“I already did,” he said. “He’s like … hmm … two miles from your phone, to the east. I’m in his car’s system. Want me to send him into a brick wall at a gentle twenty miles per hour? Activate his windshield wipers and make him think he’s got a haunted … uhh … carburetor?” He lowered his voice like he was talking to himself. “I so do not know cars.”
“Just tell me where he is and get ready to apply the brakes,” I said and looked at Augustus, who was frowning at me. “But … gently.”
“Wow,” he said, “it’s like a whole new you, but okay! I’m ready to apply the brakes in a slow, methodical fashion when you say to.”
“Let’s go, hero,” I said, gesturing to Augustus, who warily stepped close to me. I threaded an arm around him like he was the little spoon and used the other to keep the phone to my ear.
“This is so awkward,” he said.
“Think about how I feel,” I said as we lifted into the air, “I’m face to back of the shoulder blades with you.”
“Are you flying?” J.J. asked. “Never mind, I see it on the scope now. Wheeeee! Flying! I’m pretending I’m right there with you instead of sitting in my office, wasting away under the command of morons who don’t like or appreciate me.”
“You got a plan for this?” Augustus asked as the wind whipped past us. I maintained an iron grip on his chest as we arced toward downtown Atlanta’s massive skyline. That cylindrical building right in the middle stood out to me for some reason.
“You know my plan,” I said.
“Find Darrick and make him cry until he tells you every seedy thing he’s ever even thought about?”
“Why mess with a strategy that works?” I asked, slightly amused.
“Ooh, sounds fun,” J.J. said over the phone. “He’s about eight hundred meters ahead of you, going down an alley.”
“This is not a man who likes to step into the light,” I muttered.
“That makes him smarter than the average dealer,” Augustus said. “Though his choice of car seems like a lightning rod for the police. That brother has to get pulled over all the time.”
“Then let’s make this traffic stop memorable,” I said, catching sight of the red Corvette moving below. “J.J … apply his brakes. Carefully.”
“Because you don’t want to hurt him, right?” J.J. asked. “For the interrogation?”
“Also,” I said, “it’s a really pretty car.”
I watched the Corvette come to a gradual halt, screeching a little as it jerked to a stop. I was only about fifty feet above him at that point, staring down into the car. I couldn’t see him, but I imagined Cary’s face as his car stopped responding to him. “Can you kill the ignition, J.J.?”
A hard laugh came through the phone. “I can switch his radio to play something appropriately eerie, too, if you’d like. You know, set him up for the intimidation to come.”
“Go for it,” I said and hung up. The Corvette was squarely in the middle of a long alleyway, buildings on either side. I dropped Augustus over the roof of one of them. “Stand back and watch,” I said, “that way you’ll have plausible deniability if anything goes wrong.”
“Plausible whaaaa—AHHHHH!”
I dropped him the last ten feet and he landed in a roll. Clearly he still wasn’t entirely used to his meta abilities.
“All right,” I said and altered my course to take me right in front of the Corvette—again. Then I cut out my powers just as I saw the door open and came smashing to the ground hard enough that the asphalt shook a little from my impact. When I stood, I saw Darrick standing at his door with his eyes wide open. Again. “Tell me what you know about that asshole Weldon,” I said without preamble.
Darrick just stared at me, open-mouthed. “Yeah. Okay,” he said, nervousness written all over his face, while the Halloween classic “Monster Mash” blared out of the Corvette’s speakers so loudly that they could probably hear it back in the neighborhood.
Damn you, J.J.
34.
“See, the thing you need to understand about Cordell Weldon is,” Darrick Cary said, leaning against the hood of his car, “is that whatever he says he’s trying to do to help the ‘Community,’” he held up air quotes, “is really just cover for Cordell Weldon doing whatever he can to help Cordell Weldon. Any good for the community is secondary and takes a back seat to advancing his own interests. That man has ties, see. Ties to Heshie LeRoux—you know who that is?” I shook my head.
