Superhero Detective Series (Book 3): Killshot

by Darius Brasher

  Judge Archibald’s face got red. His fleshy face shook with rage. He looked like he was going to have a stroke.

  “Are you impugning the integrity of this court?” he thundered.

  “If by ‘impugning’ you mean ‘scoffing at,’ then yes, I am impugning the integrity of this court,” I said. The gallery of people behind me murmured loudly. By now, Laura was pressing into my foot with the pointed high heel of her shoe. For a small person, she exerted a lot of stomping pressure.

  Judge Archibald banged his gavel repeatedly until the courtroom fell silent again. He stared at me with unconcealed anger.

  “Mr. Lord, I am holding you in contempt of this court and fining you one thousand dollars,” he said. He impaled me with his bulging eyes. “If you say one more word, it will be two thousand dollars and two more days of confinement in jail. You may be a licensed Hero, but you are not above the law. You will show this court respect.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, your Honor, I’ll write you a check for four thousand. That’s three thousand extra if you’re too dumb to do the math. I’ll spend the balance on showing my contempt for the court,” I said.

  Judge Archibald recoiled as if he had been slapped. Then he stood, moving faster than he probably had in years. He stretched out his black robed arm, pointing his gavel at me.

  “Bailiff, take this man back to jail. Perhaps a couple more nights there will pound some respect into him,” Judge Archibald shouted.

  “You’re a world-class idiot,” Laura said to me as the bailiff approached our table. With her honeyed Kentucky accent, even insults sounded like endearments. The other people in the courtroom were talking loudly now.

  “Don’t worry. I have a plan,” I said to Laura. She did not look reassured or convinced I was not an idiot. I got that look a lot. The bailiff grabbed me by the arms and led me away.

  ***

  I did not lie to Laura: I did have a plan. When I had spent the night in jail the evening before, officials had kept me segregated from the general population. Since Heroes did not get arrested very often, the jail officials feared some of the inmates might take the opportunity to settle some scores if a Hero was in their midst. I figured if I could get Judge Archibald to send me back to jail for a day or two, he would have me kept among all the other inmates to teach me a lesson. I would take that opportunity to talk to some of them and see if any of them knew anything about the Meta who had killed Eugene. Crime was like any other business: people gossiped, networked, and kept tabs on one another. Talking to a bunch of criminals concentrated in one place would be like logging onto a LinkedIn for crime.

  Well, my plan worked. The jail did put me in with the general population of inmates. I asked around to see if anyone had any notion of who the female Meta was and how to find her. No one knew anything about her, though. If they did, they were not sharing it with me.

  The night before I was to be released after my extra two day stay in jail, I sat alone at a table in the jail’s large recreation center. The other inmates were carefully avoiding me by that point. I felt like a school kid suspected of having cooties. Though “recreation center” was what the jail called the big room, “recreation” might have been overstating matters. The only recreation to be found in the room was a small, cracked, black and white television mounted on the ceiling which did not work, some paperback books missing their covers, and a few outdated news magazines. According to the magazines, Bill Clinton was the sitting United States President.

  I was traveling back in time by reading one of the magazines when I felt several men approach me. I looked up at them. Eight men—no, nine—formed a semi-circle around my table. They scowled at me. They did not look like they had come around to ask if I was enjoying my jailhouse stay. I recognized two of them as being men I had a hand in apprehending in the past.

  The rest of the room had fallen silent, like the quiet before a storm. Though there were cameras mounted on the ceiling of the large room, normally there were at least three guards stationed at the edges of the room as well. A quick glance told me they were nowhere to be found.

  Fantastic.

  “Howdy, fellas,” I said to the group around me. I put down the magazine I had been reading. “Are you coming over to find out how Clinton’s impeachment turned out? Spoiler alert: he does not get removed from office.”

