Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  It is my 37th birthday.

  *

  HALLORY CALLS AND, you know, surprise surprise, she is still fucking furious with me, the whole China episode a fresh wound, blaming me for losing a sweet piece of commission for her and a fair cut for myself.

  “I’m not some society whore,” I tell her, watching her cute nose crinkle the fine tracery of freckles across the bridge as we regard each other like unblinking geckos on Skype, or what can I really tell you, actually we are just on the phone again, but I think if I keep documenting all my phone conversations it’s not very visual and seems repetitive, all these phone calls, so yeah, we’re really just in a screaming match on our cells as always, but you can imagine a cute redhead cut up about my latest transgression complaining at me through a computer screen if you like, even though we both know I’m not the sort of guy to really be that savvy. I read my emails like girls do, by which I mean infrequently and unreliably, leaving read emails and unread emails and emails requiring urgent attention to pile up like a Californian traffic crash of my Inbox with nothing except my website guy Dirk or Trent or whatever his name is to eventually wade in and sort out when my allowance hits its limit.

  I am barely off the latest shouting match, moving to the long dark windows of the office and staring out over downtown, drinking in the view and being totally in the moment when the phone lights up again and I sigh deeply, trying to assess in that microsecond whether Hallory managed to get in the last word in our previous call and therefore what’s the likelihood of her calling right back. I don’t know the number, but for once I answer without a care in the world rather than letting it go through to the Gehenna that is my voice mail.

  “Won Lo Sok’s Chinese. Can I take your order?” I say for laughs.

  “Sorry, is this Zephyr?”

  I look back at the phone screen again, number still unidentified and growl.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Zephyr, it’s Tiger Murphy, Atlantic City Homicide.”

  “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while,” I say calmly, my reaction to getting a call from homicide cops not much different to yours despite my stonking powers. It’s an ingrained reaction I wallpaper over with my best impersonation of unflustered superhuman known to man.

  “Probably a relief, I know,” the female detective says. “I could do with your help identifying a possible associate down at the morgue in a couple of hours, or in the morning if it’s past your bed-time?”

  “Associate?” I ask. She sounds pretty chipper for someone calling a superhero to tell them maybe one of their friends has died. “Who is it?”

  “It would be better for us to talk in person,” Tiger says. “I’m still on scene.”

  “OK,” I answer. “Give me your location and I’ll be there in a flash.”

  And so she does.

  *

  YOU KNOW AN inner city crime scene from television, so I don’t have to describe much. Two cop cruisers, an idle paramedic and a CSI van, just a few dozen bystanders behind yellow forensic tape due to the witching hour upon us.

  The body would be easier identified at the morgue and now I see it, I understand why.

  Seagal has come head-first off the five-storey office-cum-tenement adjacent, landing mostly on his left shoulder going head first, his grisly old sleazebag head twisted and slightly flattened to one side, neck split open and most of his body’s junk splashed across the sidewalk and actually draining into a gutter via an horrific rent between ear and the crushed shoulder beneath him. Tiger Murphy, a snub-nosed little Irish terrier who would be more cute if she didn’t seem so damned prepossessed, tells me High Roller’s back leg was up in the air at a jaunty angle when the corpse was first discovered a half-hour back. I look at the splattered cadaver and feel very little in the way of sympathy, a disconcerting chill creeping through my belly and threatening to exit my bowels.

  “Any reason why he would’ve jumped?” Tiger asks.

  I sigh.

  “He didn’t,” I say.

  “Fuck.”

  I nod. “Sorry. They were right to call you. It’s a homicide.”

  Zephyr 16.7 “Shadow Life”

  I DON’T KNOW where to start my explanation, so I don’t. Like every time I take a step deeper into this mess that is my shadow life, lived disastrously across a few hundred parallels, I realize mere earthly forces will only be endangered if I recruit their help.

  Seagal’s death is on my head. I can live with that. Having freed Matrioshka or helped to spawn her is not something I can so readily accept.

