Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight

by Pab Sungenis

  She winked. “That’s my secret.”

  I felt the need to retake control of the situation. “Can we get back to throwing me out of school? I don’t have all day. Oh, wait, actually I do, since I just dropped out.”

  Sergeant Simpson became all business again, but there was a subtle change in his demeanor as he and Mrs. Carr walked me to the main doors. He didn’t seem quite as threatening as he had when he thought I might go on a killing spree. Right before I stepped outside, I kissed Mrs. Carr on the cheek. “Thank you for trying,” was all I could say. I pushed the door open and stepped out into the frigid February winds.

  “Oh, and Sergeant?” I looked back at Simpson. “I’m in the book. Call me.” Then we winked at each other. Mrs. Carr stared at the cop, and this time it was his turn to say the immortal words.

  “Don’t Ask. Don’t tell.”

  I don’t know if Mrs. Carr understood that we were teasing her, but the looks she gave us as I walked out into the street were almost worth all the crap I’d gone through that morning. Almost.

  ***

  Once I was safely away from the school, I grabbed my cell phone, turned it on, and punched in Rick’s number on speed dial. I desperately needed to talk to someone, and he was the only reachable sidekick, it being school hours and all.

  I heard the click as he answered and didn’t bother to wait for him to speak first. “Dude, it’s me. I’ve just had the worst day you can ever imagine, and I needed to—”

  “Bobby?” His voice sounded hollow somehow, as if he’d just been punched in the stomach and was gasping for air. “Haven’t you heard?”

  “Heard what?” Just as I asked, the beeper on my watch went off, and the face flashed red. Code one alert.

  “I just found out a few seconds ago.”

  “What? Rick, what’s going on?”

  “Bobby.” He gasped for air again. “Mr. Zip is dead.”

  Complications

  I forget what college I’d been visiting when Uncle Jack died. It was one I ended up not applying to anyhow, probably due to the memories of getting the news. It was somewhere in Florida, and I only remember that much because I appreciated not freezing my ass off in the middle of January.

  My tour buddy had arranged for me to stay at his frat house instead of a dorm room. Not being completely unappreciative of the social aspects of college life, and having once been described by someone who didn’t really know me as “viciously polite,” I decided not to spurn his offer.

  The chemically-altered consciousness of my companions, who were out that morning trying to toss around a football and having a singular lack of success, made me discount the initial shouts of “Dude! Up in the sky!” Never having had the knack for shared hallucinations, I didn’t bother looking up, but the next bit of description made me curious. “It’s that … that dude! Ya know, the one in the white-and-gold outfit?”

  White and gold? It couldn’t be. If Uncle Hank was this far away from his home turf and in his Paragon costume to boot, then something was going down. Something bad. I excused myself by saying I was going for a jog, although something told me my compatriots wouldn’t have noticed if I’d just disappeared.

  After a few minutes of jogging along the highway, I saw Uncle Hank in the distance, standing by the side of the road. He’d changed out of costume—a cinch for someone as quick as him—and was staring at me. So it wasn’t a coincidence; he was in town to find me. The look on his face—a kind of profound sadness only someone as good and pure as he could have—told me which two words to use.

  “What’s wrong?” I gasped once I’d managed to catch up to him.

  He took my hand, in a gentle and caring way. “Bobby, I’m so sorry. It’s Jack.”

  He didn’t need to finish the sentence, and I wouldn’t have heard him if he had. The numbness was settling in. I struggled mightily and found the lung capacity for four more words.

  “Give me a lift?”

  We arrived at one of Uncle Jack’s warehouses. I don’t think it was the same one he’d rescued me from five years before, but I was too preoccupied to properly notice. For all I knew, the gods of irony may have selected the exact same one for Uncle Jack to die in; the universe liked to do crap like that.

  All the heroes were on the scene when we arrived, and most of them had kind, consoling words, but I wasn’t interested in what they had to say. The only person I wanted to hear say anything at that moment was the one person who wouldn’t feel the need to say words that didn’t matter. He was also the team’s MD, and the person best qualified to explain what had happened. I went right to Mister Mystery.

