Superhero Detective Series (Book 3): Killshot

by Darius Brasher

  I had seen a lot of Astor City police badges over the years. Though I could not swear this one was real beyond a shadow of a doubt, it certainly looked and felt real. The fact the barista was saying this guy was a cop almost guaranteed that it was in fact real.

  So, I had assaulted, battered, and taken the gun away from a police officer. And, not a lowly cadet, recruit, or patrolman, but a lieutenant. In front of a store full of witnesses. Not to mention the store’s security cameras. Blocks away from police headquarters. Great. Maybe once I was done here, I would fly to the Vatican and shoot the Pope while he was conducting Mass.

  I let go of the bald man. He spun around. He grabbed his right shoulder with his left hand and massaged it.

  “Sorry Lieutenant,” I said. “I was hired to protect the man who was in line ahead of you. It looked like you were reaching for your gun. Plus, I saw you looking at me. It made me suspicious.”

  “I was reaching for my wallet to pay for my coffee, you idiot,” he said. “And I was looking at you because I saw you were packing heat.” His face was flushed red from pain and anger. The lightning-shaped scar on his head looked white in contrast. He looked like he wanted to take a swing at me. If there had not been so many people watching, he probably would have. A couple of people near us had their cell phones out and were recording the incident.

  I wanted to say a man who had no guns should not call a man who had two guns an idiot. And “packing heat”? Really? I wanted to ask the cop who wrote his cheesy dialogue. The lightning-shaped scar reminded me of Harry Potter, and I wanted to tell the cop he should carry a wand instead of a gun. But not even I was reckless enough to make a joke at a time like this.

  I pulled the man’s wallet out of my pocket. I pretended to fumble it, and flipped it open. I quickly glanced at it. When on the lookout for a potential assassin, trust, but verify. “Lieutenant Mark Gibbons, Astor City Police Department,” the identification card tucked inside the wallet’s clear plastic window read. The man pictured on the card was unmistakably the man who stood before me. Never before had I so fervently wished someone was really an assassin who had duped a barista into believing he was a cop. Come to think of it, never before had I ever wished someone was an assassin, period. Life was full of disappointments.

  I handed Gibbons his wallet and badge. I then gave his gun back. He looked like he wanted to shoot me with it. He simply holstered it instead. The part of me that was already dying of embarrassment wanted him to go ahead and shoot and put me out of my misery. Another part of me was justifying to myself what I had done. I had been correct in guessing Gibbons was carrying a gun, and he had been looking at me intently. How was I to know he was a cop? Wasn’t it better to be safe than sorry? A third part of me wondered if I would have been so quick to act if I weren’t so jumpy from feeling the need for a drink. Was suffering from alcohol withdrawal affecting my judgment?

  Gibbons demanded my Hero’s, private investigator’s, and gun licenses. I pulled them out and gave to him. He examined them like he was praying they were fake. Fortunately, they were not. He reluctantly handed them back to me.

  “You would think someone with so many credentials wouldn’t be so goddamned stupid,” Gibbons said.

  It took both me and Eugene explaining the situation and why I acted as I did to convince Gibbons to not arrest me for assaulting a police officer, disturbing the peace, and God only knew what else. The charges probably would not have stuck—one of the benefits of being a licensed Hero was a Hero had limited police powers when acting in his official capacity—but an arrest still would have meant I would have cooled my heels in jail for a while until I was bailed out. Honestly, if I had not taken his gun away from him so readily I suspected Gibbons would have arrested me regardless of the circumstances. If Gibbons arrested me, not only would he have to deal with the hornet’s nest of having arrested a licensed Hero, but he would have to explain to his superiors how I had taken his gun away from him so easily. Cops frown on other cops losing their guns.

  I apologized to Gibbons profusely. Gibbons gave me a loud lecture in front of everyone that was no doubt designed to shame and embarrass me. It somewhat succeeded in that. It also served to make me mad. I did not enjoy being called stupid or being berated, especially in public. Who did? I uncharacteristically held my tongue. I was in the wrong, after all. And, if I got into a verbal pissing contest with Gibbons, he might have gone ahead and arrested me. I had signed on to guard Eugene, and it would be mighty hard to do it from a jail cell.

