“Cameras?” Chaz asked.
“There’s one at the corner out front. We’re reviewing the footage for a license plate or face on the card dump,” O’Leary said. That tightness was back in his forehead again. It made him look about fifteen years older. “It happened in broad daylight. There wasn’t any further communication; no note, nothing. Media relations isn’t too happy with us right now.”
Lau could imagine.
“Taunting the cops. It’s pretty classic,” Chaz mused. “And not just for supervillains.”
“So is tracing where your playing cards were bought using Internet technology,” Hafidha replied, her fingers flying over her keyboard fast enough that the click of her typing sounded steady as a hum.
Chaz turned one of the baggies over. “They’re Bee cards, if that helps.”
Hafidha looked up. “Hm?”
“Bee playing cards. The brand.”
“How’d you know that?” O’Leary asked; Lau couldn’t tell if the note in his voice was awe or faint intimidation.
“I grew up in Las Vegas,” Chaz said, without a shred of visible discomfort unless you’d seen him in a hospital bed and learned the frequencies his discomfort could take. “It’s like knowing the difference between Chicago deep-dish and New York-style pizza.”
O’Leary’s impressedness deflated like a sad balloon. Any superpower, sufficiently explained, kind of lost its magic. “I’ll let you know if the cameras turn anything up,” he said, and excused himself into the hall.
“I think,” Tan said, “that we’re disappointing him.”
“We will have to be better G-men in future,” Brady said in stentorian tones, and Lau could have sworn the two of them were about to giggle.
“Right, bros,” she said, and waited until they settled down. “How are we fighting crime today?”
Chaz took his map out and spread it across the second desk. “I’m going to recenter our crime scenes on the comic store. And the places the cars were stolen, and dumped. If it’s his local, that’ll give us a good radius for a door-to-door canvass.”
“Right. Tan?” she asked, and if he had a thrilling answer, she didn’t get to hear it: Detective O’Leary opened the door and strode through heavily, the lines on his face going downright sardonic.
“You know,” O’Leary declaimed, “I thought this case was good before.”
“It’s not?” Lau asked, warily. Not sure yet whether this was the good good, or the downright terrible kind.
“Oh, it gets better,” O’Leary said.
“We’re looking,” Lau said, “for an evil clown. How much better can it get?”
O’Leary dropped a stiff piece of paper, swathed in evidence-bag plastic, on the table. Lau flattened it with one hand. Magazine-cutout letters pasted stiffly onto print-shop paper. Greetings, fellow protectors of the peace, it said.
“We’ve been contacted by a gentleman calling himself the Slamphibian,” O’Leary said. “Offering his services to locate our perpetrator.”
“The what now?” Hafidha said.
“He is, and I quote, ‘a dark guardian of our fair city, fighting for justice against the night.’ ” O’Leary’s lip curled. “And he also listed his Facebook and Twitter for us, just in case.”
Hafidha took the evidence bag and ran her finger over a few keys. A Wordpress website came up, black background, glaring green type. “He has a website,” she said, mouth open with sheer bewildered awe. “And a scuba suit.”
“And twenty extra pounds around the middle,” Chaz said, with a slight air of relief.
“And friends,” Lau added, pointing to a link at the bottom of the page.
Hafidha blinked, and every link on the page opened like a shower of fireworks. “InvisiGirl,” she read off, in that same slightly concussed tone. “Fireman—not actually a fireman. Tragic Lad. Captain Snazzypants?”
“Apparently it is now a superpower to have good pants,” Chaz said over her shoulder.
“I’d believe it,” Brady muttered.
“What is this?” Hafidha said.
“There’s a whole subculture of real-life superheroes out there. They have websites and everything. There’s a whole crowd of them out in Seattle,” Lau replied, tapping her chin with one finger.
“How do you know these things?” Brady said, bewildered, and O’Leary cast him a grateful look.
“Seminar,” she said, and shrugged.
Tan leaned back in his chair; the chair he’d rather sneakily co-opted while everyone else was looking at Captain Snazzypants. “If that’s your hobby, a real-life supervillain is probably like Christmas and your birthday and an all-inclusive resort vacation, all at once.”
