In spite of better judgement, Jack couldn’t resist a wry grin. “Sheesh. I have to say — you really need a new scriptwriter. Who pens such archaic lines?”
“That’s right, laugh it up. A fitting epitaph: ‘The cat indulged in cheap comeback tomfoolery, right before Major Patriot placed a slug in his skull.’ Which I’m going to do, by the way.”
“And yet, you felt the need to wax pompous before hand.”
“Not at all.”
“Well, there’s a surprise.”
“Indeed. The only long-winded diatribe you’ll get from me is a brace of bullets.”
The first shot hit the same region as the bullet Jack had taken before bailing out to Melbourne, tearing through trouser material and then the gracilis muscle in the inner thigh of his left leg. The second round passed through his shoulder pad, hitting no flesh, but the next one clipped the bone in his upper right arm and took out the brachialis anticus, rendering the limb useless from the elbow down.
Not that the Equalizer was aware of any of these details at that very moment. If he screamed, yelped or stoically stayed mum, Jack had no idea.
Having been thrown backward a good two to three feet by the impact of both shots, he tottered, and then slumped onto his backside on the marble before the bank-teller windows.
Everything was spinning in slow motion inside his head, but there was no mistaking the unyielding pain from arm and leg. Warm blood streamed down inside the shirt and pants, collecting together on the floor in a dark pool, and his vision began to randomly whiteout the edges.
Donald Wright stalked the area around the fallen man, taking care not to stain immaculate red boots.
“Any other facile quip you feel the need to toss my way?” The only response was Jack’s panicked, erratic panting. “Go on, then. Lay it on me. No? Funny, that.”
“Give me…time,” the other man managed to say as he battled for breath.
“Good boy — you’re a son of a gun.”
While he greased bystanders cowering nearby, possibly fishing for applause for his witty use of an idiom, the publisher showed off and spun the revolver, Wild West-style.
“Any of you cringing, craven cowards moves — bang, bang! You get it? Call me gun crazy — I’ve flipped my wig! Comprende?” Wright roved the tiles, keeping one eye on his victim, even as he continued to wind-up the others. “You’re all pathetic. What a waste of electrons.”
Jack wasn’t sure if this was theatrical pontificating on Wright’s behalf — making him a poor-man’s ham actor — or whether he’d misplaced his marbles. Either way, the old guy was tossing that gun about and, pain or no pain, the Equalizer had to intervene. Didn’t care if these surrounding people were made out of shrimps and snails and puppy dog tails.
“Stop,” he simply said.
The older man paused to look down at the Equalizer, who was also struggling (none-too-successfully) to get to his feet. “Did you utter something meaningful, Jack?”
“I said…stop.”
“Ahh, the people’s champion awakes. Why don’t you make me? What a gas — we could indulge in a classic, rousing slugfest of superhero derring-do. You think you’re up for playing big man on campus?”
“Tricky.”
“Why?”
“Are you forgetting you used me for target practice?…I can’t exactly stand.”
“There is that, yes.”
“You’re also hardly a hero.”
“Mootable.”
“And these are innocent people.”
“Innocent? You mean insignificant.”
“They’ve done nothing wrong.”
“How honourable you sound, yet how mistaken.” Wright let out a great sigh. “Nothing wrong? You do know this bank owes me a great deal of money, lent at a discounted rate of twenty-one-point-two percent? Late on debt repayments — I ought to shoot the lot of them. Bang, bang, bang.”
“Oh, come on…And you lecture me on insignificance?”
“Easy with the tongue, tiger.”
“You know what I mean. Let them go.”
“Eh?”
“Let them…go,” Jack repeated. He stopped trying to rise and simply sat there on the ground, peering up, face pushing pale to the limit. “Your beef — it isn’t with this crowd. It’s with me. I’m the one that polished off your pug-ugly twins.”
“Right on, baby. I’ll say the beef’s with you.”
Wright pushed the barrel of his gun into Jack’s forehead, almost knocking him off balance.
