by Matt Carter
No one ever accused the Cards of being too smart for their own good.
I swing the door open and swiftly push the cart inside. The room looks empty, but all the same, I like having insurance, which is why I reach into the trash can on my cart and pull out the hamster ball.
I roll it into the corner, hoping I won’t need to break it open.
Now, you hear a lot about the mythical VIP rooms, and you expect them to be something special; hidden palaces where the rich and famous (or at least those who can scrape together enough money to pretend they’re either of those things) can hide away from us mere mortals in the kind of splendor they live for.
What I’m seeing here is just a small, dark lounge. Sure, the furniture’s posh, made of velour and some kind of gold-painted hardwood, and there’s a large neon ace of spades hung in the corner of the room, but as the Card family goes, it’s downright restrained.
It hasn’t been cleaned since the last time it was used, with empty glasses on tables and some odd bits of trash on the floor. The mirrored surface of the coffee table next to the couch has a white film of hastily wiped up coke on it. It looks like a hell of a party happened here, but I know, even at a glance, that there’s something off. That for all its attempts at appearing glitzy, there’s a sheen of grime. Not the kind of grime you find in my end of town, the kind of grime the people who come to clubs like this try to forget exists, no, this one’s just a feeling of deep wrongness.
I don’t need my powers to tell me bad things have happened in this room.
“Classy,” I say, pulling the top of my coveralls off. My left arm cries out in agony, but I hold it at bay. I’ll crunch a couple pills soon, after I put the pain to work.
“Tell me about it,” Kline says. “You should see what it’s like over here.”
“You’re at the Card mansion?”
“For now. When the girls wake up, I’m supposed to take them out shopping. ‘Ratings gold,’ Jacob calls it.”
“Well, if we get their brother arrested for being a rapist, that should make the episodes more exciting, shouldn’t it?”
“I doubt it, but if justice is done, that’s all that matters.”
“I can live with that. Gonna hang up now and get to work on that.”
“Thanks,” she says.
“No problem.”
“No, really, I mean it … I’m not proud—”
“We’ve all got shit we’re not proud of, believe me, I know. We can’t fix what happened here, but let me do my thing and we can try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“Okay.”
Kimberly Kline. Solar Flare. She’s not like anyone I’ve ever dealt with before.
I’m still trying to figure out whether or not that’s a good thing.
She’s a superhero, but like one of the ones out of the comic books and movies—not the ones writing the comic books and starring in the movies—righteous and seemingly incorruptible. I looked into her the old-fashioned way after our all-star team-up night, part of me still hoping to find something, anything about her that’d justify how much I wanted to hate her, and I couldn’t find a damn thing. Aside from her family having a lot of big business ties in town (some with Card-owned businesses), she’s squeaky clean. This alone was enough to make me even more suspicious of her, but every time we talk, I realize all over again that, no, she is just this nice.
This puts me in a hard place.
I want to hate her. Really want to hate her. She’s a superhero from one of the richest families in EPC. She’s everything a hard life in the Crescent has taught me to be repulsed by. She’s teammates with people who did nothing while one of their own burned Marco to cinders and took my families from me. I look at her and see fake, vapid, pro-hero excess. She shouldn’t be helping me protect WPC and the Crescent; she should be getting shit-faced and leaking a sex tape to make sure people haven’t forgotten about her.
But she’s better than that, isn’t she?
Much as I hate to admit it, that might be true.
I don’t think she’d have sent me here otherwise.
I pull a memory stick from my pocket and plug it into the port in my left arm. It burns going in, sending bolts up my arm that make even my hair hurt. I grit my teeth, put my hand on the nearest couch, and go to work.
I want to vomit.
I’ve seen a lot of fucked up shit in my life, but I think this room’s seen even more. Most of it’s the kind of stuff you’d expect in a room like this: drinking, drugs, sex, backroom business deals, fights; stuff I’d usually ignore.
After all, people need hobbies.
Ace Card transforming this room into his personal rape chamber, that’s something I can’t ignore.
I find and record Ace’s entire attack on the server Kline told me about. As much as I want to turn away, I make sure to watch every horrible detail. If I can’t ignore it, then nobody else watching it can either.
There’s something, though, that makes me stick around in this vision longer than I have to. Something about the practiced way he pours the drink from the wet bar, about the half-empty bottle of pills he pulls from the hidden panel in the back of a chair.
So I look further back and see the whole routine happen again, days earlier.
Then again, days earlier than that.
Another time nearly a week before.
All told, by the time disgust forces me to quit, I think I’ve watched him rape five separate women over a three week period, and I doubt they’re the only ones.
They couldn’t possibly be.
Usually he was alone, sometimes he was with his frat boy friends who took their turn after he was done. The girls were usually unconscious or close enough to protest weakly. He always got a kick out of that. By the way they were dressed and made up, like they were trying to fit in but couldn’t quite afford to, I’d wager they were all from the Crescent, maybe even WPC.
The kinds of girls no one would believe if they came forward.
I’ve been out of the vision for about five minutes now, and I’m still shaken by what I’ve seen. I want to crunch a few pills, blot this all out, but I can’t stay here. I gotta get out, pass this footage to Fadia, let her break this, make Ace pay, and—
There’s someone at the door. Shaking the handle and typing in the code.
