Making Up Lost Time

by Mark Fassett

  Still, she thought if she was careful and just broke the glass out of the frame without moving the door, she could be safe.

  She went to the stone bed, picked out an oblong stone that was relatively easy to grasp at one end, and carried it back to the door.

  Now, she was really breaking and entering.

  It didn’t matter. She had to find out if Red had left any clue about who he was after the night he died.

  She hefted the stone above her shoulder, preparing to strike the glass.

  Then the blinds shifted and the door slid open.

  “There’s no need to do that, Miss Witt.”

  The face that greeted her looked strangely familiar.

  It didn’t take her more than a moment to figure out why, either.

  If you removed the dark red beard, thickened up the lips a little bit, and let the hair grow out instead of keeping a military cut, she had seen that face in the mirror every morning of her life. Add some age to it, put on a red eye mask and a skin tight black suit with a lightning logo on the front, and the man in front of her could have been her father.

  She lowered the rock to her waist, then dropped it on the ground beside her, where it landed with a thud.

  Nice opened her mouth to speak, but nothing escaped her lips, not even the breath she took.

  Chapter 5

  HER BROTHER, FOR that’s the only person he could be, ushered Nice into the house and had her sit on a couch in the darkened basement. Enough light streamed past the cracks between the blinds that she could barely see him as he walked to the other side of the room and flicked a switch.

  When the lights came on, she found the basement finished in seventies style wood sheathing, carpeted in beige, with a large TV taking up the end wall. Other than that, the room was virtually empty, but for a pair of oversized speakers and the couch she was sitting on.

  She slipped her hand into the pocket of her coat, and it came to rest on her gun. It was vaguely reassuring, as the man who looked so much like her father came to sit on the floor in front of her.

  It was clear he was trying to help her relax.

  They waited in silence, looking at each other, until she finally was able to find her voice.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “You must have an idea,” he said. A slight smile crossed his lips.

  “Please, no riddles,” she said. “It’s been a difficult enough day already.”

  He shifted slightly, and the smile disappeared.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess you could say I’m your brother. I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time. My name’s Reggie.” The smile crept back onto his face.

  Reginald. The house didn’t belong to her father at all, at least not in name.

  Her mind couldn’t process the idea of having a brother, even if he was only a half-brother, which she thought likely. Her mom had never had a second child.

  And then the second part of what he said hit her.

  Reggie knew about her, which meant Red knew.

  And he’d never said anything.

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know, since I was eight? Nine, maybe? It’s hard to remember, exactly. I found a picture of you and your mom. I asked who you were, and he told me.”

  Red knew. How old was Reggie, twenty-four, twenty-five? Which would mean that the picture was thirteen or fourteen years old.

  “Do you still have the picture?” Nice asked. How long had her father known about her? How many years did she miss with him?

  “You know, I think I might. If you take your hand off that gun in your pocket, we can go upstairs and look. We could even get you a drink.”

  She tried not to let him know that she was startled. She took her hand out of her pocket, anyway.

  “What makes you think there’s a gun in my pocket?”

  He looked down at his hands, almost shyly.

  “My Gift,” he said.

  Then he jumped to his feet, and stuck his hand out to her.

  “Let’s go get a drink and look for that photo,” he said.

  She reached up and took his hand, letting him help her off the couch.

  He was Gifted, just like his father. Not like her. Maybe he was their answer.

  “Dad is going to be so surprised,” Reggie said as he turned to lead her up the stairs.

  Nice pulled her hand from his in shock.

  He didn’t know. It explained the smiles when all she felt was devastated. But how could he not know? Should she even tell him?

  He turned back to her.

  Too late. It was too late now to hold back from him.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Yes, too late.

  But could she tell him, or should she lie?

  She could see on his face that he was connecting the dots. His smile faded.

  “Why are you here? Did something happen to Dad?”

  Nice made a decision. Right or wrong, she couldn’t not tell him.

  She stepped forward and took his hand.

  “Let’s get those drinks, and I’ll tell you,” she said.

  “Ahh, shit.” he said.

  Chapter 6

  REGGIE TOOK THE news pretty well, all things considered.

  “It was going to happen sometime, I guess,” he said, then took a long drink from his whiskey and soda. Cheap whiskey, cheap soda.

  They were sitting across a small dining table from each other, the gray light from outside flooding the room through the large bay windows she had longed to look through. It was a shame the water wasn’t visible through the rain.

  “What do you mean?” Nice asked.

  She’d chosen cheap vodka and cranberry juice for her own drink, but it sat on the table in front of her, untouched. She’d drink it in a little bit, after her emotional roller coaster started to slow. Between learning she had a brother, and then having to tell her brother that their father had died, she didn’t know what she’d do if she started drinking. Drinking and heavy emotion never went well for her.

