‘Used to?’
‘There was a mysterious fire. Cops shut it down when the fire department got through.’
‘Huh. Mysterious fire. Right.’
‘Wasn’t me. I was getting evidence ready to drop in the police’s laps and then, poof! I figure it was Ghostfire, in retrospect. With good old twenty-twenty hindsight a lot of things like that were probably him trying to hit the Tonaldo bottom line where it hurts. Hey, have you heard anything more about the Leighton and Thorpe investigation?’
Cygnus shook her head. ‘They called Penny in again for questioning last month, but that seemed to be pretty basic stuff. I don’t think they’re getting very far. Mister Thorpe is out on bail, though I heard they took his passport. Mister Leighton was right to shut down the business; it’s going to be years before they finish investigating.’
‘That’s financial cases for you.’
‘Yeah… I got the feeling they weren’t trying as hard as they could.’
Andrea’s eyes narrowed. ‘Tonaldo probably has people in the police department. I don’t think there are enough to kill the investigation entirely, but slow it down…’
‘Hunting down bad cops is a little outside our remit.’
‘And it probably wouldn’t help much anyway.’
‘But you’re going to see what you can find out?’
‘It’s almost as if you’re my partner or something. We’re like, in synch or something.’
15th March.
‘Well, of course Tonaldo has people in the police department,’ Jacob said, his voice soft because his lips were very close to Twilight’s ear. ‘We know they’re there, but it’s not our remit to look for them, so we don’t know who they are. I mean, Tonaldo is just about the definition of “none of our business.”’
She turned her head, her lips grazing his neck and getting a small shudder out of him. ‘Doesn’t use Ultras,’ she whispered back, ‘so he really doesn’t fall under the UID’s remit. I get that.’
‘Now, the FBI… different story, but when we were branched off from them they put in rules to ensure a separation of jurisdiction. No Ultras. Tonaldo is an FBI and NMCPD problem.’
‘Kind of what I thought, but I figured it was worth asking in case you’d come across anything.’
‘Not even incidentally,’ he replied.
‘I’m actually glad about that,’ she told him, her hand sliding down over his stomach.
‘Oh?’
‘Mmhmm, I didn’t want tonight to turn into a planning meeting. Even if I’d thought of a reward.’ Her hand shifted and he let out a moan. ‘You get the reward anyway.’
16th March.
‘Red thinks we might have some other issues,’ Cygnus said between dodging kicks.
‘Never rains, etc.,’ Twilight replied between kicks.
‘She’s got people checking for crooked cops on the Leighton–Thorpe case, but she says there are rumours of a new drug coming into town soon.’
‘Another one? Excelsior wasn’t bad enough?’
Cygnus gave a shrug. ‘That one didn’t really get into town though. The South Americans couldn’t produce enough for Tonaldo, and Ghostfire told them he’d kill them if they tried shipping it in.’
‘Fair point.’ To emphasise the ‘point,’ Twilight nailed Cygnus between the eyes with a punch.
‘Ow,’ Cygnus said, rubbing the bridge of her nose where her partner’s knuckle had hit home.
‘You’re just saying that to make me feel like I could actually hurt you.’
Grinning, Cygnus backed off as Twilight moved in fast for a leg sweep. ‘If you used your sword… I think my eyes are vulnerable.’
‘Well, I’m not going to, and that’s a good reason to figure out how to do this power change thing Ultimate says you can do. Vulnerabilities are not a good thing.’
‘Point taken. What do we do about these drug shipments?’
‘The usual,’ Twilight replied. ‘Figure out when they’re bringing the stuff in and bust them.’
19th March.
‘It’s making good speed in,’ Cygnus said into the little microphone suspended in front of her mouth. They only ever used the radio gear when they had to get out of sight of each other but still needed to be able to communicate. ‘I’m having a little trouble keeping up with it. Maybe ninety seconds before it gets to the harbour.’
‘I’m a little surprised they’re bringing this in by sea,’ Twilight responded over the radio. ‘It seems… too conventional for something new. Then again, David’s never been one to change a winning formula. His son’s the one with imagination and he wants out of the family business.’
