He glanced over at me and Dirtbag, the patiently waiting newcomers, and said, “You want a booth or just a drink? Main stage don’t open till nine.”
“No,” Dirtbag said, whipping out his wallet and flashing his Sam’s Club membership card at the bartender. “We want to ask you a few questions about a birthday party that was here the other night.”
“Wednesday night,” I said.
“Wednesday night, to be precise,” Dirtbag said.
The bartender rested his fists on the bar. “You guys are cops,” he said, not like it was a question: “You guys are cops.”
“Do we look like cops?” I grinned.
“He doesn’t,” the bartender said, pointing at Dirtbag.
“Aw, c’mon,” Dirtbag muttered, wounded.
“No, we’re not cops,” I said. “We’re just trying to help out a friend of mine. You know the birthday party I’m talking about? I think they took over this place.”
“Yeah.” The bartender crossed his arms. “Half-Asian chick? She was hot.”
“That’s the one,” Dirtbag said.
The bartender had turned toward the iPad that controlled the cash register and tapped through a multitude of screens until a printer below spat out five or six sheets of paper. I pointed at the bank of tiny monitors over top-shelf liquor behind the bar. Each showed the interior of one of the private karaoke booths. “I was wondering what you had recorded from that night.”
The Korean guy looked down at the paper and cracked a smile. “You think she’s cheating on you, dog?”
“Well…something like that.”
He shook his head. “Sorry, man. I’d love to help you, but I don’t know if they want me handing this stuff out.”
“What if you got something in return?” Dirtbag said.
“Like what?”
Dirtbag pointed at me, incredulous. “Don’t you know who he is? A New York Times best-selling comics artist?”
“Before the Times discontinued that list,” I said.
“Creator of Gut Check?”
The bartender slapped his hands together. “Oh, no shit, really? That was you? I loved that movie.”
Dirtbag looked around the room like a bad imitation of a drug dealer and leaned over the bar. “My friend here is in town for Comic-Con, obviously, and would draw any character of your choice, right here, right now, in exchange for helping us out. What do you say?”
“What, you’re my pimp now?” I said.
“Yes, because you constantly undervalue yourself,” Dirtbag said, then turned back to the bartender: “So who do you like? Wolverine? Jean-Luc Picard? Thundercats? Power Rangers? Superman? Spider-Man? Batman? C’mon, everyone likes Batman.”
The man thought about it only for a second. “Me,” he said.
“You’re your own favorite fictional character?”
“Yeah, do one of me, here at the bar, so I can put it up, you know, on the mirror or something.”
“I admire your self-esteem.” I knocked out the sketch in less than ten minutes, sitting at the bar, adding as much of the decor as possible so people would know at a glance it was supposed to be the interior of the very establishment they were standing in.
When I shared the sketch, the bartender took a picture of it with his phone. “Thanks man, I appreciate it. This is going right on Facebook.”
“Good, glad you like it. And now can you, uh…?”
“Yeah, sure, dog, a deal’s a deal.” The bartender put the printouts he’d been holding into my hands. “Boomski!”
Mike flipped through the pages. They were a bunch of time-stamped songs with people’s names attached. “Chandelier…Blister in the Sun…Sorry, I don’t get it. What is this?”
“Records, like you said—the set list for the party,” the Korean guy said. “I don’t know, maybe you can figure out which dude’s balling your girl from the names people put in to sing with?”
“No…” I shook my head, pointing at the screens above his head. “I wanted to take a look at your security cam footage.”
The bartender turned around. “Aw, man, sorry, no can do. Those cameras are just so we know nobody’s giving out coke or BJs in the private rooms. We don’t bother holding on to the recordings; we flush ’em every night. I don’t even have a camera on the main stage. I can see it with my eyeballs. And then, when shit goes down”—he brandished a baseball bat from beneath the bar—“I break out Lucille.”
“Walking Dead reference,” Dirtbag muttered at no one in particular.
* * *
– – – –
“Who knew investigating crimes would be so hard?” Dirtbag said as we walked back down the hill, past the gabled Victorian manses of the Gaslamp to the convention center.