“Does this hurt? I have four bullets to go — three for play and one to finish the job. Thought you would’ve packed your toys and gone home,” the man was saying, “after what my men did to poor little Mitzi. Remember her?”
“I remember.”
“Course you do. You should. Aren’t you racked with guilt? Ahh, golden silence.”
“I’m thinking,” Jack mumbled.
“How wet! Oh, and I do believe your phony got her feet wet also. What’s the matter? Can’t raise your arm to fire off one of your magical lightning bolts? What a dying shame!”
In response, the Equalizer started laughing. It began as a low, cough-like whisper, but in seconds, Jack had his head back and he was chortling aloud.
“I wasn’t that funny,” Wright said, uncomfortable, as he lowered the gun a few centimetres.
“No, no, not you.”
“Not me? What, then?”
Rubbing his eyes with his left hand, laughter subsiding, Jack suspected he was about to pass out — but he needed to hold on, fight this sensation. Louise was somewhere behind, in danger, and Wright hadn’t noticed her.
“It’s this whole situation,” he said. “You, me, Heropa. Everything.”
“What in blazes are you talking about?”
“Well, for starters, I thought we’d wrapped your chapter. But here you are, a fossilised loser still getting round in tights. Hope I know better at your age — it’s not a good look, mate. Embarrassing.”
“You forget who has the gun.”
“Who cares? The entire world has Reset, yet you remain an old fart on his last legs…” Jack chuckled, a lousier effort this time. “And only a sixth of one, if you want to get real finicky.”
Standing over him, Wright lashed out with the pistol, this time bringing down its handgrip on the top of Jack’s head. As the Equalizer hit the floor, hard, someone screamed nearby, and followed up with hysterical sobbing.
“Shut up!” shouted the man formerly known as Major Patriot. “Shut your cake holes, or I’ll kill you all! In fact — I’ll probably do that, anyway. Rub you out, the wrong way, whatever takes my fancy.”
Hot on the heels of this tantrum, he looked down again and booted Jack in the ribs.
“You still with us?”
#183
It was a further half hour until Bob Kahn dashed into the Neon Bullpen, a manila folder of paperwork under his arm. He found Pretty Amazonia and Gypsie-Ann Stellar in the middle of a row about who was going to foot the excessive bill.
“Ladies,” he said as he joined them.
“Fashionably late or unfashionably tardy?” PA muttered before turning back to her sister. “I don’t exactly have room for a purse in this skimpy bloody costume.”
“Hardly my fault,” the reporter snapped back. “Why don’t you offer to wash their dishes? You could get them done in, what, two seconds flat?”
“I’m not one for dish-pan hands. Just fork out the cash, for Heaven’s sake!”
“Temper, temper.” Gypsie-Ann winked at Kahn, who smiled just a fraction. Neither gesture escaped the Equalizer’s notice.
“What’s up between you two?”
“Nothing.”
PA wasn’t sure which annoyed her more — her sister feigning innocence, or the one-eyed police officer staring down at the papers he was spreading across the surface of the next table — a cleaner place to do so.
“Where’s your coat hanger?” she asked.
“My what?”
“Forbush.”
“I left him back at the cop-shop. He doesn’t remember a goddamned thing about recent events.”
“Yet, you do.”
“You got it.”
“Ahh, Heropa. Full of surprises.”
“Anyhow,” the man braved, “we have the autopsy reports.”
“What took so long?”
“For one thing, a discrepancy.”
Leaning forward, PA searched amid the medical jargon, ugly penmanship, photos and findings outlined there. “A bullet,” she quickly discovered. “Fished out of the parietal lobe.”
“Say again?” piped up her sibling.
“The rear-end of the brain.”
Nodding, Khan pushed the paperwork toward the reporter. “All here. Doc McCoy discovered the slug stuck in the head of one of those John Does from the Patriot fire. Oh, yeah, they’re not JDs anymore, by the way. We matched dental records with Donald Wright — for all five.”
