Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  But who knew—maybe this massage parlor held the keys to the body pain/chakra universe.

  “Hiiiii,” gushed the little Asian mom in the yoga pants, emerging from a door in the back of the parlor. She was wearing latex gloves and offered her hand, which I took, and she worked me, shaking my hand with more length and enthusiasm than it had ever been shook by anyone, ever. “I am so excited to see you here. I wasn’t sure you’d accept my invitation.”

  “Well, what can I say?” I looked around the place. A few of the customers in the cots up front were taking notice. Others were apparently sleeping as their masseuses worked on them, or else they were feigning disinterest like pros. The masseuses were paying attention, though; I caught a lot of surreptitious looks as they plied their trade. “When you’re new in town, you accept every invitation you get.”

  “I’m Michelle. Is this your first time to New Orleans?” She still had my hand, and it felt curiously warm through the latex. Part of me wanted to pull it back, but she was gently kneading the pad of muscle tissue between my thumb and my wrist and it felt awesome.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said as she tugged me toward a set of cots in the back of the shop.

  “What do you think so far?” she asked, eyes bright and excited.

  “It’s…interesting,” I said, trying to be diplomatic, possibly because she had my hand and also possibly because she’d started to work the middle of my hand and I never realized how much tension I carried in there. Who would have guessed the muscles I clenched so regularly to punch people would develop knots?

  Michelle laughed. “That’s a nice way to say it, but I’ve got another—New Orleans has history, and she wears it on her sleeve. Come on, lie back, let’s get started.”

  “Huh, what?” She’d maneuvered me over to one of the beds and was gesturing for me to sit down.

  “Come on. Complimentary; relax while we talk,” she said, and gave me just a little guidance.

  I plopped down on the cot, not really trying to fight it. It wasn’t like I’d ever had a massage before. Most latex gloves didn’t exactly protect from my powers. I glanced at Michelle’s hand and saw a double layer, a second glove jutting out from beneath the first at her wrist.

  She caught me looking and grinned as she circled around to my feet and untied my boots. “Try to relax. And let me tell you about ‘Nawlins.’”

  “Uh—uhm—”

  “Shhh,” she said, pulling the boot off with care. “You’ve got your powers and your gun, and all I’ve got is latex gloves.” She gestured to someone and I looked back. There was another masseuse there with a double layer of blue latex gloves. “Li Na is going to get the tension out of your shoulders while I work on your feet and calves.”

  And Li Na did. She had her hands on my shoulder in a hot second, a warm oil coating her gloves as she slipped her hands past my jacket collar and down into my blouse, hitting my trapezius muscles right where they were tightest. “Ahhh—I—ahhh—” Several other completely nonsensical mutterings dripped out of my mouth as I melted under the efforts of two Triad massage artists. And they were artists.

  I’d been struck dumb by the local Triad leader. Not good for an FBI agent.

  Michelle had both my boots off now, and my socks, and she’d discovered a knot in the arch of my foot and she was really going at it like it was her worst enemy and yet best friend. There was a gentility to the way she swept her finger back and forth over that taut line of muscle or ligament while cradling my foot that disarmed me. “Now, what was I saying? Oh, right—‘Nawlins.’”

  “Uh huh,” I said, barely managing to not drool on myself. Li Na was discovering all the tension I’d piled into my shoulders while climbing that building earlier today and then crawling down the air vents. And it was a lot of tension.

  “I’ve lived here for twenty years,” Michelle said. “Seen all the charm. All the seedy stuff, too.” Her grin was Cheshire-like, especially with my eyes partially closed as I drifted into a relaxed state. “I was here before Katrina and after. The city took a real hit there. Longstanding institutions washed away—Charity Hospital, for instance. Oh, not literally. But it closed after that and never opened up again. Did you see that big grey, boxy building when you came in?”

  “Looked like it had been abandoned for like ten years?” I asked, trying to string words together in spite of the exquisite assault on my feet and shoulders. Li Na was now working the painful areas of my back—while I was lying on it. She had shoved her hands down the back of my shirt and was playing my muscles like a piano.

