Memoirs of a Crimefighter

by Seth Jacob

  “Can I help you find anything…anything in particular?”

  “Actually, yeah, but I’m not really interested in comics.”

  “Well, we have a wide assortment of action figures, busts, maquettes, trade paper backs…I think maybe I’ve even got a couple old Spectacle action figures, they weren’t really selling so I’d be happy to give you—”

  “Cut the shit. I’m not here for any of that. You know exactly why I’m here,” I snapped at him, and Neil nervously giggled.

  “Okay, okay. This is a shakedown, right? You want some cash in exchange for not busting my little side business, am I wrong?”

  “What? No, this isn’t a shakedown. I’m a customer. I want to see whatever super-tech you’ve got in back, Neil. I want to talk to the Specialist.”

  “Well, you’re talking to him already, but really, I prefer Neil. But okay, yeah. I’m a little surprised, I never figured the Spectacle for the kind of crimefighter who gets involved with black market type stuff, I sort of thought of you as a little lower tier than that, no offense.” The Specialist led me through aisles of long boxes stuffed with yellowing comics and into a back room. I detected a little passive aggressiveness in his nasally voice, and I was a little insulted, but I tried to ignore it.

  The back room of the store was even more cluttered and disgusting than the store itself. It was packed with boxes filled with comic books. They were stacked on top of each other and towered all the way up to the water spotted ceiling. Newspapers were strewn all over the floor. There was a litter box in the corner, and in the middle of the room, an 80 year old woman was sitting at a small table and eating a big bowl of oatmeal. The Specialist guided me past her and towards an empty section of space that looked out of place in the disorganized, hoarder mess of the rest of the room.

  “Neil, who’s your friend? It’s so rare that you bring friends by, introduce me won’t you?”

  “…Mother. Please don’t bother us, and finish your lunch. You haven’t even touched your lunch. I thought we talked about this?” The Specialist practically yelled this at the poor woman, and if I thought he was distasteful before, now I completely hated his guts.

  “So…what are you looking for? I got it all, except for SUHP. I heard a rumor that you’re a bit of a souphead, so I hope that’s not what you’re here for,” The Specialist took a small remote out of his pocket and clicked it. A couple of tables covered in super-tech shimmered into view in the empty section of space, and I was surprised to see that the merchandise was meticulously organized.

  “Holographic cloak. I told you, I got it all.”

  As gross as he was, The Specialist did seem to have it all. The two tables that just appeared before me had enough super-tech to satisfy the needs of any major superhero team and then some. There were compact smoke bombs, jet packs and canisters of extremely expensive fuel, personal teleporter badges, a plethora of grappling hooks, both with and without extra spools of high tension nylon wire, miniature force field generators, teeny tiny homing devices that could be stuck to things like stickers, and that was just the tip of the iceberg as far as legal crimefighting tools went.

  He also had a cornucopia of illegal devices; taser boots with a voltage level that was way above legal limits, proton accelerator pistols, a bunch of pairs of gamma ray gauntlets which I’m pretty sure are used exclusively by supervillains. I saw a couple of knock off reality rewriters that could warp the fabric of space and time to a limited and highly dangerous degree, and even more things that I’d rather not list because, frankly, I think it would frighten a lot of people to know that items as dangerous as these were for sale and not in a government vault somewhere. Something at the back of one of the tables behind some swatches of energy blast resistant fabrics in various colors caught my eye. It was one of my father’s Golden Slings.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked as I reached across the table and picked up the Golden Sling.

  “You don’t want that, that’s a piece of garbage. Maybe I can interest you in this new flight belt I just made? I’ve been tinkering with it recently, and no offense, but flying might help your game quite a bit.”

  “No thanks, and actually I am a little offended by that, but whatever. Where’d you get this thing?”

  The Specialist eyed me suspiciously, and he ignored my question again.

  “Neil, can you take me to the pharmacy today? I have a few prescriptions I need to pick up,” his elderly mother asked, and he glared at her with such a high level of disrespect that I wanted to slap that scraggly goatee off of his face, but again, I restrained myself.