  “So you’re saying he could’ve been pushed or . . . thrown?” Tiger asks.

  “Well, he didn’t jump. I can guarantee that.”

  “How? What do you know?”

  “I knew the man,” I say grimly, the answer not tasting like a lie. “I know he wouldn’t do this. I mean, look at him. He had things to live for.”

  Our silent regard falls on the disgusting twisted mess of the corpse. Humanely, one of the CSI guys throws a sheet over the scene right at that moment as they prepare to search their van for a shovel or something to remove the dubiously and now ironically dubbed High Roller’s corpse to the city mortuary.

  Tiger drifts away on some small item of procedural business, checking in with her partner John Crane, a tall, angular man who might pass for albino if it wasn’t for his thick black hair and brows. The other detective looks at me and I give a Tom Selleck wiggle of my brows back at him, but when he looks away, I scan to the top of the city building.

  A woman up there shifts just out of sight as my eyes lock on.

  A deliberate move. Secretive. A signal.

  I check the coast is clear and move away from the crowd and take to the air.

  *

  THE BLONDE STANDS arms crossed in the middle of the roof, discharge from the heating system playing across the scene with an unnecessary theatrical flourish. A smug grin confuses her nominally beautiful features, leaving me to wonder if “Belle” or Matrioshka as she is known deliberately selected a model for her next plaything.

  Yes, if you hadn’t caught up yet, the apple hasn’t fallen far from the scene of the crime.

  “You’re looking good,” I say by way of witty openers.

  Matrioshka holds the woman’s arms out and does a series of half twirls.

  “You think?”

  The host has a deep throaty laugh I’d normally find irresistible, even knowing what corruption lurks within.

  “Just something I grabbed in a rush. Or someone, I should say.”

  “You went downhill pretty fast,” I say. “I thought we were close. Friends, you know? I haven’t really had that since –”

  “The early days with Elisabeth, I know,” the model pouts. She tilts her head, humoring me like a child. “Or did you mean your relationship with Max and George? Your poor dead mommies.”

  I grimace. Not easy facing off against a foe who I willingly let absorb every memory from my past. Yet “foes” still seems a strange word, so I return to my thesis.

  “I never detected this evil in you, in the small time we were together.”

  “Small time,” Matrioshka mocks. “You almost sound like we were in a relationship. And . . . ‘evil’?”

  “There was a relationship,” I say in my defense. “We were both in it.”

  “Then you obviously didn’t know me well. Or maybe you just learnt what I wanted you to hear. You’re a fool, Zephyr. A useful one, I must admit.”

  “Useful?” I almost dread repeating the word, feeling as vulnerable as I could be at this moment.

  Matrioshka tuts and laughs to herself. The woman she’s abducted is without a jacket in the chilly night air and she walks on heels deliberately, ponderously along the edge of the roof with her breath fogging up and her blouse turning translucent as she inches into the ambient arc lighting from the crime scene below.

  “Everyone has their uses,” she says softly.

  And so saying, steps up onto the edge.


  “Belle. Step back onto the roof.”

  She cranes her head back at me, riotous blonde mane like hair from an 80s pop clip the fashion of the day. Her look could at one and the same moment freeze my blood while driving passion into a frenzy, but that’s only me being able to see past the veil of the face she wears as a mask to hide the truth within.

  “I could jump,” she says. “I don’t fear death any longer, Zephyr. It’s lost its power over me.”

  “You can jump – and then you’d jump. This innocent woman would still die.”

  “Will still die. Like all of you. Unlike me.”

  “What, you’re . . . immortal now?”

  I actually laugh, albeit nervously.

  “Maybe the brave Zephyr would rather I take him and leave this innocent damsel to be . . . Oh hang on,” Matrioshka says mischievously. “You can’t play rescuer and bang the model if you’re dead, can you?”

