We sat at the dining room table, digging into our reheated dinners, while Lori paged through the newspaper. “Can you believe these stories about this ‘bib’ woman?” asked Lori, as she reached page eight.
There it was again; someone saying ‘bib’ irritating me like cracker crumbs in my bed. I closed my eyes and tightened the muscles in my face trying to remember that she was my sister and murder was out of the question…or was it? She was asking for it. I wrapped my arms around my stomach to keep them from striking. “It’s not bib,” I began struggling to be calm, “Please don’t call her that. It’s B.I.B.”
“No one calls her that,” added Paige, barely looking up. “Bib is just gross. It misses the whole point. She’s not a baby.”
Lori gave us both a wave of her hand. “Bib Smib,” she declared, risking life and limbs again as my fingers clenched and shook.
“Whateverrrrr,” added Paige.
Oblivious to her near-death experience, Lori shook her head. “I don’t believe they call her by those initials, and right in the paper. A strong woman who wears black, you just know it means Bitch in Black.”
“That’s what B.I.B. stands for?” I asked in naive surprise. “All this time everyone’s been calling…her a Bitch right to her face?”
“Mom, please. You didn’t know that?” said Paige shaking her head, “You really need to get out more.”
Now I knew why I hated being called ‘bib’. A Bitch in Black was a totally different thing. “I don’t know. I kind of like it. At least a bitch doesn’t take any shit, right?” I said, coming to my own defense, and I did like it. After years of being “just” a single mom, being bad ass seemed pretty good.
“She’s amazing…Now they have a picture of her in the paper,” Lori continued, seeming to half agree with me.
I stopped, a forkful of mashed potatoes just before my lips. “Picture?”
“Yeah, look, there she is,” said Lori showing the paper to me. “But with that mask, what good is the picture? She could be anyone.”
My fork continued to my mouth, relieved that even my own sister was unable to put the picture together with me. “Boy, she looks great,” I added, remembering the night the picture was taken. I smiled briefly, thinking about the bar and Mr. Texas that night. Then the smile drained. I’ve got to be more careful, I thought, remembering the number of beers I’d had.
I didn’t really remember everything about that night, but I do remember going to Skelly’s with the girls from the office. After several rounds of beers, all of us girls sort of adopted the Texan when he dared stop by our table. You could tell by his body language that he was concentrating his charms on me, but having recently injured Jason, I was in no mood to humor him, or do him any damage. He bought us all some flaming shots, but gave me a couple extra, as I remember.
Then the conversation turned to the news that day about the B.I.B.; what a bad-ass she was. So I whipped the black mask out of my purse and put it on, telling all that would hear that I was the B.A.B.I.B., the Bad Ass B.I.B. Every one howled and the friggin’ Texan took my picture as I saluted him with the Miner’s Lite bottle, dressed in my work clothes with the black mask over my eyes. That was dumb, and now it had come back to haunt me.
“You wanna see the picture, Paige?” Lori asked my quiet and sullen daughter holding the paper out for her to see.
Without looking up from her plate, Paige lifted her tablet computer from beside her and held it up for us to see. There was the same picture in glowing color and much better quality than the printed version. “You old people really need to get with the twenty-first century. I saw that picture this morning. Where have you been? “ she said popping a bite of meat loaf in her mouth.
Lori was taken aback.
“I think Mom’s the B.I.B.” Paige said matter-of-factly, staring at her plate.
My mashed potatoes came to a sudden halt halfway down my throat.
Then Paige turned to us and said more lightly, “She appears mysteriously in the middle of the night. Her hair is all messed up and her clothes torn. You should have seen her when she came home from The Banshee!” Paige laughed, knowing she had gotten me into trouble with Lori.
“The Banshee?” Lori asked me, like a mother to a child. “I thought you said you weren’t going there.”
I was relieved that Paige was only joking and my mashed potatoes continued on their way. “Don’t worry; I’m not going there anymore.
“Promise?”
“Yes, I promise.”
