"There is insufficient context to determine that," Shiva said.
"What was in the vicinity of where he was found?"
"Riverside Housing Project, Feldman's Used Cars, The Slag Pit, Rance Automotive, Ma Blood's Bar, Little Home Grocery-"
"Rance Automotive."
"Owner-operator, Trey Jaxon Rance."
"I know, his name came up once already," Razordemon said.
"Statement of Trey Jaxon Rance indicated to Detective Esposito that Sam Beddle was the source of Lucid Blue on the street."
"What was Sammy doing over there? Aside from his Grandmother's house, all of the Sammy sightings have been far from Riverside."
"Insufficient information," Shiva said.
"You don't have much of an imagination, do you?" Razordemon asked.
"Why do you keep asking that? You know what I'm going to say."
"Something changed." While Razordemon was ruminating on the matter, the floating information vanished. In its place was a wireframe of the city in pale blue. A flashing red dot appeared at the northern edge of the image. "What is it?"
"Multiple reports of shots fired, including indications of automatic weapons fire. The emergency call said, quote, 'machine gun fire,' end quote. However, given the common parlance-"
"I get the picture, Shiva. Who's nearby?"
"Arrowwarp is already on the scene."
"Try to raise him and get a more accurate picture."
Most of the buildings in Leyden Heights were towers of at least ten stories. Being on solid bedrock up out of the flood plain, it was cheaper to insure more extravagant structures. Much of the city's new money congregated there, looking down upon the city proper. Only Dreadmere Plaza, Sterling Towers, and the Darjeeling Hotel could physically look down on the Heights. Most of the towers were made of glass, steel, and opulence. On the northern edge of the Heights, Green Fields Tower was a twelve-story building overlooking the Leyden Academy athletic fields.
Rodney O'Brien claimed he'd picked the building for the short commute. Indeed, he could walk to his day job. It also gave him a superb place to keep an eye on Maurice Grenfield. O'Brien knew exactly what sort of person his landlord was, but getting sufficient evidence of the fact was a different matter. The rent was painful, in more ways than one. Knowingly putting money in the pocket of a criminal he was trying to catch grated on him every month. As he spent another Sunday morning reviewing the footage his cameras had collected throughout the week, doubts crept into the back of his mind. He shook them away. Now was not the time to second-guess his life choices.
The handful of cameras he'd hidden were focused on the approaches to Grenfield's personal section of the tower and on the public entrances. He was trying to collect the web of acquaintances around Grenfield. It would illuminate the man's organization and point the way towards potentially incriminating information. So far, it had been a bit of a bust. The system didn't record the hours of inactivity that filled most days, showing only the arrivals and departures. It showed nothing new.
The crack of gunfire made O'Brien sit up. He switched the system over to the live feed. A stream of gunmen in blue and white with blue plastic masks poured in through all of the public entrances. One hulking figure stood out from the crowd. Aside from his size, he wore a steel welder's mask. On its rich blue surface was the bright white image of a skull cracked from crown to mandible. He casually carried a wrench on his shoulder that looked as if it could weigh fifty pounds easily. O'Brien puffed out his cheeks and tried to get his adrenalin-pounding heart back under control
"This is not good," he said, hurrying to the closet. From behind a panel, he extracted a hero suit and quickly changed. Mostly white with vertical navy blue stripes, it had a full face mask with integrated filter. He donned some more of his gear, fighting not to rush the process too much. As he picked up his bow, his phone rang. He glared at it, but the display read 'Community Fund'.
"Hello?"
"This is Shiva, identify."
"Identify Arrowwarp."
"Confirmed. Regional Coordinator requests information regarding alert at your location."
"We have a shitload of gunmen storming Green Field Tower. I don't know what they're after, but they don't look like they're in the mood to talk."
"Copy. Any identifying marks?"
"Blue and white gang colors."
"Copy."
"I could use some backup, there are a lot of them."
"Copy," Shiva said.
"Can you say anything else?"
"Instructions are to act on your own discretion. Backup is being dispatched, ETA unknown. Expect police presence within ten minutes."
"Great, ten minutes until it becomes a bloodbath."
"Ending call," Shiva said. O'Brien put his phone away and retrieved some quivers.
"Well crap," O'Brien said as he slipped out of his apartment.
The rent-a-cops distinguished themselves from Grenfield's private security by dropping to the floor and covering their heads. The suits with machine pistols sprayed bullets at the lobby as they tried to fall back. The mass of rounds heading in the other direction overwhelmed them. They dropped in the hallways, spreading red stains on beige carpets. Rance fished a radio from the pocket of one of the corpses. He held it to his ear as he advanced towards the elevators.
