“He’s trending.”
The next day he took them to an anonymous city building downtown.
In a third floor office they watched through observation glass as Rock Hero did the interview in a blank room with two chairs. The guy was a young dark-tanned muscle head with a buzz cut and a braided beard, tank top, shorts, big tattooed legs, big bare feet in beach sandals. His big arms stayed crossed, his chin tilted up, nose running, the beady eyes tweeked-up.
“Where did you meet Apple Gotti?”
“At a floating crash.”
“What’s a floating crash?”
“A mini-rave that goes from street to street.”
“What was the name she gave you?”
“Apple Gotti.”
“You two became acquainted?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“We left.”
“You left the floating crash?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did you go?”
“We went to a beach.”
“What did you do there?”
“We tweeked.”
“Then what?”
“We banged.”
“May I ask what you did sexually?”
“She wanted to bleed a little. I dealt it up.”
“Anything else?”
“Just some good hard beach fucking.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Weird stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Like…weird stuff. She started out trying to guess what I did.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a bouncer.”
“Did she guess it?”
“More or less. She knew I did something physical. Look at me, that’s not a biggie, right? But she guessed I do stuff off the clock. Because I do stuff off the clock, if you know what I mean. I guessed she did porn at some time or other. Turned out I was right. We watched one of her movies.”
“What type of porn was it?”
“S&M porn, a lot of dungeon time spent punishing both males and females, their faces sealed in zippered leather masks, boobs bound in wire, balls strung, dicks squeezed into balloons, wrists shackled, hardcore domme Apple Gotti verbally abusing them with the torture. A guy was standing with head and wrists in a stock while she spent five minutes stringing his nutsac. Then she pulled the string, choked his nuts. Apple Gotti twisting a chick’s nipples with a nipple clamp. This went on for minutes. I was fighting to stay awake. Then another scene in a different location woke me up. I stayed awake. Apple Gotti stuck a nail into the palm of her hand, drew blood. She held her hand out to a bound-up chick. The chick stuck out her tongue, licked the blood off her hand clean. Not a simulation. The real thing, her blood the right color. Her face showed zero expression, zero pain. Freaked me out.”
“What else did you talk about?”
“The talk got weirder. She told me she was a professional killer. She said she had a list of people to kill. She said she had to stay in Brutalia because it’s a great town to be a hitgirl.”
“What did you think of that?”
“I thought she was tripping.”
“Did she say who she was planning to kill?”
“She said she was going to kill every person who will live longer than her.”
“Did she seem mentally unstable to you?”
“Yeah but I had no problem with it. She said she was taking the night off. All she wanted to do was get high and fuck somebody she didn’t have to kill afterwards. I got lucky with her.”
“Did you exchange addresses?”
“No.”
“Phone numbers?”
“No.”
“Any plans to meet again?”
“No.”
In the observation room Gingiri said, “I think she wants to be mythic.”
The Carousel: “Why?”
“She wants to resonate.”
“What does that mean?”
“No one ever killed that many people to be forgotten. To find her follow the wetness.”
The Carousel was always impressed by how six twelve year-old girls measured-up to the role of superheroes. They were probably too young to get in their own way. If children actually had superpowers instead of playing superpowers, they’d probably do the best job at it.
24
The Carousel went over the BPD database. The Man Mafia clones numbered thirteen. Six of them were in law enforcement custody, two on death row. That left five on the loose. He ran a comparison app with the hacking window into the OSD database, extracted 2GB before OSD anti-hackware closed the window. He reviewed: Mafia 4 took over for Mafia 3 in running the Customizers.
Mafia 4’s enforcer was Mafia 9. “The psycho one.” Note made: the Man Mafia clones were varied aspects of the source cloned, Vincent Gama. A psyche with expansive madness.
BPD database: Married with 4 kids, Mafia 4 kept a Mafia-style gumare, a kept woman named Tori Lynn Electra. He’d bought her a beach house.
The Carousel determined the target: Mafia 4.
The Carousel turned the carousel, checked the racks.
Blue Boss: dark.
