“That is one of the purposes of the Hero Act,” I said. “And yes, I did check with the Guild. But, I do not have much of a description. A woman of indeterminate race, age, eye, and hair color, somewhere between five feet seven inches and five feet eleven inches tall, who can fly? An awful lot of registered Metas in the Guild’s database fit that description.”
“Hell, I fit that description. Except for the flying part,” Shadow said.
“Was it you who tried to run Eugene and me over?”
“Afraid not.”
“Good. I can eliminate you as a suspect, then. One down, hundreds more female Metas to go. At this rate, I’ll have zeroed in on a suspect right around the time I’m on my deathbed. By then, I’ll be past caring.” I shook my head in disgust. “And when I say hundreds more to go, that assumes the woman I faced today is even a registered Meta. Some Metas aren’t. You know that better than anyone since you aren’t.”
“Me having to keep the government constantly informed as to my whereabouts would make it harder to perform my—how shall I say?—extralegal activities.”
“And by ‘extralegal,’ you mean criminal,” I said.
“Of course I do. But criminal sounds so much less refined than extralegal. And I am nothing if not refined,” Shadow said. “What about the car the woman was driving?”
“Evidently it was stolen. I examined it after the Meta flew off. No keys were in the ignition, and it looked like the car had been hotwired. I later determined it had been originally been parked a few blocks away from Perk Up. The man it is registered to was in his office working at the time of the incident. He insists he did not give anyone permission to use it. I believe him.”
“Fingerprints?”
“The police dusted the interior. They said they’ll get back to me when they run the prints they found. When I saw the female Meta, she was wearing gloves though.” I shook my head. “I get the feeling the lady we’re dealing with is a pro. I’d be shocked if there are any prints in the Accord that can be traced back to her.”
“Next time, tell her to take her gloves off so you can get some fingerprints,” Shadow said. She shook her head at me with a slight smile. “I don’t know why that didn’t occur to you. And you call yourself a detective.”
“Ask supervillains for their fingerprints. Gotcha. I’ll remember that for next time.”
We fell silent for a while. I thought about what Shadow had said earlier about how I should have killed the Meta I had encountered.
“Do you really think I should have killed her?” I asked.
“I probably would have,” she said. “Or, at least I would have tried to. But I wasn’t there.”
“You didn’t quite answer my question.”
“Killing that Meta would have solved Eugene’s problem. At least it would have solved it temporarily. Assuming the Felonious Five hired the Meta you saw, if you had killed her, they could always hire another assassin and try again.” Shadow shrugged. “So, I personally would have tried to kill her. I’m just a superpowered mercenary, though. I do whatever seems most expedient. You’re a licensed Hero. You have to follow rules I don’t.”
“One of those rules of course being I’m not allowed to kill someone unless in self-defense or to prevent the death of another,” I said.
Shadow nodded.
“Also,” she said, “as I recall, a licensed Hero is supposed to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”
“You just recited the Scout Law,” I said. “You’re confusing Heroes with the Boy Scouts.”
Shadow’s face turned toward me slightly so I could see it in profile. She smiled slightly. Her teeth gleamed white in her dark face.
“Why so I did,” she said. “As an outsider looking in, Heroes and Boy Scouts look much the same.” I was pretty sure Shadow was teasing me. But, one never quite knew with her. She was capable of making the most outrageous statements with a perfectly straight face. Although I was the one who was constantly accused of making jokes, Shadow was the one who never seemed to take anything quite seriously. She looked at everything in the world as if she was faintly amused by it.
“Sometimes I think the world would be better off if Heroes did not take the no killing rule quite so seriously,” I said. I let out a long breath.
Shadow looked at me directly for the first time.
“Are we still talking about the Meta you dealt with earlier today, or are we now talking about what happened with Clara Barton?”
“Both, I guess,” I said after a moment’s hesitation. “I can’t shake the feeling Clara would still be alive if I had killed the Pied Piper when I had a chance to.” The Pied Piper was a Meta who had led the Metahuman Liberation Front. The MLF was a group of supervillains who believed Metahumans were a more advanced race of beings than ordinary humans and that they therefore were entitled to rule the world. The Pied Piper had kidnapped Clara—twice—eventually leading to her death.
“I’m tired of having to go up against people who don’t have the same scruples I do,” I said. “They will not hesitate to kill me and the people around me. I on the other hand have to hold back. Half the time I feel like I’m fighting with one hand behind my back.”
“You’re starting to sound as bloodthirsty as I.”
“Maybe you’re rubbing off on me.”
“You should be so lucky,” she said. Shadow flashed another quick smile. Then she looked serious again. “You’ve got to stop beating yourself up over Clara’s death. You can’t start killing people to try to make up for it. You throwing away what you’ve been trained to do and what you’ve sworn to do by becoming some sort of Heroic killing machine isn’t going to bring Clara back.”
“It’s true nothing I do now will bring Clara back,” I said. I shook my head in frustration. “But, maybe if I were a little more willing to kill, I could prevent innocent people like her from dying. I could have killed that female Meta today and eliminated her as a threat to Eugene. Maybe, by not being quicker to use lethal methods, I’m hobbling my ability to protect people. Maybe the world is too savage for a Hero to not be a killer. Wasn’t it Machiavelli who said ‘Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good’?”