  “It’s just, you know, three years ago, there were three of them. Dad, Smokescreen, and Mr. Rocket. And then, out of nowhere, Dad was the only one left. Smoke disappeared, and Mr. Rocket unexpectedly retired, leaving Dad holding the bag. Without any backup, it was just… It was bound to happen. I told him so many times, but he wouldn’t listen.

  “Just said, ‘Now, Son, you know I have to do this. If I don’t do it, who will?’ ”

  Nice could hear those words coming out of Red’s mouth. She remembered him saying something almost exactly like that after Mr. Rocket retired.

  She couldn’t help smiling at the memory.

  “He said that to you, too, didn’t he,” Reggie said.

  Nice just nodded. She had too many conflicting emotions warring within her. He’d known about her, known who she was. It made sense, now, why she’d been able to get closer to him than the previous liaison. But…

  “Why didn’t he tell me?” she asked

  Reggie looked up from his drink.

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t he tell me he knew who I was?”

  “To keep you safe.”

  “How would it keep me safe? I knew he was my father. He could have…”

  “He didn’t know you knew. I asked him the same question, once. He had an agreement with your Mom, that she would never tell so that you wouldn’t get mixed up with any of the dangers. If the bad guys don’t know you exist, and if they don’t know you’re important to him, they won’t try to use you against him.”

  Nice took a sip of her drink, regretting how she had turned the conversation in her direction.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said those things. I’m not the one who just learned his father was…”

  She stopped before she said the word. It was still hard, even for her, and she hadn’t lived with Red her whole life like Reggie had.

  Reggie ignored her apology.

  “You know, he was really a
ngry when he learned that you were going to be his liaison. He called the Mayor and shouted at him for a half hour. He was always so calm, but not then.”

  “He was, wasn’t he?”

  The fastest man in the world had never been in a hurry around her. He’d never seemed impatient or anxious. He’d never…

  She felt a tear run down her cheek.

  “Oh, God,” she said.

  And then she lifted her drink to her lips and started drinking to hide the tear.

  But that tear was just the first. More formed.

  Red had known. She could have told him she knew. They could have…

  Then she heard herself sniff, and she could no longer see through the tears.

  She felt an arm slip around her shoulders, then pull her to the side. She went with it, and ended up hugging Reggie and crying on his shoulder.

  It wasn’t right. He’d lost the father he’d known all his life, just learned about his father’s death only minutes ago, and here she was crying on his shoulder as if their roles were reversed.

  Yet she couldn’t stop.

  And then, after a few minutes, the immediate pain subsided. She still ached inside, could still feel a hole where her father should have been, could have been, and she knew it might always be there, but the tears had stopped.

  That was when she realized that she hadn’t been the only one crying. There was a damp patch of her hair that couldn’t have come from her tears, and realizing that made her feel better. She wasn’t taking advantage of him. He’d used her to shed some of his pain, too.

  He released her and stepped back just a little, but remained within reach should she feel the need to cry again, or maybe in case he needed to.

  “Well,” he said.

  A tiny little chuckle escaped her chest.

  “I didn’t see that coming,” she said.

  “Isn’t that what older brothers are for?” he asked, seemingly ignoring his own emotional outburst.

  She decided she’d let him get away with that.

  “Are you older?” she asked, looking at him for the first time. He didn’t really seem older. If she was forced to guess, she’d have said they were no more than a year or two apart, in either direction.

  “For real, I don’t know. I know we graduated from high school the same year. Other than that, I never learned your birthday. I just assumed…”

  It was impossible not to suspect that they were full siblings, even twins, instead of just half siblings. Nice didn’t want to think about it.

  “You know what,” she said, “let’s not discuss that right now.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s too much.”

  So he suspected the same thing. Heading down that road meant asking a lot of questions, and they might not like the answers.

  His eyes were still red from crying, and she was sure her makeup had run all over her face.

  Time to change the subject, make forward progress, like her mom had always said. Don’t waste time looking back.

  “You can probably guess why I’m here,” she said.

  He took a deep breath and nodded.

  “You’re trying to figure out what happened to him,” Reggie said.

  “I am.”

  “You don’t just want to figure out what happened, do you?”

  “No.”

  Silence loomed between them for a moment. She felt Reggie was waiting for her to say more.

  She figured she might as well lay it out there.

  “I want to kill the bastard.”

  Chapter 7

  “SO HOW DID it happen?” Reggie asked her.

  They’d left their drinks on the table and gone upstairs to the room Nice had assumed to be Red’s bedroom. It turned out to be an office, but it wasn’t Red’s office, it was Reggie’s.

  “We don’t know. Someone called the Mayor and told him they’d found Red’s body down an alley, then hung up. The Mayor called the two officers that usually worked Red’s cases, and sent them to look. If Red was really dead, he wanted to control the story.