It didn’t take much for everyone to catch the drift. “They’re going to flip,” Chaz said.
“And make this investigation harder than it has to be,” Lau added with a frown. “If the amateur Avengers start reacting, it’ll just cause our UNSUB to escalate.”
“And then someone’s gonna get hurt,” Brady said.
The hum of typing from Hafidha’s desk slowed, stuttered, ceased. She looked up, rubbed her hand across the back of her skull. “Well, maybe not today,” she said.
“Oh?” Lau asked.
Hafidha leaned back until her upside-down eyes caught Lau’s, and grinned. “I wrote a subroutine to check the money trail for us. And Doctor Volkswagen might be professional, but lucky for us,” she said, and tapped a few keys, “his henchmen aren’t at all.”
The light in Interview Three wasn’t working quite right. It was too bright, and it flickered. O’Leary flicked the switch off, and then on again. “It’s the damn ecofriendly light bulbs,” he said to Danny Brady, with a sigh. “The old fixtures don’t take them as well as the regular ones.”
“It’ll have to do,” he said, and ducked back behind the mirrored glass pane. “We might as well bring him inside.”
The man O’Leary’s officers brought into the spare, badly lit room was medium height and burly, and had a face that said “resisting arrest” all over it: short, bristly whiskers, bags under his eyes, and the kind of sneer your mother told you to wipe off your face lest it become permanent. The black muscle shirt and uniform pants just screamed “jailbird.” Or “henchman.” Or “extra on a 1960s film set.”
Nothing that said he’d been dragged out of a 7-Eleven by two uniformed officers at six in the evening for paying for his Big Gulp with a marked bill.
Interviews were all about dramatic timing: the right entrance, the right costume. Playing the part. Brady let him sweat for exactly eleven minutes before striding in, dress shirtsleeves rolled up casually to the elbow, every inch of him radiating authority so complete it didn’t even need a suit jacket. The mook—no, Mr. Rahim Kadry of Albany Park—looked up with narrowed eyes.
“Mr. Kadry,” Brady said, careful to make it sound distant and dismissive. He slapped down a file folder full of Kadry’s vitals on the table between them and opened it. On top of the thin pile of paper sat that marked five-dollar bill.
Kadry saw it, and his face just hardened.
“So,” Brady said, and lifted it up by one end, as if it were a dead fish, or a Barbie doll in a grown man’s bedroom. “Your explanation for this.”
“It’s five dollars, U.S. currency,” Kadry said, with an edged, nervous sneer. “Got seeing problems?”
Brady knew his line here like it was on a teleprompter: Don’t get wise, wise guy, or something in that neighborhood, and then he could stand up and slam both hands down on the table like he was three days to retirement and his partner’s name was John McClane.
“No, I see just fine,” he said urbanely, and dealt security camera screen caps out from his folder like five-card stud. “See, because that looks like your nose there. And over there, behind that mask? That’s definitely the scar on your right ear.”
Kadry twisted around just slightly. Enough to hide his right ear.
“I bet,” Brady continued, letting it drawl out, “we could go ask
the tellers and customers in that bank, and they’d recognize that voice of yours too.”
“Dammit,” Kadry said weakly, and then half realizing, shut his mouth tight.
“Dammit,” Brady agreed, and snapped his folder crisply shut. “It’s not you we’re after, Rahim,” he said, and laid it on right thick; the full Men in Black treatment. “We’re looking for the clown.”
Kadry froze mid-twist. “Oh, no way,” he said, suddenly absent the whole tough-guy act. “No way are you getting me to roll. I ain’t no stoolie.”
“Stoolie?” came through the earpiece nestled in Brady’s right ear: Hafidha Gates, incredulous. He couldn’t argue: This guy hadn’t even been born the day the last stool pigeon stooled.
“I’d read you out the charges, and how long that means you could be sitting in a federal prison, but we’re all too old for that,” Brady said. “You know you’re looking at hard time. So do I. Is the clown worth it?”
