by Rob Rogers
Joe had gotten his own start in the CEs by hanging around one of them, a fifteen-year-old named Ronzelle Davis who was sleeping with a seventeen-year-old girl from St. Bartholomew’s. Ronzelle had skin the color of coffee and cream, and had carved a lightning bolt into his hair. He barely noticed Joe at first, but after Joe followed him around like a puppy dog for a few days, he’d taken to patting the boy on his head. Then he started giving him errands. First, Joe just ran back and forth between Ronzelle and the girl, who was white and blonde and used hair spray that smelled like bubble gum.
Then he started doing more. He was a lookout once, when Ronzelle and some of the other CEs broke into a liquor store owned by a Mexican with graying hair and thick glasses. Ronzelle gave him one of those air horns he’d heard at basketball games, a white can with a big red nozzle that sounded out loud when you activated it. He’d stood there in front of the store, hands trembling, watching for the police or a rival gang or a good Samaritan, ready to warn Ronzelle and his friends at the first hint of trouble. But no one had come. No one came when they shattered the Mexican’s window with a pair of aluminum baseball bats, sending the plate glass shards flying to the far wall of the store. No one came when they broke the case of tequila and Ronzelle shoved the Mexican’s face into the pool of it on the floor, forcing the man to lick the floor and cut his tongue. No one came when Ronzelle swung his bat into the Mexican’s knee, which snapped audibly and forced the stoic man into soft sobs of pain. It was Devil’s Cape, after all, and no one came.
Another time he held a gun for Ronzelle, who decided that his girlfriend from St. Bartholomew’s was getting too friendly with a boy from her neighborhood. Ronzelle gave him the gun early one afternoon after school, slipping it into Joe’s Power Rangers backpack while no one was watching.
Joe hadn’t been able to help himself. He’d gone into the stall at the men’s room at McDonald’s and pulled the pistol out, staring at it. Later, he’d know more about guns, and this one in particular—a Rossi .38 special double-action revolver. It carried five shots and its two-inch barrel made it easy to conceal.
But that afternoon, Joe simply knew it as a gun. It felt heavy in his hand, its stainless steel barrel glinting in the florescent lighting of the men’s room, its rubber grip comfortable against his palm. He lifted the pistol toward his face, afraid to point it at himself, afraid to look down the barrel, afraid to cock it. Reverently, he stared into the steel, finding his own reflection. He sniffed it, the smell of gun oil faint compared to the scent of french fries nearby.
Ronzelle bought Joe an ice cream cone that afternoon, and a bag of fries, and Joe walked happily with him a few blocks out of their neighborhood, walking tall with the knowledge of the gun in his backpack, chattering and smiling with Ronzelle while dipping his fries into the ice cream and munching them down, the salty in the sweet.
After a few minutes, they came across the boy who’d been hanging around Ronzelle’s girlfriend. The boy was about Ronzelle’s age, white, with dark hair slicked back and an easy grin. He wore pine-scented aftershave and his voice cracked when he spoke.
Ronzelle asked him for a smoke, then in the space of less than twenty seconds, reached into Joe’s pack, pulled out the .38 special, shoved it into the other boy’s belly, pulled the trigger, wiped the pistol off on his shirt, and dropped it back into Joe’s pack. The boy sat on the ground, open-mouthed, tears rising to his eyes, clutching his stomach. His white hands quickly turned red. “Run,” Ronzelle had said, giving Joe a little push in one direction and then sprinting off in another. And after a few seconds of staring at the dying boy, Joe had run.
The next morning, Ronzelle had told Joe that he was a CE now, and that he had to keep what had happened a secret.
It hadn’t mattered, though. The boy Ronzelle had killed had been a nephew of crime boss Tony Ferazzoli, and Ronzelle was found later that afternoon in the freezer of a butcher’s shop, stabbed thirty-seven times with an ice pick.
Three years later, Joe had kids following after him as he had with Ronzelle. He was used to guns now and had several, including the one that Ronzelle had asked him to hold that afternoon long ago. That one had held a special fascination for him. It hadn’t been lucky for Tony Ferazzoli’s nephew, and it hadn’t been lucky for Ronzelle, but perhaps, he always thought, it would be lucky for him.
And he was right. It would.
