by David Liss
Bingham never saw the pretty lady with the glasses again.
* * *
HE’D thought they were going to a house, just like the house he grew up in only nicer, with softer beds and prettier furniture, soup bowls that weren’t chipped and forks with all the tines pointing in the same direction. It wasn’t like that at all. It was more like the hospital where they brought his mother when she became sick. He hadn’t thought they were talking about him being sick like his mom, but that was exactly what the pretty lady meant. They meant sick like his mother, and worse.
He didn’t even have his own room. He shared it with five other men, but not always the same five, because things kept happening to the others. They would get sick. Sometimes they became feverish and thrashed in their beds. Sometimes they threw up soupy liquid or blood or—one time—what seemed to be the man’s own stomach. They grew lumps on their faces and bodies. They screamed and cried for their mothers. They soiled themselves in the night and Bingham found them lying open-eyed and still in the morning. One man clawed his own face off while the others watched. No one brought them soup.
They did have a television, which was nice.
They were supposed to be nice to each other. There were security guards, and it was their job to step in when someone stole another person’s pudding cup or hogged the TV or was just mean because they liked being mean.
Zane was mean because he liked being mean. Most of the men were quiet and minded their own business, the way Bingham tried to, but Zane was mean from the beginning. He liked to trip the other patients or yank down their pajama pants just because he thought it was funny to see someone’s butt. He stole food and threw it at people and he would take the TV remote and not give it back because he said there was nothing as good on TV as watching the babies cry when they didn’t get their way. Zane said Bingham was fat, though he knew he had lost a lot of weight since leaving home, and he was losing more now. They didn’t get that much to eat, and he thought the medicine was making him thinner. Sometimes he liked to say, “I’m slim,” to people, but not to Zane, because Zane would make fun of him.
Most of the security guards would step in if Zane took things too far. Not at first, because that would mean putting down their phones or their magazines or whatever they were using to pass the time. Eventually, though, they would do something. Not Macgregor. He was kind of old and kind of lazy. He had a shiny bald head with a fringe of gray and a strangely round nose with a big red growth on it. His eyes were weirdly tiny, and he laughed when they hurt themselves.
Macgregor liked Zane. At first he only laughed when Zane was being mean, like he was watching a funny movie, but then he started to help. The two of them would play catch with the TV remote, or Zane would hand Macgregor someone’s dinner tray and the guard would dump it in the toilet.
Then there was the business with Reece, who was close to being Bingham’s friend. He didn’t make a lot of friends, but Reece was really nice to him, and so Bingham tried being nice back. They sometimes talked about things they remembered from the old days, or they would sit quietly and watch TV together. It seemed like they could do that for hours and not get bored.
One day Reece started choking. They hadn’t been eating anything, so at first Bingham thought it was a cough, but it kept getting worse. Reece hacked and wheezed and fell over. His face turned red and he clawed at his throat.
There was an emergency call button and Macgregor stood, his finger on the button, but he didn’t press it. He just stood and watched, grinning the whole time. Bingham decided he would press the button if Macgregor wouldn’t, but Zane wouldn’t let him. He held Bingham and Macgregor stood and watched while Reece twitched on the floor for a long, long time. Then the twitching became weaker, and Reece lay still, his mouth open, his eyes glassy, a stain appearing on the floor underneath him.
Macgregor pressed the button.
“Seizure in room seven,” he said in a clipped voice. The minute he took his finger off the button, he and Zane broke out in laugher. They high-fived, like they’d just watched their favorite team score.
It was after they took Reece’s body away that Bingham came to realize that he was different. He wasn’t exactly who he used to be. It wasn’t like he was growing. Or like part of the old Bingham was gone, and something else had appeared in its place. He was part old and part new. That’s how it seemed to him. His body was changing, but it was still his body. He thought things he’d never thought before, but they were still his thoughts. There was probably a word for when this happened, but he didn’t know it.
Later that day, when Zane asked him if he was going to cry for his boyfriend, Bingham took him by the hair and smashed his head into the floor until there really wasn’t a whole lot left of Zane’s head. It broke, and the stuff that had been inside was everywhere. Macgregor pressed the button really fast that time, but he wasn’t breathing either by the time the staff got there.
* * *
THEY took Bingham to the director’s office. The director worked for the boss, who was a very important man. No one wanted to upset the director, and they especially didn’t want to upset the boss.
Bingham had done both, and while he didn’t love living in the facility, he wasn’t sure he was ready to go back outside where it was cold and there wasn’t enough to eat. Now that Zane and Macgregor were gone, things wouldn’t be so bad. It didn’t seem right somehow that the very thing that would make his life more bearable would be the thing that got him cast out.
The director was an older man with a long nose and a white beard. He looked very serious, but not exactly angry. There were some questions at first about whether or not Bingham understood what he’d done was wrong, but the man didn’t really seem to care very much about the answers. He was much more interested about whether or not Bingham had ever hurt anyone before, if he had intended to hurt Zane and Macgregor, and if he had known he could do the things he did.
The director wrote down everything Bingham said in response to these questions. Being listened to was a strange feeling. Bingham discovered that he liked it.
