by Hal Bodner
Gretchen scowled and rolled her eyes as if to ask What the hell are we going to do with him? A moment later, she slid the pocket-door closed so that she and my husband could work without interruption.
Gretchen’s words echoed while I put the final touches on the pizza and slid it into the oven. I’d never been to therapy. In my situation, trusting an outsider would only lead to trouble. Whenever she started channeling Jiminy Cricket, though, I always put up at least a token resistance for appearances sake; I usually gave her advice the benefit of the doubt. In this case, I felt myself balking at what she’s said which, I’ve learned, was usually a good indicator that she might be right. Realizing that only made me resist it more. The telephone rescued me from any more introspection. It was Randy with some minor crises which had nothing to do with Tressman, thank God. By the time I hung up, the pizza crust was golden brown.
Juggling the pizza, the ring of beer cans and a pile of napkins, I took everything into Peter’s little home office, dumped the whole shebang onto the coffee table, and plopped myself onto the floor cross-legged so I could serve.
“What’s the verdict?” I slid a piece of pizza onto a napkin and handed it to Gretch. For some reason, pizza never tastes as good on a real plate as it does when it’s served on a paper one or, better yet, on a napkin.
“Arson,” Peter frowned.
“We sure about that?”
Gretchen nodded. “Definitely an explosive device planted in the lab.”
“Could it have been accidental?”
“No,” he said. “The first thing I did was to check with our Requisitions Department. There was nothing in that lab that could have gone off with a bang like that. Fire? Sure. Blowing out a wall? No way.”
“So, the question is…”
“It’s impolite to talk with your mouth full,” I told her.
“The question is…” She ignored me, and kept chewing and talking at the same time. “Motive.”
“No clues so far?”
Mercifully, she swallowed. “Our experts are good but they’re gonna earn their pay with this one. You saw the photos? After everything was blown to hell, when the place burned, it burned hot. We’re pretty sure we already know who the victims were, but the M.E. is gonna have a tough time figuring out which pieces belong to who. Whatever the perp used to do this, it wasn’t anything commonly available. Hopefully, we’ll be able to trace it and find out where they got it. Even if it was stolen, we have ways we might be able to track it down. But all this takes time. I’m hoping that, while we’re waiting, Pete and I can brainstorm something useful.”
Peter chewed his pizza thoughtfully. “Corporate espionage was the first thing that sprang to mind. But what if it was something completely unrelated to Greene Genes? Something personal for instance.”
“Like…?” I wanted to know.
Peter vaguely waved one hand in the air. “An affair. A jealous spouse. Someone who thought they’d been fired unfairly.”
“Blowing up a building seems an extreme response to some biochemists committing adultery, doesn’t it?” I asked. “I’ve met some of the eggheads who work for Greene Genes. I wouldn’t describe them as particularly exciting people.”
“Alec has a point. I don’t think the motive is that mundane.”
She made as if to wipe her hands on the arm of the chair, caught my frigid glare, and used a napkin instead. Considering the way that Travis and Gretchen both look like the Dispose-All backfired when they finish eating, I sometimes wonder if they might be a perfect couple after all. Maybe they could get a bulk discount at the local Laundromat.
“Just to be sure, I went over a list of the usual costumed crazies.” She shook her head. “I don’t think it’ll do any good. This explosion lacks style.”
“Style?” Peter was dumbfounded. “Since when does a bombing need to have style?”
“You’d be surprised,” Gretchen told him. “Most supervillains are compelled to…well, it’s like they sign their crimes. Some are very deliberate about it. Erica the Eel uses dead fish as her calling cards. With others, it’s the kind of crime that clues us in. Some specialize in art theft; others won’t touch anything other than jewelry. If witnesses report Zoot suits and machine guns, we look in one direction; if someone mentions an antique cannon, we look somewhere else.”
“And in this case?” I prompted. If the Whirlwind needed to get involved, the earlier I knew it, the better.