  “Look, Spectacle, I just put together this new utility belt, it’s fully loaded, really, it’s got the works, think you’d be into adding a utility belt to your ensemble? I’ll let you have it for 20% off.”

  “…here’s the thing, Neil. I’m a collector. I collect old, obscure superhero equipment, and right now, I’m on a big time Jack Titan kick. Do you have any other Jack Titan stuff, or do you know where I could get some more?”

  The Specialist snatched the Golden Sling out of my hand, and he placed it back on the table. He scratched the top of his balding head, and he intently considered what he was going to say next.

  “I might have something for you. Let me go check in my car, I just got some new stuff in, I’ll be right back,” he stammered, and he hastily grabbed the jet pack off of the table along with a handful of smoke bombs and one of the proton accelerator pistols.

  “I forgot, this stuff, someone was real interested in buying it, they sort of reserved it, shouldn’t even have it on the table,” The Specialist muttered, and he slung the jet pack onto his back and fastened the straps as he rushed towards the door.

  “Oh, Neil, you’re leaving? Could you be a dear and pick up some cat litter while you’re out? Cornelius is having tummy problems and we need some more,” his mother called after him, and he suddenly broke into a sprint out of the back room without looking back.

  “Shut up, mother! God damn it! Shit! Fuck!”

  I ran after him and accidentally knocked over a pillar of comic book boxes in the process. Hundreds of comics mummified in their bags and boards spilled onto the floor and I stepped all over them as I pursued The Specialist. He had reached the door of Specialized Comics by the time I had made my way through the cluttered store, but he hesitated at the sound of his precious comic books being toppled out of their protective cardboard boxes and exposed to the elements.

  “You…that was a complete run of Beyond Man! Issues 1 to 697, every issue from 1964 to today! Do you have any idea how much a collection in that condition would sell for? Now it’s ruined! It’s fucking ruined! You…you fuck!” The Specialist aimed his proton accelerator pistol at me and fired a blindingly bright, blue stream of protons at my head. I ducked out of the way of the high energy proton beam that could have punched a hole in the molecules of my skull, and a shelf of comics behind me exploded into a cloud of shredded multicolored paper.

  Pulped comic pages filled the air. I couldn’t see the Specialist exiting the store and making a break for it through the shredded paper raining down all around me. I heard the mingling of his poor old mother’s screams and Cornelius’s hissing as I struggled to make my way through the tables of comics and maquettes and collectible toys as the fog of disintegrated comic pages dissipated. By the time I finally got to the door, I had maybe a half a second to witness the Specialist on the street and powering up his jet pack. He barely even looked at me while his jet pack started glowing red hot at its exhaust ports. It was like I was a very annoying cost of doing business to him but not really anything to be overly concerned about. Then two blasts of scarlet energy shot out of the bottom of his jet pack and fired him into the air like a missile. A car swerved out of the way of the billowing mists of red energy that his jet pack left in its wake, and it crashed into a streetlight.

  The Specialist was already about ten blocks away, and he was just a speck trailing plumes of red energy above the city.
Since it was so useful in my fight with Anhur, I had started carrying around my father’s Golden Sling along with three rubber lacrosse balls for ammunition (not everyone can take a piece of concrete hitting them in the dome at 200 meters per second). I whipped out the sling and fitted one of the rubber balls into it, swung the golden ropes around my head once, twice, three times, and then I let go and fired the ball at the tiny glint of metal in the sky that was The Specialist. If I could hit that jet pack of his and mess up his trajectory, it might slow him down and give me the edge I would need to chase him down on foot.

  I didn’t wait to see if the ball hit its target. I leapt from the street and onto the roof of Specialized Comics, and I ran as fast as I could across the rooftop of that abysmally bad comic book store and in the general direction of the Specialist. I hurled myself from that building and to the next one while tracking the Specialist in the sky, and I could tell from the perfect arc of red energy following his path like a comet’s tail that I hadn’t hit him with the throw. I was angry at myself for even trying to use the Golden Sling when I should have just started immediately chasing him, and that anger fueled my pursuit.