“You should have seen her…rat woman! Her hair was a mess! And the smell!” Paige continued, joking.
“Now, that’s enough,” Lori said, coming to my defense. “She said she promised, and that’s good enough for me…I gotta look at this website in the article, thebib.org.”
“Catchy,” I said.
“Yep, hard to forget a Web address like that,” said Lori.
“I think it sucks!” Paige added, just to be confrontational.
Lori studied the picture in the paper more closely. “Allie, didn’t you have a ring like this? I remember you wore that tacky thing at Christmas,” she said, holding the paper toward me so that I could see the picture. My sister remembers everything. I wore that ring on occasion when I went out. It was a giant square cut of crystal I wore as an accessory. Most of the time I wore it on my ring finger just to mock myself—a personal reminder that there was no one putting a diamond there. The monstrous rock was my way of saying “Who needs you?” to the juvenile men of Scranton.
“Nope, never had one like that…the cut is totally different on the one I wore at Christmas. Imagine me…having a ring like the B.I.B.” I laughed, knowing Lori was totally correct.
“I noticed that too,” added Paige. She glanced at her tablet again, “See, Mom. Yours looks…”
I knew I had to stop her before she could finish. I had the pepper shaker in my hand. With the superspeed of which I was now capable, I released a cloud of pepper with a few dozen shakes that only took a millisecond and then sent the cloud to Paige’s nose at the other end of the table with one powerful, high-velocity breath. It all happened too fast for anyone to notice, and it worked; a violent sneeze interrupted her words, then another, then another.
“Eeww, what was that?” Paige exclaimed between sneezes, bringing her hand to cover her nose. The frequent sneezes began making it hard for Paige to catch her breath.
Lori looked at Paige, puzzled, and then at me. I shrugged, and we both rose to comfort her.
“Should we call 9-1-1?” Lori asked with her eyes growing wide.
By now, Paige was out of her chair, hunched over, sneezing, wheezing a little, and beads of sweat had formed on her forehead. Lori hovered over her, trying to evaluate and console her, but Paige was barely able to talk.
I played my part, knowing that Paige would be fine, but needing to show my concern. Lori, on the other hand, lost it, as was the way of her people.
“It was my fucking meat loaf, wasn’t it!”
Now I had two to calm down. I turned from Paige to grab Lori by the shoulders. “It wasn’t the meat loaf!”
“She’s having an allergic reaction to the goddamn meatloaf! I’m killing your daughter!”
“No one’s dying. She’ll be fine…get her a cup of water. Do you have any nasal saline spray?”
“Her throat’s closing! We have to get her to the hospital! Can’t you see she’s having an allergic reaction? Don’t you ever watch the fucking news? I saw this on the ‘Dangers of Breathing’!”
Lori was a bright shade of panicked red and her breathing was worse than Paige’s. Consoling Lori was no use, so I turned my attention to Paige as Lori ran out of the room. I heard the eruption of voices in the next room as she tried to enlist her husband in the “save Paige” effort.
I found some nasal saline in the cupboard of the little half-bath next to the kitchen and began the job of corralling Paige and rinsing out her nasal passages as best I could, while Lori flashed by, slip
ping her coat up over one arm and rattling her keys, heading for the car in the garage. “Never reheat meatloaf…” she muttered in passing.
Even before the nasal spray, Paige was better. But now, with the added help of a few sips of water, her symptoms were subsiding. I sat her back down and she took a few deep, breaths.
“You okay?” I asked.
She nodded. It was now my turn to feel bad for putting her through that pain. What kind of a horrible mother would do something like that to her daughter just to cover up a stupid picture I never should have let be taken in the first place? But Paige did have to bring up the ring, and she did make those nasty comments about The Banshee. Heck, she was asking for it! And compared to the eighteen hours of labor she had put me through, it was nothing. Anyway, it had worked, and the cut of my goddamn ring was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.
