I waited and tried to be gracious, but needed to express my concern. “Mrs. Gonzalez, perhaps you should leave town. The men that did this may come back again. You’re not safe here.”
Madalena’s eyes pooled with tears. “We are safe as long as you are here. These men think that I know where Francisco has gone. They are afraid he will tell people what he knows about them. I told them I don’t know where he has gone, so they think if they take Emilia I will tell them, or that he will come back to save her. With you here, they will not come back. You are a gift from God, and I will tell everyone this.”
I knew there was no use debating the subject with her. At any rate, it was a joy to see them back together, and I was happy for that moment.
Still, that was the first time I began to feel the descent of a yoke of responsibility that I hadn’t asked for or wanted. I wasn’t a faceless mom anymore. This wasn’t a bake sale where everything was warm and fuzzy. I wasn’t using my powers for fun or profit. This was real life. I had chosen this course to make the world a better place and it had made me responsible; responsible for the lives of real people, responsible for all I could do. Madalena thought I was her savior. Was I? Could I protect her from tomorrow?
I thought about my little five foot five inch frame and stacked it against all the evil in the world and sighed, thinking of Paige, soon to be out in that world, no longer my little girl riding a pony at a fair, eating macaroni and cheese, or calling me Mommy. I now felt responsible not just for Paige but for Madalena and Emilia and everyone else too. Tears began to flow. “Some superhero, bawling like a schoolgirl,” I sniveled. I took some deep breaths, then my natural sarcasm kicked in to help me. “If it’s me and the good in people against an evil world, evil had better watch its ass.
* * *
When I slipped back home that evening, I found Paige exactly where I had left her, multitasking past her bedtime. I changed back into my comfy clothes and moved over behind Paige, enveloping her in a tight hug as she sat at the computer.
Paige pulled her earbuds out, turned, and protested, “Mom!”
I just hugged her tighter, not wanting to let go.
* * *
The next morning, the foremost B.I.B. expert in the galaxy (That’s me, Logan. Remember the guy telling you this story?) and the other media people crowded Madalena’s tiny front yard and porch. They stuck microphones in her face and shone camera lights in her and her daughter’s face while I stood and soaked in the glorious media event. “My” girl had done a wonderful thing, and somehow I had attached myself to her success.
Madalena spoke happily of her daughter’s return thanks to the B.I.B. She spoke in glowing terms of the angel that had saved her daughter and was here to save the city from evildoers and devils. Like someone in a single-minded trance, she told the audience that the mayor and police needed to set up communication with the B.I.B. and work with her for the good of the city.
“Mr. Mayor, Mr. Policeman, you call this woman a puta, a puta who wears black. But I know that she is an angel, a saint, sent from God!” Madalena shook her finger at the camera. “Not every angel is white.”
She ended by saying that, with the B.I.B. to protect her, she was no longer afraid.
When I uploaded that TV footage to the website, the response was a groundswell of support for bringing the B.I.B. out into the open and embracing her as a hero. “We are no longer afraid!” became the new slogan of B.I.B. fans everywhere. So when I wrote my latest article for the Times Tribune, I continued with that theme and used Madalena Gonzalez’s words to call for open communications between the B.I.B. and public authorities. In actuality, I thought making her more public would help me find her. I couldn’t have guessed where that would ultimately lead. It wasn’t like I had a plan. I just thought as long as there was a paycheck in it and it brought me closer to her, what the hell…Hey, “we’re no longer afraid” would make a great T-shirt.
Chapter 10
The Mob Takes Note of the Black Angel
My name is Carmine Camino. For today at least, I work for Gregorio Gambrelli, crime chief of Scranton. Gregorio’s an old fart, too set in the old ways of doin’ business, if you ask me. I’m one of the boy’s who gets things done for him, if you know what I mean. Today he wants me to lean on the mayor, bring him to a meeting with Gregorio, now. The mayor’s in Gambrelli’s pocket, who owns him for the union support that got him elected. I guess today Gambrelli wants to cash in one of those chips.
