Wearing The Cape: Villains Inc. (7 page)

But now…

“He’s back in his team-intelligence role now,” I said, starting to think again.
 
“What was he working on before?”

“I don’t
know
. The guy keeps secrets like nobody’s business.”

“Does he know about the danger?”

“Yes!
 
I told him as soon as you told him about me!”

“Did you tell him about tonight?”

“Duh, as soon as we knew what was in the box.”

“Okay.
 
And?”

She shook her head.
 
“He said ‘Thank you.’”

I sighed, relieved.

Shelly wasn’t.
 
“But what if the
supervillain
who killed Mr. Moffat is a hit-man?
 
Detective Fisher said the Outfit might have had it done.
 
So, what if Blackstone’s working on something that they don’t like.
 
Or somebody else doesn’t like?”

I wasn’t relieved anymore.
 
The public knew Blackstone as a superhero stage-magician, but he was oh so much more than that.
 
He focused on developing threats, and he regularly worked with and consulted for the CPD, the DSA, and the FBI.
 
He’d probably been half the reason the Teatime Anarchist had originally taken such an interest in the team.

And if one of his investigations upset the wrong people…
 
I thought of the box and tasted bile in my throat.
 
Breathe.
 
Think it through
.

“Shell?
 
In the pre-Big One future, did the bank robbery happen?”

“Yes. Back in February.”

“And Mr. Moffat?”

She nodded.

“And
then
Blackstone was killed?”

“Yes!”

The cause-and-effect chain linked together horribly.
 
Mr.
Moffat’s
horrific murder drew Blackstone’s attention to a new superhuman threat.
 
Blackstone decided to assist the CPD in the investigation, made somebody nervous, and became the next target. Now it was just happening later.

And just how much would Shelly’s warning help him?
 
He already took elaborate security precautions but, truthfully, there were a lot of superhuman powers against which there was no defense other than hitting first or just not being there.

Mr. Moffat had been reduced to soup, his furniture reduced to scraps, in a thirty-story condo with heavy internal and external security—there’d even been a camera on the balcony—and only a neighbor getting some air one floor down had heard anything.
 
The Dome’s security was an order of magnitude higher; it could even detect an unauthorized
teleporter
by the change in air-pressure when he popped in. But there was no guarantee that whatever got to Mr. Moffat couldn’t still get to Blackstone.
 
And Blackstone’s powers weren’t really combat-oriented; levitation, illusions, teleportation, not the stuff for going up against whatever had reduced Mr. Moffat.

So the only way to be certain he was safe was to catch the killer before he targeted Blackstone.
 
But how could we find him if Blackstone, with all of his resources and mad skills, hadn’t?

“The entertainment industry gives most people a skewed idea of what superheroes really do. We’re not the police. Even in Chicago, the Metropolis of the superhero world, we have only eight CAI teams plus independents. That’s less than a hundred card-carrying capes, most of them B and C-class, covering 8 million people. Sometimes the CPD deploys us like SWAT teams, but mostly we’re emergency-response. Fires. Bad accidents. We rarely fight ‘
supervillains
,’ but we are called in whenever a disturbance involves other
superhumans
.”

Terry Reinhold, quoting Astra in
“This is a job for…”

Thursday passed with no answer to our dilemma. I considered calling Fisher to get his promise not to consult Blackstone on the case, but with Blackstone already alerted by Shelly I didn’t think it would do any good. So I patrolled, and went to school, and worried at the problem.

Friday on evening patrol, Shelly caught me taking a break on the Sears Tower.

“Shots fired in Little Tuscany on 24th and Oakley!”
she reported.
 
“Rush is on another police call, and the caller says somebody’s a superhuman.
 
You’re the closest high-mobility asset.”

I was already diving.
 
“I’m on it.”

Little Tuscany is a newly gentrified neighborhood centered on a cluster of Italian restaurants along West 24th and Oakley. It has a cozy feel, streets lined with wrought-iron Old World lampposts and benches and well-kept trees and planters, hardly the kind of place you expect serious action.
 
The fight spilled out of Puccini’s as I dropped to the street, putting the brakes on just enough not to make a crater.
 
My timing was perfect; as I touched down an explosion of shots shattered the eatery’s street window. Two of them hit me, one in the right temple.
 
They stung.
 
From the screams inside, they hadn’t been the first shots.

Atlas Rule #1: when in doubt, pacify the situation.

I went in through the window, landing in front of the shooter, a wild-eyed black kid with a pistol. Completely freaked, he still wasn’t dumb enough to try it on me—grabbing his gun I looked around for more, but then he went down in a spray of blood, a familiar eye-twisting blur behind him.

Oh no
no
No
!

“Rush!” I yelled.
 
“Sonic, code red!” Shelly would pass it on.

I broke the pistol’s barrel and tossed it, spinning around to track the blur.
 
