Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, babe. I’m the one who blew it.”

  “I loved you,” she says, almost anonymous for our proximity.

  “I know. I know.”

  Her hand slides past the peeled-back black banana skin of my costume and its instantaneous that my cock stiffens into her palm, swelling up like the squid-like pseudopod sex organs truly resemble without any conscience of their own.

  “Whoa,” I say and back off, Loren’s hand coming free with an elasticky snap. “No, honey. No.”

  “I need a fix, Joey. Please. I’ll pay you back.”

  I stare at her open-mouthed, appalled and somehow filled with loathing for myself as much as her for the creature that in her desperation she’s become. I know my part in this tragedy, and repent as much as I might like, it means little. Even my devil’s deal with the drug credit was meant to somehow assuage my culpability and it took less than a fortnight for it to fall apart.

  The shame of the moment descends on Loren as if she thought maybe this once it might not come. She starts to sob, hanging her head to hide herself the only way she knows how in plain sight. And I step forward, almost fatherly and hating myself for it as I curl a finger and lift her chin, smoothing away those tears that are surrogates for mine.

  “You need your medicine and I need to find Danica Azzurro,” I tell her. “We can help each other, Loren, if you’ll let me.”

  “But you’re going to try and shut them down,” she almost whimpers.

  “Think about what you need right now,” I say, feeling every inch the deeper cruelty and betrayal of my ploy. “Don’t think about what might or might not happen now or in a week or in a month.”

  “Fine,” she says drily.

  And she steps back, tears subsumed by a resurgence of a deep and palpable hurt, a thwarted longing, a cold-burning anger that appears as vast and alien to me as Cthulhu rising from the deep. The irony is lost on me at that very moment (though I reflect on it later) that I should adopt such a hurt look as Loren reflects back at me, cognizant of my betrayal, the reflexively unthinking willingness to use her as just another means to an end.

  “You have money?” she asks.

  “I can get money.”

  “I’ll get Ricky and Frank.”

  I nod and like a nymph from some urban fantasy gone wrong, Loren’s gone. And in a sense gone forever. And in a deeper sense, was gone a long time ago.

  *

  AS MY NEWFOUND friends ready their stuff, I catch some sunshine on the roof of the building where I battled Loren with Streethawk not long before. Twilight still isn’t answering calls, but as I get off the phone, it lights up with a familiar number I’ve been avoiding.

  Agent Vanguard on the line.

  “Zephyr, you piece of shit, where have you been hiding? We’ve got a city-wide search for your sorry ass,” he says disarmingly.

  “I thought you’d have bigger problems for your limited resources, agent.”

  “Don’t be cute with me, Zephyr. You couldn’t manage if you tried.”

  “We seem to have forgotten you crashing the wedding of the century already, hey Vanny?”

  “Cut the crap, Zephyr,” Vanguard says. “I’m here with Taurus and Miss Black. They say you made a deal. Now it’s your end of the bargain and your ass on the line.”

  “My ass on the line?” I say. “Really? You really do have a way with queer subtext, Vanguard, I’ll give you that. Do you want to come collect my ‘ass’? Is that it? Maybe I should withhold what I know so you can have the excuse to come rough me up like you’d like, huh?”

  “If you know something, God help me Zephyr, just spit it out.”

  “Spit or swallow?”

  At this point Vanguard becomes too frustrated for our phone call and amid a few clickings and beepings, Annie Black comes online and I don’t think it’s just me fancying myself as usual, but she sounds reluctantly bemused by Vanguard’s clear and present frustration.

  “Zephyr, it’s me. What’ve you got?”

  “I have an idea about a location for some of their dealers,” I say. “Given the Glow operation’s small scale so far, it might be a prime location.”

  “Small scale? You really have been out of the loop.”

  “Annie, I watch the news as much as anyone. If you think this is a Glow-powered crimewave, you haven’t seen anything yet. These guys are still testing the product and getting a solid base clientele. If they go wide with this shit there isn’t enough masks in the city to stop it descending into civil war.”