"We've got gang-bangers coming in through the loading dock."
"There's a dozen coming up from the garage."
"Lobby, report. Lobby?"
Rance keyed 'push to talk'. "Your lobby boys are dead."
"Lockdown," a new voice on the radio said. "Full lockdown. Radio security fallback procedures, now." Rance shrugged and crushed the radio in his gloved hand.
A gunman with a white stripe down his mask hurried over to Rance. "The elevators aren't responding."
"So?" Rance walked over to a door marked 'stairs' and kicked it in. "Get moving." The first few streamed through. Gunfire erupted as they collided with Grenfield's people trying to fall back from the garage.
"We're cut off," one of them shouted, trying to be heard over the shooting. "Gang-bangers in the north stairwell." Rance walked calmly past the shooting and started up the stairs. "Shit, confirmed sighting, Skullsplitter in the north-" He was cut off in a burst of bullets from below. The garage team streamed up the stairs. Rance let them pass him. There were a lot of stairs to climb, and he wasn't about to wear himself out on the first few floors.
Rance fished his own radio out of his pants pocket. "Roof team, do you have the helicopter secured?"
"Yep, you're about to see how secure." There was a screech over the radio, followed by a crash.
"What did you just do?" Rance asked.
"We dropped it on the bleachers of that snob school next door."
"Shitheads! We could have used that ourselves."
"Uh..."
"Get inside and join the fun," Rance said, rounding another landing. The door said it was the fourth floor.
"But we can't fly inside."
"Get your asses inside, now," Rance said.
"We got tights in the building," another voice cut in.
"Where?"
"Sixteenth floor."
"There is no sixteenth floor."
"Sixth," a third voice said, "he meant sixth! He's just a little dyslexic."
"Which hero?"
"Some guy with stripes like a skunk and a bow." He chortled. "Who brings a bow to a gunfight?" An outcry of pain cut his laughter short.
"I got the tights on six," Rance said. "Everyone else stick to the plan, get Grenfield bottled up." Climbing to the sixth floor, Rance kicked in the door and emerged into the hall. Off to his left, he saw two of his boys hog-tied with plastic zip cuffs. Their guns were partially dismantled nearby. At the c
orner of the hall, he caught the barest glimpse of white and navy stripes vanishing from view. Rance stuck his arm into the stairwell. "You four, hold this door, don't let the tights out." He raised his radio and called for four more on the other stairwell.
O'Brien was swearing at himself as he heard the man-mountain order more minions to box him in. He tried to remember what powers Skullsplitter had. "I thought he was dead," O'Brien whispered as he peered around another corner. Before him was another empty hallway.
"Come on out hero man," Skullsplitter called, his voice echoing within his mask.
With the shortage of hallways on a residential floor, O'Brien wasn't convinced he'd be able to run or hide for long anyway. Hurrying to the end of the next hallway, he stepped out in full view of the four holding the door to the north stairwell. As their guns came up, he loosed two arrows from a single pull. They didn't need to be accurate, they just needed some velocity. Both vanished in a flash of light a yard from his bow, reappearing in the stairwell, flying down at the concrete floor. The globular tips shattered, releasing a cloud of tear gas into the stairwell. He broke into a run towards the choking gunmen and dropped into a slide as Skullsplitter came hurtling out of the side hall.
Arrowwarp skidded past Rance's feet mere inches from his toes. The big man slammed into the drywall with the impact of a truck. The wall caved, and his shoulder emerged into the apartment beyond. The hero scrambled through the choking fumes and fired his line launcher up the stairwell. As Rance pulled himself free from the drywall, the white- and navy-striped archer shot skyward. "We have a hero loose on the upper floors. If you see him, shoot him."
Despite his best efforts, Maurice Grenfield had never been a thin man. All of his efforts at controlling his diet and getting sufficient exercise had failed to curtail his waistline. The fat had built up around his cheeks and jowls, and he'd gone so far as to contemplate surgical measures to reign in his weight. He tried not to dwell on the flavorless oatmeal that might turn out to have been his last meal. He held his boys close and kept his back to the middle wall. Much fitter men with rifles and body armor stood between him and the armored door.
Each new volley of gunshots caused him to flinch. Each one sounded closer than the last.
"We've been pushed back to the outer bottleneck," Sergei said. Sergei was loyal, and good at hurting people, but not terribly inventive. He knew why the inner chambers had armored plates in the walls and narrow entry points, but he hadn't come up with the design. There were two such bottlenecks in the apartment's design, with Grenfield's office behind the second. The escape hatch to the roof had been locked down after the helicopter had been pushed off. There was nowhere to go up there.
