by Matt Forbeck
Eliot stopped in front of the kid and raised his hand, two fingers out. Then he moved the hand from left to right as if he were sliding a switch with those fingers. “This is not the Leia you’re looking for.”
The teenagers froze for an instant, then burst out laughing. As they did, Eliot moved past them, bringing Parker up behind him. The kids let them pass, clapping Eliot on the back of his armor at the joke.
“I still got an eye on him,” Parker said as she moved around Eliot to lead him. The way the helmet was messing with his vision, he didn’t object. “He just ducked into the back hallway.”
“Don’t lose him,” Nate said.
“We won’t,” Eliot said. He was this close to ripping off his helmet, chasing the thug down, and beating Hardison’s location out of him, but he opted for trusting Parker instead. She had eyes as sharp as anyone, and he’d never known anyone who could top her instincts when it came to finding a way through buildings.
Parker pulled Eliot out of the exhibit hall and through a black curtain into the back hallway. The public wasn’t supposed to go back here, but a few exhibitors and convention center staff strolled through the walkway, ignoring them. The hall was wide enough to accommodate a semitruck if necessary, although there were only a few electric carts and handcarts for moving pallets parked back there at the moment.
“Dammit, Parker.” Eliot glanced around. “Where’d he go?”
“Maybe you should go back and look for one of the other guys,” Sophie said.
“No,” Nate said. “By the time you do that, they might all disappear. Find the guy you’re on.”
“The freight elevator’s just up here.” Parker led Eliot over to the closed doors. He looked up and saw that the elevator was heading down. “It’s the only place he could have gone and disappeared that fast, especially with all that junk he was carrying.”
“So we just wait here for the car to come back up so we can try to follow him?” Eliot said. “We’ll lose him for sure.”
Parker grabbed Eliot and hauled him away from the door, around a corner, and into a stairwell. “This should let us out near the elevator doors,” she said. “If we hurry, we’ll be right behind him.”
“How the hell do you know this building that well?” Eliot said.
“What do you think I do while you’re out looking for a place to sleep at night?”
Eliot shrugged. He wouldn’t have traded places with her, but he had to give her that one.
Parker led him down the concrete stairs into the underbelly of the convention center. He held on to the railing to make sure he didn’t trip up with all this stormtrooper gear on. The last thing he needed was to take a tumble, custom-made helmet with integrated speaker system or not.
“There are two underground parking levels here,” Parker said as they reached the landing next to the first set of doors. She threw them open and hauled Eliot through.
“It’s pretty amazing. They must be down below the water table here,” she said. “After all, the ocean’s just a hundred feet or so behind us.”
The dank scent of damp concrete permeated the parking level. The place was only dimly lit, with banks of lights spaced far enough apart to give room for plenty of shadows. Their footsteps echoed against the hard surfaces as they hustled through the place.
Eliot had been hoping to sneak up on the thugs, but that was now impossible. The chances of someone not hearing their footsteps were zero. On the flip side of that, the people they were following would be easy to hear too.
Parker snaked around a corner, and Eliot saw a pair of elevator doors slide closed before them. “Dammit,” he said.
Parker cupped a hand to her ear and whispered into the earpiece. “No, that’s good. Look at the display. The elevator’s going back up. He got off here.”
Eliot smiled inside his helmet. The girl was good.
“You hear him?” he said. “It’s not so easy in this thing.”
“I would if you’d be quiet,” she said with a hard edge in her voice. Eliot didn’t blame her. Hardison’s life was on the line, and he’d interrupted her.
She stood stock-still, her head cocked to one side, her ear still cupped. Then she burst into movement. “This way,” she said.
She turned left, moving north along the long lane that ran past the perpendicular aisles of cars, vans, and trucks packed tightly into the place. She moved with purpose, striding fast, like a speed walker, but stopping shy of breaking into a run. Smart girl that she was, she didn’t want the guy they were following to hear the staccato beat of the footsteps of someone hurrying after him.
“There he is,” Parker said in a soft voice. “Just up ahead and to the right.”
Eliot spotted him too. The man turned to the right, moving up an aisle of parked cars and into the darkness. He moved with purpose but not as fast as the two of them.
Parker kept going past the point where the man had turned off, and Eliot followed her without a word of complaint. She turned right down the next aisle. In this way, they could see the man and track where he was going but reduced the chances that he would figure out that they were on his tail.
The man sauntered down the aisle, all the way to the far end, then turned left, which put Eliot and Parker on an intercept course with him. Parker slowed her pace so that they wouldn’t run directly into the man, then slung her arm around Eliot’s armored shoulders and started to giggle.
“Oh, quit it!” she said loud enough for the man to hear. “Not here. Not on your life. Wait till we get home!”
The man glanced at them as Eliot put his arm around Parker’s bare middle, then slowed down to leer. Eliot tolerated this for a moment, then glared at the man through his helmet and said, “What do you think you’re looking at?”
The man’s face fell, and he scurried away with his boxes in his arms. An instant later, Eliot and Parker moved after him.
