The City That Heroes Built
Page 34
“It's too early to sleep,” she said.
“Don't sleep, then,” I said.
“I'm glad I got to meet your friends today. They were nice. Even Fiver. Like the rabbit.”
“I'm going to shower,” I said. “I'll be right back.” I kissed her on the forehead. When I got back to her, she was asleep. I lay down next to her and fell asleep, too.
August 8, 2021
Like the rabbit! I woke up in the middle of the night. Everything was dark. I might have had a weird dream or something. I woke up thinking about rabbits and Fiver and Watership Down. In the book, the rabbit Fiver could see the future. I got up and went to the couch. I opened my laptop and found the gifs of Rebel fighting. I watched the videos I could find, slowed way, way down. Fiver moved first. Every time. It wasn't ESP, it wasn't moving faster than his opponent. He knew what was coming. It's why he named himself after the rabbit.
I took aspirin and had a glass of water and went back to sleep thinking about seeing the future.
I woke up again, around 6am. Isabelle was stirring, but not willing to fully wake up. I went back to my books and read the part in The 11th Commandment about how seeing the future wasn't possible and had never been a recorded power. Did Fiver say something about not believing the book? He didn't act like someone that could see the future.
I made coffee and did some thinking about whether I should say anything, and decided against it. Isabelle woke up and we spent Sunday doing nothing together.
August 9, 2021
Isabelle woke up early to go to work. I woke up with her, and went down to the shop to talk while she made the first pot of coffee and put out the fresh baked brownies, donuts and croissants. When she got really busy, I headed back upstairs and did some reading.
I expected to hear from Fiver and Cal at some point in the day, but instead remained uninterrupted as I went about my day catching up on the Internet. I was watching the clock for when Isabelle was getting out of work, and there was a knock on the door at the expected time.
I'd done a lot of thinking about her. It doesn't quiet translate well when I try to describe what I like about her, and describing a connection provides no detail. I liked this girl, we got along, and I was really looking forward to hanging out with her. I practically ran over to the door.
Freezing Kate stood at my door. She wore black leather from her choker to her high-heeled boots. She didn't wait to be invited in. I closed the door behind her.
“I'm looking for Killswitch,” she said. “He came here to kill you. You got him first. That's fine. I just want to return the body to his people.”
“I didn't get anyone,” I said. “I never saw him. Wouldn't know him if I saw him now.”
“You're not surprised to hear he came to kill you.”
“I heard he was sent to kill me, even though I didn't do anything, to anyone.”
“That has nothing to do with anything,” Freezing Kate said. “You picked the wrong friends. But that's over. No one is out to get Skyborne, as long as he remains out of the city. People are trying to put that behind them. Let me take the body back, next time you're on the list, people may let that slide.”
“I don't know where the body is,” I said. “No clue who he is, and I've never killed anyone, or hid any bodies. I'm sorry. I'd help if I could.”
I opened the door to let her out. Isabelle was there. She walked in. Freezing Kate walked out. The two women looked each other over as they passed. I shut the door behind Freezing Kate.
“Research?” Isabelle asked.
“Yeah, seems I struck a nerve with all the questions I was asking. I was just getting a polite warning to stay away,” I said.
“And will you?”
“It seemed like pretty sound advice delivered in a suitably threatening manner.”
“Good. I was worried about you.”
“Why?”
“No reason.”
I sent the team a text to let them know Freezing Kate came looking for Killswitch's body. I spent the rest of the evening with Isabelle.
While I was engaged elsewhere, the team was planning to defend the Citadel. I was not aware of the planning or the plans, nor giving it much thought at all. I didn't think that I would have a part to play in any of it.
August 10, 2021
Fiver called me in the morning.
“Dude, you being followed?”
“I'm not moving.”
“Don't go anywhere. Burn this phone. Go to the next one.”
“That'll be my last one,” I said.
“Cal will be around with more.”
“I'm going to leave this up to talk to my girlfriend.”
“Don't call me on it.”
“What's this about?”
“Next couple of days might get crazy. Stay away from the bar and keep your coin out in case we can't get ahold of you,” Fiver said.
“Don't pop in when my girlfriend is over here.”
“Don't worry,” Fiver said, but I was worried.
Cal came over later. He brought a dozen cheap flip phones.
“I numbered them for you. One through 12. Use 1 tomorrow. Number 2 Thursday. And so on.”
“I thought this thing with the mob is over,” I said.
“Not the mob we're worried about. LEGION started asking around for us. You still have cash?”
“Yeah.”
“Hotel for the next couple of days.”
“Seriously?”
“Man, we're three days from stopping some really powerful villains from trying to break into the Citadel. If LEGION can drop us before that, they're going to have a lot easier time.”
“Yeah, but me. I'm nobody.”
“Nobodies get killed all the time,” Cal said. “Go someplace safe.”