Lori returned from pulling the car out of the garage as Michael, her husband, arrived having been pulled miraculously from his recliner. He stepped into the doorway at the other side of the kitchen and rubbed his belly with a Miner’s Lite in his other hand. I told them that everything was fine, and Paige even tried to smile to reassure them. That prompted Michael to disappear, and Lori to grab the meatloaf platter and toss it into the trash on top of the folded newspaper I had already sent there. So ended the “Bling-Ring-Pepper” debate… and any chance for seconds on meatloaf. Oh, and that ring was toast as soon as I got home.
Chapter 9
“We Are No Longer Afraid”
It was the next adventure of the B.I.B. that made me a true public figure. This occurred just a few days after the picture taken at Skelly’s was published. I sat on the couch and watched the evening news, while Paige chatted with her friends on Facebook, texted on her phone, and listened to music on her iPod. We were both dressed for comfort only and planned on being in for the night.
I lay on my side on the sofa, slowly munching and savoring a Gertrude Hall milk chocolate while beginning to unwrap another. The news article on the TV showed a brokenhearted, crying woman, Madalena Gonzalez, whose daughter Emilia had been abducted from their Scranton home. Madalena wailed for her daughter’s return in front of her run-down little home.
I remembered the story of Francisco Gonzalez, a mid-level mob member who had disappeared a month earlier. On the streets, I had heard rumors that he swam with the fishes. Others said he was in witness protection. Either way, I was sure it was connected to the little girl’s abduction.
I walked over to Paige, pulled out one of her ear-buds, and said, “I have to go out for a minute—you be okay by yourself?”
Paige nodded, then thought about it and pulled out her earphones. “You’re not going to The Banshee are you?.”
I laughed, as if that would never happen and I found her concern silly. I didn’t want to tell her that I had been to O’Malley’s a few nights before, the home of Scranton’s true morons—or that I was about to go out and face down the mafia. So I tried to seem cheery and calm. Me acting like that probably scared her even more.
“Don’t worry.” (That was my job.) “I’m just going out to run a couple errands. I’ll be fine. Don’t go out or let anyone in.”
“If you haven’t noticed, I’m not six anymore, Mom.”
“I know you’re not, but it still bothers me to leave you alone.”
“Mom!” she protested. She put the earbuds back in place and returned to her multitasking.
* * *
It wasn’t that hard to get a location on young Emilia’s whereabouts. A couple of mid-ranking thugs, left unconscious in alleys later, and I was outside the rundown mob safe house, where they were holding Emilia. I doubted that Scranton’s finest had looked very hard for Emilia, since she was the daughter of a mobster.
The windows were all covered, but through a crack, I could see two thugs, and in the corner, the little girl, hands bound, on a long leash that allowed her to move a bit. Apparently they were planning to keep her here for a while. I guessed that there were probably more mobsters somewhere; I heard something on the second floor. I’ll start with the two down here on the first floor. Maybe I’ll get lucky, I thought. Slipping in through the dilapidated back door was easy. Merging into the shadows of the darkly lit living room was fun.
The two thugs sat across from one another, one watching an old movie on TV, with a gun on the arm of his chair. The other had placed his mobile phone and pistol on the small table beside his chair, apparently to begin cleaning the gun; wrong time for that.
The thug watching TV was relaxed, a song playing in his head, no doubt, zoned out to the point where he barely saw the program he was watching. As he clearly wasn’t expecting any trouble on this cake job, it took him a few shocked seconds to realize that his gun hand had risen up. He watched in surprise as his hand pointed the gun at the thug across from him and fired; first, a hit to the knee, and then a second shot to the shoulder.
The wounded thug screamed out, “Manny, what the hell are you doing?” before he fell over and went into shock. I had expected to feel bad. After all, this was the first person I had actually shot. But remembering Madalena’s anguish, imagining that it was my daughter trying to scream through her gagged mouth, struggling with the ropes that bound her, I had little doubt the wounded thug deserved it. And I decided I would gladly do it again. Any mother would. Besides, he would live to spend his time in jail.