I’ve only got a couple seconds. I stash the memory stick in my cart and pull my coveralls top back on, just in time for Ace Card to open the door.
“—and I don’t care what he says, you can tell him to kiss my ass!” he laughs. Then, finally noticing me, he says, “Who the fuck are you?”
Get back in character.
“Janitor, señor,” I say, rubbing the accent on thick.
“And you are …?” he asks expectantly.
“I clean, señor.”
Angrily, he stalks up to me, all two hundred pounds of swagger, douche and entitlement, getting within a few inches of my face.
“Then let me ask you something, Pedro.” His voice is dripping with menace. This guy’s a lot bigger than me, but if he thinks this’ll be an easy fight, I’ve got a trick or two up my sleeve I’m dying to share.
“Yes sir?” I ask, tensing.
He smiles. “You haven’t by any chance found a pair of Edge Industries Cutter sunglasses around here? They cost something like fifteen hundred a pair, and I’ve been looking all over for them. Help me find ’em and there’s five bucks in it for ya, buy yourself some tacos.”
He laughs at his own joke. Of course he does.
Be cool. You got what you need, just get the hell out of here.
“Sorry, señor, I see nothing. I will leave you alone to look.”
I grab my cart and start pushing it toward the door.
Ace is quick to jump in my path.
“What’s the hurry, Pedro? This room doesn’t look very clean to me.”
“Not in your way?” I ask.
“You’re not in my way. But I’m wondering why you’re hurrying so mu
ch,” he says, eying my cart. “You don’t got a pair of sunglasses in there, do you?”
“No, señor.”
“Then let me take a look.”
“No, señor.”
I move to push past him, but he stays in my way.
“You know we’re about to have a problem here, right?”
So this is gonna happen.
“Yeah, I guess,” I say, dropping the accent and shoving my cart into him.
He’s stunned, momentarily, long enough for me to pull Harriet from her hiding place in the trash can. I’d have much preferred to get out of here quietly and not create a scene, but I can’t say I won’t enjoy beating on Ace Card.
I pull back, line up a hit, and swing for his arm.
I’m pretty sure things aren’t going to plan when he catches the bat, casually.
I know they aren’t when he wrenches Harriet from my hands and sends me sprawling on the floor. He kicks and stomps my chest a few times, not enough to do damage but enough to hurt like hell.
“Cape Fu, motherfucker!” he taunts. “Got trained by Pinnacle himself! Now, give me my fucking sunglasses before I break your motherfucking legs! Whaddya got to say to that, bitch?”
I’ve got two words for him, not that he’ll like them very much.
“PETTING ZOO!”
The hamster ball rolls out of the room’s corner, the pale blue hamster inside bursting out and transforming into a pale blue tiger that’s all too eager to sink her claws and teeth into Ace Card. With one strike, she slashes him across the chest, getting a surprisingly high-pitched scream out of him. With another, she pins him to the ground, her teeth inches from his neck.
“Oh god, oh god, please don’t kill me!”
“Can I eat him? He looks tasty,” Petting Zoo taunts. Given that she’s a vegetarian, she’s never actually eaten anyone, but the threat of it is always fun to watch.
“Just knock him out. We gotta get out of here,” I say, finding my feet again.
“Well, if you insist,” she says, transforming from a tiger into an anaconda, wrapping her powerful coils around Ace until he passes out from lack of oxygen. When he’s out, she transforms back into her usual perky self.
“You get what you need?”
“Yeah,” I say, pocketing the memory stick from the cart.
“And he’s gonna burn for this?”
“Yeah,” I say, picking up Harriet.
“Good.” She kicks him once for good measure before transforming into a praying mantis and flying onto my shoulder.
I open the door enough to see there’s one other person in the hallway. He looks familiar from the pictures Kline showed me, slightly skeezy and jittery, glued to his phone, but I need to be sure.
“You Jacob?” I ask, strolling out of the room with Harriet held behind my back.
“Yeah?” he says, confused.
That’s all I need. One powerful swing of Harriet to his jaw and he’s out like a light, collapsed on the floor and bleeding. Two small plastic baggies fall from his jacket pocket and I pick them up. One’s full of white powder, the other various pills.
“These are very bad for you,” I say, pocketing them.
My hair and the high collar of my coveralls allow me to conceal my face from the cameras as I make my escape. I don’t run, because running would attract attention, but I do walk purposefully for the door with Harriet concealed by my coveralls and Petting Zoo on my shoulder. Every step of the way I’m convinced I’m going to be seen and stopped and have to fight my way out, but no, it’s still early and nobody wants to be here let alone acknowledge a random janitor running out into the rain, so I make it outside without any trouble.
Finally free, I send two quick texts.
To Kline: GOT IT
To Fadia: HAVE I GOT A STORY FOR YOU
When I’m out of the back alley behind the club and a good enough distance away to be sure I’m not caught, I finally allow myself to smile.
Things are looking up, aren’t they?
CHAPTER 18: THE SUPERHERO
Jeremy Collingwraith lives in a downtown penthouse.
