The Legacy Superhero Omnibus

by Lucas Flint

  “Whenever you want,” said TW. “I suggest choosing a time when he’s out of his apartment. That will make it easier to break in and look for the second Watch.”

  I folded my arms over my chest, thinking about what TW said. “Midnight wouldn’t work, because he will probably be sleeping. Sometime during the late morning would work, I think, because he is usually at the Mall at that time, which means that his apartment is probably empty for most of the morning and afternoon.”

  TW frowned. “Daytime break-ins are extremely risky. If someone sees you trying to break in, then they may report you to the police. You don’t want to go to jail, do you?”

  “Good point,” I said. Then an idea occurred to me and I smiled. “What if I don’t break in, though? What if Mr. Salt lets me in?”

  TW’s frown became more confused. “Why would Mr. Salt ever willingly let you into his apartment? You didn’t even buy anything from him this time. I can’t imagine why he would ever feel the need to let you into his living space.”

  My smile grew wider. “If he thought he was going to get three thousand dollars from me, I’m sure he would give me the password to his social media accounts.”

  “But you don’t have three thousand dollars,” said TW. “You barely even have thirty. I’m not sure you’ve thought through this very well.”

  “I don’t need three thousand dollars,” I said. I rose from my bed and rubbed my hands together. “If I contact Mr. Salt and let him know that I am interested in purchasing the Watch at his apartment, I’m sure he will let me in. Then I could sneak it out without his knowledge and make sure it never falls into the wrong hands ever again.”

  “Perhaps you should offer to buy something else from him instead of the Watch,” TW suggested. “Then, while he isn’t looking, you can swipe the Watch and leave without actually buying anything. How does that sound?”

  “That’s even better than my plan,” I said. “TW, you’re really getting the hang of this.”

  “Planning has always been one of my strong suits,” said TW proudly. “Though I learned it, of course, from Gregory, who was an even better planner than I am.”

  “Great,” I said. “Then let’s get to it. There’s no time to waste.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  As it turned out, Mr. Salt had a Facebook page through which he did the most amount of his communication. I contacted him through it and the two of us set up a date I could come to his apartment, where he apparently kept the majority of his superhero artifacts. I implied in the message that I had gotten a lot of money from my dad and that I was looking to spend it on something pricey, which was my way of implying that I was interested in buying the Watch. Of course, I didn’t know if Mr. Salt would actually show me the Watch or not, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to see if he would pick up my clues and bring it with the rest of his inventory.

  The next day, I stood in front of the door to Mr. Salt’s apartment, which, in contrast to Techno’s apartment building, was cheap and plain. It was smaller than Techno’s apartment building, for one thing, and much smellier, like it was full of dogs that weren’t potty trained. The building also looked fairly bombed out and there were a couple of young Mexican guys standing on the sidewalk just outside who had watched me go in with looks in their eyes that I didn’t like. They didn’t approach me, though I felt like that was more because I didn’t look wealthy than because they were afraid of me.

  Pushing such thoughts out of my mind, I knocked on the door to Mr. Salt’s apartment. Less than a second later, I heard a series of locks being undone and then the door cracked open just enough for me to see Mr. Salt’s dark eyes peeking out from within.

  “Mr. McDonald?” said Mr. Salt. “Is that you?”

  I nodded. “Yep.” I hefted my backpack over my shoulder in a not-so-subtle gesture. “And I’ve got the money.”

  “Ah, yes, of course,” said Mr. Salt, flashing me a winning smile that nonetheless made me feel revolted. “Come in, come in. I have plenty of interesting superhero objects that the grandson of the legendary Trickshot should be very interested in looking at.”

  Mr. Salt opened the door wide and stepped aside. I walked inside and looked around at the tiny apartment in which I now stood as Mr. Salt closed the door behind me.

