PM09 - Supernatural Born Killers

by Casey Daniels

  As sweet a smile as I could manage pasted to my lips, I reached into the little silk pouch I had slung over my wrist and took out my soon-to-be husband’s ring. I cupped it in my palm—the better to keep him from getting a good look at it—and took his hand in mine.

  “This is for you…” I purred, “Superman,” and slipped the ring on Blackburne’s finger.

  He was so freakin’ happy, I thought he was going to pop.

  That is, until he looked down at the gold plastic ring with the curlicues on the band and the big green (fake) stone set in the center of it.

  When his eyes went wide and he flinched, I went in for the kill.

  “It’s kryptonite,” I said. “And you’re powerless against it!”

  That happy smile melted from Blackburne’s face and he staggered back. Oh yeah, I knew I couldn’t get away with the whole fake kryptonite harming the fake superhero for long. That’s why I made my move while the moving was good.

  “Mom! Dad! Ella!” I turned toward the wedding guests, who at this point, mostly looked confused. “Get up here quick. I need you!”

  When they were within a few feet of the makeshift altar, I ducked behind Blackburne and pushed him in Dad’s direction. All those years in prison, and he knew exactly what to do when there was a big guy coming at him. Dad grabbed Blackburne’s right arm and twisted. Mom stuck out a foot (and how she was able to afford the fabulous lace peep-toe pumps that matched her champagne-colored dress, I didn’t know but I intended to find out) and my groom went down in a heap.

  Before he could get back up, I whipped the strand of orange beads off Ella’s neck. “He’s a bad guy,” I yelled, but then I really didn’t have a lot of choice seeing as how the gorgeous flagstone patio overlooking the lake had erupted into chaos. “He was forcing me to marry him.”

  Dad grabbed for the beads and cinched them tight around Blackburne’s wrists and though she was being foxy and made it look like an accident, I’m pretty sure the way Mom’s pump connected with his ribs had more than a little malice in it.

  “Call the cops,” I instructed Ella. “Tell them Blackburne—”

  “Lana!” On the flagstones at my feet, Blackburne squirmed and squealed. “You can’t do this. Not to me. I can break my chains.” He strained at the beads on his wrists and for all I knew, he would have pulled them apart eventually. That is, if Ella hadn’t plopped down right on top of him.

  “He stole the million-dollar comic book,” I called out, already racing across the patio. “And he kidnapped Quinn. Tell the cops one of their own is involved. They’ll get here plenty quick.”

  Plenty quick was how I intended to move, too. With that in mind, I ignored the outstretched hands of some blue-haired woman who mumbled something about how I was making the mistake of my life, kicked off my white satin pumps, lifted my skirts, and headed into the house.

  “You’ll never find him!” I heard Blackburne’s voice from outside, high-pitched and strained. But then, as soon as he piped up, Ella jiggled around to squash him a little more. “He’s hidden. In my Fortress of Solitude.”

  “Thanks, Milo,” I mumbled and raced into the museum room.

  “Fireplace, fireplace,” I mumbled to myself, my words bumping around pretty much like my heartbeat. If Blackburne had lied about keeping Quinn alive until we were man and wife…

  If I was already too late…

  I punched the wall until I found the magic spot that triggered the secret door and the next thing I knew, I was in the Fortress of Solitude.

  “Quinn?” Well, dang, he’d never hear me when my voice was so small and scared sounding. I spun toward the weird statue of Superman’s parents. “Quinn, are you in here?”

  “Hiya, Pepper!”

  The sound of Quinn’s voice brought me to my knees. Literally. I dropped down beside where he was propped in the corner and tugged at the ropes around his wrists.

  “We’ve got to get you out of here. We’ve got to hurry.” My fingers were sweaty, and they slipped over the knots. “Blackburne is crazy. I don’t know what he might have had planned.” The knots loosened and I breathed a sigh of relief and tugged on Quinn’s arm. “Come on.”

  He brought his arms out in front of him and looked at his hands as if he’d never seen them before. “What’s the hurry?” he asked, though in all fairness, it came out sounding more like, “Wha’s da huey?”

