I hesitated.
“Uh, I don’t want to say,” I finally said. “I’m afraid I’ll get accused of being a misogynist again.”
“Just as I thought,” Shadow said. “The woman who said you are a misogynist was probably just mad that a man had never checked her out. Jealousy often manifests itself as name-calling. A world where a man’s instinct is to not look at an attractive woman, and vice versa, is a neutered world I don’t want to live in.” Shadow was a beautiful, tall, dark-skinned black woman shaped like an old-fashioned Coke bottle. Any man with a healthy level of testosterone and functioning eyesight would go out of his way to check her out. Since I was neither blind nor a eunuch, I had checked her out on more than one occasion. After all, only rigorous practice kept a detective’s observational skills finely honed. I had been careful to not let Shadow catch me looking at her, though. Yes I had functioning man parts and eyesight, but I might quickly lose both if Shadow caught me looking at her in a fashion she did not approve of.
“‘A body like a sack of oversized potatoes’?” I said, repeating Shadow’s words. “Now that actually does sound misogynist. You might want to tone such talk down should you ever decide to run for office.”
Shadow snorted in disbelief again.
“I’ll become a supervillain long before you catch me running for office,” she said. “If I’m going to be a leech on society and rob people, I would at least have the decency to be upfront about it.”
“Shadow, you are an unregistered Meta who goes around using her powers left and right. Under the law, technically you are already a supervillain.”
“You say supervillain, I say superpowered entrepreneur,” Shadow said. “Enterprising small businesspeople like me are what made this country great. I’m as American as apple pie and obesity. But speaking of supervillains and business, back to our reformed supervillain Eugene. Try to pretend for a moment you aren’t a rabid misogynist trying to oppress us poor, helpless women and make me a serious offer to help you.”
It was my turn to snort.
“Shadow, you’re about as helpless as a great white shark,” I said.
“White?” she said incredulously. “Why you gotta be bringing race into this? We’ll add racism to the ever-expanding list of your oppressions and micro-aggressions. But I digress. How much will you pay me for helping you? Hurry up and make me a fair offer before I report you to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.”
“How does fifty-fifty sound, share and share alike?” I asked.
“That’s better. I’ll call off the civil rights lawyers,” Shadow said. “You’ve got a deal. But, if someone needs to take a bullet for Eugene, let’s make sure it’s you and not me. I don’t want to carry this share and share alike thing too far.”
“No promises,” I said. “I’m a stickler for equality.”
CHAPTER 5
A few days later, I stood in line at Perk Up, a coffee shop a few blocks away from Eugene’s office. Eugene was next to me. In addition to coffee, the shop sold pastries and other food. It was all on display in a glass case next to the cash register. There were plenty of hotcakes on display in the case. Apparently the expression “selling like hotcakes” was a lie.
Though no one had made an attempt on Eugene’s life in the days Shadow and I had been hovering over him like guardian angels, I was as nervous and anxious as a gazelle who smelled a lion nearby as I stood with Eugene in the coffee shop. Part of that was because I was trying to look everywhere at once to spot any potential threats. The other part of that was because I was going through alcohol withdrawal.
I had not had a drop of alcohol since Eugene had hired me. All the signs and symptoms of alcohol withdrawal were there as I stood in Perk Up. In addition to being nervous and anxious, I was restless, agitated, sweaty, and my head felt like my brain was chiseling a hole through my skull. Until I had stopped drinking cold turkey when Eugene hired me, I had been drinking pretty heavily every day for months. My body clearly had grown dependent on alcohol. I knew that if I went and got a drink, it would make me feel better. I literally needed a drink. But, the fact that I needed one told me I most definitely should not have one. If I was not already an alcoholic, I was dangerously close to being one. The world was already in a big enough mess without adding a superpowered alcoholic to the mix.
The fact I knew all that did not change the fact I still very badly wanted a drink, though.
