“Why?” I covered my eyes.
“Because teeth cut and you can break your hand on somebody’s skull.”
“No, why were they there? It’s not like they’ve ever had the urge to protest anything.”
“Well…” And I could tell she was smothering laughter. “I think it had something to do with being your friends.”
I puffed out a breath, giggled, and winced. I’d pay anything for a picture of Annabeth facing down those punks. “Okay, but this has to stop.”
“Sure. How?”
Putting my hands down, I looked up at her. “I know you said our project has to wait—but we need to do something now. It’s like… ice cream and murder.”
“What?”
“Every summer ice cream sales rise. So does the murder rate. Neither is causative but they’re related. It gets hotter, people buy more ice cream and tempers get shorter. All of this—” I waived a hand vaguely. “It’s like ice cream and murder. Shankman and this morning’s riot, it’s all really about Villains Inc. turning up the heat. Atlas always said we do what we do so people would feel safe. They don’t feel safe. One big fight with lots of civilian casualties, and it’s all going to explode. We need to turn down the heat.”
She closed her mouth. “That’s…actually pretty much what Blackstone is saying. Without the ice cream.”
“So why can’t we—”
“I never said we couldn’t; I said I needed information. Which I’ve got. I know where you man is hiding. We can go talk to him tonight.”
Chapter Thirty One
There’s an art to fighting another Atlas-type. A solid hit can knock one back pretty far, but then most of the force of the hit is lost. To get the best bang for your punch you need to force the other guy to absorb the full kinetic force of the hit instead of turning most of it into motion. That means trapping him against something bigger, or getting a good grip on him so he doesn’t go anywhere when you hit him. Which can turn fights like ours into an aerial grappling match with every dirty trick of close-quarters nastiness.
Astra, The Chicago Interviews.
* * *
The Outfit had “gone to the mattresses.” Which in this context, meant that Robert Early was sleeping on an unknown mattress should Villains Inc. want to kill him in his bed. Artemis had needed to find the mattress so we could talk to him alone, and even with her resources it had taken a bit of work.
Mr. Early’s mattress wasn’t even in Chicago. Apparently the Outfit had decided to disperse some of its associates for the duration of the war. His wife and daughter had gone to her aunt’s for a holiday, and Robert had crossed the lake; a friend of a friend owned a vacation home in Grand Beach, the little summer resort town on the Michigan side. Right on the beach, it could be reached by boat in a night trip, which made it a good hideaway across the watery state line.
After nightfall we snuck out through the bay doors, Artemis on my back since I could fly a lot faster than she could float along in mist-form, and I activated my costume’s chameleon mode before heading straight up fast enough to make my passenger complain. A normal person couldn’t have held on. At three thousand feet, we switched our earbugs to their receive-only settings.
On a clear night the Lake Michigan shoreline is defined by its glowing ring of cities and towns, but since towns aren’t labeled in big glowing letters Artemis steered us by a GPS unit with Mr. Early’s address punched in. I’d Google-Mapped it earlier so I’d recognize it from above; Mr. Early’s friend owned a nice piece of property right on the beach, with an unpretentious main house, a guest house, a pool, and a stairs leading down to a beach deck. Over the lake, we dropped back down to fly close to the water; we might be black holes in the sky, but on a bright and cloudless night there was no reason not to be careful.
“There!” Artemis pointed ahead and left—I’d forgotten her night-sight was actually better than mine. I corrected as we came in, flying just above the gentle waves. The beach deck stood out, with no neighbors. At her signal I landed in its shadow, heart racing.
“My turn,” she said, handing me another preset burner-phone with a Bluetooth earset. Nodding, I clipped the cell to my belt and fitted the earset. She tested our setup, then shifted into mist to float up to the deck and out of sight.
I waited, listening to the lazy waves on the shore, my heart in my throat. Minutes ticked by, and I jumped when my cell buzzed.
“I’m in,” she said when I answered. “He’s got prime security, but not from the inside out. The upstairs balcony door is open and I’ve turned the outside systems off.”
For a moment, just a moment, I opened my mouth to tell her to get out of there. We were so far off the reservation it wasn’t funny, but we needed this.
“I’m coming in,” I whispered, and lifted off to ghost up the scrub-covered slope separating the beach from the property’s tree-shrouded backyard. I found Artemis waiting in the doorway—the kick I got from seeing her glowing with a healthy, living light like everyone else still hadn’t worn off—and stepped inside.
The balcony door opened into a second-floor study, a nice room with leather furniture and shelves of leather bound books between tasteful knickknacks, figurines, even a Swiss clock. She pointed at a paneled door between bookshelves. “Bedroom,” she said softly. “Bodyguard sitting out in the hall, nobody else. How do you want to play it? This isn’t my usual kind of negotiation.”