Gretchen shrugged. “Violent Violet was my first thought. Explosives are right up her alley. But it seems she’s found religion…again. She joined a convent. One of those places where the women take a vow of silence and raise their own vegetables. She had a disagreement with another nun. No one’s sure what it was about. The sister ended up in surgery to remove a bushel of zucchini. Violet’s back in the asylum under heavy sedation.”
“What about the Whirlwind?” Peter asked.
Gretchen and I stared at him blankly.
“I wasn’t suggesting he did the bombing, sillies.” Pete looked sheepish for a minute. “I was wondering if you’d talked to him yet. Jackson and I saw him on the news, but he was gone by the time I got there. It’s hard to miss all that aqua.”
“It’s turquoise,” I muttered.
“My little decorator.” Pete ruffled my hair affectionately.
“I’m just saying, if the guy took that much trouble to put together an outfit like that, the least we can do is get the color right.”
“He’s pretty hot,” Peter teased with an exaggerated leer. “That costume clings to him in all the right places. Besides, that’s a pretty big codpiece he wears over the tights.”
I started to swat him, realized I had a slice in my hand, and hit him–lightly!–with one of the sofa pillows instead. If you only knew, I thought, secretly pleased.
“I keep coming back to industrial espionage,” Pete said, somber. “I can think of several of our projects that would bring in a few hundred million if Jackson allowed them to be licensed for what they’re really worth.”
“I suppose it’s possible.” Gretchen didn’t seem convinced. “But the bombing has that supervillain feel to it. Dunno why. Call it instinct.”
“Feed the World was supposed to be open-source,” Peter continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “Once it was perfected, Jackson was adamant about providing the technology to anyone who needed it. A lot of people didn’t like that. It nearly gave Herman a stroke when he found out that it was the latest project that Jackson wanted to give away.”
“What about Herman?” Gretchen’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Could he have thwarted your boss so…dramatically? He knows Jackson’s ill. Two of the deceased board members were already on his shit list, right?”
“I don’t think Herman could have aimed falling pieces of the building at the people who disagreed with him. No, unfortunately Mallory and Jacob were just sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time. Besides, do you know how much it’ll cost to repair the damage?”
“But you just said…Greene Genes would make a hundred times that much if they pulled the plug on the charitable projects, and sold the stuff instead.”
Peter sighed and shook his head.
“You don’t know Herman Starcke like I do. Talk about being penny wise and dollar foolish. Quite literally, he has the first dime he ever earned in a little frame hanging on his office wall. If he was involved in this, he would have found a way to do it with only minimal damage to company property.”
It was a shame that we couldn’t make a case for Starcke being responsible. I’d have loved to have seen the little prick hung out to dry. But Peter was too ethical a guy to pin blame where it didn’t belong. Nevertheless, the sanctimonious shit heel deserved it.
Pete read the emotions from my face.
“I know you don’t like him, Alec. He’s a difficult man with some unattractive personality traits.”
“He’s homophobic, cheap, smarmy…”
I ticked the man’s sterling qualities off on my fing
ers, one by one.
“Even if he was capable of seeing the bigger picture like Jackson and I do, I thought he’d have a stroke when he saw the preliminary damage report. One look at his face and it was clear he had nothing to do with the explosion. He was extremely…” A wry grin. “…Distressed.”
The strident strains of the Ride of the Valkyries suddenly boomed from somewhere in the vicinity of Gretchen’s butt–or it may have been the William Tell Overture.
“Sorry.” She fumbled her phone out of her back pocket and flipped it open. “Thatcher here.”
As she listened, her eyelids slowly opened wider and wider with surprise. Her jaw followed suit, much faster.
“You gotta be shitting me!” she burst out. “I’m on my way.”
“I guess that means I should put the rest of the pizza in the fridge,” I said.
“What? What’s going on?” Peter demanded.
“That was the Duty Sergeant. A couple of hours ago, someone dropped a flash drive off at the station. With all the commotion today, the detectives just got around to taking a look at what was on it. It’s a demand. A ransom note. A video, yet.”
