Tales of the Red Panda: The Crime Cabal

by Gregg Taylor

  Malcolm struggled to place a handkerchief over his mouth. He tried to think of what they might be using. He had tasted tear gas, and heard poison gases described by men who had fought in the Great War. This was nothing like any of them. Besides, the Crime Cabal had no stockpile of noxious gases, and they were unlikely to bring them in just for this. Not when they had him trapped like a rat. If they were going to kill him, they’d want it to be on the sly. Bringing gas canisters through the main entrance didn’t seem likely.

  No, it had to be something on hand, something…

  Something from the laboratory!

  Now Malcolm began to truly panic. This could be almost anything. This could– No. In an instant, he remembered something Professor Zombie had… something he hadn’t listened to… Necronium 234 in a suspension of… something… then she… electrified the field. He couldn’t remember, and it didn’t seem to matter. They were pumping the room full of gas that would turn him into a zombie! What had she said? Leech from his body the sweet gift of life and leave only cold obedience. That was how they planned to keep control of the organization! They would use him as a puppet. Keep him isolated, but on-side. The men would assume that the confrontation had blown over and Malcolm had become a figurehead. They would cease to question the arrangement and when Malcolm was well and truly forgotten, he would meet with an accident and no one would ever be the wiser. It was brilliant. It was exactly what he would have done, had he had the means.

  “Well,” he thought, “at least I can cheat them of that.” And for a moment the barrel of the .45 was in his mouth. If he blew the back of his head off there would be no nice, tidy corpse to resurrect.

  At once, he heard a small noise outside the door. Through that great mass of iron and bulletproof glass, any sound that could penetrate would be far from subtle. He gripped the handle of the .45, his Roman act for the moment forgotten. If they were coming for him, by God he would take a few of them with him.

  He crept up to the small porthole in the door and turned back the cover. Through the thick pane of bulletproof glass, he could see… one man. Only one. And it was Hook Henderson. The fool was monkeying with something, but it was on the wrong side of the door. The fool must be trying to force the door, but instead of working the lock, he was playing with the intercom that was built into the wall.

  Henderson worked feverishly for a moment, and then suddenly he was finished, though Malcolm could not say what he thought he might have accomplished. Henderson stepped back from the door and smiled at Malcolm through the window, as if he had known the crime lord was there the whole time. He waved slightly, in a flippant manner, and stood watching.

  Malcolm was furious. He jammed the speaker button on the intercom to tell Henderson just exactly what he thought of traitors. At the moment he did so, the short circuit Henderson had set up inside the intercom system overloaded and arced inside the sanctum. The suspension solution was electrified in a mighty surge of power throughout the room, and Malcolm felt the Necronium 234 he had inhaled activated, like a thousand icy knives cutting into his brain from the inside.

  And at that moment, Malcolm learned the truth that all criminals must one day accept. That evil only begets evil.

  With a final scream, Malcolm found his way out.

  Twenty-One

  Bert Mendel was a very nervous little man. It was just his nature really. He had been one of those awkward children who looked like they would jump out of their skins if you said, “Boo!”. He had grown, of course. Developed an aptitude for the natural sciences and the sort of iron stomach that best befits those who work in forensics. He had joined the Toronto Coroner’s Office, risen through the ranks entirely on merit and was one of the most trusted deputies of the operation. But somehow he had never really lost the look of that awkward, sweaty little boy.

  Many people live all their lives with such a nervous condition and think nothing of it. They keep to themselves, or learn to avoid situations that might cause them stress. Sadly, for Bert, this was quite impossible. Not that he wasn’t used to working in a quiet laboratory completely surrounded by corpses; indeed, that was the only crowd in which he was ever truly at ease. But Bert Mendel was also an Agent of the Red Panda, and he lived in mortal terror that someone would find out.

