by James Maxey
Jenny jumped onto his back again, shouting curses directly into his ear. I wasn’t sure if she could actually set his brains on fire, but he gasped and spun around fast, shaking her off. When he stopped, reddish brown liquid dripped from his ear. I thought it was blood, but my nose quickly puzzled out the odor of molten earwax. That had to hurt like hell but wasn’t going to stop him. Still, in the span of seconds while he was shaking his head trying to get the burning fluid out of his ear, I spotted a manhole cover next to me. Growing up, I developed my own fighting style, ape-fu. It’s a cute name for fighting dirty. I bite, eye-gouge, and bludgeon my opponents with any blunt instrument that’s handy. All that matters is that at the end of the fight I’m standing and they’re down for the count.
A manhole cover was heavy and hard enough to do some damage. My fingers were too thick to fit into the holes, so I punched the ground beside it, bloodying my knuckles further. The shock of the blow caused the manhole cover to jump enough for me to grab the edge. I lifted it, pleased with the heft. It easily weighed seventy pounds, maybe a hundred.
I wasn’t stupid enough to throw it at McGruber and let him catch it and use it against me. Instead I gripped it with both hands above my head and charged. He braced himself, legs spread wide, ready to block the blow, when Jenny came up dead center behind him and kicked him in the nuts. Jenny’s footwear of choice is steel toed work boots, so he felt it enough to take his eyes off me for half a second.
I brought the disk down with everything I had, catching him on the eyebrow. He staggered backward, dazed, until Jenny thrust her leg behind his ankle and he fell to his back. I was on him a second later, smashing his head again and again with the disk. He fought back, landing blows to my chest and face, but I was so hyped up I shrugged them off. A sense of panic began to grow as the manhole cover bent. What did it take to knock this fucker out?
About the ninth time I hit him there was a sickening crack. His forehead sort of dented in, causing his eyes to bulge. His arms dropped to his sides, limp.
I rolled off him, panting, my arms like lead.
“Val,” I whispered, forcing myself to rise again.
I found her on the sidewalk where she’d fallen. She was completely still, face down on the pavement. It didn’t even look like she was breathing.
“Val?” I said, my voice on the edge of a sob.
I knelt beside her and touched her hair. She didn’t react at all. I turned her over. She was utterly limp, her face pale, her eyes half open, unfocused. My senses are much sharper than a humans, but I still pressed my ear against her chest to confirm what I could already hear. She wasn’t breathing. Her heart had stopped. McGruber had broken her neck. Or… or had… when I’d grabbed him, did I…?
In the distance, I heard sirens screaming. My mind was locking up, refusing to believe what I was seeing. How could Val be dead? How could this have happened just as she was finally getting her life back together?
Jenny put her hand on my shoulder. I looked around. A crowd had formed outside the bar across the street. Everyone had out phones, capturing the moment on video. I felt the rising urge to yell at them, to chase them away. Couldn’t Val even die without being hounded by cameras? But I didn’t yell. I didn’t even move. I could only sit there, holding her, shaking my head slowly. Even in death, Cut Up Girl was once more about to go viral.
Chapter Two
A GUY IN A GORILLA SUIT
CLUTCHING VAL’S LIFELESS BODY I felt completely numb. I haven’t shed a tear since I was eight, after a beating by a foster father that left me bruised and left him with a broken jaw when I finally snapped and hit back. Whatever switch normal people have in their brains to turn on tears is broken. Now, in the moments of my greatest sorrow, my world turns into a tunnel. Everything goes quiet. All I can see is what’s directly before my eyes.
I don’t know how long I held her. I caught glimpses of shadows moving at the edge of my vision, glimpsed bright lights flashing red and blue. The wail of sirens, the voices of men and women shouting, the sound of a helicopter overhead, it all became background static, noise without meaning. A persistent pain in my neck finally dragged me back out of the tunnel. I reached behind me and found Jenny’s fingers dug into my fur, tugging hard to get my attention.