  “How did he die?” Mystery liked to talk in blunt terms and appreciated that I understood his desire for other people to be as tightfisted with words as he could be, so I got right to the point.

  “He was stabbed through the heart. Probably with his own sword, since we haven’t found it.”

  “His breastplate should have stopped just about any weapon, even his sword.” Another look confirmed why it hadn’t; it was also missing. “Why would he not be wearing his breastplate?”

  “He said it was a power source. Might the attacker have taken it?”

  I looked around. “There’s something wrong here. How could someone get the jump on him, disarm him, and kill him with his own sword?”

  “How can I run faster than light?” Mr. Zip asked. “How can Prism harness the spectrum to do her bidding? The questions go on.” Zip thought for a moment, which at his speed meant he’d cogitated and ruminated over more data than any of us could have done in half an hour. “The suit, breastplate, and sword were all metal, right? Maybe it was someone who controls magnetism?”

  “None of our villains are magnetic,” I responded.

  “Dinah, Moe, and Humm are all locked up good and tight,” Mystery offered about the magnetic triplets he’d wrangled with, “in plastic cells none of them can get out of.”

  “As is Mr. Monopole,” Clytemnestra confirmed about her magnetic villain.

  “Then we’ve probably got a new villain in town with some power we haven’t heard of.” Zip sat down, something he didn’t do more than he needed to since he tended to be in constant motion. “I don’t like puzzles, and that’s what this is becoming. I wish we had some answers.”

  At the time, I hadn’t wanted any answers, I hadn’t wanted more questions, and I hadn’t wanted any more sympathy. I’d wanted to go lock myself away and be alone for a while.

  That was a month before, and this time I didn’t have that kind of luxury. Mr. Zip would never get the answers he’d wanted back then, but maybe I could.

  ***

  I don’t think I’d ever changed into costume so quickly. Of course, part of that was probably due to where I changed—the construction site porta-john across the street from the school, and the nearest place I could get any degree of privacy. Trust me, that odor was all the inspiration I needed to change clothes as fast as I could and signal for an emergency teleport to wherever I was being summoned. Getting away from that stench was worth the agony of being yanked apart and slammed back together in Professor Smith’s office.

  A few glances around the office, however, and I wished I was back in the porta-john. I’ll spare you the description.

  Paragon and Mister Mystery were already on-site, collecting data. Paragon was using that intensive vision thing of his, trying to spot any microscopic details as to the perpetrator’s identity, while Mystery was doing a medical work-over of what was left of the Professor. I tried to take in as much of the situation as I could, but with the two of them on the job, I would just be in the way. When Clytemnestra and Prism jumped in a moment after I had, they seemed to come to the same conclusion and just stood back. Morgaine followed a couple of minutes after, and, without even bothering to speak with anyone else in the room, set right to casting spells to try and reveal the identity of the murderer or reconstruct the crime a bit. It was the same basic procedure they’d followed a month before at the scene of
Uncle Jack’s murder.

  That was when I finally broke the silence in the room. Under normal circumstances, I probably would have asked for details like who found the body, what we knew already, and so on. But those were the furthest things from my mind. “Has anyone told Tommy?”

  Clytemnestra and Prism gasped in horror, not because I’d been so bold as to ask the question, but because neither of them had thought of it first. Mystery answered me. “I sent Shadow to take care of it.” That was a relief. Tommy wasn’t as tight with the Professor (who actually was his uncle) as I had been with Uncle Jack, but I was certain he would be taking it hard and would have been devastated if word of the death had come from a disinterested party, or worse, the six o’clock news.

  “You discovered the body?”

  “Yes,” Mystery said while still not turning his attention away from the job at hand. “He managed to push his panic button, which rang down in Headquarters. I called Paragon and teleported here right away, but as you can see, I was too late.” He pulled out a little digital-voice recorder. “Apparent time of death: 9:32 AM, Mountain Standard Time.” That made it official. By the end of the day, the signature of Dr. Lawrence McBride would grace Professor Seth Smith’s death certificate, the same way it graced Jack Horner’s. A cover story would be worked up, and no one beyond the six of us would ever know what really happened. Assuming we could figure out what had really happened.