They watched from the corner where the aisle they were in intersected with the main lane. The man walked along it, not looking back, until he reached the far wall. Then he turned to the left again and moved back down the final aisle.
Eliot and Parker walked arm in arm, still leaning on each other, until they reached that last corner. They stopped there for a second, time enough for Eliot to give Parker a squeeze and for her to let out a delighted giggle. And also so they could see what the man with the boxes was up to.
The other three men had arrived at the spot first and were unloading their boxes into the backs of two identical vans parked next to each other. They were a pair of extended-cab cargo vans, the kind that contractors all across the country use to haul goods, tools, or even people. Although the backs of the vans had no windows, or any markings either, they would have fit in at any construction site in the nation.
Two men—ones Eliot had seen working around Patronus’s booth on Wednesday night—held open the back doors of each van while the other four unloaded their burdens into the vehicles. Eliot noticed that they put the heavier boxes into the van on the left, a little farther down the aisle, while the lighter ones went into the van on the right. He couldn’t see inside the vans from where he stood, as the open doors blocked the line of sight, but by the way the thugs were struggling to get anything into the farther van, it had to be pretty full.
The men holding the doors turned to glare at Eliot as the others finished their work. They meant to intimidate Parker and him into turning around and walking way, but Eliot wasn’t having any of that. With a deep chuckle, he pulled Parker tighter to him and started to stagger down the aisle.
FORTY-THREE
The first items had sold for good, if not spectacular, prices. The crowd assembled around Patronus’s booth clearly wanted what he had to sell, but he’d saved many of the best pieces for later in the night. Now the time had come to auction them off.
Patronus clapped as the woman working on the stage with him carried the last item back to its spot in the display cases and returned with a stack of original art pages, each
carefully sealed in its own plastic bag along with a certificate of authenticity. “And now,” Patronus said, “we have one of the great lots that you’ve all been waiting for: the early work of the legendary artist Simon Curtiss!”
This drew a huge round of applause from the crowd, including some howls and whistles. Sophie chuckled at the noise. “This is a far cry from the staid halls of Sotheby’s and Christie’s, isn’t it?” she said. “Still, I can’t fault them for their enthusiasm.”
“No one gets more excited about their collectibles than comic-book fans,” Nate said. “It reached a fever pitch back in the nineties. The bestselling comic book of all time came out back in 1991, X-Men Number One by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee. It sold more than seven million copies.”
“That seems like an awful lot,” Sophie said.
“It was,” Nate said. “Way too much. Today, the top comics usually sell around a hundred thousand copies. The comics market in the 1990s was driven by speculators, people who remembered how valuable those old Superman and Batman comics their mothers had thrown out would have been if they’d managed to keep them.
“Trouble was, they forgot basic economics, the laws of supply and demand. Those comics grew so much in value because no one ever thought they would. Most people just threw them away when they were done with them.”
“So the ones that remained shot up in value.”
“Right. Trouble with something like X-Men Number One is that there aren’t seven million people who want a copy. When it came out, people bought ten, twenty, even a hundred copies and put them away in hermetically sealed bags, thinking they’d eventually pay for their retirement or their kids’ college education.”
“But that would make the supply far outstrip the demand.”
“Yep. So you can now find copies of that issue here in the hall for a buck or two, about what it sold for back in 1991. Just about anyone who ever wanted one has a copy, so they’re worthless.”
“You sound an awful lot like Hardison,” Sophie said with a soft smile.
Nate bowed his head. Maybe Hardison hadn’t been the only one who’d learned something in the years of their friendship. “Back when I was an insurance investigator, I had a case in which a man had lost a thousand copies of the comic in a fire and was claiming they were worth a hundred dollars each.”
“And you learned all this then? And remembered it?”
He looked at her. “Hardison and I chatted about it on the plane out here.”
Sophie put her hand on Nate’s arm and gave him a look that he could interpret in only one way. “Are you worried about him?”
He frowned and nodded.
Hardison was a grown man, and he made his own decisions. But Nate still considered him—hell, everyone on the team—his responsibility. If they discovered that Hardison had been killed, he wasn’t sure how he’d ever be able to forgive himself for it.
And then Patronus said something in a loud voice that got Nate’s attention. “Before we move on with the rest of the auction, though, I’d like to take a short break to have a great man say a few short words about the Hero Initiative. Please welcome none other than the Man himself, Stan Lee!”
Stan made his way to the short stage and shook Patronus’s hand before taking over the microphone. The crowd went wild, clapping like crazy. Even Nate got into the act, putting his fingers between his teeth for a loud whistle.
“Thanks so much, Lorenzo,” Stan said as the noise died down. “For those who don’t know me, I’m an old man who used to make a lot of comics with a lot of great people. I’m going to turn ninety years old at the end of this year, and I’ve been working in comics for, let’s see, seventy-three years now, my entire adult life.”
The crowd again burst into applause, but Stan waved them down to silence. “Please,” he said with a mischievous smile. “I just told you how old I am. If you keep this up all night, I might not make it to that big birthday.”
The audience laughed but quieted down.