“As politely as we can.” I’d been thinking all the way in, and hoped my instinct wasn’t wrong. She smiled. “Thought so. I unplugged the house phones and put away his cell. Left his gun—thought it might make him feel a bit better.”
I took a breath, squaring my shoulders. “S’okay, it might help at that.” Running through my traditional pre-meeting checklist, I stopped on appearance and switched off chameleon mode, reverting to my proud blue and white. At a nod, Artemis cracked the bedroom door and I entered the darkened bedroom. Not completely dark; Mr. Early had a vanity light on in the bathroom and the door open. Smart. Artemis hung back as I stepped up to the bed and cleared my throat.
Mr. Early had to have been an Outfit soldier when he was young; he swept up his piece—a businesslike .45—before he’d even sat up, got it aimed at my center of mass before his eyes were fully open, and would have fired if I hadn’t stuck the tip of my index-finger behind the trigger, my fist wrapped around the barrel.
I waited till he had time to process our positions and come down off his automatic, normally quite effective, reaction to finding an intruder in his room.
“Softly, Mr. Early,” I said earnestly. “We need to talk, and making a fight of it won’t help anybody.” Then I let go of the gun.
Hard eyes studied me, then looked past me to Artemis, and finally towards the hallway door.
When I nodded, he lowered his piece. “Carl,” he called. “I need you to come in here.”
The hall door opened, checked halfway, and eased partly shut. I held my breath.
“Are you alright, Mr. Early?” the man on the other side asked. “I see at least one other person with you.”
How— Oh. A handy dresser-mirror stood against the wall to the right of the bed, and in it I could see out the door to the tall man holding it open.
“It’s fine, Carl,” his boss said. “These ladies just want to talk to me.”
The door opened all the way and Carl stepped inside. He held his gun out but pointed down, conspicuously away from us.
I exhaled silently, unutterably relieved, and put on Mom’s society smile. “I apologize for arriving unannounced, Mr. Early, and you can’t be comfortable. If we stepped into your study would you join us?”
He looked surprised, then thoughtful. “Yeah, I would. Carl, go with them.”
A good soldier, Carl holstered his piece without comment and followed us out. Artemis left the door open behind us so I could hear easily. The wardrobe door opened, closed, and a moment later Mr. Early joined us wearing bright vacation sweats and a pair of loafers withou
t socks. He left his piece in the bedroom.
“Drinks?” he asked. When we declined he opened up the liquor cabinet and poured himself three fingers of scotch. Taking a sip, he settled and I sat across from him, straightening my cape. Artemis stood behind me, mirroring Carl’s position. With his intensely dark hair, narrow build and face, and air of restrained violence, he and Artemis could have been a matched set—though of course he couldn’t see that under her hooded mask.
“So,” I said, when Mr. Early’s silence passed me the opening serve. “Do you come here often? Grand Beach is beautiful in the summer. I’ve been out here many times.”
He took another sip, smiling back but still watching me with shrewd eyes. “My daughter loves it. Swims like a fish and terrorizes the local boys. Organizes everything. Sophie thinks it’s too far from the good stores. What can I do for you, Ms. Astra.”
And here we go. “We appreciated your message the other day, Mr. Early, but I’m afraid it’s not enough.”
“It isn’t.”
“I’m sorry, but no. You know about the Dome attack, and I’m sure you heard of today’s events.”
“Nothing to do with us.”
“That is not quite true, Mr. Early. So far you have two dead that we know of, one in a very public attack with a lot of collateral damage. Every new incident of superhuman-on-superhuman violence increases public apprehension, enabling people like our good friend Mr. Shankman to turn up the rhetoric. Blackstone says the Outfit is eating itself, and as far as he’s concerned that’s fine, but every day your war is adding more gas to the fire.”
“We’re taking care of it.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough anymore. The attacks have been public, so now we have to be seen to ‘take care of it.’”
He grunted. “And why did they send you? Why aren’t I having this conversation with Blackstone?”
I rolled my eyes. “Plausible deniability?” True enough—what Blackstone didn’t know about couldn’t be his fault. “And do you think he’d leave the hospital to talk with you now?”
His gaze wavered. Good. Our family’s been hurt, so you wonder how responsible he holds you for it. I closed my mouth and let him think about it.
He swirled his scotch, set down the glass and sat back.
“So what can we do? We’re already at war.”
Somehow I managed to keep my expression neutral.
“Information, Mr. Early. We need to know what and who we’re facing. Blackstone thinks you revived the old Villains Inc. and it got out of hand.”
He nodded.
“Smart man. What has he told you about it?”
“Only that it was modeled after Murder Inc., your old hitman-for-hire operation.”
“Meh,” he said. “Maybe. And you guys laid it out but good. Business, no hard feelings. But can you see why we couldn’t just leave it there?”
