Villains Inc. (Wearing the Cape)

by Marion G. Harmon

  “Jimmy?” I said softly. “Why all this? I thought Mr. Moffat was an innocent bystander in the bank job?”

  Wyatt frowned. “He might have been, miss. Might not. Either way, Detective Fisher thinks the bonds are probably Outfit money. They might have done this just to make a point.”

  “But—” Artemis and Fisher were back, circling the living room. She shook her head, and he looked frustrated. He made a note.

  “I’ll have them look for blood trace anyway. But thank you.”

  “You’re saying there’s nothing?” Phelps asked skeptically.

  “That’s what she’s saying, detective.” He tapped the box with his foot. “Are you ready?”

  She smiled. “I’m not squeamish, Lieutenant. But I appreciate your concern.”

  “Okay, then.” He lifted the wood lid with his gloved hand, and the copper smell sharpened. I didn’t feel the slightest temptation to go over and look; instead I watched Artemis.

  She dropped her smile. “Now that’s just...wrong.”

  “Tell me about it,” Fisher agreed, the cigarette back in his mouth.

  “May I?”

  He handed her a rubber glove and she pulled it over her own. When she dipped a finger in the stuff I took a sudden interest in the paintings. The third one from the right, a happy eruption of birds, was pretty good, and I made a mental note to find out if the artist was local.

  “It’s him,” I heard her say. “But not just him. There’s something else.”

  “Something else?” Fisher asked. “Not someone?”

  I turned back. She was shaking her head.

  “No. It’s something almost reptilian, but it’s not. And there are traces of sulfur.”

  “Sulfur?”

  Now that she said it I could smell it too, a hint of rotten eggs just on the edge of my nose, buried under the blood-smell. I nodded agreement, and Fisher ran fingers through his hair.

  “At least I know we have a victim and not a fugitive. Thank you, both of you. Phelps? You can call the crew in now.”

  Fisher followed Artemis and me onto the balcony, where he lit up and sighed.

  “God—sorry Astra. I’ve been wanting to do that for an hour.”

  Artemis smiled. “I can’t throw stones, detective—all this has made me thirsty and I’m off to The Fortress for a drink. Goodnight Detective Fisher, and call me anytime you need quick bloodwork done.” Without looking at me, she turned to mist and faded from sight. Fisher puffed a smoke-ring.

  “And that’s not disturbing. Sorry about tonight kid. You okay?”

  I sighed. “I wish Atlas were here—I’m no good at this.”

  “You’re better than you think. It still sucks.”

  I leaned against the balcony. “Do you have any idea who did this?”

  “If you mean who put him in the box, no. Who ordered it? Yeah, maybe.”

  “Could it be the bank robber?”

  He made another ring and shook his head. “Naw. The MOs don’t match. Whoever she is, she left him alive and well; why kill him now, after we’ve already talked to him?”

  “The Outfit?”

  “Now there’s a possibility. Especially since our missing Mr. Tony Ross is an independent antiques dealer. Personally, I think he’s an Outfit banker.”

  “A what?”

  “Sorry. I think he’s a wise guy who’s job is to hold the cash. It’s better than a numbered offshore account—electronically untraceable. He keeps a ledger with the bonds, and pulls or collects payments on his trips. An Outfit auditor checks the books quarterly to keep him honest. Everything’s coded, no names are used, so even if the feds flipped him they wouldn’t get much—and his bosses probably have something on him anyway. We’ve got the Organized Crime Division looking into that angle.”

  “So why kill poor Mr. Moffat?”

  “Send a message to anyone who knows what the robbery was about. For all they know, he might have been our thief’s accomplice.”

  “Oh.” I shivered, hugging myself. “Do you think Mr. Ross is dead too?”

  He nodded. “Yeah kid, I do. Or dropped off the face of the Earth. His bosses have to assume the leak was on his end—or maybe that he arranged it himself. So he’s dead or running.”

  I thought about that.

  “You’re not going to catch them, are you?”

  Taking a last puff, he ground out the cigarette in his palm (the balcony was still part of the crime scene, I supposed) and tucked it away.

  “Not unless somebody somewhere gets monumentally stupid. Contrary to popular belief, contracted hits are really hard to solve, even if you have a good idea who ordered the job. We’ll do our best, and they’ve got to be careful. That’s probably why our thief showed us the bonds; so we’d know who she was stealing from, make them be cautious. Fly safe, kid.”

  Chapter Five

  A protest outside Restormel, the base of the Hollywood Knights, turned violent today. The crowd, gathered to protest the Knights’ break with the National Superhuman Professionals Union over its support of the Domestic Security Act, threw bricks and even improvised incendiaries at the gates. Baldur, the team’s photokinetic, flash-blinded the crowd, making it easier for police with eye-protection to remove the rioters.

  LA Evening News

  * * *

  Flying is without a doubt the coolest part of my breakthrough. I always loved stargazing, and the night sky high over Chicago had become my sanctuary. There are few things as beautiful as a full moon over a sea of clouds, and tonight I needed it to get the image of the box out of my head.