“Have you been feeling any different lately?” the director wanted to know. “Stronger, maybe?”
“I feel good,” Bingham said. “More awake, I guess, like I know everything that’s going on. I didn’t know that I felt stronger until—until that thing happened.”
“But you felt stronger when you attacked those men?”
“Yes,” Bingham said. “Am I in trouble?”
“Not in trouble,” the director said. “Not if you’re willing to help us.”
“How can I help you?”
“By taking more medicine,” the director said.
“It doesn’t make me sick, so okay.”
“The boss will be very pleased to hear that,” the director said.
It turned out that Bingham wasn’t punished for what he had done to those two men. Instead, they gave him his own room. He had a TV that he controlled by himself, and no one tried to take his food away.
IT was strange to be back at the Bugle. While he was in high school this place had been like a second home to him, a sort of refuge. He was a kid accepted by adults, and extraordinary adults at that—people who were taking risks and defying the odds to get at the truth.
They did it because it was good and right, and because they were ambitious and driven and addicted to the adrenaline rush of danger and deadlines. They fueled themselves with burnt coffee and stale donuts and street knishes grabbed on the run. Granted, Peter had been doing similar stuff as Spider-Man, but these people were doing it with words and insight and persistence. They didn’t have any special powers randomly granted by the universe. They relied on their own grit and determination.
He was happy to say hello to everyone on the way in—Ben Urich, Betty Brant, Robbie Robertson. It was great to see all of them again. At one point he passed a group of reporters gathered around a computer that was playing a live broadcast of Jameson’s new radio show. They all seem
ed to find it hilarious.
Finally he met up with MJ by her cubicle. “I’ve told everyone I’m helping you with a project for your work,” she said, “so keep your voice down. I don’t want Mr. Robertson to know I’m doing research that has anything to do with Fisk.”
Peter had his own concerns about that, but he had no desire to restart the argument. For now, they were focused on the woman who had been of such interest to the Roxxon operatives. They had a photograph of her and they knew her address, and that was it. Based on that information, however, they were able to establish her identity as Laura Remzi. Nothing else of interest came up about her. She had no discoverable ties to Roxxon or to Fisk or to anyone else either Peter or MJ could identify. Sitting in front of her monitor they dug around for another half an hour, but came up with nothing.
“I don’t get it,” Peter said. “She seems perfectly ordinary. She’s got troubles, but so do a lot of people. There’s no reason she’d be of interest to Fisk.”
“What if she isn’t?” MJ proposed. “What if it’s someone she’s close to?” She let her fingers dance along her keyboard for a few minutes, and then she slapped her hand down on the desk. “And there it is. Her brother is an assistant district attorney.”
Peter thought about this for a minute. “I guess it would be embarrassing for a DA to have a sister with a substance abuse problem, but that’s not exactly something you could use to twist this guy around your little finger.”
“Maybe,” MJ said, “but Fisk has always relied heavily on extortion. It could be that this, combined with something we don’t know about, is a powerful enough incentive for this DA to play ball. We know he wants to control people inside law enforcement.”
“Okay, this is useful,” he said, making note of the assistant DA’s information. “Thanks.”
“I’ve also been doing some digging on Fisk’s assistant, Maya Lopez. It’s all very interesting.” She handed Peter a file. “It looks like her father was some kind of operator—first for an organization out west, then for Fisk. Maybe with Fisk might be more accurate. They seem to have cooperated on a number of occasions, but they had a falling-out. Police suspected, though they could never prove, that Fisk had Lopez killed after a shipment of guns was seized by ATF. Fisk might have thought Lopez was cooperating with the feds.”
“Interesting that he took the guy’s daughter in.”
“Especially since she’s deaf,” MJ said. “He isn’t exactly known for assisting people out of the goodness of his heart. If he helps someone, it’s because he expects to get something out of it. Helping the child of someone who set out to betray him is pretty unexpected.”
“Deaf,” Peter said, and he snapped his fingers. “That explains why she didn’t respond to anything I said.”
“Yeah, from what I could see, she can read lips,” MJ said. “Your mask is going to be a problem if you run into her again.”
Peter began to leaf through the file. “I remember this murder,” he said. “I was just starting out, and I showed up at the crime scene thinking—honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking, but I was 15 years old and figured I could help the cops or something. It was a disaster. Half of them wanted to arrest me, so I took off, but word of my being there got around. Jameson tried to float the idea that I’d killed the man and had been spotted at the scene, even though I didn’t show up until an hour after the cops. That may have been the first time he started going after me. Not that any of that matters.”
“I’m not so sure,” MJ said. “Lopez worked with Fisk. His daughter works with Fisk. You first encountered the impersonator at a Fisk construction site. Now Jameson is trying to pass off the impersonator as the real thing.”
“What does Jameson have to do with it?”
“The company that owns his radio station made some bad investments. Fisk bailed them out, but he got a controlling interest.”
Peter shook his head and whistled. “Even so, I don’t think Jameson would do this sort of thing for money, let alone dirty money.”
“No, but he might not know where the money is coming from,” she replied. “Or he may think he’s above it all.”
