Marvel's SPIDER-MAN

by David Liss

  “Were you watching me pee?”

  “No,” Peter said quickly, “I turned away, but I may have heard some splashing.”

  Remzi sighed and then waved him in.

  “You seem like the real one.”

  “So you know the other one is an imposter?” Spider-Man asked as he stepped inside.

  “There’s no official word,” Remzi said, “but it’s pretty obvious to me. The other guy is a jerk, he doesn’t sound like you, and he doesn’t make stupid jokes. Besides, the lines on his suit are too close together.”

  “Exactly! You’re very observant.”

  Remzi laughed and shook his head. “Honestly, I’m kind of a fan.”

  “And I’m a fan of hard-working public servants. Guess that makes us a couple of mutual admirers.”

  Remzi looked at him. “So, there was something you wanted to talk about?” He raised an eyebrow. “One of the cases I’m working on? I’m not sure I can—”

  “No, I’m afraid that’s not it,” Spider-Man replied. “You have a sister named Laura Remzi?”

  The DA looked stricken. “Is she… Did something happen?”

  “No, no, everything’s fine as far as I know,” the Web-Slinger said hurriedly. “I don’t want to give you too many details, but I was following some guys, and this one took photos of your sister as she went about her business and, um, did things.”

  “She’s using again?” the DA asked, sounding as if he was bracing himself.

  He knows. Spider-Man nodded.

  “I was afraid of that.” Remzi sighed. “Okay, well I can try to get her help. My niece has stayed with me before, so I can make it work.”

  “Do you have any idea why someone would want this information?”

  “Do you know who’s behind it?”

  Peter grimaced under his mask.

  “You don’t want to tell me,” Remzi said. “I get it. You don’t know if I’m compromised or not. So, I’ll shoot straight with you.” He paused and looked like he was gathering his thoughts. “You want to know if someone came to me and said, ‘Do this or we’ll expose your sister,’ would I roll over?”

  “I guess that’s the question.”

  “The answer is no,” Remzi said. “My sister has a problem. She’s been dealing with it for years, and she’s been in rehab once already. Obviously this is all stuff we’d rather keep private, but we’re not talking about classified information here. It’s not like I’d break the law or risk my career to hide something her friends and our family already know.”

  “Then why take the photos?” Peter asked. “Again, no specifics, but the guys doing this work don’t come cheap.” A gentle vibration indicated an incoming call, but he ignored it.

  “That’s how it’s done,” Remzi said. “It’s like asking a gold prospector why he doesn’t just go to where the gold is, instead of working a bunch of bad claims first. You collect everything you can, and see what’s of use. My sister got photographed, and that photograph is now raw intel. Someone will go through all that raw intel and decide what’s worth using. A little further research will prove it’s not worth much, that it can’t be used to make me turn. If you hadn’t seen it go down, we’d never know it happened. But Wilson Fisk won’t get anything he can use on me.”

  “I never said it was Fisk.”

  “Come on,” Remzi said. “Extortion has always been his go-to plan—and who else would have the means or the desire to spend God knows how much, just to collect heaps of raw data?” He gave a wry grin. “Besides, everyone knows you have a bug up your ass about Fisk.”

  “Because I’m delicate, I prefer ‘bee in my bonnet,’” Spider-Man said, “but both are accurate. Any idea what he’s after?”

  “Not a clue,” Remzi said, “but check this out. I recorded it the other morning, and it’s been bothering me ever since.” He picked up his TV remote and began searching through his DVR for a clip. After a minute he hit play and unmuted it.

  On the screen Norman Osborn came out of City Hall. Reporters shouted questions at him, and he gave off a stream of noncommittal answers until someone asked about the city’s “cozy” relationship with business interests. The mayor stopped in his tracks.

  “I object to the word ‘cozy,’” Osborn said. “It suggests something improper. This city was built on business, and when business does well, people do well. If anything, there is a new wave of civic-minded business in this town we need to encourage—people like Wilson Fisk, who find new ways to make money while helping out workers and families and ordinary people. I don’t want to hide that. I want to encourage it.”

