by Matt Forbeck
“What about the scandal that erupted this weekend over the fact that Kanabe’s been illegally selling pornographic manga on the Internet? Bit of bad timing that, if this was meant to be his return to the comic-book community.”
Patronus shrugged. “I didn’t know about any of that until I read it in the papers.”
Wouldn’t it be great if he was able to throw so much of the suspicion onto Kanabe that he himself came out of the mess smelling like a rose? That way he maybe could even manage to keep using the Patronus name. Despite the uproar that was certain to occur after it became obvious that the auctioned pieces were forgeries, if he could pin the blame on the disgraced Kanabe, it would put him in the clear. It might even make him an object of sympathy, the noble artist who devoted so much of his time to helping the Hero Initiative only to be ripped off by the disgusting Mr. Kanabe.
“All I know is that Mr. Kanabe has always been the real force behind this auction,” Patronus said. “If it wasn’t for him, there wouldn’t have been an auction in the first place, and I’ll forever be grateful to him for that. After I turn this money over to him tonight, we’ll have a chance to celebrate. I cannot wait to see the big check he’ll be presenting to the Hero Initiative.”
“That’s good to hear,” Johnston said as they reached the entrance to the back hallway.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you here, Mr. Johnston,” Patronus said. “It was a real pleasure to meet you.”
“Oh, you don’t remember? We’ve met before.”
Patronus’s smile faltered. “Forgive me. I—I think I’d remember something like that.”
Johnston smiled. “Well, we’ve never actually met in person, but we’ve exchanged many e-mails over the years, haven’t we? After all, I was the one who exposed you for trying to pawn off your artwork as the creations of some of the biggest names in the industry while you pretended to be an agent for them. What was the name you were using back then?”
Patronus glared at Johnston. He knew exactly what the reporter was talking about, and he also knew that he was trying to trick him into confirming that he had been the one who had committed those frauds. He wasn’t going to fall for that.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Patronus struggled to keep his voice from shaking. “And now I really do have to be going.”
“You probably blame me for blowing that for you, and I’m happy to take some small credit for it,” Johnston said. “But you know, you would have been found out soon enough anyhow. You’re not nearly as good as the people you claim to be.”
“What?” Patronus couldn’t believe the man would insult him like that.
Johnston shrugged. “I’ve seen the stuff you tried to submit. It was—what’s the right word? Oh, yes: rotten. My eldest daughter has posted material with a better sense of anatomy and perspective on our refrigerator, and she’s only seven.”
“You son of a bitch.” Patronus’s face turned red as his temper seethed. “I put a lot of goddamn work into those pieces.”
“Ah, so it is you after all.” Johnston grinned at him. “So good to finally meet you in person after all these years.”
“Go to hell! You and your damn Web site. And if you print a single word of this, I’ll track you down and kill you and your little girl too.” With that, Patronus turned on his heel and stalked off, leaving Johnston standing there chuckling over his little victory.
“There are two of them, actually,” Johnston called after him. “And if you fight as well as you draw, I think they might be able to take you on their own.”
Patronus kicked himself for not sticking to his denials. He’d let the limey bastard get to him, and now he was going to have to deal with it. He figured at the least he’d simply deny that it was his voice on Johnston’s recording. After three and a half days of the show, it was shot and he didn’t sound much like he usually did anyway. He’d claim he’d never met Johnston and that the reporter was just fabricating a story to garner hits for his Web site from a bogus scandal.
And to think that Johnston would attack him, Patronus, with such allegations in the middle of his trying to sort out the aftermath of Mr. Kanabe’s betrayal of both himself and the Hero Initiative. How dare he?
Patronus was smiling again by the time the freight elevator reached the parking garage. Johnston couldn’t touch him, not if he didn’t let him, right?
He walked over to where the van was parked at the far north side of the underground lot. Most of the people parked in that area had driven in before the show and weren’t planning to leave until tomorrow evening after the convention ended. There was barely any foot traffic back in the last aisle all weekend, and none now.
As he approached the van, he slipped in something wet on the concrete and almost went down. It looked almost black against the concrete in the dim light, but it had a red tinge to it and smelled like copper. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought it was blood.
When he reached the van, he pulled out his keys and pressed the fob to unlock the doors, but nothing happened. He tried it three more times, getting closer every time, until he finally gave up. He wondered if maybe the battery in the fob had run out or if the thing was just broken. The van wasn’t that old.
The men should have been waiting for him, but he didn’t see anyone standing there. He wondered if they’d at least locked the damn doors before they ran off to the nearest bar or wherever the hell they’d gone. He tried the back door of the van, and it was unlocked.
He cursed the thick-necked morons for their carelessness as he pulled open the door. Inside, the van was stacked from top to bottom with boxes that he didn’t recognize. Maybe some of them had been in the booth—he wasn’t sure—but he didn’t see any of the tubes that he’d placed so much of the original artwork into.
He growled in frustration, wondering if the bastards had ripped him off. He wouldn’t have put it past them. If he had his phone with him, he’d call them up and chew them raw.
