In any investigation, there were five Ws and one H that needed to be answered: What happened? Who made it happen? When did it happen? Why did it happen? How did it happen? I did not have an answer yet to any of the five Ws. But, thanks to Avatar, I had a possible clue as to the H: namely, how had Avatar been killed? Avatar had said Chaos’ reality-bending energy was the only thing he knew of that could pierce Avatar’s invulnerability. Perhaps someone had somehow used that energy allow them to shoot and kill Avatar. Chaos, it seemed, was the key. Once I knew the answer to “How?” perhaps that would lead to the other answers I sought.
It was time to pay Chaos a visit.
CHAPTER 16
I was at home alone the evening after I discovered Byron Hennings was Avatar. I still needed to visit Chaos at the Metahuman Holding Facility—or MetaHold, which was what almost everyone called it for short—to see if he had anything to do with Avatar’s death. But, visiting the world’s only Omega level supervillain was not a simple matter of driving to MetaHold and knocking on the front door to inquire if Chaos was available for tea and biscuits. Access to Chaos was strictly restricted. There was bureaucracy to be navigated, officials to be massaged, hoops to jump through, and red tape to be cut. If I had to rely on my own connections and pull to get access to Chaos, I would probably be old and decrepit by the time I managed to get to see him. Fortunately, I was working for arguably the world’s pre-eminent superhero team. I had already contacted Seer, told her I needed to visit Chaos, and why. She assured me she would contact the right people to get me access to Chaos. I was waiting to hear back from her. If someone had told me before I became a Hero and detective that much of the job consisted of waiting for people to call me back, I would have called them a filthy liar. Almost nothing was as glamorous as it seemed.
I checked the heat of the oil I was heating up in my deep fryer. Ginny had bought it for me a couple of months ago. Before I had it, I fried food in a skillet like some sort of knuckle-dragging caveman. The deep fryer was so much better than my skillet that it was like communicating with someone via a smartphone versus a telegraph. I did not fry foods very often. I was a Hero, after all, and being fit was an important part of that. As I had once told Ginny, I tried to maintain my girlish figure. She had responded that I was the scariest looking and most muscular girl she had ever seen. I had told her body-shaming was beneath her.
Anyway, eating a lot of fried foods was not a prescription for maintaining fitness or one’s girlish figure. My mother would have said otherwise. I remembered like it was yesterday her telling me fried food in general and fried chicken specifically was health food.
“The body is a biological machine, right?” she had asked me when I had suggested to her the fried chicken she was in the middle of cooking was perhaps not good for us.
I nodded yes. I must have been about nine-years-old at the time.
“Well,” my mom had said, “since the body is a machine, and machines needs lubricant, and this oil I’m cooking in is a lubricant, fried chicken is therefore healthy.” She winked at me. “That’s what people call a syllogism.” My mom’s Georgia drawl had elongated the vowels in the word, making it seem longer than it was. “I imagine you’ll be studying about syllogisms in school one of these days. You’ll see that I’m right. Logic does not lie.” Though I was only nine, I suspected there was a flaw in her logic somewhere. For better or for worse, I got my sense of humor from her.
Even assuming my mother was incorrect and fried chicken was in fact not health food, having some every now and then would not kill me. I was feeling nostalgic for the traditional Southern cooking I grew up on. It was comfort food. I need comforting. The fact Avatar was dead still bothered me. The more I learned the worse I felt. Whoever had come up with the expression “ignorance is bliss” had hit the nail on the head.
The oil I planned to fry the chicken in was not quite hot enough. While I waited for it to reach the right temperature, I finished preparing the cuts of chicken I had bought at Whole Foods a bit earlier. I did not shop at Whole Foods very often. There was a reason Whole Foods was called “Whole Paycheck,” and the Heroic path was not paved with gold. But, I was flush with cash thanks to my work for the Sentinels. I did not have to take out a second mortgage to pay for the chicken from Whole Foods. Being able to afford decent chicken was cold comfort for Avatar being dead.