  “We hear you been asking a lot of nosy questions,” one of the men said. He had a jagged scar under his right eye. He had that half-menacing, half-furtive look a lot of career criminals did. If you saw him on the street instead of in jail, you would probably think he was the sort of person who ought to be in jail and then cross to the other side of the street. Yes, appearances can be deceiving, but often they were not. “The fellas ‘round here don’t appreciate being asked nosy questions about you kind of people.”

  I stood. I slowly went around the table to get closer to the man with the scar. It gave me satisfaction to see I was taller than he was. I looked down at him. He did not seem the slightest bit intimidated by me, though. I would not be either if I had my eight closest hoodlum friends with me. One of them looked like a cross between a gorilla and a giraffe. I was not taller than that guy. Mount Everest was not taller than that guy. He looked like he lived at the gym, only leaving it long enough to eat entire sides of beef and inject steroids. The other men closed ranks around me a bit. I positioned myself so my torso faced the gorilla-guy, while my head was turned slightly to address the guy with the scar.

  “What do you mean by ‘you kind of people’?” I asked the guy with the scar. “People with a thirst for knowledge about Bill Clinton who are minding their own business?”

  “No. I mean fuckin’ dirty Meta freaks,” he said.

  “Well, technically, I’m a Hero, which is a small subset of Metahumans. Or, ‘fuckin’ dirty Meta freaks’ to use your felicitous phrase. My, but you do have a way with words. I admire the heck out of it. I detect a hint of an accent. Did you get an advanced degree overseas? Perhaps you studied at Oxford? Or was it the Sorbonne?”

  The man with the scar did not respond. He just gave me a hard intimidating stare, the one wannabe thugs affected and hardened criminals actually had. I managed to not faint under it. It was not the first time someone had given me the hard stare.

  These guys had not come up to me to ask if I had a doily preference. They had come to start trouble. I would have been shocked if this encounter did not degenerate into a fight. I reached out with my powers. Blast it, there was no water nearby. So instead, I locked my powers onto the man with the scar. He seemed to be the leader. I also locked them on one of the men on my left. He moved with the confidently aggressive grace of a trained fighter. I proceeded carefully. If I did it right, I could render the men unconscious in seconds by preventing oxygen from dissolving into the water content of their blood. If I did it wrong or too quickly, I would kill them instead. I wanted the group to make the first move, though. If they did, the cameras’ surveillance footage would demonstrate I acted in self-defense if a fight broke out. Being charged with assaulting a bunch of inmates on top of the trouble I was already in was the last thing I needed. I did not want to spend a day longer than necessary in this jail. I owed it to Eugene to bring his murderer to justice. I could not do that behind bars.

  One of the men snorted at my words.

  “You talk mighty big for someone who’s outnumbered. You act like you ain’t even scared of us,” someone at the corner of my eye said.

  “I’m not,” I said. That was most definitely not true. I had been in a lot of fights and near-fights in my life. I had been scared before every single one of them. Only a fool was not afraid of a potential beating. There was no need to tell these guys that, though. Bullies feed on fear. Show them you are not afraid, and often they will just leave you alone.

  No such luck this time. A fist rocketed out from the side, going toward my jaw. I moved my arm up, absorbing the blow on my bicep. I simultaneously unleashed my powers on the two men I h
ad earlier focused them on. They both staggered. I knew they would be unconscious in seconds. Unfortunately I could not simply knock all of the men out; doing so was a delicate operation, and there were too many of them. If I tried, I would kill them instead.

  I kicked the gorilla-like man in the balls. A jail was no place to fight fair. That was why I had moved to stand in front of him. He was the biggest threat—literally—and I needed to neutralize him first and fast. The big man howled, doubled over, and fell to his knees, clutching his privates. Three down, six to go. Six on one. Still not great odds. The remaining six men rushed me.

