Double Down (Lois Lane)

by Gwenda Bond

  To prevent the sisters from resuming their starring roles as the lead players at the bicker twins theater, I made for the door. “That’s settled, then. Let’s get moving.”

  True to his word, my cab-driving, um, acquaintance—friend seemed a bit strong—pulled up to the curb moments after we stepped out the front door and onto the sidewalk to wait. He waved a beefy, blinged-out hand, rings on every finger, as I climbed into the front and let the others take the back.

  “Where are my favorite reporters headed to? Daily Planet Building?” he asked. “Can I expect one of your famous tips?”

  “Sorry,” I said, “this is a normal tip kind of day.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Can’t win them all. Where to?”

  I fished out my notepad and showed him the address I’d harvested off the Internet.

  “Good thing it’s daytime,” he said. “Not the best neighborhood.”

  I remembered Dante’s conviction that it was just a neighborhood that needed to feel like it mattered again. “Not the worst either.”

  He grunted. “Close enough to it, though. For a story?”

  He was as nosy as my parents. “Maybe. But only if we get there this year.”

  “Fine, fine,” he said, and put the car in drive.

  James surprised me by staying quiet and not chatting up Melody. And Maddy and Melody weren’t going to gab with each other, so it was a silent ride. I did note that Melody had her wrist cradled in her opposite hand, but she didn’t drop it periodically, like she had the day before. The tic was changing. Who knew if it meant anything?

  When we reached the site, I saw Dante deep into painting across the street from our target. He’d finished up the base for the background of his mural and had started roughing in a city skyline.

  I pulled out some money and turned to collect the rest from the back seat. Maddy looked at Melody, who said, “I forgot my card. Can you cover us both?”

  “I didn’t bring mine either,” Maddy said.

  “I’ll cover it,” James said, taking out his wallet and passing over half the fare in cash.

  I doubted he could afford to throw in that much. He’d told me that his family took a big financial hit when his dad went away, all outward appearances to the contrary. But I held my tongue.

  “You want me to wait?” the cabbie asked.

  “Probably better if you aren’t hanging around. I’ll text when we’re done and you can come back? It should take an hour or two.”

  “Sure thing, unless someone willing to give the big tip calls first.”

  “Touché,” I agreed.

  We got out of the car, and I gave a pointed look in Dante’s direction and fake-fanned myself. “Is it hot out here or is someone just going to be happy to see you?” I murmured to Maddy.

  In seconds, she wore the same blush her sister had before. They did have a few things in common.

  Dante spotted us and began beaming. Not just in our general direction, but right at Maddy. With a smile that could rival the sun. He stowed his paint roller and loped over to join us.

  “I’m like some kind of psychic,” I told her.

  “Stop,” she said. But she bit her lip against a smile.

  “Hi there,” he said when he reached us. “I didn’t think I’d be lucky enough to get to see you again before Monday.”

  Melody choked out a cough, but Maddy’s reaction was so intense she didn’t seem to notice. She froze in nonverbal blush mode.

  “Did I say that out loud?” Dante said, laughing at himself. “I meant it. But I didn’t mean to scare you off. I’m normal, promise.”

  I was certain Maddy wouldn’t be able to respond. She was always so reserved around James whenever he paid even the smallest amount of attention to her. And her judgy sister was watching.

  But she smiled at Dante. “What if I’m not normal?”

  “Tell me more,” he said.

  James raised his eyebrows when I looked at him. Melody slipped her arm through his.

  “Looks like I’m the only one who forgot to bring a date,” I muttered.

  But, then, I always was. How could I be anything other than a fifth wheel when the only person I was interested in was 1,200 miles away in Kansas—not to mention hiding his real identity?

  What would it take to have a world where we both live in Metropolis and know each other?

  Maybe someday.

  Maybe someday I’d know his first name.

  I was pretty sure I sighed out loud. So before they could tease me about it, I sped up to get out front of the others, extracting the tools I’d brought.

  “I figured we’d look for a back entrance,” I said over my shoulder. “Otherwise we’ll have to clear these boards away. And given my luck, the cops would probably cruise by at just that moment.”

  “This might not be such a good idea,” James said.

  “We’re not going to break anything. Not even bend. We just need to poke around inside. It’s abandoned and we’ll leave everything just as we find it. Promise.”

  “Right,” James said, unconvinced. “So then how do we get inside?”

  “There’s something else,” Dante said, and pointed to the graffiti on the boards. “Those tags have a meaning. They mean, essentially, no trespassing, orders of the Boss. He’s a big part of why this neighborhood needs reminding that it matters.”

  The Boss again. I wanted to know more, but it could wait until we were inside. I swept my arm to indicate the mostly deserted street around us. “I don’t see anyone, and especially not a boss. We’ll be okay.”

  “Back door is smarter,” Dante said.

  He stuck with us as we traveled up an alley and around back. There were more tags, similar to those up front—variations on the stylized B—along the back wall, the door, covering the two dumpsters. But the heavy metal door bore only a single impressive padlock.