That was the moment I became aware of two cops with their guns pointed at me.
“I said, put your hands in the air!” the closest cop was shouting. He had his pistol gripped with both hands. I wrinkled my nose, fighting the instinct to bare my teeth.
“This woman needs an ambulance!” I said, though it was too late for that.
“Put her down and step away!” the cop shouted. “Get your hands in the air!”
“You don’t need to shout,” I said, managing to keep my cool. “I’m fellow law enforcement. I’m with the Lawful Legion.”
“Put the girl down!” he said, really screaming now.
I decided to obey, placing Val as gently as I could on the sidewalk. I rose, holding my hands open. “Seriously, tell me there’s an ambulance on the way,” I said.
“It will be here any minute,” said the cop. “Get up against the wall. Put your hands against it.”
“He didn’t do anything!” Jenny screamed, stepping between me and the cop. “It was that guy!” she pointed at McGruber. With his face smashed in, he wasn’t the best evidence of our heroic credentials.
“Calm down, Jenny,” I said, putting my hands against the wall. “This is just a misunderstanding.”
“You can explain it all down at the station,” the cop said, as his partner approached with cuffs. He stopped a few feet away, his eyes a mix of fear and confusion as he drank in my full size.
“You’re going to need bigger cuffs,” I said. “And a bigger squad car.”
WHILE THE COPS focused on getting me cuffed, Jenny gave me a nod from the edge of the crowd of onlookers, then slipped between a couple of guys, disappearing into the throng. There’s a famous experiment where people are asked to watch a video of a team tossing a basketball around and keep count of how many times the ball is passed. During the video, a guy in a gorilla suit walks across the court. When interviewed after the video, most people have no memory of seeing the gorilla. The mind can only focus on so much. I’m living proof that this effect carries over into real life, since the cops were so focused on me that they failed to notice Jenny casually strolling away from the crime scene.
Most of the crowd was filming and snapping photos. I’m kind of used to this, though usually people are a little more furtive, or else they come up and shyly ask if they can get a picture. I’m kind of famous as a Legionnaire, and the fact that I normally dress in a suit and a tie puts people at ease when I’m in public. Looking down, I found my shirt torn open and spattered with blood. My suit and pants were ripped in a dozen places. I doubted anyone was going to ask to take a selfie with me that night.
Ten tedious minutes later a van big enough to hold me arrived and we headed for the station. I finally came out of my grief fog enough for the cogs in my brain to start turning again. They whirred and clicked toward some horrible suspicions. Val spilled the beans on the Butterfly House and gets murdered the same night? There’s no way that could be a coincidence. Before McGruber went to work as head of security for the Butterfly House, he was a D-list super-hitman known as Icer. Had he been hired for one more job? On the other hand, Val had once knocked him out with one of her exploding clones, and, yeah, he obviously remembered us dropping him from a helicopter. He had his own motives for hunting her down.
Plus, the timing was all wrong if someone powerful was trying to silence Val. I mean, if they didn’t want her to talk, why not take her out before the press conference? It’s not as if killing her kept her story from getting out. People were already downloading her book on Amazon. Killing her was probably going to make even more people read the book. Maybe it was only a coincidence that McGruber tracked her down on the same night.
By the time I reached the station, I
was confident I wasn’t caught up in some sinister conspiracy. Aside from the cop on the scene screaming at me, every other member of the LAPD treated me with respect. The woman who fingerprinted and photographed told me her daughter was a huge fan. At some point, I remember being asked if I wanted an attorney, and I said no. The Lawful Legion has a team of attorneys dedicated to smoothing over the members’ encounters with the law, but I still wasn’t sure how the rest of the Legion was going to feel about my blabbing, so I wasn’t eager to give them a call. Besides, my fight with McGruber had been filmed by a hundred onlookers. I’d acted in self-defense. Once the cops watched the videos, I’d be walking out with my name cleared inside an hour.
