Beside me, Mike throws his hands in the air and stares at me with bug eyes.
“Drew . . . this is Mr. Masters you’re talking about. He’s like our ugly-sweater-vest-wearing second dad. There’s no way he’s working the other side,” he says. “Probably he and Jenna went to get doughnuts or something, if they went anywhere at all. Or maybe you’re just pissed off because your Super is a loser so you’ve concocted some harebrained, cockamamie scheme to give you an excuse to steal a freakin’ car and pretend to play hero when there’s absolutely no one out there who needs saving, except for your incredibly freaked out friend who you dragged into this mess who is now going to be arrested for grand theft auto!”
Mike pounds on the dashboard, and both headlights explode.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’m under a lot of stress right now.”
Maybe he’s right. Maybe I am just being paranoid. Maybe we will pull up to the apartment and everything will be fine. Kid Caliber and the Titan will still be tucked away, and we will drive back to school in our stolen car to find Jenna waiting for us outside with news that the Fox has finally captured the Dealer and the whole thing is over.
Suddenly I slam to a stop, and Mike nearly breaks his other arm trying to keep himself from chewing on the dashboard.
“Then again,” Mike says.
There, ahead of us, is Kid Caliber’s apartment complex. Or what’s left of it. There is a hole in the second-floor wall, and I can smell smoke.
“Do you hear that?” I ask.
“Hear what?”
Mike doesn’t hear the sirens. Only I can hear them. They’re still far away.
“Hand me my bag.”
Mike reaches behind him and grabs my backpack. I dig through it and pull out my costume, slipping the mask over my face, clicking the belt into place. I look at the Sensationalist in the rearview mirror.
Mike shakes his head. “What are you going to do? You’re not going in there, are you?”
“Not me,” I say. “Us.”
It is way too quiet, and that means a lot coming from me. The door to Red’s apartment has been blasted off its hinges and lies, a smoldering slab, on the carpet inside.
“Come on,” I say, “the coast is clear.”
The Sensationalist says things like that, I’ve decided.
“I shouldn’t go in there.” Mike points to the shaggy carpet stretching out from the door. His house is all hardwood floors.
“I think a little static electricity is the least of our worries,” I tell him.
One look inside, and I know we’ve missed something big. There is a confusion of smells—hard to pinpoint through the smoke. The acrid tang of gunpowder is overwhelming, though. “There was a shootout,” I say, sniffing.
Mike points to the holes riddling the walls. “What gave it away, Sherlock?”
By the kitchen lie a couple of spent machine guns, their muzzles black. I have a good guess who they belong to. The television is shot out, twice broken now. There are scorch marks along the walls. The recliner looks like maybe it was split in half by a chain saw. There’s glass everywhere, but no bodies. I look down the hall to the room at the end.
Outside, the sirens are getting louder. We don’t have a lot of time. I reach down to my belt and pull out my stun gun, holding it out in front of me as we pass by the bathroom to the end of the hall. I realize the little bit of voltage I’m carrying is nothing compared to the human Taser walking beside me, but it helps to have something in my hand.
“Drew,” Mike says. The hair on his head is standing at attention.
“Quiet.”
Nothing. No sound. No movement coming from inside.
The Sensationalist stands at the door—I stand at the door. The same one I stood at yesterday. I give it a push.
This room looks normal, untouched. The bed’s even made. I can still smell him, though. “They got him,” I say. And then I catch another scent, lighter than the first but distinct. I close my eyes, zeroing in on it, dissecting through the layers to concentrate on the few molecules of it still lingering in the air. My feet suddenly grow numb. There is no mistaking that smell.
“Purple Passion,” I whisper.
“What?”
“It’s Jenna.”
He took her too. The Dealer scooped up the two has-been Supers and kidnapped Jenna on the side. And Mr. Masters helped. He must have. There’s no other explanation. I can still catch a trace of his VapoRub as well. They were all here.
“Drew.”
Mr. Masters must have somehow contacted the Dealer and then led Jenna into a trap. She probably knew too much. Maybe she had already confronted him. Maybe that’s why she told me not to trust him, to stay away. To protect me.
“Drew.”
And now the Dealer had her. His ticket to the last Super who still posed a threat to him. Somewhere Jenna was probably dangling from a hook or staring down a death ray with the Dealer at the trigger, waiting for the Fox to arrive. Capture her, and there would be no Supers left. He would have his revenge, and Justicia would be his for the taking.
“Drew, I think you should take a look at this.”
I shake my head to clear it and then step back into the hall. The sirens are only blocks away; I’m sure even Mike can hear them. I grab Mike to push him out the door when I see what he has in his hand. Actually, had I been concentrating on sounds instead of smells, I would have heard it.
An old rail conductor’s watch, gold plated but tarnished with age. A crack runs down its face.
“I don’t think Mr. Masters would have just left this behind,” Mike says.
I take the watch in my hand, trace the jagged lightning bolt along the glass.
“No. I guess not,” I say. The wind sneaks through the hole in the wall of the apartment.
In that wind I can still smell her.
Then we both hear the voices coming from outside.
“This is the Justicia police. We know there is someone in there. Come out with your hands on your head.”