Cygnus eyed up the speedboat she was following and then the dock ahead of it. ‘I figure you should be able to see this thing now. It’s very white.’
‘I see it. That’s another thing that bothers me. It’s too visible. It’s like they want to get caught.’
‘We’ll catch them, and then you can ask,’ Cygnus suggested.
‘I guess that works… There’s a van pulling up. Looks like the typical pattern. Nail the boat this time.’
‘We don’t usually care about the smugglers.’
‘This time I think we should.’
‘Okay,’ Cygnus replied, eyeing up the boat the smugglers were using. It was the kind with a bank of outboards fitted along the back mounted on a short deck. ‘Okay, you got it.’ She watched the boat pull in against a jetty on the northern end of Pier Two, and then dropped toward it rapidly.
She heard men talking urgently as she pulled up from her dive and dropped onto the rear deck on the side closest to the dock. Grabbing a motor housing in each hand, she gritted her teeth and pulled. There was the horrendous screeching of metal under stress and then a loud splash as the two engines fell into the water.
‘Madre de Deus!’ Cygnus actually recognised the exclamation as Portuguese rather than Spanish. She heard the third motor rev and had to grab hold of it to stop herself going over the side. The boat lurched forward, but the force was no longer even and all that happened before the pilot had figured that out was that the nose of the speedboat ploughed into one of the thick supports on the side of the dock. Bracing herself, Cygnus pulled hard and the third engine followed its friends to the bottom of the bay.
There was a lot of shouting and random bursts of gunfire from above; Twilight was busy. Before Cygnus had started working with her, she took things easy on a bust like this. She would slip from shadow to shadow, take her targets one at a time, not take too many chances. Cygnus had changed her. Not drastically, but she knew she was faster and took more chances than before.
Right now she was tossing out smoke pellets to hide her movements, shadow-stepping between targets to surprise them, darting from one to the next with swinging batons and kicks. She wanted them on the ground and unresponsive as fast as possible because…
Exactly why she thought something was wrong she was not sure, but something did not feel right and she had a feeling that they were not going to find out what was wrong until everyone was down.
Twilight turned, sweeping the legs out from under a thug wielding a sub-machine gun, and then slammed the hilt of one of her batons into his forehead. Cygnus was rising over the edge of the dock with two thugs gripped in one hand and a third in the other. None of them looked like they were going to be communicative any time soon.
‘You took them out before they even opened the van,’ Cygnus commented as the last wisps of smoke faded and the area could be seen properly.
Twilight turned and looked at the grey vehicle standing on the jetty. Just one van, no escort, and they had had time to open the doors. The black-clad heroine frowned. ‘Check down below, would you? See if you can find anything illegal.’
Dumping her catch on the dock, the blonde turned and dropped down again while Twilight walked back toward the van. Normally at this point she would have found a phone on one of the unconscious thugs and used it to call the police. Using their own phones was, she tho
ught, poetic justice, but it also stopped anyone identifying her. This time she was holding back on that because…
The van had small windows in the rear doors, but they had been painted out. There was a wall between the section the driver occupied and the cargo area, with no way of seeing through. She climbed up onto the roof and found a plastic ventilation cover up there which she could lever open with her sword.
‘If there are drugs on that boat, they are seriously well concealed,’ Cygnus said as she flew up from below to hover beside Twilight. ‘Were they shipping something out?’
Twilight shone a penlight into the small opening in the van’s roof. ‘Uh… yeah… sort of. I think they were planning to ship us out, in bits. We need to call the bomb squad. Like, now.’
‘Oh shit,’ Cygnus replied, turning and heading for the nearest man who looked like he might have a phone on him.
~~~
‘Yeah,’ the ordnance disposal officer drawled, turning a lump of something with wires sticking out of it in his hand, ‘they wired the door to trigger the bomb, and there was a command detonator. We found that on the boat. There’s almost a ton of explosives here. Homemade stuff, based on fertiliser.’
Twilight nodded. ‘I know how to make it. It’d have just about atomised anyone on the dock.’