Feeling like Colonel Sanders, I sprinkled my family’s special secret seasoning on the pieces of chicken. The ingredients of the seasoning had been passed down from generation to generation in my family like it was a family heirloom. Once you tasted it, you realized it was. If I did not ever have children, I supposed I would take the secret to the grave with me. Or, maybe I could bequeath it to someone in my will. Avatar bequeathed a small fortune; I would bequeath a chicken recipe. As someone who had tasted my family’s chicken, I could say with confidence that whomever I willed the recipe to was getting the better bargain.
Once the chicken was properly seasoned, I rolled it in white flour. Some people dipped their chicken in a scrambled egg before flouring it. Some people also smoked crack cocaine and beat their children. That did not mean they were in the right. Once the chicken was properly floured, I put the pieces in the metal basket that went with the fryer. I gently lowered the basket into the fryer since the oil was now sufficiently hot. The oil began to bubble and pop satisfactorily. The smell of frying chicken filled my small kitchen. I got a sudden sense memory of what it smelled like when my mother fried chicken when I was a little boy. I got a lump in my throat. I cleared it with a cough, feeling foolish. My parents and sister had been killed in that car accident a long time ago, but it still felt as if it had just happened. I wondered if that feeling ever went away. Then again, maybe it would be worse if the feeling did go away. The immediacy of the still-raw grief made me somehow strangely feel like I still had a family.
I very badly wanted a drink. A beer—or several—really would have hit the spot. I instead took a swallow of the sweet black tea I had made before I had prepped the chicken for frying. I pretended it was beer. Despite my powerful imagination, there was no way I could convince myself the sugary liquid was really beer. Nonetheless the tea was still good, another slice of nostalgia from my childhood. It was traditional Southern sweet tea, which is another way of saying it was a pitcher of sugar with a bit of tea added. Drinking it risked diabetes. I was not deterred. I was a Hero. I laughed in the face of danger.
Brown rice was already cooking on low heat in a small pot on the stove. It would be ready soon. While it and the chicken cooked, I put some fresh collard greens I had already chopped up into a large heavy pot. I drizzled the top of the greens with some olive oil. My Southern ancestors were probably rolling in their graves at my use of olive oil. They would have used fatback, which was literally the fat from the back of a pig. In deference to that girlish figure of mine, I was using olive oil instead. I hoped my mother, grandmother, and all the Truman women who went before them could forgive me.
I added salt and pepper and a bit of water to the greens. They were young and tender, so they would cook quickly. I turned on the burner under the potful of greens and put the lid of the pot on it tightly.
I picked up my glass of tea. I walked out of the kitchen to the floor to ceiling window in the dining area. I sipped my tea while thinking of Avatar’s death and looking out over the city. It was well after dark. The lights of the city shone brightly, like an enormous overly decorated Christmas tree. The people in it were going about their business—working and playing, loving and hating, living and dying—without a single thought about me. I thought about them, though. This was my city. That was how I thought about it. I felt as protective of it as a father does a child. I had helped a lot of people in Astor City over the years, annoyed more, and even hurt a few I should not have either through action or inaction. How many of those people would give me more than a passing thought if the same thing happened to me that happened to Avatar? Ginny? Certainly. Shadow? Probably.
Glenn? Maybe. Certainly not many. Maybe more than I suspected, but probably not as many as I would hope. Life goes on. No one got out of life alive and none of us is here to stay, so carpe that old diem and gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
I sighed. I took another drink of my tea. I no longer wished it was beer. Now I wished it was scotch. The color was about the same as scotch’s, but the taste and effect were not. My reflection in the glass in front of me kept me company.
I spent a lot of time alone. I had no family and, deliberately, few close friends. I usually did not mind spending so much time alone. Spending a lot of time alone meant there were fewer people who might get hurt or killed because of me. I was in a dangerous business with the potential for a lot of collateral damage. Not having a lot of people close to me was what allowed me to not wear a mask and costume and use my real name instead of donning spandex and assuming a name that sounded like it was out of a Saturday morning cartoon. Now that Ginny was in my life, perhaps I needed to protect my identity to protect her. How would I feel if something happened to her? How would I feel if something happened to me before I told her how I felt about her? I was tempted to call her right that second. Then I remembered she had a study group with some of her fellow law students tonight. I wondered if Avatar had told the blonde woman in his pictures how he had felt about her before he died. I hoped so.