Mike looks at the cast on his arm.
“I don’t think I even can,” he moans.
I look at Mr. Masters’s watch. This is getting worse by the minute.
31
HELP IS ON THE WAY
Mike is having a panic attack. Little jolts of electricity are literally weaving their way in and out of his hair; he looks like one of those trolls people used to stick on top of their pencils.
“Oh. Fantastic! Because stealing a car wasn’t enough, now we can add breaking and entering!”
“Just entering,” I say, peering through the window. “The door was busted down when we got here.”
“You’re hilarious.”
That’s what the Sensationalist does, I decide. He makes jokes to help defuse the tension of the dangerous circumstances he always seems to find himself in. I take a peek outside.
There are only two squad cars, though I can hear other sirens in the distance. Fire. Ambulance. Who knows, maybe the National Guard. Justicia’s already on high alert, and I’m sure the guys in costume outside the apartment are just as antsy as we are. The cops don’t have their guns drawn yet, though their hands are ready at their sides. Behind me Mike is spinning around in circles, looking for some kind of secret escape route—a slide or a pole that leads to an underground passage, perhaps. I look at the watch again. The crack runs straight down the middle, but the hands are moving. I wonder if it still works.
I concentrate on the Purple Passion again, focusing in on it the way Mr. Masters taught me. It’s just strong enough to pin down. I think this will work. I hope it will.
“We are only going to have one minute,” I tell Mike as I adjust my mask and belt and stand by the doorway.
“What?”
“You take the SUV.”
“What?”
“I’ll take one of the cop cars.”
“WHAT? You’re stealing a cop car? Don’t you know they can hang you for that?”
“Go get help. I do
n’t care who. Find someone.”
“I don’t need to go get help. Help is outside, about ready to blast my head off.”
“Yeah—I think we’re going to need bigger help than that. Besides,” I say, pointing to my mask, then gesturing toward the trashed living room with the bullet holes and smashed furniture, “this would take more explaining than we have time for.”
“How am I supposed to drive with only one arm?”
“You’ll figure it out. I’m going to find Jenna,” I say. “Take this.”
I dig in my pocket and pull out my ring. The Titan’s ring, the one that led me here the first time around.
“What is this? Are you proposing?”
“It’s my SLD. You can use it to find me.”
“Find you? Find you where?”
I give an exaggerated sniff. “I don’t know, wherever Jenna leads me. If I had to guess, I’d say the Dealer’s secret hideout.” Mike just shakes his head.
“This is the Justicia police,” repeats the voice outside. “Come out with your hands on your head. You have thirty seconds to comply.”
Mike takes my ring and slips it into his pocket. It wasn’t designed for his skinny fingers and would just fall off—besides, we’d both feel a little weird if he actually wore it. “My mother is going to kill me if I get arrested,” he says.
“She might not get the chance,” I say.
I grab Mike’s hand and then press the button on Mr. Masters’s watch. The world is instantly silent. It still works.
Sixty seconds.
We careen down the stairs and throw our backs against either side of the hallway door leading outside. I take just one second to listen, just to be sure, then throw it open.
Outside the apartment, three cops are lined up, pistols at their sides, ready to storm the building. A fourth is sitting on the driver’s side of one of the squad cars. Just down the street, an ambulance is turning a corner. Above us, three birds have just launched from an electrical wire. They are all frozen. Everything is. I hand Mike the watch. “Take it,” I say.
“No, you take it,” he says, pushing it back.
We have forty seconds left. This is no time to argue.
“You’re going in alone. You’re going to need it,” he insists.
“Yeah, but it’s me, remember? I can sense danger coming from a mile away.”
Probably to end the argument before the cops come unstuck, Mike takes the watch, then heads to the Suburban. I run over to the nearest squad car, which is, unfortunately, the one with the cop sitting in it. Thankfully the keys are in the ignition. I have about twenty seconds left.
I pull the cop free, with some effort, and then take an extra five seconds to unholster his gun and throw it in the bushes by the apartment. Cop cars are significantly different from Suburbans. There are a lot more distractions. Still, the basic mechanics are the same. With two seconds left, I throw the car into gear.
Time thaws instantly, and I turn to stare at the face of a police officer who just a second ago was sitting where I am now. He looks completely bewildered as I throw the car into gear. As I screech away, I see him reach to his side for the gun that isn’t there.
Up ahead I see Mike tearing down the street in the borrowed Chevy, making trophies of other cars’ taillights as he careens back and forth, trying to drive for the first time in his life and with only one good hand. On the police radio, someone is asking me to report in. I figure that’s a bad idea. After all, this is the second car I’ve stolen in less than an hour. Mike is right. I’m probably going to hang for this.
Provided I don’t die first.
32
THE JACK OF HEARTS
It is said that a bloodhound’s sense of smell is fifty million times better than a human’s. Bloodhounds can track a scent several days old. They can pick up a whiff of a lost girl from one of her mittens and track her through miles and miles of forest, using their big floppy ears as shields to block out other smells.
But can a bloodhound steal a patrol car and drive with its head hanging out the window, following a faint trail of Purple Passion body spray through the streets of town at sixty miles an hour?
