Gray Widow Trilogy 1: Gray Widow's Walk

by Dan Jolley

  On the TV, applause from a studio audience gradually ended, and Janey glanced up just as a breathtaking redhead filled the screen. She chewed slowly and watched the redhead with narrowed eyes, her mind elsewhere. In a lower corner of the screen the word LIVE flashed slowly.

  “Few sensations have gripped America in quite the way the topic of tonight’s show has,” Sheree said perfectly.

  Maybe the whole thing was a bad idea. She tapped her plate absently with a piece of fake bacon. Grown women don’t do what I’m doing. When they have problems they deal with them, either alone or with someone else’s help, but they deal with them. They don’t do what I’m doing.

  But then, other people can’t do what I’m doing.

  She shook her head and closed her eyes...and snapped them open again, all her attention on the TV and Sheree Baker’s voice.

  “In just over one week, the mysterious character known as the Gray Widow has captured the hearts and minds of people all across the nation. She appears from out of nowhere, dishes out a brutal brand of justice, and vanishes again. More than a dozen people have come forward with stories of how the Gray Widow has helped them, claiming that she’s come to their rescue as they were about to be victimized. But our guests today have a different take on what the Gray Widow is all about.”

  The cameras cut to focus on a couple in their late forties, seated uncomfortably in two chairs on one of the set’s raised platforms. They both wore clothes appropriate for Sunday morning worship services, and both had tightly pinched faces. The man was fat, his belly spilling over the belt of his trousers, while the woman was reed-thin, approaching skeletal. Janey couldn’t picture either of them smiling. A caption appeared on the screen below them: TOM & AMANDA PITTMAN. Below the names, in smaller letters: Son was shot and hospitalized after imitating Gray Widow.

  Janey’s throat turned dry as sand. She dropped her fork on the plate and forgot about it.

  “Say hello to our guests, Tom and Amanda Pittman. In a widely publicized case, their son Nathan left the house a few nights ago, put on a mask, and tried to stop a robbery at a convenience store. In the process Nathan was shot, and is now in critical condition at Gavring Medical. Tom, Amanda, how are you doing?”

  Janey thought her eggs would come back up, and she forced herself to drink a sip of orange juice. Her entire world had narrowed to the TV screen.

  Amanda Pittman nodded bravely. “We’re still here, Sheree. We’re holding on.”

  Sheree nodded sympathetically, plastically. “And how is Nathan?”

  “There’s been no improvement,” Tom Pittman said. His voice was gravelly and phlegm-filled. “The doctors haven’t said anything about him getting better anytime soon.”

  “Tom, Amanda, I can only try to understand the pain you’re both going through, and I extend my deepest sympathies. Now, I understand you’ve decided to take action based on what happened to your son?”

  “We have, yes,” Amanda Pittman said. “We’re going to do something about that worthless, spineless vigilante that made our Nathan go out and do what he did.”

  “And you’re talking about the so-called Gray Widow?”

  “Yes we are,” Tom Pittman growled. “Nathan wouldn’t ever’ve got those stupid ideas in his head if not for that piece of trash. So we’ve got a lawyer, and as soon as the police catch her, we’re going to make that Gray Widow pay for what she’s done.” Pittman filled the name with venom.

  “So, just so there’s no confusion here,” Sheree said, sounding as though she barely understood it herself, “what you’re going to do is file a lawsuit against the Gray Widow. Someone whose identity is unknown.”

  “It’ll be known soon enough,” Amanda Pittman chirped. She looked and sounded like an old, desiccated bird. “When the police catch that slut and pull off her mask, we’ll have a lawsuit waiting for her so huge it’ll make sure she never causes any more harm to any other innocent young people.” The woman sounded coached.

  Janey stood up from the couch, boiling inside. Captured the hearts and minds of the nation? She cursed herself for not keeping up with the news. And this kid, getting shot playing hero? How could she not have known about that?