  “It’s been a little longer than that now,” Michelle said wistfully. “But this city? She can take any hit. Come back stronger.”

  “You must really love it here,” I muttered.

  “I do,” she said, finding a knot in the bottom of my foot that made me gasp as she worked the edges of it. “I started my career here, you know. Not just in New Orleans, but in this very shop. My father made me begin at the bottom. I lived with the workers, climbed my way up the ladder—”

  “And now you’re a yoga-pants-wearing mob boss?”

  Michelle laughed, and it sounded positively delightful, like we were sitting around her upscale suburban home swapping mom secrets, like ‘27 Tips for Removing Stains’ or ‘How to Blow his Mind While Improving Your Pelvic Floor with Kegels.’ Actually, those might have been rejected Cosmo articles. “Don’t knock the yoga pants until you’ve tried them,” she said once she’d finished chuckling. “As much heroing as you do, you should get a pair. They’re close to spandex but not quite as shiny.”

  “You’re the second person to suggest that. Never really gone for the spandex-clad hero look,” I said. “Jeans, suit, whatever…I’ve got a professional creed or something to uphold.”

  “And steel-toed boots,” she said.

  “Hey, when I kick a man in the jimmy, I want him to really suffer for my art,” I said, feeling like I was melting into the cot. Which was quite comfortable, come to think of it.

  Michelle laughed again. “I can understand wanting a man to suffer.”

  “I bet you do. What’s your preferred method—concrete shoes? Pliers? A blowtorch? Opera?”

  “Don’t knock opera until you’ve tried it, either,” she said, switching feet and giving my heel a thorough kneading that made me let out a little grunt. “I’m a sucker for Turandot. Nessun Dorma gives me chills.” She shuddered. “And makes my kids whine every time I play it while I drive them to school.”

  I peered out at her through slitted eyes. “Do you really drive a minivan? Because if not, my mental image of you is going to be totally ruined.”

  She smiled, a big, toothy grin. “Honda Odyssey.”

  I laughed, then stopped when Li Na hit a knot in my shoulder the size of Charity Hospital. “Okay, not that I’m not enjoying this, or your talk on New Orleans, but what’s the real reason you had me come here?”

  “My father had many different businesses,” Michelle said, really sinking her fingers into the sole of my foot. It was like she had meta power and dexterity in her fingertips, but it wasn’t. Li Na was working over my shoulders in the exact same manner, like her fingers were powerful wires, perfectly focused and directed to teasing out every knot in my musculature they could reach. “Do you know why I picked this one to work?”

  “Because driving trucks laden with drugs had worse hours and would force you to subsist on gas station food, thus stretching the bounds of your yoga pants?”

  “That’s not a bad point,” she said, “but no. Or mostly no, at least.” She lowered her voice, breathing lightly as she hit another tension point in the bottom of my feet. “I like to help people relieve their woes. And you—you have so many woes. Your body is so tense that it’s working against you.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d charge it as a co-conspirator, but it keeps getting me out of real trouble,” I said. “Especially my fists.”

  Michelle barked a command softly but forcefully in Chinese, presumably, and suddenly Li Na ha
d one of my hands in hers, working her way along my index finger starting at the tip. It felt great, of course. “You know what else is working against you?” Michelle asked.

  “No, but I hope you’re going to tell me, because if you don’t, I feel like I’m going to be even more disappointed than a guy asking for a happy ending and finding out you don’t serve that here.”

  “Everything’s available…for a price,” Michelle said, grinning through my darkened vision, my half-closed eyes.

  I shuddered a little, and not from joy. “Let’s just ride past that and pretend you didn’t say it, and maybe you can tell me what you mean by ‘working against me’ instead.”

  “Sure, sure,” Michelle said, “just a second.” Another lady was standing next to her, dark-haired and dressed in very, very plain clothes—a cloth uniform-like top and pants that matched. She looked to be in her fifties and little slivers of grey hair were streaking through the black. They exchanged words in Chinese. Then the older lady walked out the door and turned right, heading west up Canal Street, disappearing with a last look back at me.