  “Nice here.” He stretched out on the floor. “Warm.”

  “No, it’s not nice here.” I grabbed one hand and pulled. “And why are you acting so funny and talking so weird?”

  Good thing I figured out the answer on my own, because there was no way I was going to get it from Quinn. Whatever drug Blackburne had administered, it was still in Quinn’s system. He was alive. He was breathing. I was grateful. But Quinn was as drunk as a skunk.

  “You look like…” From his spot on the floor, he squinted up at me. “Pepper. You look like Pepper.”

  “I am Pepper.” I knelt back down on the cold steel floor, the better to let him get a bird’s-eye view. “And you’re Quinn, Quinn Harrison. You don’t belong here. We need to get you outside.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t move.

  “Now.”

  “Okay.” He wiggled his fingers in front of his nose and laughed.

  “Quinn.” I tugged at his hand again, hard enough to make him slide a couple inches across the floor.

  “Whee!” Quinn threw back his head and laughed. “That was fun. Do it again.”

  I did. In fact, I tugged until I couldn’t tug any more, all the way over to where that million-dollar comic book hung on display in the clear case suspended in the center of the room.

  “All right now.” I propped an arm around his shoulders. “You’re going to have to stand up and walk out of here. Can you do it?”

  He looked at me, his nose wrinkled and his eyes scrunched. “You look like Pepper,” he said.

  Don’t ask me how since his legs were Silly Putty, but I managed to haul him to his feet. “I think it’s time for us to leave.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t move.

  “Now.”

  “You look pretty.”

  I glanced down at the gown and my bare feet sticking out from under it.

  Quinn leaned in to brush my lips with a kiss. “Like a princess. Are you a princess?”

  “I am. And the princess gets to tell her subjects what to do.”

  His eyes sparkled and with one finger, he traced the sweetheart neckline of my gown. “Anything.”

  “Later.” I caught hold of his hand and held it in a tight grip. “For now, the princess wants to take a walk. Yeah, that’s what she wants to do. She commands you to come outside with her and take a walk.”

  “Wanna stay here.” He nuzzled a kiss against my neck and his tongue sent ribbons of fire racing over my skin. “My job is to make the princess very, very happy.”

  “Ah, happy!” Fireworks erupt every place his kisses landed and for one quick second, I tipped my head back, enjoying the sensations. “But we can’t—” I stepped back, hanging on to his hand but keeping a safe distance between myself and the sensations he sent skittering through me. “The princess…” I wasn’t sure when all the air had been sucked out of the room, but I knew I had to fight to fill my lungs. “The princess commands you to stop now. She wants to leave.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I tried to tug him closer to the spinning secret door, but no luck. He was too busy giving me the sort of careful once-over I’d seen him subject suspects to, only on the job, he was never as googly eyed. “Are you getting married or something?”

  “I’ll explain. Later. After we’re outside.”

  “No.” He locked his legs and refused to move another step. “Need to know. Now.” He made an effort to emphasize his point by pounding one fist against the steel desk, but since he missed by a mile and nearly went down in a heap, I don’t think it had quite the dramatic effect h
e’d hoped for.

  When I grabbed for him to keep him from falling, Quinn took advantage and wrapped his arms around me. “If you’re going to marry anyone,” he said, “it’s gotta be me.”

  Not the moment to roll my eyes, but it’s not like I could exactly help myself. I gave those broad shoulders of his an openhanded smack. “You’re drunk.”

  “I’m…drunk. And serious.”

  “It doesn’t count, not when you’ve been drugged.”

  “That doesn’t change…how I…” He hiccuped. “Feel.”

  “I’ll tell you what…” I pushed out of his arms. “We’ll talk later when you’re feeling more like yourself.”

  “Won’t change my mind.” He shook his head so hard, his inky hair flopped over his forehead. “I love you.”

  My heart clutched. My breath caught. I hate to admit it, but I got misty-eyed.

  “You look like Pepper,” he added and grinned.

  So much for a magic moment.

  I hung on tight so he couldn’t escape and we headed for the secret door.