  “B is for bingo,” I said. “Let me get out my lock picks.”

  “Lois—” James started.

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” Maddy cut him off.

  But James rolled his eyes. “It’s not locked,” he said. He pointed at the padlock, which was, in fact, not quite closed.

  “Great work,” I said. I carefully removed the lock and swung the door open. Uninviting darkness awaited us within.

  “You’re sure this is a good idea?” James asked.

  “This does kind of look like rusty nail heaven,” Maddy said.

  I swapped the lock pick set for a compact flashlight I feared would be no match for the lightless interior we were about to enter. At least there were several of us? Not that I’d confess it to any of my companions, but I might have hesitated to go inside alone. Maybe.

  I flicked on the flashlight. “It’s the best idea I’ve got today. I want Melody to get a look around. See if being here jogs any more memories. We need clues.”

  Melody met my eyes, level, challenging. “I thought you liked the hard way.”

  “I do,” I said. “That’s why we’re here.”

  She raised her chin in a nod. “Lead on.”

  The rustle and scurry that preceded us into the building was the opposite of comforting. “I don’t think the mice got the memo about trespassing,” I said.

  “You hope those are mice,” Dante said. “Probably our own special Suicide Slum rats.”

  I heard a gentle whimper from Maddy’s direction, and Dante quickly said, “It’s okay. The rat thing was a joke.” That seemed unlikely, but I kept quiet. He went on, “I looked up that band, by the way. Tyrannosaurus Hex? But I couldn’t find anything about them. I dug your review of Library Riot in the Scoop, though…”

  Dante was staying close to Maddy, distracting her by complimenting her reviews. Oh, they were too adorable. She deserved someone who was into her. Not someone like James, who continued to frown
—as usual—and had Melody’s arm looped through his. With her perfect hair and flowery sundress, she looked as out of place as possible in this abandoned locale.

  Melody shrugged James’s arm off to come up beside me. “He was on the top floor,” she said.

  We navigated in silence except for Dante’s low and continuous stream of conversation directed at Maddy, and the occasional scurrying in front of us. The elevators were obviously out of commission, and a light switch I tried in the hall did nothing. But we found a set of fire stairs, and they were remarkably tidy except for a thin film of dust.

  “Why did I have the impression buildings like this became squats and things?” I asked no one in particular. “Is this a stereotype I have about bad neighborhoods?” I might have moved around a lot, but I was under no illusions about the level of privilege I had. I wanted to be called on it if I was making bad assumptions based on watching too many movies and not knowing enough about the actual neighborhood we were in.

  “It probably would be a squat,” Dante answered, breaking off his Maddy distraction mission. “But the Boss controls that kind of thing.”

  “Who is this Boss?” I asked.

  “The Boss rules this area, for better or worse. Mostly worse. When he says to stay out of a building, people stay out.”

  Yesterday Dante had said something about the Boss controlling crime. “So he’s a crime boss then?”

  “He’s the crime boss,” James said. “Moxie ‘Boss’ Mannheim. He’s been remaking his image as a respectable businessman for years, but rumors persist. Don’t you read the Planet?”

  “Of course I do.” The name had rung a vague bell when James said the whole thing, but clearly I had some homework to do.

  I pushed open the door to the third floor and let Melody go in first.

  This had been the lab. That much was clear from what lay in front of us. There were a handful of waist-high counters, a few filing cabinets left around the edges. Some test tubes and syringes. But it was a shell of a lab. These remnants were all there was left. I checked out one of the filing cabinets, opening the drawer to reveal a whole lot of empty inside. I tried another one. Same.

  “This was the place,” Melody said.

  Standing by one of the counters, she reached out to touch a small rack. “I don’t remember anything…”

  I started looking around the edges of the room. Maybe there was a clue for me here outside her head.

  I did see a slip of paper on the floor, the size of a sheet from a small notepad, and bent to retrieve it. The words written on it in pencil were too faded to read, but there was a signature. It was two Ds though, hardly a name.

  Something I could keep in mind when I went down to City Hall on Monday. I pocketed it, and jumped when a crash and clatter sounded behind me.

  “Melody!” James called.

  When I turned, he had a grip on one of Melody’s arms and Maddy had the other one. Melody was pale, eyelids fluttering, her legs wobbly enough that she’d have been on the ground if James and her sister weren’t holding her up. Just like the day before.

  “Mel,” Maddy said, a tremble in the word. “Mel, what is it?”

  Melody wrenched her hand from James and put it to her forehead. She mumbled something under her breath.

  We waited, and I knew everyone was as scared as I was. We stood in a dark abandoned ruin, where something inexplicable had happened to Melody, completely powerless to help her.

  If I’d convinced myself that this was anything like Anavi and the Warheads, and that I’d solve it with relatively little problem, that dream evaporated as we waited to see if she’d recover.

  I had no idea what was going on here, no idea who was behind it.

  No clue, except a possibly meaningless DD signature on a scrap of paper and a phantom address for a phantom company.

  Melody’s eyes fluttered once more, then popped open and she was with us again. Sweat was a sheen on her cheeks. “Can I speak to you alone?” she asked me, only slightly imperious. She looked at Dante.