  Even though I was still injured from my encounter with the female Metahuman at the casino, I was a former professional mixed martial arts fighter and trained Hero. The men attacking me were not. Though outnumbered, I acquitted myself well. There was a flurry of blows and dodges, kicking and twisting. I knocked out one man, incapacitated another by gouging his eyes, and broke two arms. I was starting to think I was going to prevail. Then, I was rocked by a sucker punch to the back of my head. I staggered. Someone kicked me behind my knees. I went down. The men pounced on me like jackals going in for the kill of a wounded antelope. Blows rained down on me. I tried to get up, but the men kept me down.

  No fair! I was winning, I complained to the universe mentally. The universe did not care. Neither did the men surrounding me who kept me on the ground by punching and kicking me. I felt like a piñata. At one point, I threw up. It was not candy that came out of me.

  Though it was touch and go, I did not ever quite lose consciousness during the beating. After what seemed like an eternity, I became faintly aware of no longer being kicked and punched, though I still ached all over. Through already swelling eyes, I saw that the guards had reappeared. They had pulled the men off of me. I suspected the invisible hand of Judge Archibald in the guards’ delay. He probably did not enjoy being called out in his own courtroom in front of reporters. I did not enjoy having the stuffing beaten out of me. Everyone had their dislikes.

  Through a haze, I saw someone hovering over me. It was one of the guards.

  “Just taking a breather,” I managed to croak. My tongue felt swollen. “When I get up, I’m going to kick all your asses.” I did not think he could hear me. It was just as well. I was lying, anyway. I had no intention of getting up. The hard floor felt oddly comfortable. At least it was not kicking me.

  I lay there for a while, teetering on the edge of the dark abyss of unconsciousness, tasting and smelling my blood and the rancidness of my own vomit. Though I had not uncovered any clues as to how to locate the woman who had killed Eugene, I did manage to get the crap kicked out of me. So, I guessed I had accomplished something by staying in jail an extra couple of days.

  Honestly, after failing Eugene, I kind of felt like I deserved the beating.

  I found myself thinking of the female Meta who had killed Eugene. I had little doubt if she got into a jailhouse fight, she would simply kill her attackers. But I was a Hero, and I was not supposed to do such things. Heroic ideals were cold comfort, though, when you were lying on a cold jailhouse floor in your own blood and vomit. Where was Eugene’s murderer, I wondered? In a fancy restaurant, maybe, having a nice meal using the money she got for killing Eugene while tuxedoed waiters heeded her every beck and call. Which of us was the smarter of the two?

  That was the last thing I thought. I fell off the edge of the abyss. Blackness rushed up to greet me. It embraced me like a lover.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Jesus, Truman, you look a hot mess,” Shadow said, looking up at me from the foot of the courthouse stairs. Unlike me, she was immaculate as always. She wore tight black leather pants, a tight black silk shirt, and a black lightweight jacket. It was a bright sunny day, and dark sunglasses were on Shadow’s chiseled face. Her clothes gripped her considerable curves like a second skin.

  “I feel a hot mess,” I said. I immediately regretted it. It hurt to move my mouth. It hurt to move everything despite being juiced to the gills on pain medication. I tried to not think about it. It hurt to think, too.

  Holding on to the handrail, I continued to ease my way down the front of the courthouse’s marble steps, trying to make my way down to Shadow’s parked car. Every step was a painful effort. Shadow came up the stairs to help me down. She put her arm around my waist. Normally male pride might have made me push her away. It must have been beaten out of me by the jail inmates. Besides, Shadow had super strength, and was plenty strong enough to help me. I leaned against her gratefully, though the bruises on my side shrieked in protest. Her body paradoxically felt both hard and soft, like rebar covered in velvet. In better times I would have considered copping a feel. Today I knew I was too weak to withstand the inevitable counterattack from Shadow.

  “So this was your brilliant plan to get a lead on the Meta I heard about on the news and you mentioned to me on the phone? Get the shit kicked out of you by a bunch of prisoners?” Shadow asked as she helped me down the stairs. She helped me as effortlessly as if she was partially carrying a rag doll instead of a full grown man.

  “I told my attorney I had a plan,” I said. I winced as I took another step down. “I did not say it was a good one.”

