by Rob Rogers
“I bet he was a little light in the loafers, you know what I mean,” Bilbray said, peering down at the broken hero.
Jason looked at him.
“You know, that shirt, that outfit.”
Jason wished he could close Swashbuckler’s eyes for him. The smell of the fire was beginning to die off as the normal smells of Devil’s Cape pushed through. Rotting vegetation and decay from the swamp, pollution from the cars and the factories, the sulfurous odor of the paper mill, a hint of flowers blooming somewhere in the distance.
“I’ll look into that,” Jason said dryly. “For my report.” He chewed on the inside of his cheek, almost asked Bilbray if he could quote him on that, but there wasn’t any point in antagonizing the man. They weren’t done here yet.
Bilbray smiled. Two of his front teeth were cracked and streaked with brown. “You got a good sense of humor,” he said. “Take after your uncle.”
God, I hope not, Jason thought.
The sergeant’s smile widened. “Hey,” he said. “You like pancakes?”
Jason raised his eyebrows, but didn’t answer.
“Come here,” Bilbray said. He led Jason over to the tarmac, then gestured expansively at what looked at first to be a pile of rubbish in the middle of a cracked pothole in the runway.
It was the Winged Tornado.
“Maybe waffle is a better word here,” Bilbray said, chuckling to himself, “or sausage patty.” But his amusement died as he saw the look on Jason’s face, and he dropped his eyes to the ground and shuffled from one foot to the other.
The Winged Tornado had been the newest member of the Storm Raiders, a tall young man with white, feathered wings like an angel’s growing from his back. No one knew where the wings had come from or how they worked—the hero had defied physics as he soared through the sky at breathtaking speeds. He’d worn a light gray Kevlar uniform covered with swirling cloud patterns, a stylized tornado emblazoned on his chest. A gray mask covered the top half of his face, reinforced by a lightweight metallic helmet, thin and aerodynamic like a bicyclist might wear.
He was a flattened mess now, broken and shattered and bloody, hardly recognizable as having been human.
“There’s one of the wings there,” Bilbray said, more subdued, pointing farther down the runway where a crime scene technician was snapping photographs. “And the other one landed near the plane.” He pointed again.
Each of the wings was intact, as wide as a tablecloth and nearly as flat. The feathers near the base of each wing where it had joined his back were red with gore, but the rest were pure white like a dove’s.
Jason could imagine this death, too. When the heroes were attacked, the Winged Tornado had burst out of the vehicle and straight up into the air, flying up high to position himself to help his teammates below. But Osprey had been up there waiting for him.
The first reports of the Cirque d’Obscurité had mentioned sightings of a young girl with wings, but she had never been identified and hadn’t participated in combat. But by the time the group was identified in Eastern Europe years later, that had changed. She was older and fiercer, bristling with knives. Special curved blades that extended from her gloves like talons. Long, triangular weapons called katars or Bundi daggers that she held by horizontal hand grips so that the razor-sharp blades sat above her knuckles, designed so that she could punch an enemy and drive the blade right into him. Bandoliers of slim throwing knives. If the Winged Tornado had resembled an angel, then she had resembled a cruel hawk. They called her Osprey and she was as deadly as any of them.
Jason pictured the Winged Tornado high in the night sky, not seeing Osprey swooping down toward him. She caught him there, clinging to his back with her talons and slashing with her knives. She severed his broad wings and they pinwheeled through the air like maple seeds. And then she simply let him fall hundreds of feet to the tarmac.
Jason tried not to think of the sound of the impact, tried not to wonder whether the hero had fallen silently and stoically to his death or had screamed all the way down.
He tried not to wonder whether he could have stopped all this, had he been there.
He closed his eyes, saying a silent prayer—he didn’t know to whom or what—for the Winged Tornado and the others. When he opened his eyes again, he saw District Attorney Warren Sims watching him from another part of the runway. Their eyes met, and then the D.A. turned away. Jason saw him wipe his forehead with a trembling hand. His face was slack and as he walked onto the grass, his steps were unsteady. At least someone else gave a damn, Jason thought.
