Super Born: Seduction of Being (13 page)

“
You should have seen
her
…rat woman!
Her
hair was a mess! And the smell!” Paige continued,
joking.

“
Now, that’s enough,” Lori said,
coming to my defense. “She said she promised, and that’s good
enough for me…I gotta look at this website in the article,
thebib.org.”

“
Catchy,” I said.

“
Yep, hard to forget a Web address
like that,” said Lori.

“
I think it sucks!” Paige added,
just to be confrontational.

Lori studied the picture in the paper more
closely. “Allie, didn’t you have a ring like this? I remember you
wore that tacky thing at Christmas,” she said, holding the paper
toward me so that I could see the picture. My sister remembers
everything. I wore that ring on occasion when I went out. It was a
giant square cut of crystal I wore as an accessory. Most of the
time I wore it on my ring finger just to mock myself—a personal
reminder that there was no one putting a diamond there. The
monstrous rock was my way of saying “Who needs you?” to the
juvenile men of Scranton.

“
Nope, never had one like that…the
cut is totally different on the one I wore at Christmas. Imagine
me…having a ring like the B.I.B.” I laughed, knowing Lori was
totally correct.

“
I noticed that too,” added Paige.
She glanced at her tablet again, “See, Mom. Yours
looks…”

I knew I had to stop her before she could
finish. I had the pepper shaker in my hand. With the superspeed of
which I was now capable, I released a cloud of pepper with a few
dozen shakes that only took a millisecond and then sent the cloud
to Paige’s nose at the other end of the table with one powerful,
high-velocity breath. It all happened too fast for anyone to
notice, and it worked; a violent sneeze interrupted her words, then
another, then another.

“
Eeww, what was that?” Paige
exclaimed between sneezes, bringing her hand to cover her nose. The
frequent sneezes began making it hard for Paige to catch her
breath.

Lori looked at Paige, puzzled, and then at me.
I shrugged, and we both rose to comfort her.

“
Should we call 9-1-1?” Lori asked
with her eyes growing wide.

By now, Paige was out of her chair, hunched
over, sneezing, wheezing a little, and beads of sweat had formed on
her forehead. Lori hovered over her, trying to evaluate and console
her, but Paige was barely able to talk.

I played my part, knowing that Paige would be
fine, but needing to show my concern. Lori, on the other hand, lost
it, as was the way of her people.

“
It was my fucking meat loaf, wasn’t
it!”

Now I had two to calm down. I turned from Paige
to grab Lori by the shoulders. “It wasn’t the meat
loaf!”

“
She’s having an allergic reaction
to the goddamn meatloaf! I’m killing your daughter!”

“
No one’s dying. She’ll be fine…get
her a cup of water. Do you have any nasal saline spray?”

“
Her
throat’s closing! We have to get her to the hospital! Can’t you see
she’s having an allergic reaction? Don’t you ever watch the fucking
news? I saw this on the ‘Dangers of Breathing’!”

Lori was a bright shade of panicked red and
her breathing was worse than Paige’s. Consoling Lori was no use, so
I turned my attention to Paige as Lori ran out of the room. I heard
the eruption of voices in the next room as she tried to enlist her
husband in the “save Paige” effort.

I found some nasal saline in the cupboard of
the little half-bath next to the kitchen and began the job of
corralling Paige and rinsing out her nasal passages as best I
could, while Lori flashed by, slipping her coat up over one arm and
rattling her keys, heading for the car in the garage. “Never reheat
meatloaf…” she muttered in passing.

Even before the nasal spray, Paige was better.
But now, with the added help of a few sips of water, her symptoms
were subsiding. I sat her back down and she took a few deep,
breaths.

“
You okay?” I asked.

She nodded. It was now my turn to feel bad for
putting her through that pain. What kind of a horrible mother would
do something like that to her daughter just to cover up a stupid
picture I never should have let be taken in the first place? But
Paige did have to bring up the ring, and she did make those nasty
comments about The Banshee. Heck, she was asking for it! And
compared to the eighteen hours of labor she had put me through, it
was nothing. Anyway, it had worked, and the cut of my goddamn ring
was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.

Lori returned from pulling the car out of the
garage as Michael, her husband, arrived having been pulled
miraculously from his recliner. He stepped into the doorway at the
other side of the kitchen and rubbed his belly with a Miner’s Lite
in his other hand. I told them that everything was fine, and Paige
even tried to smile to reassure them. That prompted Michael to
disappear, and Lori to grab the meatloaf platter and toss it into
the trash on top of the folded newspaper I had already sent there.
So ended the “Bling-Ring-Pepper” debate… and any chance for seconds
on meatloaf. Oh, and that ring was toast as soon as I got
home.

Chapter 9

“
We Are No Longer
Afraid”

It was the next adventure of the B.I.B. that
made me a true public figure. This occurred just a few days after
the picture taken at Skelly’s was published. I sat on the couch and
watched the evening news, while Paige chatted with her friends on
Facebook, texted on her phone, and listened to music on her iPod.
We were both dressed for comfort only and planned on being in for
the night.

I lay on my side on the sofa, slowly munching
and savoring a Gertrude Hall milk chocolate while beginning to
unwrap another. The news article on the TV showed a brokenhearted,
crying woman, Madalena Gonzalez, whose daughter Emilia had been
abducted from their Scranton home. Madalena wailed for her
daughter’s return in front of her run-down little home.

I remembered the story of Francisco Gonzalez, a
mid-level mob member who had disappeared a month earlier. On the
streets, I had heard rumors that he swam with the fishes. Others
said he was in witness protection. Either way, I was sure it was
connected to the little girl’s abduction.

I walked over to Paige, pulled out one of her
ear-buds, and said, “I have to go out for a minute—you be okay by
yourself?”