‘Do you think the people driving in with it knew it was there?’ Cygnus asked, her eyes wide as she looked over the bags of explosive taking up much of the van’s interior.
‘Yeah,’ Twilight said. ‘We usually wait on them unloading and then hit them. They were planning on dropping into the boat where the dock would protect them. I doubt they all knew, but some of them did.’
‘Trap,’ Cygnus said, frowning.
‘Uh-huh. Pretty good one too. Someone analysed our methods and proposed the best way to use them against us.’
‘Looks like they didn’t analyse as well as they thought,’ the bomb guy commented. He developed a slightly sickly grin and his cheeks coloured. ‘Uh, could I get your autographs before you go? It’s for my daughter, honest. She’s a big fan.’
Twilight glanced at Cygnus and then back at the policeman. ‘You want mine? She’s the one with the calendar and the pin-up pictures.’
‘Oh no, she’s a bright kid. She knows you’re a team.’
‘Right,’ Cygnus said, grinning, ‘that does it. We are so getting you some publicity shots done.’
Twilight glowered at her and then growled, ‘What’ve you got I can sign?’ to the cop. She really did not like the way the evening was going, for several reasons.
21st March.
Penny looked up at the sound from the wall screen just as it lit up to show a car on the drive to the house. That was one issue with being unemployed and people knowing where you lived; while no one had really tied Penny and Cygnus together thanks to some creative accounting and sleight of hand, people did know where to find Cygnus when they wanted her. Generally, the ones who wanted her dead did not come up the drive in a car with government plates.
Grumbling, she got up from the sofa and went to get changed. In her case, that was a little more involved than it was for some people, but by the time Dannon and Bryant were buzzing for admittance, she was pulling the belt tight on a silk wrap as she walked to the door.
‘Agents,’ she said, smiling at them, ‘to what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘Must be nice,’ Dannon said, ‘having nothing to do but lounge around in your underwear all day.’ His tone was amused, but there was a hint of a barb in it.
‘Being unemployed isn’t as much fun as you’d think,’ Cygnus replied. ‘And for the record, I’m not wearing underwear. Come in. I assume there’s something you need to discuss?’
‘NMCPD say you were looking into some sort of new drug shipment recently?’ Bryant asked as they followed her through the house. ‘The bomb incident?’
‘Yeah,’ Cygnus replied. ‘Red Huntress got wind of something new, and Twilight thought she had information on when they were shipping it. Maybe all part of a trap for us though. When we went to look, we found a ton of homemade AMFO waiting for us.’
‘It looks like it was a trap and a decoy,’ Dannon said. ‘We’ve had three people hospitalised overnight with symptoms of extreme exhaustion. The toxicology matches Excelsior, or what we know about it anyway. Luckily, no Ultras seem to have taken it yet. We’re issuing a warning to all the registered ones we can get to and putting out a general notice on UltraNet.’
‘I’m not into recreational drugs at the best of times,’ Cygnus said, ‘unless you count caffeine. Want some?’
‘We’re on the clock. I assume I can trust you to let Twilight know about this?’
Cygnus glanced at him. ‘Yeah, of course. We check in every night even if we’re patrolling alone.’ There was every chance that he would be seeing her himself after that. It looked like Dannon had not mentioned that to Bryant yet. ‘We’ll keep an eye out. Maybe we can find out how this stuff is coming in.’
‘If you do,’ Bryant put in, ‘it’s a police matter. We’re only putting the word round to Ultras because of the effects it has.’
‘Coma, psychosis, death, possibly by exploding head… that kind of effect?’
‘Uh, yeah, that kind of effect. You probably don’t want to take it.’
‘Ah, but that’s the thing,’ Cygnus replied. ‘This stuff is inhaled. Technically someone could use it as a weapon. Kind of expensive, but possible. We need to nail it, get it stopped, and maybe get someone like Doctor Ultimate working on a way of treating it.’
‘The Union is supposed to be working on something,’ Dannon said. ‘In the meantime, don’t breathe any strange gasses.’
