet?” she asked the guard. This fellow seemed put out with her query and the charm wavered.
“Not that I know, ma’am.”
Gypsie-Ann decided to try the Neon Bullpen or the Brick’s car phone — she had no way of getting directly in touch with her sister.
“All right, Jack, I’m out of your hair. But for crap’s sake be careful, you hear me? Don’t forget what we learned tonight.”
“All up in the old coin locker.” Tapping his forehead as he limped to one of the metal concertina doors beneath the Equalizers banner, Jack laughed. “She’s here. She’s safe. And thanks, Gypsie-Ann — for everything.”
Davis, the security guard, faded into the shadows near his desk while the reporter strode away from the foyer, shoved through the entrance, and headed for her convertible.
#167
The first thing Jack spotted when he entered Equalizers HQ were the flowers — hundreds of yellow roses sprinkled across the white floor, petals everywhere, making a path from the door, across the living space, and ascending the staircase.
Jack again smiled, deeply touched. He wanted to run along the trail, to take up the girl in his arms and shower her with kisses aplenty, and then to just hold her — for hours if need be. She’d forgiven him. She’d returned to him. She was safe. Even the death masks on the wall looked jolly.
He stopped, picked up a rose, sniffed it, and the smile became a beam.
Skirting alongside the other flowers so as not to damage a single one, Jack galloped upstairs — pain be damned—and tossed his hat across the room below. On the landing were additional roses, lined up leading straight to his bedroom door, which was partly ajar. Orange candlelight flickered within. Jack sneaked over, his heart pounding more than before. She’d forgiven him. She’d returned to him. She was safe, just when he’d begun to believe the worst.
He knocked softly. “Louise?”
There was a soft sound of music, something out of place in the circumstances, yet familiar all the same. Ary Borroso’s old song ‘Aquarela do Brasil’. Jack pushed the door forward. Lying on top of the bed, apparently asleep, was Louise.
Strangely, her fish tank — the one with the seahorses — also sat in the room, on the table beside her. Jack could see half the water was missing. There were seahorses flipping about on the surface of the table proper, next to a pair of cat’s eye glasses. Louise’s head, hair and shoulders were wet, her face deathly pale.
As he embraced these details, Jack’s smile evaporated.
A R0SE BY ANY 0THER STA1N
#168
The woman felt like she’d throw up. “That’s it, then. Game over.”
“Stellar, this isn’t no game,” snapped Robert Kahn, the police officer seated to her left. He’d taken off his beige trench coat, had it draped on the back of the chair, and he slouched over, fiddling with a cigarette he refused to light.
“Depends on your perspective,” she said.
“Depends on a lot of things — but a game? No.”
On the reporter’s right, Pretty Amazonia quietly stared at the ceiling, ignoring the others. Finally dropping her chin, she surveyed the trampled foliage all about and suppressed a rising anger. “This is too much,” she hazarded. “This is despicable.”
The three sat together in the meeting area downstairs at Equalizers HQ, although they’d renounced the big round table in favour of more intimate placement on the settees. Even so, it felt like a mausoleum. Huddled amidst crushed yellow flowers, they spoke in low tones, scarcely able to fatho
m what had taken place here only an hour before.
Gypsie-Ann shivered. Maybe a lining on the stomach was required? How long had it been since she’d eaten something? “All this makes Melbourne feel like a tea party.”
“Where?” asked Kahn, placing the cigarette back inside its Camel box.
“Forget it. PA, what are we going to do?”
“We?”
“We.” Stellar worried about her sister. She’d never seen her this rattled.
Roughly pushing fingers through her hair, Pretty Amazonia peered back and sighed in loud fashion. “I’ll tell you what we need to do — we need to find Jack. In his state, God knows what he’ll do.”
“Agreed. How’s the Brick?”
“Touch and go — the damage was massive, and Polyfilla’s never going to be adequate. Mister B’s out of it now — I pumped him full of drugs I had to administer orally, since there was no way to get a needle through his thick hide, diluted them with whiskey so the bugger would drink up. Hate to tell you, but it looks like more of your blood is required.”
