Masked (2010) (16 page)

It was Gilfoyle who gave Hoyt his First Dan in Tae Kwon Do.

Had Gilfoyle known what Hoyt planned to do with it, he might have taken it back.

Each class began with three oaths.

“I promise to develop myself in body, mind, and spirit, and avoid anything that would limit my mental growth or physical health.

“I promise to develop self-discipline, to bring out the best in me and those around me.

“I promise to use the skills I learn in class constructively and defensively, to never be abusive or offensive.”

Hoyt was about to break the third oath. He had waited many
years for this night, postponing gratification until he was ready, living deep within himself, content with being ostracized, and then as he grew in prowess, size, and grace, content to distance himself from other students who, cognizant of his change, made overtures. Including girls.

Hoyt was ready. He’d been waiting his whole life for this moment, this brief window of opportunity that opened between the wildass dreams of youth and the wisdom and hindsight of maturity.

Hoyt turned on the light in his bedroom. His tightly made bed, a mattress with hospital corners, lay on the floor next to obsessively neat stacks of books and comics. Tolkien, Jack London, Mark Twain, Marc Olden. Batman, Spider-Man, The Badger. The stacks were tightly squared away with no overlap or spillage. A rickety wooden desk held a used PC that one of the black belts who worked at Hewlett-Packard had given him and helped him set up.

Posters of Bruce Lee, Barb Wire, John Elway, the Watchmen, and Carmelo Anthony were thumbtacked to the shabby plaster wall. Hoyt slid the vinyl accordion closet door to one side with an arid squeak. He gathered the black BKs, the loose-fitting black cotton trousers from Asian World of Martial Arts, a black sweatshirt, the black leather gloves, and lastly, the sheer black mask that covered his head completely but allowed full vision due to its diaphanous nature. Like Rorschach.

Hoyt understood the difference between comic book heroes and real life. He understood physics. He wore a cup. He didn’t kid himself that he could fly or burn holes through walls.

But Hoyt was confident he could kick the shit out of anyone who wasn’t a professional fighter. For the last three years no one had messed with him. The last person who tried ended up with a broken wrist and Hoyt ducking suspension because his assailant had been a well-known troublemaker.

Hoyt’s heroes were Batman, the Punisher, Rorschach, and especially Badger, a deranged war veteran who identified with animals.

Hoyt had a puppy for two weeks before his mother acciden
tally left the gate open. A day later, Hoyt found the puppy burnt and disemboweled behind an upholstery shop. Someone told him the Alameda Posse had done it for shits and grins. Their tags were all over the neighborhood. Some merchants didn’t even bother to remove them until the city bitched.

Hoyt had made good money every summer cleaning the graffiti off local businesses. Peers sneered and jeered. Hoyt didn’t care. He earned the money he needed to (a) keep the house and (b) fund the Project.

The Project that began tonight.

Project Tagger.

Hoyt stood in front of the mirror and pulled the mask over his head. Like a condom. Protecting him from viral evil. A stylized letter
T
leaped from its black background like a hungry face hugger. Tagger turned off the light. In shadow he was darker than the devil’s asshole.

He hefted the ’chuks in one hand, the sai in another. Carry them or not? He replaced them in their canvas bag and took an iron device that looked like the sign for pi and fit in the hand like brass knuckles. Two of the points protruded between the fingers. Finally he took the aerosol can of red paint. A powerful magnet clung to the base, holding the interior rattle in place so that it wouldn’t make a sound when he moved. He slipped the punch and the paint into a black fanny pack.

“I am nothing,” he swore in the darkness. “I am nothing if I am not helping people.”

Hoyt had learned by age six that self-pity did no good. He’d learned that all things were relative, that his own misery was nothing compared to some of the kids he’d seen on the street, feral kids whose parents were crack whores and syphilitic losers.

He had his youth. He had his skills. He had direction and the will to back it up.

Look out, Denver.

Tagger flowed soundlessly from his house, a black snake in a gutter. He moved in the shadows, hugging walls and climbing
buildings. Ahead lay the Carlton Arms, a rundown four-story apartment block, the last outpost of civilization before Rock Creek Park, a serpent winding its way through Denver’s tenderloin, a conduit for rapists, murderers, and thieves.