  Two years before, Bert had, like many before him, become convinced that he had devised a perfect system to beat the odds at games of chance. He was certain that his system would grant him a life of luxury and ease after beating one of the big gambling houses at their own game. What Bert had discovered was that the only system that such games respected was one simple rule – in the end, the House always wins.

  Before long, he had found himself hopelessly indebted to some very dangerous types. Every time he tried to gamble his way out, he only dug his own grave a little deeper. In the end, when the men he owed knew Bert was a bad investment, they concluded that he could best serve their business interests as an example to others who might decline to pay. And so he had found himself on a bridge, badly beaten and about to be thrown into the murky and polluted waters of the Don River. He hated to think of his own desiccated corpse showing up in the morgue in which he had worked. Of his own organs being cut out and weighed, of his own flesh subjected to the same tests to try and learn the identity of his killers. But it seemed the only, perhaps even the logical end.

  But that grim logic took an unexpected turn, in the form of a mysterious stranger in a red mask. With mad, joyous laughter he had disposed of Bert’s assailants, and in short order, with his remaining problems. His debts vanished, his lost savings were restored. He had been granted a second chance such as few men are ever given. But it had come at a price. Bert had wanted nothing more than to melt back into the anonymous little life that he had gambled away. It was not to be.

  “Bert Mendel,” the man in the mask had said. “I have restored your life. It belongs to me now.”

  He had heard the first whisperings of course, few in the city had not. A mysterious being with inexplicable abilities, on a crusade against crime. Some called him a menace, some a marvel. Some called him a Satan, some a savior. In time, all would know his name. But Bert Mendel had been one of the first to call him “chief,” even if he only thought of him as trouble.

  At the moment, Trouble was leaning on his filing cabinet, flipping casually through his records. Trouble’s crazy lady friend was hanging upside down from the ceiling, packed into a tight crouch and watching Bert with that grin that made him think she just might go for his throat. He felt a fat bead of sweat drop from the back of his hairline and run down his spine, icy-cold. He shivered in spite of himself.

  The man in the mask looked up from the file, only slightly annoyed.

  “This isn’t really what I was looking for, Bert.”

  “It’s all I got!” Bert panted. “You gotta get outta here. Please.”

  “Bert,” the Red Panda began with a smile as white as the blank eyes that peered from his domino mask, “you’re a monument to Man’s inability to learn his lesson. No matter how often I come to you with a nice simple request–”

  “Simple?” Bert sputtered. “There ain’t nothing simple about this!”

  The Red Panda ignored the interruption, “–you still imagine you can get me to leave with a few waves of your hands and some desperate sputtering. You have information that I need. Lives hang in the balance. I don’t really have time to do this the hard way.”

  Those words seemed to hang in the air, just a little. Bert turned his head away, to peer over his shoulder. The Flying Squirrel had not moved, had not so much as budged. But it was just possible that her Cheshire Cat grin had widened even more at the mention of “the hard way.”

  “Hi,” was all she said.

  New rivers of sweat rolled down Bert’s face. She really was staggeringly lovely. He had never been quite so afraid of anything in his life.

  “Do you think you can make her stop looking at me like that?” he whimpered.

  “No,” t
he masked man replied. “But you can.”

  “How?” Bert gasped, unable to look away.

  She cocked her head to the side, just a little.

  “Make with the skinny, sweat-pea,” she grinned.

  “I’ve given you everything I’ve got already,” Bert pleaded.

  The girl looked at her mentor and raised an eyebrow. “Boss?” she said.

  The Red Panda flipped the file open and summed up the Coroner’s report in a scholarly tone.

  “It says here that one of the four corpses pulled from the remains of Northcott’s Greengrocery was none other than Satchel Braun, notorious racketeer and former enforcer with Ace Ryder’s mob.” He flipped the file closed with a smirk.

  “You don’t say?” the girl said, releasing her hold on the ceiling, flipping in mid-air and landing on her feet, soft as a kitten. “Well, that’s very interesting.”

