Devil's Cape

by Rob Rogers

  “Air ball,” Salazar said. “H to H-O.” He held out the ball.

  Cain took it and dribbled it a couple of times. Each time it hit the asphalt, the sound echoed around them. He jerked his head at the basketball goal. “Two dribbles, then a jump shot,” he said. He dribbled the ball forward, then jumped up toward the hoop, throwing the ball. It slid through.

  Salazar took the ball. “That’s it?” he asked. “You just didn’t want the trouble?”

  Cain turned and looked at him. “You here about Tyrell?” he asked.

  Salazar dribbled the ball up and jumped. He didn’t get as high as Cain had, but the ball went right where it was supposed to. He smiled in satisfaction. “Nope,” he said.

  The ball rolled to the edge of the court, where Cain snatched it up. The grass lawn next to the asphalt was filled with weeds. There was an ant pile the size of a hubcap off to one side and Cain stood there for a few seconds, watching ants climbing in and out of the dirt. He turned back to Salazar. “Do you even know why you’re here?” he asked.

  Salazar frowned and pushed his thinning hair back. “No real reason,” he said. “Someone told me about the attack and I thought I’d check on you.”

  “Why?”

  Salazar looked annoyed. “You going to give me the ball?” he said.

  Cain bounced it to him.

  The detective turned the ball over in his hands, looking from it to the hoop and back again. He avoided looking at Cain.

  “If you were like a lot of cops,” Cain said, “you just would have shot me that night.”

  Salazar shrugged. “Off the backboard,” he said. He threw the ball, which bounced off of the backboard, circled the rim twice, and dropped through the net. He snatched it up on the bounce.

  “If I’d killed Tyrell yesterday after you left me alive,” Cain said, “that might have been your fault, you want to look at it that way.”

  Salazar threw the ball to Cain, harder than he needed to. “I don’t,” he said.

  Cain stepped forward. “You’re here because you want to make sure you did the right thing in talking me out of shooting myself,” he said. “You want to make sure that wasn’t a mistake. You want me to—” He broke off, suddenly unsure of himself. He threw the ball. It arced gracefully through the net. “You want me to be good,” he said quietly. The words felt odd to him.

  Salazar stood watching the ball bounce away. “I said off the backboard,” he said. “That’s H-O to H-O.”

  A ray of sunlight broke through the clouds. Cain squinted. The ball had rolled into the grass, but neither of them moved to get it. They looked at the ball, not each other. “I made you mad,” Cain said. His skin felt hot. His heart was pounding. He didn’t want Salazar mad at him, but he didn’t know why it mattered.

  Salazar looked up at him then. He sighed. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. He walked over to get the ball, his cop shoes crunching the dry grass. “I’ve had a long, long week,” he said. “I saw a lot of bad things this week.” He bent down and picked up the basketball. “Then I heard someone—” He looked at Cain. “It was Dustin Bilbray, actually. I bumped into him at this gas station last night and he was laughing about how you almost got killed yesterday.” He put the ball under one arm and just stood there, watching Cain. “I didn’t know why I came here. I just did.”

  At another time, the thought of Bilbray laughing at him would have enraged Cain. But now he barely found himself picturing the man. Instead, he thought of Jazz flying backward. He could see her blood pooling on the street. He could hear 5-D sobbing. He could almost taste RC and Jim Beam, like bile in his throat. He felt sad. “I’m not any good, Salazar,” he said. “Not killing Tyrell doesn’t make me good.”

  Salazar didn’t move. “Maybe not,” he said.

  Cain swallowed. “If you came here looking for me to be a better man than I was, you’re going to be disappointed,” he said.

  “Maybe so,” Salazar said.

  Cain looked away.

  “When I met you,” Salazar said, “you didn’t notice anyone but Cain Ducett.” He bounced the ball to Cain, who caught it. “Back then, you would have killed Tyrell Smith without thinking about it. You might have wondered what I was doing here, but you would have been looking for angles to work.”

  Cain looked back at him now.