  “Who’s she?” I asked, watching her go.

  “One of my many, many employees,” Michelle said. “Now…where were we?” She prodded that tendon on the underside of my foot, and I grimaced because it hurt.

  “Someone or something is working against me, you said.”

  “My, my, you have a keen grasp of focusing on your enemies and hobbles,” Michelle said, running a finger solidly up my left Achilles tendon and against the meat of my calf, pushing my pants leg out of the way like it wasn’t even there. It didn’t appear to want to resist her any more than I did.

  “You get people trying to kill you as often as I have, it becomes a survival mechanism,” I said, moaning because now Li Na was hitting a real kink between my shoulder blades, her hands pancake-flat beneath my back yet still somehow effective.

  “I can imagine,” Michelle said. “You ask what works against you here? Probably the same thing as in any city: natural enemies to what you represent.” I opened my eyes, watching her face as she worked on my foot.

  “What do I represent?” I asked.

  “The law,” she said, smiling slyly. “For example, someone in my world might see your arrival as a harbinger of trouble that could come their way—an unpleasant change to the status quo that heralds worse to come.”

  “So, like rats see water flooding into a sinking ship?” I stared at her.

  She cocked her head at me, not missing a beat. “Rats tend to survive sinking ships a lot better than human beings do.” She thudded the base of her hand against the meat of my left heel and I almost gasped. She seemed to smile, acknowledging my pain. “But no, I hardly see New Orleans as a sinking ship. The water she took on was years ago; now she’s riding high again…especially if you listen to our new governor’s assessment of the situation.”

  “Funny thing about that,” I said. “I’ve never heard a politician give an honest dead reckoning of a situation in their own state unless they’re trying to get elected to fix it, and then they usually err on the side of it being worse than it is.”

  “It’s almost as if they’re working in their own interests,” Michelle said, adopting a sort of faux-scandalized tone.

  “Amazing, that.”

  “Which brings us around to the same question again,” she said, considering something—my foot, what was on her mind—very carefully as she worked. “What incentive would someone in my position have to work with someone like you?” She looked me right in the eyes. “Let’s say they knew…something…about what happened here today. Why would they want to stick out their neck and help someone like you? Someone who could bring a considerable amount of trouble on them?”

  Michelle was a subtle person, the kind who invited a known superpowered person and federal agent into her massage parlor to soften them up before dropping something. I, on the other hand, was not subtle, and I had a strange feeling I was being tested here for exactly that. The conundrum seemed obvious—Michelle wanted to share something about the assassination, but she wanted some assurances that I wouldn’t bring the hammer down on her or her criminal enterprise if she did. Quid pro quo.

  It put me in a slightly tight spot, but not really. “My purview is metahumans committing crimes,” I said. “Ordinary OC activities are out of my purview, and I don’t tend to worry about them unless I stumble on something particularly egregious in the amount of pain it’s causing, where leaving it alone would be a moral wrong.”

  “An interesting line to draw,” Michelle said, giving me another slap on the bottom of the foot that seemed to signal she was wrapping up. “Very well.” She pursed her lips. “One of my employees ran into a woman on her walk to work the other day. Just after the shot, and behind the Hotel Fantaisie.”

  “Oh?” I tried to nibble the bait, not go after it like a mechanical shark leaping open-mouthed toward Roy Scheider’s sprinkled chum.

  “Yes,” Michelle said, doing a little cold-playing of the news herself. “A woman carrying a golf bag, pulling a suitcase…and wearing a wig.” A small smile spread across her tight lips. “Might that be of interest?”

  “Yes, it would,” I said as Li Na seemed to finish up at my shoulders. “Where can I find this witness?”

  Michelle’s smile got just a touch wider as she peeled off her gloves one at a time. “Why, she just walked out the front door a minute ago. You know?” The smile turned into a grin, pure mischief. “The lady that I spoke to just now?”

  “Crap,” I said, popping to my feet in a single jump. Michelle leapt back as though expecting this, but Li Na almost caught a shoulder in her nose for being slow. “You could have stopped her.” I looked down. “Hey—where the hell are my boots?”