  Gibbons finally decided to let me go after his lecture ran out of steam and he ran out of ways to call me stupid. I could have supplied a few more to him. But, when someone is shooting at you, you don’t hand them more bullets.

  Eugene and I left Perk Up. Thanks to my run-in with Lieutenant Gibbons, we had been in the shop far longer than we had intended to be. Many of the people I had carefully noted while waiting in line with Eugene were gone. We started to walk north on Hamilton Street back to Eugene’s office. The street and the sidewalks were only moderately busy this time of day. That would be changing shortly as people got off of work. Soon the sidewalks and streets would be teeming with people rushing home.

  Though it was late afternoon, the day was still bright and sunny. My mood was not, though. Eugene must have sensed that.

  “I would rather have you overreact to a situation than underreact,” Eugene said. The look he gave me was one of pity.

  “Yeah, better safe than sorry,” I said. My heart was not in my response. I did not know if Eugene meant what he said, or if he was simply trying to make me feel better. I did not feel better. It was a cliché that everyone made mistakes. But, Heroes were supposed to keep them to a minimum. We had too much power to make too many mistakes. People often died when we made mistakes. That had been hammered into me over and over years ago when I had trained for the Hero Trials, the series of tests one had to pass to get his Hero’s license. My experiences as a Hero further served to hammer the point home. What if I had not merely disarmed Lieutenant Gibbons? What if I had seriously injured him? Or, killed him? Had drinking—or my recent lack of drinking—impaired my judgment? Was I letting my zeal to protect Eugene become paranoia?

  Eugene and I fell silent as we continued to walk down the sparsely populated sidewalk. Though I was thinking about what I could and should have done differently in the coffee shop, I was still hyper-aware to any hint of danger. I was on Eugene’s right side, closest to Hamilton Street. We passed a series of businesses on his left. There was a sudden squeal of tires. Someone behind us yelled in alarm. I turned my head in the direction of the sound. A grey car was barreling down Hamilton in our direction.

  Right as I saw it, the car jumped the curb with a loud thump. It hurtled towards me and Eugene.

  CHAPTER 7

  I lunged to the left without thinking. I enfolded Eugene in my arms. I tackled him to the ground like he was a quarterback about to get a pass off. We fell hard on the concrete inches from the front of a building. I was on top of Eugene. He cried out in surprise and pain. The car rocketed past us with a roar. It just barely missed us. I gagged on the smell of burning rubber and exhaust.

  I rolled to my feet. My gun was in my hand and pointed at the car. I must have drawn it, though I did not remember doing so. The safety was already off. My finger was on the trigger. I hesitated. Too many people around. Plus, maybe the car having swerved towards us had been an accident. I did not want to overreact again and kill somebody.

  The car clipped a man on the sidewalk. He went down. People screamed. The car lurched back to the right, off the sidewalk, barely missing oncoming cars on Hamilton. Horns shrieked in protest. Out of habit, I noted the details of the car: a grey Honda Accord with a license plate starting with NDR. I could not catch the rest.

  The Honda tore down the street away from us, towards where Hamilton intersected Franklin at a red light. A fire hydrant was near the intersection. I triggered my powers, stretching out my mind to increase the water
pressure in the hydrant. The hydrant burst. Water shot out. It drenched the road in front of the speeding Honda. As fast as thought, the water on the road became ice at my mental command. The car hit the icy patch. Losing traction, it spun out of control, fishtailing to the right. It rammed into a couple of parked cars on the side of the street with a loud crash. The Honda slammed to a stop. There was the rending of metal and the tinkling of broken glass. Glass shards sprayed people walking by the parked cars. More screams. One car’s alarm went off. Its shrieking punctuated the shouts of onlookers and the honking of horns.

