“The Mister Hyde to my Doctor Jekyll.” I doubted Isaac would think I was so straitlaced if he knew I had cheated during the Trials and that I had imprisoned Mad Dog in The Mountain. I still had not told him. If I did, there was a chance Isaac would report me to the Guild. I had too many things to worry about already without the Guild watching my every move again. More importantly, I didn’t want to tarnish the image Isaac had of me. Having him think ill of me would be more than I could stand. I felt pretty guilty about keeping secrets from my best friend, though. I would have to add it to the long list of the things I felt guilty about. As I looked down on Isaac’s open, friendly face, it made me feel like the world’s biggest dick to hide things from him.
Then I thought of the Omega brand dildo. No, I was the second biggest dick.
“I wonder if Tony Robbins gets interrupted this much when he’s dropping self-help knowledge,” Isaac muttered about my Dr. Jekyll crack. “Anyway, I learned my lesson from Candace and not taking the time to vet her. I’ve actually met Viola. Told her a bunch of tall tales about you. Like you, she fell for my lies, and she wants to meet you. She’s smart, funny, nice, the whole package. She’s a sweetheart of a person. I think you’ll like her.”
“‘Sweetheart of a person’ is another way of saying she has a great personality. So great that I’ll probably not even notice her hunchback or her lazy eye.”
“You haven’t been with a woman in how long? Over two and a half years? Beggars can’t be choosers. Besides Shallow Man, Viola’s cute. She’s got all the right body parts in all the right places. Because I’m such a good friend, I risked getting the stink eye from Sylvia by taking a nice long look and making sure. The sacrifices I make for you. You’re welcome.”
“It’s a wonder the Pope hasn’t canonized you.”
“He probably would if I stopped creepily staring at women. And if I was Catholic. Wait. Does money come with sainthood? Because I could convert.”
“I don’t think so.”
“A shame. The church is a tax-exempt money-making enterprise, yet it can’t break a piece off for the saints? Seems unfair. The saints need to unionize. Anyway, can I tell Viola you’ll give her a call?”
“No.”
“But—”
“No,” I said even more firmly. “I’m not interested in fun and frivolity, as you put it. I get all the frivolity I need from talking to you. All I’m interested in is making sure I’m ready to face whatever crisis is coming down the pike. I failed Neha. And Hannah. And Dad. I won’t fail again. Or have someone close to me get hurt simply because they’re close to me. If I must live the life of monk to avoid all that, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Isaac sighed in resignation.
“I can’t say I’m surprised to hear you say that. The phrase ‘stubborn as a mule’ was probably coined to describe you. But try to keep an open mind about going out with Viola. If not her, then someone else. At least think about it. And I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss what Ninja said to you, either. She has a point—you can’t do everything by yourself. If you won’t let me help you, you should let someone. As powerful as you are, you’re not omnipotent. I’ve seen you often enough in your underwear first thing in the morning to be certain of that.”
He lay down on the bench under the suspended barbell. I moved behind his head to spot him. He looked up at me and said, “You can’t carry the weight of the world on your shoulders alone. If there really is some major crisis in the works like the disgraced Sentinels told you, you’ll need all the help you can get. Plus, I’m pretty sick of your brooding loner impersonation. You see how you’re standing there to spot me in case I need help lifting the weight? That, my friend, is a metaphor.”
Isaac was quiet for a while as he did three sets of ten reps each, with a brief rest between each set. If this was what it took to keep Isaac from nagging me, I would use my powers to tie a barbell around his neck.
I felt eyes on me as Isaac started a fourth set. I looked up from watching Isaac’s barbell rise and fall to look at the mirrored wall in front of us. Through its reflection, I saw a pretty blonde woman languidly riding a stationary bike behind us. She noticed me looking back at her and smiled. I gave her a slight nod of acknowledgement. I turned my attention back to Isaac, dismissing the woman from my mind. A few years ago, a pretty woman smiling at me would have made my week. Who was I kidding? It would have made my year. Now I found it faintly irritating. Women threw themselves at me all the time when I was dressed as Omega. They weren’t attracted to the man under the mask; they were attracted to Omega’s fame and power. The way they behaved around Omega versus the way girls had behaved around Theo most of my life showed me how mercenary and superficial most people were. It made me miss Neha even more. She had liked me for me.