My food was ready. I turned everything off and fixed myself a plate. I sat down at my dining room table to eat. I took a bite of the chicken first. I chewed thoughtfully. It was good. Not as good as my mother’s, but good. Every time I fried chicken I tweaked the recipe ever so slightly in an attempt to perfectly recreate how I remembered my mother’s chicken tasting. I never got it quite right. I would keep trying.
As I ate, I thought of the living and the dead. The list of the dead was much too long. My parents. My sister Helen. Avatar. Those two Metahumans I shot outside of my office a while back. My client Eugene Poindexter, who was dead because of me. Clara Barton, the young Meta who had wanted me to train her, also dead because of me. There were others in that list of the dead. Too many. Meanwhile, supervillains like Chaos, Lady Justice, the Pied Piper, Bonecrusher, Shrapnel, and Killshot were very much alive. How was that fair?
The words of the Hero who trained me and sponsored me for the Trials suddenly rang in my head. “What the fuck does fair have to do with anything?” Zookeeper always said. “Good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people. Accept it and move on. If you’re able to tip the scales of justice in the right direction just a little, you’ve done more than most people ever do.”
He was right, of course. But, knowing that in your mind and feeling it in your gut were two different things.
I finished eating. I cleaned up the kitchen. I double-checked to make sure the alarm was set and the door was locked. I checked the monitors of my alarm system. The coast was clear in the hallway outside my door. No supervillain was sneaking up on me. Nor did I see a spy from Kentucky Fried Chicken hoping to steal my chicken recipe. I went to my bedroom. The air smelled of fried chicken. There were worse things to smell like. After lifting the closed blinds and exposing the city to view, I crawled into bed. I normally slept in a completely dark room, but tonight I was in no mood to be alone. It was not even 9 p.m. The city lights kept me company until I drifted off to sleep far earlier than I usually did.
I needed my rest. I had plenty of scale tipping to do.
CHAPTER 17
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the poem that used to be on the base of the Statute of Liberty read. The Statute of Liberty was long gone, having been destroyed in a terrorist attack back in the 1980s by Black Plague. MetaHold was now housed on Ellis Island in the Upper New York Bay instead of the Statue of Liberty. Huddled masses yearned to breathe free in MetaHold, all right. Whoever decided on the location of the United States’ primary federal prison for Metahumans had either a keen sense of irony or a whimsical sense of humor.
MetaHold Warden Richard Sakey had neither.
“I’m telling you Mr. Lord, there is no need for you to see Chaos. It is quite impossible that anyone would have gained access to him. He is housed in the most secure and technologically advanced jail cell the world has ever known.”
“Yesterday you probably thought that it was impossible for a Hero as handsome and as witty as me to exist.” I smiled broadly at the warden. “And yet here I am.” Sakey did not smile or laugh or do anything to indicate he thought I was amusing. Though he would not be the first person to think I was not funny, in Sakey’s case I suspected he did not find me funny because he did not find anything funny. If so, that was a mighty bleak way to go through life.
I had been to MetaHold before, but not during Sakey’s tenure as warden. This was the first time I met him. Sakey was a tall, thin man with a head that looked too big for the rest of his body. He had a prominent Adam’s apple and a bald spot he was doing his best to hide with an artful comb-over. Maybe the comb-over hid not only Sakey’s bald spot but also his sense of humor. Sakey’s comb-over did not fool me, though. If I proved to be as good at detecting Avatar’s killer as I was at detecting male pattern baldness, the killer did not stand a chance. He should have just made an appearance, given himself up right then and there, and saved me a bunch of time, trouble, and heartache. I glanced around. Only Sakey and I were in his office. Unless he or she was hiding in Sakey’s comb-over, there was no contrite killer to be found. Uncooperative bastard.