  “Instead,” Salazar continued, “you put yourself in my head. You thought of someone other than yourself long enough to pick my brain apart. I’ve had to meet with police shrinks half a dozen times after one incident or another and they’ve never gotten me to understand a damn thing about myself I didn’t already know. You did it in less than five minutes. That’s empathy.” He nodded. “That’s progress. That’s something.”

  Cain felt like he might cry. He blinked and turned his head toward the sunlight. “It’s H-O to H-O, isn’t it?” he said. “We’re never going to finish the game if you keep talking.” He dribbled the ball and set up his next shot. The wind was picking up a little more now. He thought he could smell the ocean.

  When the first Doctor Camelot retired, a second took his place immediately. That Doctor Camelot, in turn, was succeeded by a third, perhaps the most impressive and heroic of them all. When he died, Vanguard City waited with bated breath for a new Doctor Camelot to pick up his standard, to carry on his good works, to pull the sword from the stone, so to speak. But he never came.

  — Excerpted from “Whence Camelot: Five years later,” by Leslie Flannigan, Vanguard City Crier

  Chapter Ten

  Vanguard City, Connecticut

  Mid-June, sixteen years ago

  It was just a stupid accident that Kate Brauer ever stumbled on the picture. Her mother, Angela Brauer, usually kept it hidden away with everything else she kept hidden away. But the week before Kate came back from Cambridge for summer vacation, Angela had gotten word that Kate’s “Uncle” Charles had been diagnosed with leukemia, and she’d retrieved the photo and wept over it a bit, then stuffed it in a bureau drawer under a stack of clothes and forgotten about it.

  If Kate hadn’t brought home so much dirty laundry, if she hadn’t found herself desperately needing a clean T-shirt her first afternoon back while her mother was off at work, if she hadn’t gone looking for something to wear in her mother’s bureau, if she’d settled for the first, the second, or even the fifth T-shirt that she came across, Kate might have lived out her life blithely unaware of the truth about her father.

  Kate tossed aside a solid blue shirt in disgust when she realized that it had a pale bleach stain marring one sleeve, then reached back into the drawer, intent on pulling out the whole stack of shirts she saw. Her fingernail caught against something hard and she felt it tear. She swore, pulled the drawer the rest of the way out, and reached inside more carefully to see what was responsible for her broken nail.

  It was a simple wooden picture frame, holding a group portrait of her father with several of his friends, her “aunts” and “uncles.” She blinked. At first, she thought it had to be from a Halloween party. But it didn’t make any sense. Her father had kept his friends more or less separate. They didn’t really even know each other. Uncle Rinji he’d met through work, Uncle Samuel through . . . well, college, wasn’t it? Aunt Vikki through the Citizen’s Action Committee. She’d had to introduce several of them to each other at her father’s funeral. But here they were, together, their arms around each other and her father, glomming for the camera.

  And their costumes . . .

  Uncle Rinji was dressed as Raiden. He was wearing his glasses, of course—he couldn’t see without them—while Raiden wore none, and his hair was looser and more flowing than Raiden’s ever was, but still . . . Aunt Vikki wore a Miss Chance costume, the low-cut one the hero had worn back in the mid-80s until that silly fight with the Mastermime, when the villain had yanked her top down and taken a picture. Her Miss Chance mask was hanging loosely around her neck. Uncle Samuel was dressed as Sam Small, just with no mask in sight. Uncle Charles wore a maskless
Swashbuckler costume, Aunt Tanja looked like Patriot, and Uncle Jose was half-covered in some kind of latex makeup job that made him resemble Velociraptor. And her father . . .

  Her father, smiling at the camera, his eyes twinkling, wore the armor of Doctor Camelot, the helmet in the crook of one arm.

  Kate sat staring at the photo for perhaps twenty minutes, her quest for a T-shirt abandoned and her torn fingernail forgotten. Then she set the frame down on top of the bureau and left the room, her mother’s shirts still scattered across the carpet.

  Once she’d figured it out, once she put her mind to it, it took her only fifteen minutes to find her father’s hidden lab. She knew it had to be in the basement—she’d found him coming out of there any number of times in her childhood, smelling faintly of Old Spice and motor oil. Once or twice, she’d even walked down there looking for him—it was forbidden territory, of course—only to come up empty, yet with him later emerging, a smile on his face, as if the room hadn’t been completely vacant a scant few minutes before.