After Isaac’s final set, we switched places, with me lying on the bench after taking some of the plates off the suspended bar. Though I was far from the scrawny kid I had been when my powers first manifested, I was still not as strong as Isaac. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men were created equal, he had not been talking about bodybuilders.
Today I was doing descending pyramids—starting the first set with the heaviest weight I could manage, then dropping in weight with each successive set. By the end of them, I was benching the empty bar. I was so spent that my arms and chest shook as I completed my last set, though the bar only weighed forty-five pounds. I did the last set quickly, trying to maximize the pump.
“You really should slow down when you do those,” came a woman’s voice. My eyes darted to see the blonde woman who had been on the stationary bike. Now she stood at the foot of my bench. I refocused on completing my set, and re-racked the bar. I sat up and got a good look at the woman. Like an impressionist’s painting, she looked better from a distance than close-up. She was probably about my age, though tanning beds had prematurely aged her. Her eyelashes were fake, and her hair looked brittle from being bleached too often. Her caked-on makeup made her look a little clownish under the harsh gym lights. Her outfit was expensive, revealed more than it concealed, and looked like it had never been sweated in. She was slender, but more skinny-fat than fit. She had the all the earmarks of someone who came to the gym to hook up more than she did to work out.
“Excuse me?” I said, annoyed at the interruption. Talking to someone when they had a weight overhead was bad gym etiquette, not to mention dangerous.
“I said you were doing those all wrong. You were going too fast. I can show you how I do them, if you’d like.” Her tone and body language implied she wanted to show me a form other than just proper form.
I looked her up and down. I said, “Tell you what—if I need to learn how to slather on eye shadow so that I look like a racoon, you’ll be the first person I ask. As far as workout advice is concerned, I’m all set.”
The woman was taken aback. She looked like I’d just slapped her.
“I was just trying to help,” she huffed once she’d recovered. She stomped off.
Isaac looked at me as if he had never seen me before.
“I take back everything I said before about your Southern charm and manners,” he said. “I’ve never seen you be so rude to someone. What the hell is wrong with you?”
I shrugged. “She’s just some dumb cape chaser.”
“You’re not wearing a cape, jackass, or a sign that says ‘Super-powerful Meta,’” Isaac said in a low, earnest voice. “She doesn’t know who you are. She came over here because she was interested in you. Though I can’t imagine why.” Isaac shook his head at me in disbelief. “This is what I mean. You’re in costume so much that it’s consumed you. You don’t know how to take the mask off. It’s why I’ve been saying you need to get a life.”
I didn’t feel like arguing, so I didn’t respond. But I knew the truth:
I didn’t need people like Ninja. Or Viola. I certainly didn’t need Miss Clown Face. I didn’t need anybody.
It was safer for everyone that way.
CHAPTER 5
I was flying late at night in a routine patrol of the city when I saw a man standing on the side of the Avatar Memorial Bridge. He was perched on the narrow outcropping on the outside of one of the stone balustrades. A fall would be lethal.
I swooped down. My cape sprouted from the neck of the Omega suit. Clothes make the Hero.
“Is everything all right?” I asked the man once I was level with him. I floated in mid-air several feet from the bridge’s side. My cape flapped loudly behind me, the sound mixing with the patter of a gentle rain. Water trickled down the invisible force field around me.
“Jesus!” the man cried, startled by my sudden appearance. He nearly slipped off the edge of the bridge before catching himself by grabbing the bridge’s thick stone side.
My mouth twist wryly. “Hardly. Is everything all right?” I repeated. The man’s eyes were wild, rimmed with red. I suspected tears mingled with rainwater on his face.