  “Great,” Annie says. “Let’s set up a meeting for tomorrow at main office. Ten o’clock’s free. We can discuss your intel and start drawing up a case plan.”

  “Case plan? Honey, I’m ready to roll right now. I’m on my way to a . . . you know, a frigging buy or whatever they call it.”

  “Zephyr, there’s no way we can lift a finger at a moment’s notice like that,” Agent Black tells me. “We need warrants, plus there’s the little matter of having to double-check all your intel first to make sure we’re not going to set off a major incident.”

  I hold the phone away from myself for a moment like a disappointed dad. Clearly this one’s going to be on me. Reluctantly, I return to the conversation, tone and enthusiasm dropped a few levels.

  “I’ll see you at ten,” I tell her. “We’ll see what we know by then.”

  I click disconnect, stare over the rooflines through sagging washing and bent satellite dishes for a few moments, then start thumbing through my contacts list with a look of benign regret.

  *

  AN HOUR LATER, the daylight is dying, strangled by the growing cloud cover fusing with the exhaust from low-flying aircraft descending over the city, and Mastodon, Streethawk, my daughter Windsong (yeah, a bad idea I know, but I’m desperate) and Negator stand with me. We engage in some light banter and I warmly jibe how Negator is really going to need a new handle if he keeps acting like such a good guy. With a little extra muscle lined up, I’m ready when Loren and her sorry crew clamber up behind me, the two Latino men looking uncertain as they flank my former lover.

  Loren’s eyes rake over the other costumes.

  “Are you ready?” she asks.

  It feels apropos to make a fist and smack it into my other palm and Negator gives a gay little laugh that makes me grin, feeling strangely good about our prospects.

  Ricky has arranged a minibus and we cram downstairs and into the vehicle, me and the other veterans swapping weird looks.

  “First time I’ve ever been chauffeured to an ass-whooping,” the ‘Don says.

  I catch Ricky making lingering eye contact with Streethawk and then he looks back at the rest of us apologetically.

  “It’s a fair distance and we’re not all flyers,” he says.

  Indeed, neither he, Gaslight or Loren have had a Glow hit today, so it’s more like we’re getting a tour of the barrio by its most pre-eminent car thieves than by its defenders. Nonetheless, and our garish attire notwithstanding, we consent to the bus drive and soon we’re crossing the I-98 and heading north-west.

  Atlantic City is a big place and this turns into a long drive. We start out grinning eagerly, adrenaline at work as we clamp head rests, chatter inanely, chew fingernails, boots tapping on the scuffed floor of the bus, but after thirty minutes it’s hard to maintain the momentum and a half-hour after that Windsong is the first to call it, borrowing Negator’s cloak to make a pillow and curling up in discomfort, muttering something about catching up on a late night at Club Capricorn.

  “You think the general public’s figured out about you two yet?” Negator asks.

  “I dunno,” I say and shrug and grin, pointing at him making gun fingers. “You think the public’s worked it out about you yet?”

  “Me? Ha, I’m nobody,” the former villain says. “This is my last suit, Zephyr. Once it’s wrecked, I’m out. I’m done. My uncle’s on his last legs. Runs a motor shop and store up in Maine. I might go up there and hel
p out.”

  “As a mechanic? Jesus, man. You can do better than that.”

  My blunt précis gives even Negator pause and I watch in pain as he moves his jaw with no sound coming out for a second or two as he frames his reply.

  “You know, Joe? Fuck you.”

  He looks away out the bus window and I sigh and the inner city countryside rolls on. Soon we are crossing the Hudson and moving into those northerly precincts, huge tenements blocks giving way to industrial complexes around what used to be Hackensack, rail yards, factories shutting down for the night with guard dogs patrolling the chain-link perimeters, taxi depots, courier warehouses, those sorts of self-storage farms where people from the suburbs have to drive halfway across the city to visit their extra possessions like elderly relatives in an aged care home.

  It gets dark and in this part of the city only some of the street lights come on.

  All the better for us.

  Zephyr 17.9 “Both Better And Worse Than Today”

  THE PLACE HAS drug lab written all over it. For once I’m not being literal here, but if you call a disused commercial dry cleaning complex with ten-foot brick walls topped in razor wire anything but choice real estate for an operation like this, then maybe you’re shooting up the product too.

