Seven Wonders (8 page)

  Tony regarded Nate with a raised eyebrow. Nate paused, bottle almost but not quite at his lips, eyes wide like he'd been caught naughty.

  Tony frowned. "So what?"

  Nate sighed, completed his drinking maneuver, and set the bottle down,
clink
. "So the old man who followed you? You seen him again?"

  "Oh, that." Tony's mouth felt thick, the bitter aftertaste of juniper sticking to his tongue. "No, not since last Friday. And gee-whizz, thanks for reminding me that I have a stalker. I've been trying not to think about being bashed to death with a walking stick for a whole week."

  Nate shook his head vigorously, drinking as he did so. Tony raised an eyebrow. How did people manage to fill themselves with so much weak beer?

  "Yeah well there's something you really need to know. Your stalker? He was in the shop today. Oh yes, Carlos the Jackal wants a laptop for his granddaughter."

  Tony almost choked. He waved at the girl behind the bar, not quite making coherent sentences, but eventually she got the message and extracted a green bottle from the neon-lit fridge behind her. Tony slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar and took a long, cool draught of Mexican beer. His throat cleared and his head felt light.

  "What the
fuck?
When exactly were you planning on telling me this?"

  "Calm down, sister. I'm telling you now. I figured you might want some alcohol at hand first."

  Tony sucked the bottle again, draining it in three gulps. The bitter taste was gone but his molars ached from the cold.

  "What did he want? Was he looking for me? Did he stay long? When did he come in? Who did he speak to? Was it you? What did he want?"

  Nate waved his friend down, and tried to resist laughing but failed,

miserably. He half-turned away out of politeness.

  "Dude! Easy, tiger, easy! Like I said. He wanted a laptop. Bill saw him, I was on the other side of the shelf and kept an ear out. He was there for about twenty minutes, no he didn't ask for you, I don't know what time it was, and he left with some brochures. He sounded nice."

  "Nice?!" The music in the bar was loud, but not so much that his outburst was lost. A couple of nearby drinkers turned in his direction, forcing him to smile politely and pretend nothing was wrong. But his heart was hammering out of his chest again. Anxiety, panic, adrenaline. He had to do something about it or get out of the city. This was it, last straw. The Shining City could take a jump.

  "Yeah, nice. Smelled of lavender."

  Tony sat back on his barstool, brain processing the new data but having quite some difficulty. "My would-be murderer is a nice old man who smells of lavender? Thanks a lot."

  Nate laughed, patted Tony neatly on the head like he was a little boy, and swung off the barstool. "I'll make sure I mention it at your eulogy. I need to pop the cork." Tony was alone at the bar.

  The stool behind Tony creaked a little.

  "You have your own stalker? I'm jealous, I've always wanted one."

  Tony turned around.

  The girl leaned in on the bar, mirroring Tony's own lazy slouch. He reflexively shifted, sitting up almost politely, but the girl didn't move. She grinned, and sipped from a shallow clear glass. Tony recognized the scent, and matched her expression.

  "I thought nobody drank gin these days?"

  "You're so right." She swirled the remainder around the glass and swigged it back. "You know I had to actually point to the bottle on the shelf? Jesus, I don't know why I come here. Don't they use it for 'Sexual Assault and Misdemeanors in a Dark Alley'? Or is that vermouth?"

  Tony couldn't help but laugh. For the first time that night, in the company of a total stranger, he felt relaxed, his fear of the city and of the old man evaporating as the girl's eyes met his own.

  "Let's see if they remember how to make it this time." Tony leaned in on the bar, grabbed the attention of the same girl that had served him a beer, and placed his order. He watched as her face creased with thought for a moment, then she turned and reached for the little-used bottle of blue gin.

  "Blue gin? You must be rich. I think I like you." The girl on the barstool nodded appreciatively at Tony's selection of top-shelf liquor. Tony found himself grinning like a little boy, so busied himself with his wallet, avoiding her gaze.

  "Yeah, real rich. Who knew retail slavery would be put me at the top of the Fortune 500." He extracted another twenty − his last bit of cash − from his wallet. He didn't try to hide it. He'd had enough of pretending to be social for one month anyway. He glanced around and saw Bill still trying it on − apparently quite successfully − with the maybe-underage girls. Nate had yet to return from the men's room.