  Janey dumped her mostly uneaten meal down the garbage disposal as the Pittmans further described their hatred for her and their desire to see her brought to justice for the injury done to their son. Her hands trembling, she stood behind the couch and watched as members of the audience voiced their own opinions about her and how she should be dealt with. Some disagreed with the Pittmans, but a lot of the audience were middle-class, morally upstanding parents, and they seemed to back the couple wholeheartedly.

  Janey clicked off the TV and violently hurled the remote the length of the apartment. It sailed through the door to her bedroom and punched a small triangular dent in the wall over her work table. She hurriedly dressed in dry clothes and headed downstairs.

  * * *

  Fields wasn’t there when Simon got back. Probably off getting food or something. Simon stamped his feet on the front porch and wiped them on a bristly rubber mat before he came inside. Brenda sat on the couch, reading a Joe Lansdale novel, and looked up as he opened the door. “Well?”

  Not hi. Not hello. Not how are you. Just well? Simon felt annoyed and frustrated, but when he tried to think more about that his head went sort of funny and he couldn’t quite put a finger on why, so instead he decided to concentrate on what he’d been sent to do.

  “Kid Creepy had it right on. I watched Sinclair get out of her car. Piece-of-shit little Honda. Got the tag right here.” He handed her the notebook and went to the kitchen for a drink. She got up off the couch and followed him. “Another little tidbit for you, too. She’s got herself a boyfriend, looks like.”

  “Oh really.” Simon glanced at Brenda, saw the cogs and wheels turning. Brenda craved information, craved secrets. “Tell me about him.”

  He shrugged. “Just some bony sand nigger, looks like he’s abou—”

  Simon’s whole head snapped around with the force of the backhand. He turned back toward Brenda, and she did it again, harder the second time.

  “Don’t you ever,” she growled, “ever let me hear you use that word again.”

  Simon’s face crawled with the change, back and forth. He finally settled on human and rubbed his jaw. “Touch a nerve, did I?”

  * * *

  Brenda glared at Simon Grove, breathing hard, while the time-distorted voices of dozens of children echoed inside her. Nigger nigger nigger, Brenda is a nigger, nigger nigger nigger... They’d made it into a crude song.

  She wanted to kill them all. She wanted to kill Simon.

  With a snarl she slapped one open hand onto Simon’s forehead and pushed him backward into the kitchen wall. The scent flowed off her in a rushing chemical wave, and as she funneled it all into him his eyes glazed over and his jaw went slack.

  “Forget we talked about this,” she said, low and dangerous. “But do not, ever, in your entire life, use the word ‘nigger’ again. Got that?”

  He nodded numbly.

  “Good. Now I’ve got some information to gather. Get out of my sight.”

  * * *

  Janey felt as if she’d been out of the country for the last several days.

  Sitting in a public library in front of her shiny new laptop—she didn’t have wi-fi in her apartment, not yet at least, and hadn’t wanted to wait—she paged through site after site, each of them, in one form or another, featuring the masked vigilante commonly called “the Gray Widow.”

  She found the very first article to mention her, dated August 31. The first day she met Tim. That one didn’t try to give her a name, but the appellation “Gray Widow” popped up soon enough. As near as she could tell, it had originated with a reporter named Darius Clay and gone viral from there, replacing the other names that had tentatively been put forward, su
ch as “the Shadow Woman,” “the Woman in Gray,” and one that actually made her shudder: “the Woman Hood.”

  She’d only been truly active for, as Sheree Baker had said, a little over a week, but in that period she had made the front pages of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, as well as countless smaller sites. Each of them had only artists’ renditions of her, except for Fox News, which featured a stylized, solid black head-and-shoulders silhouette on the cover, with a large red question mark where her nose would have been.

  She found one of the renditions particularly striking. It depicted a woman in a skin-tight costume, a pair of nunchaku in one hand and a huge semi-automatic pistol in the other, and breasts at least four sizes larger than her own C-cups. The artist had taken it upon him- or herself to give her what amounted to a logo, too: a ragged, splintery cross with an evil-looking skull at its center, right in the middle of her chest.

  Janey made a sound with her lips like Pffff.

