Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis

by P. T. Dilloway

  “You not leave me?”

  “I promise, I won’t.”

  Jim slid the sunglasses to the end of his nose to look her in the eye. He nodded slightly and then turned to the salesman, who looked ready to faint. “We go,” Jim said.

  “Oh, sure. Right this way, sir.”

  Emma watched Jim follow the salesman as if sending a child off to his first day of school. Once he was out of sight, she went into the women’s clothes section. She had plenty of suits at Becky’s house, but most of those had suffered a little wear and tear since her days at the Plaine Museum. For what she needed to do, she wanted to look as sharp as possible.

  While she scanned the racks, she kept one ear cocked; she waited to hear a frantic voice shout for security to the men’s department. It was a mistake to leave Jim alone with the salesman, especially after the way he’d reacted when the salesman tried to touch him. She could only hope Jim listened to her and realized no one here wanted to hurt him.

  She decided on a simple beige suit and white blouse, both of which were on sale. She decided once she took off the tags they would look good enough. The hardest part was to find shoes to go with the suit; the store didn’t have any in her size until she asked someone to go back and search for a pair. The salesgirl returned five minutes later with a pair of brown flats that were a size too small but that she could squeeze into.

  “These will do,” Emma said.

  On her way back to the men’s department, she saw a rack of sunglasses. She picked out a pair that was all black and big enough to completely shield Jim’s eyes from the light. Armed with these packages, she returned to the men’s department and promptly dropped everything on the floor.

  The salesman had picked out a charcoal-colored suit for Jim that fit him perfectly, along with a white shirt and black tie. He even had a pair of shiny black wingtips instead of a beat-up pair of combat boots from Sylvia’s closet. She had only ever seen him in his bulky coat—and naked the night of his injury—and had never really thought of what he might look like in normal clothes. She had never really thought he could look handsome. With the suit and his long hair he reminded her of a movie star or a European prince. “You like?” he asked.

  “Yes. Yes, I do,” she said as she scrambled to pick up her items. “It looks very nice.”

  “And it’s at a very reasonable price,” said the salesman. “For your friend I’m willing to knock twenty percent off.” Jim hissed at him again. The salesman gulped and then said, “All right, for you, forty percent.”

  “Good.” Jim shook the salesman’s hand. “We go now.”

  “Sure. Have a good day.” The salesman did not ask them to come back again; he had probably seen all of Jim Rizzard he ever wanted to see. He gave them a receipt to take up to the cashier, where Jim received very different looks from on the bike. The cashier practically swooned as Jim handed the receipt to Emma.

  “Oh my,” the girl said. “You certainly picked out a nice suit.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, you did,” Emma said. She reached into her purse for her credit card. “It looks very good on you.”

  “It smell.” The cashier raised an eyebrow at this; she didn’t understand that to Jim anything that didn’t smell like sewage stunk.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Emma assured him.

  Before they left the cashier station, she handed the new pair of sunglasses to him. He gratefully accepted these; his shoulders slumped a little as he relaxed. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “Now, we just have to make one more stop.”

  ***

  That next stop was a Kinko’s, where Emma used the store’s computers to design and print out business cards for she and Jim. She used Aunt Gladys’s name for her alias and for Jim used the name Josh Albert based on the nametags of two employees. If she had more time she could have designed fake driver’s licenses and even passports, but she hoped the business cards would be enough. If asked for more, she could always say they had been mugged on the way in, which wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility.

  Jim looked at the business card uncertainly for a moment. “This a lie.”

  “Yes. Just a little white lie.”

  “What we doing?” he asked her once they’d got back on the bike.

  “That explosion was near a company called TriTech. Aggie’s sister’s boyfriend works there. I think they might have something to do with it,” she explained.

  “Why they blow up home?”

  “I’m not sure yet. If we can get in there we might find out.”

  They left the motorcycle in an alley about two miles away and then hailed a cab. It was a waste of three dollars, but if anyone from TriTech watched them approach, it wouldn’t be very realistic for them to show up on a motorcycle. The cabbie gave her a surprised look when she gave her destination, then shrugged and took them down the road to TriTech.

  “This where we go?” Jim asked as they stood in front of the building.

  “That’s right. Just let me do the talking.”

  “Fine.” She didn’t think Jim would have any objection to her speaking for the both of them. He stayed a step behind her as they approached the revolving door at the front of the building. From the way he slowed down, she thought he might balk at this the way he had at the escalator, which might make things more difficult. But then he took a deep breath and followed her into the door, to come out safely into the lobby.

  Emma looked around the spacious lobby; its leather furniture and modern sculptures gave it the feel of a five-star hotel instead of a high-tech research firm. There was even a wooden reception desk, behind which stood a woman in a suit that nearly matched Emma’s. She glared at them icily from behind a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. “Can I help you?”

  Emma tried to smile like the salesman earlier and took the card from her pocket. “I’m Gladys Cabot and this is my associate, Mr. Albert. We’re here to see Mr. Ward.”

  The receptionist looked from the card and then at a computer screen. “I don’t see you on the list for today,” she said.