  Ricky parks the minibus on an angle where we can see down the quiet street, nothing but businesses and warehouses and most of them shut for the night. Then his buddy Frank hops out of the bus with Loren and a little trepidation, the two hundred I cadged from Mastodon in Loren’s hot little hand.

  The pair cross the street in civilian clothes and head for the dead company’s gate. I catch my daughter’s cat-like stare of total contempt aimed Loren’s way. It’s hard to remember they were acquainted once under circumstances both better and worse than today. Before I can say anything, Mastodon picks at one of the huge fake tusks jutting from the rig around his collar, clearly missing the dollars already and knowing they ain’t coming back.

  “Explain to me the part of the plan where we need to sit here while they buy the stuff?” he asks me in that slightly dim-sounding voice of his.

  But he has a point.

  “Well old buddy, it’s a little like this. Loren and Frank scoring verifies we’re in the right place. It lets us scope out the operation a little. And once they have the gear and power up, we’ll have a couple of extra warm bodies to help out if we need it.”

  “You really think junkies who are relying on this stuff are gonna help us smash the ‘nefarious drug lord’, dad?” Windsong chimes in.

  The others swivel their gazes my way as if hoping for a reaction. Even Streethawk. I can only shrug. Streethawk shakes his head with a mild sardonic laugh and exits the side door by vaulting out, then crouching on the dirty sidewalk like a bloodhound with a scent as he performs his own unique brand of surveillance.

  Across the way I can barely see Loren and her companion under the light of a single bulb set athwart the gate beside a security camera. But money changes hands with an indistinct-looking man in a green parka. Moments later they hustle back and I know they’re not just in a hurry to share the good news.

  “If we mix the two bags and split it, there should be enough for three shots,” Loren says with flashing eyes that dim a moment later as she remembers we don’t all share her enthusiasm for experimental pharmaceuticals.

  “They’re in there?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “Two guys watching the gate with sniper rifles,” Streethawk says, appearing from practically nowhere as the shadows take over the urban decay outside the bus. “You’ve got a handler dealing with the gate in an old gate house hidden behind the brick wall from this angle. Then you’ve got at least a dozen people inside. It’s all lit up. Busy in there,” he says. “If this ain’t a drug factory, I’m Martha Stewart.”

  “So, how do you want to do this, Zeph?”

  Negator’s question smothers the dim-witted smile on my face, frown collapsing as I look out the windows of the minibus and track the pearl-hued light from the gate house. My eyes then switch back to Streethawk and he nods, reading my thoughts only because they’re so predictable.

  *

  THE FIRST SQUAD is me, Streethawk and Negator. As another flier, my idea was to take Loren, but to do that I’d have to stay and watch her and her boyfriends finish making their mix to inject themselves with the same hellacious strain of junk that’s led us all to this point. I don’t think I could stomach it: never a big fan of junkies, and then to see a woman I cared for brought down to that level is a penance I can’t shoulder.

  So the three of us roll out of the bus, the second squad nominally under Mastodon’s leadership agreeing to wait for their Glow-induced reinforcements before taking up a position near the gate ready to come once we’ve taken out the lab’s defenses.

  Although Streethawk is nominally ground-bound, Negator and I are on tippy toes waiting for him to lead the way, which he does in a measured sprint across the road where he then bounds up the brick wall and over the concreted broken glass and slashing wire in some crazy-ass Jackie Chan move that leaves us on the back foot, two dark-clad figures jetting hard and fast into the sky to avoid prying eyes as Streethawk karate chops and roundhouse kicks the goon in the gate house.

  The snipers across the open lot don’t get the chance to say boo. Hidden in a nook atop the faded, guano-spotted asbestos roof, they look out in perplexity at the sight of a man in faded denim kickboxing their gatekeeper to pieces, scrambling to heft their hardware as we crash down from above. Our arrival isn’t exactly a stealth mission as we crash through the impromptu walkway the snipers use for their nest, continuing down into the arc-lit chaos of the laboratory below.