Tagger hunkered in the shadow of an ancient cottonwood twenty feet from the rear of the Carlton. An iron fire escape hung ten feet over the alley. The fire escape went all the way to the roof.

The French art of
parkour
consists of moving swiftly and gracefully from object to object, using the full range of human motion. It was specifically designed to deal with obstacles by turning them into advantages. Those who practice the art are known as
traceurs
.

Tagger took off running and leaped, his gloved hands clamping securely to the frame of the fire escape without touching the ladder. No sound betrayed him as he effortlessly chinned himself, gripped the top of the rail and pulled himself up and over.

He ascended the iron stairs, stepping close to the side to avoid the slightest squeak. Gangsta rap belched from an open window. Christina Aguilera from another. Tagger hoisted himself onto the roof. He wasn’t even breathing hard. He’d been running five miles a night for the past two years.

Tagger had the roof to himself. Empty beer bottles and smashed crack vials littered the black-topped surface. A few dead plants sprouted from desiccated pots, a gardening project long since abandoned. As Tagger flowed to the opposite side of the building, the only sounds were the tell-tale crunch of broken glass beneath his feet and the wail of sirens, like crazed banshees, crisscrossing the city. Tagger crouched on the parapet above a sheer eighty-foot drop and gazed into the heart of darkness. Rock Creek Park lay across the street, an urban jungle watered by snow melt from the nearby Rockies. Even on the hottest days the water ran dark and cold.

The air smelled of garbage, pine, honeysuckle, and diesel.

Tagger listened, cupping his ears with his hands. Sounds of the jungle began to emerge. A cat’s scream. Barking dogs. A vulgarity
hurled into the night. Booming bass in a tricked-out Honda. Tires squealing.

Tagger knew he would find what he sought in Rock Creek Park.

It was time.

He walked to the roof entrance and pulled the broken door open with a shriek of protesting metal and crunching glass. The interior was unlit and stank of piss and disinfectant. The bulbs had given out long ago and no one had replaced them. No maintenance man entered the stairwells. Faint light from the landings showed the walls covered with graffiti.

Two gangbangers were smoking crack on the third landing. Hoyt ran at them two steps at a time. The gangbangers, tribal tats peeking out of their gray wifebeaters, looked up. Their hair had razor cuts and highlights. Eighty bucks of haircuts each.

“What the fuck—” one said before Hoyt’s heel smashed into his face, bouncing his head off the cinderblock wall with a moist thunk. The other gangbanger instinctively reached for something in his pocket as Hoyt spun expertly, lashing out with a reverse backkick that slammed the banger’s head off the wall like a squash ball.

The first banger moaned and held his hands to the back of his head. Blood poured down his back onto the wall. He looked up. Hoyt grabbed his ears and zoomed in six inches from the banger’s face. Three-D effect. He jammed the banger’s Adam’s apple with a leopard claw strike, reached down and yanked loose the big Harley wallet attached to the banger’s belt by a chain.

Forty bucks. The other banger was coming around.

Hoyt withdrew the small aerosol can from his belt pouch, yanked the banger’s head upright by his oily black and purple hair, and painted a red
T
down the middle of his face while the man gasped and spat.

“Tell them Tagger was here,” he hissed, and
bam
, he was outta there.

The first blow had been struck. The first chord of fear had sounded. Project Tagger had begun.

It had been so easy—so easy to overwhelm the crack-addled
gangbangers in the stairwell. It didn’t seem real, like playing a video game. He was his own avatar. Like he was hovering somewhere up above the action and could see himself. Down the staircase on spring-green legs, into the stinking lobby awash in garbage, crushed crack vials and empty wine bottles, out the door onto the stoop, past the five bangers intimidating pedestrians, past them so fast they shut up for a second in amazement.

As Hoyt disappeared into the dark he heard one of them say, “What the fuck? Was that a vampire?”

“No, man, it was a zombie, dude. Dint you see
28 Days After
?”

The spruce and cottonwoods swallowed Tagger whole as he headed south, adjacent to but not on the concrete path. He’d read the police reports off the computer. A gang had been haunting the park, stealing bikes by whacking riders in the back of the head as they rode by. Four rapes in two months. Stabbings, drug deals, murder. Rock Creek had it all.