“You ready, for the next one, Mr. Kalodimos?”
Jason didn’t correct the name this time. He just nodded.
They moved closer to the burned-out plane. Miss Chance lay sprawled on her back, a small red hole in the center of her forehead. Blood soaked into the dirt below her head, and if Jason had stepped to one side, he probably could have seen some of the damage that the bullet had done on its way out of her skull. He didn’t.
In the mid ’80s, Miss Chance had been considered a sex symbol to rival Madonna. Girls around the world donned purple and green harlequin masks in imitation of her. She’d been notorious for her low-cut uniform, curvy figure, and big hair. Jason had had a Miss Chance poster in his room.
And now he stared sadly at her corpse. She was in her mid-forties by now, but must still have been beautiful. The uniform was less revealing now, and more practical. She’d worn an armored purple jacket over a purple-and-green-striped unitard that stretched to just below her knees. Left shoe green, right shoe purple. The gloves just the opposite. Gold hoop earrings, a touch of lipstick, and that famous mottled green and purple mask. Her hair was shorter than in her youth, her skin as smooth as porcelain. Her eyes were shut, but there was no illusion that she was asleep. She was dead. She was gone.
“They killed her first,” Jason said.
“You think so?” Bilbray asked. He was curious, like he hadn’t given it much thought, like figuring out exactly what had happened didn’t much matter.
“She was the most dangerous,” Jason said.
Bilbray bit off a laugh. It came out like a wheeze. “Come on,” he said. “You’ve got Patriot who can bounce bullets off her tits and that Chink guy who can shoot lightning out of his ass. . .”
“Raiden was Japanese American,” Jason said quietly. And of course the lightning could come from anywhere and usually came from the man’s hands.
Bilbray pulled out the sweat-covered handkerchief and blew his nose loudly. “Whatever,” he said. “Me, I’d probably take him out first, then the black girl.” Patriot was black. She was also probably close to fifty. “Then maybe the dude with the wings and the faggot in the blouse.” Jason just looked at him. Bilbray gestured at Miss Chance with his handkerchief and went on. “I’d save her and the little guy for last.” By little guy, he meant Sam Small.
“Sergeant,” Jason said, “I owe you a favor and I owe you five hundred dollars, but if you don’t either shut the fuck up right now or start talking about these men and women with some degree of respect, I’m going to find some way to hurt you very badly.”
Bilbray stared back at him. His nostrils flared and he stuck out his chest. He dropped the handkerchief, which fluttered down and landed against the side of Miss Chance’s head. He balled his hands into fists. “I should—” He broke off, and Jason could feel him backing down. The chest dropped. The fists unclenched. The sergeant forced a laugh that sounded as artificial as a wind-up doll’s. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, you’re a lot more like your uncle than I thought.”
No, Jason thought. I’m a lot more like my father than you think. Instead, he looked back down at Miss Chance.
Bilbray followed the look and hurriedly snatched the handkerchief back up, shoving it into the depths of a pocket.
“She was supposed to use ‘luck magic,’ ” Jason said. “She manipulated probability. She and her powers were unpredictable. One time, she was in a warehouse and there
were fifteen hired gunmen there with rifles. She ended up with her back up against a wall and they lined up like a firing squad to kill her. Their rifles jammed. All fifteen at the same time. Most of them went for their sidearms, and those jammed, too. All but one of them, and he missed his shot. The ricochet came back and hit him in the chest. The rest of them gave up after that.” Jason shook his head. “She was the most dangerous,” he said again.
“This rifle didn’t jam,” Bilbray said. His tone was spiteful.
No, Jason thought. It didn’t jam because she didn’t know it was there. It was that shot that had announced the ambush.