"There is cavalry on the way, right?" someone asked.
"The police will just cordon off the building and wait for the shooting to stop," Grenfield said. "The only rescue we might get would come in colored tights."
"That would send us to prison," Sergei said.
"Our options at this point are prison or die like a cornered rat."
Grenfield smoothed out his son's hair. "Now is not the time to die." His words were followed by an eerie lull in the noise outside. If anything, the sudden silence was worse than the gunfire. "What is going on out there?"
"Stay down, they're up to something."
Sergei's words were punctuated by a crash not unlike an explosion. As gunshot rang out in the apartment proper, a rush of hot wind swept in, silencing the shots in screams. The flickering orange glow and the sprinklers alluded to a flame just out of sight. More gunshots tore through the downpour of the sprinklers. The roar of Sergei's rifle opening up had Grenfield clenching his eyes and praying. Sergei's gargled scream had tears of fright rolling down Grenfield's face, rendered blissfully invisible by the sprinkler water.
"The big bad boogieman," Skullsplitter's low voice growled over the patter of the fire-suppression system. "Boss of the Heights, cowering with children."
"Please let my boys go," Grenfield said. "They're not part of this."
Skullsplitter's dispassionate mask stared down at the three figures huddled before him. Drops of watery blood fell from the end of his wrench like the tick of a metronome. For the longest moment, the world shrank to that soulless gaze and that dripping blood.
Rance raised his radio. "I'm sending two boys out. Let them run. Anyone who hurts them answers to me." He lowered the radio. "Now run, or die here."
Tearfully, Grenfield pushed his boys away. After a moment's reluctance, they bolted. Once they were out of sight, Grenfield sank to his hands and knees. Rance rested the hard steel of his wrench against the back of Grenfield's head.
"Make it quick."
"Of course."
Part 14
Leyden Heights was awash in red and blue flashing lights as Razordemon approached the cordon. He pressed through a pack of reporters and let himself past the tape. "You're late to the party, hero," one of the uniforms said. His resentment was audible. "The shooting's over."
"Who's in charge?"
"Captain Bell," the uniform said, stabbing a thumb over his shoulder. Razordemon nodded and walked in the indicated direction. Bell was a short man with dark brown hair and no chin. The loose skin on the underside of his jaw and front of his neck hid the already unimpressive bone structure. He looked up at Razordemon.
"What brings you here?"
"The perpetrators were wearing gang colors from a group tied to a case I am working in concert with Detective Esposito."
"How did you know that?"
"There was a member of the community on the scene, he reported it. I am also interested in finding out how he fared."
"We haven't found your friend yet, but there are a lot of bodies to go through. Plus, the perpetrators shot their way through the first units on the scene and are still at large. I've got four dead cops here on top of the piles of crooks."
"I'm sorry to hear that, Captain."
"Sorry? This is as much your failure as it is MPD's. Gangs aren't supposed to have the muscle to stage an assault like this. And you didn't have an inkling this was in the works?"
"I didn't even know Skullsplitter was even still alive. Reports were he died."
"What? What aren't you telling me?"
"Excuse me?"
"You can't just name-drop a costumed criminal like that and not explain their connection."
"Currently, it was 'sighted at the scene.' If you help me find my associate, we might get a fuller picture of what happened here."
"We found him," Bell said.
Arrowwarp limped slowly out of the building, leading two terrified boys into the sunlight. Red dribbled from a makeshift bandage about his left calf.
"You all right?" Razordemon asked.
"It's just a graze. Put enough bullets in the air and sooner or later, one is going to find its mark."
"Who are they?"
"Grenfield's boys. I got them to hiding because I wasn't too sure how well the amnesty was going to stick."
"What happened to Grenfield?" Razordemon asked.
"Dead," Bell said. "We identified him fairly easily."
"Look, I'm sure the Captain would like to ask the boys a few questions," Razordemon said. "We need to get you to an ambulance."
"You're not going to cut me out of the loop on what he knows either," Bell said.
Razordemon led Arrowwarp away from the diminutive Captain. "You're certain it was Skullsplitter you saw?"
"I was this close to him," Arrowwarp said, holding his fingers a few inches apart. "He's a bit thicker in the middle than he used to be, but still a wrecking ball."
"So he's not dead."
"I guess he could be undead. That's not unprecedented, but my money's on alive."
The two reached an empty ambulance. "Anything else before I leav
e you to get checked out?"
"Well, is there any chance I'll be able to get out of the paperwork?"
"Not the slightest. You were the licensed hero on-scene."
"Damn."
"Do you need a cover story for your injury in your civilian identity?"
"Naw, I know what it's going to be."
Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus) Page 61