  Tony raised an eyebrow towards his new friend as he fingered the money. She smiled, shook her head, and waved her still-full glass at him. Tony nodded, part of him relieved to learn he'd have a couple of bucks left over for the rest of the weekend. A moment later and he parted with his hard-earned cash for this unnecessarily expensive G 'n' T.

  "Retail, eh?" The girl's tongue rested on her upper lip. Tony found it to be the most attractive expression he'd ever seen. And really, this girl was something else − short dyed-black hair that shone with a bluish tinge in the dingy light of the bar, ruffled, spiky. It went with the angles of her face, sharp cheeks, pointed chin. Various clichéd descriptors floated in the front of Tony's mind − he wanted to say "elfin", maybe "birdlike", but aside from a pleasing bone structure there was nothing delicate about this girl. She wore a white T-shirt with sleeves torn off at the shoulder, exposing toned, muscular arms, clear evidence of a healthy gym routine. Each bicep was a multi-colored mural of tattoos − blacks and reds and yellows, a mix of abstract symbols and patterns on one arm, sharp leaves, thorns and flowers, and stylized birds on the other. Hunched over the bar as she was, legs folded over each other, the silver-capped toe of one of her Beatle boots almost touched his leg as her foot bounced with her heartbeat. The ensemble was finished with black tights and black mini, and an enormously wide belt, studded with silver.

  She was exactly the kind of girl that Tony had always wanted to meet, and exactly the kind he never expected to. Cool, edgy, part of the alt crowd, part of a
scene
, hip but not a hipster. Tony shrank inside as he caught himself thinking those actual words. Good God, was it that long since he'd met a girl?

  Tony raised his glass, noting again the volume of heady spirit overwhelming the amount of tonic. The girl laughed at his expression and raised her own drink. The pair clinked a toast, then swigged. Then their eyes scrunched, faces twisted in only slightly exaggerated displeasure, and both burst out laughing.

  "Yeah, retail." Tony found his voice again after the harshness of the poorly prepared drink. "Been selling computers at Big Deal for four years. Not quite the high-powered career I had in mind, but it's easy enough. I can handle being bored and being paid to be bored. Work is work."

  The girl nodded. "Work is work." She whispered Tony's mantra back to herself. "I like it. Jeannie." She held out a hand. Tony hesitated, thinking he'd misheard what she said, then took her hand. Her grip was light but there was strength in the fingers. "Tony. So, genie in a bottle?"

  She smiled and sipped her drink, carefully this time, really only letting the liquid bathe her lips. Tony found himself imagining that she enjoyed the warmth the strong spirit imparted, the hint of bitterness as she ran her tongue around her mouth. He took another sip of his own drink and found his hand was shaking, just a little, and the front of his jeans were suddenly uncomfortably tight.

  "Wow, a Fortune 500 retail monkey and a comedian as well?" Jeannie's smile was like a summer's day. "This is my lucky night."

  "You and me both, huh?"

  "Wanna dance, monkey?"

  Before Tony realized what he was doing, realized that dancing was the most horrible thing that he hated the most, Jeannie had slipped off the barstool, grabbed his hand, and dragged him onto the dance floor.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The night belonged to the Cowl; he
owned
it. It was his kingdom, his domain; everything he did revolved around it. His costume was black, non-reflective, and the long scalloped cloak could envelop his entire body with a twist of an arm, reducing him to nothing more than a shadow. The famous hood, pulled forward, could hide most of the lower part of his face, the only section of bare skin visible. Give him an alleyway, a rooftop − hell, give him the shadowed overhang of a shop front − and the Cowl could vanish, becoming one with the blackness.

  He'd been doing it a long, long time, and life on the night side of San Ventura was easy. Indestructible, invulnerable, able to fly, to run, to manipulate energy, to see through people and walls, to eavesdrop on every conversation on the West Coast of North America. Life was easy.