“Again?”
“We need the Brick back on his feet.”
“I’m beginning to suspect I picked the wrong power — I feel like a blood-bank.”
“Stop whining. As you like to badger people, at least you’re alive.” PA diverted her attention to the floor and started counting rose petals, before she told herself to stop. “Shit, I tried so hard. Really I did. CPR, adrenaline, AED — God, I so wanted to help her.”
“I know you did.” Stellar glanced at Kahn, who nodded as he opened a small, leather-bound notebook. “We know.”
“Screw your sympathy.”
“We were aiming at empathy. Misfire?”
“I’ll say. Either way, I don’t want that shit.” The Equalizer jumped up, acting edgy. “We need to clean this place. These flowers. Jesus.”
“Priorities, sweetheart. First we have to go get Jack. Any idea where he might’ve gone?”
“None at all. The Brick may be better at answering — they tended to hang out together. Turns out Jack pinched Mister B’s prize motorcycle, but I think I’ll skip telling him that part.”
“Jack can ride one?” the reporter muttered.
“The Brick gave him lessons.”
“Great.”
“But, before nicking the wheels, Jack was here when you arrived?” This was the cop speaking.
“Yeah. He’d just found her.”
Kahn glanced over his notebook. “What happened next?”
“Girl was laid out on his bed, flowers scattered all round, and some kind of evil attempt at romantic Latin jingles on the stereo. A howling success, that was.” PA closed her eyes. She didn’t want to venture back there.
“Go on.”
No choice. She knew the cop would hound her. “Jack was in the bedroom, as I say, but he also wasn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I guess this was shock. No. No, the horror, more like it. He just sat there in the middle of the floor, staring at nothing, like he’d already given up the ghost. His face was…Bloody hell. The girl’s brain had been deprived of oxygen by the time I got her breathing again. I have no idea about Blando physiology — we needed to get her to a proper hospital, so I dialled an ambulance. And then you.”
“What about Jack?” persisted the officer.
“Jack was gone, right before I called. I looked up, after the AED got the girl’s pulse back, and he wasn’t there. So far as he knows, she’s dead. Might as well be anyway, but we have to find him, have to help him. I can’t imagine what he’s going through. No one deserves this.”
Gypsie-Ann slowly scratched behind one ear, lips compressed, before she broached another unsavoury topic. “You realized he’d been shot?”
“What? — No! Where?”
“In the leg, earlier this evening, when the Brick copped it.”
“Anyone patch him up?”
“I think he did that himself.”
“Home medicine for a bullet wound? God, more to fret about.” The police officer leaned forward, clearing his throat.
“We haven’t forgotten you,” Gypsy-Ann snapped.
“Well, we need to go back a degree, get the full details, so I can try to help.”
“How do you think a Blando flatfoot can help?” asked Pretty Amazonia, her face lacking enthusiasm of any sort — making Kahn wonder whether this was a deliberate insult or a genuine query.
“Ladies, I’m not completely useless. I know taekwondo and jūjutsu, was an amateur heavyweight champion in my twenties, I have a gun, and an entire police force at my disposal. You people need all the assistance you can get.”
The reporter nodded after the speech. “Yeah, fair enough.”
“Okay, talk to me. PA, do you know what exactly was done to the victim?”
“I told you. Someone tried to drown her. Almost succeeded, too, since she was minus a heartbeat before I arrived. Same end result — they got what they wanted. The girl isn’t going to recover from that kind of necrosis of the cerebral neurons. There were abrasions around her wrists, so I’m guessing she’d been tied up at one point. Also bruising on the collarbone and neck, skin beneath her nails. Kid put up a fight.” PA looked at her sister. “By the way, I did notice. She’s the Aerialist. I have no idea why I didn’t see that before, whatever the hair-colour. But how can this be? She’s a Blando — I double-checked.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t anyone bother telling me?”
“Long story. Only found out tonight, but we don’t have time to go into it. Later, okay?”