“Organized crime boss here in the ATL,” Augustus said. He’d climbed down a standpipe in a stubborn refusal to sit on the sidelines for this. Maybe he didn’t trust me not to break Darrick’s legs or something, I don’t know. Maybe he was just feeling chatty.
“If there’s a dirty deal being done in the Bluff, Cordell Weldon knows about it and has a piece of it,” Cary said.
“If that was true, why hasn’t some enterprising reporter made his name by blowing a big fat whistle on it?” Augustus asked.
Cary looked at him like he was stupid. “Are you out of damned mind? You know how fast Cordell Weldon can wreck a fool?” He snapped his fingers. “You’d get mashed before you even went to press. He has friends on all the editorial boards, and they all line up to kiss his ass. Not the left cheek, not the right cheek, but right in the middle, and they smile all the while and ask him if they can do it again.”
I exchanged a look with Augustus, who looked extremely sour. “I am familiar with the effect he describes.”
“You were beset by an uncontrollable desire to kiss Cordell Weldon’s ass?” Augustus asked.
“This is a man with all the power,” Cary said, saving me from coming up with a suitably bitter reply, “and he can call someone racist and have everyone in the world thinking they’re a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in about two seconds.”
“That’s bullshit,” Augustus said. “Why doesn’t anyone in the neighborhood call him out on it?”
“Because just like everywhere else in the world, he’s turned on the money tap and let the green flow into the right pockets,” Cary said, clapping his hands together. “This is not some new type of scam Weldon is running. In the history of the world, this is the oldest racket in the book. He’s preying on the powerless, making speeches, stirring up shit, steering everybody in one direction while he veers his ass in the other while no one’s looking. You call file that sumbitch under Charlotte N.”
I stared at him blankly. “What?”
“Charlatan,” Augustus said, sighing. “You know anything about how he’s tied to Edward Cavanagh?”
“Cavanagh pays that man money,” Cary said. “Same tie as everywhere else.”
“But what does Cavanagh get in return?” I asked. “Assuming you’re right.”
Cary just laughed. “Something you governmental do-gooders never learn because you’re so busy being up your own asses about serving the people is … money makes the world go round. Love? Pfffft. I love my family, but plenty of young men around here love their families. That doesn’t put any food on the table or a roof over their head. Money does that. I don’t know for sure that there’s money passing back and forth between your boy Cavanagh and Cordell Weldon, but if you see a white man bringing his factory down into the Bluff rather than taking it Mexico or China, I would make my bet there’s money in there somewhere for him. That’s just the way it is, and you’re a fool if you don’t see it.”
I looked at Augustus; he looked at me. “The lowlife makes a valid point,” Augustus said.
“Don’t you get all high and mighty with me, Augustus Coleman,” Cary said. “We can’t all get jobs at your white master’s factory.”
“Why not?” I asked, just ignoring the insulting part of that statement. Augustus looked irritable about it as well.
“Some of us got priors,” Cary said. “Kind of makes it a little difficult to get a clean slate when the slate’s already dirty as hell, you know?”
“Yeah, spare me your bullshit,” Augustus said. “Some of us
managed to keep out of the trouble you somehow steered your ass into.”
“Well, congratulations on having your no-stink shit together earlier in your life than I did in mine,” Cary said.
“If Weldon is somehow connected to supplying Cavanagh with warm meta bodies,” I said, “maybe they tested the suppressant on them during development?”
Augustus nodded. “Could be. If this stuff came out in secret, maybe that’s how they cooked it up. Found a couple of unregistered metas hiding, homeless, and rounded them up to be test subjects. That FDA approval is kind of hard to get, I guess.”
Cary’s looked like he was about to choke. “Did you say … suppressant? That shit that causes you people to lose your powers?”
“Yeah,” Augustus said. “What do you know about it?”
