Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  Desk; heavy gray safe; a single lamp balanced, burning, atop it. And in the light of that lamp, a cadaverous man crouched over a mess of blueprints, his face a halfway mess of makeup smeared and crackling, dripping down his chin.

  “You’re not him—” he said, and snarled, and launched himself at Brady’s face.

  Brady ducked aside, spun around faster than you’d think a man that big could move. Morrison sprawled on the ground, leaving a smear of white face paint across the concrete. Pushed up to a crouch, his eyes bright and mean.

  A flicker in Chaz’s blind spot: Arthur Tan, his gun at the ready. “Down! Federal agents!” he said, and Morrison’s knees wavered.

  “Get down on the ground,” Chaz said, sharp and biting, and something in Morrison’s head recognized its counterpart and gave: Morrison went to his knees with his hands high in the air, poised and waiting. For something.

  Tan blew out his breath.

  “We have the suspect, and we are clear,” Chaz said into his collar, and stayed in his shooting stance.

  “Daniel Morrison,” Brady said, still staccato with adrenaline, and the clown’s head whipped up, sharp, surprised. “You have the right to remain silent.” He holstered his weapon and approached slow and deliberate. Reached out for the cuffs looped at the belt below his vest.

  Morrison lunged.

  Brady caught the one hand mid-flight, slapped a cuff around it. The other deked, dodged, pushed past him. Clamped on to his jaw.

  Somewhere, behind them, someone let out a startled shout.

  Morrison’s eyes narrowed—everyone looked different while jamming—and his grin stretched wide and grotesque. Those gloved fingers tightened on Brady’s cheeks, his chin.

  Chaz Villette’s stomach turned over. His fingers went automatically to the trigger; he lined up the shot.

  “Morrison, stand down!” he said, squeezing the trigger soft enough for a breath to tip the whole thing over. He could get the head shot from here. It was so close he didn’t even need to try. “Put your hands up in the air!”

  And then Brady reared up, shook off the hand, and bent it behind Morrison’s back. Click went the cuffs. “Ma Brady didn’t raise a son who got cavities,” he said sternly, and hauled Morrison up to his feet. “Nice try.”

  “Shit,” Dan Morrison said, suddenly confused, and sagged as the SWAT team swarmed.

  Dan Morrison filled out Interview Three much better than his sidekick, Chaz decided. He sat straight and tall and flicked his eyes around the room quickly, with a manic, bitten grin on his white-caked face.

  The double-wide cuffs and leg manacles weren’t hurting his image either.

  He needs to touch you, Chaz reminded himself as Danny Brady and Nikki Lau sat down in the opposite chairs. Kids who drove getaway cars were one thing, but for a gamma, one who’d already gone after the arresting agent? You wanted at least two people in the room, and you wanted them armed.

  For the first time on the case, Chaz felt how paper-thin the numbers guarding his back had become. Found himself wishing terribly that Falkner or Reyes were there.

  “Mr. Morrison,” Brady started, rumbling and deep and with a decided twang. So he had decided to be Bad Cop today. It made sense. There was a light bruise running along his jawline, turning slowly purple. “You’re in a lot of trouble. Bank robbery runs up long prison terms. And no parole.”

  Morrison’s face, under the ruined paint, did not even flicker.

  “It’ll get a lot easier for you if you cooperate,” Lau added.

  Nope, Chaz thought. Nothing.

  “We know you got fired from the scrapyard,” Lau said. “After the accident. And we know it wasn’t your fault.”

  For the first time, Morrison’s face spasmed. Twin muscles in his neck twitched with the effort of holding still. And even so, his hands closed into fists inside the manacles; closed tight.

  “I’m not,” he said, in a voice devoid of humor, “going to talk to you about that.”

  “The coroner’s report said the bottom car was badly rusted,” Lau said soothingly. “There was no way you could have known it was unsafe.”

  “You want me to talk?” Morrison said, and bared dirty teeth. “Well. Bring him around, and we’ll talk.”

  The staring contest across the table lasted ten more minutes before Chaz let the mirror, tinily, inchingly up.

  He wasn’t just indifferent. He was waiting.

  And utterly, completely resolute.

  Chaz tapped gently on the glass, and Brady and Lau heard it. Closed their files, and came outside.

