“You,” he exclaimed. “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want to see your face again?”
I stopped leaning on the car and stood up straight. Though John was wider than I, I was taller, and it gave me great satisfaction to look down on him. I gave him a smile, the wide open one that both charms and infuriates.
“I believe your parting words to me were ‘Get the fuck out of my house,’” I said. I extended my arms a bit to encompass the surrounding parking lot. “This is not your house. But, perhaps these niggling little details are hard for you to miss, you not being a trained detective like me.”
“I don’t have time to play games with you,” John said. “I’m tired, and I want to go home.” He stepped forward, toward the car. I stepped to the side and barred his path.
“You can go home. But first, we talk,” I said.
“I’ve got nothing to say to you,” he said. He tried to move past me again, and again I moved to bar his path.
“Hey, get the hell out of my way,” John said.
I said the words I had been itching to say to him when John had told me to get out of his house days before.
“Make me,” I said.
John put his left hand out and pressed it against my chest. He pushed me. I had my right leg slightly behind my left one, and I did not budge. John pushed harder. I still did not budge. A look of anger and frustration passed over John’s face. With his hand still on my chest, he took a swing at me with his free hand. The slight shift in his posture telegraphed the punch before his arm even moved. I was ready for it. Before the punch connected with my face, I twisted slightly to my right, grabbing John’s left wrist and forearm as I did so. His punch missed me by a country mile. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. I pulled at John’s left arm, using the momentum of his punch against him to send him sailing past me. He sprawled to the ground, landing like a sack of potatoes on his stomach.
John twisted on the clay surface. He struggled to get to his feet. He was moving slowly. Him hitting the ground so hard probably knocked the wind out of him.
I resisted the temptation to knock him down again. I had come for information, not to beat the tar out of him. Beating the tar out of him would be a nice fringe benefit, though.
“So here’s the thing, John,” I said as he rose. “When I was at your house, I wondered how a factory forearm was able to afford a nice car like this one. I’m guessing it costs a good deal more than you make in a year. When I found out you got it right after your daughter disappeared, it piqued my curiosity even more.” I left out the fact I had spoken to Mrs. Barton by telephone, and she told me she had no idea where her husband had gotten the money for the car, but that not only had he bought the car soon after Clara disappeared, but he had also paid off the couple’s credit card bills in full.
“So, I paid a visit yesterday to the friendly folks at Taylor BMW,” I said. “They were more than happy to chat with a charming Hero such as myself.” John did not need to know that my natural charm was considerably aided by greasing the palm of the salesman who sold the car to John. “They told me you paid for the car in cash. You literally brought in a bag full of bills,” I said.
“So I asked myself, ‘Self, how do you suppose our working class friend John Barton got enough cash to choke an elephant, right around the time his daughter disappeared? Could it be the two facts are related?’ And then I said, ‘Self, why are you asking me when we really should be asking John?’ So, here I am John, asking. Where did you get the money from?”
John was on his feet by then, breathing heavily. His face looked wary and a little bit afraid. I think he was starting to realize that, despite his size, he was outmatched.
“None of your damned business,” he gasped.
“Wrong answer,” I said. I hit him with a right jab in the pit of his stomach. He made a sound like air escaping from a balloon. When he doubled over, I kneed him in the face. I hit him square in the nose. There was a spray of blood. John cried out. He fell to his knees. I stepped back out of the range of him in case he was foolish enough to try to counterattack.
“My nose,” John said in a raspy voice. He raised his hands to touch it. He yelped when his hands made contact with it. His voice sounded muffled. His face was messy with blood. “I think you broke it.”
“I hear you like to hit little Meta girls. Now you know how it feels when a Meta hits you back,” I said. “I’ll break more than just your nose if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”
John shook his head stubbornly. I sighed. I got closer to him and kicked him in the ribs. Hard. John squealed like a hog being butchered. He fell on his side, clutching where I kicked him. As much as I disliked John, I did not relish literally kicking him when he was down. It smacked of bullying, and I hated bullies. But, I had a job to do, and I was going to do it.
“I’m waiting,” I said.
“I sold her,” he gasped, writhing in pain.
“You sold Clara?” I asked. John nodded. Though I was halfway expecting it, I was still shocked. “To whom?”
“I think you busted my ribs, too,” he said. “I need to go the hospital.”
“You’ll go to the morgue instead if you don’t answer my questions. Who did you sell Clara to?”
John rolled onto his back. He was twitching like a dying cockroach. The ground had not yet dried out from the recent snows. Red clay clung to John’s clothes like blood. His eyes squeezed shut. Tears escaped from the corner of them and rolled down the sides of his face.
“Some guy,” he finally said. He sounded like he had problems breathing. “One of you Metas. He heard about what Clara can do from somebody at her school. He got into touch with me, said he’d pay good money if he could take her and I’d look the other way. Not call the cops, not look for her, that sort of thing.”
“What’s this guy’s name?”