In the days since Eugene had hired us, Shadow protected Eugene at night; I was in charge of him during the day. I had wanted him to take some time off of work and stay at home until the trial date for the Felonious Five arrived. Eugene would have none of it.
“I’m not going to turn into a hermit and a prisoner in my own home because of some threats,” he had said when I had brought up the notion of him staying at home. “Besides, I have too much work to do at the office to turn my life upside down for what might be just idle rumors. I hired you to protect me. You can protect me just as easily at the office as you can do at the house.”
I had told him that was not the case as it was easier to secure and guard a single location, but he insisted on living as normal of a life as possible. Since Eugene was paying me, he was the boss. I did not like it, though.
Before we had made our way to the coffee shop that day, Eugene had worked in his office all morning and much of the afternoon. Meanwhile, I had cooled my heels in one of his guest chairs, unsuccessfully trying to focus on reading, unsuccessfully not thinking about having a drinking, successfully and thoroughly inspecting Eugene’s female support staff for any hint of a threat, and barely not dying of boredom.
Eugene had wanted to take a coffee break, and we had made the short walk from his office to Perk Up. As we stood in line waiting to place our orders, I wished I had eyes in the back and on the sides of my head as I tried to look everywhere at once to spot sources of potential danger. Maybe no one was trying to kill Eugene. But, if I operated under that assumption and I let him get killed on my watch, I would not have blamed Eugene if he came back as a ghost and haunted me. I had to operate under the assumption that someone was indeed trying to kill him and plan accordingly.
I wanted to decapitate myself and re-mount my head on a swivel. I understood viscerally for the first time why prey animals tended to have their eyes set so far apart in their heads to spot potential danger before it was too late. Never before had I had reason to be envious of rabbits and their wide-set eyes. I take that back—rabbits were also known for their fertility. Rabid fertility was certainly something to also be envious of.
One never knew where peril might lurk. Metahuman assassins did not wear signs around their necks identifying them as such. I kept my eyes peeled, my powers on a hair trigger, and my hands ready to slip inside my jacket. I felt the comforting weight of my nine millimeter Remington mounted in a shoulder holster on my left side.
People had asked me in the past why a licensed Hero needed to carry a gun. One dummy had even suggested I had some weird male power fantasy; another said I was probably compensating for some—how to put this politely?—biological inadequacy. Neither was the case. Since I had superpowers, no I did not necessarily need to carry a gun. A gun was but another tool in my superheroic toolbox. It was better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it. For example, what would I do if I went up against a supervillain with the power to nullify other Metas’ powers? Complain that he wasn’t fighting fairly, say what he was doing was not cricket, and try to nag him to death? A gun would come in mighty handy in that situation.
Also, sometimes a gun got results where superpowers did not. Unlike a gun, you could not wave your superpowers in someone’s face threateningly. The threat of violence was often more potent than actual violence. I think I read that on a fortune cookie. That did not subtract from its truth, though. Wisdom can come from a multitude of sources. Got that gem off a fortune cookie, too.
Besides, if I did not carry a gun, I could not fantasize about pulling it out and shootin
g one of Perk Up’s baristas behind the counter with it. Her name was Justina according to her name tag. Even though music was playing in Perk Up and the shop buzzed with conversation and activity, Justina’s loud voice—sometimes yelling, sometimes singing, sometimes whistling like a red-headed, pasty-faced cuckoo bird—cut through the rest of the noise in the place like a jagged and very annoying knife. She was what I imagined a banshee sounded like. Justina was making my already throbbing headache worse. Although it was a nice fantasy, actually pulling out my gun and shooting her would have been a tad of an overreaction. Both the police and the Heroes’ Guild frowned on such things.
In addition to my gun, I had on black pants, a forest green long-sleeved tee shirt, and black athletic shoes. It was my superhero and bodyguard casual chic look. I had a black leather bomber jacket on over the gun to avoid drawing too much attention. The jacket was unzipped for easy access. A couple of people in Perk Up looked at me funny when my jacket opened enough to display the gun. I did not care. It would never do to have the need to draw my gun quickly, but not be able to do so because my jacket was zipped up. Assassins were not known for their willingness to wait while bodyguards unzipped and armed themselves. Polite assassins who gave their opponents a fair chance were not successful assassins.
