Chapt 4

[moon_custafer]

The place was a small bar with blue-painted walls and dim light. He found Amanda down at the end, pointedly ignoring a couple of oglers. He gave them a carefully- calibrated threatening glance, and sat down beside her.
            “You all right?” he whispered.
            “I think so. I just felt, after I left the coffee place. Like someone was following.  I couldn’t see anybody around who was the same block after block, but – there were eyes. Maybe I’m just being paranoid. And now those guys keep looking at me.”
            “You’re not being paranoid. Well, maybe about those guys. They don’t have the look; I think they’re just scoping you out.”
            “Ew.”
            “Thanks for the implied compliment.  Anyway, you picked a good spot: the washroom in this place is downstairs along with a bunch of storeroom and service areas, and I think there’s an employees’ door to the back in among it all.  Did you find any more?”
            “Either the city tried to sink all evidence of their screw-up, or whoever took the dvds tried to downplay their existence. I say we take it up with the sppecial-effects guys.”
            “Well, Vermin doesn’t know about the theft either, and he clammed up when I tried to pry about the phones themselves. By the way, I told him about you, to freak him out.”
            “He’s freaked out by you dating?”
            “I may have exaggerated your fighting skills and involvement in the underworld a bit. Do you have any, now that I think of it?”
            “Some of my relatives are no better than they should be, but you’re the only super-criminal I know, that I’m aware of.”
            “Fighting skills, I mean.”
            “No.”
            “Like to learn? It won’t be like high school gym, I promise. And it’s useful stuff to know, even when you aren’t hanging out with me. Those guys at the bar aren’t the only jerks in the world.”
            “You tempt me, but I may wind up doing more damage through sheer lack of coordination than I can inflict on purpose.”
    “It’s a deal. We regroup, I give you a crash course in looking menacing and later we interrogate the sinister FX guys. The question is, where do we go from here that’s secure?”
    “Couldn’t you make the door to my apartment disappear? Look like part of the hallway wall, I mean.”
    “Yes, but I’d have to do it from outside, and then if I opened it the effect would shake off.”
    “Hmm. How big a thing can you mojo?”
    “I can’t do the whole building. People would wonder where it had gone.”
    “That wasn’t what I had in mind, exactly.”
 
    They reached Amanda’s place and circled it as completely as they could. Victor kept an eye open in case they’d been followed, while Amanda pointed out certain features of the buildings and its surroundings. Then she led him up to her front door and went in.
           “Is it locked behind you?” Victor asked. He touched the door and it sunk into the dingy beige paint of the common area walls. He set the alarm on his watch for six hours thence and made his way down the back stairs to the parking lot and hauled himself to the low roof of the neighbouring garage.  Several minutes, a scramble up some faux-stone cornering, an unpleasant jump of several feet and a couple of near-slips later, he was climbing in a back window and into Amanda’s anxious, waiting embrace. “Just a moment,” he said, leaning out the window to touch and hide the drainpipe he’d climbed  for the last few feet of his trip, “and let me wash up first. Those bricks were grimy.”
           Giggling with relief, Amanda abruptly scooped him up, tossed him over her shoulder  and carried him bodily to her shower.