John didn’t respond. I moved over to him. I put my foot on his ribcage where I kicked him. He clutched at my leg weakly. I applied a bit of downward pressure. He yelped.
“The name,” I said again.
“He told me he was the Pied Piper. I don’t know his real name, I swear. He came to the house when I knew my wife would be gone. He paid me and took Clara with him when he left. She left with him without me even telling her to. I think maybe the guy could control her, or something.”
“Did this Pied Piper say why he wanted Clara?”
John shook his head frantically from side to side. He continued to squirm beneath me.
“So you just let some guy whose real name you don’t know take your only daughter for God only knows what reason?” I said. I was disgusted. “How much did this Pied Piper pay you?”
“One hundred thousand,” he gasped. “Get off of me. You’re killing me.”
Though I didn’t want to, I let up a little on the pressure I was applying.
“A hundred thousand dollars,” I said. I snorted. “What, he didn’t have thirty pieces of silver handy?”
John did not respond. It was a rhetorical question anyway. What was there to say?
I asked John what this Pied Piper character looked like, and he told me. He was a white male of average height in his forties with black hair that was graying a bit. As that fit the description of a sizable percentage of the population, it was not much to go on. But, it was all John could give me. He was in too much pain and too concerned about saving his own miserable hide to lie to me.
Once I had gotten all of the information out of John I thought I was going to, I got off of him. I stepped back. I looked down at him on his back as he rocked from side to side, clutching his ribs.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he was hoarsely whispering. “Metas are evil. God Himself says so. Clara is not even human. I didn’t do anything wrong.” He said it over and over again, like he was a broken record. I didn’t know if he was trying to convince me, or himself.
I looked down at him with contempt. What kind of father who called himself a Christian sold his daughter?
What kind of father of any religion sold his daughter?
I had hurt John. But, he wasn’t going to die. With medical treatment, he would be able to live his bigoted small life for many years to come. What I had done to John seemed like insufficient punishment for what he had done to Clara. Maybe it was not my place to judge. The New Testament taught that one should turn the other cheek. That was fine, I supposed, in a world of sweetness and light where the lion had lain down with the lamb and swords had been all turned into plowshares. But that was not the world I lived in. In that world, the words “an eye for an eye” from the Old Testament appealed more to me.
I reached down and grabbed John by his jacket. I dragged him away from his car until he was a decent distance away from it. He did not even resist. He just moaned in pain and kept saying “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
I patted him down. I found his car keys in his right front pants pocket. His cell phone was in his left pocket. I took both. I slipped the cell into my own pocket.
I walked to the BMW, leaving John to rock back and forth in the dirt. I unlocked the car, opened it, got in, and started the engine. Leaving it running, I got back out and walked over to John again. He still lay where I had left him.
I stretched out my water awareness. There was plenty of water vapor in the air around and in the car, not to mention liquid water in some of the car’s parts. A water molecule consisted of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. Any grade school chemistry student could tell you that. Hydrogen was highly combustible. People had been reminded of that by the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, where a dirigible using lighter than air hydrogen gas caught on fire and exploded. Oxygen was the fuel which every fire needed to burn.
Using my hydrokinetic powers, I broke up a lot of the liquid water and water vapor in and around the car to its component gaseous parts, namely hydrogen and oxygen. All it would take from there would be a single spark, which the car’s spark plugs would happily provide.
In seconds, there was a muted whooshing sound from the car. Smoke rose from the hood of the car. In seconds, there were visible flames. Crackling and popping sounds filled the air. Seconds later, probably when the fire hit the car’s gas tank, there was an explosion. With a loud boom, the car exploded. A fireball rose into the air. Debris flew everywhere. My ears rang. My face felt hot from the flames.
John had traded his daughter in for a car. Destroying the car did not come close to balancing the scales of justice. But, at least it was a step in the right direction.
John was propped up on his elbows, staring at the burning remains of his car like he was staring into the fiery pits of Hell.
“My car! My car! What did you do to my car?” he said to me.
“You’re lucky I didn’t put you in it first,” I said. I bent over and grabbed him by the front of his jacket. I pulled him off the ground until his face was inches from mine. The parts of his face that were not bloody were pale from injury, pain, and fear.
“I’m going to find your daughter,” I said. The words came out in a hiss between my clenched teeth. “When I do, you had better pray to that nutty god you worship that she’s not hurt. If she is, I’m going to find you and hurt you again too. And, I won’t hold back the next time.”
I itched to punch his teeth down his throat. With an effort, I resisted the impulse. I let go of him. He slumped back onto the ground with a cry of pain. He let out a low sound. I couldn’t tell if it was a moan or a sob.
I started to walk away.
“You can’t just leave me here like this,” John said. “I’m hurt bad.”
I pulled his cell phone out of my pocket. I had meant to call the ambulance for him with it after I burned his car. In my anger I had forgotten. I did not want to use my own phone to make the call and have John’s beating be traced back to me. Licensed Heroes weren’t supposed to do such things. There were rules we were supposed to follow. I had clearly stepped outside of them.