In Devil’s Cape, summer heat was as much a threat to the city’s citizens as its criminals were. It bathed them in sweat, stole the moisture from their bodies, incited them to violence. Devil’s Cape, as befitted its pirating heritage, was a city of late nights, bars open at all hours, and general carousing. But in the summertime, people stayed out especially late, the heat unrelenting even in darkness, keeping them awake, invading their dreams, driving them to the streets.
It drove Joe to the streets that night, Ronzelle’s Rossi .38 special tucked into the waist of his cut-off shorts, sweat clinging to his body. Cars were scuttling their way through the city’s twisted streets, horns were blaring even this late at night, and the air was stagnant with the heat. Whatever breezes the nearby Gulf should have been bringing in were stymied somewhere, never reaching the corner where Joe stood with his friends and flunkies. Leaning against the door of a corner bar called Vern’s, he was reduced to fanning himself with a Storm Raiders comic book he’d grabbed from one of the kids who flocked around whenever the CEs came by. He smelled fried chicken and something rancid from a nearby dumpster.
On a normal night, Joe and his friends wouldn’t have bothered messing with the guy in the dented blue Toyota. There was just no advantage in it. The guy—he had reddish-brown hair that needed a trim, a T-shirt for some water park in Wisconsin pulled over a heavy waist, and a red plastic watch he’d probably gotten out of a vending machine for fifty cents—didn’t look worth robbing. His car wasn’t worth much, and it wasn’t like he did anything to provoke them.
But it was that Devil’s Cape heat.
It wrapped around them, put them on edge. They reeked of the heat. They thought of little but how hot they were and how annoyed they were—with each other, with the world, with the heat. And with that stranger in the Toyota who stopped on the street in front of them, trying to decide if he wanted to go into Vern’s for a beer or not, the exhaust from the car’s tailpipe wafting slowly into Joe’s space, his corner, the pungent scent of it making him suddenly determined to beat the man who brought it to him.
So without really giving it much thought, Joe walked forward and banged on the Toyota’s hood with his fist, making the car shake. “You moving?” he asked the man loudly. “ ’Cause you in my space.” He sidestepped his way around the front of the car, his eyes locked on the man inside, angry at the man’s surprised face, angry that the man wasn’t already moving the hell away, angry that his hand hurt from where he’d bashed the hood. “You hear me, Opie?” he asked, trying to shake the feeling back into his hand, feeling for a second the warmth of Ronzelle’s .38 special tucked precariously into his pants. “I don’t want to smell your car anymore.”
The man in the car was realizing his predicament then, but it was already too late. Joe was leaning up against the driver’s window. Dwayne—more than six feet and two hundred pounds at sixteen years old, always bored, always anxious for some action—had stepped forward and kicked one of the headlights out with the heel of his shoe. Myrell had spread all ten fingers out against the passenger window, leaning forward and pressing his broken nose against it, too. Twelve-year-old JZ, eager to join the CEs, had climbed up on the trunk. Another kid, Isaac, was pulling on one of the windshield wipers.
The man honked his horn then. He was afraid, but he was afraid to run them over, too. But that just made Joe and his friends angrier. Dwayne kicked out the other headlight, Isaac yanked the wiper off, and Joe pulled out Ronzelle’s pistol and stuck it against the glass. “You’re giving us your car now, Opie,” he said, wondering then if Dwayne or Myrell knew how to drive. “You get out of
the car and give me your keys and maybe I won’t cap you.” On the trunk, JZ whooped and kicked his feet. The man honked his horn again, but Joe knew that no one would come running. It was Devil’s Cape, after all.
“You going to kill him?” JZ asked, excited.
Joe tapped the glass with his pistol, then stuck it back into his shorts. What would Ronzelle have done, he wondered. “I might,” he said. Then he nodded at Myrell, who pulled his torn old T-shirt off, wrapped it around his elbow, and then used that elbow to hit the passenger window hard, sending deep white cracks through it with his first blow.
And then, as he readied himself for his second hit against the window, Myrell just suddenly disappeared from view.
“Myrell?” Joe asked.
“What the hell?” said JZ.
Myrell dropped from the sky and tumbled to the sidewalk in front of them. They all stared at him, backing away from the Toyota, no one reaching out a hand to help him. Then, in almost comical unison, they turned their heads upward.