  I try to focus on the immediate threat to my existence and let the insult to my heroic professionalism go through to the catcher. Fists on hips, I try to strike a pose that might encourage solemnity, only to find the blonde woman laughing again.

  “Oh Zephyr, you’re so precious.”

  And she leaps backward off the edge of the building.

  *

  IN AN INSTANT I dive over the edge, following the blonde as she plummets to a rendezvous with the mess Seagal’s already made on the sidewalk. I’m fast enough that I can catch her in my arms, clutch her against my chest and put on the brakes so hard that I land on the ground boots apart with a jarring thud, but nothing worse.

  The shocked woman twists in my arms, fighting like an alley cat to get free while crying hysterically. Setting her down, she staggers a few paces off and looks around with bedraggled hair and a terrified gaze, the cops and emergency workers and coronial staff and bystanders and a TV crew setting up all staring back at her like a weird mirror image of her own momentary insanity as she breaks down trying to understand where she is and what she’s just survived.

  Tiger Murphy is first to bolt forward, followed closely by Crane as the female detective shoots me a quick look demanding an explanation and I scan the crowd and cannot see anyone or anything looking back with the sort of knowing wink or nod to self-incrimination that might give me a handle on this situation.

  Realizing Matrioshka is gone again and I’ve somehow escaped untouched, again, I bunch my shoulders and join the huddle around the model and hope I can settle her down without revealing too much about what I might or might not know.

  Zephyr 16.8 “The Unlucky One”

  STREETHAWK FINDS ME like he always does, dawn not too many hours away and the circus-like crime scene at Seagal’s death site now mostly packed up.

  To the accompanying bugles of my stomach rumbling, we walk together through the not yet day-lit streets, a city that never truly sleeps anyway always alive, especially to my erstwhile sidekick, who wears several bands of white tape across his nose and under his eyes giving him a decidedly Native American look, the pale blue eyes and blonde Mohawk somehow more ode than mockery. As Streethawk lopes beside me, a feral dog of the urban prairie, his expression’s faraway as he connects with and reads the city with every fiber of his being. Fatigue linked to my own low energy state has me looking maudlin, too bent out of shape to care much about conversation except for the fact he’s deliberately sought me out, which means something is up.

  We get down near the Fabric District where most the latest clubs have set up, meaning there are plenty of food carts still weaving between the vomit-pebbled streets of this hedonistic Beirut. Amid a steady stream of early morning clubbers exiting staircases, staggering to taxis, snapping shots of me and Streethawk on their cells and just generally meandering about in the street like primates, underage girls freezing in their tiny dresses amid the prescience of snowfall, we eat burritos at my expense as the ‘Hawk finally tells me the reason for his visit.

  “I found her. The girl you asked about. Loren.”

  I am silent for a moment as I digest beans and Streethawk upends his burrito and sucks out its slippery red entrails, shredded lettuce on his chin before he signals for another.

  “Took you long enough,” I say sullenly, the retort a long time coming.

  The ‘Hawk reads my gaze perfectly. A slight sneer. Truculent meets sardonic.

  “Hurting, are you?”

  “It’s not easy being the man who deflowered humanity’s savior,” I admit.

  “Ever think about it another way? You saved her life.”

  “What?”

  “The name of the girl who blew up in that alien ship? What was it?”

  I sigh. A bum note plays from a saxophonist wasting his talents on yet more unappreciative, barely dressed girls who toss breath mints into his instrument case.

  “Candace.”

  “So she was the unlucky one,” Streethawk says. “Maybe you can take the credit for that kill. I dunno. You seem to have a lot of shit that keeps you up at night. Strange for a dude everyone thinks is such an asshole.”

  “I prefer you without the director’s commentary,” I say.

  Streethawk only gives a dry laugh.

  “Loren got lucky. You couldn’t say that now. She got to bang you and lost her powers, but just in the nick of time, yo.”

  “What do you mean, ‘couldn’t say that now’?” I ask.

  The vigilante just gives me a look.