“On a flash drive? Cool!”
They both frowned at me but I couldn’t help being impressed. When the Whirlwind first showed up, which wasn’t all that long ago, the bad guys were still clipping ransom notes out of newspapers.
“What are we waiting for?” I began gathering up the soiled paper plates and napkins.
“I suppose you can both can ride in with me.”
“There’s no need for Alec…” Peter’s protest evoked Gretchen’s earlier observations about his over-protectiveness.
She sighed.
“You know how he is. If we don’t take him with us, we’ll get the puppy dog eyes.”
I tried to make myself look as much like an adorable cocker spaniel as possible.
“Then, it’ll be the whole rejection bit with the hurt feelings.”
I sniffled and tried unsuccessfully, to summon a tear.
“And when that doesn’t work, he’ll just keep calling every five minutes to try and wheedle out of us what he wants to know. We might as well bring him along and spare ourselves the drama-rama. Just make sure he keeps quiet.”
“Me? I’m not loud.” I spread my hands in a gesture of helplessness and tried to project innocence and quietude. I suspect that I failed miserably.
Peter cocked an eyebrow at Gretch and she read his silent question.
“It’s a new one. He calls himself Thanatos.”
“That’s the Greek god of death, I think,” I chimed in.
Just because I was hooking at sixteen did not mean I failed to pay attention in high school. Alec Archer is no dumb bunny.
“This is not shaping up to be a good week.”
She’d rarely spoken truer words.
Chapter Eight
While I am understandably prejudiced in favor of the Whirlwind’s costume, I couldn’t help envying Thanatos’ outfit. Whoever designed it deserved an Oscar.
If you’ve chosen a career path as a haberdasher to a supervillain, garden variety creativity and talent wouldn’t be enough. You’d have to pack a wallop of ingenuity as well. Of course, some clients would be easier than others.
If you were lucky, you might end up creating a wardrobe for someone like Captain Dirigible. Your biggest challenge would be in trying to sew enough gold braid onto his uniform to mollify his colossal ego. But what if the villain you’re tailoring for has a weird genetic aberration? You can’t ignore the presence of a tail, for example, and hope to get away with it. I suppose you could always strap it down, but that’s bound to get uncomfortable. The customer might get pissed and, in that line of work, they won’t stop at simply stiffing you for the bill. They’re liable to make you into a stiff. Even if your client looks normal at first, you run the risk of running head-first into obstacles that would be insurmountable to the ordinary tailor or dressmaker. Momma Deadly’s outfits might look like off-the-rack floral print gunny sacks, but the last time I checked, Walmart doesn’t weave radiation-proof thread into their cotton/poly blends. I sometimes wondered if there wasn’t some half-insane tailor, held captive somewhere by a coalition of supervillains who traded him back and forth between them. I picture him cackling madly while he hacks away at a swatch of otherworldly fabric with a pair of pinking shears, and sweats over an atomic-powered sewing machine to put a neat hem into a pair of Teflon trousers.
Thanatos’ costume, though, was different. If it was designed to accommodate some strange ability, you couldn’t say by me. Certainly, there was enough leather and armor to hide an extra limb, or some grotesque organ, but if it was there, I couldn’t see it. What it had in abundance, however, was style.
The pundits always say that black is flattering. What the pundits conveniently forget to mention is that on certain guys, black tends to accentuate the body’s more interesting bulges– especially in the chest and groin area. The molded armor heightened the effect, but even so, the smooth, lithe way Thanatos moved bespoke a natural athlete. With a body like his, I doubted that being bullied in school was what drove him over to the Dark Side.
And that cape! Man, the cape was cool! Talk about professional jealousy!
I have no idea what material it was made of; maybe Travis could have figured it out if he could have gotten his hands on a sample. It looked like someone had figured a way to combine liquid tar with silk and weave it into one flowing, billowy mass. Unlike my own cape, which only came to mid-thigh level, mostly to keep me from tripping over it, Thanatos’ was not only full length, it was more than full length. Each time he took a step, it flared behind him like gigantic raven’s wings; when he stood still, it formed a shimmery, inky puddle at his feet. That cape was like a living, breathing special effect. Though it was completely inappropriate under the circumstances, I couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to make love on linens made from the same marvelous stuff.