Most of the Cirque d’Obscurité wouldn’t use rifles, Jason figured. They had other tools at their disposal. But there was one man with them—they called him Gork for some reason—who was a mass of burn scars. No real powers that Jason knew of, except that he was supposed to be either impervious to pain or in so much pain all the time from his injuries that additional pain didn’t make an impression on him. Kraken had waited nearby in the grass for the chance to grab someone, maybe planning to get Swashbuckler or maybe just seizing the first opportunity that came along. But Gork had been planted farther away, with a long-range rifle, a sniper scope, and one mission: to kill Miss Chance first. To take any luck out of the equation.
“How did they know?” Jason asked himself.
“What?” Bilbray’s voice was still angry.
“This was a carefully planned ambush,” he said. “How did they know when and where the Storm Raiders were going to be?”
Bilbray’s smile was smug and tight. “This is an ongoing investigation,” he said. “I can make no comment at this time.”
Jason turned his back on him and walked closer to the plane.
Patriot’s body lay close to the wreckage, curled on one side. Jason had known that she was big—“Amazonian” was a word often used to describe her in the press—but was still surprised at the sight of her. She must have been about seven feet tall, her body heavily muscular. She wore a flaglike uniform—blue boots; red pants; blue belt; a shirt half blue and half white, with half of a white star intruding into the blue; a blue and white mask that exposed her eyes, her mouth, and her forehead and hair; red gloves. Her skin was smooth and dark brown. She’d worn her hair long and in tight curls; the few white hairs stood in stark contrast to the black.
Patriot had been the leader of the team since Doctor Camelot had died more than twenty years earlier. She was bulletproof and could lift several tons, but the Cirque d’Obscurité had killed her.
Jason could see singe marks on the back of Patriot’s uniform, and pieces of debris in her hair. She’d been outside of the plane when it had exploded. The force of it must have been incredible, but it hadn’t been enough to throw her forward. There were no dirt stains on her knees or gloves, no marks in the ground to indicate that type of a fall.
Her neck was broken, her head twisted forward and to the right. Someone—it had to have been the Behemoth, the brutish strongman of the Cirque d’Obscurité—had come up behind her, perhaps even walking through the wreckage of the plane, and managed to snap her neck.
“Time to go,” Bilbray said. His voice was tense.
Looking up, Jason could see the mayor and chief of police looking in their direction. He nodded politely at them, then turned to stare at the Storm Raiders’ plane. Even though the fire crews had put out the fire, the heat coming off of the wreckage was sweltering. Hector Hell, he thought. The firemaker.
“Raiden?” Jason asked.
Bilbray chuckled a little despite his new urgency. “That nice aroma you smell isn’t baby back ribs,” he said. “It’s him. Blast blew him apart, fire cooked him. They found his head. No question, really.”
Jason sighed. He remembered images of he’d seen of the hero, who’d taken his name from a Japanese word meaning “thunder and lightning.” Raiden had worn a maroon karategi, or karate uniform, with a thick royal blue obi, or belt, and a sort of golden mantle on his shoulders. He was thin and muscular, with long, black hair he kept in a ponytail. His entire body seemed to crackle with electric sparks. He had never worn a mask, but it hadn’t seemed necessary, as the electricity that rippled across his body obscured his features. To Jason, Raiden had always seemed noble and brave, someone to emulate.
Something on the ground caught Jason’s attention.
“We gotta go,” Bilbray said. He put one hand on Jason’s arm at the wrist and the other at the elbow. It was a police technique. He could look like he was escorting someone politely, but all he needed to do was apply a little extra pressure at the wrist to cause pain and get the person to move along.
Jason didn’t budge. It would take someone far stronger than Dustin Bilbray to make Jason move when he didn’t want to. Still, he didn’t want to make a point out of it, didn’t want Bilbray to get an inkling of just how strong Jason really was. He twisted his arm out of the sergeant’s grip and squatted near the ground. “Just a second,” he said. A rusty coffee can lay on its side in the grass. Maxwell House. Good to the last drop. “What about Sam Small?” he asked.