Cary blinked, and I could see him doing the calculus in his head about whether to say anything or not. I stared him down, and saw him make the decision quickly. “Someone asked me about it recently is all. Not related to your current line of inquiry. Please, continue arguing amongst yourselves.”
“I think we’ll make that decision,” I said, edging closer to him, “whether it’s relevant or not. Someone asked you about suppressant? Like wanted to … what? Buy some?”
“Yeah,” he said, backing away and into his car, his thighs bouncing off the hood lightly. “Maybe a little.”
“Who?” I asked. “People don’t just go looking for suppressant for innocent reasons. It doesn’t provide any kind of high—”
“How would you know?” Cary asked, looking a little defensive. “I’ve seen people smoke some crazy shit when they can’t get hold of—”
“Give me a name,” I said.
“These are my customers,” he said, protesting a little impotently. “I can’t—”
“Let me tell you something else you can’t do,” I said, cutting him off. “Fly without a plane. Want me to prove that to you?” I pointed up.
Darrick Cary looked at Augustus, like he was considering his answer long and hard before it came out. “Taneshia. Taneshia asked about suppressant. She … wanted to know if I could get my hands on it.” Cary bowed his head. “She wanted some real bad, and she was willing to pay to get her hands on it.”
35.
Augustus
I stood there, stunned, Darrick Cary’s admission still echoing in my ears. “Was she asking for it for herself or for someone else?” The question that popped out without me even having to think about it.
Cary sneered. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Something about the way he said it, about the way he’d been acting throughout our whole conversation just set me off. I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and dragged him over to the wall of the alley and slammed his sorry ass up against the brick. His eyes went wide again, mouth fell open into an O as he realized for the first time that maybe he should have answered that differently.
“Whoa!” Sienna called from behind me.
“I can see that you would like to know,” Cary said, humbled, “and I am willing to tell you in exchange for you not breaking my … anything.”
“Start talking,” I said, “I’ll think about it.”
“Well, the truth is that I don’t know,” he said, and I believed him because he was looking straight into my eyes and seemed like he might need to change his pants. “I didn’t want to ask. I told her I doubted I could get it, but that I’d ask, and that was the end of that conversation.”
“Starting to get an idea of why she hesitated to give me your name and how to get ahold of you,” I said.
“She gave me up?” Cary asked, suddenly outraged. “Oh, I ain’t selling to her no more!”
“Let him go,” Sienna said gently from behind me. “This doesn’t really change anything.”
“You don’t think so?” I asked, turning to look at her. “There aren’t that many metas around here. Either she was looking to suppress me, or she knows someone else she’d like to take out of the equation.”
“Lightning man,” she whispered.
“I’m thinking maybe lightning woman, now,” I said. “No one ever saw it was a him. Only witness was a kid, and we got zero description of a face, just a hood. Could be anyone under that.”
“Man, if Taneshia is shooting lightning and killing people, I really need to leave town now,” Cary said. “She’s going to know I gave her up.”
“Anything else?” Sienna asked, coming up behind me. She waited a moment, and Cary tried to shrug in my grasp. It didn’t go so well, but the point was made. “Let him go.”
I dropped him and he slumped to the ground, catching his feet and trying to adjust himself in a faint effort to salvage his dignity from being manhandled by me. “I don’t even think I want to know this, but … what are you fools planning to do?”
I looked at her. She looked at me. “Find evidence on Cordell Weldon,” she said. “Drag him out into the light of day.”
Cary shook his head, like he was just giving up on us and life. “A man like Cordell Weldon does not leave evidence. He’s too smart for that. Fat cat like that will always land on his feet. Little cat like me? I got to stay low, keep to falls I can survive. Man. Such a waste. You got all this power in the world and nowhere to point it.”
“I can point it at him,” Sienna said, menacing.