  The door to the Honda opened. A woman stepped out. She staggered, obviously shaken up from the crash into the parked cars. She shook her head, as if to clear it. She then looked at Eugene, who was crouched down on the sidewalk near me. It was almost if I could read her thoughts: “Should I make another run at him now?” she seemed to be thinking. I almost started to run to her. I stopped myself. I did not want to leave Eugene’s side. Then the woman’s gaze shifted to me. For an instant, time froze as we stared at each other. She half-smiled, half-grimaced at me. There was something vaguely familiar about her, something about the way she held herself and moved. I could not put my finger on why she was familiar. I pointed my gun at her. I had no intention of firing it, however. She was too far away. There were people behind her. I did not want to miss her and hit someone else. If the woman was afraid of me and my gun, she hid it well. The look she gave me was one of challenge, not fear.

  Though I did not recognize her, she was a Metahuman. There were several clues to that fact. The first was, despite her having on regular street clothes, the woman wore a white mask with pink accents that completely covered her head except for her eyes and mouth. White and pink gloves were on her hands. A similarly colored cape that was attached to her mask billowed out behind her.

  I could have killed her readily enough. I could have made the water molecules in her blood be explosively repellant to one another, or prevented the blood from reaching one of her vital organs. But merely incapacitating her was a more delicate operation and required more time and concentration than killing her would. Before I could focus my powers on the woman’s body to incapacitate her, she sprang into the air. Any Tom, Dick, or Harry could put on a mask, gloves, and cape. Not just anybody could fly. This was the decisive clue the woman was a Metahuman. She rose straight up like a rocket. Her cape snapped loudly in the air behind her. She moved too quickly for my powers to lock onto her.

  Time to change tactics. I sent a stream of water from the still gushing hydrant after her. I intended to suffocate her or to encase her in ice to bring her crashing to the ground. It was too late. Once the woman was higher than the tallest of the surrounding buildings, she streaked off horizontally. In seconds, she was but a diminishing dot in the sky. Maybe I could have hit her with a surface to air missile, or a particularly long-winded bolt of lightning. I had neither. I had only my gun and the water from the hydrant, both of which the woman was already out of the range of.

  The woman went from being a small dot in the sky to being totally gone. If it had not been for the carnage she had left behind, I could have convinced myself the woman was but a product of my imagination.

  I let the water I had sent airborne fall harmlessly to the ground. I looked around. Cars were now parked in the middle of Hamilton Street, causing traffic to back up both ways. Water from the hydrant was soaking people, cars, and the street. No one else appeared to be a threat. I brought my powers to bear again. With loud cracking sounds, I encased the hydrant in a thick block of ice, cutting off the water flow. Without the rushing sound of running water, the scene was suddenly strangely quiet even though horns were still blowing. Everyone looked shell-shocked, as if they could not believe what had happened.

  I holstered my gun before I accidentally shot myself or, worse, someone else. My hand shook a bit. I was not sure if it was because of adrenaline or if it was alcohol withdrawal rearing its head again.

  I turned back to Eugene. I helped him to his feet.

  “You hurt?” I asked. My blood pounded in my head and roared in my ears.

  “I don’t think so,” Eugene said. The front of his suit was dirty. He was visibly shaken. “You think that was just an accident?”

  “You hear of a threat to your life, a Metahuman almost hits us with a car, and then flies away?” I shook my head. “If that’s just a coincidence, it’s the world’s biggest one. No, it was no accident.”

  I started to hear the wailing of sirens. A throng of people surrounded the nearby man who had been hit by the speeding Honda. He was lying on the sidewalk. A splatter of blood was on the pavement at his side. He was writhing in pain. Good. He was alive, at least for now.

  “I didn’t really think it was an accident,” Eugene said. He shook his head. “Wishful thinking, I guess. It’s been a while since someone tried to kill me.”

  “Happens to me all the time,” I said. “I wish I could say you get used to it. You don’t.”

  Telling Eugene to stay close, I went to the man on the sidewalk to see what I could do to help. The blood splatter on the pavement looked like something out of an impressionist painting.

  Yes, maybe I had been paranoid earlier when I accosted the police officer. But, as the female Metahuman’s appearance had made clear, even paranoids had enemies.

  CHAPTER 8

  “It’s too bad you didn’t shoot that woman,” Shadow said, “or used your powers to make her head explode.”