  In comparison to Techno’s apartment, Mr. Salt’s felt more like a cramped broom closet. Off to the side was a partially open door which revealed a dirty-looking bathroom, while to my right was an entryway into a small kitchen that smelled of bad Mexican food that had been burnt. The walls were mostly bare, save for a couple of pictures of what looked like Mr. Salt’s parents, perhaps back in Mexico, because the background didn’t look like anywhere in the United States. The ceiling tiles were cracked in a few places and, based on a couple of dark spots, I could only assume that they were the victim of frequent leaks from whenever it rained too hard.

  The main living room was clean enough, but the couch looked old and already had some stuffing poking out of it in a few areas. A large cardboard box stood in the center of the living room, next to the coffee table that sagged in the middle, with a couple of wooden chairs set up on either side of the table for sitting. A small flat screen TV stood on top of a desk next to a couple of those candles that have Jesus on them, though the TV was currently off. A door leading to what I assumed was Mr. Salt’s bedroom stood next to the door to the bathroom, though unlike the bathroom door, it was closed.

  “Please, take a seat on my couch,” said Mr. Salt, gesturing at his sofa. “Would you like some iced tea? I just made some. It’s quite fresh.”

  I nodded. “Sure, I’ll have some tea. Is the stuff in the box?”

  Mr. Salt nodded as he walked over to the kitchen. “Of course. But please don’t touch any of it yet. I do not want you to accidentally break or damage it. It’s my livelihood, you understand.”

  “Oh, sure, sure,” I said. “I would never think to touch someone’s stuff without their permission. My parents always taught me to respect others’ property, especially if they make a living from it.”

  “You have good parents, it seems,” said Mr. Salt. “Reminds me of my parents, who taught me the value of treating others’ possessions with respect. Not too many people seem to understand that particular virtue nowadays, alas.”

  I nodded politely again and sat down on the couch, resting my backpack on the sofa cushion next to me. The couch sagged under my weight and felt lumpy and uncomfortable, but I didn’t complain, because I didn’t want to accidentally offend Mr. Salt and make him kick me out of his apartment. I needed to get close enough to the Watch that I could take it from him, hopefully without him knowing. The last thing I needed to do was jeopardize my plan before it even started.

  While Mr. Salt poured me some tea in the kitchen, I said in my head, “TW, can you sense the original Watch yet?”

  “Not yet,” said TW. “But I am looking f-for it. T-Tracking is h-hard because of my g-glitch.”

  I frowned slightly. TW was stuttering again, which was never a good sign. But before I could say anything to him about that, Mr. Salt appeared and held out a glass of iced tea to me. “Here you are, my friend. A freshly poured glass of iced tea, just as you requested.”

  Snapping out of my thoughts, I took the iced tea and said, “Thanks, Mr. Salt. This looks pretty good. I’m thirsty.”

  I sipped the tea and winced involuntarily. It was the worst tea I’d ever had in my life. It tasted less like tea and more like tea-flavored ice water.

  “Is there a problem, Mr. McDonald?” said Mr. Salt. “You cringed.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s just that the tea tastes, uh, unique and I wasn’t prepared for it.”

  Mr. Salt chuckled as he sat down in one of the wooden chairs near the box. “I suspected that was the case. You see, I used a special family recipe that has been in my family for generations. I’m not going to tell you the secret ingredient to its unique taste, but suffice to say that there is a reason it wa
s the most popular beverage in Mexico for a while there and it wasn’t because my grandparents were great marketers like me, I’ll tell you that.”

  I smiled politely, but I knew Mr. Salt was just lying to me. He probably just used store bought tea that he diluted heavily with water. I always suspected Mr. Salt was something of a liar, but to hear him make such an obviously false claim made me think that he also thought I was just a stupid kid who didn’t have enough experience to see through his lies. He was about to be in for a big surprise.

  “But enough about my familial legacy,” said Mr. Salt. “We are here to talk business and business we shall talk. You have the money, yes?”

  I patted my backpack, which was actually full of old newspaper I had found in the attic of our house, but he thought it had thousands of dollars. “Sure. Enough to buy almost anything you have, I reckon.”

  “Really?” said Mr. Salt in an impressed voice. “Well, let’s start with the first artifact I wish to show you. Another lesson I’ve learned is that you never delay business needlessly.”