  She was a more sophisticated searcher now. She tapped walls and bookshelves, the ceiling and the floor, comparing the sounds, until she had a good idea where the door had to be. And the hidden switch was obvious once she knew what to look for. It was disguised under a small knothole in the wooden book cabinet, right behind Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. He must have grinned to himself about that one, she thought.

  She’d deduced that the hidden entrance was in the wall decorated with the framed album covers he’d treasured. “Ella and Duke at The Côte D’Azur,” Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” “Tito Puente and his Concert Orchestra,” and a dozen others, including, she realized with another touch of warmth for her father’s humor, the soundtrack of Camelot. As she explored the walls, she noticed that each frame was attached to the wall at all four corners. It might just have been meticulous care, but she calculated that it was actually insurance that they wouldn’t become tilted or dislodged when the wall itself moved.

  She stared at the album covers for a full minute, her finger poised by the knothole, heart beating fast. Then she pulled the switch.

  The wall silently slid backward six inches, then glided sideways until it was gone. She was amazed at how quiet it was, even after all this time. Her own breathing was louder than that moving wall. She closed her eyes for a second as a soft rush of cool, clean, ionized air swept out of the opening and over her. Then she opened her eyes and walked inside.

  She’d been expecting a small room, but instead, she found herself at the top of a tall, broad staircase leading down into a chamber as large as a gymnasium, if not quite as tall. As she walked down the cut stone steps, squinting her eyes at the incandescent lights and the bright white paint of the walls, she thought first not of her father, but of Uncle Samuel, who’d sat so patiently next to her and lied so badly, though she hadn’t realized it at time.

  Her father, ever organized, ever methodical, had divided the room into sections.

  The first, glittering with chrome, held equipment he must have used in designing and developing the Doctor Camelot armor and its systems. There was a large lathe, a series of diamond-headed drills, an air compressor, welding equipment, a pair of injection molding machines, a durometer for measuring the hardness of rubbers and polymers, and more she couldn’t identify. She walked along his worktables there, her fingers tracing the blueprints and diagrams. There were dozens of note cards in his precise handwriting, some of them in small stacks and others clipped or stapled above different pieces he’d been working on. At the center of it all was a single comfortable office chair on well-worn casters, and she could imagine him rolling himself from one spot to another in an excited fury of work and experimentation, a pencil clasped in his teeth. She sat in it for a minute, the wheels squeaking a little in protest. His presence was strong there as she rolled herself gently from one station to another with her feet. It felt to her almost like she was a young girl again, sitting in his lap.

  She stood. The next section contrasted starkly with the metal and tools. It was a small workout area with a punching bag, a jump rope, and a series of weights. A hooded New England Patriots sweatshirt she’d given him the Christmas before he died hung on a peg on the wall. She leaned down and held it against her face and imagined that she could smell Old Spice.

  Beside the punching bag extended a long, narrow reinforced tunnel that served as a firing range. Colorful paper targets decorated the far wall, which was nicked and singed by whatever armaments her father had tested there. Another tunnel opened right out of the ceiling at the end of the range. It had no handrails—the only way anyone could travel through it was to fly. An alternate exit, she guessed.

  There was a trophy area. Notes that had been sent to Doctor Camelot. Crayon pictures from kids. A headless robot with a plaque reading Deadlock’s combat drone X7-J. The signature metallic shield and sword of the first Doctor Camelot. A chest plate from an earlier version of the Doctor Camelot powered armor, the metal ripped; a plaque beside that one read Torn by Lionman’s claws. There was a clown car and a tusk from a woolly mammoth and a Polish 37 mm anti-tank gun.

  The final section seemed to be devoted to research. There were several microscopes, an infrared spectrometer, a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, a centrifuge, an X-ray machine, photographic equipment, and other pieces. There was also a large computer with several monitors. Everything still seemed to be running, or had turned on when she opened the door. Lights blinked on the equipment and she was just barely conscious of a quiet electronic hum. There were stacks of note cards here, too, and some posted to corkboards. All were placed evenly, neatly squared, except for a single card near the computer, set at an angle, as though perhaps it was the last one he had been working on. She bent over it, reading her father’s words, and her breath caught in her throat:

  Mercenaries.