Sam Small had been called the “six-inch man” because he had the ability to shrink himself to the size of a doll. He was shorter than his teammates even at full size, but athletically built, with thinning brown hair, tanned skin, and a ready smile. He wore a dark green uniform with brown leather gloves and boots, and reinforced leather padding at the shoulders and chest. His mask resembled a pair of green-tinted safety goggles, and he carried an assortment of tools on his belt. He was often underestimated, but his ability to strike from surprise and to use the size-changing ability to his advantage had helped his teammates often over the years. Even when at his smallest size, he was said to be able to lift as much—and hit as hard—as a full-sized man.
“Goddamn it,” Bilbray said, “the chief is going to have my ass if I don’t get you out of here.”
The word was that the chief was a friend of the Robber Baron’s. But that didn’t mean that the chief had any allegiance to Costas Kalodimos. The Robber Baron often pitted his friends against each other. And even if the chief were friendly with Uncle Costas, that didn’t mean that he would cut Jason any slack. And even if he cut Jason slack, it could be ugly for Bilbray. Jason looked up at Bilbray. “What about Sam Small?” he repeated.
Bilbray was sweating heavily. “Dead in the plane, we figure,” he said. “No sign of him. Probably cinders.”
Jason nodded and stood up. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.” And with one foot, he casually and carefully ground out any evidence of the tiny footprints he’d noticed in the dirt beside the coffee can. Sam Small, the six-inch hero, hadn’t been in the plane when it exploded. He might not be dead at all. But the Devil’s Cape police sure as hell didn’t need to know that.
* * * * *
At the WTDC truck, Koo was crunching sour cream and onion potato chips and listening to a Nirvana CD. He’d stuck the purple bubble gum behind one ear. “You know, if you get special access to a crime scene, a camera can be handy. I’m just saying.”
“Part of the deal,” Jason said shortly.
“See anything good?”
Jason shook his head.
“We done here?”
“No. We might get some more footage. The D.A.’s here. I’m going to try to interview him.”
Koo popped a chip into his mouth. He pointed. “Isn’t that his car driving away?”
It was. Sims’s tires squealed off into the darkness like he couldn’t get away fast enough.
“Got a plan B?” Koo asked.
Jason stared at the floor of the truck. He saw the Winged Tornado falling from the sky, saw the tidy red hole in Miss Chance’s forehead.
The Cirque d’Obscurité. Under orders from the Robber Baron. In a way, he’d been relieved to see evidence pointing to the carnival troupe—the methodology of the murders, the weapons used. Just last month, Jason had heard reports of a masked superhuman working for Costas Kalodimos. The masked
man, who called himself Scion, had demonstrated powers just like Jason and Julian’s—incredible strength and speed as well as flight. Jason had little doubt as to who the masked man was. But at least Julian hadn’t been responsible for this. Jason couldn’t imagine him working with others, particularly the Cirque d’Obscurité. Hector Hell and his teammates might work for the Robber Baron, and Uncle Costas might work for the Robber Baron, but Jason figured that they were rivals for power, regardless, just as the members of the Kalodimos crime organization were rivals with the Ferazzolis. “He plays them against each other,” he said.
“What’s that, ace?”
Jason looked at Koo. “Just figuring some things out,” he said.
“Y’okay,” Koo said. He stood up. “You do that.” He crumpled the potato chip bag and tossed it on the floor of the truck. “I’m gonna stretch my legs and see if there’s anything worth filming. You find something you want to point a camera at, you just shout, okay?” He pulled the gum from behind his ear, popped it back in his mouth, and climbed out of the truck, slamming the door behind him.
Jason took his glasses off and stared at them. The Storm Raiders had defended Vanguard City for decades. Devil’s Cape had murdered them within seconds. In many ways, he thought, they had come to a city as foreign to them as any in the world. They didn’t know how Devil’s Cape worked.
If they’d landed in a crowd of people, if they’d let the public know that they were on their way, they might have had a chance. Instead, they’d landed in a remote airstrip usually deserted at night. And they’d told someone that they were coming. Someone who’d told the Robber Baron, who’d sent the Cirque d’Obscurité.