“Machiavelli?” Shadow said. “Sounds like a white guy. Relative of yours?”
“Not all white people are related,” I said. “If I made a similar assumption about black people, you’d jump down my throat. And rightly so. No, Machiavelli isn’t a relative. He was a writer and philosopher. Among other things—”
Shadow held up a hand to stop me.
“Before you bore and patronize me to death with a history lesson, I was just kidding around. Niccolò Machiavelli is the father of modern political science. Among other things, he wrote The Prince, which is where the quote you just recited came from. He died in 1527, if I recall correctly,” she said. Surprise must have been on my face. Shadow grinned at me. “I have a master’s degree in English, so of course I know who Machiavelli is. The bigger surprise is the fact you know who Machiavelli is. You look like a Mafia thug, not someone who goes around quoting The Prince.”
It was a good thing I was already sitting down, or else I might have fallen over in shock. I had no idea Shadow had any formal education other than a doctorate in hurting and killing people.
“You have a master’s degree in English?” I said incredulously. “I had no idea.”
“I’m also a chess grandmaster and know thirty-seven synonyms for the word penis. There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” Shadow said. That was true enough. Though I had come to trust Shadow with my life, I did not even know her real name. Hell, for all I knew, Shadow was her real name. If Shadow indeed was her birth name, I would have hated to see what her parents named their cat.
“You have superpowers, you look like a centerfold, you are a chess grandmaster, and you have a master’s degree in English,” I said. “Anyon
e ever tell you you’re a Mary Sue?”
“What the hell is a Mary Sue?”
“You have an advanced degree in English, yet you don’t know what a Mary Sue is? Wow. It turns out you’re not perfect after all.”
“Of course I’m not perfect,” Shadow said. “After all, I associate with you. Another way I’m not perfect—at least in some people’s eyes—is that I have no problem killing someone if I think I need to or someone hires me to. God knows I have before. Though I’m no Hero and am not restricted by the same rules Heroes are, I still have rules about who I’m willing to kill.”
“I know,” I interjected. “It’s why I haven’t taken you into custody yet.”
Shadow’s teeth quickly flashed in a grin again.
“It’s why you haven’t tried to take me into custody yet,” she said. “You would find trying to do it and actually doing it to be two completely different things.”
“You don’t think I could?” I asked.
Shadow shrugged.
“Maybe you could,” she said. “Despite all the goofy things you say, you’re probably as tough as you think you are. Here’s the thing, though: I know I’m as tough as I think I am. You might be able to subdue me, but you would certainly know you had been in a fight afterwards.” Shadow shook her head. “But you’re getting me off topic. What I was saying was I have rigid rules about whom I will kill. I will only kill someone if they deserve it. My conscience acts as a check on my Metahuman powers. Not everyone shares my conscience or my rules. As you said, there are plenty of people who will kill for little reason, or no reason at all. That’s why, even though I am not in compliance with it, I think the Hero Act is such a good idea. We talked about this before when we were going up against the Metahuman Liberation Front. If the Hero Act did not require Metas to register with the federal government and for them to become licensed Heroes and follow the rules in order to legally use their powers, there would be a lot more Metahumans killing people than there already are.”
Shadow shook her head. “That’s all my very long way of saying this: no, I don’t think you should start going around killing people. Even if killing someone is sometimes the most expedient thing to do. You’re a Hero. You’re supposed to be better than that. You set an example for the rest of us.”
She was right. I knew she was. But it did not make me stop wondering if I would have saved Eugene future grief had I killed the Metahuman woman who tried to run him over. It did not make me stop wondering if Clara would be alive had I killed the Pied Piper. How many lives might I have saved in the past—how many lives might I save in the future—if I put a permanent end to supervillains when I encountered them? If you encountered a rabid dog, you did not pat it on the head and ask it nicely to stop biting people. No. You put it to sleep for the benefit of society. Maybe some rabid Metas deserved to be put to sleep. And, if Heroes were not going to step up to the plate to do it, who would?
I shoved the thought to the side for the time being.
“It’s pretty ironic that an unregistered Meta and sometimes paid assassin is advising me to follow the law,” I said to Shadow. “Your mouth says one thing, but your actions say another.”
“Do I contradict myself?” Shadow asked. “Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
“Wow, that’s beautiful,” I said. I shook my head in amazement. “Who would have thought you had the soul of a poet?”
Shadow looked over at me again. Pity was on her face.
“I didn’t come up with that. It’s Walt Whitman. From his poem Song of Myself.” I must have looked impressed. Shadow shrugged modestly. “I told you, I have a master’s degree in English. Who do you expect me to go around quoting, Snoop Dogg?”
“It’s whom do you expect, not who,” I said.
Shadow turned her head back to look at Eugene’s house.
“Don’t you think I know that? It’s rude of you to correct me. No one likes a know-it-all, Truman.”
