Wearing The Cape: Villains Inc. (6 page)

“Some
thing
else?” Fisher asked.
 
“Not someone?”

I turned back.
 
She was shaking her head.

“No.
 
It’s something almost reptilian, but it’s not.
 
And there are traces of sulfur.”

“
Sulfur?
”

Now that she said it I could smell it too, a hint of rotten eggs just on the edge of my nose, buried under the blood-smell.
 
I nodded agreement, and Fisher ran fingers through his hair.

“At least I know we have a victim and not a fugitive.
 
Thank you, both of you.
 
Phelps?
 
You can call the crew in now.”

Fisher followed Artemis and me onto the balcony, where he lit up and sighed.

“God—sorry Astra.
 
I’ve been wanting to do that for an hour.”

Artemis smiled.
 
“I can’t throw stones, detective—all this has made me thirsty and I’m off to The Fortress for a drink.
 
Goodnight Detective Fisher, and call me anytime you need quick
bloodwork
done.”
 
Without looking at me, she turned to mist and faded from sight.
 
Fisher puffed a smoke-ring.

“And
that’s
not disturbing.
 
Sorry about tonight kid.
 
You okay?”

I sighed.
 
“I wish Atlas were here—I’m no good at this.”

“You’re better than you think.
 
It still sucks.”

I leaned against the balcony.
 
“Do you have any idea who did this?”

“If you mean who put him in the box, no.
 
Who ordered it?
 
Yeah, maybe.”

“Could it be the bank robber?”

He made another ring and shook his head.
 
“
Naw
.
 
The MOs don’t match.
 
Whoever she is, she left him alive and well; why kill him now, after we’ve already talked to him?”

“The Outfit?”

“Now
there’s
a possibility.
 
Especially since our missing Mr. Tony Ross is an independent antiques dealer.
 
Personally, I think he’s an Outfit banker.”

“A what?”

“Sorry.
 
I think he’s a wise guy who’s job is to hold the cash.
 
It’s better than a numbered offshore account—electronically untraceable.
 
He keeps a ledger with the bonds, and pulls or collects payments on his trips.
 
An Outfit auditor checks the books quarterly to keep him honest.
 
Everything’s coded, no names are used, so even if the feds flipped him they wouldn’t get much—and his bosses probably have something on him anyway.
 
We’ve got the Organized Crime Division looking into that angle.”

“So why kill poor Mr. Moffat?”

“Send a message to anyone who knows what the robbery was about.
 
For all they know, he might have been our thief’s accomplice.”

“Oh.”
 
I shivered, hugging myself.
 
“Do you think Mr. Ross is dead too?”

He nodded.
 
“Yeah kid, I do.
 
Or dropped off the face of the Earth.
 
His bosses have to assume the leak was on his end—or maybe that he arranged it himself.
 
So he’s dead or running.”

I thought about that.

“You’re not going to catch them, are you?”

Taking a last puff, he ground out the cigarette in his palm (the balcony was still part of the crime scene, I supposed) and tucked it away.

“Not unless somebody somewhere gets monumentally stupid.
 
Contrary to popular belief, contracted hits are really hard to solve, even if you have a good idea who ordered the job.
 
We’ll do our best, and they’ve got to be careful.
 
That’s probably why our thief showed us the bonds; so we’d know who she was stealing from, make them be cautious. Fly safe, kid.”

A protest outside
Restormel
, the base of the Hollywood Knights, turned violent today. The crowd, gathered to protest the Knights’ break with the National Superhuman Professionals Union over its support of the Domestic Security Act, threw bricks and even improvised incendiaries at the gates. Baldur, the team’s
photokinetic
, flash-blinded the crowd, making it easier for police with eye-protection to remove the rioters.

LA Evening News

Flying is without a doubt the coolest part of my breakthrough.
 
I always loved stargazing, and the night sky high over Chicago had become my sanctuary.
 
There are few things as beautiful as a full moon over a sea of clouds, and tonight I needed it to get the image of the box out of my head.

“Shelly?” I called. “You can come out now.”

She floated beside me, looking down at the gossamer white clouds below us. The wind ruffled her unruly red hair.
 
A dream in my head, a future-tech cyber-neural projection onto my senses, she was real to me.

“Thanks for keeping me out down there,” she said, hugging herself though she didn’t really need the 501 jacket she wore.

I smiled.
 
A tired smile, but I could make it a real one.
 
“I told you so.”

“Bite me.”