“Like, literally everybody, ever, since Cain hit Abel in the head with a rock and told God ‘I didn’t do it,’ ” I said.
“God: The First Detective,” Dirtbag said. “That’s your next comics series. Wait, no: The Old Testament Mysteries.”
“You know,” I said, ignoring him and flipping through the karaoke set list, “this isn’t completely useless. Sebastian’s first song pops up a few minutes past midnight. That fits within the timeframe of the murder.”
“What song did he sing?”
“Bowie. ‘Space Oddity.’ ”
Dirtbag scoffed. “Figures.” He was thumbing through pictures on his phone. “He doesn’t show up until late in the photos, either.”
“Where’d you get photos of the party? Why didn’t you tell me you were there?”
“No, dummy, I wasn’t there, I just know how to use Instagram. She made a hashtag. See?” He handed his phone to me, and I flipped through the feed. In the images, the dreary mainstage of the Gaslighter was transformed into a purple- and fuchsia-lit cauldron of energy, like the heart of a sun: there was Christine onstage, singing “Goody Two Shoes” (I could tell by the lyrics lit up on the screen in front of her: You-Don’t-Drink-You-Don’t-Smoke-What-Do-You-Do). Other photos showed various pals singing onstage, Christine rejoicing behind a Great Wall of wrapped presents and gift bags, her and her friends lifting shot glasses, and the same basic repeating shot of drunkenly grinning revelry. Then, almost forty pictures later, was Sebastian and “Space Oddity” (Tell-My-Wife-I-Love-Her-Very-Much-She-Knows).
“You don’t follow Christine on Instagram?” Dirtbag said. “Her feed is pretty awesome. She eats such photogenic food.”
“No, Dirtbag, I do not follow my ex-wife on Instagram, for the same reason I don’t cut myself.”
We had passed under the arch to leave the Gaslamp and were waiting to cross the train tracks amongst a motley crew: a woman in Princess Leia hair walking a small dog in a Yoda costume; a white guy in a Black Panther outfit carrying his helmet; hooded members of the Assassins Brotherhood; and a tall, skinny man dressed as Wonder Woman who somehow managed to precariously navigate the space between the tracks while teetering atop his high-heeled red boots, without breaking both of his ankles.
“This is good, but all it does is show Sebastian could have committed the murder,” I said. “I can’t show any of this to the cops. Not with some kind of, you know, corroborating evidence.”
The sidewalk in front of the convention center was mobbed with traffic stopping and starting as people gathered around groups of accidentally themed cosplayers to take shots: an Elektra squaring off against a Daredevil, or an H. R. Giger Xenomorph and a Predator frozen at each other’s throats.
At one point we were stuck right in front of a yellow T-shirted, bullhorn-wielding young member of the Eastboro Baptist Church:
“DO YOU HAVE THE BADGE YOU NEED TO ENTER HEAVEN-CON? IT IS NOT A FOUR-DAY PASS, NO NOT A THREE-DAY PASS, NOT EVEN A SINGLE-DAY PASS. NO, THIS BADGE IS FOR ETERNITY!”
I had to cover my ears until the crowd started moving forward again. “How those
guys avoid getting punched in the face every day is completely beyond me.”
Dirtbag nodded in the street preacher’s direction. “They’re worried about that too. Must be why they all wear body cams.”
The Baptist kid couldn’t have been much older than eighteen, with bowl-cut brown hair and so much acne on both cheeks that they had turned the color of pinot noir. He had a satchel slung over his shoulder; attached to the strap just above his solar plexus was a small, cockroach-shaped object with a single unblinking eye. In the sketch I had done of the church group at the beginning of the con, I captured that object without recognizing what it was.
I grabbed Dirtbag. “Hang back and keep an eye on me,” I said. “Don’t step in unless it looks like I’m in serious trouble.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Dance on the fine line between incredibly stupid and incredibly brilliant.”
I pushed my way through the crowd until I reached the preacher kid.
He yelled from the bullhorn five or six steps up the stairs leading to the Sails Pavilion. He saw me approach and stop at the base of the steps, and he warily kept one eye on me as he continued his rant.