When I walked into his office, the mayor was leaning back in his chair with his shiny Italian shoes on the desk, admiring the view outside his large window. He was a dignified, well-dressed, sack of shit with neatly cut silver hair. When I appeared, his feet slipped off the desk, and he almost fell out of his chair. “Yes?” he said in a blank tone.
“Giovanni’s, now,” I said, throwing him his coat.
We walked into Giovanni’s restaurant precisely at 2:00 p.m., and I escorted the mayor back to a private booth in the corner, where Gregorio Gambrelli waited, eating a plate of linguine marinara with sausage. (They have the best sauce at Giovanni’s. It’s to die for.) Gregorio was long past his prime. Stress had whitened his hair and left his skin a blotchy gray.
Two of the boys stood on each side of the booth in suits with their arms folded. Another large man—Vito the asshole, with fingers the size of saplings—sat across from Gregorio. When the mayor arrived, Gregorio gestured to Vito, and he left the booth and stood with the others. I joined them but kept my ears open.
The mayor sat down anxiously looking at the old-framed black-and-white photos of Gambrelli’s ancestors, generations of crime bosses, which looked down at him from the walls encirlcing the booth and then turned his attention to Gambrelli.
“You know about this…this…B.I.B. woman in the papers?” Gregorio asked.
The mayor nodded.
“She’s not good for business. She’s cost me some good men. She sent a busload of our girls one way to Vegas. Kinda hard for us to make money with no girls! And have you ever heard of anyone winning at the numbers? It happened last week. Now, in the paper I read today, they want you to ‘communicate, coordinate,’ with her,” he said, picking up the paper and dropping it on the table.
“Don’t worry,” began the mayor nervously, “I won’t let that happen.”
Gregorio raised his hands in the air. “You see? This is why I have to do all the thinking for you politicians,” he said, pounding his head. “You don’t think. You don’t get it…Get this straight,” he said, looking the mayor deeply in the eye. “I want you to communicate with her. I want you to bring her out. I can’t kill what I can’t find, capisce?”
The mayor stared, blanking in surprise, and then nodded.
“You and your boys downtown come up with some way to make her show up, and my boys will take care of the rest. We’ll communicate with her real good. You got it?”
“I can do that,” the mayor said.
“Good, I’d hate to think I got you elected for nothing. My boy Carmine here will stick with you till it’s done.”
“You can trust me.”
“I hope so. For your sake, I hope so. Now, if you will excuse me, I have other business,” Gambrelli concluded, as two of the boys pulled an unwilling man toward the table and a waiter refilled the chief’s water glass without blinking an eye.
I took hold of the mayor’s arm and escorted him back to his office. The sleeve of his suit felt slimy to the touch. I hate those friggin’ politicians.
* * *
I stayed with the mayor in his conference room that night. I watched the little weasel while he paced and spoke with his advisers. “Somebody’s got to have some idea how we can contact this woman!”
The room was full of blank stares from the six people surrounding the big table at the center of the room, including me. If that were Carmine’s meeting, I’d be busting some heads.
The mayor asked, “Edwards, what did you find out about the B.I.B. website? T
here has to be some contact info there. Something?”
Edwards was the mayor’s assistant, a real worm—you know, the young Ivy League type with glasses. He shook his head. “We had no trouble getting into the server, but it looks like there is nothing more there than you see on the site. We tracked the email of that picture they printed in the paper back to some guy’s laptop. We leaned on him pretty heavy, but all he could tell us was where he was that night. He didn’t know who she was or where to find her again…The site’s a mess, by the way; it’s like somebody’s attic.”
The mayor threw up his hands, “Anybody, anybody got an idea?”
Edwards added, “The site is already offering rewards. I don’t think that will work.”
“How about a full-page ad in the paper?” offered Elizabeth, a young woman who worked with Edwards.
The mayor thought about it. “Yeah, but if she’s under cover, why would she respond? Any other ideas…anybody?”
There was quiet in the room, until one of these young hipster-type geekwads, a guy, who called himself “megabyte” sitting away from the others against the back wall chimed in. He was the mayor’s IT communications guru who, unlike the formal suits and ties of his co-workers, always dressed in a rock ’n’ roll T-shirt and jeans. “She’s, like, a superhero, dudes. You have to treat her with honor and respect. You have to acknowledge her”.