I packed a bag and filled it with clothes and $10,000 in cash that Fiver had given me. The rest I had spent or dripped into my bank account. When Isabelle got off work, I convinced her to spend the rest of the week in a hotel with me. She agreed. If she was suspicious, she didn't show it. We grabbed a room on the beach. I tried to relax.
August 11, 2021
Jen started texting me early and kept at it for a couple of hours until I finally picked up my phone.
You're going to miss it.
I hate missing things.
What am I going to miss? I asked.
Finally. Come over.
Why?
Girlfriend?
Sitting right here.
You're going to miss it.
And I did. Cal put on a suit and teleported past security from a boat. He had a body camera and Jen and Fiver watched his every move. Pop pop pop, he bounced from spot to spot, until he was able to turn a corner and join the group of Supra Rights Watch lawyers and families as they went into the courtroom. He settled in the back and watched and photographed everything.
The state's attorney eloquently charged Leonidas with terrorism, conspiracy and a litany of other charges. Leonidas pled not guilty. Cal popped over to him, then away to a coin he had stashed outside of the courtroom. There he concentrated, and did a long distance teleport.
Jen texted only, You missed it.
I found out like the rest of the world, when the news broke. Cal told me the details of his infiltration later, but refused to tell me about the arrangements to hide Leonidas. Jen and Fiver were equally silent on the subject.
August 12, 2021
I drank my coffee reading about Leonidas' escape and the fall out. The Guardian Angels were invited to guard the Citadel for the executions. The news reported that two US Agents flew into Santa Maria that night. The government officials said they were typical US Marshalls conducting an investigation to track and recover the escaped prisoner.
My second burner started buzzing with incoming texts around 10.
You still okay?
Yep. I replied.
Where you at?
Beach.
Cool.
A little while later, Fiver texted.
His text identified him as the sender. The phone had been programmed with F, CP, R, to identify Fiver, Catchpenny and Rescue, Cal's recently adopted call sign. SB was Slowburn. I looked at the number of the earlier texts. It wasn't a pre-programmed number. I checked the numbers from yesterday's phone. It didn't match any.
I grabbed Isabelle's bag, put it in her hands. I grabbed her hand and my bag and pulled her with me.
“What?!”
“We've got to go.”
“Without coffee?” she asked.
I opened the door to the hallway.
A man and a woman wearing suits and sunglasses were standing outside our room in the hall. The woman's hand was raised to knock. She made the motion as if the door was still there.
“Knock, knock,” she said with a smile. “Good morning, Tom. We'd like to ask you some questions.” The US Agents moved with the same subtle motion to reveal badges pinned to shoulder holsters under their slick bespoke suits. They looked like the same type as Secret Service or FBI, but their supra-powers put them a notch ahead of the typical government agent.
Isabelle reached past me and slammed the door in their face.
“What's this about? No lie.”
A polite tapping on the door.
“Mr. Garza, we'd just like to talk,” the female Agent said.
“Don't open the door,” Isabelle said. “What do they want?”
Why was it so hard to tell my girlfriend the truth? Delaying wasn't going to do me any good, and I couldn't really explain away government agents.
“My friends are supra-heroes,” I said. “I don't know anything.”
“Don't open the door,” Isabelle said again. “One of them is a telepath.”
“How do you know?”
“You don't get to be a US Agent if you don't have a power like that.”
“What do we do?”
“You tell me.”
I called Cal.
“Coin out,” I said. “Immediate extract. Two.”
Cal appeared. He grabbed Isabelle and me. We re-appeared in the armory. I looked around and found a wastebasket to hand to Isabelle. She threw up.
“What was that?” Cal asked.
“US Agents were outside my door.”
“Fuck. How do you know?”
“They were there when I was leaving. Someone texted me this morning from a number I didn't know.”
“Slowburn's been compromised,” Cal said. He looked at Isabelle. She wasn't paying attention. “You're going to have to stay here. No calls, no nothing. Not even leaving by the stairs.”
“What happened?”
“Thirteen. Lady Thirteen. She knows about Fiver, so she knows about you, and me, and more or less Catchpenny. Of course she knows Slowburn, but it might be the US Agents that got to him. Did you recognize them?”
“No,” I said. “Suits, sunglasses, short hair and badges. What if they raid the bar? They'll find us here.”
“They're watching right now. They don't need us, they need Leonidas, and they've got all the time in the world.”
“Is there a plan for this? I mean, you and Fiver always have plans for everything.”
“If the US Agents have us identified, they'll bring in the FBI and the local cops to help with surveillance. But they've also got the Courtney family and their extensive resources to contend with. They have a hard enough time finding normal fugitives, so it depend on what kind of resources they want to commit to this.”
“He's an escaped terrorist,” I said.
“To California,” Cal said. “To the rest of the world, he's just a supra. Feds might just be doing due diligence so they can leave it all behind.”