Cary laughed, totally fake. “No, you can’t, and that’s the point. Even you can’t stand with the whole world against you. And, girl, they are turning that way. This is a whole new level of heat, one you are not ready for. Try and imagine them gassing you with that stuff and dragging your ass off to some prison. Or worse, digging a ditch somewhere and just letting you disappear—”
“Never gonna happen,” she said.
“Pfffft,” Cary said. “You’re going to die a villain. They’re going to make it happen, you just wait and see. They’re setting up for it. And Cordell Weldon is going to dance on your grave.”
“He’s going to have a bitch of a time dancing once I break his legs,” she said and grabbed me around the chest. We shot off into the sky, straight up. The wind buffeted us as we climbed into the warm midday air.
“Where we going?” I asked.
“I’m going to drop you off and you’re going to try and find Taneshia,” she said, loud enough to be heard over the howl of the air, “and then I’m going to make a slight … detour.”
“Detour? Now?” I asked.
“No time like the present,” she said.
I waited to see if she was going to say anything else. When she didn’t, I just asked. “What is so damned important that you’re going to take off in the middle of the investigation?”
“I need to talk to an old friend,” she said, pensive in a way I wasn’t used to seeing from her. “Someone who might be able to shed some light on how we go about ripping people of power out into the light of day.”
“What makes you think that this person can help?” I asked as she arced us across the sky toward the black cloud that I now knew was my house. My home. A smoking wreck.
“Because,” she said, as we started to come in for a landing, “if we’re lucky, he’ll be the next president of the United States.” And she dropped me off and flew into the sky, vanishing from sight with a sonic boom that shook the world around me, leaving the spectators still standing on my lawn with their mouths agape.
36.
Sienna
It wasn’t a long flight to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. It was somewhere around four hundred miles, and I did it in less than half an hour, hauling ass until I saw the skyline. It didn’t take much effort on J.J.’s part to get me a copy of Senator Foreman’s itinerary and to find his hotel. It was a big one, after all, a giant tower that overlooked downtown.
I approached carefully, dropping in from the clouds at highest speed and stopping in seconds before I splattered on the roof. It wasn’t a comfortable landing by any means, but it kept me from being seen by any but the most observant, and even then they’d
pretty much just see a blur falling out of the sky. The sound was somewhat obvious, but I couldn’t do much about that. Breaking the sound barrier rattles windows, and that’s just the way it is.
I entered the hotel from the roof stairs and immediately encountered the U.S. Secret Service. I raised my hands, badge in my left and looked the surprised guards in the eye. “Federal agent. I’m here to see Foreman,” I said and let them scramble.
I stood in the stairwell with a steadily increasing number of black-suited agents while waiting. I figured they’d eventually reach critical mass and run out of places to stand, but somehow they all managed to continue giving me a wide berth while piling in. I took utmost care to avoid any threatening gestures while they kept their hands on their weapons. I was actually fortunate they hadn’t drawn down on me. I’m sure it wasn’t exactly protocol to let a super-powerful metahuman close to a presidential candidate, especially one who was likely having the word “rogue” thrown about in relation to her name. They kept it cool and cordial, though, and I did the same, extending them the professional courtesy of keeping my hands up and where they could see them, which allowed them the illusion of thinking me innocuous. The fact I could smoke everyone in the stairwell—literally, thanks to fire powers—in seconds was probably lost on them. It was a brave new world, and bodyguard training hadn’t quite caught up to it.
I realized after a moment that the chill, calm atmosphere of everyone in the stairwell was probably not entirely natural, and shook my head, letting out a little sigh. I was definitely feeling calmer than I had been upon approach. Even identifying that as an unnatural feeling in my head gave it a little less power but didn’t eliminate it. I didn’t really want to be irate, so I just went with it in any case.
“This way, ma’am,” one of the agents finally said, after a burst of staticky voice in his earpiece gave him his marching orders. He was a tall, light-blond-haired guy with freckles. They made way for me, though I don’t know how. There had to be twenty agents in the stairwell by that point, and it wasn’t exactly wide.
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