  “Shelly?” I called. “You can come out now.”

  She floated beside me, looking down at the gossamer white clouds below us. The wind ruffled her unruly red hair. A dream in my head, a future-tech cyber-neural projection onto my senses, she was real to me.

  “Thanks for keeping me out down there,” she said, hugging herself though she didn’t really need the 501 jacket she wore.

  I smiled. A tired smile, but I could make it a real one. “I told you so.”

  “Bite me.”

  She sighed dramatically. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

  A commuter jet roared by far below us, flying out of O’Hare.

  “No,” I agreed. “We never played at ‘crime-scene examiner.’ But the dress-up was fun.”

  Tucking my legs up into lotus position, I watched her play with her hair.

  “Shelly? I’ve been thinking. Why didn’t you warn us about the godzilla? With all those future-files in your head, a historical event like a godzilla attack on Navy Pier would be hard to miss.” Certainly nobody had really expected a godzilla attack to come out the Great Lakes; Lei Zi still had Riptide, Galatea, and a scratch-team from the other Crisis Aid and Intervention teams searching the lakes for eggs and godzilla-young.

  Shelly sighed again.

  “I was wondering when you’d ask me that. She wasn’t due for another two years.”

  “Hey what?”

  She scowled, looking worried.

  “The Teatime Anarchist’s files are all history files he collected on his trips to the 22nd Century, right? And every time he came back knowing what was going to happen, he’d change things just by knowing? Same for his quantum-twin, and their little games could change things big-time, right?”

  I nodded. “But you told me there’s a kind of inertia—like time is a river. Whichever way it goes, it’s still headed for the sea.”

  “Yeah. The Anarchist told me once it’s like, if you could go back to 1914 and keep those Serbian goofs from assassinating Archduke Ferdinand, World War One would still have happened, because Germany and France would have just found some other reason to fight. Probably over the African colonies.” She snickered at my look. “Hey, all of the world’s history right here in my head, remember?”

  “Brag brag brag.”

  “But the war would have happened later, right? Maybe a lot later,” She chewed her lip. “So stuff changes, but it’s still
kinda the same. Whoever’s behind the Godzilla Plague, I think the Big One, or maybe the Whittier Base Attack, made them move up their timetable.”

  “Oh.”

  Well, that made sense; in another history the Whittier Base Attack had been the White House Attack. The Ring had used the opportunity created by the Big One to take their shot ahead of schedule. And Atlas died instead of me.

  “So you’re saying the Big One sped things up?”

  She shrugged, frustrated. “Some things. And long term it’s got to be changing lots of things; over fifty thousand people died—that’s a lot of rocks thrown in the river. So far sixteen high-tech companies that would have started up this year, haven’t. And one big political scandal never happened now. And this year’s mid-term elections? Don’t even ask.”

  Hearing Shelly talk like an expert on stuff that had never interested her before was deeply weird.

  “So the future’s out of date,” I said. “‘Always changing, is the future.’”

  She giggled, then turned serious again. “I’m not going to be as much help as the Anarchist thought,” she said glumly.

  “Sure you are—lots of the stuff we’re going to run into is older than last year, or won’t be changed much by it. So it won’t happen the same way: we’ll deal.”

  She didn’t look happier.

  “Hope...” she said softly.

  That was the Trouble Voice. Something bad had happened, or was about to.

  She flipped her hair out of her face and looked at her sneakered feet. I noticed they had magic-marker graffiti on them.

  “The last history-dump TA got before the Big One was from 2030,” she said.

  “And?”

  “It was different.”

  My eyes stung, but I waved it away.

  “I know that; Atlas was alive and we lived happily ever after, right?”

  “No—I mean, yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about. In the last pre-Big One future, Blackstone died two months ago.”

  I stopped breathing.

  “How?”

  “He was murdered.” She avoided my eyes.

  My stomach seized. It felt like somebody had snuck up and punched me in the gut.

  “No. Why? By who?”

  “Nobody ever found out. But it was the same guy who killed Mr. Moffat—at least the method was the same.”

  Dear God, no. I was going to be sick. Projectile-vomit from five thousand feet.

  “The thing is,” Shelly continued in a rush of rising panic as I tried to shut out the image of Blackstone-soup in a box, “since the Big One he spent the last few months recruiting and managing the team.”

  I nodded. After the funeral I’d been half-useless for weeks, sleepwalking my way through my exercise regime, focusing on my classes and now-solitary aerial patrols, smiling until my face froze. I was pretty sure I’d scared Shelly, and I knew I’d scared my parents, who’d been through it before when she died, but even I’d seen how Blackstone had stepped up to fill the leadership void left by Atlas and Ajax.

  But now…

  “He’s back in his team-intelligence role now,” I said, starting to think again. “What was he working on before?”