The TV thug was frozen in utter amazement. Then he became even more horrified when he saw his own gun turning and pointing at his face, the dim light finally revealing my black-clothed hand curling around from the back of his chair, guiding the 9 mm toward his eyes. At that point, the thug lost all bladder and bowel control, letting out a long fart and wetting his pants. My voice saying, “Manny, you stink,” was the last thing he heard before a hammer fist to the back of his neck made everything go black.
Slipping into the safety of the shadows once again, I heard the footsteps on the stairway. The footsteps stopped, and all was quiet for some time. Finally, a figure of a man slipped into the darkness along the wall. I listened for more thugs coming, but heard none. It was just he and I. I liked those odds.
I appeared out of the shadows a few feet away from the third thug, an Asian man standing in a defensive pose. His shirt was open, revealing a tight, muscular chest. The way he held his body told me he had practiced for this moment for years. He was not armed and didn’t feel the need to be. He glanced quickly about the room for any allies, and found none, as I had decommissioned his two associates. He was making all the right moves. But when he saw that his attacker was a woman in a costume, he disregarded the evidence around him and got cocky. “What’s all this about? You’re a little late for Halloween.”
“Maybe I’m just early. Trick or treat?” I taunted as I circled him. “Why don’t we just forget the treat and go right to the trick?”
He circled away and looked for his opening to strike. “What the hell you supposed to be, some kind of witch?”
I stopped moving. “Let’s get it stright. It’s not witch…it’s bitch,” I said, unleashing a front kick that easily powered through his attempt at a forearm block.
The kick must have surprised the thug immensely. But the pain of being sent through the two-by-fours and siding of the old house must have been worse. By the time he landed in the snowy yardhe was unconscious.
I looked at the hole in the wall—cold air and snowflakes were now swirling through it—and then to the window two feet away, wondering how I could have missed sending him through the window as planned. Then I dropped to the shadows again and listened intently. I turned on my supersensitive ears. Besides the girl’s whimpers, I heard the buzzing of lights, a TV, the mumble of a set of earphones for a personal music player on the second floor, and the sound of a mouse in the basement behind the furnace with a bad case of indigestion. All was clear.
I turned my attention to Emilia. “Emilia, it’s okay. I’m a friend of your mother. You are safe with m
e.”As I untied the girl and took off her gag, she remained full of fear. I held on to her. “You’re safe now.”
“Mama sent you?”
“Yes.”
“I knew she would. I knew mama would never give up on me!”
“I’m going to take you home, but you have to be quiet. There could be more of these bad men.”
Emilia shook her head. “Just them.”
“Are you sure? Just three?”
Emilia looked at the two in the living room and one out in the yard, counting with her fingers. “Yes, just three.”
“You okay?” I asked.
Emilia nodded.
“No one hurt you?”
Emila shook her head.
I grabbed the thug’s mobile phone off of the table, placed a “911 shots fired” call, gave the address, closed the phone, and dropped it at the thug’s feet. Making the call that would lead to his arrest from his own phone gave me a little satisfaction.
“One more thing, Emilia. I need you to be brave. I hope you’re not afraid to fly.”
“Fly?” questioned Emilia as I wrapped my arm around her waist, walked her through the front door, and we shot into the night sky. At first she screamed, but within a few seconds she laughed with delight, and we were gone.
* * *
It was late when we reached Emilia’s house. Madalena was reluctant to open the door until she heard her daughter’s voice, then the door flew open. They combined in a tearful hug that went on for a long time. Finally, Madalena became aware of me.
“Santa Maria!” she cried, “It is you! I saw you in the papers. I prayed for you to save my daughter and now you are here!”
Emilia joined in, clinging to her mother’s legs. “She brought me home, Mama. She fought all those bad men that took me away. She knocked them all down. Then we flew through the sky all the way home!”
Madalena took my hand and kissed it. “You are an angel from heaven. I can never repay you.”
Super Born: Seduction of Being Page 9