A man floated in the air about twenty feet above their heads, hands on his hips, wearing a navy blue and gold uniform. A tight cowl covered the top of his head and his nose, the eyes hidden from view by white-tinted lenses. Joe could see his mouth and chin, his skin tan against the blue of the cowl, the chin strong and set, the mouth turned in the faintest hint of a grin. The uniform covered him tightly from his neck to his toes. He was tall and muscular, though not a body builder. More like a quarterback or a middleweight boxer. The navy blue was broken by sections of gold, as well as thick dark-brown leather. A huge blue cape hung from his back nearly to his ankles, rustling in a breeze that Joe and his friends could not feel.
“Leave the man in the car alone,” the flying man said, “and go home.”
JZ and Isaac hit the sidewalk running, sprinting away from the man as quickly as they could. Myrell pulled himself slowly to his feet, obviously hurt by his fall. But Dwayne and Joe were slower to move.
Dwayne glanced at Joe, ran his tongue over his lips, and crossed his arms, one foot on the Toyota’s bumper. “Make me,” he said simply.
The flying man shook his head. Then, in a lightning-fast motion, he swooped down toward Dwayne, flying at him head-first, and slammed a fist into Dwayne’s gut.
The punch knocked Dwayne a couple of feet in the air and he fell backward into the street, moaning.
But when the flying man turned and moved toward Joe, Joe pulled out Ronzelle’s Rossi .38 special stainless steel double-action revolver with the two-inch barrel and shot him in the eye.
One of the white lenses in the flying man’s mask shattered on the impact and the flying man cried out and collapsed beside the Toyota, laying there panting on his hands and knees.
Joe shot him again, in the ribs this time, then shot him three more times before the gun was empty. “Don’t mess with the CEs,” he said softly. Then he dry-fired the pistol once at the terrified man in the Toyota and started backing away.
The man in the uniform stood up.
Joe stared at him, his mouth dry and open, Ronzelle’s gun warm in his hand. Dwayne and Myrell were already stumbling away, Dwayne clutching his gut and Myrell limping. And then he ran, too, toward home, sprinting as fast as he could.
He didn’t see the masked man fly back off into the sky behind him, one hand over his injured eye, shivering despite the Devil’s Cape heat.
The third Doctor Camelot never patented his weapons, never made his armor available for scientific study. But he did share some of his ancillary research—the work in subharmonics that led to his sonic blasters, the experiments in molecular bonding that led to the gluelike substance he used to detain captured criminals until the police arrived. The patents he transferred to the Storm Raiders Foundation have earned millions for the team over the years. Even these narrow glimpses into his work reveal a brilliant mind. The man hidden in the armor must have been part Edison, part Tesla, part Merlin.
From “Whence Camelot: Five years later,” by Leslie Flannigan, Vanguard City Crier
Chapter Twenty-Four
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Five days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders
2 p.m.
On a sweaty afternoon, Kate Brauer walked a block over from Thibodaux Court to Chancery Street, where she’d discovered a small Chinese restaurant that served the best fried dumplings she’d ever encountered. As she walked, she admired a particularly large banana tree decorated with ribbon and a Sail to Devil’s Cape bumper sticker.
On the surface, Kate decided, Devil’s Cape wasn’t all that bad. Tourists came to the city for its promise of wild parties and drinking, for dripping po’boy sandwiches and andouille sausage, for tours of abandoned pirate hideouts and haunted graveyards, for jazz and blues music that rivaled those of nearby New Orleans, for walks through cobble-stoned streets scented with bougainvillea. Lehane University was top-notch despite its reputation for heavy partying, and the city’s library had an amazing collection not only of seventeenth century writings, but also other treasures, such as the memoirs of notorious gangster Marcus “Pidge” Poggioreale, who, in the 1930s, had stolen a top-secret serum from a government lab, downed it himself, and become bulletproof.
People often nodded at each other in the street. Many said “sir” or “ma’am,” and the peculiar Southern drawl and Cajun twang of their speech was pleasing to Kate’s ear. The heat of the city, though oppressive, also served to slow people down a bit. Stores tended to stay open a few minutes longer than advertised, because the people in the stores never quite got around to closing them on time. For the average tourist, for the average citizen, crime was a factor only in certain neighborhoods. It was a part of the headlines, or a brief burst of noise on the news, sandwiched between the weather report—invariably hot and humid, with a chance of showers—and the latest news about the Devil’s Cape Bandits’ training program and chances in the fall football season.