Other than Eugene and I, there were a total of thirty-one people in the large coffee shop at the moment: fifteen customers who were seated; nine people in line with us; four employees behind the counter, including Justina; and three others in the back room of the shop I could not see. I could see them in my mind’s eye, though, thanks to my powers. Since the human body is over sixty percent water, my water manipulation powers made people in the area stand out in my mind like heat sources viewed through infrared goggles, even the ones who were not visible to my actual eyes.
I kept sweeping over the occupants of the shop with my eyes and powers. I was keyed up. I wished I had insisted Eugene not go out in public like this until the Felonious Five murder trial was over. Maybe it was psychosomatic or a symptom of my body craving alcohol, but I felt an itch between my shoulder blades, as if there was a target on my back. I was uneasy as I continued to look the patrons of the coffee shop over. Except for the people who had caught a glimpse of my gun and a few others, no one seemed to be paying me and Eugene the slightest bit of attention.
A few feet away at one of the shop’s round tables sat two women in their twenties. One had a baby carriage with her. My keenly honed deductive abilities told me there might be a baby inside. Catching sight of two flailing pink little feet told me that sure enough, there was. Why Scotland Yard had not hired me to fly over and solve their thorniest cases was beyond me. The other young woman had a young boy, maybe five or six-years-old, standing by her chair and clutching her skirt. A stain was on the front of his light blue shirt. Chocolate milk or hot chocolate, probably. He was looking at me intently with his mouth agape in the unselfconscious and unabashed way children often stared at you. Perhaps he was staring at me because he had never seen a licensed Hero in real life before. It was more likely he guessed we were about the same age mentally. Probably sensed a kindred spirit.
Though I was still hyper-conscious to any possible threats, I took a moment to cross my eyes at the boy while sticking my tongue out at him. The boy giggled, turned, and buried his head into his mother’s skirt. Perhaps if I spotted an assassin, I would merely have to cross my eyes at him. It was good to have a plan.
Another person was looking at me. She was a white woman several people in line behind us. She was average in almost every way—dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, brown eyes behind black, square-framed glasses, average height, average looks, wearing neutral-colored clothing, and so on. If it were not for the fact she was looking at me as frankly and openly as the little boy had been, I probably would not have paid her the slightest bit of attention. Her gaze was assessing, as if she were a cat surveying a mouse. Now that I was paying attention to her, there was something vaguely familiar about her, as if I had seen her before. I chalked up the women’s familiarity to the fact she was so average in appearance that she looked like a lot of other people.
The woman saw that I was looking back at her. Rather than looking away, she instead smiled slightly at me. At the risk of being called a misogynist again, I winked at her. She did not seem offended or oppressed by the wink. Rather, the woman smiled even more broadly, as if she had just opened an unexpected present. The smile lit the woman’s face up, and she suddenly went from being nondescript to quite pretty.
Thoughts of the woman flew out of my head when I noticed a third person was looking at me and Eugene. He stood behind a young blonde woman who was immediately behind Eugene and me. The man was in his early thirties, a few inches shorter than I, stocky, and his big head was shaved completely bald. His broad nose looked somewhat like mine, flattened, as if it had seen its fair share of blows. Though he was Caucasian, his skin was dark, like he spent a lot of time outside. There was a jagged scar on top of his head. The scar was lighter than the rest of the skin on the man’s head, making the scar look like a lightning bolt. The man was wearing blue jeans and a thigh-length cloth coat. The coat was partly unbuttoned. There was a bulge on the left side of it. The bulge could have been caused by a thick wallet, a paperback book, the man’s shirt bunching up underneath the coat, or any number of things. The bulge also could have been caused by a concealed gun.