  “It’s not going to work,” he said, and wrung his hands. “He’s waiting for someone, or something, and until it shows up he’s not saying a word.”

  Brady glanced back over his shoulder, through the two-way mirror. Chaz could practically feel Morrison glaring at them right through it. “I’m just going to make you do this every time I do an interview. It’ll save me valuable coffee time.”

  Hafidha snorted from her perch in the corner, next to Tan. “And cost you a fortune in Slim Jims.”

  Lau waved them both off distractedly. “We need an in here. We have maybe three hours before Chicago field office comes by and informs us that he’s their baby.”

  “But it’s our case,” Hafidha scowled.

  Lau shrugged, infinitesimal. “Four robberies, that high-profile, and with an all-new, all-different way of waltzing right past high-tech vault doors? The FDIC is probably having kittens right now. We have to prove that what Morrison does isn’t replicable if we want to ever get him through the doors of Idlewood.”

  “Even if it’s going to be suppressed.” Hafidha’s voice was flat. Chaz snuck a glance over. So was her face.

  “Especially if it’s going to be suppressed,” Lau said, and started toward their borrowed, drab gray office. Chaz trailed behind her, and wasn’t halfway to the door before he caught a smell better than sex, a full night’s sleep, and sex again in the morning.

  “Oh hey there,” Hafidha said, and opened the door, and there was O’Leary, arranging a stack of pizza boxes with the most incredible heat coming off them.

  “I thought it’d been a long time since you’d eaten,” O’Leary said. “And you mentioned, well.”

  “Detective?” Chaz said. “Bless you,” and reached into the top box for about five slices.

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Tan said, around a bite of deep-dish pizza. “He turned steel into peanut brittle. Those cuffs aren’t stopping him, and neither is the door. Why isn’t he trying to break himself out?”

  Chaz turned his head slowly; regarded Arthur Tan. “Now,” he said, “that is a good question.”

  Tan took the praise well. A twitch of the lips, at the corners. Not even a trace of an attempt to duck it, or take over the conversation by force.

  “What’s he waiting for?” Brady mused aloud. “He doesn’t want to get caught, or he’d have been sloppier with his countermeasures. No hideout, no stolen getaway cars, no problem spending the money.”

  “ ‘We’re not him,’ ” Lau said, quoting softly. “More like who’s he waiting for?”

  Chaz sat bolt upright on the desk. The metal shrieked underneath him, and he leaped off the furniture.

  It did nothing. He sat down again, cautiously. Cleared his throat.

  “We don’t fit,” he said. “Supervillains getting apprehended by diligent police work, read their Miranda rights, and tried in a court of law isn’t part of his mythology.”

  “Origin story,” Brady corrected.

  “Shut up,” Chaz replied. “He’s not interested in us. He’s waiting for a superhero.”

  “Aren’t we all, baby?” Hafidha said, and Chaz diligently wadded up the wrapper from his straw and threw it at her head. She fended it off with her palm; oil from the pizza glistened down her fingers. “Damn, I need a napkin.”

  “Hold on,” Tan said, “I’ll get some,” and ducked out the door.

  Hafidha watched him go. “Down the Hall’s
trained that guy a little too well.”

  “He’s just trying to be nice,” Lau said, and held her own greasy hands over the paper plate. “It’s not his fault Blaze tries to make every new agent the BAU gets his personal assistant.”

  “Sidekick,” Brady put in.

  “I swear,” Chaz said, and opened two boxes looking for a spare scrap of mozzarella.

  Hafidha watched his fingers thoughtfully. “So you’re saying what he’ll respond to is some manly chinface in a cape, not us. And until we get him one, he’s not going to talk.”

  “Yeah,” Chaz said, closing on a dribble of cheese. “And we have an answer to this.” He gestured with his chin to Hafidha’s rig. “The Slamphibian. Get him in, coach him up, and get this done.”

  Lau pulled a wearied face, shook her head. “We can’t legitimize that. As much as it’s probably just dress-up, they’re still extralegal vigilantes, and if we endorse one Mom will have our heads even before Celentano sharpens his guillotine.”

  “Celentano’s guillotine is always sharp,” Hafidha said dryly. Chaz took a moment to be briefly very thankful that Arthur Tan was in the precinct kitchen for the insubordination segment of the day.

