by Diane Duane
The nice thing about ram raiding, though, was that it was fairly detectable. The sound of such a large amount of glass breaking at once, or of the clatter of metal shutters in the street, was much louder than mere vandalism usually produced. For a costumed hero with sharp ears, a built-in ESP-like warning system that he called his spider-sense, and an eye for trouble, it was a happy sound.
Spidey had an eye for trouble tonight. It was difficult, if not impossible, for even a super hero to punch out an entire phone company. But as surrogates for them, he would be more than glad to punch out any crooks he ran across tonight. It would be a small consolation, but better than nothing. Additionally, he had his little motion-controlled camera with him; should any action occur, he would get pictures of it, and tomorrow Peter Parker would take them in to the Bugle and see who might be interested in them.
He swung on down Park Avenue South a ways, humming absently to himself as he watched the traffic flow. Ahead of him, under the sodium lights, he could see several pickups of the kind favored for ram raiding, but they seemed to be going about their business peaceably enough. Nonetheless, he followed them for a while, watching the cross streets as he passed them by. It was pleasant to be doing a simple night’s work for a change. The previous weeks’ run-ins with Venom and the repeated revelations of the underhanded dealings of the Russian-backed import-export company CCRC had made life more complicated than he liked. Having Manhattan almost destroyed in a nuclear explosion a few weeks prior to that hadn’t done much for his composure, either. “Super villains,” he muttered. “Fooey. Give me punks. I’m ready for punks.”
He swung right down Park, practically to the Village, hung a right at Fourteenth, and headed west, past dozens of little stores that sold discount clothes, electrical equipment, and other odds and ends. But everything was surprisingly quiet; the city was well-behaved tonight.
Typical, he thought. When you want a crook, you can never find them, but when you don’t want them, they’re everywhere.
At Thirteenth and Sixth Avenue Spidey paused thoughtfully, looking down at the Burger King there from the skyscraper where he clung. One of the problems with web-swinging in this town was that cooking smoke and steam from restaurants and snack bars rose upward in a great cloud, and he could always smell them on his rounds. If he hadn’t eaten before he left, he soon wished he had, and he almost always ate before he got home. MJ’s comment was that the only creature in the city to which Spider-Man was not a hero was his refrigerator, because he robbed it himself every night.
MJ…. He swung along up Sixth a ways, thinking of her patient look as she sat at the kitchen table after that phone call. How does she stay so calm? It seemed to be a natural gift. Her bubbly personality didn’t usually extend to noisy complaint, but she had confessed to him what serious fun she had had pitching a major fit one evening on this Miami trip in the direction of a misbehaving director—and the astonishment it provoked from the others in the area, especially those who had known MJ for a little while and had never heard her make a loud noise before. There may be something to that approach, he thought. Save it for later, and people pay more attention—
CRASH! Glass shattered not too far from him. Spidey paused in mid-swing, swung himself around to the plate-glass front of a building at Twenty-fourth and Sixth, and there held very still, listening above the soft roar of the city for the rest of the crash-and-tinkle. It always took a little while to settle down.
North, he thought, and west. A block up.
He spider-scuttled around the face of the building from the Sixth Avenue side to the side facing north, and there made a huge leap onto the roof of a convenient warehouse that stood directly across the street. He came down fairly in the middle of the roof without too much difficulty. Streets were pretty easy to jump: avenues were trouble, and he hadn’t jumped one without webbing in a while.
He bounced across the building’s roof to where it abutted with another, slightly taller; leapt up to that one’s roof, scuttled straight across it to the Twenty-fifth Street side, paused, and peered over the square-cut, fake-castellated brick rampart that topped it out.
About halfway down the block between Sixth and Seventh on Twenty-fifth, a metallic brown Dodge four-by-four pickup had rammed the front of what looked to be a small jewelry store, whose alarm was ringing forlornly. The truck was sitting up on the sidewalk, nose well in through the dark window, while dark figures danced about the truck’s hood, grabbing things out of the store, and stowing them away in their coats. Two other figures held long objects—assault rifles, Spidey guessed.