  “I’ll show you. Eat up.”

  *

  FOR A GUY who can’t fly, Streethawk sets a pretty wicked pace as we cross the city. I ponder whether I should offer to pick him up and fly, but the gay subtext and my general disquiet, not to mention that despite the aesthetic pressures on gay guys, Streethawk smells faintly of garbage, it all adds up to discourage any sort of offer. Instead, I lumber after him feeling about as graceful as a bull in the proverbial, occasionally lighting into the air as Streethawk parkours over early morning traffic banked up headed for the nearly finished rebuild of the Hell Gate Bridge.

  The ‘Hawk uses every nook and cranny of the city to cut down the distances between him and our apparent target, unearthing disused subway lines, shortcuts through awakening restaurant kitchens and back alleyways that time seemingly forgot, snippets of old New York as palpable as ghosts crowding those back entrances, old stoops, enshadowed courtyards and urban alcoves of yesteryear, the denizens staring at us like it’s we who are the residents of some strange undercity rather than the daylight world of taxes and death.

  What used to be the Bronx is now a barrio with hardly anything in English except the names of the drugs hawked openly on street corners, the sun barely up little discouragement for the steady stream of early morning junkies either just waking up to get their fix or more likely coming down from a night’s scavenging to pay for their high.

  Descending into the barrio is like stepping into a sewer. The reptilian gazes of the steroid-cranked pushers and their muscle glaze over us, them trying to pull the act of somehow letting us know they see us and we’re no threat while at the same time palpably aware we can bust them into pieces if we decide. I am happy to let it go, if happy can be the word for the feeling of my late night snack threatening to clamber back up my throat like something from Ghostbusters and vomit out with the force of a fire hose, anticipation of what I will find and what I will even say if I see Loren occupying three-quarters of my brain, but I don’t know if it’s his own twisted sense of machismo or the custodianship he has for the street, but the ‘Hawk fronts up to several of these street soldiers, nothing queer about the repellent leer he pushes into their faces until the tough guys decide to look away, completely unreassured by the hardware tucked into their Diesel and Levi knock-offs.

  We tread down a paved alley between back room knock shops and Spanish gambling dens, more steely gazes looking up from mah jong and dominoes, open barrel fires doing something to cut against the morning chill as we glimpse the milky blue sky high above and far out of reach
reflected in the puddles of melting frost gathering between the early nineteenth century stone pavers.

  Streethawk nods to a set of steps up a steel railing and a doorless entrance, but he himself hangs back, reluctant or perhaps repentant to go beyond.

  “Seriously?”

  “Get in there, champ.”

  “Yeah,” I say in a leaden tone. “It’s funny, after all this time I’m not sure what to say –”

  “Just get the fuck in there, Zephyr. I’ll watch your back.”

  Rightly scolded, I bound up the stairs and into the gloom beyond.

  *

  THE GUY HALF-asleep on a rotting sofa leaps up at my entrance and seems to surprise us both by his hands bursting into spectral blue flames.

  He’s about my size, greasy black hair gelled into what the kids call a faux hawk, a quilted jacket above the inevitable white wife-beater and thick hank of gold chains. A single tiny tattoo like a Tolkien rune or something hovers beneath one eye like a frozen black tear drop.

  “Yo,” he says.

  And then the goon swings that glowing fist at me, though he may as well be in slow motion for all the good it does him. Adrenaline blasts through my veins and I slam my palm into the middle of his chest, hurling him back and away further down the hallway and past the doorway he was so poorly guarding.

  There is movement in the darkened room beyond, but the doorway goon is up again, those weird gaslight hands throwing blue ionic tracers around the trash-choked hall beneath a stairwell going higher up. I focus on the immediate threat, and as the guy gestures and hurls a blast of that strange energy my way, I grab the sofa on which he was reclining and fling the whole fucking thing at him, the flames blasting amid the rotted covers, rewarding me with a muffled thud.