What I didn’t take into account was that no one had started filming anything before McGruber had tossed Jenny into the street and the car almost hit her. The squeal of brakes was what made people in the nightclub look to see what was happening. By the time most people had their phones pointed at me, I was straddling McGruber, bashing in his face with the manhole cover.
“This guy was invulnerable,” I explained, when the lead detective got around to asking why I’d used such a deadly weapon. “I’ve seen McGruber get shot in the face and shrug it off. If I hadn’t taken him out, he would have killed me as well as Val.”
“Valentine Summers,” the lead detective said slowly, flipping through pages on the clip board in front of her. “A.K.A. Cut Up Girl.”
The detective was about fifty, a heavy set black woman with garish purple nails. Her badge gave her name as Nance-Tyson, but she introduced herself as Detective Nance. Twenty minutes into our interrogation, she’d played neither good cop nor bad cop, but absolutely nailed the role of weary cop who’d rather be home in bed. She stared at the notes in front of her for long, silent moments between questions. I kept worrying she might nod off. From the bags under her eyes, you’d think she hadn’t slept in a week.
She cleared her throat “You’re of the opinion it was Mr. McGruber who killed Ms. Summers?”
“It’s not an opinion. I watched him do it.”
She nodded. Slowly, she picked up a pen. Slowly, she flipped through the pages on the clipboard, before finally making a small checkmark next to something. Wearily, she looked back at me. “It will be tomorrow before we have reports from the coroner, but it looks like Ms. Summers died of a broken neck.”
“That’s what I’ve told you,” I said, crossing my arms. They’d cut me loose of the zip ties they’d cuffed me with earlier. I could have snapped free at any time, but I knew the officers were only doing their jobs.
Another long pause while she looked at the notes. “I do see,” she said, “that Ms. Summers had a bruise shaped like a thumbprint on her neck. 60mm. That’s a very large thumb.”
“McGruber has big hands,” I said.
“So do you,” said Detective Nance, nodding slowly.
I clenched my jaw. “I know you’re just doing your job,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“But, seriously, there’s no way I’m a suspect. Val was my best friend. McGruber was attacking her. I tried to stop him. That’s part of my job description. I’m a superhero, right? A member of the Lawful Legion.”
“Not according to our database,” she said.
I said nothing. Had the Legion fired me already because of the press conference?
“We checked the Legion registry,” she said. “There’s no record of anyone named Big Ape in their database.”
“What?” I said. “I assure that’s not right. I mean, look, you watch the news, right? You’ve seen me on television, haven’t you?”
She shook her head slowly. “Can’t say I watch the news all that much. What with aliens attacking every other Tuesday and supervillains announcing their latest doomsday plans on the first of each month, it gets a little overwhelming. I’ll have to take your word that you’re famous.”
I know this makes me sound thick, but it wasn’t until that moment that I understood why McGruber hadn’t attacked before the press conference. My vague conspiracy fears snapped into focus. Taking out Val wasn’t enough. I also knew the truth about the Butterfly House. So did Jenny. McGruber was probably sent to kill all of us. Or was our death the ultimate plan? What if whoever sent him counted on me killing him? Cut Up Girl would be dead, I’d be in prison and completely discredited. And Jenny? What if she’d gone back to our teammates for help? If someone inside the Legion wanted to shut us up, she could be walking into an ambush.
“I want a lawyer,” I said.
“You were offered one earlier,” said Detective Nance.
“Now I’m taking you up on the offer,” I said.
As I spoke, there was a commotion in the hall. People shouting, followed by a loud banging on the interrogation room door. From the other side, a single voice suddenly became clear, a man’s voice, somewhat shrill and nasal, shouting, “I demand to see my client!”
Detective Nance raised an eyebrow. “That was fast.”
A voice came over the intercom. “Detective Nance, there’s an attorney here demanding—”
“We heard,” she said, sighing. “Might as well let him in.”