“Maybe,” Peter said. “Though it wouldn’t surprise me if he was planning an exposé of the people who pay him. As much as he can be a pain in the ass, Jonah is a straight-shooter at heart—Spider-Man notwithstanding. In the meantime, none of this points to a larger goal. Fisk is working on something that’s supposed to make him too big to prosecute.”
“There’s one more thing,” MJ said. She pulled up a photograph of a spear. Peter knew it only too well, since he’d been looking at the business end of it just recently. “I can’t prove for sure that this is the same weapon in your picture,” she said, “but it sure looks like it could be. It was stolen from a private collector about fifteen years ago. Lopez’s father was implicated, but never charged. There were later pictures of a similar spear in his New York home.”
“That doesn’t seem like a big deal,” Peter said. “Maybe he hid it somewhere, but if it was in his possession, it’s not so strange it ended up with his daughter.”
“It gets strange, though,” MJ continued, “because Lopez was stabbed to death with a spear in his own home. It was missing from its display case and never recovered.”
“So, Maya Lopez was fighting me with the same weapon that was used to kill her father?” Peter asked.
“That’s what it looks like,” MJ said. “Either she’s cold as ice, or she doesn’t know.”
Peter found the second option more likely. Maya Lopez had fought with passion, but he hadn’t had the sense that she was cruel. She blamed him for her father’s death, and that meant the spear was a memento, not a trophy.
“Let’s get back to Fisk,” he suggested. “I still don’t see his endgame in all this.”
“Fisk’s processes are expansive, not linear,” she said. “He isn’t chasing a single, shiny object. He thinks in complex patterns. That means whatever we’re looking at is only part of that pattern. I hate to say it, Peter, but I think you may be giving yourself too much credit. You’re asking, ‘What does Fisk gain if people hate Spider-Man?’ It’s more likely he’s asked himself, ‘What are the scenarios I need to succeed?’, and just one of them is having a population angry with Spider-Man.” She smiled and tilted her head. “I haven’t crushed your ego, have I?”
“I may recover… in time,” Peter said distractedly. “But keep on crushing, because I like your metaphor. It’s like a big spider’s web, and if you pull on one thread, you can see what else moves.”
“That wasn’t really my metaphor at all,” she said, “and it may bring us back to the subject of your ego.”
“You’re brilliant,” he said, standing up and giving her a quick kiss. “Your insightful questions have allowed me to solve the case! Okay, not really, but I do think I have a new angle to work. I’ll call you later.”
“A thread in a carpet works just as well,” she called after him. “Just saying.”
On his way out, Peter passed a group of reporters who were talking about a story that had just come in. Spider-Man had chased off a mugger and then made off with the victim’s wallet.
“Can you believe we used to think that guy was a hero?” one of them asked.
* * *
WHEN he got out to the street, he took out his phone and called Yuri Watanabe.
“Did we ever find out anything about Andy, the victim from the cruise terminal?” he asked her.
She told him to hold on, so she could go somewhere private. She had to be careful when discussing anything that involved Fisk. Peter listened for a few minutes to the distant sounds of a police precinct before she was free to talk.
“Nothing much,” she said. “His record is fairly long, but not remarkable. A lot of petty crime—breaking and entering, mainly. Nothing violent.”
“It’s just a hunch,” he said, “but can you maybe dig a little deeper. I have a feeling there’s something there. We don’t have a
whole lot of leads, so I want to make sure we exhaust everything we’ve got. That night, he said his brother was shady. Maybe look there.”
“Okay, I’ll give it a shot,” she said. “Anything else?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I need a home address for someone, and you’re not going to like it.”
* * *
HE didn’t want to break into the East Side apartment. That seemed like a bad idea for a guy who was supposed to be doing heroic things. On the other hand, he couldn’t just ring the bell and hope to get buzzed in. Showing up at the window while the guy was watching TV would be just as bad.
So he picked a compromise. He opened the unlocked window, waited on the outside ledge, but he didn’t enter. He was, in a sense, already there, but he hadn’t gone inside, so he hoped that would come across as more respectful and less creepy.
After a while the front door opened, the man entered his apartment, put down some groceries, and hung his plastic-wrapped dry cleaning in a closet. He then went into the bathroom and peed with the door open.
Spider-Man grimaced beneath the mask and turned away. This wasn’t helping with the creep factor. At least, he thought, it was only peeing. After the man emerged, he entered his living room and turned on his television. Noticing a shadow on the floor he looked up at the window and gasped.
“Hey,” Spider-Man said with a friendly wave. “You have a minute?”
Assistant District Attorney Abe Remzi took a step back. He then pointed with the TV remote.
The Web-Slinger held up his hands. “Is this a bad time, Mr. Remzi? I could come back. I have zero problem with making an appointment.” Remzi blinked a few times, but then hit the mute button.
“What do you want?”
“First of all, for you not to freak out,” Spider-Man replied. “That’s definitely at the top of my list… and to talk. I’ve been waiting here for you, but I didn’t want to actually come inside without being invited. I guess that sort of makes me like a vampire. Or a polite person. Hopefully you’ll go with the second option.”