  We were nearly there when it spun open and Rossetti and Howie stepped into the Fortress of Solitude.

  My only choice was to plow past them and run like hell and I would have done it, too, except for the fact that dragging Quinn behind me was like trying to corral a bowl of Jell-O. Oh, and that Rossetti had a gun pointed right at us.

  “Boss said if anything went wrong at the wedding, I was supposed to take care of him.” With the barrel of the gun, Rossetti pointed at Quinn. “I guess something went wrong. And since you’re here, too…”

  “There’s been a delay. That’s all.” I took a step back and hauled Quinn along with me. “I was just about to head back outside and—”

  “It’s soundproof in here. Did you know that?” Rossetti moved forward.

  I scrambled back another couple steps and when all Quinn did was lean forward, close one eye and look at that big ol’ gun like he’d never seen one before, I tugged him.

  “Nobody’s gonna be leaving here,” Rossetti said. “And nobody’s going to find you, either. ’Cause nobody knows about that secret door.”

  It was a classic line from a classic bad guy, and it would have packed a punch if at that second, the door didn’t swing open again.

  As it turns out, Howie was standing a tad too close. When the wall came around, it clunked him in the head and he went down like a brick.

  Mom and Dad raced into the Fortress of Solitude screaming something about following Rossetti and Howie. Rossetti did what bad guys do and took a shot. And me? I didn’t have a lot of choice. At the same time I flung Quinn to the floor and threw myself on top of him, I swiped at the box containing Action Comics #1. The clear box swayed like a son of a gun. Rossetti’s shot pinged, ricocheted, and bounced back at him. It didn’t kill him, and there wasn’t much blood. Well, not too much, anyway. When he grabbed his shoulder and fell to the floor howling, Dad kicked the gun across the room.

  I lifted myself up far enough to make sure Quinn was okay and found him looking up at me, a grin as wide as Lake Erie on his face.

  “Hey,” he said. “You look like Pepper!”

  It didn’t take much to convince the cops that Blackburne was a bad guy. For starters, there was my signature obviously forged on the marriage license that had been given to the minister. And, of course, the biggie: that stolen comic book hanging in the Fortress of Solitude. I don’t know what that display case it was in was made out of, but it hadn’t gotten as much as a scratch from the bullet that bounced off it when Rossetti took a shot at us. Blackburne was hauled in for questioning, but not before he looked at me longingly and screamed, “Lana, I love you!” Rossetti and Howie were handcuffed and taken away. The wedding guests were gathered into the big-ass living room and questioned, but since none of them really knew what was up, the cops let them go, one by one, and after a couple hours, there weren’t too many of us left out on the flagstone patio.

  The minister was one of those left. It should be duly noted that he looked so panic-stricken that my dad went and got him a scotch, straight up, and his hands shaking as much as his voice, he gave a statement to the cops, swore he was free of any complicity and prayed (I was grateful) that the “poor bride” would not be permanently scarred by this terrible incident.

  Mom, Dad, and Ella had plenty of questions of their own, and I sat down with them in the glow of the candles that still fluttered all around us and answered them as best I could. Some poor paramedic (my guess was that he was low guy on the totem pole) had been given the assignment of trying to convince Quinn to go to the hospital, and even from where we sat in those white chairs that had been lined up on either side of the aisle and were now scattered willy-nilly, we could hear his response. I’d better not repeat it word for word. Let’s just suffice it to say that Quinn told the man he’d had enough hospitals for one lifetime and there was no way in hell he was going to let them transport him to another one. Apparently, the paramedic knew something of Quinn’s reputation; he didn’t ask a second time.

  Mom and Dad went in search of something cold to drink and I took the opportunity to stroll closer to where Quinn was sitting at a table near the door that led into Blackburne’s library. The paramedics had already draped a blanket around his shoulders and given him an IV and about a gallon of coffee to drink when some mucky-muck from the police department showed up who seemed genuinely worried. Worried, schmurried. I didn’t care. Not as much as I did when I heard the guy say something to Quinn about what a great job he’d done and how he’d risked his own life to solve the case, and how they would transfer him back to Homicide where he belonged as quickly as they could.