  “Not to mention,” Brady said, “they’re nothing but regular guys in funny mascot suits. Morrison, for all that he’s still working his way up to gamma first base, is still a gamma.”

  “A gamma in the middle of the story he wants most to be in,” Lau said slowly. “So he’s happy. His back is nowhere near the wall.”

  “What’re you thinking?” Brady said, because they had been working together long enough that he could of course tell when she was thinking something.

  “I’m thinking Chaz is right: what we have to do is keep him in the story he wants to be in. And he’ll cooperate, and we don’t have to fire any bullets into anybody today, and end this thing tidily.”

  “The question is, how?” Chaz said.

  There was a nagging detail. Chaz was missing something important, something crucial, and— “Tan does voices,” Brady said suddenly, and Chaz sat up straight. Realizing slowly, madly, what might just make this work. “He did Christian Bale in the car.”

  “He did what?” Hafidha said, bemused.

  “It was really good, too. Spot-on,” Brady added.

  “Interviews,” Chaz pointed out, “are all about playing the part anyway.”

  He saw the second when Lau caught on; her eyes warmed, slowly, speculatively. “We don’t need a fake superhero if we have a fake fake superhero,” Lau said, wonderingly. “Tan could do it.”

  “Tan,” Arthur Tan said, coming back into the office with a whole sheaf of dining hygiene products, “could do what?”

  “You do voices?” Lau said, and Tan cracked a faintly embarrassed smile.

  “Ain’t I a stinker,” he said, and waggled his eyebrows, Bugs Bunny-style.

  Lau grinned, bright and brief. “Do you think,” she said, “you could pull off a good superhero?”

  The eyebrows flattened out fast. “Not to be insubordinate, but what are you all plotting at?”

  “We’re not plotting,” Chaz said.

  “I can see it on your nasty little profiler faces,” he replied, cheery. Wary. Smart guy.

  “Morrison’s not going to respond to us. He’s waiting for some superhero to come in and declare victory over his vanquished criminal enterprise. How would you feel,” Lau said carefully, “about a solo interview? And a little playacting?”

  “Oh, no way,” Tan said, immediate. The napkins hung in his hand, forgotten.

  “You did that impression in the car,” Brady said. “It was good. It might get Morrison where he belongs.”

  Tan looked at them all, one by one, eyebrows up. Wavering.

  Lau picked up the extension phone and punched three numbers. “Detective O’Leary?” she said into the receiver. “Are there any costume shops close by?”

  The cowl smelled like stale beer and sweat. And neither had belonged to Arthur Tan.

  This was, he decided, unfair.

  “You’d think someone would have cleaned this thing between Halloween and now,” he said. His voice was only faintly muffled by the way the mask pressed on his cheekbones.

  “It’s off-season. There’s no point,” Villette said, and pawed, for some reason, at Tan’s left shoulder. “Hold still; I have to get the cape hooked on.”

  “Cape,” Tan said, and held still. The weight settled more symmetrically about his shoulders. “I don’t know how anyone expects to pass a field fitness test in one of these things.”

  “Lucky for you, you don’t have to,” Villette said, and gave the cape one last tug. “How’s your earpiece?”

  “Fine,” Tan said, and shoved it into place through the stiff fabric of the cowl.

  “Great,” Lau added, from the corner. “Now, let’s just hope he’s not one of those nerd-racists who said Heimdall couldn’t be black.”

  “You’re deshpicable,” Tan muttered, and took an experimental step. The costume clung to his legs in odd, uncomfortable ways. It’s only for a few minutes, Tan old boy, he told himself, sighing. And it is for great justice.

  He waddled out of the conference room, down the hall to Interview Three, and opened the door.

  The cape swished. It swirled and puddled about Tan’s legs as he walked into Interview Three, clear on the other side of the glass, and stopped in a foot-planted pose that out-alphaed any alpha males inside a ten-mile radius of the greater Chicago area.

  Morrison’s eyes lit up. He would have pushed to his feet if his hands hadn’t been cuffed tidily to the table. “You,” he said, and spat on the floor.

  “Oh, great,” O’Leary said. Lau could see him dreaming of mops.