“New York, New York,” Spider-Man muttered under his breath, smiling under the mask as he got out the camera and set it on the “rampart” on its little tripod, switching it on. The camera went zzzt, turning its “head” toward the action down in the street.
Spidey swung down.
He hit the first of the robbers with no warning whatsoever—his favorite way. He simply took him feet first in the back, knocking the gun the punk carried clear across the sidewalk and under a parked car. It skittered along the concrete, spitting sparks as it went, and Spidey had just enough time to recognize the shape. Kalashnikov, he thought. Very stylish—not!
The two crooks who had clambered in through the window and loaded themselves with stuff from the counters inside now noticed him. One of them stuffed a last glittering necklace inside his jacket, pulled out a pistol, and started emptying it at Spidey.
This, the crook shortly found, was a futile tactic. Spider-Man bounced around on the sidewalk, rather like a drop of water on a hot griddle, keeping the truck between him and the other two crooks, and waiting for the sound he wanted to hear: bangbangbangbangbangbangbangbangclick.
“Aha,” Spidey said cheerfully. “That’s a Glock, and you’ve had your seventeen.” He jumped at the man, a big heavy guy with a five o’clock shadow several time zones ahead of itself. The crook was still fumbling for the replacement cartridge when Spidey’s fist caught him just under the jaw, and sent him and the gun flying, it one way, he another. As the man flopped out of the way, his coat fell open and rained jewelry on the sidewalk.
From beyond the Dodge came more gunfire: some machine-gun, some pistol. Spidey ducked as the slugs whined and ricocheted around him on the pavement. “Impatient people,” he muttered. “You’d think they’d wait and take better aim. But never mind.” It was half a second’s work to web his first crook up against the lightpost against which he had conveniently come to rest. After that, Spidey crouched down again and bounced toward the truck, ducking down behind it.
The guy with the Kalashnikov ran around one side, and the guy with the pistol around the other. It was as much as Spider-Man could have hoped for. “Now, who says New Yorkers aren’t considerate?” Spidey said, shooting out a line of webbing and neatly tripping the guy with the pistol as he came around the corner of the Dodge. The crook slammed down onto the sidewalk; the pistol flew off to one side and embedded itself in a big lump of a substance for which there was a $50 fine for leaving it on the street.
“There’s a message there somewhere,” said Spidey—and then his spider-sense stung him, and he jumped right over the truck. Not a moment too soon: a spray of bullets dug a little crater on the spot of sidewalk where he had been crouching.
The crook ran for the driver’s-side door of the Dodge and yanked it open. He had just gotten himself in behind the wheel when Spidey did the same with the passenger-side door, climbed up onto the cab step, and shot webbing all over the would-be driver, his gun, his legs, his arms, and anything else that showed. Then Spider-Man leaned in and pulled the keys out of the ignition, smiling at the furious, struggling man. “You should have gotten out of Dodge while you could,” he said and jumped out again.
Bullets rattled and whined off the truck’s body. Spidey looked toward the jewelry store and saw the one remaining crook, whom he’d briefly forgotten. “Can’t have you feeling left out,” he said as he rolled and bounced off the sidewalk, bounced
again, and wound up clinging to one of the second-floor windows of the building that had been rammed.
The last crook stared wildly around him, spraying the area with bullets. Spidey hugged the wall, only having to move a couple of times—the big jutting brownstone windowsill protected him somewhat. Then he heard the sound he wanted to hear—not so much a click, but a sort of mmf, as the Kalashnikov ran out of things to fire.
He jumped from the window and came right down on the fourth man. The gun spun away. The two of them rolled together briefly. The gunman struggled. Spidey reared a fist back. “Night night,” he said, and struck.
A couple of moments later he stood up, breathing hard and looking around at the mess, then walked over to the truck, while hearing, in the distance, the sound of sirens approaching.