  Mr. Salt put down his own tea glass—which I noticed he hadn’t even sipped from yet—on the coffee table and reached for the cardboard box, but before he could open it, some kind of Spanish song suddenly started playing out of nowhere. I thought it was a radio at first, but then Mr. Salt pulled his phone out of his pocket and I realized that it was actually his ring tone.

  “Hello?” said Mr. Salt, holding the phone close to his ear. “Who is it?”

  A voice on the other end started talking quickly in Spanish, but Mr. Salt quickly interrupted that voice in Spanish of his own. I wasn’t a Spanish speaker myself, but I knew a few words from my Spanish classes in high school. Even so, I found it hard to understand what Mr. Salt was saying about anything, though perhaps I didn’t need to, because his increasingly angry facial expressions and tone of voice made it clear to me that whatever he was talking about, it wasn’t any good.

  Finally, Mr. Salt said one last harsh thing in Spanish and hung up on the call. He looked at me and said, in a polite voice that was the exact antithesis of the angry one he used on the phone, “My apologies, Mr. McDonald. That was the landlord of my apartment, telling me that my payment was late and that if I didn’t pay today, he would evict me and kick me out on the street.”

  “What?” I said. “Is that true?”

  “Of course it’s not true,” said Mr. Salt. “I paid my rent yesterday and he knows that. Jerk is always trying to get more money out of me and the other people in this building. I should probably find somewhere else to live, but unfortunately that’s easier said than done given how … cheap the rent here is.”

  “Uh huh,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

  Mr. Salt stood up. “Go down to the office where that jerk is and give him a piece of my mind. I apologize for having to leave you here like this, but this call was the last straw and I am tired of being pushed around by this guy. I’ll be back in about five minutes and we can resume our transaction then.”

  Mr. Salt walked past the couch to the front door. I turned around in my seat to see Mr. Salt open the door and close it behind him, almost slamming it in anger. I was kind of glad that I wasn’t the landlord, because I wouldn’t want to find myself the target of Mr. Salt’s anger.

  Regardless, this was exactly the opportunity I’d been looking for. While Mr. Salt was away, I could look for the Trickshot Watch and retrieve it. He said he would be back in five minutes, but I suspected that it would take longer than that for him to get his rent problems figured out. Regardless of how long he would be away, this was the best opportunity to look for the Watch.

  Rising from my seat, I peeked inside the box, but to my displeasure, I didn’t see the Watch or the box in which it was normally kept. Just a bunch of junk, like the piece of concrete and battery that he had tried to convince me and Debra belonged to some legendary superheroes. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, given how the original Watch was probably the most valuable thing he owned, but it was a bit of a disappointment anyway.

  “I found it,” said TW in my head suddenly. “It’s in Salt’s room. Look in there.”

  I looked at the door I had noticed earlier and walked over to it. I tried to open it, but the door was locked. I looked around for a key, but did not see any nearby. Mr. Salt probably had the key on him, which made sense from his perspective, but from mine, it just meant that it would be harder to get in.

  “Maybe I should try punching it in,” I said. “I could do that.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said TW. “Not unless you want his neighbors to hear you trashing his apartment and call the police on you.”

  Scowling, I had to admit that TW had a point. “Then how should I get in?”

  “Break the lock,” TW said. “Without punching the door in.”

  “You’re boring, you know that?” I said, but I nonetheless pressed the button on my Watch and soon wore the Trickshot costume.

  I grabbed the doorknob again and twisted it hard enough to hear a small but audible snap come from the knob. Turning the knob, I pushed open the door and entered the room, though I left the door open in case Mr. Salt came back and I needed to make a quick escape.

  Mr. Salt’s bedroom was fairly small, with a single bed against the wall, an old-looking chest of drawers with a mirror on top of it, and not much else. The only window in the room was closed and covered with a cheap-looking curtain, which was thin enough that light from outside filtered in nonetheless. There was also a closet door, though it was closed.