~~~
Jacob looked up to see a slim female figure slinking into his lounge dressed only in a lace mask. He was reaching for the TV remote when she sat down on his lap and stopped him.
‘No need to get right down to it, y’know?’ she whispered. ‘Even if I made it easy. We can sit here and cuddle.’
He grunted out a soft laugh. ‘Honestly? At this stage in what we’re calling our relationship, keeping my hands off you is not that easy.’
She gasped as his fingers slid up her inner thigh. ‘So I see. You haven’t told Bryant about us yet though. Might be better if she hears it before she works it out.’
‘Cygnus knows, I suppose?’
‘If it wasn’t for her, I’d never have gone through with it.’
‘I’ll tell Heather,’ he said, ‘when I think the time’s right. Cygnus told you about the Excelsior victims?’
‘Yeah, of course. I talk to my partner.’ The fact that he was delaying telling Bryant about them was irritating her more than she had expected it would, but right now, with his fingers stroking over sensitive flesh, it did not seem quite so important. Her thighs spread further apart to give him easier access. ‘But we can finish this conversation when you’ve finished what you started,’ she added.
~~~
The club was called No Limits and, as was typical of places with names like that, it had plenty of rules. Anyone caught using illegal narcotics on the premises was in for a ride in a police cruiser, for example, but that did not mean that people did not carry or use.
Jordan was a case in point and had got her hands on a real prize. Technically it was not even illegal, having no official designation as a narcotic. The little inhaler it came in looked like asthma medicine, though anyone taking it for that condition was going to be in for a shock. She had enough for four hits, but she was not greedy; the stuff made you feel amazing, according to her source, and she was going to share it around.
She had picked out her three friends already. Ashley was her BFF from high school, Trent was her boyfriend, at least for now, and then there was the guy Ashley was trying to get to commit more, Paul. Jordan was not sure Paul was really worth it, but she would do just about anything for Ashley, so giving this guy the last shot in the hope he would finally decide to stick with one woman for five minutes was goin
g to happen.
‘What is this stuff?’ Trent asked as Jordan took the inhaler out of her purse.
‘The guys I buy from are calling it “X” and it’s new, and it’s supposed to be the most amazing high there is,’ she told them.
‘I kind of doubt that,’ Paul replied, his lips curling into a snide little grin. ‘They always say things like that.’
‘Well, you try it and see, tough guy.’ She lifted it to her lips and pressed the cap, feeling the rush of cold vapour in her lungs. She handed it over to Paul.
Grinning, he lifted, pressed, gasped at the cold, and handed it over to Ashley. By the time Trent was sucking in his jolt, the first wave of euphoria was sweeping through Jordan’s body. It began as a flare of warmth in her fingers and toes, and spread rapidly to envelope her body.
‘Oh… woah… that’s nice…’ she said. ‘You feeling this, Paul?’
‘All I’m feeling is… ah, shit… Brain freeze or something. Shit this hurts.’
Jordan turned to look at him, but moving was hard. Trent was still functional, but the drug had just hit Ashley and all she could do was giggle as she watched her would-be life-long partner double over with his head in his hands. A few seconds later, when he started screaming in agony, neither of the two girls were aware of anything aside from the feeling of ecstatic pleasure pumping through them.
~~~
‘You have got to be kidding me,’ Twilight grumbled. She was very much enjoying the sensation of Jacob screwing her on the lounge sofa and the fact that he was pausing to answer the buzzing of his phone was not going down well.
‘You’re never quite off duty in the UID,’ he replied before hitting the answer button. ‘Dannon, and this better be important.’
The grinding motion he had been continuing, if at a reduced speed, came to a complete stop after a couple of seconds and he pulled out. Twilight turned to look at him and found a frown creasing his features. She gave him a quizzical look but got only a shake of his head in reply.
‘I’ll be there in thirty minutes,’ he said into the phone, before hanging up. Now she was more curious, and a little worried. And he knew it. ‘We’ve got a dead Ultra. Paul Hopkins. Called himself Sandstorm.’
Shadows (Ultrahumans Book 2) Page 4