CHAPTER 9
I stood in front of the painting, studying it intently. A spaghetti spray of paint of various colors adorned the huge canvas. The work looked like it had been painted by a blind epileptic monkey in the middle of a seizure. The plaque mounted on the wall next to it said the title was Young Girl in Repose.
The title confused me. I did not see a girl, young or otherwise. And, wherever she was in the jumbled mass of colors, she might have been in repose or she might have been shooting an AK-47 while doing jumping jacks for all I could tell. Perhaps a different angle was needed. I cocked my head to the side. No good. I squinted. Nope, nothing. There was big spot on the canvas in the right quadrant which was empty of paint. Perhaps the painter had painted the young girl there in invisible ink. And here I stood, like an idiot, fresh out of ultraviolet lights.
“What do you think?” my girlfriend Ginny asked. She was standing next to me studying the painting too.
“I think this painting captures just the way a girl would look if a girl looked like something else,” I said. “A junkyard viewed while tripping on LSD, perhaps. Or the rain-soaked scene of the murder of a clown. Now that I think of it, that series of squiggles could be a chalk outline.” I turned towards Ginny. I looked her up and down appreciatively. Her red hair framed her milky-white face like her skull was on fire. She had on high-heeled boots making her almost as tall as I, dark skinny jeans, and a top that matched her crystal blue eyes. I loved her a little bit more every time I looked at her. Though I had been going out with Ginny since before I met Clara Barton, I had not told Ginny how I felt about her yet. I did not know what I was waiting for. Actually, yes I did. I had felt like too much of a mess while I had been drinking to get serious with anyone.
“The painting is called Young Girl In Repose,” I said to Ginny. “I think it was mistitled. You’re a girl, and this painting looks nothing like you. You’re not young, though, so maybe that’s the issue.”
Ginny punched me playfully in the bicep. The punch stung a bit. Though she was slim, Ginny worked out a lot and she was stronger than she looked. In addition to attending law school, she worked at a gym. She took full advantage of the free membership that came as a perk of her employment.
“See, that just goes to show what a cultural philistine you are,” Ginny said. Her eyes danced playfully. “Not to mention rude for pointing out the all too obvious fact I’m not that young. I’ll let slide the fact you called me a girl instead of a woman, though. As you implied, I’m too old to fret over labels.” She turned her attention back the painting. She gestured at it pointedly. “Don’t you see what the artist is doing here with his use of color and composition? Clearly the painting is a meditation on the fleeting nature of beauty and the transience of life. The artist is saying that we come from dust, and it is to dust we shall all inevitably return.”
I looked back at the painting with new appreciation.
“Wow! Do you really see all that here?” I asked. My knowledge of art extended little beyond knowing how to spell the word.
Ginny stood up on her tiptoes to give me a kiss on the cheek. She wrapped her arm around mine.
“Of course not,” she said with a grin. “And I’ll bet no one else does either, though they might pretend they do. I don’t care what anyone says: this painting is just a bunch of random paint splatters. The painter is more of a con artist than any other kind for selling stuff that looks like this.” Ginny jerked her chin at the painting. “Now let’s go look at something else. Preferably something that actually looks like something. Staring at this monstrosity is giving me a headache.”
We strolled off to look at more art. We were in the Astor City Museum of Fine Art at night. The museum stayed open late a couple of nights a week. A world-class museum that also had extended hours was one of the benefits of living in a big city like Astor City. Smog, high crime, and bumper-to-bumper traffic were three other such benefits. They were of more questionable value. On second thought, the high crime part was not of questionable
value. As a Hero and private detective, the high crime rate helped to keep my bank balance healthy. Gun ammunition was not cheap.
After leaving Shadow to continue to watch over Eugene and his house, I had driven to meet Ginny here at the museum. After leaving here, we would have dinner, and then, perhaps, dessert. Since the kind of dessert Ginny and I often shared was not served in a restaurant, dessert was my favorite part.
My arm stung a bit from where Ginny had punched me. I resisted the temptation to rub it. People might see me. Heroes were supposed to be tough. Despite the time, a lot of other people were around. I had a reputation to uphold. Well, I was hardly famous, so it was very unlikely someone would recognize me as a Hero. Still, it was better to not take a chance. What if I had a fan club, and the president of it happened to be around? What would she think if she saw me rub my arm after a non-Meta punched me? She might rush home and tearfully rip my poster down from her bedroom wall.
“Do you think anyone has a picture of me up on her bedroom wall?” I asked Ginny.
“Yes. I do,” she said.
“You do not. I’ve been inside your bedroom. Though I’ve been, ahem, distracted most of the times I was in there, I would have noticed a poster of myself.”
Ginny squeezed my arm.
“My mistake. Just wishful thinking, I guess,” she said.
“If you want, I’ll have a poster specially made just for you. Since I don’t have a Hero’s suit, I’ll just wear my birthday suit in it. I can see it now: the tagline will read, ‘My water powers will make you wet.’”
Ginny giggled loudly. The noise drew the glare of two old ladies who had been quietly contemplating a sculpture that looked like a cross between a bicycle, a vacuum cleaner, and a pterodactyl. The plaque next to it said the piece was entitled Hope Springs Eternal. Of course it was.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 3): Killshot Page 6