  “Really? Oh, well, there must be some kind of mistake. I know I set up a meeting with Mr. Ward’s secretary for this morning.”

  “Let me check.” The woman picked up a phone; she turned her back and talked softly so Emma couldn’t hear the conversation. When she turned back around, the woman said, “Just a moment, please.”

  Emma turned from the reception desk, and saw Jim examine one of the sculptures, a vaguely humanoid shape made out of bent metal. “This nice,” he said. “Nicer than mine.”

  “They just used better materials,” she said. “If you want, I could probably find you some metal like this—”

  “No.” He looked down sadly at the floor. “No need.”

  Again she could sense something beneath the surface, but now was not the time to ask him about it. Right now she had to get in to see Harry Ward, the CEO of TriTech. She had done a little research on the company after she heard Tim Cooper would work there. There wasn’t much to find out about the company or its founder. TriTech had appeared on the scene a little over three months earlier; overnight it had moved into the Fleischman Building and hired technicians and researchers like Tim.

  As for Ward, there was more information on him, but she didn’t trust it. The elaborate background story of how he’d grown up in Wisconsin, graduated from the University of Wisconsin, and then bounced around a number of technical firms all sounded fine on the surface. The grades, awards, and references were all there, nice and neat. A little too neat for her taste. There were no gaps in it at all. Maybe she had spent too much time around cynics like Marlin and Captain Donovan, but a history that tidy set off warning bells in her mind.

  “Ms. Cabot?” a voice asked. It sounded as cold and hard as the metal of the sculpture. Emma expected to see an old woman but instead saw a blond woman in her mid-thirties at the latest.

  “That’s me,” Emma said. She extended her hand, but th
e woman refused to shake it.

  “I’m Ms. Fielding, Mr. Ward’s assistant. I don’t recall speaking with you or making any appointments with anyone from a Dart Security Company.”

  “My assistant made the appointment. There must be a mistake.”

  “We don’t make mistakes,” Ms. Fielding snapped.

  “I see. It’s probably a mistake on my end. There’s been some turnover lately.” Emma reached into her purse for her BlackBerry. She hit some buttons to pretend to check her appointment calendar. “Oh, I see the problem. It says here the meeting is supposed to be on Thursday, not Tuesday.”

  “I’m not aware of any meeting with you at any time.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe you could check—”

  “I don’t need to check. I suggest you and your associate leave before I call security.”

  “Ah, well, that’s actually what I came to talk to you about.” Emma looked around the lobby and gestured to one of the guards who glared at them from the corner. “Your security is good, but it can be even better. My company—”

  “Our security is fine. Now, Ms. Cabot—”

  “Please, could we just have a few minutes with Mr. Ward? We’re prepared to make him a very lucrative offer.”

  “As I’ve told you, Ms. Cabot, we do not need your services.” Fielding held two fingers up in the air. Quicker than Emma would have expected, two security guards were on them. Jim struck a defensive pose; he hissed at the guard who tried to put a hand on him. “I think you can see that quite clearly now.”

  “Yes, I can,” Emma said. She looked over to Jim. “I don’t think we’d better waste any more of Ms. Fielding’s time.” She put a hand on Jim’s shoulder and felt his muscles relax again. She gave him a little push towards the door; the security guards followed after them, hands on their pistols until Emma and Jim were on the sidewalk. Then the guards stood in front of the revolving doors; they glared at Emma and Jim as if to challenge them to try to go back inside.

  “We fail,” Jim said.

  “We’ll just have to find another way in,” Emma said. Though she still couldn’t prove it, she knew there was something going on here—and she would find out what.

  ***

  They walked back to where Emma had stashed the motorcycle. Emma looked glumly down at her feet. “There has to be some way in,” she said mostly to herself.

  “What about armor?” he asked.

  “It’s no good. They’ve got cameras all over that place. They’d see me in seconds.”

  “Oh.”

  She considered cutting the power to the building, but a place with security that tight and that dealt in such high-tech work would certainly have a backup generator in place. Emma sighed as she kicked a loose stone with her new too-tight shoe. The simple problem was she didn’t have the expertise for this sort of thing. She had always been a good, law-abiding person. For this she needed someone with experience at breaking and entering.

  “They never taught me this kind of stuff in school,” she said to Jim with a smile.

  “You do good job.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, but I’ve done a lousy job.” She caught up with the stone she’d kicked and gave it another boot. “Don Vendetta and her gang are still on the loose, overall crime rates are down marginally, and we’re still not any closer to finding who almost killed you.”

  They didn’t say anything on the rest of the way to the bike. She knew Jim had done his best to cheer her up, but that wasn’t his area of expertise any more than hers was to break into a secured building. Once they were on the bike, she drove slowly; she had no place to go.

  Then on the left she saw the Fawkes Art Museum. She wove through traffic to pull into the parking garage. “Where we go?” he asked.

  “Come on, you’ll see.” After she parked the bike, she took his hand and then led him up the front steps to the art museum. As soon as he was inside the doors, Jim began to look around, his jaw slack.