The inside of the truck’s cab was surprisingly clean. It’s either brand new, Spidey thought, or I’ve come across a bunch of neat thugs. The back of the flatbed was empty of everything but the boxes and jewelry that the crooks had tossed into it. But inside the cab, on the little parcel shelf under the back window, he found a cardboard box. On the outside it said a&p 12 o’clock coffee. On the inside were four cell phones.
He reached in and looked at one. Considering his current mood, Spidey was tempted to chuck the thing across the road—but it was evidence. And who knew what numbers might be inside it?
He carefully took the box out of the truck and put it on the hood. Up and down the block, as Spidey looked up at the windows, he could see a Venetian blind bend down, or a curtain twitch aside, as people looked curiously out and decided that what they saw was nothing to do with them. Inside the mask, Spidey smiled gently.
The sirens got closer. Spider-Man watched with some caution as the cop cars came around the corner, into Twenty-fifth. He was not universally loved by the police. Now two squad cars pulled up, and a third “unmarked” car: five uniformed officers got out, and a sixth, in shirtsleeves and dark pants and a tie thrown over his shoulder, a face he knew. He last saw it months ago at an NYPD sate house in the Bronx one time when Venom was in town.
“Sergeant Drew,” Spider-Man said as the cops came up.
Stephen Drew nodded to him cordially enough, and said to one of his people, “See if you can’t shut that thing off—it’s enough to wake the dead.” And for a moment he said nothing more as he walked around the scene and looked things over.
“Okay,” he finally said to the others. “Get the web off these guys’ hands, anyway, so we can cuff them and take them downtown. You caught them in the act, I take it,” he said to Spider-Man.
“I did. Burglary anyway. Maybe grand-theft auto as well.”
“Could be. Run the truck,” he said over his shoulder, to one of his officers. “Now, what have we here?”
“Four cell phones, at least. There may be more hidden in the truck—”
“Not that,” Drew said. “This.” He took out a handkerchief, wrapped it around one hand, then bent over to pick up what was half sticking out from one of the parked cars nearby: the Kalashnikov machine gun.
“AK-47,” said Spidey.
“Nope,” said Drew, with odd relish.
Spider-Man blinked. “Nope? I thought I knew these guns pretty well.”
“Take another look at this one.” Drew held it out for Spidey to examine. “Check the muzzle.”
Spidey looked at it, shook his head. “I’m not sure what I should be seeing.”
“Bigger caliber,” said Drew. “This isn’t just Russian, it’s Russian military. And—” He turned the gun over, looked at the stock for a moment, then raised his eyebrows. “Interesting. This doesn’t even have the Russian Army brands or reg numbers on it.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“I’d stick to ‘interesting’ for the moment,” Drew said. “But I doubt this was bought on the street here—or, if it was, that it’s been here for long.”
“Russian…” Spidey said.
Drew turned the gun over again, looking at it. “Very shiny…” he said. “Oh, Russian, yeah. And not just in origin. I expect one or two of these guys are Russian themselves.”
Spidey nodded. It was no news to him, or anyone else in New York, what new influence had become something to be reckoned with in the New York crime world. When perestroika took hold and the old USSR fell, many people who were not oppressed in the usual sense of the word suddenly found themselves free to seek out the Land of the Free. It wasn’t finding work they had in mind, though—again, not in the usual sense of the word. The USSR had always had an active network of criminal organizations. At the end of the Eighties, those organizations, as individuals and groups, had actively begun colonizing the United States, in force, either to exploit what they considered a profitable new market for crime, or else to mine the U.S. for technology and new scams, which they would then export to the growing consumer economies in Russia and the former Eastern Bloc.
Drew took another look at the machine gun, unloaded it, cleared it, and then peered down the barrel, squinting a little in the golden light. “If I’m any judge of these things,” he said, “this hasn’t seen a whole lot of use. It’s very new. Must just have come in. Possibly via Long Island. There have been reports of some odd movements among the fishing fleet, last week.”