At the Wok Inn, Kate ordered a double helping of fried dumplings and a large container of hot and sour soup from the store owner, a heavy Chinese woman named Mrs. Fong whose accent was a peculiar blend of Beijing and Old South. “Only for you!” proclaimed Mrs. Fong when she handed the order to Kate, slipping in an extra almond cookie, clearly pleased to see Kate returning already for her second meal that day.
As Kate walked back to her new home, the aroma wafted from the greasy bag, blending pleasantly with the scent of gulf air that an errant breeze carried her way.
Her lab was coming together. The trickiest part of the move was managing to get all the lab equipment she needed into Juan Marco Quintana’s secret room on the top floor without anyone—movers, in particular—knowing what she was doing.
Some of her equipment had come from her father’s hidden laboratory, although much of that had become outdated in the years since his death.
But there’d been another find in his lab that had made things easier for her over the years: an old battered chest filled with gold and other treasure. She had gasped when she’d found it, tucked away with his trophies behind the remains of Deadlock’s combat drone X7-J. At first, she thought he’d taken it from one of the criminals he’d fought. But then she saw the documents he’d put in an envelope on one side of the chest, under a gold and bronze astrolabe that sparkled with lapis lazuli. They were meticulous salvage records of how he’d recovered the chest from a Spanish naval ship sunk by pirates some two hundred and fifty miles off the coast of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. He’d chanced across the ship. He was deep in cold waters, testing his Doctor Camelot armor against the ocean depths, concentrating on making sure that the armor’s seals remained firm and that the pressure inside the suit helped prevent him from getting the bends. He didn’t notice the ship, mostly buried in marine life and silt, until he was almost upon it. But then he’d propelled himself inside and emerged with the chest held tight in his armored hands.
The chest held fine porcelain and sealed jars of spices, dozens of pearls and cut emeral
ds, hundreds of coins bearing the likenesses of Philip II and Philip III, and several small bars of gold and silver.
It had presented a dilemma to Kate at first. Did her mother know about it? How could she broach the subject without having conversations she wasn’t ready to have? And the documents didn’t mention her father’s name. Instead, they clearly tied the treasure to Doctor Camelot. If she tried to sell any of the pieces, how could she avoid revealing the secrets her father had kept so carefully?
In the end, her father solved these problems for her. More notes, kept in the bottom of the chest, detailed small pieces that he had sold in the past, generally in order to pay for more equipment. He had used a contact in Vanguard City, a reformed fence whose life he had saved. The man had remained discreet in exchange for a thirty percent cut. He was still alive, and perfectly willing to resume the sales on Kate’s behalf when she contacted him anonymously through encrypted telephone calls and e-mail messages. Much of the money had gone to her mother, deposited, also anonymously, in her savings account. Some had gone toward charity, including Vanguard City Children’s Hospital. And the rest Kate had used herself, to purchase expensive and difficult-to-find equipment through the same fence.
Kate had been cautious in the sales, only releasing a couple of pieces at a time. But she’d practically cleaned out the chest the night the Storm Raiders had died. She took an ironic pleasure from using the treasure—sunk to the bottom of the ocean by pirates who had undoubtedly planned to plunder it instead—to finance her new plans for Pirate Town.
To keep movers from seeing anything they shouldn’t, Kate had driven down to Devil’s Cape with a trailer filled with scanners, processors, laboratory equipment, and enough armaments to launch a small war, leaving the bulk of her possessions for a moving truck to deliver later.
She’d loaded the equipment into large crates and used a small motorized dolly to wheel them onto the first floor of her home. Then, once the windows were covered and she had some measure of privacy, she’d broken out the exoskeleton that her father had worn within his Doctor Camelot armor. She’d retooled and resized it a few years earlier as a pet project, studying its hydraulics, replacing its body sensors with more sophisticated ones, and managing to tune up its strength enhancement to the point where she could comfortably carry more than a ton. Much more, if she wore the full armor on top of it, using its motors to augment those of the exoskeleton and to protect her from accidentally banging or pinching herself while carrying something heavy.