Tagger was more likely to make noise stepping on crack vials than grass. The banks of Rock Creek, which could change overnight from a sleepy sewer into a raging river, were covered with rock and devoid of grass. Buffalo grass grew in the shade of the cottonwoods, and the Parks Department had planted thousands of blue spruce and Douglas fir to create a green belt that wound through Denver, past Invesco Field, underneath the Interstate, by the state capitol, and on into the arid plains of the east.

Tagger moved silently but swiftly, alert to any sign of criminal activity. He startled a coyote, which lifted its snout from its business, leaped the creek in one bound, and was gone. Most of the path lamps overlooking the concrete trail had been shot out by gangbangers.

Tagger stopped. There was something not right about a cluster of bushes fifty feet ahead. Tagger went into a crouch. He looked and listened. The dark bulk of the shadow shifted itself to get more comfortable, inadvertently displaying an aluminum baseball bat. It was a bicycle batter in the warm-up bin. Tagger tensed, sensing he was about to go into battle. He willfully relaxed
his abdominal muscles, seeking a calm cool spot in the middle of his gut. Hysterical glee nibbled at the edge of his consciousness, as it had the first time he’d won a fight. His blood hummed. But from which direction would the victim come? Should Tagger sneak up on the dude and take him out? Was it right to take preventive action before a crime had occurred? What did Gilfoyle call it, “prior restraint”?

I ain’t no cop
, Tagger thought.
I am the dark conscience of the city, the embodiment of its victims’ prayers and a summons for others to follow
.

Still he waited, weighing his options. He was confident he could sneak up on the bike batter unseen and unheard. Slap a rear naked choke on him and leave him tied up for the cops like the Batman. Tagger knew that realistically, he would just as likely leave enough clues for the cops to find him. He didn’t need to advertise himself. The criminal scum on whom he preyed would do that for him.

A faint light appeared intermittently a hundred yards down the path. A bicyclist headed their way, leg lamp describing an oncoming spiral. The rider would reach the bike batter before he came to Tagger, unless Tagger acted fast. Seeing and feeling the batter tense up and concentrate his attention on the approaching cyclist, Tagger took off in full sprint, landing on the balls of his feet, making no sound on the arid, sandy earth. The bicyclist was ten feet from the bushes as the batter tensed, bat behind his head in the classic stance, ready to spring.

Tagger sprung first. Four feet from the bike batter, he threw himself into the air, turned sideways and lashed out with a flying sidekick that struck the aluminum bat, slamming it into the side of the batter’s head with a slight bong. The batter said, “Oof.”

The cyclist, wearing a streamlined helmet and a little dentist mirror, glanced once in their direction and took off with renewed vigor, ass pumping up and down as he put his full weight into it.

Tagger landed and rolled, rising instantly to his feet. The bike batter retained his grip on the bat, put a hand to his head, and gaped in astonishment at the lump. His beady, bloodshot eyes fo
cused on Tagger.

“You fuckin’ with the wrong dude, man.” He came forward, swinging the bat before him in furious arcs.

Tagger timed it, sprang forward inside the swing and smashed his forehead into the batter’s nose. Tagger grabbed the batter by the shoulders and jammed his knee into the batter’s gonads.

The batter dropped, groaning and cursing, to the ground, knees drawn up. “Ahmina fuck you up, man. . . You know ’bout MS 13? We gonna bleed you for days, man. . .”

Tagger seized the bat, holding it casually for a minute while the batter looked up through pain-glazed eyes and saw, for the first time, his antagonist.

“What the fuck are you, man?”

Wham!
Tagger brought the bat down with the full force of his body onto the batter’s knee. He felt bone and cartilage tear through the bat. The batter would never again play baseball. The batter screamed high and piercing like a girl or an alley cat. Tagger removed the spray paint from his fanny pack, took off the magnet, shook it and painted a red
T
on the batter’s face.

He leaned in, inches from the groaning batter’s ear. “Tell them Tagger was here.”

He was outta there.

Tagger was so stoked by his mission he’d forgotten to search the batter for money. Oh well. It was his first night and thus far it had been spectacular. Two for two.

He was an avatar operating in a three-dimensional game with simultaneous players. First Person Shooter. Only he did no shooting.