  Remzi paused the feed. “Osborn is going out of his way to praise Fisk. It feels like we’re being softened up.”

  “For what?”

  Remzi shook his head. “No idea, but if Fisk is involved, it’ll be bad.”

  REACHING a nearby rooftop, he checked his phone. The message was from Watanabe, and he played it back. It wasn’t much, she said, but she had a line on this thief’s brother. She gave the name and address, and the message ended.

  The location was across Central Park—on the Upper West Side near Columbia. Aiming a web at a nearby water tower, he launched himself into the air. Some quick swinging and a couple of bus rides later—on top of the vehicles, of course—he caught a lucky break.

  It was late afternoon and Spider-Man was trying to figure out the best way to get the brother’s attention when the guy, Vincent, brought the trash out. He hadn’t spent that much time with the victim, but the web-spinner could see the resemblance. This guy was a little older, a little taller. He looked like he spent time in the gym, but they were clearly related.

  “Don’t be startled,” Spider-Man said, and the guy nearly jumped out of his skin. He was upside down and clinging to the wall, which he guessed was maybe a little startling. Still, words counted for something. He hoped.

  The man relaxed and faced him. His expression was unreadable.

  “You were there,” he said. “When Andy died.”

  Spider-Man nodded and dropped down. “Yeah,” he said. “I spoke to him a little while before he was shot.”

  “Some of the cops think you killed him,” Vincent said. “Or that some guy who’s impersonating you killed him.”

  “I think he was killed because he talked to me. He gave me a bad tip, and once he’d done that, my guess is that he had to be silenced so he couldn’t be made to talk. That’s the best sense I can make of it.”

  “So, who did it?” the man asked, frowning. “Who killed my brother?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping to find out,” Spider-Man said. “If you have any information, it could really help. He told me you were connected to the Scorpion.”

  The brother smirked. “Man, he fed you a line. I’m the straight arrow in the family. He was the screwup. ’Til the end, I guess.”

  “You know anything about who he was in with?”

  Vincent shook his head. “Andy had been messing up since he was a kid, but he was trying to get his act together. He really was. He was working on his GED and apprenticing as a riveter. I was so proud of him, you know. It’s not easy to turn things around, but he was legit doing it. Then I hear him on the phone, talking about doing a job, you know? I confronted him, and he said he had no choice. He said he had to do this one last thing, and then they’d let him be. I told him I’d go with him, but he lied to me about when and where, so they got him.” He wiped at his eye with the back of his hand.

  “Why didn’t you tell the police about this?”

  “Of course I told them. Some dude with a mustache came by and I told him everything. He left his coffee cup in my house for me to clean up, like I was his servant or something.”

  He’d told the police, but the information wasn’t in his file. That was troubling.

  “Thanks for talking to me,” Spider-Man said. “I’m not sure how, but this will help. I promise I’m going to do everything I can to bring his killer to justice.” Andy was a real person, he remin
ded himself, with a real brother who had to deal with tragedy. That familiar anger sparked again inside.

  “I believe you,” Vincent said. “It’s too bad the police don’t care as much as you do.”

  “There are plenty of good cops.”

  “I wish I had your faith,” the brother said. “Half the cops out there think you’re the bad guy, and still you keep on going, doing what you do. I don’t know how you keep it up.”

  Sometimes Spider-Man didn’t know either.

  * * *

  HE was headed downtown, back in an area where higher buildings made web swinging a lot easier. Trying to organize his thoughts when the call came through. It was Watanabe.

  “I’m at a murder scene,” she said. “It’s Remzi, the assistant DA. He was beaten to death.” She let out a sigh that evolved into a growl.

  “There’s webbing all over his apartment.”

  * * *

  “THIS has got to stop,” he told her. “Right now. Tonight. I met him. He was one of the good guys. He wanted to help me.”