  * * * * *

    In their boardroom, the Forensic Five took their seats around their table - they actually had a round table; it was made of brushed aluminum and Ipe wood - for their twice-weekly meeting. 
    “What’s up with this new player, this...Obscurant? What’s that supposed to mean, anyway?”
    “As far as I can tell, it’s a back formation from Obscurantism, the deliberate creation of more mystery than is necessary.”
    “Well, he picked a good one then, I’ve got to admit. Nothing he’s done is making sense yet - blowing up a warehouse full of hair care products? Creating some kind of scorpion panic on a dance floor - who is he, a bald man who hates disco?” There was ripple of laughter.
    “Settle down, people. It’s just this sort of unpredictable behaviour that makes a villain dangerous.”
“I disagree - there are no unpredictable villains. We just need to discover how he’s wound.”
    “Right. Wanda - can you look into the targets? See if there’s any connection between them. Anything else on this fellow?”
    “We’re still trying to figure out how he worked the scorpion gag. All the ones were found were plastic, but all the witnesses swear they saw them move, and some of them are pretty credible and consistent. We checked them all for drugs of course, but except for the usual recreational substances there was nothing in their systems, and a lot of the testimony came from kids who were absolutely clean.”
    “Some kind of animated plastic? Remote control?”
    “We’ve sent them to the lab, but so far they say they’re just toy plastic scorpions like you could buy in any novelty store; except they’ve been painted with black light paint - like you could buy in any art supply, hobby shop or hardware store.” There was a collective sigh of disappointment.
    “Guys - there’s a report coming on the police scanner. They’ve just found Dr. Vermin - dead in the city square.”

* * * * *

   Some time later,  scrubbed, warm, satisfied and, for the moment, safe, they curled up on Amanda’s enormous sofa and discussed their next move. “I’m sticking with you through this,” she said, “No arguments.”
    “None to make. But if I’m to introduce you round as my cohort, you might want to well, disguise yourself a bit. I’m not exactly Bob from the accounting department, and you don’t need any more trouble on my account than you already have.”
    “Who am I supposed to disguise myself as, Paul Bunyan?”
    “Er, to be a drooling fanboy, I was thinking something a bit more glamazon - no, trust me, in heels and or tights you could really intimidate people if you needed to. Not to mention the way you picked me up just now.” Victor’s face was tilted and smiling but he was serious, too.  He was a smallish but reasonable-sized adult male and the ease with which she’d manhandled him had really caught him off guard. Evidently there was even more to Amanda than appeared on the surface. She’d told him a bit about her relatives and he’d begun to wonder if they were at least dilute meta - even supers were still trying to understand the phenomenon that was themselves, but it had long been evident that some powers were genetic in origin.
“Well, I do have some long underwear somewhere,” offered Amanda, a little uncertainly.
“What colour are they? I’m being practical, not flirtatious.”
“Black.”
“Practical and classy. Good.”
Amanda went to an over stuffed bedroom closet and, embarrassed, dug through the heaped up clothes, suitcases, highschool history essays mix tapes stuffed toy animals and one broken vacuum cleaner.  To spare her feelings, Victor turned his attention to the bookshelves. She had an interestingly broad range of reading matter, including, he noted, a number of popular-science magazines and how-to book, histories, several large poetry anthologies, something called The Grammar of Ornament,  all the L Frank Baum Oz books and a great deal of SF.
            “Found them,” she declared at last, holding up a decent un-holey pair of high-tech microfibre thermal tights and a stretchily matching top with long sleeves. “I don’t think they’re even in need of washing.”
            With her swimsuit over the long johns, Victor’s protective gloves and kneepads and her tall black winter boots, Amanda, casting a critical eye in the big mirror on her bedroom wall had to admit she looked pretty good. She had even sacrificed one of her T-shirts to make herself a cowl. Victor, in the tiny kitchen, was devising a utility belt for her out of household odds and ends and the contents of his pockets. He’d already shown her how to plant and monitor the little tracker clip and how to arm the timed smoke bombs; the latter in theory only, given the alarm on the ceiling of her kitchen. They’d practiced some hand-to hand moves until it started to get dangerously arousing.
            “Sorry, babe, but we can’t let our getting-ready montage be interrupted by a love scene.”
            “How about a “falling asleep with my glasses still on” scene?” Victor was really yawning now.
“I forgot, you were busy all last night, weren’t you? When shall I set the alarm for, then?”
“Most of the really good evil doesn’t get going until 3 am. I think we’ll be ok if we set it for two thirty.”  He fell into her big bed with his clothing, if not his glasses, still on. Amanda brushed her teeth and set the clock before joining him. He was already deep under but his body curled instinctively towards her as she lay down, and she draped an arm over his angular shoulders and drew him closer. He sighed and smiled in his sleep, and she watched his clever, tired face until her own eyes closed and she drifted off.
 
