“Yeah, definitely something weird is going on here. I mention Killshot’s real name, and this guy runs for his life, not hesitating to take potshots at us when we chased after him.” I glanced around the room, focusing on it for the first time as I had been too busy chasing after Shrapnel before. If the building looked like it belonged in an issue of Architectural Digest, this room looked like one out of Interior Design. Expensive looking pieces of furniture, art, and electronics were scattered about in a black, white, and beige color scheme.
“You know more about fashion and design than I do,” I said to Shadow. “Is this place as expensively decorated as it appears to be?”
Shadow went over to one of the prints on the wall and examined it carefully. She then looked at some of the furniture pieces.
“I can’t afford some of this stuff,” she said. “And I make a lot of money.”
“That’s kind of what I thought. The plot thickens about our comatose friend here: why he ran, how he can afford to live in this building, and how he can afford all this nice stuff, all as an unemployed engineer.”
Shadow winced a bit.
“I think there may be some metal still in my leg,” she said. She looked at me carefully. “And you have a gash in your forehead, not to mention a bleeding wrist. We need to patch ourselves up. Then maybe we’ll have a chat with Shrapnel and get some questions answered.”
“Agreed,” I said, pulling out some latex gloves. I handed a pair to Shadow. “Let’s secure Shrapnel first so he doesn’t go anywhere while we’re tending to ourselves.”
Using electrical tape I found in a kitchen drawer and some cords Shadow yanked out of lamps, we tied the still-unconscious Shrapnel to a cushioned metal kitchen chair. We were careful to tape the palms of his hands together so his shrapnel would not be a threat to us. We gagged him with one of his ripped up tee shirts. Since the cops had not shown up to investigate a commotion, it seemed we had been lucky enough to not attract anyone’s attention yet. We did not want that to change by allowing Shrapnel to cry out for help.
I checked Shrapnel’s bonds to make sure he was fully secure.
“Here I am, a licensed Hero sworn to uphold the law, and so far today I have trespassed, broken and entered, and assaulted and battered. Now, by tying this guy up, I’ve falsely imprisoned,” I said.
“Well, if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it right,” Shadow said. “I was taught that in Sunday school.”
“If this Shrapnel character somehow helps us locate Killshot, it will be well worth it.”
“You trying to convince me, or yourself?”
“Neither. We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do. It’s becoming clearer and clearer Killshot is too dangerous for us to let her continue to run around loose.” I looked down at Shrapnel’s tied up body. “I’m going to have a difficult time explaining all this to the cops and the Guild, though. It’ll be mighty hard to continue to look for Killshot from a prison cell.”
We went to Shrapnel’s bathroom. It was as opulent as the rest of his apartment. I told Shadow to take her pants off so I could see if there was any metal still in the back of her thigh.
She snorted derisively. “You should be so lucky,” she said. I took that as a no.
“Unless one of your superpowers is twisting your torso around one hundred and eighty degrees, you can’t see back there as well as I can,” I said. “If you want to limp around with metal in your leg until you go to a doctor, suit yourself.”
Shadow hesitated for a beat. Then, she sighed in resignation. She unbuttoned her pants.
“Fine,” she said. She pushed her pants down to her ankles, exposing her dark muscular and shapely legs. “But if I get so much as a hint you are enjoying yourself back there, I swear to God I’ll kick you to death.”
I knelt down behind her. I looked at Shadow’s exposed leg, but not before noticing the panties she had on. I was a healthy heterosexual man, and it would have taken a man more virtuous than I to avoid stealing a peek at her butt. The Pope, maybe. In light of how fit and attractive Shadow was, I would not have bet money on the Pope being able to resist taking a gander either.
It was almost impossible not to laugh at what I saw when I glanced at Shadow’s derrière. I somehow managed not to. Shadow’s warning still rang in my ear. I did not think she had been kidding. She would probably actually try to kick me to death if she felt sufficiently provoked. What kind of Metahuman badass wore Snoopy panties, though? The Empress indeed did wear clothes, and there was a Peanuts character on it.
Using some tweezers I found in Shrapnel’s medicine cabinet, I picked the remaining metal out of Shadow’s leg. Then I swabbed her with an antiseptic and bandaged her up. Then, Shadow cleaned and bandaged the gash on my head and the puncture wound on my wrist. The temptation to make a Peanuts reference was almost too much to resist. God only knew what Shadow would have done had I succumbed. Punched me in my peanuts, likely.
After Shadow and I were patched up, we returned to the living room. Shrapnel was awake. His dark brown eyes were rolling around in his head like a frightened pony’s. He grunted over and over, with the sound muffled by the gag in his mouth.
Shadow and I pulled up a couple of other kitchen chairs and put them in front of Shrapnel. I was about to remove his gag when Shadow stopped me. She walked over to a nearby bookcase and picked out a hardback book. She brought the thick book back over to us and stood in front of Shrapnel. She looked him dead in the eyes.
“When my friend takes the gag off of you,” Shadow said, “if you let out a sound louder than a peep, this is what I’ll do to you.” Shadow ripped the thick book in half as readily as ripping a single sheet of paper in two. Shrapnel’s eyes got wide. “Understand me?” Shadow asked. Shrapnel nodded his head up and down emphatically.