Martian Justice: dark.
Wild War Action with WW2 superhero Sgt. Circus.
Amazing Pirate Action with 18th Century pirate superhero Captain Argosy.
Rugged Guy Action with Avenger Scout.
Hardcore Action with the superhero team of Pound & Flesh, the bionic ghosts of two murdered homicide cops in futuristic crime-ridden apocalyptic 1980s Los Angeles.
Turning the carousel tweaked fragments of lost pre-2000 memory. The KM brand comic books Milo Spector had collected in his tin milk box as a kid. Peeking at the dashboards of the Space Age autos parked along his walk to the corner drug store. Add a dime for green Martian bubble gum.
He decided to pick the one with the least firepower he might need later.
That determined the tactic: deception.
He pulled Rugged Guy Action.
Tori Lynn Electra was face down and moaning louder than the Playboy Channel. Between her spread legs and bouncing peach spike heels, below his hairy paunch, Mafia 4 was pumping his stud muscle into her. Her two white toy dogs were on the bed watching.
Mafia 4 stopped, stared at the intruder in her bedroom.
He said, “There’s an intruder watching.”
“What?” She looked.
The intruder was gone.
Mafia 4 put on a robe, went out to the living room of the large beachfront house, the doggies at his three hundred dollar slippers. Below his white crest of hair was now a pair of Ray-Bans. The Ray-Bans turned to the costumed intruder standing there. It looked like a teenage boy in a Boy Scout uniform. The boy: cap, kerchief, green tights under khaki shorts, brown high topped shoes with motorized roller skate wheels.
The Ray-Bans took in the intruder, the frown behind them wondering the intruder’s role in his world. “You work for me? You delivering something?”
The intruder folded his thin arms, said, “I am Avenger Scout. I’m with Junior AXIS.”
“Huh? What are you, some kind of fucking Boy Scout?”
“I am the last of the Lost Scouts of the lost city of Utopia.”
“No problem,” Mafia 4 replied.
Mafia 4 opened a briefcase, took out a cell phone.
He said, “I’m going to have three guys fuck you then cut off your dick and make you suck it.”
Avenger Scout said, “Watch your language, mister; and focus on the possible.”
“That fucking so? Are you bulletproof?”
“No, but bullets never hit me,” Avenger Scout said. “I came to blow secrets sky-high. I am here about one of your clones. You have been wronged and made a pathetic fool laughed at behind your back. By the pledge of the Lost Scouts I hereby avenge you.”
Mafia 4 looked down at the two doggies seated at his feet staking him out for food. He swung his foot, booted one of them across the living room. The other dog yelped, took
off. Now wearing a peach satin robe, Tori Lynn ran yelling at Mafia 4. He yelled back at her to shut the fuck up. She did.
Tori Lynn looked at the intruder in shock. “A Boy Scout?”
“You’re talking shit,” Mafia 4 said. “How have I been wronged?”
Avenger Scout said, “Tori Lynn Electra has been cheating on you with Mafia 9.”
She stared numbly. Then spat, “Eat shit you lying little prick.”
Mafia 4 was glaring at her now. Tori Lynn turned to him, shook her head. “He’s lying.”
Avenger Scout put a hand on his chest. “By all that is lost Utopian and all-American I speak the true-bluest truth. Tori Lynn has been seeing Mafia 9 and they laugh at you on a bed covered with your hundred-dollar bills.”
Tori Lynn looked up at Mafia 4, put her hands on her hips. “You let this happen? You let this little…fucking asshole talk like this? To us? To you? I thought I knew you. Where are your balls?”
Mafia 4 wasn’t listening to her, the Ray-Bans watching Avenger Scout with no expression behind them. Mafia 4 took off the Ray-Bans. He stared at Tori Lynn. She avoided his stare. Didn’t matter. His stare sucked the life essence from her until she barely had the strength to support her implants. He smelled the truth off her.
“Bitch,” Mafia 4 said. “Fucking cunt.”