“As many of you already know, the Hero Initiative is a charity near and dear to my heart. I grew up in this industry, and I’ve made so many friends in it over the years, met and worked with so many wonderful people. But as they reach their golden years, not all of them are doing as well as we would all hope. That’s where the Hero Initiative comes in.
“The Hero Initiative provides financial assistance to those creators who need it most, the men and women who created many of the heroes that we all grew up with. Just as they provided us with inspiration and hope, it’s our turn to give that back to them. Through auctions like this one and the sale of special Hero Initiative merchandise, we’re able to do just that.
“So dig deep, buy lots of wonderful artwork, and stop by the Hero Initiative booth in the hall tomorrow for your last chance to grab some great things to take home from the show. Or go to HeroInitiative.org when you get home and join the cause there. Every dime of the sales from our booth and our Web site goes straight to the organization, and you’ll get some great mementos out of it too.”
Stan paused for dramatic effect and spread his hands out to take in the entire convention center. “Together, we can do some real good for the people who made all of this possible. Because everyone deserves a Golden Age.
“Excelsior!”
The crowd erupted into applause that lasted until Stan Lee left the podium with a big wave and a grin. The clapping died down as Patronus replaced him on the stage and said, “Thanks, Stan! You’re still the Man. Now get ready, everybody. We’re about to dig into the rarely seen collection of Simon Curtiss!”
As the crowd settled down and got ready for the bidding to begin again, a curious thought struck Nate. He turned toward Sophie so that anyone watching him would think he was speaking to her.
“Hey, Parker,” he said into the earpiece. “Where exactly are you right now?”
“In the parking structure below you,” Parker said, her voice low. “Haven’t you been listening?” She giggled loudly then—for the benefit of the men loading the van, Nate guessed.
“I mean, exactly where. You’ve been studying the place since we got here.”
“Below you. Just like I said.”
“Directly below us?” Sophie said.
“Yep. One level down.”
“That’s a heck of a coincidence,” Nate said, more to Sophie than anyone else. “Why do you suppose that is?”
“Last place left to park?” said Eliot. “This place is packed to the gills.”
“They could have come in early and parked the vans there before anyone else came into town,” Nate said. “If they really wanted those spots.”
“But why?” said Sophie. “There’s no way to get from there to here, right?”
“Not unless you want to drill through several feet of solid concrete,” Parker said. “The floor of that place is rated to hold up to three hundred and fifty pounds per square foot. You could drive a loaded semi across it. It’s brutally thick.”
Nate furrowed his brow. “It doesn’t make a bit of sense, does it?”
“I don’t suppose it matters now,” Eliot said. “One of those guys is coming toward us. Time to make our move.”
FORTY-FOUR
As Patronus’s men in the parking structure finished loading their things into the two vans, one of them spotted Eliot and Parker hanging out at the corner at the end of the aisle and started to glare at them. He didn’t say a word, just tried to scare them off with the meanest, hardest expression he could summon. Most people who saw something like that on the face of a man that size would have found a good reason to exclaim that they’d forgotten their keys and needed to go back and look for them. Now.
Eliot, of course, ignored him. Instead, he held Parker close to him and pretended to be raging drunk. “C’mere, baby,” he said loudly. “C’mon, my little prisoner. Give me a kiss.”
Parker caught on immediately and started to giggle in mock protest at Eliot. “Oh, please, Mr. Stormtrooper,” she said. “Do
n’t throw me in the pit with that big, bad monster. The, um, sarlacc! He’ll tear me to pieces!”
“C’mon, baby,” Eliot said, snorting. “Give me some of that Alderaanian sugar.”
Parker squealed in laughter and slapped her hands against Eliot’s shoulder pads, then beat them like a snare drum. Over her shoulder, Eliot saw most of Patronus’s men look over and roll their eyes at the pair of them. One of them actually laughed along with Parker.
That first guy, though, he kept staring at them like a statue, unmoved in any way.
“We’re almost ready to go,” one of the other men said to the glowering sentry. “How about you?”
“Just let me take care of this,” he said.
Eliot groaned inside. He’d hoped to get a few of the men closer together and take them all out at once. Instead, this clown was going to try to shoo them away. That meant the time to move was now.
He stumbled forward, and Parker reached out and caught him. He laughed out loud, then tripped forward again. This time Parker lost her grip, and Eliot had to catch himself on the bumper of a nearby car. That brought him closer to the thug strolling toward him. Almost there.
“Oh, hey!” Parker said with a wild giggle. “My captor has fallen over! Perhaps I can get away. Ha! But he’s my ride!” That sent her into a fit of laughter again, doubling her over as she stumbled after Eliot.
Eliot pushed off of the car he’d fallen against and staggered forward again, putting himself on a collision course with the angry thug. “You can’t catch me,” he said. “I had friends on that Death Star!”
Eliot glanced back at Parker and saw her still following him. It gave him a convenient excuse to charge straight into the thug coming at them.
The man had stopped in his tracks, though, to watch Eliot and Parker come to him, which meant that Eliot wound up misjudging where he was going to be. Rather than stumble into the guy’s arms, he tripped up and fell to his knees at the man’s feet.