  “Alchemist,” Tan said, with a depth of grim and gravel that made Lau’s stomach shudder. That voice couldn’t come out of that man. It was uncanny.

  “I knew you’d have to respond eventually,” Morrison said, and let out a high-pitched giggle that unnerved for all the wrong reasons. “None of them could stop me. They don’t have what it takes; they won’t go far enough.”

  Lau shifted her weight on the other side of the glass. She didn’t want to know how far was far enough. Or how this might have escalated. “Ask him,” she murmured, “how he did it.”

  Tan got the message. He crossed gloved arms over his chest and stared down at Morrison’s seated, crunched-up form. “There’s one thing that racks my brain,” Tan said, cold and raspy and even. “How you did it.”

  “Oh, ho,” Morrison said, and grinned as wide as he could; it looked like a recipe for face sprain. “You couldn’t figure out my master plan. How many nights I’ve slaved, refining my dark powers; how much steel I’ve reduced to dust with nothing but the touch of a finger.”

  Tan snorted. “I don’t believe you. You used chemicals. We’ll find them soon enough.”

  Morrison’s nostrils flared wide. “Stupid vigilante. You think I need chemicals?” He reached down, grabbed the chain that linked his cuffs and anklets. A sharp hissing sound carried through the interview room, over the speaker.

  The steel reduced to powder, to nothing. Clanked to the floor.

  “Looks like you’re still cuffed to the table,” Tan observed, and Morrison snarled.

  “Well, this is a whole different side of the gentleman,” O’Leary said from the corner.

  “You see what I can do? Your bars can’t hold me! Your boxes won’t keep me in!” Morrison’s grin was more like a rictus now, taut and vicious. “I did it myself, and I spent a whole month in that scrapyard practicing it myself, and once I’m done, none of you are ever going to tell me what I can or can’t do again!”

  “Villain monologue,” Hafidha mumbled. “Oh, no kidding.”

  “Like telling you you can’t work at the yard anymore,” Tan said evenly, “because those cars rusted out and fell, and that kid died?”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” he shouted, and slammed his cuffed feet on the floor.

  �
��It’s just your fault that you robbed three banks,” Tan said.

  “Four,” Morrison spat, “and I’ll do it again.”

  “And that’s a videotaped confession,” Brady said, and smacked his fist into his palm like a personal high five.

  Tan slouched, almost detectably. Relief. “We’re done here, Alchemist.”

  Morrison stuck up his white-gloved hands. “You’ve foiled me this time,” he said, and grinned extra wide. “But you’ll never find the loot.”

  Chaz Villette’s face went blank, briefly. “It’s in his comics collection,” he said. “One bill per page. He spent the whole night sliding them in and putting them back in their little plastic bags.”

  Brady’s heavy blond eyebrow rose.

  “Carefully,” Chaz added. “So the corners didn’t crease.”

  “I’ll get that search warrant drawn up, then,” O’Leary said, and made a note on his battered pad.

  “It’s not about the loot. We’re putting you away, Alchemist,” Tan said from behind the mask, softly, almost meditative. “For a long, long time.”

  Morrison cackled, once, sharp. “Oh, I’ll be back,” he said, with an undercurrent of sheer, childish, wide-eyed glee. “Just like a bad smell, I’ll always be back.”

  Tan himself might have waved a hand to brush it off, or cracked wise. Tan’s costumed secret identity just looked down his molded vinyl nose at Morrison for a long, long moment, and stalked crisply out the door.

  “Good?” he said when he came around the corner. His voice sounded hoarse and a bit weary.

  “Double-plus good,” Lau said, and gave him a small, sharp nod. “Extra good.”

  “Right,” he said. “Someone get this sweatshop off of me?” and Chaz Villette nodded, and led him back into the men’s room to change.

  O’Leary watched Morrison fidget at the table through the glass. “This your usual day?” he asked, only a little strained.

  Lau grinned. “Not even close,” she said. They hadn’t had to shoot anyone all week now. “Our central office will fax the transfer papers to our secure facility over, and get custody assigned formally.”

  O’Leary nodded, and reached out to shake her hand. She took it, and it wasn’t so eager this time: solid, professional. “Thanks for the work. I”—he paused—“don’t think we would have pulled it off ourselves.”