“So, so?” asked the mayor, circling a finger for the geek to speed up and get to the point.
“You gotta do somethin’ like Batman. They had this searchlight thing that they turned on whenever he was needed. It was a special thing. You know, like we need you, man. We need you right now. How could a superhero ignore that?” Megabyte asked.
The mayor thought about it. “Dramatic, yes, but it might work.”
Then Edwards chimed in. “You know, Mr. Mayor, the new Batman movie—Batman twenty-five or whatever it is—is opening next week. If we could time it with the release of the movie, perhaps my contacts at the movie distributor could comp us some air play and maybe even get us the searchlight prop they used at the world premiere. With the free publicity, we could make a big event out of it. How could she ignore Hollywood?”
The mayor thought about it as he paced. “Yeah, women love Hollywood, the red carpet and all that. Can we get a red carpet? We’ll invite every body who’s anybody in town. We’ll walk them down the red carpet like the Oscars; evening gowns the whole nine yards! I’m a genius. Why can’t you lumps think outside the box like me? After all these years, you would think something would rub off on you. Okay, full media blitz! Take out the ads in the paper, use the radio, and get the TV guys to cover it. We have to make sure she knows about it and what kind of event it’s going to be. We’ll offer her overnight celebrity status…Get the art department to turn that picture in the paper into a silhouette that we can put on the searchlight.”
“What kind of silhouette do you want?” asked Edwards.
“God, do I have to think of everything? I don’t know something…sexy. You know, her, but better. What woman could refuse?”
To my way of thinking, a lot of women could refuse that. This B.I.B. seemed to be doing just fine without dealing with a turd like the mayor. What’d she need him for, anyway? Some women have to be the center of attention, some women don’t. Edwards didn’t seem to like the plan either. When he saw me shaking my head, he leaned over and whispered to me, “I don’t think the mayor’s three divorces qualify him as an expert on women, but if that what he wants, that’s what we’ll do.” The little fairy was separating himself from the Mayor should this not go down as planned. He didn’t want Gambrelli as an enemy and he wanted me to know it. Smart boy.
* * *
Chapter 11
Rebecca Dupes the Simple Fellow
That night I met the next woman on the list, Rebecca Sans, at the same coffee shop where I had met Jennifer Lowe. After some initial discomfort, I finally got used to being there, sitting at exactly the same table as I had with Jennifer, in fact.
Rebecca was a lively, bright girl, but no superwoman. She was a graphic designer who wore up-to-date clothes, her brown hair short, and a pair of rose-colored glasses. Unlike Jennifer, she was petite all over—I remember how thin and frail her arms looked. But I also remembered how lively and excited about life she seemed to be. (I hate people like that.) We did the survey shtick, drank some coffee, and chatted. After a while, she talked about the website she was finishing up work on, and it dawned on me that a lot of web design people call themselves graphic designers. With my site becoming a cluttered mess as I tried to maintain and grow it, I spontaneously offered her the job of redoing my B.I.B. site.
“What a coincidence I run a web site that really needs some work. I’ve been doing okay with it, but I’ll bet someone like you could really help update it. You know, fine-tune it. How soon are you available?”
“How cool! What kind of site do you have?”
“You ever hear about the B.I.B.?”
“The B.I.B.? I love what she’s doing! What does your site have to do with her?”
I proudly opened my lap tap and used the coffee shop’s WiFi to bring up my site. I flipped the screen around to show it to Rebecca, smiling, ready for her to be impressed at my awesome work, even if I do say so myself.
Instead, I watched her face sour and her head pull back as she clicked through the site. When her mouth dropped open I realized that maybe the site needed a little more work than I thought.
It took a long time for her mouth to close and be able to form words. “Well…this picture of her is so cool. I love that. But do you really talk to people on your message boards with this kind of language?”
“Well, some of them are true vulgarians. I’m not someone who sugar coats shit!”