I’ve been training for this moment.
I can still hear sirens, and I’m guessing several of them are probably headed my direction. I’ve turned off the constant chatter of the police radio so I can concentrate on Jenna. I don’t care about anything else right now. How goofy I look with my mask on and my head sticking out of the car, how much trouble I’ll be in from the cops, how much trouble I’ll be in from my parents. How there’s no way I’ll be able to keep my secret any longer. How I’m not even sure that I want to. As long as I find her. As long as she’s okay.
I follow Jenna’s scent for several miles, to the outskirts of town, past a series of warehouses to an old abandoned factory situated next to a lumberyard. It smells like rotten wood and rusted iron. The factory looks like it hasn’t been used for decades. It’s the kind of place you see in gangster movies when they tell the snitch who ratted them out that he is “going for a ride.” Even if I couldn’t still sense her, I’d know I was in the right place.
I can’t hear any sirens anymore, which actually makes me nervous. Surely there is some GPS locator or something that will allow them to track this car down. The cavalry will arrive. And Mike should have gotten help as well by now. Maybe he’s even using Mr. Masters’s watch to buy us all some extra time without me even knowing it.
Mr. Masters.
Maybe I was wrong about him. Or maybe the Dealer betrayed him, just as he betrayed us. Hopefully I will find him here too.
The huge sliding doors to the factory are all sealed tight, leaving just one entrance on the side, protected by a complicated-looking electronic lock—not something I can pick easily. I reach down to my belt and pull out a canister of concentrated liquid nitrogen—the advantages of a strong background in chemistry. In a matter of moments, the lock is just a block of solid ice. A nearby rock serves as a decent hammer, and the lock shatters in three blows. The door swings open.
Now this is breaking and entering.
The air is thick with dust, but Jenna’s trail comes back to me. It is stronger than it was outside, and I catch it without even trying. I’ll find her first, then together we will find the Titan and the others. I listen for voices, but the place is massive and the walls thick cement. I catch a sound other than the buzzing of the fluorescent lights above me and follow it, taking shallow breaths and keeping my feet from shuffling on the cold cement floor. Every beat of my own heart sounds like a gunshot, giving me away.
The sound I’m following gets clearer, and I press my ear up against the wall. They are voices, muffled through the thick stone that separates us, but I recognize one of them immediately.
“You won’t get away with this,” it says.
They are the first words I’ve heard him say since that day at the bar.
And if he’s saying that, it means things are really bad. Supers only say somebody won’t get away with something when that somebody is right on the cusp of getting away with everything.
I keep my right ear against the wall as I walk, turning a corner, looking for an entry, but this place is a labyrinth, and the voices are like echoes. As I get closer, I can start to make out the other voice more clearly, and though I’ve never met the Dealer, never even heard him speak, his voice seems strangely familiar.
“You say that, but all the Supers who had even a chance of stopping me are already my prisoners,” the voice says. “There’s no one left to save you.”
I see a door up ahead and crouch down. From inside I hear the Titan coughing, his voice hoarse, barely a whisper. The other’s voice is cool and confident, much younger than I would have expected for someone who’s been dead for the last six years. It’s a soft growl. Almost sultry. “You were the last piece of the puzzle,” it says. “The last on either side, in fact. The Suits are back in prison. All the other Supers are out of the picture. Even that
meddlesome watchman is taken care of. The Fox is the only one who can save the day, though I’m afraid she won’t arrive in time to save you. You will sink into oblivion as the whole place goes up in flames. When the smoke clears, I will emerge victorious, and you will be forgotten.”
“Then I guess you’ve thought of everything,” the Titan says.
I stand at the door, trying to understand what I’m hearing, but none of it makes any sense. I’m not even sure who all is in there. I hear the Titan mumble something, and even I have to strain to make it out.
“Killing me won’t bring you justice.”
The other voice laughs. “Justice? I’ll worry about justice later, when I’m the only hero left who’s worth a damn. I’ll give new meaning to the word and mete it out, wherever and whenever I see fit. But that’s after you pay for what you’ve done.”
That’s it. I’ve heard enough. I reach for the door with one hand, dropping the other to my belt and grabbing a smoke grenade, hoping that it might buy me enough time to sneak in, maybe even get the Titan free before the Dealer—or whoever it is—even knows what’s happened.
Then I catch the scent that brought me here, suddenly intense, and turn to see just the girl I’d been hoping to run into again.
“Thank god it’s you,” I whisper. “Where have you been?”
She is in costume. Her hair falls down around her shoulders. Her green eyes glow. The silver shimmer of her outfit reflects the glare from the overhead lights. I expect her to be surprised to see me. Or relieved. She looks neither. She looks irritated.
“What are you doing here?” she hisses, taking two steps closer to me so that we are within arm’s reach.
“I came to rescue you,” I say, then realize how ridiculous that must sound coming from me. “I thought Mr. Masters kidnapped you. I tracked you from the apartment.”
If any of this comes as a shock, she doesn’t show it.
“The Titan,” I say, pointing to the door. “The Dealer’s going to kill him. At least I think it’s the Dealer, but it sounds an awful lot like . . .”
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