  “It just didn’t seem like a good idea at the time,” I said.

  “I’ve found that it’s almost always a good idea to kill your opponent,” she said. “Makes it much harder for them to try to kill you.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind for next time.”

  It was early evening, a few hours after my run-in with the female Meta. It was time for Shadow to take over bodyguarding Eugene. We sat inside Shadow’s car parked across the street from Eugene’s fancy house. Eugene was inside the house. Shadow was in the driver’s seat; I was in the passenger’s. After talking to Shadow for a bit, I planned to meet my girlfriend Ginny for a date at a local museum. I wanted a drink—or several—before meeting her. Since I had promised Eugene I would abstain from drinking, I would do my best to resist that temptation. The lure of alcohol was strong, which only served to confirm I should do my best to ignore it. I knew I had to stop drinking permanently at some point anyway. Now was as good a time as any to start. Knowing that and ignoring the alcohol cravings of my body were two different matters, though. It reminded me of the prayer the Christian theologian Saint Augustine of Hippo once made: “God, grant me chastity and continence. But, not yet.” I knew how he felt.

  Eugene lived in a ritzy gated community in the Astor City suburbs. His sprawling tan brick house and its location in a very affluent community were silent testimony to the fact there was more money in being a stockbroker than in being a Hero or a private detective. Then again, there was more money in being a high-priced prostitute than in being a Hero. It just went to show where society’s priorities were.

  Shadow did not look at me as we spoke. Her gaze was fixed on Eugene’s house and grounds, alert to any hint of danger. She was dressed in a black summer sweater and black pants. Black was Shadow’s go-to color of choice. If I ever saw her in a primary color, I might have had a heart attack. Shadow’s clothes clung to her curves. This was not because her clothes were particularly tight but, rather, because Shadow’s curves were considerable. Shadow probably could put on a burlap bag and still look like a magazine centerfold. Since she was looking at Eugene’s house and not at me, I was tempted to take a good long look at her body. What if her body was growing a tumor she did not know about? It was my duty as her friend to look out for her best interests. But, if I gave in to the temptation and Shadow caught me ogling her, she would be the one who gave me a heart attack. So, I kept my gaze on Shadow neck-level and above. It was safer that way. Besides, I did not want to be accused of being a misogynist agai
n.

  As dark as Shadow’s clothes were, they were not as dark as her skin. Shadow’s skin was so dark it was almost blue. Her tightly curled hair was shaved close to her skull, leaving only an ultra-thin layer of jet black hair.

  The car we were in was old and somewhat beat-up. I was not the kind of car I expected to find Shadow in. I expected her car to be like her: sleek, chic, fast, and easy on the eyes.

  “This your car?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Shadow said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead owning a car like this. My cars are a little on the showy side. They’re not good for a job like this. For a job like this, you need something inconspicuous.”

  “So whose car is this, then?”

  Shadow shrugged.

  “Beats the hell of me. I borrowed it,” she said.

  I sighed. “By borrow, you mean stole.”

  “No, I mean borrow. Stole implies you’re not giving it back. I’m taking this car back to where I found it in long-term parking at the airport as soon as you relieve me in the morning. Its owner won’t even miss it. I’ll borrow a different one tomorrow. If you think about it, I’m doing the owners of these cars a favor by driving them and keeping the batteries alive while they are gone.”

  “You’re a real humanitarian,” I said.

  “I think so too. I’ll be sure to mention to the cops you said so if I get caught.”

  “On another criminal note, based on what I’ve told you about the Meta who tried to kill Eugene, do you recognize her?” I asked.

  Shadow shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “Though I’ve performed an assassination or two in my time, not all Metahuman killers know one another. It’s not like we hold weekly meetings to get to know each other and swap poison recipes and gun recommendations. We are not the Rotary Club.

  “Did you run the woman’s description and powers past the Heroes’ Guild?” Shadow asked. “Maybe she is a registered Meta and they can give you her name and location. I thought one of the main purposes of the Hero Act’s registration requirements was so a Meta can be tracked down if she does something illegal.”