Though he was doing his best to not be obvious about it, I was sure the bald man was studying me intently out of the corner of his eyes. I stepped to the right a bit, further away from Eugene and the rest of the people in line. The man immediately shifted to keep me in his peripheral vision. That confirmed it: he was definitely watching me. Something about the way the man carried himself hinted at potential danger and barely suppressed energy, like that of a coiled spring. He seemed like a cocked revolver whose trigger might be pulled at any moment. The way he behaved and the way he looked at me without acting like he was doing so made me even more nervous than I already was. The bulge under his coat made me even edgier. My already pounding skull pounded harder still as my heart began to race.
The line moved forward, bringing Eugene to the front of the line. Eugene started to order. The young blonde behind him stepped a bit to the side to look at some dessert items in the glass case by the counter. Eugene’s back was totally exposed to the bald man. Though the man still was looking at me out of the corner of his right eye, his eyes were also still straight ahead, pointing at Eugene. The bald man’s right arm lifted. His hand slipped inside the partially open coat, towards the bulge on the left side of his body.
I was sure he was reaching for a gun.
CHAPTER 6
I reacted without thought. I closed the gap between me and the bald man in a few swift steps. I grabbed his right arm which reached inside his jacket, twisting it behind his back. The man yelped in surprise and pain. While holding his right arm behind him in a hammer lock, I shoved his body forward, slamming him into the glass display case next to the register. He cried out. He tried to push back at me, but I was strong—the countless hours I had spent at the gym were not just for show—and I had leverage over him. I felt the man’s free left hand clutching at me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Do you know who I am?” the man gasped. It sounded like I had knocked the wind out of him.
“You’re the guy who was reaching for what looked like a gun. As for me, I’m a licensed Hero who’s going to break your arm if you don’t stop grabbing at me and shut up,” I said. His left hand kept moving against me. I levered the man’s right arm up more sharply. He let out a yelp of pain. His left hand stopped moving.
“Stretch your left arm out and lay it flat on the case before I break your other one,” I said. The man complied. “Now spread your legs.” The man complied again. Properly applied pain did wonders to foster cooperation. Though I was focused on the man, I was faintly aware of the fact the man and I were causing a bit of a commo
tion in the store. Voices raised in alarm. “Someone call the police,” someone said.
I patted the man down. I paid particular attention to where I had seen the bulge under the man’s jacket. The bulge certainly felt like a holstered gun. I reached into his partially unzipped jacket and pulled the object out. It was in fact a gun. It was a black and silver semi-automatic. A nine millimeter from the looks of it. I made sure the gun’s safety was on. I slipped it into my jacket pocket. I returned my hand to the man’s jacket as I had felt another bulge there. I pulled something out of the inside pocket of the man’s jacket. It was a leather wallet. Without opening it to examine it, I pocketed it too.
“You’re making a bad mistake buddy,” the bald man said. His voice was strained. Having someone wrench your arm almost out of its socket was no fun.
“Shut up before you make me shoot you with your own gun,” I said. “If I do, when you get to Hell, your fellow assassins there will make fun of you.”
The hubbub around us due to the scene I was causing increased. I ignored it all, keeping my focus on restraining the bald man and continuing to pat him down. But, hearing my name being called finally pierced by concentration.
“Truman,” Eugene was saying, “the lady behind the counter says this guy is a police officer.”
“Yeah, he is,” I heard Justina say. “He comes in all the time.”
Right as those words were sinking into my consciousness, I felt a lump in the front left of the man’s pants pocket. I pulled it out. It was a badge. A hard knot of embarrassment and anxiety grew in my stomach as I examined it. The oval metal shield was mounted on a thick black leather rectangle. It was an Astor City Police Department badge. A badge number was stenciled into the bottom of the badge. The geometric shape of the area containing the badge number indicated the rank of the badge holder. The square there meant the badge holder was a lieutenant.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 3): Killshot Page 4