  Or had been. His powers were ebbing, one by one, almost according to some predefined checklist. The unexpected curtailment of the bank job had come as something of a surprise, the lack of power a terrifying, paralyzing moment of realization. As much as he tried to pretend it was age, or tiredness, or just some weird phase that would pass, he knew, really, that something was up. It wasn't natural. It occurred to him that perhaps it was some kind of act of God, that He was judging him. But… no, he was doing God's work, he knew that. And besides, there was a probable cause much closer to home.

  The Seven Wonders. It had to be. They'd finally found a way to take him down without getting their brightly colored hands dirty.

  But the Cowl was the Cowl. And so he ignored his fading powers, pushing the problem to the back of his mind. He didn't need powers to rule the night. He was an expert in terror and combat. Nobody could touch him, superpowers or no superpowers.

  And… and in a way, it added something. A new thrill. It was almost like he was doing it himself, getting his hands dirty, going back to basics like he did when he first started on his mission to control the city ten years ago. Maybe this
needed
to happen. Strip it down, take it back to basics. The feeling was strange, but it drew him close to his beloved city, the city he had guided, shaped and terrorized for a decade. San Ventura was his city, and nobody could take that from him. And, for the moment at least, he could still heal, although it was slower now. He'd recovered from his drop in the ocean, but his shoulder still ached if he lifted his arm too high.

  He thought of this as he waited in the shadows of the alley, a dozen blocks south of the main strip, heading out towards the less salubrious suburbs but still within the city limits. An area of dark parks where crackheads did deals with prostitutes, where police calls often went unanswered, where the law feared to tread after a certain hour thanks to the Cowl's personal fan clubs. If only he'd thought of it first, it would have been a genius piece of marketing: all you needed was a black hooded sweat top and a black bandana to tie around your face, and some red spray paint to scrawl an Ω on your chest and that was it, you were in the Cowl's gang. He'd even seen some shirts with the logo – the
brand
– properly screen-printed, some even attempting to copy the entire sigil. Now that was commitment to the cause.

  None of it was his doing, but it pleased him nonetheless. As his grip on the city tightened, so more and more gangs − just kids, really − came out at night, dressed in black, calling themselves the Hoods, or the Executioners, or the Black Hats, or the End Times. He liked those names. They sounded like metal bands. No one in San Ventura dressed like the Seven Wonders, or formed vigilante justice groups to patrol the night. It wasn't that kind of city. The night belonged to the Cowl and his admirers. The night was what everyone feared.

  The Cowl snapped out of his reverie at the sound of slow, soft footfalls. They were a block away still, but he'd been waiting for them and his subconscious tuned the sound in, focusing on it, judging speed, distance, direction. He wasn't sure whether he still had superhearing or whether he was running on pure instinct and years of experience. The footsteps were matched with a third sound. It was hollow, brittle, muted. A walking stick with rubber foot. The target was getting closer.

  It was a bad area of town, but even so, the man with the stick walked it every night, late, late. He even left the street − which was at least doused with the tobacco smudge of yellow sodium streetlamps − and walked down the dark alley. A suicidal shortcut in any large city in America, surely, the very kind of cliché that delighted fans of every cheap B-movie thriller.

  But the man was never afraid and never hesitated, and for good reason. The Cowl knew he had the protection of the Seven Wonders − the
personal
protection of them. Or at least he had. The old man always walked the same route, closing his laundromat at 7pm precisely and heading home via the same street and the same alley. The Cowl knew about the arrangement with the city's protectors, and that was why he'd always warned the gangs off the man. The more usual kind of criminal, the regular or garden-variety mugger, had tried a few times, but more often than not had found themselves at the end of Linear's silver supersonic fists, or being held by a rapidly tearing shirt front from two hundred feet in the air, Aurora or the Dragon Star still climbing high.

  But that hadn't happened for a while. No one had tried anything in forever. Perhaps the word had got around the bums and drunks that this guy was too much effort and not worth the risk. The impossible crime.

  But tonight… well, tonight the Cowl had something he needed to collect. He could be in and out before the Seven Wonders were alerted. And he knew for a fact that most of the superteam were otherwise engaged, prepping security with the SVPD for the annual grand police charity ball tomorrow, which was due to start in just a few hours. The city's rich and famous and beautiful would all be in attendance. The Cowl allowed himself a smirk at this, and stretched out his arm, trying to exercise the pain out of the joint.