  There’s a dozen drug lab workers in white coats and face masks. Long tables. An actual conveyor belt for something or other. Rows and rows of metal cabinets. Trolleys. A forklift. Stacks of wooden pallets. Cardboard boxes open with supplies. An enclosed metal cool room. A Perspex box like a newspaper editor’s office overseeing the labor zone. Several goons in flak jackets with shotguns and Tec-9s pausing in their patrol to gawp at us.

  Negator and I stand up back-to-back, dusting bits of crap off us as what passes for security around here wakes up, puts their collective jaws back into place, and swing their automatics in our direction.

  “Don’t move for a second,” Negator whispers.

  I have to trust my one-time enemy as three goons plus three of the closest lab workers open up on us with everything they’ve got.

  But Negator has us covered. The bullets and shotgun rounds hit a shield of disintegrating energy in a sphere around us that only flickers into visibility as the metal fragments are neutralized. The firestorm goes on a few seconds, not a man-jack amongst them thinking to hold rounds in reserve to cover their buddies reloading, so the moment the last cartridge ejects and brass-jacketed shells finish tinkling to the ground, Negator gives a feral grin and we launch at the defenders, each going our separate ways.

  The closest guard tries swinging the shotgun like a baseball bat, but I duck under the blow easily and stiff-arm the guy hard enough that he flies about ten yards and backwards into a conveyor belt which clotheslines him onto a sticky carpeted walkway from where he lies clutching his kidneys and moaning. Before any of this has really registered, I twist 180-degrees and kick the handgun from the next asshole’s hand before crossing his jaw with a bitter left. Before he can slump to the ground senseless I grab him by the white smock and hurl him into the third guy desperately backing away trying to pull a fresh clip from his jeans. They go down like lovers and I Taser them where they lay.

  I look back to see Negator’s similarly dealt with the other immediate threats, ruthless abandon in his final takedown. He glances at me across the lab still erupting into chaos and gives a curt nod before vaulting back into the air through the hole we made on entry, sending the signal to the others if they didn’t get it already.

  “Alright you pieces of shit,” I yell loud over
the still echoing traces of gunfire. “We’re shutting you down and you’re gonna give up Danica Azzurro!”

  I look around at the closest three guys who haven’t yet shat their pants and made a run for it, each glancing to the other as if awaiting some crucial semaphore. Outside of the rush of battle, they look like college kids who made just one bad decision too many when choosing jobs for the summer – admittedly in the summer of 2003 maybe. The one in the middle who wears his stubble like a kid seeking approval for being able to grow it shoots me a confused frown.

  “Miss Azzurro? You’re not gonna get her here.”

  “No shit,” I say. “You can tell me where to find her though.”

  The lab workers are still parsing this one, shooting looks between each other I realize a moment too late is a shorthand of another kind.

  I only catch the quick movement by a fluke of peripheral vision and then the green streak is on me.

  *

  IT’S BEEN A while since I tussled with Raptor, but it’s not easy to forget a lizard guy with a third hand on his tail, and when I cleaned out the Juggalo gang house he was guarding, as I remember right – or maybe I should say, what little I remember right – he left a pretty dramatic calling card I have to assume is still at his disposal.

  I dodge right as one of his raking fists whistles past my ear. I roll backwards over a table festooned with kilo bags of what’s probably Glow on its way to market debut, and to his credit, the diminutive villain-for-hire holds back his follow-up swing at the last moment for fear of making the stuff airborne.

  I am not so restrained.

  Opening my palm, a blast of spectral lightning lances out and its only Raptor’s lizard-quick reflexes that save him. The guy standing nearby isn’t so lucky and goes down in a bowel-voiding heap.

  It’s at this moment the main warehouse loading doors swing open and Mastodon charges in, flattening several otherwise innocent workers fleeing in that direction, while Windsong, Negator and Seeker flutter through followed by Streethawk, the glowing Gaslight and mud-armored brick Rocky. He’s gonna have to do something about the copyright on that name, though I guess at the level he’s playing at it’s probably not the problem it could be.