“Has your webmaster ever heard of the terms layout, balance, and centering?” When she saw me run my hand through my hair instead of answering, she continued, “There are twenty links on this page in twenty different places…” “Five of the links go to the same article about the health benefits of drinking beer. That one of yours?…” I gave her a blank stare for good measure. “Menu, template, navigation bar? Any of those sound familiar? Okay, is your webmaster a Labrador or a chimpanzee?”
“Oh, him. Yeah that guy who runs the site is a real loser. That’s why I wanna hire you,” I said, hoping she would not discover that I had created the crappy site myself.
“What’s his name? Maybe I know him.”
“Oh, his name is Webb.” She gestured with her hand rotating, asking for more information. “Webb Shite, his name is Webb Shite…German or something.”
Rebecca laughed and put her hand over her mouth.
“Well, that might have been his company’s name, not him personally…I’m sure I have his card here somewhere.”
“Never mind,” she said, smiling. “I’m sure I can help you…a lot. And I’ll do it cheap, cause I love the B.I.B. I’d do anything to meet her.”
Me too, I thought, thinking of the mountain of things I was doing to try to accomplish just that.
“How about three thousand for setup and then fifteen hundred a month, flat rate? That will cover a new design, construction, and daily maintenance of the email and message boards. I’ll monitor the tip line, send out rewards, set up a searchable tip archive, build you an online store to sell B.I.B. stuff, and set up a daily blog for your articles, as well as organize the links and set up some ad space so you can get some advertising income.”
The size of fees made me blink…twice. That was telling her. I wasn’t sure where the money would come from but I knew I needed the help.
“And I’ll need some juice.”
“Juice? I just got you a coffee refill.”
She laughed again. “You are so funny! You are just a trip!” I had no idea I was so entertaining. “No, silly! Not juice, juice. I mean some commission on the merchandising and advertising sales. That’s going to be a lot of work. I need to do designs, get supp
liers, find people to buy ads…Miner’s Lite comes to mind immediately. She’s holding a bottle of their beer in that picture. It’s a natural.”
I blinked one more time; you know, just to be certain I had covered all my ‘blink’ bases. Then I extended my hand across the table for a handshake. “Done,” I said.
“Great! Give me your contact info. I can start as soon as I finish this other site I’m working on.”
I scribbled down my name, email, and cell phone number on a piece of notepaper and handed it to her.
“Logan?” she asked, looking at the sheet. “I thought you said your name was Tom.”
“What gave you that idea? No, it’s Logan…My boss was Tom. But he died…weird sexual accident. I don’t like to talk about it. Maybe that’s how you got confused.”
“Your name’s not Webb Shite, either?” She said with a knowing grin.
“Forget that loser. I already have. You’re my web designer from now on.”
“Okay, then we’ll talk soon,” Rebecca said with a gigantic smile (I hate people who do that too), then she turned and was gone.
As I packed my Penn State materials in my bag, I revealed a little hole gouged into the tabletop. I ran my finger over it, thinking it was an odd shape.
A guy who was cleaning tables next to me saw what I was doing. “Yeah, that’s weird, huh? I had to dig that out. Somebody melted a pen, and it left that hole. It was a bitch getting it out.”
“Melted a pen? How do you do that?”
“Beats me. I saw a little smoke coming from the table. When I looked over I saw this really stacked chick blow out some flames and leave. Man, she really looked pissed, and there was this metal plug in the table. All I know is, if you look down in the center, you can see part of the clip of the pen with the brand name on it. I couldn’t get it all out. Somebody didn’t like that pen!”
I looked in the center and saw what he was talking about. It was the same expensive brand of chrome pen I had left with Jennifer Lowe. Maybe somebody didn’t like the survey I left her, or maybe she didn’t like being left by the guy who gave her the pen.
That was the first time I even began to wonder, could there be more than one? Jones’ focus had always been on finding the strongest one, but number two might not be too shabby. Through the shop window, I watched Rebecca reach for her mobile phone as she bounced toward her car with a big smile on her face. She speed dialed and waited beside her car door for it to answer. I was glad to see that my job offer had made her so happy, but I wondered who she was calling. At any rate, I was glad this survey interview had concluded without incident.
Super Born: Seduction of Being Page 10