The only thing that kept Thanatos from being a walking wet dream was the mask.
It was ugly as hell, hideous in fact, halfway between a skinless skull and some kind of grotesque demon. The horns weighed in favor of the demonic, yet there was a suggestion of raw, sinewy muscles around the mouth and across the cheeks that gave the impression that the skin had been flayed from the face of a corpse. While Thanatos definitely had the body of a god, thanks to the mask, he lost a few points on the Hotness Scale.
“Alec! What a surprise! It’s great to see you again too, Peter.”
As usual, Mayor Richie Banterly’s only acknowledgment of Gretchen’s presence was an infinitesimal nod in her direction. Richie knows she’s one of my best friends so he’d never stoop to a snide comment, or an outright snub, not in front of me anyway. But he can’t entirely hide the fact that he doesn’t really like her very much. I’ve broached the subject with him a few times but, so far, he’s deftly avoided telling me why. Fortunately, I know how much Richie admires competence in any field, whether it be hustling or law enforcement. So, I’m pretty sure he’d never let his personal feelings affect her job security. Nevertheless, I sometimes worry that, one day, I’ll be caught between the two of them and my loyalties might be tested.
Richie’s political career had certainly been a boon to his wardrobe. The suit he wore must have cost seven or eight hundred bucks; his Italian leather loafers definitely did not come off a warehouse discount rack. When we first met, he was strictly a T-shirt and jeans kind of guy, and with good reason. Even though he was shorter than average, he had broad shoulders and a rock-hard torso that the tight, simple clothing he preferred only accentuated. He never lacked for trade and, from the few times we messed around gratis, I can confirm that Hizzoner, naked at the age of twenty-two, was a pretty damned amazing sight.
Not that there was ever any chance of anything developing between us. Richie’s build was a little too beefy for me. In return, I’m too much of a pretty boy type to suit his taste. Besides, I’m White
. When he wasn’t working, Richie preferred partners from south of the border, like his current lover, Julio. They’ve been together for quite a while; it’s only a matter of time before they tie the knot officially.
“Hiya, Richie. How’s the First Lady?”
“Digging somewhere in North Africa. At least he’ll be safely out of the way if this new lunatic is for real.”
I could never remember what kind of -ologist Julio was. He’s mentioned digging up pyramids but, when I asked him about finding mummies and curses, he laughed. Once, I asked him to keep an eye out for a baby T-Rex skull. I wanted one to display on the coffee table in our living room. Julio looked at me queerly enough so that I never brought it up again. On the other hand, last Christmas he gave us a pair of embroidered native robes. They were hideously ugly but the needlework was exquisite. Neither Peter nor I would be caught dead wearing them, but we entertained vague ideas of mounting them as “art” for the wall if we ever got around to it.
“You’re looking well, Peter.”
“You’re not.”
Coming from anyone but my husband, the comment might have been rude. But Peter and Richie had been friends for almost as long as Richie and I had, and Richie accurately interpreted it as concern for his welfare.
“Yeah, I know.”
The mayor rubbed his eyes tiredly. I saw the beginnings of crow’s feet and a hint of frown lines that looked like they might grow into doozies in a few years. I also noticed a slight softness just above his belt buckle, and a bit of a droop to his shoulders. In my mind’s eye, I always saw Richie as a hot twenty-something hustler. For the first time, I had a premonition of what he would look like in a few decades. The vision was not a pretty one, and it saddened me.
“You’ve seen the video. Any idea on who it could be? I assume Greene Genes has made its share of enemies just like any other company. An ex-employee. A competitor. Have you caught any brilliant mad scientists doing unauthorized experiments recently? Is there anything familiar about this guy?”
Peter shrugged.
Richie tried another angle. “How about the threats? Is there any substance to them?”