  A local news site contained a transcript of a debate which had taken place on—she couldn’t believe this—the Good Morning Sheree show. Apparently the program normally ran very light fare, but the dialogue between two columnists, Greg Thatcher and Chirina McCallum, had served to focus the city’s opinions after it showed up on Twitter and began trending. By bizarre default, the Good Morning Sheree forum grew into Atlanta’s most common sounding board for expressing its feelings on the Gray Widow’s activities.

  The articles grew in frequency with each passing day. Even in just the few days she’d been common knowledge, she’d achieved the status of cultural icon, for good or bad. She was convinced of that when she found an advertisement for the upcoming Gray Widow web comic.

  The artist who’d composed the web comic ad had obviously seen the earlier cross-and-skull drawing; the design was there, though this version of the Gray Widow also wore about sixty pounds of plate metal armor and hefted an implausibly huge gun. Janey grinned in spite of herself.

  The Gray Widow buzz took a sharp turn for the serious after Nathan Pittman was shot. News of the shooting itself started out as small potatoes: lower-middle-class teenager shot during convenience store hold-up, in critical condition. Then the connection between Nathan’s actions and the masked vigilante got out, and his story jumped to the front page and went out over the wire. When the Chronicle got pictures of Nathan’s room, well on its way to being wallpapered with clippings about her, the entire nation learned the circumstances overnight.

  A good two hours of Widow-related reading made Janey’s head begin to spin. Eventually, after some time spent assimilating it all, three distinct things occupied her mind. The first was the image of Tom and Amanda Pittman, and the grief they felt because of what had happened to their son.

  The second was guilt.

  The third was an enormous sense of indignation.

  Sides were taken, yes, but if what she’d read in the past couple of hours was any indication, most of the people who voiced opinions didn’t care for what she was doing. Words kept cropping up such as irresponsible and hurtful. Twice she was called a negative role model. In the pieces published after Nathan Pittman was shot, the voices which had in the past been wary and suspicious bared their teeth and went after her with gusto.

  “Of course she’s to blame for Nathan Pittman’s injury,” proclaimed a noted televangelist. “What else can we expect when our children are bombarded with such images? What else can happen when an uncaring domestic terrorist stares back from every television and computer screen? The media is at fault, but even more so is the terrible individual herself. You see, this is what happens when women do not understand their place in God’s plan. Whoever is behind the mask of the Gray Widow, she should be in the home, helping to raise the next generation and seeing to the needs of her hard-working husband. All this…this vigilantism? It’s a perversion of God’s will.”

  Janey had to take a break after reading that quote to let her heart rate settle back down.

  In nearly every instance, those who spoke out against her were parents. The Gray Widow got Nathan Pittman shot! Catch her and lock her up before she hurts some other innocent child! Catch her and lock her up before she hurts my child!

  At the other end of the spectrum were the twelve- to twenty-four-year-olds, particularly the teenage boys, who couldn’t seem to get enough of her. One kid from Nashville, Tennessee had appointed himself president of the fast-growing Gray Widow Fan Club, which already boasted 60,000+ members.

  She read about the Gray Widow Updates on BuzzFeed.com, and discovered that James Wan was talking to Paramount about a film.

  Merchandise had flooded the market in record time, unimpeded by copyrights or the need to gain permission: posters, T-shirts, hats—ThinkGeek.com had a whole Gray Widow section.

  Interviews taken with people stopped randomly on the street ranged from bitter hatred to mooning adoration. She hadn’t quite caught on with the young teenage girls yet, but that didn’t stop the females college-age and older, many of whom apparently found her both intriguing and inspiring. She saw a picture of a grinning college co-ed holding up a pair of Gray Widow boxer shorts. They looked hand-made.

  The positive press still didn’t outweigh the negative. She couldn’t get Amanda Pittman’s voice out of her head. “Piece of trash...”

  Eventually Janey slung Tim’s raincoat over one shoulder, tucked her expensive new purchase under one arm, and walked slowly to the exit, staring absently into space.