  I furiously dashed across the next rooftop and then bounded off of it and towards a much taller building, landed on a fire escape, and used its metal railing as a starting block to rocket myself towards a flag pole jutting out of the side of a skyscraper, then swung on the flag pole and harnessed my momentum to fling myself towards the Specialist. I ripped through the air and flew at least a dozen city blocks before landing on yet another rooftop which I ran on like the devil was chasing me. The fact that the Specialist had run from me and the way that he did it convinced me that I was closer than ever to finding out who had stolen my father’s trophy room. I couldn’t let that comic collecting bastard slip away from me.

  I was getting closer now to The Specialist, who had to be only a block or two ahead of me, and I was experiencing none of the thrill that I usually got from leaping above the city skyline. I was totally focused on the task, eyeballing angles of jumps that would save me only a few feet of travel distance, pushing through the burning in my lungs and my legs as I darted across rooftops to close the gap between me and the Specialist, and every second counted because that jet pack of his was carrying him at least 50 miles per hour, and I could only keep up this pace for so long.

  The Specialist was only a few yards ahead of me now. He was soaring above the city streets way too fast for me to try to jump onto him, but he was definitely within throwing distance. I took out the Golden Sling again while clearing the gap between two buildings, put the second rubber ball into the leather patch in between two lengths of gold painted rope as I ran across a window ledge, whirled the sling around my head and let go. The rubber ball flew at The Specialist, and it sailed over his head.

  I kept running after him, and I heard him scream a string of profanities in his sharp, nasally voice as he saw the ball shoot past him and he looked over his shoulder to see that I was still on his tail. He banked left hard, and I skidded to a stop on a rooftop just before I would have had to jump in the wrong direction. He pointed his proton accelerator pistol over his shoulder and fired three blind shots in my general direction. One of the blue blasts of highly charged protons would have torn most of the electrons from my molecules if I hadn’t dived onto the ground. I stayed there and covered my head with my hands as the second shot disintegrated the aluminum panels of an air conditioning unit behind me, and the third shot scorched the ground only a few feet away from me.

  I got up, and I was all out of juice. Couldn’t possibly catch him on foot now as he pulled ahead of me and left me in his red plasma dust. I put the third and last rubber ball into the Golden Sling, swung it around my head and focused on the Specialist rocketing away from me and getting smaller and smaller by the second. I felt a desperate urge to take the shot as fast as I could but I resisted and I took my time, inhaled and exhaled as I tracked the Specialist’s flight and tried to picture the throw in my mind, and then I let that ball fly. It was a hopeless Hail Mary throw, and I assumed that it had no chance of hitting him, much less actually doing any significant damage.

  I stood on the roof and put my hands on my head to help me catch my breath, and I watched the Specialist fly farther and farther away from me. By this point, I had accepted that I had lost him. I was about to give up and go home when I saw a disruption in the trail of red energy that the Specialist’s jet pack was leaving in its wake. Instead of a steady stream of smokey scarlet energy, it was shooting out of his jet pack’s thrusters erratically like a dotted red line. The Specialist started careening all over the place, then the jet pack almost completely stopped sputtering its red energy propulsion, and he crashed through a billboard.

  For a few seconds, I stood on that rooftop completely shocked. I honestly couldn’t believe that worked. It took me a few minutes to make my way across the city skyline and to the building with the Extradimensional Fitness billboard that had a gaping hole in it, and the whole time I was hoping that I didn’t just accidentally send the Specialist falling to his death. I landed on the ledge of the billboard with Beyond Man’s smiling face plastered on it. Luckily, I looked through the hole in Beyond Man’s normally impeccable teeth to see the Specialist lying on the roof below and still alive with relatively minor injuries. His jet pack was popping and crackling with little gasps of red energy coughing out of its exhaust, it had a big dent on it from the ball’s impact that had almost entirely crushed its left tube-like side. The Specialist was groaning and trying to unbuckle the straps.