I didn’t care.
I was no longer in the mood to call someone to help John. So, I flipped the phone over to John. It landed on his chest.
“You say you’re hurt badly? Here’s your phone,” I said. “Call someone who cares.”
I walked over to my own car and drove off.
Maybe when the cops showed up, John would tell them I had beaten him and torched his car. Maybe, but I didn’t think so. He was too scared of me now. But, even if he did tell on me and the cops came around to question me, I would tell them what John had done to his daughter.
A lot of cops were parents. They would understand what I did.
CHAPTER 9
After leaving John, I drove to the central location of the Astor City Library. It was not too far from my office. There were some parking spaces on either side of the building that were clearly labelled “For Librarian Use Only.” I pulled into one of those empty spaces. I had just broken several laws with John. What was one more? I doubted breaking a parking code would push me into supervillain territory. If it did, what would my code name be? Parking Scofflaw? It was not a name that would strike terror into the hearts of the public.
Before going into the library, I walked across the street to a deli. I ordered a roast beef sandwich. I flashed healthiness the middle finger and I got a side of fries to go with it. Breakfast seemed an eternity ago. Stomping a relatively defenseless citizen burned a lot of calories.
I felt sick to my stomach as I ate, and not because of the food. Now that the white hot fire of my anger at John had cooled a bit, I had second thoughts about what I had done. I did not know how else I could have handled the situation, though. John would not have told me what he had done to Clara by me simply asking him nicely and by saying pretty please, with sugar on top. But, I could have perhaps not hurt him as much as I did. Despite what John had done, the strong should not prey on the weak. Though John was a grown man, I had superpowers and extensive physical training. John had about as much of a chance against me as a child did against a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It was an issue I struggled with a lot—finding out the information I needed to find out and doing what needed to be done without crossing into the territory of doing things to people simply because I had the power to do them.
Me hurting John was a sour taste in my mouth as I ate my meal. I did not feel badly about destroying his car, though. He had sold his daughter, after all. If John had bought a fleet of cars, I would have felt perfectly fine about torching each and every one of them. Plastic and metal were not the same as flesh and bone. Maybe I had a future as a car wrecker. I could visualize the sign outside my business: “Truman Lord, Car Wrecker Extraordinaire. Prove you sold your child into slavery, and I’ll destroy your car for free.”
The more I thought about John, the more I lost my appetite. I threw the rest of my meal into the trash. I left the deli, feeling more and more like a bully. Perhaps if I ran across a puppy between there and the library, I could kick it and make my transformation to bully complete. Fortunately for the puppy population, I did not see any between the deli and the library.
I had been to the Astor City Central Library many times before to do research for various cases. Each visit had been less pleasant than the last. I had to go through a metal detector once I was inside. Yes, a metal detector to get into a library. I had to show the guard my private detective and gun licenses to have him let me keep my gun.
As I went into the library, I thought about how much libraries had changed over the years. There had been no metal detectors in my childhood library. I grew up in a small town in Georgia. The county library had been in walking distance of my elementary school, and I had gone there every day after school until my parents got off of work and picked me up. That library had been housed in a pre-Civil War mansion which had been gifted to the county by a rich local family. It was self-imposed penance for their family building its wealth on the backs of slaves, maybe. It was cheaper than redistributing their wealth to the descendants of their family’s slaves, I supposed.
At any rat
e, the library from my childhood had been large and majestic and crammed full of books. I got a better education from my reading there than I did in school. The librarians had uniformly been dressed primly in ankle-length dresses and sensible shoes. They had been knowledgeable to the point of omniscient, and they did not hesitate to shush those who defiled their shrine to learning with loud conversations and tomfoolery.
The Astor City Central Library was not like that. That was not a good thing. Rather than it being housed in a mansion that inspired a feeling of romanticism, it was housed in a structure that looked more like a dull office building where people went to have their souls crushed. It seemed like there were more computers than books inside. The librarians looked and sounded like they had only gotten their GEDs rather than masters and doctorates in library science. I doubted they could navigate their way around the Dewey Decimal System with a head start, a map, and a compass.
The Astor City Central Library was more part homeless shelter, part television viewing lounge, and part singles bar than a place people went for quiet reading and contemplation. And, rather than being a silent shrine to learning like my childhood library, I have been inside of nightclubs that were quieter. I would have to pull out my gun and fire it into the ceiling to break through the hubbub and draw the ire of a librarian. I would probably have to explain to her first what “ire” was though. That was probably why the library had metal detectors—the librarians did not want patrons to shoot off guns and interrupt the librarians while they took selfies and updated their social media.
I went up to the reference desk on the second floor. There were two young women behind the desk. That was the only thing that gave away the fact the two of them worked there. It certainly was not their attire, their professionalism, or their attitude.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 2): The Missing Exploding Girl Page 6