  I couldn’t speak for Maddy and James, but I’d forgotten that Dante wasn’t one of us. He had no real idea why we’d wanted to get into the building badly enough to force entry. But he’d come along anyway.

  “Of course,” I said, and I helped her walk with me to the nearest corner. Dante didn’t say a word, giving us privacy. Maddy and James hung back too.

  “I saw something,” she said, fingers circling her wrist. “When it happened. I was trying to remember being here before and instead… All I could see clearly was that gray wristband, him touching it. And I saw stairs. A lot of stairs, in the dark.”

  “Any hint where this was?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Not here.” Then, “You still like the hard way?”

  “Less and less all the time,” I said. “Try not to worry.”

  I was telling people to do that a lot lately, even when I had no evidence it was sound advice.

  “I’m trusting you, so of course I’m worried,” she snapped.

  Oddly, the intended insult was a relief. It reminded me what I was, no matter how out of my depth I felt, no matter how new to it I was. I had found my calling. I was a reporter.

  “Don’t. Finding things out is what I do. I’ll get to the bottom of this. You have my word.”

  *

  By the time we got the lock on the door and our cabbie had arrived at my summons, Melody had recovered. And remembered nothing else new. Dante had stayed to work on his mural, and James, Maddy, Melody, and I headed back uptown to the sisters’ address. I forked over the cab fare when we arrived, not wanting James to have to shell out again.

  “Thanks, girl reporter,” the cab driver said, and I realized I’d never bothered to learn his name.

  “It’s Lois. What’s your name?”

  “Taxi Jack,” he said, and then waved and took off.

  I could easily walk home from Melody and Maddy’s place, but I was in danger of running late again. I didn’t want to miss SmallvilleGuy at 3:06.

  “You’re sure you don’t want us to come in?” James asked them as we stood on the sidewalk outside their building. Both twins shook their heads no and disappeared inside.

  I was about to tell James I’d see him Monday, but he said, “Can I talk to you for a sec?”

  Employing my stealthiest discretion, I checked my phone for the time. It was almost three. The poster would be putting up his revealing details about the flying man any time now.

  “It’ll only take a minute,” he said, raising an eyebrow at my phone.

  So much for my stealthiest discretion.

  “What’s up?” I asked, heading east up the street of tall, mostly residential buildings. We passed a small grocery store, the inside crowded with shoppers stocking up for the week.

  James followed me without so much as a peep of a question about where we were headed, which was in the direction of my brownstone.

  The two of us hadn’t hit it off when we’d met, though we now mostly got along fine. But I still didn’t feel like I could get very close.

  With James, there was that whole business with his dad, the ex-mayor of Metropolis, being sent away to prison on charges that included embezzlement, blackmail, and other unsavory activities. James Worthington, Jr., had lost the public’s trust. A golden boy toppled from the greatest of heights, his family left in the shadows of his fall.

  “My dad came home yesterday,” he said.

  “I know, as does anyone in town with eyes and ears,” I said, but gently. Trying to lighten his solemn mood.

  “Right.” He paused to let a couple towing two crying children pass us. “You know that I thought Dad deserved what he got. But now I’m not so sure.”

  Wait a second. This was a big deal. James had told me that he agreed with the reporters who’d helped take his dad down, that w
hat his father had done was wrong. That was why he wanted to work at the Scoop.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lois,” he said, and paused. He began to walk along the bustling sidewalk again, before I could even ask what was wrong. “He told me he’s innocent.”

  “What?” I said. It was too loud, but I couldn’t keep it in.

  He steered us out of the direct path of other people, glanced around, and lowered his voice. “Me and my mom. He turned on some music really loud last night and pulled us in close and then he told us that he was innocent. But that we couldn’t say anything about it to anyone.”

  “And you’re telling me?” I wasn’t at all convinced by his dad’s post-jailhouse confession, but I had to admit I was touched that James had come to me about it.

  “Do you think it’s possible?” he asked. “Is it wrong that I want to believe him? He’s not like he used to be. He was always a good mayor, but he was cocky. He thought no one could be smarter than him. He’s not cocky now.”

  “Well…” I said, buying a moment to think. “You know him better than I do. What do you think?”

  “That’s just it,” he said. “I gave up thinking I knew him years ago. When he got caught. When he went away.”

  “You’re a good reporter.” The me of three weeks ago could never have imagined saying this, but it was true. “Perry would say you should trust your gut.”

  “What would you say?” he asked.

  The answer he needed wasn’t mine. “James, I can’t tell you how to feel about this. You don’t have to decide today, do you?”

  “Nope, but I have to go home and look him in the eye. I was hoping you’d tell me how to feel.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and that was true too.

  He nodded, and we stepped back into the flow of movement on the sidewalk. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was letting the people I cared about down by not having all the answers.

  Yet.

  CHAPTER 6

  I was ten minutes late. I didn’t take the time to hit Strange Skies first, just went straight to chat. The message came as soon as I logged on.