Instead, he stalked around to the front of the van to climb in and drive off. As he did, he spotted one of the men in the driver’s seat. He grabbed the door’s handle and flung it open. “What the hell is wrong with you guys?” he said with a snarl.
It wasn’t until then that he saw that the man was bound to the steering wheel with zip ties and that his mouth had been duct-taped shut. Patronus peered at him in stunned fascination and saw that his nose had been flattened and he’d bled all over the tape. Another one of the guards sat in the passenger seat, and the same thing had been done to him. The men stared at him with wide, terrified eyes, pleading with him to do something to save them, to at least set them free.
Patronus almost dropped the cash box but caught it just in time. The adrenaline that was pumping through his bloodstream prodded him to reach up and strip the tape from the driver’s mouth in one sharp, painful move. “You got to get us out of here,” the guard said in spluttering panic. “We’re sitting on a bomb!”
This time Patronus did drop the cash box. “What?”
“They beat us up and took the other van. They tied up the other guys and shoved them under this one. They taped them to the chassis!”
“What bomb?”
The man jerked his head toward the rear of the van. “Those boxes, we moved them in here all weekend long, right under your nose. Hell, under everyone’s noses. No one looks at a guy carrying a single box in or out of the con. Not if you got an exhibitor badge.”
“What’s in the boxes?” The level of betrayal here stabbed through Patronus. Not only had they not moved the artwork down here—his artwork—but they’d stuffed the van with something else.
“Haven’t you heard a damn thing I said? You got to cut me loose. Get us out of here, now!”
Patronus leaned into the van and slapped the man across the face. “What’s in those boxes? Where’s my art?”
“It’s gone!” the guard said. “They took it! They only left the dynamite!”
&n
bsp; Patronus staggered backward, his jaw loose and hanging open. Everything had gone from good to bad so fast that it left him dizzy. He needed to get out of here, to find someplace safe to think.
He reached down and scooped up the cash box, then turned to go.
“No!” the guard said. “You can’t leave us here. It ain’t human! That bomb could go off any second!”
Patronus ignored the man’s pleas. These men had betrayed his trust, and as far as he was concerned, blowing up in a fiery explosion was a perfect reward for them. He just wanted to be far, far away when it happened.
The thing that astonished him next was that he didn’t hear the sirens. He supposed the cops didn’t have them on. One second he was leaving the bastards who’d betrayed him behind, strapped to a van filled with high explosives. The next, squad cars appeared at both ends of the aisle and blocked them off while a well-armed squad of SWAT officers stormed between the cars in the aisle across from him, bellowing at him to put down the box and lie down on the ground.
Patronus did as they demanded. He didn’t understand how his life had all gone so wrong so fast. There was only one person who could have done this to him, and he vowed to make him pay.
Kanabe.
FIFTY-ONE
Daichi Kanabe had not had a good convention. He’d come into it like most people at the show, full of plans and hopes, but now, on Saturday night, they all seemed to have been dashed.
On Wednesday, he’d been sure that it would all go right. The men he’d hired as Patronus’s security were all seasoned professionals, and at the prices he was paying them, they’d have strapped their own mothers to the bomb he had them build. As for Patronus, he’d proven to be the perfect patsy, one who thought he was actually betraying Kanabe instead of the other way around. And if the plan had gone off properly, Patronus would have taken the blame for everything.
A disgruntled fraud in the comic-book industry robs many of its legends blind and then runs off with the funds from a charity auction meant to benefit them. But to crown his revenge, he wants to blow up the convention center as well. It would only be seen as ironic that the bomb had gone off too early and killed him along with everyone else.
When the bomb had failed to go off on schedule, or even close to it, Kanabe had taken matters into his own hands, and not even that had worked. No matter how many times he’d called the phone attached to the bomb from his hotel room in the Hyatt, it hadn’t detonated. He would have liked to think the problem was with the cheap phone he’d had the guards pay for with cash, but the other ones he’d purchased seemed to work fine.
He had to assume that everything had gone bad, and that meant he had to leave. He could be at the airport in less than fifteen minutes, and he would simply bump up his flight back to Japan by a day, explaining that he had a family matter to attend to. No one would suspect a thing, and if and when they did, he’d already be out of the country.
He stood outside and waited for the valet to bring his Lexus up from the parking lot. It seemed to be taking forever, and he’d already decided to stiff the person on the tip. So what if the entire downtown area was packed right now? It wasn’t his problem.
When the valet—a woman, it turned out—arrived with his car, she was just as bumbling as he expected. First, she parked the car as far from the front doors as possible. Then she fumbled with the trunk, dropped his luggage, and even tripped into him as she tried to catch it before it hit the ground.
After the kind of day he’d had, such incompetence was intolerable. He considered slapping the woman but decided he’d settle for her job. “Do you have a manager?” he said to her instead. “Bring him to see me immediately!”
She scurried off like a frightened mouse and spoke to a man who had been sitting on the edge of a planter near the hotel’s front entrance. He leaped off it and sauntered over to Kanabe, a sour look on his face, as the woman scurried back to the car again, probably to scratch it, not from malice but out of sheer incompetence.