“You scared the shit out of me.” He did a double take. His head moved forward as he looked hard at me in the dim glow from the streetlights that soared over the bridge. “Oh my God! You’re Omega. You’re famous. My, um, little cousin wears your underwear.”
A car approached, its headlights illuminating one side of the man. Reddish-brown skin, prominent broad nose, high cheekbones, troubled dark eyes. Mexican descent, or maybe Native American. He was older than I. Early thirties maybe. Wet black hair clung to his skull like seaweed. His blue shirt, tan khakis, and brown loafers were drenched.
The passing car made a sound like frying bacon on the wet bridge. It was after 2 a.m. There weren’t too many cars on the road now in this part of the city. Right inside city limits, the bridge was on one of the major thoroughfares running from the Deerwood suburb to the northeastern quadrant of the city. A city park was far below the bridge, shrouded in darkness.
I waited until the car zoomed by.
“Tell your cousin I appreciate it,” I said. “Can I help you with something?”
“No, I’m good.” His voice was ragged, like he hadn’t slept in a while.
“Sir, clearly you’re not. You’re standing in the rain on the edge of a bridge in the middle of the night. Why don’t I help you back over the railing and we can talk about what’s troubling you?”
“Come any closer and I’ll jump!” I froze. Only the tips of one hand’s fingers on the stone railing kept the man from toppling into the darkness below.
I said, “If you know who I am, you know what I’m capable of. You’re not going to fall unless I let you fall.”
The man’s eyes narrowed.
He said, “All right, I guess you can stop me from falling. But what are you going to do, follow me around day and night from here on out? If I don’t off myself tonight, I’ll do it tomorrow. Or the day after that.” He sounded and looked like an educated man. How had a guy like this wound up here? Regardless, he had a point. Even if I forcibly removed him from the bridge, I couldn’t become his personal shadow to make sure he didn’t hurt himself later.
I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t a crisis counselor. I had no experience with literally talking someone down from a ledge. The Academy’s class in Hero Psychology, Strategy, and Tactics hadn’t prepared me for this.
“What’s your name?” I finally said after hesitating.
The man looked reluctant, like it was a secret he didn’t want to divulge. “Angel,” he admitted. He pronounced the g in his name the Spanish way, like it was a harsh sounding h. Mexican descent then, not Native American.
“Tell you what, Angel,” I said, saying his name the way he had, “I’ll make a deal with you. You tell me what’s bothering you and we’ll hash it out. Maybe I can help somehow. If you decide you want to jump after we talk, then I won’t stop you.”
Angel looked surprised. “Really?” Other than the way he had said his name, his voice was accentless.
“Really. You’re a grown man. It’s your life. You can do what you want with it.”
Angel mulled it over.
“All right,” he said. He barked out a humorless laugh. “Besides, I’ve got some time to kill.”
I laughed, though not amused by the pun. In reality, I was scared. Scared I wouldn’t be able to talk this guy into not jumping. Scared I would fail and get someone killed again.
I floated over to the stone railing. I sat, but not too close to Angel. I didn’t want to spook him. I pulled my cape from under me and let it hang on the other side of the balustrade. After a moment’s hesitation, Angel hoisted himself up on the thick railing as well.
There we sat, just a few feet from one another, with our feet dangling into a dark void. Rain sprinkled down, providing a sound almost like background music. Just two guys shooting the breeze, one of them praying the other wasn’t about to plummet to his death.
“I’m listening,” I said. I wished I had something more profound to say, but I was no psychiatrist.
Reluctantly, after a few fits and starts, Angel began to tell me his story. Once he got rolling, though, the words spilled out of him in a torrent, like he was a dam under stress that had been ready to burst.
Angel was a lawyer. His parents had illegally immigrated to the United States from Mexico, but Angel was born in Texas. His father was a roofer and his mother a housekeeper. They had sacrificed, scrimped, and saved to give him, their only child, the best education they could, which to them meant sending him to private Catholic school. He worked hard in school, got a full scholarship to a good college, and was the first in his family to graduate college. He followed that up with graduating from law school, and then passing the bar. He moved to Astor City, taking a job with one of the prestigious white-shoe law firms here, making more money than God. Despite rolling in money, he soon tired of helping rich people get richer. He quit his big firm job, opened his own practice, and was poorer but much happier representing the little guy he had been screwing over when he was at the big law firm.