“Drew,” Spider-Man said, amused, “is there any gossip about shady stuff in this town that you don’t know about?”
Drew chuckled, glanced up. “If there were, I’d hardly mention it. I have my rep to think of, after all. Let’s see those phones.”
Spider-Man handed him the small box. Drew had a look at them. “Top of the line, these,” he said. “Expensive. They may be from a legit supplier—or they may have been traded as part of some money-laundering scheme. Either way, they’ll have been cloning existing numbers into these. That way these guys can keep in touch with their bosses, while they’re doing their dirty little jobs, and no one can trace them. They just ditch the phones when they’re done, and steal new ones.”
“It’s a subject,” Spidey said, “which has been interesting me lately.”
“You onto something?” said Drew, catching the intensity in his voice.
“I don’t know yet,” Spider-Man said. “I don’t really know which questions to ask.”
“Well—” Drew looked briefly embarrassed. “You did me a mighty favor, once upon a time. Vance Hawkins wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for you. Anybody does my partner that kind of favor, I tend to remember it. Look—”
The sound of more sirens was beginning to echo in the background. “I’ve got to clean this scene up and get these guys out of here,” Drew said. “And the town is hopping tonight—at least the West Side is. Got a lot of stuff that’s going to keep me busy. But if you’ll give me a day, and then call me here—” He reached into his pocket, pulled out his business card. “If you’ve got some questions about ‘cell crime,’ I’ve got somebody who might be able to give you some info that’d be useful to you. Would that suit?”
“It’d suit very well. Thanks, Drew.”
“Hey, listen,” Sergeant Drew said, as yet another squad car pulled up, “like I said, favors are no good if you don’t pass ’em back. And now I suggest you make yourself diplomatically scarce. I’ll talk to you later in the week.”
“Right,” Spidey said.
“Get outta here, bug,” Drew growled, more (Spidey guessed) for the benefit of his men than anything else.
In a much better humor than he had been, Spider-Man went straight up the wall and headed for Twenty-sixth Street, and taller buildings that would let him web quickly home
* * *
PETER got up early the next morning, and spent a happy couple of hours in the darkroom, developing the pictures from the previous night. He had been experimenting with a new low-light 1200 ASA film, which got surprisingly good results under sodium-vapor lamps—even though, if you were too close to the light source, the shots tended to get a bit washed out. Luckily, these weren’t washed out at all:
the contrast was crisp and the color good, though flushed with the inevitable golden tint of sodium lighting.
There was the front of the jewelry store, there were the spilled jewels on the floor and the sidewalk, and there were the bad guys, also on the floor though a lot less pretty to look at, webbed into tidy or untidy packages as speed of capture had dictated. It was all very picturesque, and Peter went to his meeting with city editor Kathryn Cushing with a high heart.
Kate went through the prints one after another, picked one—a glittering strew of gemstones and jewelry catching the light, and for contrast, the dull, oiled-metal gleam of the machine gun lying alongside—and looked at it thoughtfully. “Are these guys anybody in particular?” she asked Peter.
“The cops thought they may have been Russian.”
“Really?” She picked up a slick-surface pen and began making crop marks on the paper. “I like the color on this. Almost sepia tone. You do that on purpose, or is it just what the film produces under street light?”
“A little of both.”
“Do I hear the sound of a man protecting his secrets? Well, never mind. It looks good. That’s what matters. Russian, huh? Mel Ahrens would like this.…” She pushed the picture away and leaned back in her office chair, steepling her fingers and staring at them for a moment. “Never mind that right now. You did a super job on the Miami end of things, Peter. A difficult assignment, but very good results. I wasn’t entirely sure you had it in you.” She grinned. “I don’t mind admitting to being wrong. So now I want to start putting you on more high-profile work—and I think I have just the thing.” She started rummaging around in her file drawer.