His hands snapped around her throat. They struggled back and forth, Tori Lynn stronger than she looked. Tori Lynn wrestled him against a desk, he pinned her against it. Her hand went into a desk drawer. She kept a gun there. The hand found an empty drawer, slid around inside it frantically.
Avenger Scout whistled to her. She looked. He tossed her the gun. She stuck out a free hand, snatched it from the air, turned it to Mafia 4.
Blood spattered Mafia 4’s face. He stepped back from the pistol in Tori Lynn’s fist and the hole in his chest. She popped him until the body was flat on its back then she popped him in the face. The doggies came back into the room.
Then Tori Lynn turned to Avenger Scout. Behind her, the doggies were feeding on Mafia 4’s splattered face, his hand crawling toward the fallen briefcase.
Tori Lynn said, “Everything you said was a fucking lie. You just walked in and made the shit up. And that fuckhead bought it.”
“That’s my superpower: veracity. When Avenger Scout speaks, a person can only believe what he says is the absolute truth. Even you believed it while I was saying it. Amazing, isn’t it? But I’m sworn to only use my power for good.”
Tori Lynn pointed the pistol at him. With her other hand, she picked up a cell phone.
She said, “My turn to tell the truth. I’m going to shoot you. Not like I shot him. You I do slow, one body part at a time. Not kill you. I’ll call his people. I’ll tell them you did this. I’ll shoot you so you won’t be able to move. Then we’ll wait for them to come and take you. They’ll want you alive, Boy Scout-boy. Act cool now.”
Avenger Scout looked curious. “Gee whiz. Pick a body part yet?”
“Definitely not your balls. They’ll want those.”
Tori Lynn aimed the gun at his right knee, trigger muscle flexing along her trigger finger.
Avenger Scout roller-skated to one side as Tori Lynn’s body flew past blown by the two blasts from the Magnum .44 in Mafia 4’s dying fist. He lay there twitching maybe one second from dead. His arm dropped. Avenger Scout watched him try to lift the gun again high enough to aim it at him.
When Avenger Scout skated to the door and out, only the doggies were still moving in that house, lapping up the splatter. He closed the door. Behind the closed door the Magnum blasted twice.
25
Combing the high desert used up half a tank of gas. It looked like it sounded: miles of nowhere, sand blown dunes, cow skulls. In an east coast city. So remote the radio stopped picking up stations. Mermaid Gangster rode this terrain on a paisley Siren cycle.
There was no one else around for at least twenty miles. Then she saw the first man-made object in two hours. It was an abandoned tractor trailer in the high desert. She parked, got off. Outside the trailer, the generator was running. The doors were slitted open.
She climbed in. The trailer was refrigerated to below freezing. Ice chips crunched under her boots. She waited for her heart attack but inside the refrigerated trailer that organ had frozen, either there or at the factory. There were three severed heads and four gym bags filled with hundreds.
Nude, his rippling tattooed dragon back to her, Mafia 9 was fucking a woman carved from ice. The ice sculpture was on hands and knees, Mafia 9 pumping it doggie-style. He seemed oblivious to the intruder.
Good. Psycho. She started backing the fuck out of there toward the doors. She pulled the siren grenade, a Sharpie-sized gel capsule that would turn the trailer into a corridor of disintegration cells. She would step outside and her thumb would pop the activation dot. She would toss the grenade into the trailer and after fifteen seconds of metal-bounced light Mafia 9 would be smoke and dust: AXIS guerilla mission accomplished.
His tattoos bled across the darkness in a spinning blur, his ice-frosted dick stabbing the air. Her arm went numb then the grenade then her body hit the floor.
She tumbled into a flip back onto her feet, started blocking his strikes. He was powerful but slow. She hit him with bolts of attack, turned his face into hamburger. A flying snap kick took him off his feet. He hit the floor, got up before she could blind him. She went for his left leg. Her right leg bone snapped. He was slow because he was that good. His hands had fingers like solid wood. The floor tipped upward until cold steel stuck to her face. Then his fingers found her throat.