  Circus or carnival sideshow acts?

  Cirque d’Obscurité.

  Roscoe Clay Bridge, planned attack, 8:32 a.m. matching Judge McBain’s commute.

  On a Friday in early April, six years earlier, just before 8:30 in the morning, the Storm Raiders had confronted a group of superhuman sideshow freaks who were making preparations to collapse the Roscoe Clay Bridge. The bridge, which crossed the Connecticut River, was the sprawling, gleaming symbol of Vanguard City, an architectural wonder of steel designed with the cubic forms and zigzag lines of art deco so typical of the city. The saboteurs had all previously worked for a small traveling carnival called Ma’s Spectacular Amusements, but had split off from the main act a few months before to form their own troupe, which they called the Cirque d’Obscurité, or the Circus of Darkness. In the months following the attack on the bridge, the troupe would be linked to a variety of crimes across the United States and beyond, but at that time, they were known only as an interesting group of performers making their way from one suburban performance to another. The Storm Raiders had approached them expecting a fight, but had badly underestimated the abilities of the Cirque d’Obscurité. The heroes prevented the destruction of the bridge, but Doctor Camelot, the team’s leader, was killed by the carnival strongman called the Behemoth, and in the chaos that followed, the carnival troupe escaped. They were still at large.

  Kate stood bent over that note, picturing her father. She’d been told he’d died working late at the office on a Thursday, the night before Doctor Camelot had died, but that had been a lie. He’d spent that night here in his secret room, piecing together information, deducing the threat to the bridge and presumably rushing off to stop it. And that deduction might have saved hundreds of lives, but it had doomed him.

  The death of Doctor Camelot had always seemed abstract to her, overshadowed as it was by the reality of her father’s death. But now she was re-imagining things, seeing her father in that armor, associating her father with the hero and his death, seeing the other Storm Raiders not as distant icons, but as her parents’ closest friends.

  “Now I know w
hy she wouldn’t turn off the damn TV,” she said to the empty room. And then she began to cry.

  For Palm-Reading, Tarot Reading, Voodoo Cursing, and All That Jazz, call or visit . . .

  — A business card left by public telephones and park benches across Devil’s Cape

  Chapter Eleven

  Devil’s Cape, Louisiana

  Two days ago

  Jessica Rydland didn’t go by any name but Jazz anymore. It suited her. Like the music she took her name from, Jazz was a mass of contradictions, varying rhythms, and improvisations. She was at times criminal, patriot, anarchist, philanthropist, coward, atavist, miser, and dreamer. She digested voodoo, tarot, phrenology, Mayan spirituality, crystal theory, SETI, astral travel, parapsychology, Kabbalah, and marijuana in roughly equal measure. Most of the time, she realized, she was stumbling through the edges of the vast, unknowable world, touching on truths that she could barely understand, much less communicate to others.

  But sometimes, every once in a while, she channeled something greater than herself. She found herself bristling, electrified with power and certainty that defied explanation. It had been that way for her that hot day on the sidewalk when Cain Ducett had quite nearly murdered her. Filled with rage and a strange vision of things to come, she’d focused every bit of her will on laying a curse on Cain. She’d envisioned him changing, his beautiful face and body warping into a form as hideous and hateful as his soul. And she’d made it happen.

  Jazz ran an anemic fortune-telling business out of her home at the edge of the tourist-friendly Silver Swan district, just where the district began to run into the crime-ridden neighborhood of Crabb’s Lament. Years ago, she had purchased a run-down shotgun house. Common in nineteenth century Devil’s Cape and New Orleans, shotgun houses were narrow, rectangular buildings constructed on top of brick piers. They were built without hallways; each room simply ran into the next one all the way to the back of the house. Hers was actually a double shotgun home, with two sets of rooms running side by side to the back, with a camelback, or shortened second story, toward the rear.