  Mystery narrated his findings into the recorder, and Paragon completed his scans. “Lots of DNA scattered around here. I’ve ignored any that looked like it came off us.” It impressed and disturbed me that he had apparently not only scanned all the Justice Federation’s genetic signatures but also committed them to memory. “I imagine the rest belong to his students. Far too many people have been in and out of this room over the past few days to really nail anything down. If one of his students did this, then we might never figure out which one it was.”

  “I seriously doubt any of his students could have pulled this off,” I said, surveying the damage to the body and surrounding room. “Unless one of them is in our league, and we don’t know about them yet.”

  “Is there any kind of marker you’ve seen before? Anything that would point to someone we’ve dealt with in the past?” Clytemnestra always knew which questions to ask. If it weren’t for the strength, agility, and other stuff, her inquisitive mind would have been enough of a super power to put her on the team, as far as I was concerned. “Especially anything that would suggest someone from Mr. Zip’s rogues gallery?”

  “Not really,” Paragon continued. “There’s some microscopic scorching on the carpet that suggests friction burns, but that sort of comes par for the course with a speedster. Zip probably caused them himself sometime in the past.”

  “Do we have a clue how they got in or out?” Prism asked.

  “Not that I see. The door was locked from the inside when I teleported in. Mystery insists he didn’t lock it, so it was either the killer or Seth himself. I can’t figure out how the killer escaped, either. It’s like they vanished.”

  Not something I wanted to hear, but a definite clue. “Any residual smoke in the room?” I asked.

  Paragon looked at me, confused. “A little bit. I thought it might have been tobacco smoke. Is it significant?”

  “Well, it sort of confirms who did this, doesn’t it?”

  This time, everyone stared at me. Even Mystery stopped dictating his notes and observations and turned to look at me.

  “Isn’t it obvious? It’s Uncle Jack’s killer.”

  “Jack’s killer?” Prism choked on those two words. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Oh come on, you mean you five haven’t figured out … ” Their dumbfounded looks, which were running the risk of turning into angry glares, told me they certainly hadn’t figured out anything. I sighed. “He didn’t tell you, did he?” Then I panicked. “He never told you! He … ” I ran across to the desk where the two of us had examined the video the day before.

  The portable hard drive was gone.

  “No.” I threw myself into the Professor’s desk chair so hard I nearly skidded across the room and had to grab the edge of the desk to steady myself. I quickly searched through what would have been the obvious places for him to stash copies of the footage on his computer. They were all empty.

  “NO!” I shouted as I ripped the desk apart, hoping to find he’d stashed the drive somewhere in a drawer to keep it safe. No such luck. I would have smashed the lock off the filing cabinet and searched those drawers if my sword hadn’t been locked up in my ex-principal’s office, halfway across the country. I was thinking about trying it with my bare hands when Prism put her hand on my shoulder.

  “Bobby, what’s going on?”

  “He never told any of you. He didn’t say anything. And now it’s gone. The only evidence I had is gone and none of you … ”

  “Bobby, take a deep breath.”

  I did as Prism told me and somehow managed to pull myself back together.

  “Now, please tell me what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “I don’t know exactly who killed Mr. Zip, but I think I know why.”

  ***

  All eyes fell on me as I recounted the events of the past couple of days. I told them about the confrontation at the blacksmith’s, the questioning by the police, my conversation with the Professor as we reviewed the security camera footage, his observations and deductions, and his promise to call in the others, which he obviously did not do. “Now Mr. Zip is dead, and the only evidence that might lead us to the person who probably killed him is gone.”

  “Not good.” It was a hell of an understatement, the kind of thing I’d come to expect from Mystery. He stared at the ceiling, a move I’d caught him doing a couple of times in the past when he was trying to solve a puzzle, as if he could see all the pieces fall into place against the blank canvas above him, but his manner and his comment revealed another motive. “I didn’t see any security cameras in here any of the times I’d visited Seth. Can any of you find any I might have missed?”