“Think they'll push back the executions?”
Isabelle had stopped throwing up and was now paying attention.
“There's nothing to be gained by delaying,” Cal said. “The Guardian Angels are on alert. We'll be ready.
“Why didn't you tell me you guys were going to break out Leonidas?”
“You're in enough trouble without knowing about that.”
“So we stay down here for 48 hours, then it's over?”
“Yeah, sometime tomorrow night it will go down.”
“And if LEGION attacks here?”
“They don't know we're here.”
“Thirteen knows this is Fiver's bar.”
“And Fiver's miles away.”
“What if they decide that they're going to take hostages unless you all stand aside?” I asked.
“Who? The bar staff? Then we hire more bar staff. The problem with being a psychotic murderer is that you already kill people, so threatening to kill people if… that's not a real threat. It's not like they stop being a psychotic murderer the rest of the time. Nah, they're going to save their effort for assaulting the Citadel.”
“Seriously, you'd just let the bar staff die?”
“I wouldn't let thousands die to save 20,” Cal said.
“You don't know that thousands are going to die.”
“I don't know that any hostages would live.”
“I'm still nervous about staying here.”
“Your call,” Cal said. He looked at Isabelle. She looked at me.
“Hotel sounds good,” she said.
“Okay, yeah. Better phone discipline this time,” I said. “How did Slowburn get compromised anyway? Did he turn on us?”
“He's known to the US Agents.”
“Are you and Fiver?”
“Unlikely. We haven't been around that long.”
“You worked for the government,” I said.
“A lot of supras did and a lot of supras do. It takes time and money to monitor us. They've got bigger fish to fry.”
Cal took us up. Isabelle and I took a cab to a hotel. A Mexican restaurant was across the street.
“Lunch first?” Isabelle said.
“Yeah,” I said. We ordered carne asada burritos and found an empty table in the back.
“So you've got supra friends,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I figured you had something like that going on.”
“You can see why I had to lie about it.”
“Oh, I'm not even worried about that. I can't expect you to reveal things like that to me. I mean, maybe if we're still going out months from now, I could use a heads up.”
“I mean, that's pretty much everything I've got,” I said. “I've been doing research for supras.”
“What about the woman in black leather from the other day?”
“She's looking for a missing person that, so this is going to sound like a big deal, but it's not.”
“Okay,” she said.
“For a while, someone was trying to kill me because a friend of a friend was a supra. That's all sorted; no one wants to hurt me. But that's why I did the phone switch.”
“Okay. The woman from the other day?”
“Was looking for the assassin that was supposedly sent to kill me, only he never showed up. She figured that I killed him, which I did not, and she wanted the body for his people.”
“What people?”
“I'm assuming he has a family or close friends.”
“Who was she?”
“She's a middleman. Middlewoman. Freezing Kate. Really evil type I'm told. I mean, she works for the mob from time to time, so there's that. Also, not one to trifle with. She's a supra.”
“Yeah, I could tell.”
“How?”
“The way she carried herself. Also, she's really hot. Supernaturally so.”
“I feel like every really hot chick is probably a supra. And most buff dudes, too,” I said. “I'm aware that I'm probably wrong most of the time.”
“That's why I figured your friends were supras when we went on the boat,” she said.
“They were pretty happy to have an excuse to take their shirts off.”
“They could use a little sun.”
�
��So you're not mad at me?” I asked.
“No. Why would I be?”
“I just expected some drama.”
“Look, if we were living together, or were long time serious, I would expect to know. If for no other reason than so I would be prepared if, say, you grab me and rush me out of a hotel room.” She brushed her hair away from her face. “But I mean, really, it's pretty cool, and it's always sort of in the back of your head when you meet someone, isn't it? Like how we see someone really fit, you just assume. When you don't have a job, people start to wonder. When you are getting strange visitors, it sets off warning bells. It does for me, anyway. I'm sure other women are looking for signs that their guy is cheating, or married, or has some other flaw that they want to detect. I don't know, I guess I just think it'd be cool to find out my boyfriend was a supra.”
“I'm not, though, just so you know,” I said. “You'll notice I'm not very fit, and also I don't have any powers. I mean someone told me I did, but I don't really think it's a thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“So someone with the power to detect powers said that my power is to attract supras. Not in a sexual sense, but that they tend to gather around me, or are drawn to me. She was very vague, cited some circumstantial evidence, but no smoking gun. So I have friends that are supras. Some people have a lot of friends that are musicians, it's not because they have a power to attract musicians.”
“Right?” she said. “People claim dubious abilities all the time.”
“Well, Calliope said she was legit, mostly. Her power anyway,” I said. “But someone how I got blamed for messing up her power to detect powers.”
My phone interrupted. Jen had sent me a text.
I talked to C. Hope your girlfriend isn't psycho.
I replied, All good.
Got something to show you.