She awoke in the trunk of a moving car, wrists bound to her ankles. Time passes slowly in the trunk of a car. The pain of her broken leg located and caressed every pimple of road surface. At least the trunk was empty. And the bone was regenerating by the mile. That was the upside. The downside? She could still get jacked-up badly by a massive psycho with free time. She could always be killed. That still didn’t make this shoe shopping on Fifth Avenue.
Eight years later the car stopped on uneven ground. The trunk opened, she was yanked out, dumped onto sand. It was still daylight. Coast rolled in to her right, forty yards from the car. The beach was secluded, hidden by high rocks.
The tape binding her was like steel, barely parting with a wrinkle after flexing every muscle in her body against it for miles. Still naked, his nudity spattered with blood, Mafia 9 began circling her body. Closer to her view were his thickly-veined feet.
She said, “Why bring me here?”
“A mermaid gangster should die at the beach. How’d you find me?”
“I’m a Siren. Sirens can smell psycho. It was on the bodies you left. On the severed dog parts.”
“I didn’t kill the dogs.”
“I know. The victims did. Made them fight in cages.”
“The client is a vet too.”
“A vet who wanted other vets killed off?”
“Yeah. The backstory will be revealed in his videotaped suicide. I won’t spoil it.”
“We followed the smell of psycho right to you.”
“Suck my cock, I’ll let you live.”
“Fuck off.”
One of his feet left the sand. A thousand-foot needle pierced her neck. His foot returned to the sand.
Through the pain, the words whimpered past her lips. “Fuck off.”
“Suck me off and live.”
“I’m a superhero, loser.”
He stomped her, kicked her stomach. He kicked her face, bloodied her mouth. Her blood painted his toenails.
“My cock would break your teeth.”
He kicked sand into her face. She needed to keep him talking to her instead of killing her.
She said, “Join AXIS.”
“I’m a clone.”
“You’re a tool for the OSD.”
“Hey retard. I’m a fucking clone. I was made to be a tool.”
His words made her more comfortable. He was talking to
her instead of killing her. Her brain relaxed enough to let neurons move around again. She worked her way up to her knees. She looked up into a stare that flickered across stretches of vast remoteness the way the farthest star point flickers.
“So you have no mind of your own,” she said.
“Right.”
“Get with AXIS. We can take out the OSD.”
Mafia 9’s sand-gritty foot curved into a striking blade, the knobby little toe carefully measuring off the distance to her neck. The outside edge along the foot was inhuman-looking, the skin calloused into a bone-white ridge as though from years of training on brick walls. He stepped back ten inches, started flexing his striking leg for the kick.
“My foot’s built up the striking edge of an ax,” he said. “Three strikes will take the head clean off. Done it once before. I plan to take off your head and send to Dr. Playground in a box.”
Her brain shrunk to the size of two thoughts: she was wondering if he could actually do it. She was wondering how to stop him. He flexed the leg some more, measuring the shortest striking distance to her neck. She was running out of conversation.
“You’ll never do it.”
“What?”
She said, “You’re too soft.”
He stepped over her, yelled until his spittle hit her. “Fuck you! I am that hard! I am that cold! I am so cold I fuck ice!”
“You’re a pussy,” she said.
“Fuck conversation.”
She dropped onto her right shoulder, into a slant of incoming tide. By now the tape around her wrists had been stretched barely enough to snap a muscle freeing one hand. Mafia 9 grabbed her shirt, pulled her back up onto her knees. He popped one striking foot out of the wet sand. He saw a foot spattered in blood turning underwater colors, blues and greens. The blood of a siren was poisonous but it took too long to work. Had to talk to Girlfinger again about that.
He was dead before hitting the sand.
Her heart started again. On the sand before her lie the body of Mafia 9. Warm puppies, Alpine sunsets, and autumn forests had nothing on the sight of his dead body. His dead body could’ve had its own calendar with the same photo for each month. She drove the car over his face leaving.
The cuts and broken bones were regenerating but they still smarted like fuck. She took out a cigarette, lit it. It was stale. But she was still alive. The cigarette tasted fresh like she was twelve again.
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