“Do you have a policy for hiring the mentally handicapped?” Kanabe said.
“Oh, I’m not her boss,” said Nate.
“As I said to her, I demand to see her manager immediately!”
Nate shrugged as he watched Sophie over Kanabe’s shoulder. She held up the passport and wallet she’d picked from the man’s pockets, then tossed them into the car. “She doesn’t even work here,” he said.
Kanabe glared back at Sophie, who was already striding away from the car, her back to him. He didn’t understand what was going on here.
“Do you have any idea who I am and how angry you’re making me right now?”
Nate gave the man a wry smile. “Of course I do, Mr. Kanabe. You see, I always make a point of doing my research, especially when it comes to people who kidnap and beat my friends and try to frame them as terrorists.”
Kanabe glanced around, wondering if this man could be with the police. Was the game finally up? He had thought he had more time.
“The hacker,” he said. “He was a thorn in my side. I removed it. It is only business.”
Nate leaned in close. “He’s a good friend of mine. The best. And I take it personally when someone tries to kill my friends—along with a lot of other innocent people.”
Kanabe snorted at the man’s bravado. “If I can do that to him, what makes you think I won’t do it to you? Do you have other people you care about? I can kill them for you—all of them—one by one.”
Nate grimaced at Kanabe. “You’re making this a lot easier than I thought.”
In his head, Kanabe was already killing Nate and anyone close to him. He’d start with the valet and then work his way closer and closer, saving the coup de grâce for this insolent bastard who was standing before him.
Unfortunately, he’d let his temper get ahold of him for a moment. Better to play it cool for now and have his revenge at his leisure, later. He could afford to be patient. He just needed to leave town first, fast.
“You don’t have a shred of proof for any of your accusations,” Kanabe said. “None of them will hold up in a court of law.”
Nate laughed. “You think we’re going to turn you over to the law?” he said. “Oh, no, we’re much more dangerous than that. And as for evidence, I think a full confession from your friend Lorenzo Patronus might do the trick.”
Kanabe had negotiated hundreds if not thousands of business deals over the years. He could read people like traffic signs. He wasn’t about to let this man intimidate him. “You’re bluffing.”
“I am?” Nate shrugged. “I suppose I could be. Why don’t you call him and find out?”
Kanabe grunted. This fool expected him to take his word for what had happened. He had gall to tell him to call Patronus, figuring that he wouldn’t dare do so for fear of being connected somehow to him. Kanabe knew, though, that it was far too late to deny that connection. He’d forged it on purpose anyhow, planning to portray himself as the silent business partner of a madman, who, it turned out, had duped him, just as he’d duped so many others, including all those artists who supposedly donated their work to the auction.
“I will,” Kanabe said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He took great care not to hit the redial button, which would have placed the call to the bomb in the van again, or at least tried to. Instead, he looked up Patronus’s number in his recent-call list and prepared to tap the man’s name.
Nate smirked. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Kanabe said. “But I’m all too happy to expose you as a liar.”
“I’m not lying,” said Nate. “And when all this is over, I want you to remember two things. First, if you ever go after Hardison or anyone else associated with him again, I’ll burn everything you love to the ground.”
Kanabe wasn’t impressed in the least. “And second.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Nate turned around and walked away, back toward the hotel. Kanabe la
ughed at him in triumph as he tapped Patronus’s name. So much for this stranger and his threats.
He put the ear to his phone. It started to ring.
His car exploded.
It wasn’t a huge explosion, not like the one he’d planned with the van, but it was enough to knock him forward a couple feet and to destroy his car. Every bit of glass in the car shattered outward, and the whole thing went up in a ball of flame that erupted into the dusky sky. Then the Lexus burned, the heat from it so hot that Kanabe couldn’t help but stagger back as he stared at it in despair.
“My car,” he said. “My car!”
The police officers who were racing toward the blazing machine changed course and converged right on him. “You say that’s your car, sir?” the younger of the two men said. “Can we see some ID?”
Kanabe reached for his passport and discovered it was gone. The same was true of his wallet. He had no way to prove who he was, and worse yet, with those two items gone, he had no means of leaving the country. He was doomed.
The older police officer put a hand on Kanabe, which he tried to shrug off. “Sir, you need to calm down—and I think you’ll need to come down to the station with us too.”
“You bastard!” Kanabe screamed after Nate, who had already disappeared, along with that rotten valet. “You absolute bastard!”
FIFTY-TWO
Nate grinned all the way back to the Horton Grand, and Sophie grinned right along with him. “All in all, a good few days’ work,” he said as they neared the Gaslamp Quarter. “Wouldn’t you say so, guys?”
“Damn straight,” Eliot agreed over the earpiece. “Although I could have done without getting shot again.”
“Doc says he’s going to be all right, though,” said Parker. “After fixing up both Eliot and Hardison, he says whatever he owes you is done.”
“Fair enough,” Nate said. “Be sure to thank him for his services. Hopefully we’ll never need them again.”