  Happy endings.

  I like happy endings.

  I made myself scarce while they talked details.

  “Looks like I missed plenty.”

  Not to worry, I was half expecting Jack Haggarty to show, so I didn’t jump out of my satin gown when he materialized on the stone wall that surrounded the patio.

  Not caring what happened to a gown I never would wear again anyway and I never would have even dreamed of buying in the first place if it weren’t for the whole Quinn-is-going-to-die crisis, I sat down next to him. “I’ll say. We caught your murderers.” I slid Jack a sidelong glance only to find that he was staring across the patio in Quinn’s direction. “You don’t look especially happy about it, and you should, you know. Now that the bad guys are going to pay for your murder, you can cross over. You know, rest in peace.”

  “You don’t believe that bullshit, do you?”

  The way Jack spit out the words made me flinch. This time when I looked his way, I took my time, sizing up the way one corner of his mouth was pulled into a thin line, and the lethal set of his jaw. His shoulders were rock-steady and just as hard. His eyes—trained on Quinn—were fiery.

  “Something’s wrong.” Understatement. I mean, after all, my knees were knocking and my stomach was back to doing the sorts of painful triple-axel contortions it had been when I stood at Milo Blackburne’s side at the altar. If there was anything I’d learned over the course of my investigations, it was to trust my instincts. Mine were screaming. Too bad I couldn’t understand exactly what they were saying.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked Jack. “And why are you…” Even when Rossetti had his gun trained on us, I hadn’t seen the sort of look in his eyes that I saw in Jack’s. Single-minded. Unadulterated. Hate.

  I hopped off the wall and stepped in front of Jack so he couldn’t aim that dagger gaze at Quinn. “Why are you looking at Quinn like that?”

  Jack’s lips twisted. He swiveled that heart-stopping look in my direction. “Are you that stupid?”

  “No.” My shoulders shot back. “As a matter of fact, I’m not stupid at all. I solved your murder, didn’t I? And I figured out why the bad guys tried to pin Dingo’s murder on you. They didn’t want to take the heat and they figured if the cops were busy looking for the Topic candy bar eater, they�
��d never have to worry. You should be grateful, Jack. And more than a little thankful, too.”

  “Oh yeah. Grateful.” His words were blistering. Still in a seated position, Jack floated up into the air, the better to see over me. “I’d be more grateful if that son of a bitch actually died like he was supposed to.”

  My mouth fell open and even when I made a concerted effort to snap it shut, it automatically flapped open again. “What are you…What the hell…What are you talking about? Who…?” I whirled around to look where Jack was looking, even though I didn’t really need to.

  “Quinn.” My voice echoed in my ears. I spun back around only to find Jack sitting on the wall again. “This is some kind of joke.”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  “You mean…” I guess when the minister had prayed the poor bride didn’t suffer any permanent mental trauma, it hadn’t exactly stuck, because I had a flashback to those minutes at the altar. My mouth went dry. Just as it had then. My knees banged together. My blood thrummed so hard and so fast I couldn’t pull in a breath. “You mean you knew Quinn was the one who was supposed to die? You were…” I ran my tongue over lips that felt as if they’d been coated with sandpaper. “You were counting on it?”

  “Damned straight.” One look at me, stupefied, and Jack laughed. “Figured the more an amateur like you was involved, the more screwed up things would get. And I was right. Only it wasn’t supposed to end this way.”

  My hands curled into fists. “Why?” I asked. “Quinn was your partner.”

  “Yeah, a partner who always said he’d never move to the Detective Bureau unless I did, too. We took that promotional exam the same day, you know. He passed it. I didn’t. And he—”

  “That was like, what, five or six years ago? Cut the guy a break, he was young. And probably so excited that he—”

  “He betrayed me.”

  Jack’s words stopped me cold.

  “Quinn’s a good man,” I said, and talk about cold, I’m pretty sure my voice qualified. “He’s honest, and he’s brave, and he cares about the people he helps. He’s a great detective. I don’t know you, Jack, but I’ll tell you what, I do know that’s something you could never be. You took bribes. You betrayed your badge.”