Another kid crashed into the bar, more blood flying.
 
I couldn’t be sure, but the speedster seemed to be swinging a baseball bat.
 
A third kid, screaming rage and fear, waved a
Glock
.
T
his
one was stupid or panicked enough to shoot at me, and I took two more to the chest before I closed the gap to grab the barrel and wrench it up and away.
 
Making a fist with my other hand, I punched him carefully in the solar plexus.
 
He fell gasping to the floor, his diaphragm shocked into spasms.

Where’s Rush?

Puccini’s is a small place, a family-owned restaurant packed with checker-cloth covered tables lit by candles in jars, and you have to go around the bar to get to the dining area from the street. When the eye-twisting blur appeared again I snatched for it as it went by less than a step away. I missed, saw a second blur, red and white, at the now-open door.
 
The two blurs collided, and then Rush stood in the doorway gripping a black kid in cornrows and wearing a bloodied biker’s jacket in a come-along hold.

“
HeyAstra
,
what’sthefuss
?”
 
He cuffed the protesting kid with plastic ties, then dragged him over and anchored him to the bar’s foot-rail almost faster than my eyes could follow.

“Do you need to get back to your own situation?” I asked over my shoulder as I checked out the scene, hiding my relief.
 
All but one of the injured were obvious gang-bangers.
 
The exception, a middle-aged woman, sat on the floor, her face white with shock.
 
Her dinner partner pressed a folded linen napkin to her ribs.
 
I knelt beside her.

“Nah,” Rush said, grinning under his
visored
helmet.
 
“Violent home invasion, all done.”
 
Sirens wailed, far away, and the kid started to cry.
 
Rush nudged him with his foot and decided he’d keep.

I gently checked the woman’s improvised pressure-bandage, whispering reassurances. She’d taken a stray bullet, but would be alright until the paramedics arrived. I kept moving. Five gang-bangers were down, and the sixth, the owner of the
Glock
, let Rush cuff him without trouble. We checked everyone over as the sirens got louder.
 
Broken knees, cracked skulls, and, amazingly, nobody dead—just injured gang-bangers and shocked diners. The scene didn’t go with the soft music and the fragrant smells of
gorgonzala
and risotto, but the Reaper had passed by tonight.

The cleanup always lasts longer than the action. By the time four squad cars pulled up in quick succession, Rush and I had patted down the gang kids and restrained the ones not too injured to make trouble. Rush got with a patrolman and administered a sandman pack—a drug injection that would knock an elephant out—to our new speedster friend so they could safely transport him after the patrolman read him his rights.
 
One of the patrolmen pulled a collapsible stretcher from his trunk, and I helped secure the injured woman.
 
She told me she was Donna
Burcelli
, thanked me graciously, and made no fuss as I flew her over to Westlake Hospital. Her husband followed in his car.

I just managed to miss the swarm of reporters and paparazzi who descended on Puccini’s, and saw Rush hop his motorcycle and disappear over the Wall into
hypertime
.
 
Leaving Westlake, the flight back to the Dome gave me time to dictate a full after-action report. Back in my quarters, I surveyed the damage.

“You look like the victim of a squirrel attack,” Shelly laughed, sitting on my bed, her feet tucked up and arms around her legs.

“Get your imaginary feet off my bed,” I shot back, and she stuck out her imaginary tongue.

“That was more like it,” she said.
 
“Not a proper
supervillain
fight, but…”

I fingered the bullet hole in the leather face of my mask, right at the edge of the wig. My hands were trembling.

Nobody died.
I took a deep breath.

“He was a mad and scared breakthrough, Shell.”

From the statements of badly shaken diners, the kid had run into Puccini’s, chased by the six gang-bangers. They’d proceeded to corner and beat on him, and he learned just how fast he could be.
 
They escalated to guns when he started speeding, and he got the trophy bat off the wall and went to town. I really couldn’t blame him, though if Rush hadn’t arrived I couldn’t have done a thing to keep him from killing every one of his attackers if he’d wanted to. I might be a maid of steel, but I’m not faster than a speeding bullet and it was a miracle nobody had been killed.

And I’d hated calling for Rush, though admitting that made me feel small.
 
In the showdown with the Teatime Anarchist’s twin, Rush had been on the wrong side.
 
The subsequent investigation proved he’d been “handled” and lied to, but I hadn’t liked him much for a lot of other reasons before then and I didn’t like disliking a teammate.

Shrugging it aside, I stripped down.
 
The torso of my costume was a loss too: four holes, one of them in my built-in bra padding.
 
Well, I had more.
 
I grabbed the terrycloth bathrobe the staff provided and headed for the shower, blissfully anticipating using all four heads
and
the
waterfall
. I wondered if, in the unchanged history, we’d have still met the kid tonight.