Naturally.
Thankfully, that means there’ll be no one else on his floor to hear when I break the glass. I haven’t touched it yet, and already we can hear his stadium-sized voice.
“I’m doing everything I can, Will, but your boy doesn’t make it easy.” Collingwraith leans back in his desk chair, holding his phone to his ear with one hand, picking up a drink from next to his laptop with the other.
Eddie’s holding tightly to my back while I float silently outside the window. He holds up a finger asking me to wait and listen, and I nod.
My thoughts exactly.
“I’m going to need his transcripts, documentation of all his extracurriculars, anything we can use to humanize him to the jury, and yes, like it or not this will go to trial. He’s the boy next door, we’ll play that up as much as we can, and if we’re lucky, we can talk this down to a few years with good behavior and keep him out of gen pop.”
My skin begins to heat up, and I have to take a breath to cool it, keep it from burning Eddie.
Eddie notices and shifts his strictly functional grip to give my shoulder a squeeze of sympathetic fury.
It’s an infinitely awkward gesture, a distant, overly formal echo of the casual intimacy of our last flight together, and hanging here in the air together with him clinging to me for life, I can’t simply lean closer to indicate that I feel him. I do appreciate the sentiment, though, so I put my hand equally awkwardly on top of his, which is freezing from the winter air whipping past us at this altitude.
I let my skin heat up after all, this time to a careful, hot water bottle hundred degrees.
“What are you paying me for?” Collingwraith repeats incredulously. “You want to find out how much worse things could get for Ace under some mail-order degree public defender, be my guest. He got caught with his dick in the cookie jar. It happens, believe me, I know it, you know it, but take my advice, Will. If you’re still interested in that senate seat, I’d start disassociating yourself from your son’s actions now.”
By the way Collingwraith holds his phone away from his ear, Card’s pride in his son is no more flexible now than ever.
The police weren’t initially that receptive to Eddie’s recording, in spite of his power’s legally certified infallibility, but once his anonymous friend leaked it to every major news outlet on the West Coast, Ace was arrested within the hour, right there in the private hospital where he was being treated for multiple fractures sustained in what he insisted was a “giant snake attack.”
Less than two hours after that, Card was live on his favorite cable news channel, ranting about how disgusting it was that these socialist vultures would persecute Ace this way at such a vulnerable time, for the sake of using him as their own political scapegoat, and might even go so far as to use a bit of youthful mischief as an excuse to rob him of the best years of his life.
I can’t watch the complete footage of the interview without gagging, but three of Card’s top corporate donors for his senate campaign have since abruptly withdrawn their support, so maybe that’s for the best.
Ace is already home on bail for now, but he’s going to trial for at least four of the five rapes on the video, and a dozen more women have already come forward since the evidence broke. Ella isn’t testifying—god knows what she must have been forced to sign—but payoffs and NDAs seem to be a special contingency for when there are liabilities like me involved. The women without witnesses on their side apparently weren’t even worth what it would cost to quiet them on the spot, although I suspect the Cards are regretting that policy now.
Ace won’t get all of what he deserves. When I saw him this evening, he was most upset about the picketers blocking the entrance to the Silver Cowl and how difficult it was for him to maneuver through doorways with two arm casts, but at least now everyone knows what he is, and if Collingwraith is trying to prepare the family
for the inevitability of some jail time, then I’m hopeful there isn’t a lawyer on earth who could get him off with less.
Ace now hates me more than ever, convinced I somehow had something to do with his sudden change of fortune. However, in light of the public backlash, his dad insists that the family “appreciates my friendship in this difficult time.” I even overheard him admonishing Ace to be nicer to me—at least in public.
Meanwhile, since our mass arrest at Snyder Sanitarium, Dissident and I have been busy, sometimes together, sometimes separately, blowing up Milgram’s drug and weapon caches and liberating his human trafficking network, one drugged-out batch of survivors at a time, getting them back to their families when there are any, to shelters when there aren’t.
No one knows, no one sees our faces, but I don’t think I’ve hated myself this little since my first PCG mission briefing.
Eddie says his power will be useful tonight, for investigating the possible link between Card and Milgram in person, and I’m sure it will, but I think the real reason he’s here in Dissident’s place is because he wants to carve off a piece of Collingwraith himself.
“I’m telling you,” says Collingwraith. “No, I’m just explaining, probation isn’t going to be on the table this time.”
Eddie pulls his bat from his coat, cranes his head closer to the window over my shoulder, and grins under his ski mask.
“Ever played good cop bad cop?” he whispers.
I haven’t, but I can’t think of a better time to try it out.
“Which one do I get to be?”
Eddie laughs. “Yourself.”
He gestures with the bat, and I hover closer, until he can tap it against the penthouse’s glass wall.
Collingwraith sets his drink down and squints at us, unable to see clearly past the glare of the interior lighting.
When it looks like he’s about to shrug us off and return to his call, Eddie taps again.
“I’m going to have to call you back,” says Collingwraith, getting up and squinting harder, shading his eyes but not reaching to turn out any of the lights. “No, I’m not bullshitting you. I’ll be right back.”