  “See?” said Bert. “That- that’s got to be good for something.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Except he’s the guy we recognized at a hundred paces, Bert. Who were his playmates?”

  “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know! Did you check out the rest of the Ryder mob?”

  “The rest of the Ryder mob,” the Red Panda said sternly, “is either in prison or in the boneyard. Case Bermel and Mitch Palmer are the only two still at large, and neither our behemoths nor our bomber were them.”

  “Look,” Bert sputtered, “you two were there! How can I tell you anything you don’t already know? Chief O’Mally has this case locked down. If anyone found out I was talking to… to anyone, much less to you… I’d be more than out of a job, I’d be in the clink myself!”

  “I have many Agents, Bert,” the masked man said seriously. “Some serve me for the adventure. Some out of a sense of duty. For some it is money, some a chance at redemption. Nearly all have some debt to repay, as you do. Many risk their lives in my service. All I have ever asked of you is that you do what you are already paid to do, but to report to me when I need you. Your cowardice is often mildly amusing, but I’m afraid we just don’t have the time today.”

  Bert’s ears and cheeks grew hot with shame. “I don’t – I didn’t –”

  “The names, peaches,” the girl said.

  “I can’t give you names. I don’t have names.” Bert sighed. “I don’t have much of anything on those other three bodies. The Coroner pulled the original reports. He’s ordered fresh autopsies.”

  “That alone is interesting, don’t you think?” the Red Panda said, his gloved hand on Bert’s shoulder in a gesture of apology. “Tell me.”

  Bert shook his head. “The pathology was wrong. It was… it was bungled. That’s all.”

  The Red Panda re-opened the file in his hand.

  “The pathology was good enough to tell that Satchel Braun’s jaw was probably broken before the explosion, rather than by it.” He looked up at Bert. “I broke it.”

  Their eyes locked for a long moment. At last Bert slumped a little.

  “I didn’t sign off on those reports, but I helped with the work-up,” Bert said heavily. “I’ve never seen anything like those bodies before. I mean… there wasn’t a lot left of them you understand. Especially the one wearing the bomb. They didn’t find enough of him to fill a shoe-box. A lower jaw-bone that was probably his… couldn’t match the dental work, such as it was. Teeth were pretty awful. He could have been a drifter.”

  The Flying Squirrel sat at one of the stools by the workbench. The bomber who destroyed himself with the building had haunted her a little. She was not pleased that there was little possible resolution to his story.

  Bert continued, “The two gorillas were in better shape, so to speak. I’ve never seen guys like that. There was… they weren’t natural. Somehow, something had… enhanced their strength I guess, but they were massive.”

  The Flying Squirrel rolled her eyes a little. “We noticed that too,” she said.

  “One of the gorillas we couldn’t tell from Adam. But we had a hit on the other. There was enough left of his face to make a positive I.D. Some guy who worked down at the Port Authority. Big fella, sure… but not like this. He went missing two weeks earlier. Nobody reported it. They figured he’d just moved on.”

  “No family?” asked the Squirrel.

  “Not so you’d know, though I guess somewhere…,” Bert trailed off. “Here’s the thing, though. The cops ran this guy’s record. Clean as a whistle. If he’d ever been anywhere near trouble, nobody ever heard of it. Two weeks later he’s twice his original size and smashing heads for the mob. Too screwy for me.”

  “Perhaps,” the Red Panda said seriously. “But for the Coroner?”

  “That was different,” Bert continued. “Listen… I don’t know how to explain it, except that if you spend enough time around dead folks, you get kind of an instinct for it. The tissue, it didn’t… didn’t feel right. And I don’t just mean the explosion and the fire… I’ve dealt with things like that before, and this was… it was wrong. It was like… like a cadaver more than a corpse. More like something that had been in a jar of formaldehyde. Except it was nearly a whole person. So we ran some more tests. Everything came back the same…”

  “And?” The Flying Squirrel leaned in.

  “Those gorillas? They’d been dead at least a week. The bomber too.”