“All right. But you better fill me in. Who put the bite on her?”
“Good question. I’m thinking the security guard downstairs,” Stellar mused. “There was something off about him — and he’d scarpered when I came back.”
Kahn jotted more notes. “Give me a description. I’ll get my boys on it.”
“What’s the point? We all now know who’s ultimately respon-sible: Donald Wright.”
“Our very own fucking Lex Luthor.” Pretty Amazonia wandered away to pick up a stray fedora from the floor; recognized it as Jack’s and almost cried on the spot. She was trying desperately hard to avoid doing that. “The perennial arsehole.”
Kahn frowned. “And a former Cape.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Wright will be a challenge,” appraised Gypsie-Ann, “since we still don’t know how many of him there are.”
“Perhaps we do.” The police officer edged forward on his seat, eyes slit. “Did Jack share with you the Big O’s final effects?”
That snagged the reporter’s attention. “No — well, not with me. PA?”
“Not us either.”
“Maybe he forgot. It was a small matter, and I mean that literally, just a tiny, folded-up piece of paper with an obscure message written there. We found it in a secret pocket in the Big O’s costume.”
“Well?” asked Gypsie-Ann, impatience making her voice shrill.
“It said ‘There are 6’. Nothing more.”
“Six? Six what?”
“That’s what Jack asked. The note didn’t say.”
“Then why are you telling us this?”
“It could be a clue as to how many duplicates Wright has.”
“Lordy — clutching at straws, aren’t we?” The reporter shook her head. “Does this mean we’re completely desperate?”
“Six is a possibility.”
“Or not.”
She contemplated the notion, rolling it round the hay inside her skull. This would be just like O, finding out something vital, and then neglecting to take adequate notes — unlike Kahn, who wrote down everything.
“Well,” she said, “five, six, or more — Wright will still be a problem, along with all the accoutrements he’s shipping into this city. Fat chance me doing an exposé, given he runs the paper and we have no evidence. Kahn, we need Prof Erskine here. Jack told me he’s worked wi
th Wright. He may know something we don’t.”
“I thought you’d be pressing charges.”
“Did I say that?”
“No, but he shot you down in cold blood.”
“Stop trying to read my mind.”
“Whatever.” Kahn used his pen as a bookmark and closed the tome. “Not an easy thing to arrange in any case — Judge Fargo wants him to stand trial for the assault.”
“Leave Fargo to me.”
“And Chief O’Hara? I’d have to go above his head, but you should know that he and Wright are in each other’s pockets.”
“I’m sure you’ll sort something out. You’re usually inventive at that sort of thing — for a law-enforcement official, I mean.”
The police officer smiled. “Flattery, with a caveat, goes far.”
“I knew it would.”
Having propped herself on the edge of the large round table with the Equalizers logo in the centre, Pretty Amazonia flaunted a pair of scissors and started snipping away at her hair, leaving great wads of purple on the floor, in between crushed orange flowers. Stellar and Kahn stopped quarrelling to stare at the sight.
“PA?” Stellar said, more worried. “Are you okay?”
“Sure I am.” The woman grabbed a fistful of tresses and hacked them off just inches from her scalp. “But there’s a time for gung-ho, as much as there is for glamour. I’m going to kick Wright’s bum, and I don’t think he’ll worry while I bounce round looking pretty. What he did to Jack and his girl is…just vile. I’m going to paint his life vile. Hence the time for gung-ho.”
#169
Jack rode straight over to the Port Phillip Patriot, crashed through the glass entrance, grabbed an elevator up, and blew out the twenty-first and twenty-second floors. Didn’t realise he had that much power. Innocent people might’ve got hurt, but the place should have been empty this time of night — not that he gave a shit either way.
Next up was Hatfield House, at 380 South San Rafael Drive. This time Jack taxied it, remembering nothing from the drive, how long it took, or how much he paid.
Left the neoclassical mansion shattered and ablaze. Didn’t know if one or more of Donald Wright’s clones were caught in either maelstrom.
Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? Page 29