  I had spent the night in the jail infirmary after the beating. I had called Shadow from the infirmary and asked her to meet me upon my release to pick me up and take me home. Thanks to my encounter with the nine inmates the day before, I was now blessed with tattered and soiled clothing, a concussion, two black eyes, a busted lip, a scratched cornea—hence the eyepatch on my left eye—bruised ribs, a sprained ankle, a bruised liver and kidney, and cracked teeth. And, of course, I still had the wound in my left side from where the female Meta had shot me with the beam from her eye. But, I was alive. That was more than Eugene could say. Though the crap had been beaten out of me, my anger at myself for not protecting him had not been beaten out of me. It was a burning coal of red-hot anger in the pit of my stomach.

  One of the doctors in the infirmary had told me it was a minor miracle nothing was broken or permanently damaged. He said the fact I was in such good shape had much to do with it. I had told him he was wrong about nothing being permanently damaged in that my ego might be irreparably ruptured. The doctor said there was nothing medical science could do about that. I would be sure to ask for a second opinion.

  Shadow helped me to her car. It was a gleaming, late model black Mercedes double-parked right outside the courthouse. She helped me ease into the front passenger seat. I winced as I sat down. Though it had not been diagnosed, I wondered if I also had broken buttocks. But what did I know? I was no doctor. Not much of a Hero either, lately.

  I glanced around the car’s shiny interior. It still had that new car smell.

  “Nice car,” I said to Shadow. “Did you steal—excuse me, borrow—this one like you did the last one?”

  “Of course not. This is my car. One of several. What I do is a lot more lucrative than what you do,” Shadow said. She closed the door on me, went around to the other side, and got into the driver’s seat. No one shot a rocket propelled grenade at us as we pulled away from the courthouse and glided onto Judiciary Way. Things were looking up.

  Shadow was taking me to my place. I desperately needed a shower and a change of clothes. I looked, smelled, and felt like I had taken a bath in a sewer.

  “Well the races are right, but the sexes have been reversed. Plus, shouldn’t I be in the back seat? Where are the cameras?” I asked.

  “What?” Shadow asked, her eyes still on the road.

  “For the Driving Miss Daisy remake. Isn’t that what we’re filming? Tell the director to only film me from the right side since I have an eyepatch on the left. Unless of course he wants this to be a pirate flick.”

  “I see they did not beat your sense of so-called humor out of you. Unfortunately,” Shadow said. “Feeling up to telling me exactly what happened with Eugene and that Meta? You didn’t say much about it on the phone earlier and the news report
s are all over the place.”

  “Sure, talking doesn’t hurt. Well, much.” I proceeded to tell her everything that had happened since I had last seen her when I had taken over Eugene’s protection the day we went to the casino. I did not leave anything out, including the fact Eugene had been murdered while I was away getting a drink. Shadow had been as responsible for Eugene’s safety as I had been. By letting him get killed on my watch, I felt I had let Shadow down almost as much as I had Eugene.

  Shadow listened to my story without comment.

  “So, what’s our next move?” she said once I had finished. She did not say anything to blame me for Eugene’s death. I was not sure if that made me feel better or worse. Maybe if someone yelled at me about it, it would lighten the load of the considerable guilt I felt.

  “You don’t have a next move,” I said. “Since you were hired to protect Eugene and he is now dead, your work is done. Since I am the one to blame for getting Eugene killed, I am going to track down the Meta who did it. You can go back to bench pressing cars or rolling around in your mercenary money or whatever it is you do when you are not with me.”

  Shadow shook her head.

  “Nope. That’s not how this works. Since Eugene was under my protection as much as he was under yours, I am going to help you find this Meta. For one thing, I finish what I start.” Shadow flashed a smile. “For another thing, how would it look if people who hired me to protect them are killed and I don’t do anything to bring the killer to justice? I would become a laughingstock of the badass community. I have a reputation to uphold.”