  “I don’t know. The guy keeps secrets like nobody’s business.”

  “Does he know about the danger?”

  “Yes! I told him as soon as you told him about me!”

  “Did you tell him about tonight?”

  “Duh, as soon as we knew what was in the box.”

  “Okay. And?”

  She shook her head. “He said ‘Thank you.’”

  I sighed, relieved.

  Shelly wasn’t. “But what if the supervillain who killed Mr. Moffat is a hit-man? Detective Fisher said the Outfit might have had it done. So, what if Blackstone’s working on something that they don’t like. Or somebody else doesn’t like?”

  I wasn’t relieved anymore. The public knew Blackstone as a superhero stage-magician, but he was oh so much more than that. He focused on developing threats, and he regularly worked with and consulted for the CPD, the DSA, and the FBI. He’d probably been half the reason the Teatime Anarchist had originally taken such an interest in the team.

  And if one of his investigations upset the wrong people... I thought of the box and tasted bile in my throat. Breathe. Think it through.

  “Shell? In the pre-Big One future, did the bank robbery happen?”

  “Yes. Back in February.”

  “And Mr. Moffat?”

  She nodded.

  “And then Blackstone was killed?”

  “Yes!”

  The cause-and-effect chain linked together horribly. Mr. Moffat’s horrific murder drew Blackstone’s attention to a new superhuman threat. Blackstone decided to assist the CPD in the investigation, made somebody nervous, and became the next target. Now it was just happening later.

  And just how much would Shelly’s warning help him? He already took elaborate security precautions but, truthfully, there were a lot of superhuman powers against which there was no defense other than hitting first or just not being there.

  Mr. Moffat had been reduced to soup, his furniture reduced to scraps, in a thirty-story condo with heavy internal and external security—there’d even been a camera on the balcony—and only a neighbor getting some air one floor down had heard anything. The Dome’s security was an order of magnitude higher; it could even detect an unauthorized teleporter by the change in air-pressure when he popped in. But there was no guarantee that whatever got to Mr. Moffat couldn’t still get to Blackstone. And Blackstone’s powers weren’t really combat-oriented; levitation, illusions, teleportation, not the stuff for going up against whatever had reduced Mr. Moffat.

  So the only way to be certain he was safe was to catch the killer before he targeted Blackstone. But how could we find him if Blackstone, with all of his resources and mad skills, hadn’t?

  Chapter Six

  “The entertainment industry gives most people a skewed idea of what superheroes really do. We’re not the police. Even in Chicago, the Metropolis of the superhero world, we have only eight CAI teams plus independents. That’s less than a hundred card-carrying capes, most of them B and C-class, covering 8 million people. Sometimes the CPD deploys us like SWAT teams, but mostly we’re emergency-response. Fires. Bad accidents. We rarely fight ‘supervillains,’ but we are called in whenever a disturbance involves other superhumans.”

  Terry Reinhold, quoting Astra in “This is a job for…”

  * * *

  Thursday passed with no answer to our dilemma. I considered calling Fisher to get his promise not to consult Blackstone on the case, but with Blackstone already alerted by Shelly I didn’t think it would do any good. So I patrolled, and went to school, and worried at the problem.

  Friday on evening patrol, Shelly caught me taking a break on the Sears Tower.

  “Shots fired in Little Tuscany on 24th and Oakley!” she reported. “Rush is on another police call, and the caller says somebody’s a superhuman. You’re the closest high-mobility asset.”

  I was already diving. “I’m on it.”

  Little Tuscany is a newly gentrified neighborhood centered on a cluster of Italian restaurants along West 24th and Oakley. It has a cozy feel, streets lined with wrought-iron Old World lampposts and benches and well-kept trees and planters, hardly the kind of place you expect serious action. The fight spilled out of Puccini’s as I dropped to the street, putting the brakes on just enough not to make a crater. My timing was perfect; as I touched down an explosion of shots shattered the eatery’s street window. Two of them hit me, one in the right temple. They stung. From the screams inside, they hadn’t been the first shots.

  Atlas Rule #1: when in doubt, pacify the situation.

  I went in through the window, landing in front of the shooter, a wild-eyed black kid with a pistol. Completely freaked, he still wasn’t dumb enough to try it on me—grabbing his gun I looked around for more, but then he went down in a spray of blood, a
familiar eye-twisting blur behind him.

  Oh no no No!

  “Rush!” I yelled. “Sonic, code red!” Shelly would pass it on.

  I broke the pistol’s barrel and tossed it, spinning around to track the blur. Another kid crashed into the bar, more blood flying. I couldn’t be sure, but the speedster seemed to be swinging a baseball bat. A third kid, screaming rage and fear, waved a Glock. This one was stupid or panicked enough to shoot at me, and I took two more to the chest before I closed the gap to grab the barrel and wrench it up and away. Making a fist with my other hand, I punched him carefully in the solar plexus. He fell gasping to the floor, his diaphragm shocked into spasms.