Several years passed uneventfully as Angel slowly built his legal practice. Then, his father fell off one of his roofing jobs, seriously hurting himself. As he did not have medical insurance, it was a financial disaster for the family. Angel helped his parents out as much as he could, but his practice was not generating enough income to do much good. He had more than enough money to help them, though, in his attorney trust account, which was the bank account in his name in which all the retainers his clients paid him were deposited. He was not supposed to take any money out of that account until he had earned it and billed his clients for it.
Knowing dipping into that account for personal reasons was both unethical and illegal, Angel resisted the temptation to do so. But when his father needed an expensive medical procedure, Angel could resist no longer. He took enough of his clients’ money out of the trust account to cover the cost of his dad’s procedure. He planned to replenish it as soon as he could. Rather than replenish it, though, over the course of several months as his father needed more and more procedures, Angel almost completely wiped out the money in the account.
One of Angel’s few corporate clients demanded its sizable retainer back once it became clear to the company that Angel was too distracted with his family’s problems to provide the level of service it had come to expect from Angel. There was not enough money in the trust account to give the client its money back. Angel tried to stall the client, scrambling to scrape the money together so the corporate client wouldn’t learn that Angel had stolen it to help his father. Angel faced losing everything he had worked for and his parents had sacrificed for.
Eventually the client grew suspicious. It reported Angel to the Maryland State Bar Association, the body that licensed and regulated attorneys in the state, much like the Heroes’ Guild licensed and regulated Heroes. Three days ago Angel got a letter from the bar, demanding that he explain why he had not returned his client’s money. For the past couple of days, Angel had been in limbo, not knowing where to turn or what to do.
He
decided to do this.
“I don’t understand,” I said when Angel had finished. “Why not just tell the bar what you did and why you did it? It’s not like you took the money to buy drugs or you squandered it gambling. You took it for a good cause. Besides, it’s just money. You can always make more and pay your client back.”
His eyes pained, Angel shook his head. “Taking a client’s money without earning it is an express train to disbarment, regardless of why you took it. Being a lawyer is all I ever wanted to do. Swearing the lawyer’s oath in the Court of Appeals in Annapolis was the proudest moment of my life. I can’t stand the thought of not being able to practice law anymore. On top of that, practicing law is all I know how to do. If I can’t practice law anymore, how in the world will I make the money I need to pay my clients back? Clean toilets alongside my mother?” Angel snorted derisively. “There aren’t enough toilets in the whole country. Plus, what I did is a crime. It’s no better than breaking into someone’s house and stealing their wallet. Worse actually, because no one is surprised when a burglar steals something. I’m a lawyer my clients trusted. I breached the fiduciary duty I have to properly handle money entrusted to me. There’s the very real possibility I’ll wind up going to jail.” He shook his head again. “I can’t stand the thought of that either.”
Angel let out a long breath. “What I wouldn’t give for an ice-cold beer right now.” He smiled mirthlessly. “Confessing crimes makes me thirsty.”
Angel fell silent. I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, the wrong thing would pop out. I just wanted to keep Angel talking. If he was busy talking, he wasn’t busy jumping.
“You know the one thing worse than being disbarred or going to jail?” Angel added.
“No, what?”
“The look on my parents’ faces when they find out I’m a criminal and not their golden child.” Tears mingled with the rain on his face. “They’re devout Catholics. Salt of the earth. Aside from coming into this country illegally, they’ve never done anything wrong their entire lives. And the only reason they did that was so I would be born American and have a shot at a better life than they had. They raised me right. Work hard, be nice to others, tell the truth, and don’t take anything you didn’t earn. The fact I took money that didn’t belong to me will make them absolutely sick. I can’t face them. Not after all the sacrifices they made for me. I won’t.”
Rogues Page 5