  “Hmmm,” Michelle said, making a show of looking down, befuddled. “I don’t know.” She looked back up at me and smiled. “I’m sure we can find them—if we looked very hard for the next few minutes. But then you might not be able to catch…” She chucked a thumb over her shoulder, still smiling.

  “You set me up,” I said, glaring at her. “She got a cell phone? So you could call her back?”

  Michelle shook her head. “Lives at a boarding house I run for my employees in town, but she has a tendency to disappear elsewhere, especially when she doesn’t have a shift for a few days.” Her grin got really toothy. “Which she doesn’t until…oh…three days from now, I think?” She waved me to the door. “Go try and catch her. I’m sure we’ll find your shoes by the time you get back.”

  “Damn you—and thank you,” I said, and bolted for the open door out onto Canal. The street was buzzing with activity, the afternoon rush in full swing.

  Holloway and Burkitt were lounging on the SUV’s hood and both snapped to attention the moment I burst out. “A Chinese woman, probably in her fifties, came out of here in the last three minutes or s—”

  “That way,” Holloway said, snapping up to point to the nearby street corner. “Down Bourbon.”

  I looked toward a narrow street, clogged and glutted with pedestrians surging in and out. “I finally get to visit Bourbon Street,” I said, bolting for it. Traffic was high; no chance in hell they’d beat me taking the SUV. Not at this hour. “And it’s for a foot chase where I’m barefoot.” I could already feel the pavement skinning away at the soles of my feet as I burst into a metahuman-speed run. “So much for being the Big Easy.”

  19.

  Olivia

  My Uber dropped me at the end of Fremont Street and I was left staring down the strange, tunneled street in the fading desert light as the sun sank behind the buildings. Something was clearly going on, the LED display that roofed in the entire length of the street lit red, a bizarre tableau that made it look like hell had come to Vegas. It shed its light on the street below, which seemed to be almost abandoned. I half expected a tumbleweed to roll through any second.

  The storefront windows to each of the four casinos that comprised the mass of Fremont Stree
t had been shattered, sparkling glass reflecting the red shining down from above. Veronika stood at the crossroads of the four hotels, looking around as though something were going to happen at any moment. She was alone in this, whatever pedestrian traffic usually present at this time of day vanished like an ice cube on a Vegas sidewalk at midday.

  “You should have stayed on the Strip with me,” Veronika said as I approached, coming in at a jog.

  I eyed the zipline that hung over us. It was abandoned, and I wondered what it must have felt like walking down this street and seeing people zip over you. I would have guessed anxious. Or at least I would have felt anxious to have people zipping over me. I’d be afraid they’d fall and clean my clock. Or bounce off, I guess. Fatally.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked. The cops looked like they had started to establish a perimeter on the west side.

  “Shhhh.” Veronika held a finger up to her lips. “Be vewwwy quiet.”

  I stared at her blankly. “Why?”

  Her neck sagged as her face contorted to disbelief. “Are you joking? Or are you just a millennial?”

  “No and yes,” I said, trying to figure out what the hell she was talking about.

  “You don’t know Bugs Bunny?” she asked, still staring at me like I was an idiot.

  “I had an…unconventional upbringing,” I said, shaking my head. “Kinda cult-like. Not much contact with the outside world. Cloistered, you could say.”

  “Well, we’re wabbit hunting, okay?” Veronika looked around slowly. “The speedster is tearing around here, ripping shit up like you wouldn’t believe. They’ve evacuated the hotels and casinos, funneling people out the back. Now he’s just going ape shit tearing everything apart for fun, I guess.”

  “Not stealing anything?” I asked. I still hadn’t seen any movement yet, other than a few flickering signs and the overhead oscillation of the red-lit roof.

  “Hell, he could have carried away half the casino vaults by now and the only way we’d know is if he zipped by waving a ton of bling and showering us in hundred-dollar bills like ultra-premium strippers,” Veronika said, her hands starting to glow blue. “Actually, I wish he would do that.”