  “What?” she sputtered. “Bert, we were trading punches with them an hour before!”

  “Well, I didn’t know that at the time. So we put forward the theory that they were… plants of some kind. That it was part of some caper–”

  “What kind of caper would that be?” she asked incredulously.

  “Yeah… that’s where we kind of ran out of steam too. Anyway, the Coroner flipped his lid. Said we were all idiots and ordered new pathology. Told us all in no uncertain terms that if any of us breathed a word of this we’d be out on the street. Now we’re up to our elbows in fresh bodies from the Golden Goose–”

  “–and you’ve got four more that tested the same as the others,” the Red Panda finished the thought.

  “How in blazes did you… Yeah… yeah, that’s right,” Bert said, wide-eyed. “And none of us knows how to tell the Coroner. Or what to tell him. It’s all crazy.”

  “Boss?” the Squirrel began, “Do you know what the screaming blue heck is goin’ on here?”

  “I just might have an idea,” the masked man nodded. “But I need those reports, Bert.”

  Bert sighed and pulled a thick folder from the lower drawer of his desk. “The boss took all the copies of the first reports. These are the test results on our pickled eggs from the Goose. Even some tissue samples on slides. I figured you’d be around eventually.”

  The Red Panda smiled and placed his hand on the folder. Bert did not let go of his end. He met the mystery man’s blank eyes and held them.

  “It’s not a little thing you ask of me,” Bert said, seriously. “No man may serve two masters.”

  “One day, Bert,” the Red Panda said, “I hope that you will see you have only ever served one.”

  Bert’s brow was still furrowed in confusion ten seconds later when both heroes were gone without a trace. Clearly today was not to be that day.

  Twenty-Two

  “You wanna let me in on it?” Kit said, sitting on the worktable swinging her feet. The Crime Lab was not the most diverting place in the world when one was sitting quietly, which she never really enjoyed at the best of times.

  “Hmmm?” he said, peering through the microscope.

  “You never teach me the science stuff,” she said under her breath.

  “What?” he said, surprised.

  “Well…” She felt childish for having brought it up. “You taught me half a dozen martial arts, you gave me Static Shoes and Gliding Membranes…”

  “Because I thought you liked flying and… hitting things,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she howled in protest.

&nbs
p; “Are you telling me you don’t like–”

  “Of course I like flying and hitting things.” She was genuinely cross now. “Who wouldn’t? But…”

  His brow was furrowed in confusion. She sighed.

  “You don’t think I can do it,” she said, as though admitting something she was ashamed of.

  She looked at her shoes, as if she hadn’t actually said anything revealing, but had noticed something very interesting on the side of her foot for the first time. She almost never displayed any sort of vulnerability. She might do it more often if she ever realized he found it as irresistible as her cowl-head.

  He watched her for a moment. The man who now thought of himself only as the Red Panda hadn’t learned much from his father, beyond exactly what sort of man he didn’t really want to be. But there was a single truism that he could still remember being told when he was very young.

  “It may not always be convenient, but the truth is easy to remember.”

  He gave her a little chuck under the chin, and was quietly impressed at how steady his hand was.

  “Did it ever occur to you,” he began, “that if I taught you everything, you’d never give me that look like I just did something particularly clever?”

  Her eyes sparked to life. “You like that?” she mumbled.

  “It’s entirely possible that I have invented any number of things expressly to get that look.” He turned back to the microscope.

  “Could you hedge your bets a little more?” she smiled.

  “If I have to,” he said stepping back from the microscope. “Look at this.”

  “Honest?” she said, unsure now if this was a worthy trade for the moment he’d just backed away from, but unwilling to give up the chance to learn.

  “Go on,” he waved her in.

  “All… right…” She hovered over the microscope. “Er… what am I looking at?”

  “One of the specimens we got from Bert. This was one of our playmates from the Golden Goose. Or rather, a very small part of one of the very small parts of him that were left.”