  Emma kept a hand on Jim’s arm to pull him along. She paid the admittance fee for both of them and then led him into the main gallery, which at the moment was filled with portraits from the late Middle Ages. Jim showed little interest in these; he gave each a cursory glance before he moved on.

  The next gallery contained a collection of sculptures from the Renaissance. Here Jim perked up; he stood at the very edge of the velvet ropes and leaned in so close Emma thought a security guard might give them a warning. “These beautiful,” he said. “Lifelike.”

  “Yes, they are, aren’t they?” she said. Emma had visited all of the city’s museums several times, but the Fawkes Museum was one of her least-frequented. As a science geek, old pictures and sculptures had never held much interest for her. She much preferred the Plaine Museum with its exhibits on meteors and Egyptian culture.

  Still, she could see Jim loved the sculptures here in the same way she loved the meteors, geodes, and Alex the mastodon at the Plaine Museum. To her surprise, he pointed to the pleated hem of a woman’s skirt on one of the sculptures. “That very difficult, especially with marble,” he said. “Have to be careful.”

  “You used to carve marble?”

  “Not me,” he said. The excitement left his voice. Emma thought he might say more, but he didn’t.

  They continued down the aisle to a naked woman done in the style of Michelangelo. Jim squeezed her hand as he pointed to the woman’s face. “She look like you,” he said.

  Emma squinted at the woman’s face and then shook her head. “She’s a lot prettier than me,” she said.

  “You pretty.”

  “No, I’m not.” She looked down at her feet, too big to fit into normal shoes. She remembered how her third grade bully Jimmy Gates had labeled her “Dorky Storky” because of her ungainly frame. What she hated the most about that insult was its accuracy. She had always felt like a big, awkward bird. An ugly duckling that had never changed into a swan. She supposed that, as much as her parents dying, her hectic work schedule, and later her duties as the Scarlet Knight, had kept her away from dating. “But it’s nice of you to say that.”

  “I make sculpture like that of you. Then you see.”

  “You don’t have to do that. I like the sculptures you made of me already.” Though they were made out of rolls of toilet paper, old newspapers, and other discarded items, she did like Jim’s depictions of her—at least after she got over the initial shock. In their simplicity they were much like the Native American and Inuit totems that sometimes graced the Plaine Museum. And with them she didn’t have to confront her long nose, slight breasts, and huge feet. Sometimes illusion was preferable to reality. She patted his arm. “But thank you.”

  “Why you hate youself? You not freak like me.”

  “You’re not a freak, Jim.” Before she could stop herself, she blurted out, “I think you look very handsome”

  “You just say that.”

  “I mean it.” She brushed a tress of tangled hair away from his face. “In this light, and in that suit, you look very sophisticated.”

  “I ugly. Deformed.”

  “No you’re not.” She wished he would take off the sunglasses so she could look him in the eye. “Did someone tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “No one.”

  “Jim—”

  He hissed at her as he had at the salesman earlier. She knew this meant she shouldn’t press him any further on the subject. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “You just curious. That why you smart.”

  They left the gallery in silence and meandered into another filled with landscape paintings. She thought he would pass on them as he had with the portraits earlier, but to her surprise he stopped at a painting of a New England harbor at sunrise. “That ocean,” he said. He pointed to the still water of the picture.

  “Yes, the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “You see it?”

  “Yes. It’s not far from here. Maybe we
could take a trip—”

  “No! City my home.”

  “Oh, I see. I just thought—”

  “I know. You nice, but not understand.”

  She put a hand on his bicep to gently turn him to face her. “What don’t I understand, Jim?”

  “My friends. They need me. I leave them too long already.”

  By his “friends” he of course meant the tribes of rats in the city sewers. These viewed Jim Rizzard as a sort of king or chieftain. In large part it was because Jim had lived five times longer than even the oldest rats; they could remember nothing else. “I’m sure they can manage without you for a little while,” she said.

  “Like city not need you.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, but then closed it again. He was right. He viewed himself as indispensable to the rat population the same way she viewed herself as indispensable to the humans of Rampart City. “Maybe the city doesn’t need either of us,” she said with a slight grin.

  “City need us more than ever.” Again she had to agree; she needed only to think of their ill-fated trip to TriTech.

  “I guess you’re right.” They continued through the art museum in silence. Emma decided to stay back and let Jim appreciate the art. After all, who knew when he might get another chance?

  ***

  The security at Coeur de la Mer was far less stringent than at TriTech, so Emma was able to bluff their way in for a table. Ordinarily she would never do something like that, but tonight could be Jim’s only night aboveground and she wanted him to experience one of its finer eateries.

  It wasn’t until they were seated and she studied the menu that she remembered she had come here with Dan. That had been nearly seven years ago when she first started at the Plaine Museum. She had felt so awkward, out on her first real date and still too young to drink.

  This time she tried to project calm and confidence, at least on the surface. Jim didn’t so much as pick up his menu, barely able to read English, let alone French. He seemed to take for granted she could order for both of them. She ordered an appetizer of ravioli and then two orders of fish, which she knew wouldn’t remind him of his friends down in the sewer.