Kadry was starting to look uncomfortable. “Da boss,” he said, pulling the sleeves of his black shirt down around his chunky wrists, “knows better than to tell me just where the hideout is.”
“Hideout,” Hafidha said wonderingly.
“He has,” and Tan stopped, to let this sink in, “a secret hideout.”
“Dammit. Real estate,” Hafidha said, and the earpiece crackled slightly as she took it straight off her face.
“The boss,” Brady said smoothly; he was too old a hand at this to miss a cue that big. “That’d be Dan Morrison, aka Danny Dare?”
Kadry’s pugnacious face wavered into just a regular pug. “You know his secret identity.”
“Secret identity,” Chaz said over the earpiece. “You think he can project his own mythology?”
“No need to. Comics fandom is a shared mythology,” Tan pointed out.
“Shh,” Lau added, and the peanut gallery fell silent.
Brady said nothing. If he let the silence stretch out enough, it would convert, as if by magic, into We know a lot of things.
Kadry wilted a little under that bluff-laced stare. His right foot started a twitching little fidget routine across the gray-painted floor.
“Where’s Dan?” Brady asked softly.
Kadry’s shoulders sagged. “He’s got a storage unit about three miles from his place. That’s where we keep all the stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“The guns, the bags, the masks. All the stuff you keep in a hideout.”
He looked, Brady reflected, truly and completely miserable. “How’d you even get into this?” he asked, and Kadry’s head came up.
“There aren’t a lot of spots for brown guys in comics,” he said, and the resentment in his eyes was in a whole different key from the kind he’d been putting on for Brady’s benefit before. “Danny said I do a few jobs, I could probably move up. Get my own handle. We’d team up.”
“Team up,” Brady echoed. He could feel his eyebrow aching to head upward.
“I was thinking the Elephant. Because, y’know, I don’t forget shit.” His grin was sudden, and way too young.
The eyebrow rose free.
“Yeah,” Kadry said, and the grin faded, “I know it’s not that good.”
Brady was going off-script, but screw it, he wanted to know: “Why not fight crime instead of doing it?”
Kadry snorted, quietly. “Obviously,” he said, in the tones of an argument that had been rehearsed over and over for years, “it’s the villains that are the real defined characters in any good comic. Nobody would even care about the heroes if there wasn’t a villain there first. Take away the super-crime and they’re just poor ordinary bastards with better uniforms than the rest of us.”
Brady sat back. The earpiece he was wearing crackled. “Bet you a shiny penny we can go back to that comic store and find every single guy in that car,” Arthur Tan said.
“I won’t take that bet,” Lau mumbled. Brady pictured the phalanx of detectives that would likely descend on Punch in the Face Comics in about twenty minutes flat. He’d never seized the records of a comic store before. Story to tell the grandkids, he thought, meditative.
“I can’t keep you out of prison,” Brady said. “You robbed four banks, and spent a marked bill. They’ve got you red-handed.”
“Should’ve just made sure I had change for the Slurpee,” Kadry mumbled. From the slight reddish stain in his cheeks, Kadry would never need to be told about professional practices in post-heist management again.
“You should have. But you can make this easier on yourself.” And here it came, the pitch: “Walk me through. Tell me everything about how this was planned and carried out.”
Kadry’s eyes widened. “Everything? Like what?”
“Like, say, how you got into the vault.” Brady suggested, as if it was just another question, and not the most important question.
His suspect seemed to regain a little poise. “Oh, that,” he said, and flickered a smile. “See, that’s Dan’s superpower. He touches the doors and they unlock. Touched the windows on that bank for us the last time, and down they came. It’s pretty cool.” He screwed up his face. “Except for the time the bank guard got fresh and Dan grabbed the guy’s face, zapped his fillings. That was kind of a dick move.”
Brady let out a breath. Practically felt the Significant Glance being exchanged on the other side of the mirror.
Devolving. And fast.
“Kind of,” Brady agreed. The sounds in his ear were a quiet pandemonium. “Rahim, the detectives here are going to get a pen and paper so we can go over this bit by bit. Would you like a coffee or something when they come in?”