  * * *

  After Janey had gone through one of the six glass doors at the main entrance and started down the marble stairs, a man in a sweatshirt, jeans and Atlanta Braves cap made his way over to the reference librarian, a plump, smiling woman of about forty. “Afternoon, ma’am. Would you be the one to talk to if I had a question about the library’s wi-fi network?”

  The librarian’s smile got broader. “I would indeed! What would you like to know?”

  Zach Feygen showed her his badge. “I’m a detective, ma’am. And I’m wondering how hard it’d be to get a look at what kind of search someone did on the public network here.”

  * * *

  Back at the LaCroix, Janey trudged down the hallway, past the office door, to the elevator, which she rode by herself up to her floor. She didn’t see anyone else as she unlocked her apartment and went inside.

  Barely aware of her surroundings, Janey went straight to the empty utility closet, stepped inside, and emerged into the basement. She slept there that night, stretched out on top of a sleeping bag thrown over an inflatable mattress.

  At 2:13 a.m., Janey awoke and lay motionless, staring at the ceiling. She let the night vision come to her, and moved her eyes slowly over every crack and crevice and irregularity in the poured-concrete-and-steel-beam ceiling. Eventually she rolled off the mattress and padded across the smooth, cool floor to the Vylar suit, which hung on its rack, waiting for her. She tugged the rack over next to her work bench and reached through the darkness, up to her bedroom. Scorching air flooded around her. When she pulled her hand back, she held a brush and a tube of black acrylic paint.

  With a somewhat sardonic smile Janey stared at the suit and unscrewed the cap from the tube.

  * * *

  Earlier that night, but several hours after he left the library, Zach Feygen groaned and rolled his shoulders as Heather worked on his back. He did that partly because it felt good, and partly because he knew Heather liked to see his muscles flex. He still ragged himself from time to time for robbing the cradle—Heather was a good nine years his junior—but damned if she didn’t have herself together better than anybody else he’d been out with in the last three years.

  The sheets always smelled like her now. He loved it.

  Feygen’s eyelids were heavy, and felt as though they were lined with gravel. He was immensely tired, and knew he ought to be dropping off to sleep any second now.

  Any second now. But it
wouldn’t happen. Not with his insides as twisted up as they were. Not with what he’d found out today.

  “You’re thinking about her, aren’t you?” Heather asked, reading his mind. She worked her hands up both sides of his spine, kneaded the heavy muscles there.

  “I can’t get it out of my head. Her, the case, the whole thing. The way she stood there, downstairs, and talked to us. Plus...”

  Heather paused. “Plus? Plus what?”

  Feygen sighed and slowly rolled over, looked up at her. If anything could begin to take his mind off work, Heather certainly could.

  She straddled him on the bed, wearing only a pair of filmy French-cut panties, and he reached up to run his fingers along the skin of her side, and across one tiny breast. “You’re like a work of art,” he said softly. She smiled and took his hand, nibbled on the fingertips.

  “Most of the time that would work,” she said. “But this time I’m not going to let you distract me, because I can tell, you’ve really got something to say. So out with it.”

  Feygen frowned, but he laced his thick fingers through Heather’s slim, delicate ones and decided to talk.

  “I think I know who she is.”

  Heather’s eyebrows shot up. “Yeah?”

  “Her father—he’s dead now, died a little over eleven years ago—he was a magician, like Copperfield, or David Blaine, only not as big.”

  She frowned, and made him feel very old by asking, “Who’s Copperfield?”

  “Oof. Doesn’t matter. Never mind. But this guy, the father, played a lot at this one place, used to be a really fancy venue. And that’s the place where the Gray Widow first showed up. So I looked at the original blueprints, and there’s this part of it... It’s got to be her. The woman I’ve been following, it’s got to be her in the suit and the mask. I’ve got no proof, but I’ve got more than enough for a search warrant.”

  She slid one hand over his chest. “So...you’re going to bust her?”

  Instead of answering, Feygen pulled her down against him and wrapped his arms around her.