I peeled off the electrical tape that secured the gag in his mouth. I was not too gentle about it. After all, he had shot at us. Trigger-happy bastard.
Shrapnel started talking the moment the gag cleared his mouth. With frightened glances at Shadow, he was careful to not speak too loudly, though.
“What is the meaning of this?” Shrapnel sputtered. “Who the hell are you two? Let me loose. Do you have any idea of who you’re messing with?” I was suddenly reminded of Hacker, a member of the Metahuman Liberation Front Shadow and I had captured, tied up, and questioned when we had been on the hunt for Cara Barton months before. We had tortured Hacker to get the information we needed out of him. It was something I still felt guilty about, though it had seemed necessary to save Clara at the time. But, do the ends ever justify the means?
I shoved thoughts of the ethics of being a Hero aside for now. I focused my attention on Shrapnel. I shook my head at him.
“We’re free and you’re tied up. That means we’ll be the ones asking you the questions,” I said. I wished I had a gun. Though I would of course not shoot a tied-up man, Shrapnel did not know that. A gun was often an effective tool of intimidation.
“I’m not answering any goddamned questions,” Shrapnel said. I wondered if he would be so bold if the barrel of a gun was pointing at him. Maybe if I put my thumb up and pointed my forefinger at him, he would tell me everything I wanted to know. Fortunately, though I did not have a gun, I did have my ability to detect lies based on blood pressure, heart rate, and perspiration I had been working on perfecting. I had last used it on the poker players who had played with Eugene at the Golden Horseshoe Casino. This time, I could use it for something more important than determining whether or not a poker player was bluffing. First I needed to establish a baseline for Shrapnel’s physiological reactions using questions I already knew the answer to.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what,” I said to Shrapnel. “I’ll ask you some questions, and if you answer honestly, we’ll untie you. Then you can call the police, shoot at us some more with the metal out of your hands, whatever you want. Fair enough?”
“What kinds of questions?” Shrapnel asked. He looked and sounded relucta
nt, suspicious, and dubious, as if he doubted we would really let him go. My Heroic integrity would have been offended but, so far as I knew, Shrapnel did not know who I was, much less that I was a Hero. He did not know who Shadow was either unless her bloodthirsty reputation made her more famous than I thought she was. Shadow and I had agreed in the bathroom to not address each other by our real names around Shrapnel. Unless he already knew us somehow, he would have no way to identify or find us after we left other than what we looked like.
I jumped right into the questioning. I confined myself to yes or no questions I already knew the answer to so my powers could get a read on when Shrapnel was lying or telling the truth. Trial lawyers called those types of questions leading questions. If they were good enough for high-priced lawyers, they were good enough for me.
“Is your name Jeremiah Longfield?” I asked.
“Yes,” came the grudging answer after a slight pause. I made note of how Shrapnel’s body reacted when he answered the question.
“Do you live here?”
“Yes.”
“Is the following the address you live at,” I said, then reciting the address for his apartment, but deliberately getting the street name wrong.
“No.”
After several minutes of yes and no questions, I thought I had a good read on when Shrapnel was telling the truth. Now, time to dive into why Shadow and I had flown all the way across the country.
“Do you know a woman named Brooke Cantrell?” I asked.
A slight hesitation. “No,” Shrapnel said. He was lying.
“Do you know a Metahuman named Killshot?”
“No.” Another lie.
“Do you know who I am?”
“No.” The truth.
“Do you know who my friend here is?” I asked, gesturing at Shadow.
“No.” The truth again.
“Have you ever heard of a man named Eugene Poindexter?”
“No.” A lie.
“Are you aware a man named Eugene Poindexter was recently murdered?”
“No.” A lie.
“Have you ever heard of the Felonious Five?”
“No.” Another lie.
I asked Shrapnel a series of yes and no questions like this until I had learned everything I thought I could learn by asking leading questions. It was still quite a lot, and certainly more than I had known before I had spoken to him.
I stood. I picked up the gag I had used on Shrapnel before.
“Open your mouth,” I said to him.
“Why?” he said, staring at the gag. “You said you’d let me go if I answered your questions.”
“In due time,” I said to him. “But right now, open your mouth.”
Shrapnel clenched his jaw and looked stubborn. He did not open his mouth.
“Why does everyone always want things done the hard way?” I asked Shadow. I stepped behind Shrapnel. I held his nose closed with the fingers of one hand. He grunted and tried to shake me loose. That was hard to do, though, tied up as Shrapnel was. After maybe thirty seconds of struggling against me, Shrapnel opened his mouth to let out a yelp. I immediately cut him off by shoving the gag back into his mouth. Shadow, who was ready with more electrical tape, taped the gag into place again so Shrapnel could not spit it out. I let go of his nose. Shrapnel sucked in air noisily. I walked back around to the front of him. He was glaring at me with hatred in his eyes. He was not the first person to look at me like that; he would no doubt not be the last. I could not have cared less.