“ONLY ONE HERO HAS THE POWER TO GIVE YOU THE HEAVEN BADGE! HIS ORIGIN STORY WAS DYING ON THE CROSS FOR YOUR SINS! HIS SECRET IDENTITY WAS A SIMPLE CARPENTER BUT IN REALITY HE WAS THE SON OF GOD!”
Once it became clear I wasn’t going to jump him, the teenage preacher slowly lowered the bullhorn and looked at me, not saying anything.
“Hi,” I said, looking around, still smiling. “I’m sure you get this a lot, but I’m a real fan. I really like what you guys are doing here. Sorry, I’m kind of fanboying out here, but I was wondering…where do I join up?”
* * *
– – – –
The Eastboro Baptist Church pitched their tent, literally, across a quartet of undoubtedly exorbitantly priced parking spaces in a lot across the trolley tracks from the Hyatt. It looked like a cross between a football tailgate party and a bivouac for Christian soldiers. A congenial grandpa type flipped burgers and dogs on a charcoal grill. A red-faced young woman who couldn’t be much older than eighteen sat in a big canvas lawn chair under the tent, with a wet towel wrapped around her neck; she panted and sweated and fanned herself with a small battery-powered pinwheel.
“Listen up everybody, I made a friend outside Hall H,” the acne-spotted preacher announced as he led me into the tent.
“Yeah, I was just wondering if you guys had a mailing list or something I could sign up for,” I said.
“What’s your name, young man?” asked a grandmotherly woman wearing a tennis visor and holding a clipboard with a mailing list on it.
“Sorry?”
“Your name?” she asked again.
“Oh, sure. My name is Danny Rand. That’s R-A-N-D,” I spelled out slowly.
“And are you ready to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” I said, nodding my head vigorously. “I mean, I’ve been a real big fan of the Bible for a long time. It’s a great series. I know some people complain it’s got long stretches of windy exposition and an unlikable main character, a classic peak TV antihero type, with all his strict boundaries and anger management issues.
“I knew the scuttlebutt for a long time was that it couldn’t really expand past a small niche audience. But then, you see, they did a really smart thing: a soft reboot between Books One and Two that retconned out of existence a lot of the stranger and more confusing aspects of the continuity that had prevented new readers from jumping onboard.
“And I get that original-series fans had a problem with it, and the next-generation addicts can give them a really hard time, but overall I think the renumbering really expanded the franchise’s appeal. After all, the new guy, the son who inherits the mantle of the father? I mean, that’s just real hero’s journey stuff, it’s Storytelling 101. It’s like Dick Grayson becoming Batman, or Bucky Barnes becoming Captain America. I have always been a sucker for a legacy hero.”
The faithful nodded vigorously at my impromptu speech. I was running my mouth so that I could thoroughly look around the tent; fortunately at the end of my sermon, my eyes found what I had been hoping to find. Behind a table on which an array of crackers and popcorn and sports drinks had been scattered was a desktop computer with a flatscreen monitor and one of the small body cameras attached via USB. Sitting at the station was a black woman with a round, Campbell’s Soup Kid face and glasses and a glorious heap of dreadlocks piled on top of her scalp. When the senior manning the grill announced that the burgers were ready and everyone pretty much lost interest in me, I wandered over to the computer table. Before I could greet its guardian she said:
“You’re Danny Rand.”
“You heard?”
“You’re Iron Fist.” When she pushed her glasses back up on her nose I could see the entwined woman symbols tattooed on the inside of her right wrist.
“I can neither confirm nor deny my secret identity.”
“You were raised in the mountains of Tibet among K’un-L’un, capital city of Heaven, where you were apprenticed to Lei Kung, the Thunderer, achieving the ability to channel your chi through your hands by defeating Shou-Lao the Undying and plunging your fists into the dragon’s molten heart.”
I frowned. “You can’t tell that just by looking at me?”
The IT lady barked out a laugh. “Well, I’m Tasha.” She shook my hand. “I don’t know what kinda nonsense you’re up to, but thank you for helping me get my nerd on and making my day slightly less tedious.”