Gypsie-Ann frowned at the disclosure. “What, they’ve been eating the same food over the past five years and followed exactly the same regime of dental hygiene? Isn’t that kind of strange?”
“The stranger thing here, in the circumstances, was the bullet.”
“I suppose so.” She rifled through photographs of corpses on five different slabs. “You can barely recognize these people. Ouch. Skin burned away. Old Henry did a swell job identifying them at all.”
“This was before the Reset. Doc McCoy also couldn’t remember anything this morning. Thanks for the heads-up, Stellar — nice to be forewarned for a change.”
“You’re welcome.”
“What about the bullet?” PA asked.
“I took it this morning to Ballistics, which is one of the reasons I’m late — the other being that McCoy mislaid his report, since he couldn’t recall doing the autopsies. We had to scour the morgue from top to bottom, not the best place to do a spot of scouring. Ended up finding the folder in a toilet cubicle.”
“Ew.”
“Don’t worry — only reading material, I think.”
“We hope. And the bullet?”
“It’s a .45 ACP, which I suspected. Used in Colt pistols.”
At this news, the reporter stared. “Like an automatic?”
“Could be. Or a large calibre sport shooter.”
Gypsie-Ann sat back, thinking. “Wright had a Colt automatic. It’s what he used to kill one of his doubles in front of me and Jack.” Straight after, she jumped up, sending her chair flying backwards and clattering across the floor. A nearby waiter looked peeved, but she didn’t notice. “Oh, crap — suicide guy was one of the five! Which means, if there are six—”
“One of those losers is still on the loose.” PA stared at her sister. “Jack. The Brick. We have to warn them.”
Nodding, Gypsie-Ann had started to say, “There are times when you do have your moments,” but Pretty Amazonia was gone before ‘times’ had spilled past her lips. “And I do wish you’d let me finish my compliments,” the reporter added into empty air.
#184
“You still with us?”
“…Yep…”
“Grandy-doodee.”
A kick to his ribcage was nothing compared with the pain emanating from the top of Jack’s skull. At least his leg and arm were dull throbs — useless limbs, sure, flopping about like they belonged to someone else — but the migraine was immediate and overwhelming.
The Equalizer knew he had to retain the old man’s attention, keep him from looking too closely over the bench behind him and thereby espying Louise beyond the grille. Hopefully she’d ducked down low, out of sight, but he had no way of knowing if this were so.
Talk, you idiot, he told himself. Any old thing will do.
“You wouldn’t have any…pain killers on you?”
Donald Wright pretended to pat himself down. “Sadly, the medicine cabinet is dry. Tell you what, though, I have another funky idea. Why don’t you resort to an old-fashioned four-letter word of ill-repute? My sources tell me that this escape clause is back on the cards.”
“Go to hell.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt there — eventually. You, however, can stop the pain, here and now. You can live, Jack-o-mine.”
“With a catch?”
“Of course, of course, of course. There is the silly two-day handicap, giving me plenty of time to exterminate your twee chums: Stellar, Pretty Amazonia, that brute the Brick, old Erskine. I’ll throw in the police officer, Captain Kahn, for good measure — I know you’ve been buddying up. Even if you resort to another Reset, I have until midnight to mop up these folk. The day is young. You may have killed all my clones but left me, the original and the best.”
“Jeez…you have ludicrous tabs…”
“On myself? You already told me. Yawn. Well, go on.”
“Go on, what?”
“Laugh some more. A slug in the labonza will knock any remaining wind out of the sails — let’s see how well you snicker after losing that member of the family.”
His gun was already moving down in this direction. Confused and disoriented as he was, Jack grasped he had to stall the fiend. If only he could think clearly — everything was yellow-starred, wonky, a flux of extreme agony from various points in his body.
“I don’t get it,” the Equalizer managed to say, but it came out too soft. The weapon was still on the prowl. “I don’t get it,” he reiterated in a louder voice. Bingo. The pistol paused.
“Don’t get what?”