  “Anyway, when they got there, they found him just as the caller described, only the caller hadn’t mentioned the bullet hole in the back of Red’s head.”

  For a moment, Reggie looked like he might tear up again, but he held them in, and Nice regretted the way she’d been so blunt.

  “I don’t understand how Dad could get surprised like that,” Reggie said, before she could apologize.

  His reference to ‘Dad’ made Nice wince at how she kept calling him Red. She’d always called him Red. She’d never had the chance to call him Dad.

  “We don’t understand, either,” she said. “He’d always told us he could move out of the way of any bullet. I never saw it…”

  “I have. Dad would practice. I saw him evade hundreds of them. He could do it even when the gun was pressed against his body.”

  While she pondered the problem, Nice examined the room. On the wall that faced Puget Sound, a desk with a computer sat to the left of a window that stretched from floor to ceiling. On the right hand side of the window stood a tall bookcase filled with two inch binders, all of which were neatly labeled with dates and an eight digit number that obviously had a meaning she could not decipher.

  Behind her, more book cases, and on one wall, a gun safe that was taller than her and had to weigh a couple thousand pounds.

  “Did he practice here?” she asked, indicating the gun safe.

  “No, that’s mine. He’s had me practicing since I was five.”

  “Did you practice by trying to shoot him?”

  He looked her in the eye, a hurt look on his face, one that was different than the sorrow over losing his father.

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest you killed your father,” she said as quickly as she could. He might be her brother, but she didn’t really know him. “I just connected his practice at evading bullets with him having you practice shooting, and I…”

  The hurt look on Reggie’s face cleared up.

  “Oh, heh. I get it. No. He never had me shoot at him. He had me training with real pros. Ex-military snipers, Olympic sports shooters, that kind of thing. I’ve never shot at a person. He trained with them, too, just… differently.”

  Nice got it this time. Red trained by being the target.

  She walked over to the bookshelf by the window and reached for one of the binders.

  “So what are these? Case files?”

  “You could say that,” Reggie said.

  She glanced back at him, and his lips were pressed tight together behind his beard.

  “Do you mind if I look?”

  He relaxed a little.

  “No, go ahead.”

  She grabbed one at random and opened it to the first page. The title at the top of the page said “Meathook”. Below that, a list of addresses, followed by dates and times and a page number. At the bottom of the page, two words in big bold red letters. “At Large”.

  She flipped through, and each page after the first appeared to be something like a log entry, descriptions of sightings and encounters. There were nearly thirty entries for Meathook.

  She closed the binder and returned it to the shelf.

  She pulled another at random. This one only had a dozen pages or so. The first page had the name “King Cobra”. Not entirely original. He was also at large.

  “Are all of these at large?” she asked as she returned King Cobra to his place on the shelf.

  “Yes,” he said. “That shelf is all at large.”

  There were a lot of binders on the shelf. She didn’t bother counting.

  “They’re all Gifted?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s scary,” she said.

  “Hey…”

  “What I mean is,” she said, turning to face him, “if your—no, our dad thought he should keep his eye on them and took that many notes about them, that’s what’s scary. Any one of them could have
killed him.”

  Reggie’s eyes shifted away from her and to the shelf.

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Can you send me the files so I can search through them when I get home? We’ll have to go through them all.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said.

  She felt her eyebrows raise of their own accord.

  “What do you mean you can’t. Don’t you want to catch the guy?”

  “I mean, they’re not on the computer. They’re only in these binders.”

  “That seems dangerous,” she said. “What if you had a fire, or something.”

  “Nah,” he said, turning to stare out the window. “If we had a fire, we’d lose them. Not a big deal. But if we got hacked and someone found these files on the internet, they might be able to figure out how Dad was watching them, or they might find some way to hide from him. Dad always felt it was better to keep them from learning he was on to them until he was ready to spring whatever trap he had planned. If you look in the reports on the other shelves, you’ll see that he documented how those worked, too. Dad was meticulous in his preparation.”

  “But here, they’re hardly protected.”

  “First, you’d have to know they were here. Dad never came straight here, and he certainly never came dressed as Red Lightning. He’d always go through his place before coming over.”

  “But I knew where he lived. Someone else could know.”

  “If someone else knew, they’d have been here already.”

  She could tell he was getting annoyed with her questioning, and he was right to be. What was done was done, and Red had his reasons for doing it.

  “So how am I going to go through all these, then? I can’t exactly take them home on the bus.”

  “Like I’d let you take them, anyway,” he said. “Stay here tonight. I’ll order pizza, and we can go over them together.”

  “Together?”

  “He was my dad, too. Besides, you’re not Gifted, and I am. You could use my help.”

  She turned and looked at him, really looked at him. He was still staring out the window, but even just seeing the profile, she could see he was serious. His brow was furrowed, and his eyes were narrow, as if he weren’t even really looking out the window, but was focusing in on himself.