  I climbed through the hole in the billboard, and I jumped down to the roof near the Specialist. He was making a pointless attempt to crawl away from me on his belly and towards his proton accelerator pistol, which he had dropped in the fall. I turned him over with my foot to face me like I was flipping a pancake. I still was riding high on the charge I got from actually hitting him with that desperate half court shot of a throw, and I was excited to pry whatever information he had out of his balding head.

  “Where’d you get the Golden Sling, Specialist?”

  “I…ordered it from this little website called…go fuck yourself Spectacle…dot org.”

  I crouched down next to the Specialist, who was scratched up pretty bad from crashing through the billboard and onto the gravel covered roof top, and honestly, I felt bad for the guy. He looked so small and pathetic lying there on that rooftop, strapped to a bulky metal jet pack that made his already skinny body look gaunt, wearing a Beyond Man symbol t-shirt when he was about the complete opposite in both character and appearance from Beyond Man.

  “Specialist…Neil. Jack Titan was my dad, okay? Someone stole all of his superhero mementos, and I’m trying to—”

  The Specialist started laughing before I could finish.

  “Don’t you think I know that? Why do you think I ran, dummy? I was contracted to steal that box of garbage from your apartment. Nice place, by the way,” the Specialist sneered at me in between bursts of nasally giggles.

  “Contracted by who? Who sent you to steal that stuff?”

  The Specialist didn’t answer me. He just kept giggling, and normally his laughter would just be annoying, but in this particular situation, it was infuriating. I grabbed him by the Beyond Man symbol on his chest and yanked his whole upper body towards me.

  “Look, Spectacle, I can’t tell you that. I’ve already jeopardized my career and reputation by telling you that much. Who’s gonna hire the Specialist if they can’t trust him not to blab all over town about who paid him to secure their contraband?”

  “Okay, how about I throw you off of this roof, and we’ll test to see if that nifty jet pack is still working?” The Specialist resumed giggling at this threat, and I shook him violently by his shirt, but that only made him laugh even more.

  “You won’t do that. You’re a superhero. I’ve read every appearance you’ve ever made in any comic. I could practically recite your Wikipedia page and I’ve read mo
re forum posts about you than any guy should in a lifetime. You’re a goody two shoes, self-righteous, sanctimonious, bland crimefighter. You wouldn’t kill me. You wouldn’t even beat me up to get information, you’re not like that,” The Specialist rattled off with such confidence that I knew the smug little jerk was telling the truth. He really knew his shit. It wasn’t hard to believe that this guy had spent years living on the internet and absorbing everything there was to know about the superhero community.

  “You’re right. I won’t kill you. That’s a little too fucked up for my tastes. But you know what I would do? I would be perfectly happy going back to Specialized Comics and taking a look at some of those boxes of comics I saw in your back room. You think stepping on some old issues of Beyond Man was bad?”

  “You wouldn’t,” the Specialist quaked, and now it was my turn to laugh.

  “Oh no? I would love to go back to that shithole you call a comic store, and I would love to make you watch while I slowly took your oldest and most treasured comic out of its plastic bag…”

  “Stop it,” the Specialist whispered.

  “…and sloooowwwllllyyy rip the cover, just taking my sweet time with pulling apart the ancient fibers of that paper…”

  “Shut up, I get it,” The Specialist insisted.

  “…oh, I can just hear it, the scratchy sound of that paper tearing. And it wouldn’t end there. It would take hours to destroy all of your collection, and I’m a creative guy, I could come up with some fun ways to do this. Maybe I’d eat a bucket of barbecue wings and then read your, I dunno, Anhur #1 or whatever and just paint those pages with honey barbecue sauce. You like honey barbecue? Or maybe I’d use a few early issues of Superb 6 as toilet paper, might be a little uncomfortable but hilarious nonetheless—”

  “Alright, okay, I’ll tell you what you want to know. Just promise me you won’t mess up my comics?” The Specialist looked at me with a sad, pleading expression in his eyes.