  Taking off the Trickshot costume, I said, “All right, TW, where is the Watch?”

  “It should be in the closet,” said TW. “That’s where the strongest readings are coming from, so I would suggest searching there.”

  “Closet, eh?” I said, looking at the closet door. “Seems like an obvious place to look.”

  I walked over to the closet and opened it. Several shirts of various colors and styles hung from the clothing pole, while shoes were scattered about the floor. But my eyes were drawn to the top of the closet, where a familiar box stood like it hadn’t been touched in years.

  “There it is,” said TW. “The Watch. Get it down and check on it to make sure it’s still in one piece.”

  I didn’t need TW to tell me twice. I pulled the box down from the closet and flipped it open, expecting to lay my eyes on the Watch that I had seen back in the Mall.

  Instead, I found that there was nothing in the box at all. It was completely empty and the Watch was nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “What the heck?” I said. I turned the box over and shook it several times, but nothing came out. “What happened to the Watch? TW, didn’t you say that the Watch was supposed to be in there?”

  TW flashed next to me, looking every bit as confused and worried as I was. “I don’t understand. My sensors said that the Watch was in there, but now I don’t see it anywhere. I’m not sure what went wrong.”

  “It must have been your sensors,” I said, looking at TW in annoyance. “With your programming decaying, I bet that your sensors are starting to pick up on things that aren’t even there. They’re not as reliable as they used to be.”

  “I … I suppose so,” said TW, who sounded like he had just been sucker punched. “But my sensors have never been wrong before, not once.”

  “Do I look like I care?” I said. “I just wasted a ton of time and energy going to this terrible apartment in the bad side of town to meet with a shady merchant who doesn’t even have what I want. All for nothing.”

  “It must be somewhere in here,” said TW, floating into the closet and looking around. “Perhaps he doesn’t keep it in that box anymore. Perhaps he keeps it—”

  TW was interrupted by the sound of a door being unlocked. With a start, I realized that Mr. Salt was already back and was clearly trying to unlock his front door. I was still standing in his bedroom, in front of his closet, with one of his possessions in my hands, look
ing exactly like a thief.

  Trying not to panic, I closed the box and tossed it up back into the closet before I slammed the door shut and ran out of the room. I closed the bedroom door behind me and practically jumped back onto the couch just as Mr. Salt opened the door and entered the apartment.

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Salt,” I said, turning in my seat and waving at him like I’d always been sitting here. “You got back fast.”

  “What did I say?” said Mr. Salt as he closed the front door behind him. He flashed me a smile. “My landlord is a jerk, but he’s also a spineless coward who doesn’t know how to handle renters who aren’t willing to put up with his crap. He’s not going to harass me about my rent anymore, at least until next month, anyway.”

  I nodded, but took a sip from Mr. Salt’s tea instead of saying anything. The tea tasted as awful as ever, but the point was to keep myself from saying something that might make Mr. Salt suspicious of me. Still, I couldn’t help but glance at the door to his bedroom. It was closed, sure, but it was not locked, and Mr. Salt would notice that sooner or later. Hopefully later, by which time I would be on the other side of Rumsfeld and Mr. Salt would be left with no explanation for why his bedroom door’s lock was broken.

  Mr. Salt, luckily enough, sat down on his chair from before. “With that out of the way, I think it is finally time for us to begin our business transaction. Let’s start with something I know you will love: The late Baron Glory’s left sock, recovered from his battle with Titan King in New York City.”

  Mr. Salt reached inside the box, but I held up a hand and said, “Uh, before you do that, can I ask if you still have the Trickshot Watch? The one you showed me in the Mall?”

  “Hmm?” said Mr. Salt. “Oh, yes. I remember. I sold that one yesterday.”

  “What?” I said, but caught myself and said, “Uh, I mean, is that so?”

  “It is,” said Mr. Salt, nodding. “And I fetched a pretty penny for it, too. Much more than the three thousand dollars I quoted you. The man who bought it from me must have been very well-off, though I don’t think he is from around here, because I’ve never seen him before.”