  Yeah, right, like the greatest detective in the world would miss something we could find. Still, we all did our bits. Paragon swept the room with both vision and hearing, as did Clytemnestra, although her senses weren’t quite as keen as his. Prism shot beams through the jewel in her necklace, coating the walls with fine beams of light, and then shook her head no. Morgaine whispered one of her spells but didn’t seem to dig up anything. Finally, I pushed my visor back down and cycled through the scanner modes it provided. None of them showed anything out of the ordinary. At least, nothing less ordinary than the six of us, and certainly nothing that looked like a camera, scanner, or electronic recorder of any kind, hidden away. “I got nothing.”

  “Then we’re stuck,” Mystery said and grunted.

  “I don’t understand,” Morgaine said. “If he had this footage and thought it might reveal who killed Jack, why didn’t he bring it to the rest of us?”

  It pained me to say it, but judging by the confused looks on their faces none of the others had made the same conclusions I had. “He went rogue.”

  “What?” Mystery cocked an eyebrow and looked at me. “Are you saying he went over to the bad guys’ side?”

  “Not like that.” Geez, didn’t any of them keep up with modern slang? “He decided to go it alone and face the killer on his own.”

  I could have sworn I heard an audible gasp, but no one was betraying any kind of shock with their facial expressions. Mystery continued. “You mean he figured out who was in that video? He knew who killed Jack?”

  “I’m almost certain. He even asked me at one point if I knew who it was, as if I should have already guessed. He thought it was someone who knew my secret identity, which sort of cuts down the number of suspects. He must have picked up on some clue he didn’t share with me and decided not to share with any of you. I’ll bet he confronted the killer on his own.”

  “But why would
he do such a stupid thing?” Prism was so worked up by the idea of Mr. Zip not confiding in any of them that she was shouting. “Why go it alone?”

  “I can only think of two possible reasons. First, his friendship with Uncle Jack might have led him to it. After all, they hung out a lot when out of costume. That was how I got to be so close to Tommy.” Everyone nodded. “Zip might have wanted to take revenge by himself. But I doubt he was that stupid, or that arrogant, to want to deny the rest of us a share in the vengeance. This leaves the second possible motivation.” I sat on a relatively unscathed portion of the desk. Just the thought of what I was about to say next made me weak in the knees; it was too terrible to contemplate. “The second possible motivation is that he felt he couldn’t trust any of us. Or one of us, at least.”

  “Bobby?” Clytemnestra was trying to be her usual, imperious self, but the tiniest of cracks in her voice told me she was coming to the same conclusions, and they unsettled her, too. “What are you trying to say?”

  “I think Mr. Zip recognized the person on the video, or at least thought he did.” I swallowed. “And realized it was one of you.”

  Awkward?

  If you ever want an uncomfortable situation, try informing the five most powerful people in the Universe that you think one of them might have knocked off numbers six and seven.

  “Let me get this straight.” Paragon’s voice could cut through any noise and drown out all the others, so when he spoke, it commanded our attention. “Are you accusing one of us of killing the Scarlet Knight and Mr. Zip?”

  “I’m not accusing anyone of anything. Hell, for all I know they both spontaneously combusted in strategic parts of their body. All I’m saying is that I think Mr. Zip recognized the person in that video, thought it might have been one of you, and thus didn’t communicate his suspicions to anyone because he didn’t know who he could trust.” I stood back up and would have paced if there weren’t so many of us in such a cramped space. “Or it could have been one of the Knight’s old enemies who recognized me and tracked me out here yesterday, then realized why I’d visited. Or one of his old enemies who didn’t realize the importance of what was on the drive. Or maybe Zip got distracted before he could call in all of you. Or maybe it was bunnies that did it all. I don’t know the whole story, but it comes down to Sherlock Holmes or Occam’s razor. Is it the only improbable option out of a sea of impossibilities, like Holmes said? Or is it the simplest answer that’s right, as Occam insisted? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve been shaving pretty closely these past couple weeks, so I’m leaning toward Occam.”