She sighed dramatically.
 
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

A commuter jet roared by far below us, flying out of O’Hare.

“No,” I agreed. “We never played at ‘crime-scene examiner.’ But the dress-up was fun.”

Tucking my legs up into lotus position, I watched her play with her hair.

“Shelly? I’ve been thinking.
 
Why didn’t you warn us about the
godzilla
?
 
With all those future-files in your head, a historical event like a
godzilla
attack on Navy Pier would be hard to miss.” Certainly nobody had
really
expected a
godzilla
attack to come out the Great Lakes; Lei
Zi
still had Riptide, Galatea, and a scratch-team from the other Crisis Aid and Intervention teams searching the lakes for eggs and
godzilla
-young.

Shelly sighed again.

“I was wondering when you’d ask me that.
 
She wasn’t due for another two years.”

“Hey what?”

She scowled, looking worried.

“The Teatime Anarchist’s files are all history files he collected on his trips to the 22
^nd
Century, right?
 
And every time he came back knowing what was going to happen, he’d change things just by knowing?
 
Same for his quantum-twin, and their little games could change things big-time, right?”

I nodded.
 
“But you told me there’s a kind of inertia—like time is a river.
 
Whichever way it goes, it’s still headed for the sea.”

“Yeah.
 
The Anarchist told me once it’s like, if you could go back to 1914 and keep those Serbian goofs from assassinating Archduke Ferdinand, World War One would still have happened, because Germany and France would have just found some other reason to fight.
 
Probably over the African colonies.”
 
She snickered at my look.
 
“Hey, all of the world’s history right here in my head, remember?”

“Brag brag
brag
.”

“But the war would have happened later, right?
 
Maybe a lot later,” She chewed her lip.
 
“So stuff changes, but it’s still
kinda
the same.
 
Whoever’s behind the Godzilla Plague, I think the Big One, or maybe the Whittier Base Attack, made them move up their timetable.”

“Oh.”

Well, that made sense; in another history the Whittier Base Attack had been the White House Attack. The Ring had used the opportunity created by the Big One to take
their
shot ahead of schedule.
 
And Atlas died instead of me.

“So you’re saying the Big One sped things up?”

She shrugged, frustrated.
 
“Some things.
 
And long term it’s
got
to be changing lots of things; over fifty thousand people died—that’s a lot of rocks thrown in the river.
 
So far sixteen high-tech companies that would have started up this year, haven’t.
 
And one big political scandal never happened now.
 
And this year’s mid-term elections?
 
Don’t even ask.”

Hearing
Shelly
talk like an expert on stuff that had never interested her before was deeply weird.

“So the future’s out of date,” I said.
 
“‘Always changing, is the future.’”

She giggled, then turned serious again.
 
“I’m not going to be as much help as the Anarchist thought,” she said glumly.

“Sure you are—lots of the stuff we’re going to run into is older than last year, or won’t be changed much by it.
 
So it won’t happen the same way: we’ll deal.”

She didn’t look happier.

“Hope…” she said softly.

That was the Trouble Voice.
 
Something bad had happened, or was about to.

She flipped her hair out of her face and looked at her sneakered feet.
 
I noticed they had magic-marker graffiti on them.

“The last history-dump TA got before the Big One was from 2030,” she said.

“And?”

“It was different.”

My eyes stung, but I waved it away.

“I know that; Atlas was alive and we lived happily ever after, right?”

“No—I mean, yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
 
In the last pre-Big One future, Blackstone died two months ago.”

I stopped breathing.

“How?”

“He was murdered.” She avoided my eyes.

My stomach seized. It felt like somebody had snuck up and punched me in the gut.

“
No
.
 
Why?
 
By who?”

“Nobody ever found out.
 
But it was the same guy who killed Mr. Moffat—at least the
method
was the same.”

Dear God, no
.
 
I was going to be sick. Projectile-vomit from five thousand feet.

“The thing is,” Shelly continued in a rush of rising panic as I tried to shut out the image of Blackstone-soup in a box, “since the Big One he spent the last few months recruiting and managing the team.”

I nodded.
 
After the funeral I’d been half-useless for weeks, sleepwalking my way through my exercise regime, focusing on my classes and now-solitary aerial patrols, smiling until my face froze.
 
I was pretty sure I’d scared Shelly, and I
knew
I’d scared my parents, who’d been through it before when she
 
died, but even I’d seen how Blackstone had stepped up to fill the leadership void left by Atlas and Ajax.