“You…”
“Me? You want an explanation? A confession? Some kind of villain’s soliloquy?”
“No. Not that.”
“Oh.” Wright sounded disappointed. “What, then?”
Jack crawled to the wall beneath the counter and pulled himself back up to a sitting position. “There were six of you.” He offered this as a statement, rather than a question. They had to be certain.
“There weren’t six.”
Bzzzt—! So much for the note, Milkcrate Man’s memory, and that collection of bowler hats.
“You think you intuit everything, daddy-o. We were seven.”
Huh?
“Did you know that seven was a lucky number in Japan? No? Don’t sweat it — people in general are ill-educated these days. Such a shame. In my past life, in Melbourne, I had an interest in things Japanese. A fascinating, hip culture, albeit a dead one. Ahhh, seven. What an intriguing number. There are the seven deadly sins, the seven dwarfs, seven samurai — and the magnificent seven. We believed we were the latter, all decked out in our identical Major Patriot duds.”
Over where he lay, Jack barely listened. He was on the verge of unconsciousness, grappling with the thing at the same time that he manhandled nausea and dizziness, trying to dodge all three and evaluate what to do next.
“But seven is not lucky!”
Wright suddenly punched a wall, and directly after removed his red gauntlet and flexed the fingers of the hand, staring at them, apparently in some pain himself.
“Our kinship was undermined,” he blathered on while examining each digit, “by one of our own, in league with another, a corrupting influence from this place. A phony. One of our magnificent seven started to get other thoughts, began questioning. Not a freak out per se, but thinking independent of the other six.” Satisfied nothing was broken, Wright put the glove back on. “He fell in love.”
Blame the searing pain, but Jack had a flash of lucidity in that moment, realized something he’d never suspected and would hardly have dreamed up at any other point in the narrative.
“Shite. The Big O…”
“Hah! ‘Big O’, my foot — we tried to put the kibosh on his developing liaison with Bullet Gal, but the man was too far gone. Betrayal by one of your own, your psyche rebelling against itself — can you imagine such a thing, Jack? Our own flesh, blood and spirit. He betrayed us! Us!” Now continually striking himself in the head with the automatic, Wright turned full circle several times
, spinning like a wound-up whirling dervish. “The candyass!” he yelped between blows. “The prick!”
His mask tore and fell aside; nasty welts appeared across the man’s leathery forehead, nose and cheekbones, until finally he stopped smacking. A look of surprising clarity then entered his eyes.
“He passed judgement and denounced the other six. Took on a new costume, a new name, refused to rejoin us. Thought himself a better person. All because of her — that brat Mitzi. A phony, for Christ’s sake. Who did he think he could be? The prodigal-bloody-son? We were never the same after that. We lost a significant part of our soul.”
“But Sir Omphalos was — looked — younger than you.”
If he was offended, Donald Wright forgot to show it. “Yes, yes, all right. Perhaps he discovered a better moisturizer.”
A trail of red seeped down Jack’s face, so he wiped it away with the suit-sleeve of his left arm. This was nothing — beneath him spread a lot of blood on the floor. He refused to examine further. Knew he’d already lost too much of the stuff.
“Still, there were six,” Wright mused. “Six being sufficient to run the roost. We took up an alias our brother didn’t know, this new identity as the publisher of the Patriot — along with all those other hats — and slowly and surely drew our plans against him.”
“And murdered the guy.”
“That’s right, baby. After all, we had a panting public to amuse.”
“Taking self-loathing to new extremes.”
“Not at all.”
“Then you had one of your other duplicates kill himself. Why?”
“A demonstration of our power — an example, and a warning.”
“To who? …You or us? The Big O was already dead by then.”
“Let us say all interested parties.”
“Bit excessive, don’t you reckon?”
“Well, SC-baby, you people didn’t know how many of me there were. Casually offing one of my selves like that would intimate a lot more clones — I have to say, I’m surprised you came close to guessing the correct number. How did you?”
“Little things.”
Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? Page 35