“Yeah,” he said, faintly. “That’d be good.”
Danny Brady inclined his head, and slipped out of Interview Three. He moved around the corner to where his team watched Rahim Kadry slump onto his folded arms on the flicker-lit table scattered with photographs.
“You got this?” he said to O’Leary, who was watching Kadry with a speculative eye.
“Oh, do I ever,” he said, without turning his gaze even a hair’s width.
“I’ve got it.” Hafidha’s voice came down the hall, five seconds ahead of the printouts in her hand, her bright, set eyes. “Storage facility, one medium locker, rented to a Daniel Morrison. That’s his little villain pad.”
Lau looked at the printout, at Danny Brady waiting beside her, at the team gathered about the window of Interview Three.
“All right,” she said, and patted her gun. “Let’s suit up and move out.”
Act IV
The superheroes were gathering outside the station.
They were pretty polite for a mob of vigilantes, Chaz reflected. Polite in that wary way that dancers in a goth club were: with the sheer conviction that if they merely loftily ignored the existence of all other comers, everyone would clue in and pay attention to them. They staked out their corners of the intersection and parking lot, and the media stared at them from across the street as if it was no-man’s-land.
All except one, who was happily in the right turn lane, chatting through his scuba helmet to a nest of cameras.
“Oh look,” Chaz Villette said, under his breath. “It’s the Slamphibian.”
Daniel Brady stifled a very unlovely giggle.
“In fact,” he was saying, “I take my duties to the fair city of Chicago extremely seriously.” The reporter angled the microphone closer. The scuba suit made him hard to hear. “My hunt for the fiend known as the Alchemist will know no boundaries. Night and day, I will walk the city streets relentlessly, seeking to bring him to justice.”
“The Alchemist,” Chaz said. “They’ve given him a name.”
“They have given him a name,” Lau said.
“These guys thrive on attention. This needs to not be happening.”
“Cat’s out of the bag,” Lau murmured back. “Too late now. And there’s a certain elegance to letting the reporters and the superheroes just solve each other. Note how we are walking right past them to t
he car.”
They were, in fact, walking right past the clump of humanity camped out on the station steps. Nobody even turned to look at them. Must be, Chaz thought, the total lack of spandex.
No one noticed when they got into the two black SUVs, pulled out of the parking area, and drove up the street into the tangle of Chicago.
Chaz rested the map on his skinny thighs—Dinner, after this, he reminded himself absently—and called out directions in a monotone voice. North through an old mixed-use neighborhood, into slightly more industrial space; the kind that would be torn down or renovated into Exciting Loft Living! the second the economy sputtered back to life.
The streets were deserted. The perfect place for a storage complex. Or for a secret hideout.
Lau pulled into the run-down lot of a low-roofed batch of buildings, the neon sign half burnt out: SP EDY STOR G . Looked at him. “This is it.”
Chaz folded up his map and checked his gun. Still there. He climbed out of the passenger seat, shut the door with a soft thump, and formed up ahead of the vest-and-visor-covered SWAT team.
O’Leary met them at the front, and silently proffered the key to unit thirteen. “Thanks,” Lau said, and bounced it in her hand. “We all ready?”
It echoed in Chaz’s earpiece. Nods around the group: the SWAT officers, Brady, Tan double-checking his vest straps beside him.
“Right then,” Lau said, and dropped her voice to a murmur. “Brady, Chaz, out in front please. I’ll get the door.”
The key to unit thirteen slid into the lock noiselessly; the owner of Speedy Storage, need to buy a vowel or not, kept a tidy ship. Chaz positioned himself on the far side of the door, firearm at the ready, knees bent, legs ready like a sprinter’s.
Lau turned it quickly, yanked her hand back.
Brady planted his foot in the center of the door and kicked it wide open.
Chaz wheeled and surged in behind him, eyes going back and forth, back and forth, looking for anything Brady needed to be covered against. The storage unit was dark, shadows shifting, eleven feet by thirteen. The walls were covered—coated—with glossy cartoon posters. They crinkled in the wind of Brady’s passage.
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