  “That’s why they killed him,” Watanabe said. They stood on a roof adjacent to the building where Remzi’s East Side apartment was found.

  “No,” Spider-Man replied, fighting to control his fury. “I don’t buy it. If he had anything to say, if he had any evidence that I could have used, he’d have told me. He was upset that they were messing with his sister. I don’t think he’d have held back.”

  “Then why kill him, if not to silence him?” she countered. “To frame you? People who might think the worst of you already do. It’s a lot of trouble to go through if there’s no payoff.”

  There had to be a payoff. They’d killed Andy to keep him quiet, but what about the people in the sandwich shop. What was the payoff there? Why did they have to die?

  Why did Anika have to die?

  Then he saw it.

  “We’ve been thinking about this wrong,” he said. “The point wasn’t to hide anything. The point wasn’t to make the public lose faith in me. The point was to keep me busy.”

  “Keep you busy?” she asked. “But why?”

  “Because of what the Kingpin is up to,” Spider-Man said. “Whatever it is that’s going to make him too big to fail. That’s all that really matters to him, and he doesn’t want me messing it up.”

  “So you think Fisk believes you alone can stop it,” Watanabe said, shaking her head. “Whatever it is. Again… why? You don’t have anything on him. If you were breathing down his neck, if you were one step away from exposing him, then I’d get it—but that’s not the case. There’s not any reason for him to think it’s the case.”

  “And that’s why I didn’t see it,” he said. “I never imagined I could be dangerous to a plan I know nothing about.”

  “And now you think you are?” she said. “Dangerous?”

  “No, but I’m starting to see things in the proper perspective,” he told her. “I’m just one thread in the carpet. Fisk knows I have the potential to disrupt whatever it is he has planned, and he’s trying to neutralize me before I can become a genuine threat. I played a big part in his arrest last time—upended his life and almost had him sent to jail. If there’s one person he wants distracted while he’s making his move, it would be me.”

  “So he’s got you chasing after the imposter,” Watanabe said. “You’d do anything to find the restaurant bomber—in part because you believe it will lead you to Fisk. But while you’re looking one way, you don’t see what Fisk is doing somewhere else. Meanwhile, the police and the public don’t trust you, at least not entirely, which makes your job that much harder.”

  “All of which gives Fisk plenty of breathing room.”

  “But even if this is true,” Watanabe said, “how does the knowledge help us? This guy—your double—kills people. We can’t just ignore him because he’s a distraction.”

  “He’s still a key to nailing Fisk,” Spider-Man said. “I don’t know that we need to change our approach, but it might be enough to change our mind set.”

  “I hope that’s enough,” Watanabe said. “Remzi was one of us, and at least half the force thinks you killed him. If anyone finds out I’ve been talking to you, I’m toast. We may be on the right track, but until we have the whole picture, Fisk has outsmarted us.”

  * * *

  KILLING a district attorney. That was going too far, even for a lunatic like Bingham. Had Mr. Fisk authorized this?

  No, that was ridiculous. Mr. Fisk didn’t kill people. He’d made a mistake when he’d brought in Bingham, and now he would have to undo it. She wished he would ask her to fix it—but she could do nothing without his authorization.

  Maya had come as soon as she heard the news reports. Crouching in the deepening shadows, she saw a police officer emerge onto the roof of a nearby building. She looked through her binoculars, and while she couldn’t be certain, she thought it might be the woman from Bingham’s photo. Was that the cop working with Spider-Man?

  It would be best to wait and see what happened next.

  Before long her patience was rewarded. Less than half an hour later, Spider-Man arrived. The two talked for a while, and while she couldn’t tell what he was saying—not with the mask—she knew they were talking about Mr. Fisk. The cop said his name, more than once.

  That was bad news.

  Mr. Fisk had never intended for anyone to get killed. Bingham was out of control, yes, but that wasn’t Mr. Fisk’s fault. She needed to make sure this cop didn’t create trouble for a man who was working as hard as he could to help the people of this city.