“I still say you are wasting your time,” Sakey said. Left unsaid was the idea that I was wasting Sakey’s time. Well, it was unsaid vocally. The look on Sakey’s face said it all.
“It’s my time to waste,” I said, standing. “Are you going to take me to his cell, or are you going to make me find it by myself?” Sakey reluctantly got to his feet as well. He was wearing an expensive suit, tie, and shoes. Perhaps there was more money in warehousing prisoners than I would have thought.
“If the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons herself had not ordered me to give you access to Chaos, honestly I would just tell you to go away,” Sakey said. “This is a secure facility, not a place for sightseeing. You must have a lot of pull.” I shrugged modestly.
“The Attorney General has me on speed-dial. Whenever she finds herself in a sticky wicket, she gives me a call.” This was not true of course. The Sentinels were the ones with the pull, not I. Sakey did not need to know that. It seemed best to leave him with the impression I had the ear of the President all the way down to the Secretary of Agriculture. Maybe he would be more cooperative that way. Nor did Sakey need to know I had already sightseen a bald spot. It did not seem wise to antagonize the man in charge of MetaHold. I had been forced to surrender my gun before entering the facility. If Sakey ordered the prison guards to shoot me, I would not be able to shoot back.
Sakey shook his head at me. “Follow me,” he said reluctantly, heading for his office door. Sakey’s office was on the top floor of the sprawling three-story facility. We walked down stairs to the first floor. After exiting the stairwell, we walked down a corridor with rows of cubical holding cells on either side of us. The cells were enclosed in what appeared to be a thick glass. It could not have been mere glass, though. There were some Metas housed at MetaHold who could walk through thick glass like it was tissue paper. Thanks to the transparent glasslike substance, I could see that some of the cells we walked past were empty. Most were not. The ones that were not empty contained a single prisoner. A handful of the prisoners were reading or writing. Others were sleeping. A few were staring at the walls. A handful of others appeared to be talking to themselves or having a fit. The inmates who were loud more than made up for the quiet ones. Wails, yells, maniacal laughter, and heart-wrenching sobs filled the air. Though most of the prisoners were not clinically insane, I imagined this was what an insane asylum sounded like.
MetaHold contained only Metahuman prisoners. Each cell was specially desi
gned to contain the Meta within it. I recognized some of the prisoners. Doctor Dastardly was in a cell on the left, lying in her small bed and reading a book. With the glasses perched on the end of her nose and her scholarly demeanor, you would think she was a college professor or a librarian instead of a supervillain who had come within a whisker of destroying all of New York City before she had been stopped by Captain Courageous. Two cells down from her was Pinball. Pinball was one of the loud ones. He was bouncing off the walls like a human tennis ball. A trail of yellow and red energy followed him like the tail of a comet as he shrieked at the top of his lungs with each bounce. On the left was Rhino. The horn that extended from the middle of his forehead was as thick as my forearm. It looked sharp enough to cut a man clean in two with one strike. I should know—Rhino had nearly done that to me. When I had encountered him, he had already done it to several streetwalkers and probably would have done it to more of them had I not stopped him. That series of prostitute murders was what had first brought me into contact with Brass.
Rhino got up from his bed when he saw me. He came over to stand right next to the glass of his cell as the warden and I approached. He glowered at me. I nodded at him in acknowledgement. Rhino just continued to stare at me. His small eyes followed me as I walked. If looks could kill, I would have been struck dead. If Rhino’s cell did not sap him of some of his super strength, Rhino would not have needed a look to kill me.
It flitted through my mind to say “Feeling horny?” to Rhino as I walked by him. I could not bring myself to do it. Even though Rhino richly deserved to be where he was just like the other prisoners did, that did not change the fact I felt a little badly for him. Though what Rhino and the others were in were called cells, they really were cages. I did not like the idea of a person being confined to a cage. People were not animals, even the ones who had the savage mentality of animals like Rhino did. For that matter, I did not particularly like even animals themselves being in cages. I found zoos more than slightly depressing for that reason. When I looked into the eyes of zoo animals, it often seemed like something sad and pleading looked back at me.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 4): Hunted Page 19