I gestured for Shadow to come with me. She followed me back into Shrapnel’s bathroom. I closed the door behind us. It occurred to me to ask Shadow to let me see her Snoopy underwear again, but this did not seem like the right time or place. Maybe later.
“I could guess a lot of what you learned from Shrapnel based on your line of questioning, but I suspect your Jedi mind tricks can tell me more,” she said.
“You’re right. Here’s what I now know thanks to that interrogation. Or at least what I think I know. There are some gaps in it because there is only so much you can learn asking yes and no questions of an uncooperative witness. So some of this is me filling in the blanks with educated guesses. As far as I can tell, Killshot and Shrapnel work together, and have been doing so for years. She, as we guessed, is an assassin for hire. Shrapnel is the go-between between her and her clients. He sets up the jobs and collects the money, while Killshot carries them out. One such job was Eugene. A family member of one of the Felonious Five contacted Shrapnel about taking Eugene out before he could testify against the group at trial. Shrapnel does not know exactly where Killshot is, though he does know how to get into touch with her.” I paused, thinking about if I had left anything important out.
“That’s the gist of it,” I said.
“Well, the next step would seem to be to persuade Shrapnel to tell us how to get into touch with Killshot,” Shadow said. “And I know just how to do it.” She laced her fingers together and cracked them ominously.
I thought about it for moment.
“No,” I said.
“No?”
“No,” I repeated, more firmly this time. “We are not going to torture that man to find out what we want to know. I’m a Hero, and it’s high time I started acting more like one. Me not behaving like a Hero is what got Eugene killed in the first place.”
Shadow looked at me incredulously, like I had sprouted a second head.
“There’s a man feet away from us who can give us information we’ve been hunting for, and you’re not willing to dirty your hands a little to get to it?” she said. “When we were looking for Clara, we tortured a man to locate her. You were a willing participant in that.”
“Willing but reluctant,” I said.
The look on Shadow’s face was one of disbelief. “If your precious Heroic ethics are suddenly making you too squeamish to do what needs to be done, just stay here in the bathroom and daydream about lollipops and butterflies. I’ll go out there and take care of it.” She made a move towards the door. I stepped in front of her.
“No,” I said again. “The situation with Clara was different. If we had not done what we did to find her as soon as possible, Lord only knows how many people might have died because she remained in the hands of the Metahuman Liberation Front. Thanks to the MLF, Clara was a ticking time bomb we needed to find and defuse. That’s not the case here. We’ll find Killshot, but we’re not going to torture a man to do it.” I shook my head, both at myself and the situation. “I’ve cut a lot of corners lately. Maybe some of them needed to be cut as we wouldn’t have gotten this far without it. But this is too far. If we go out there and torture that man, how are we any different than him? Any different than Killshot?”
Shadow was silent for a moment.
“Eugene was my client as much as he was yours,” she finally said. “Come hell or high water, I’m going to find the woman who killed him. If Shrapnel knows something more about her, I’m going to make him tell me.”
“No,” I said firmly.
“And who’s going to stop me?” Shadow said. She suddenly seemed even larger than usual. Though I was taller and bigger than she, she was much stronger. I became acutely aware of how close she was to me and of how fast she was capable of moving.
“I think you know the answer is me,” I said.
“You think you can?” The look Shadow gave me was the same one she had given Shrapnel when she had ripped up the book in front of him.
I sighed.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Shadow stared at me. Tension hung in the room between us like a thick curtain. My senses felt heightened, like they always did right before a fight broke out. I was ready to use my powers to stop Shadow. I did not want to do it, but I would.
After a long while, Shadow looked away. Disgust was on her face. She looked like she wanted to hit something. I somehow knew that something would not be me. I knew the crisis point had passed. I le
t go of the breath I had not realized I had been holding.
“You’re an idiot,” Shadow said. “And I’m an idiot for letting you have your way.”
I opened the bathroom door.
“You’re not the first person to call me an idiot. Hell, you might not be the first person today. I suspect you won’t be the last,” I said.
CHAPTER 27
Shadow and I left Shrapnel’s bathroom. Starting in Shrapnel’s kitchen, Shadow and I thoroughly tossed his apartment. We were looking for additional clues as to how to locate Killshot. Oftentimes when I searched a place, I was doing so secretly and I had to do it so the owner would not later realize someone had gone through his things. Since Shrapnel had a front row seat to me and Shadow going through his stuff, secrecy and care were not issues. Though we did not go out of our way to destroy Shrapnel’s things as we went through his place, we were not overly careful either.
While searching the living room, I knocked over and broke one of Shrapnel’s jade figurines. It was a beautiful little piece of art. I felt badly about it. Then I reminded myself Shrapnel was an accessory to Eugene’s murder, and who knew how many others. I picked up another figurine. Maybe Shrapnel had used some of the money he had gotten from Eugene’s death to buy it. I deliberately dropped it onto the wooden floor of the living room. It broke into several pieces. It did not make up for Eugene’s murder, but at least it was a start. Baby steps.
We finished searching the apartment. We only found a handful of things of any real interest. The first was a porn collection that would have shocked me with the scope of its depravity had I been less worldly. I flipped through a few of the magazines.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 3): Killshot Page 20