The only members of the Legion’s legal team I’d met were intellectual property lawyers who’d helped me licensing my Sock Monkey dolls. I didn’t recognize this guy. He was tall and gaunt, with a leathery face that looked more like a cowboy than an attorney. His hair was pure white and buzzed flat.
“Alan Flowers,” he said, introducing himself. “I represent Mr. Moreau. This interrogation is over. Any statements that have been made before my arrival will be inadmissible in court.”
“That’s for a judge to decide,” said Detective Nance.
“I wouldn’t be here if a judge hadn’t already agreed with me,” he said, opening his briefcase. He handed her a sheet of paper. “This is a court order to release my client.”
Detective Nance picked up the paper, furrowing her brow.
“The apprehension of my client was live-streamed from a dozen different points of view, all of them cataloging an inexcusable mountain of violations of my client’s civil rights. He wasn’t read his Miranda rights, for starters,” said Flowers.
I opened my mouth, then clamped it shut. I plainly remembered having my rights read, but decided it was dumb to point that out.
Detective Nance started to respond, but Flowers cut her off. “Furthermore, Mr. Moreau had weapons drawn on him without provocation. He was plainly unarmed and obviously attempting to comfort a dying woman. What’s more, he wasn’t properly seatbelted when placed in the van.”
Which was true. The seatbelt wouldn’t go around me.
Detective Nance sighed, shaking her head, dropping the court order on the table in front of her. “Whatever. Just make sure he’s available for more questions if we have them.”
“Of course,” said Flowers.
“You’re free to go,” she said without looking at me. It might have been my imagination, but she sounded relieved. She couldn’t have come into work expecting to tackle a case involving a giant man-ape. She was probably happy to have the whole thing taken out of her hands.
Two minutes later we were walking through the parking garage next to the station. I was still confused as to who the hell this guy was. “It’s not that I’m not grateful you’re here, Mr. Flowers, but who in the Legion sent you to be my attorney?”
“The Legion didn’t send me,” he said.
“Then who—”
“Nobody,” he said. “I’m not an attorney.”
“But… the court order…”
“Fake,” he said, with a slight grin. “I infiltrated the courthouse and stole the letterhead on my way over.”
For half a second, I thought he was joking. But if he wasn’t…“Shit. Am I a fugitive?”
“Yep,” he said. “Being a fugitive is a better option than being dead.”
“Dead?”
“Powerful people want you silenced,” said Flowers. “Tomorrow morni
ng you’d have been found dead in your cell, suffocated with a makeshift noose, just another suicide. Or maybe some fellow inmate would have stabbed you. There’s a hundred ways to make you disappear once you’re in jail.”
We reached his vehicle, a massive Jeep that looked like it would scrape some of the lower roofs in the garage.
“It’s a good thing you don’t drive a Miata,” I said.
“Get in,” he said. “We caught them off guard but a single phone call will expose us. We need to get some distance before that happens.”
The front seat of the Jeep wasn’t exactly roomy but I managed to squeeze in. As I closed the door, an ugly possibility hit me.
“You know,” I said, “escaping from custody would also provide a good excuse for a cop to shoot me.”
“Try to nurture that paranoia,” said Flowers. “You’ll need it to survive.”
“Why the hell should I trust you?”
“You shouldn’t trust anyone,” he said, putting the Jeep in gear. “But, I’m a good guy. A fellow vigilante. Down in Texas, they call me Reverend Rifle.”
“Never heard of you,” I said.
“Good,” he said, though he sounded slightly disappointed. “I try to stay out of the papers.”
“What’s a vigilante from Texas doing in Los Angeles? Why the hell did you show up at this exact moment? Seems like a huge coincidence.”
“I didn’t come out here planning to rescue you. I came here to talk to Valentine Summers. I saw she’d be holding a press conference. It seemed like a good opportunity to speak to her. Unfortunately, while I try to plan for everything, I didn’t quite plan for LA traffic. I arrived after the event was over.”
“Why did you want to see Val?”