“My pleasure.” I shook her hand. “I guess we should probably leave it at Danny for now. I take it…” I looked back at the Baptists, who were paying us no mind. “I take it you’re not with these guys, huh?”
Tasha scowled. “Hell, no, I’m not with them. It’s just a job. I’m local, and I am gonna give my boss hell on Monday for renting me out to the God-Hates-Fags people, don’t think I won’t. I been a geek all my life, but never got within sniffing distance of Comic-Con, so I got all excited when they said they wanted me to work it. But this was not what I had in mind.”
“They give you a hard time because, uh…”
“Because I eat pussy? Naw, they’re all right. In fact, they’re really, really…nice. It’s kind of freaking me out to be honest with you.”
“I hear you.”
“Now tell me what I can do for you before I have to send you home to Luke Cage.”
I nodded at the bodycam hooked into the computer’s USB port. “They keep you around just to manage bodycam footage?”
“Nah, man, their social media game is fierce. I shoot their videos for Instagram, I upload all their shit to Facebook, Twitter—half of these olds can’t use a flip phone, so I’m their lifeline to the Internet. The bodycams are just in case somebody picks a fight. They use the raw feed later to identify the attacker—I don’t need to tell you a lot of people try to kick these guys’ asses. And sometimes they use the footage as content, too.”
“How long do you keep the ‘content’?”
“Gotta store it all at least until the end of the con. You don’t know when it might come in handy. Thing is, though, video’s a real data hog. An hour of it is like one gig, and there’s only about twelve gigs’ worth of storage on each one of these ancient cams, but that don’t matter ’cause the batteries only last, like, four or five hours of continuous filming anyway.”
“Pretend I have no idea what you just said.”
“Point is, we gotta keep swapping the bodycams, dumping the footage on the hard drive, wiping the cameras, then sending them back out again.”
“So you got it all on here?” I said, pointing at the computer.
“Yeah, I got it, I got it.”
“Is there any way I can see what you captured from Wednesday night? Like, between
eleven and midnight.”
Tasha shrugged. “Sure.” She sat down at the keyboard.
“Really? You’re not going to ask me why?”
“Nah, man, you’re Iron Fist. I assume you’re tracking down some evil-ass ninjas.”
“I’d like to tell you but I probably shouldn’t, for your own safety.”
Tasha awakened the monitor with a slap of the space bar, then called up a video viewer app that split the screen into sixteen rectangular squares, like a digital fly’s multifaceted eyes. Each box was the view of a different Eastboro Church street preacher spaced about a thousand feet apart along the sidewalk in front of the convention center. The brake lights of cars passing on Harbor Avenue left long bloody pixel streaks across the screen. This late at night, groups of con-goers and cosplayers were small and infrequent—Hogwarts robes flying, plastic assault rifles dragging along the ground, weighed down by their enormous Atlas Entertainment branded swag bags. A Skeletor in a bone codpiece came right up to one of the cameras and blocked it briefly with his middle finger. A guy in sunglasses and no shirt walking with two women suddenly swerved and ran up to another, hocking and spitting a big old loogie over the lens, presumably aiming at the wearer’s head; the view flailed wildly into a frozen, pixelated blur.
“What you got here is everything from like twenty-two thirty hours to midnight, when they pack it in,” Tasha said. “You looking for anything in particular?”
“I’ll know it when I see it,” I said. “I hope.”
Tasha clicked on the control bar at the bottom of the master screen and began fast-forwarding through all the videos at the same time. A Heath Ledger–style Joker and a Margot Robbie–style Harley Quinn practically skipped, arm in arm, across one end of the Harbor Drive sidewalk to the other at comical speed. A company of orcs with leather armor and battle axes quick-marched across the street to the Bayfront hotel bar. A Quicksilver (classic flavor, original green costume) lived up to his name by running, at 10x-speed, to the light-rail stop, but in Buster Keaton fashion he fell down, got up, and fell down again, then got to the station just as the train pulled away. Too slow, super-speedster: oh, the irony.
The Con Artist Page 11