  There was one person who would be able to make use of this information, to change the conversation, and quickly. She had to do everything in her power to protect Mr. Fisk, even if it meant protecting him from himself. She wished he would confide in her fully. How could he not trust her?

  She picked up her phone and sent the text to Jameson.

  SPIDER-MAN HAS A CONNECTION

  INSIDE THE POLICE DEPARTMENT

  THEY’RE PROTECTING HIM

  FROM PROSECUTION

  She hoped that would be enough to buy Mr. Fisk the time he needed—and Maya the time she needed. If she was going to remain effective, she had to know more, regardless of the consequences.

  FISK sat across from Mr. Fleisher of Roxxon Blackridge. It was late for a meeting, but he’d been in the building and was trying to set up an appointment while Fisk was still working. He’d waved the man in.

  “Does this concern the surveillance subjects?” Fisk asked.

  “No,” Fleisher said. “The other matter.”

  Fisk had asked Roxxon Blackridge to perform a security review. Given the sensitivity of some of the material he was keeping in his various safes, he needed to make sure there was no chance of anything going missing or falling into the wrong hands.

  “If we’re going to discuss that,” Fisk said, “perhaps we should reschedule. My assistant Maya Lopez helps me facilitate our security arrangements, and I’d like for her to be included in any meeting.”

  “I don’t know if that’s wise.”

  Fisk raised one eyebrow. “Are you suggesting something?”

  “I am prepared to provide you with information,” Mr. Fleisher said. “It’s up to you to make the inferences.” He opened his briefcase and removed a manila envelope. From that he removed a black-and-white photo of Maya walking into his office complex on the Upper East Side. “Miss Lopez entered the building at 9:47 a.m.”

  Fisk shrugged his massive shoulders. “Her duties require her to visit any number of my properties.”

  “She proceeded to the executive suite on the 76th floor. Security cameras show her there at 9:53,” he said, providing another photograph. It showed Maya in an otherwise empty office. A painting had been swung away from the wall, revealing a safe. Although her back was to the camera, it was clear what she was doing.

  “Did she take anything?” Fisk asked in a clipped voice.

  “We don’t know,” Fleisher sai
d. “Moments after we captured this image, the security system experienced an unexpected glitch. It shut down for eleven minutes, and erased all records since the previous backup. We next captured Miss Lopez when she was exiting the building.” He provided a third black-and-white photograph of Maya stepping out onto the street.

  Fisk steepled his fingers and said nothing.

  This was a trick he’d picked up over the years to keep himself calm. It wouldn’t do to attack a high-level Roxxon Blackridge executive, but Fisk could envision himself breaking the man’s neck. Perhaps something less immediate, though. Punching him in the face, knocking him down, kicking him in the stomach until he vomited blood. Yes, something like that would be more satisfying.

  He took in a deep breath and waited.

  “We were very lucky,” Fleisher said. “Because we were performing the review, we were piggybacking on your systems. When your network went down, we were blind as well, but some of the records were preserved. Had we not captured these, we would never have known Miss Lopez was in the building.” He frowned, then added, “Whoever did it knew how to ensure that the data was unrecoverable.”

  Still Fisk didn’t move. He thought, however, about crushing Fleisher’s head with his bare hands.

  “There’s no way to know what Miss Lopez was doing,” Fleisher continued. “Frankly, we can’t say that she was doing anything improper. It may simply be a coincidence that you experienced these difficulties while she was present. However, if I were you, I would proceed carefully.”

  “Thank you,” Fisk said, his voice flat and distant. “I appreciate your time.”

  Fleisher seemed not to understand. “Mr. Fisk, I hope you regard this threat with the seriousness it deserves. If you would like, I could assign a team to—”

  “No,” Fisk snapped, and the man jumped. “This is an internal matter. I will handle it.” He gave a wave of his hand and hoped Fleisher would take the hint. If he didn’t…