Paige nodded, then thought about it and pulled
out her earphones. “You’re not going to The Banshee are
you?.”

I laughed, as if that would never happen and I
found her concern silly. I didn’t want to tell her that I had been
to O’Malley’s a few nights before, the home of Scranton’s true
morons—or that I was about to go out and face down the mafia. So I
tried to seem cheery and calm. Me acting like that probably scared
her even more.

“
Don’t worry.” (That was my job.)
“I’m just going out to run a couple errands. I’ll be fine. Don’t go
out or let anyone in.”

“
If you haven’t noticed, I’m not six
anymore, Mom.”

“
I know you’re not, but it still
bothers me to leave you alone.”

“
Mom!” she protested. She put the
earbuds back in place and returned to her multitasking.

* * *

It wasn’t that hard to get a location on young
Emilia’s whereabouts. A couple of mid-ranking thugs, left
unconscious in alleys later, and I was outside the rundown mob safe
house, where they were holding Emilia. I doubted that Scranton’s
finest had looked very hard for Emilia, since she was the daughter
of a mobster.

The windows were all covered, but
through a crack, I could see two thugs, and in the corner, the
little girl, hands bound, on a long leash that allowed her to move
a bit. Apparently they were planning to keep her here for a while.
I guessed that there were probably more mobsters somewhere; I heard
something on the second floor.
I’ll start
with the two down here on the first floor. Maybe I’ll get
lucky,
I thought. Slipping in through the
dilapidated back door was easy. Merging into the shadows of the
darkly lit living room was fun.

The two thugs sat across from one another, one
watching an old movie on TV, with a gun on the arm of his chair.
The other had placed his mobile phone and pistol on the small table
beside his chair, apparently to begin cleaning the gun; wrong time
for that.

The thug watching TV was relaxed, a song
playing in his head, no doubt, zoned out to the point where he
barely saw the program he was watching. As he clearly wasn’t
expecting any trouble on this cake job, it took him a few shocked
seconds to realize that his gun hand had risen up. He watched in
surprise as his hand pointed the gun at the thug across from him
and fired; first, a hit to the knee, and then a second shot to the
shoulder.

The wounded thug screamed out, “Manny, what the
hell are you doing?” before he fell over and went into shock. I had
expected to feel bad. After all, this was the first person I had
actually shot. But remembering Madalena’s anguish, imagining that
it was my daughter trying to scream through her gagged mouth,
struggling with the ropes that bound her, I had little doubt the
wounded thug deserved it. And I decided I would gladly do it again.
Any mother would. Besides, he would live to spend his time in
jail.

The TV thug was frozen in utter amazement. Then
he became even more horrified when he saw his own gun turning and
pointing at his face, the dim light finally revealing my
black-clothed hand curling around from the back of his chair,
guiding the 9 mm toward his eyes. At that point, the thug lost all
bladder and bowel control, letting out a long fart and wetting his
pants. My voice saying, “Manny, you stink,” was the last thing he
heard before a hammer fist to the back of his neck made everything
go black.

Slipping into the safety of the
shadows once again, I heard
the footsteps
on the stairway. The footsteps stopped, and all was quiet
for some time. Finally, a figure of a man slipped
into the darkness along the wall. I listened for more thugs coming,
but heard none. It was just he and I. I liked those
odds.

I appeared out of the shadows a few feet away
from the third thug, an Asian man standing in a defensive pose. His
shirt was open, revealing a tight, muscular chest. The way he held
his body told me he had practiced for this moment for years. He was
not armed and didn’t feel the need to be. He glanced quickly about
the room for any allies, and found none, as I had decommissioned
his two associates. He was making all the right moves. But when he
saw that his attacker was a woman in a costume, he disregarded the
evidence around him and got cocky. “What’s all this about? You’re a
little late for Halloween.”

“
Maybe I’m just early. Trick or
treat?” I taunted as I circled him. “Why don’t we just forget the
treat and go right to the trick?”

He circled away and looked for his opening to
strike. “What the hell you supposed to be, some kind of
witch?”

I stopped moving. “Let’s get it stright. It’s
not witch…it’s bitch,” I said, unleashing a front kick that easily
powered through his attempt at a forearm block.

The kick must have surprised the thug
immensely. But the pain of being sent through the two-by-fours and
siding of the old house must have been worse. By the time he landed
in the snowy yardhe was unconscious.

I looked at the hole in the wall—cold air and
snowflakes were now swirling through it—and then to the window two
feet away, wondering how I could have missed sending him through
the window as planned. Then I dropped to the shadows again and
listened intently. I turned on my supersensitive ears. Besides the
girl’s whimpers, I heard the buzzing of lights, a TV, the mumble of
a set of earphones for a personal music player on the second floor,
and the sound of a mouse in the basement behind the furnace with a
bad case of indigestion. All was clear.

I turned my attention to Emilia. “Emilia, it’s
okay. I’m a friend of your mother. You are safe with me.”As I
untied the girl and took off her gag, she remained full of fear. I
held on to her. “You’re safe now.”

“
Mama sent you?”

“
Yes.”

“
I knew she would. I knew mama would
never give up on me!”

“
I’m going to take you home, but you
have to be quiet. There could be more of these bad men.”

Emilia shook her head. “Just them.”

“
Are you sure? Just
three?”

Emilia looked at the two in the living room and
one out in the yard, counting with her fingers. “Yes, just
three.”

“
You okay?” I asked.

Emilia nodded.

“
No one hurt you?”

Emila shook her
head
.

I grabbed the thug’s mobile phone off of the
table, placed a “911 shots fired” call, gave the address, closed
the phone, and dropped it at the thug’s feet. Making the call that
would lead to his arrest from his own phone gave me a little
satisfaction.