    
    The centre square of Gradient was dominated by the Firestone Monument, a hollow clock, a bronze sun-dial with a hole in the rim through which the sun could finger in turn each of the hours on the inner surface.  Stripped naked, Vermin hung at the centre of the sculpture with his paws just brushing the edge of the bronze wheel and his tail dangling obscenely between his legs.  Without his white lab coat he looked no more than an ordinary rat, but one of the first passers-by to spot him had also noticed the tiny goggles lying at the foot of the sundial.
 
    “What was the cause of death, Brody?” Roadie, Kestrel and Assassin Beetle had driven to the scene of the crime and were asking around. Normally they would have played things more subdued and diplomatic with the cops - they may have been official City Crimefighting Partners on newsprint and at public-relations events; in reality, they knew, their status was delicate and they were in truth, on suffrance; but it was rare for a known Supervillain to be found dead, and the team felt that in a situation like this, they were the experts.   
“It’s too early to say officially.”
    “And unofficially?” Kestrel snapped. The detective paused, then gave in to the capes’ off-the-book inquiry: 
    “You didn’t hear it from me. Looks for all the world like he was garrotted, then suspended in the hollow centre part of the Firestone monument - sort of a sick hamster wheel joke, I guess.”
    “Poor bastard - I know he was an enemy of ours , and of the whole city, but -  I’m sorry Kestrel - I didn’t mean to speak out of turn.”
    “It’s all right, Roadie. He was a creep and a dangerous madman, but he still didn’t deserve to be - put on display -  like that.”  
  Though it was a September night, the temperature had not yet dropped significantly. That would happen later during the quietest hours of deep darkness, though it was never completely dark in Gradient City. Despite this, and despite being a sizable man who wore a T-shirt on all but the coldest days, Roadie shivered as they walked back to the armoured car he had built for the team.
“So, do we think this is a settling of old debts, or a new strike by the Obscurant?”
    “It would certainly net him attention.”
    “But so far, he hasn’t killed anybody, that we know of.”
    “Escalation.”
    “Escalation is a steady climb. You’re trying to argue for villain-on-villain murder from somebody who up till now has been operating at a hyper-prankster level. If you ask me, this is more Doe’s speed.”
    “Doe?” That was Assassin Beetle talking: “He’s been quiet of late, and anyway Vermin wasn’t a major player. “
    “Have you ever known that to stop Doe? Come on, the guy would off jaywalkers if he didn’t know we’d take him down for it.”
    “You think he’s afraid of us? We couldn’t stop Doe if he really went -” 
    “Shush --” Assassin Beetle glanced in the direction of the police detective. 
    “All I’m saying is, Doe has his limits. God help us if he didn’t.”
    “Yes.”
    
    John Doe sat on the box tomb of Garnett McCarthy (1894-1953, Beloved Mother of Tess and Randy), the best vantage point in Hesperides Cemetery, and through the eyeholes of his corpse mask, looked out over the city. Gradient City, he thought, not for the first time – the city of slippery slopes, paved with the corrupt ideals of a sick society.  Tonight, though, there seemed something more than usually unstable about his unruly charge – this new felon with the cryptic name, what was he up to? There was something perverse in his attacks, something obscenely childish. Doe could respect a mass killer like Retrograde, or a sadist like Spine. Such men he viewed as his proper opposite numbers, fit meat for avenging angels. This Obscurant, though, with his fireworks and his toy bugs, was not taking the game seriously. He was destroying the purity of the conflict with his jackass knavery, just like that old fool Mandrake. Doe’s hands itched, and he took his gun and cradled it like an infant, soothingly. Let those weakling Five have their shot at the new boy first, trying to make sense of his self-indulgent dribbling; then after their inevitable failure, his victory over disorder would be all the sweeter.
 
 * * * * * * *