“The gangs?”
“The gangs. They make good buyers, good soldiers, but get a few breakthrough gang-bangers together and they start thinking like comic-book supervillains. They’ve got the powers—why should they take orders?”
“So you brought Villains Inc. back.”
“Damn right, and fast. Some, they’re out-of-town hires. Others, they’re street villains themselves—we pay them well and we know where their families live. And we always pay a few of them quietly, let them stay in their own little groups so we know what’s going on on the street and they don’t know what we know. But you cleaned most of those ones out last year when you took down the Brotherhood and the Sanguinary Boys.”
I leaned forward. “So what happened?”
“The witch happened. Look.” He retrieved his glass, rolling it between his hands. “The associate who ordered the banker’s hit went over the line. We don’t use those assets for public messages, not anymore. That associate is no longer a concern, and when you guys got on the witch’s tail she should’a taken the severance package we offered her and got out of town. Instead she reached out to our other hires. Don’t ask me how—we kept the guys on our books separate. But she’s pulling them together, wants them working for her and us working for them. Call it management reorganization.”
“Has she got all of them?”
His face set. “Not hardly, but we’re having a hard time moving against her, not knowing who to trust. But the world’s bigger than this town, you know? And we have deeper pockets.”
Great. So they were hiring mercenaries for their war. He smirked, message delivered.
Behind me Artemis shifted, and it took everything I had not to look back at her. It would be like we were suddenly south of the border with the warring drug-cartels; this fight could burn Chicago down. Or put us under martial law.
We are so far over our heads. I waited until I could be sure my voice was steady.
“You know how that’s going to end,” I said. He shrugged.
“Maybe, but we didn’t start it. We’ll clean our own house.”
“And we’re in the middle of it. As I said, it’s not good enough. And as you say, it’s your house. Their actions are still your responsibility.”
His eyes narrowed. “What are you saying?”
“That people have died under our protection, and they were our responsibility, Mr. Early. You know the people responsible. We want Villains Inc. If not locations, then names or at least descriptions so we know who we’re up against.”
The silence stretched tight. I listened to the gears of the Swiss clock until he grunted, tossed back the last of his scotch, and set the glass down with a click.
“This is where I say we don’t like threats, you say it’s not a threat, and we both get counterproductive. So here’s the deal. We take care of our own, and I mean the ones who have stood with us. The rest, you can have them, the one’s we’re sure about. We’ll even tip you the nod when we learn anything you can legally act on that doesn’t compromise our own interests. We keep it friendly between us.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything.
“Then we understand each other. I’ll have to speak to some associates, iron out what’s fair, but you can take something home tonight to show our good faith. The witch has three lieutenants I’m sure of. They’re—”
Carl took hold of Mr. Early’s head and twisted it with a sickening sound, killing him instantly.
* * *
I froze, but Artemis drew and fired as Mr. Early slumped bonelessly forward over the coffee table, both e-lasers out and snapping. Carl turned to leave, ignoring the shots that should have dropped him twitching to the carpet. Shaking off the shock of sudden death, I launched myself at his back and he slammed me into the wall. Bouncing, I met another kick on the way down. My side exploded in pain as this one threw me across the study desk and into the shelves.
Pulling myself up, I watched Carl turn on Artemis and I knew. Villain X, the unknown Atlas-type from the Dome attack. Mr. Eager had been wrong in his trust. Carl tossed the couch aside, reached for her, and she danced away into mist.
“Hey!” I yelled, and hit him with the desk. Oak is heavy and I followed it, smashing us through the balcony doors, taking the fight out into the night.
He fell, off balance, and I kept up the momentum to smash Carl down into the pool patio. He took the hit and flipped me off over his head. We both paused for breath, floating over the patio.
“Did you carry the gun to floss your teeth?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Camouflage. People see you packing, they think that’s what you’ll use. You’re a cutie; let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Cutie? I’m one of the hundred strongest people on the planet! I’ve gone through three costume changes! I’ve got a rep now! What do I have to do?”
We smacked into each other and clinched. I used my shorter reach to get a shot in on his solar plexus, locking his diaphragm into spasms, but he got a knee up into the same ribs he’d hit before and my vision exploded. He drove us back down into the patio, me beneath him
. Our hit shattered the concrete, collapsing our end into the pool.
Our slide let me twist and I broke his hold. I got a solid punch on his jaw, two more hits to his stomach, then took one in the head with no room to roll with it.
My vision swam and I lost my hold. He pulled back for another hit but Artemis came out of mist to put one of her .45s to the base of his skull. Bang. He let go and I fell to the lawn as he climbed into the sky. I leaped after him, and everything went weird and dark.
* * *
“Hope?”
A hand squeezed my shoulder and I spat out grass.
Villains Inc. (Wearing the Cape) Page 21