The teen cried out in surprise, grabbing at his falling pants. Too late. The jeans pooled around his legs. I pulled the gun out of the pocket, making it look as if it had bounced out thanks to its collision with the asphalt. I made the gun skitter away from the teen, forcing it to slide into a storm drain a few feet away from him.
The teen cursed, pulled his pants partly back up, and shambled over to the storm drain. After a brief hesitation, he lay down on his belly on the side of the street. He stuck his arm into the storm drain up to his shoulder and groped for the gun. His search was in vain; little did he know I had made sure the gun was well out of his reach. Some of the pedestrians waiting at the intersection with me tittered at the display, but not too loudly, not wanting to be heard laughing at the teen or his friend who stood over him. If you drew attention to yourself on the streets of Astor City, you almost always regretted it.
Once the walk sign said we could cross Tennessee, I and my fellow stick-in-the-mud, law-abiding pedestrians did so. We passed the teen jaywalkers. The shorter one still groped for his gun. Though I suspected the stories I heard about there being mutant alligators in the Astor City sewer system were merely urban legends, the devil in me wished one of those gators would happen along and make an hors d’oeuvre of the teen’s arm. Smugness tugged the corners of my mouth into a slight smile. Despite not yet having done anything about Mechano of the Sentinels, at least I had done something about a punk with a gun. Baby steps.
I broke away from most of the pack by taking a left at the corner, and then a right onto Williams Place, the street on which I lived. Row houses lined both sides of the street. Most were well-kept and looked recently renovated. A handful were old and rundown. Tennessee Heights was well on its way on the gentrification road from poor to solidly middle class.
The house I shared with Isaac and guy named Bertrand Dubois was one of the ones that had seen better days. It was one of the few rental houses on the block. Our landlord, a squat cigar-chomping guy named Mario, had asked “Do you want to live in a palace, or do you want cheap rent?” when we three roommates had asked him for the umpteenth time that certain repairs be made. Since none of us were swimming in loot—if we had been, there would have been no need for us to be each other’s roommates—we had opted for the cheap rent. Astor City was an expensive place to live, and an affordable residence wasn’t easy to come by. Having it fall down around our ears in slow motion was a trade-off we were willing to accept.
I nodded at Deshaun as I sidestepped his outstretched legs on the walk to my house. He nodded back in acknowledgement. His baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes. He was a very fleshy black guy who carried a lot of his weight in his midsection. When he stood, he looked like a partially melted chocolate bar. He wasn’t standing now. He sat in his usual spot on the short stone and concrete wall that lined the street. His thick legs stretched out in front of him onto the sidewalk. He wore a red, black and yellow Astor City Stars basketball jersey, so oversized that it looked like a tent even on Deshaun’s overweight body. And, just as the two jaywalkers had, Deshaun wore baggy and saggy blue jeans. Jeans dangling at half-mast seemed to be as much of a uniform for young knuckleheads as costumes were for Heroes.
Deshaun was one of several drug dealers operating out of a dilapidated house at the end of the block. The house was owned by a guy named Mitch who had inherited it from his deceased parents. Mr. and Mrs. West, the nice elderly black couple who lived directly across the street from me and had been there since they were dewy-eyed newlyweds, told me Mitch’s parents had been teachers who were pillars of the community. Mitch had followed in their teaching footsteps by teaching guys like Deshaun how to sell drugs. Deshaun and another guy named Fidel took turns dealing on my street. Deshaun had the day shift; Fidel had the night shift and would replace Deshaun in a few hours. Deshaun and Fidel dealt drugs on my street twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in fair weather or foul. Like the U.S. Post Office, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night would stay these poison peddlers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
Unfortunately, I knew all too well from life on our block how the drug dealing process worked: People looking to score would approach either Deshaun or Fidel. They’d talk about what the customer wanted, negotiate a price, and then money would change hands. Deshaun or Fidel would go to one of the places on or around the street where they had their supply stashed—they never kept the drugs on their person to guard against the unlikely event the police hassled them—and then return with the goods. The other guys who worked for Mitch had a similar setup all throughout Tennessee Heights.
Tennessee Heights was Mitch’s territory. Mitch had carved it out as his area of operation long before I had arrived in the neighborhood. From what I’d heard, the guy who ran the Tennessee Heights drug operation before Mitch had objected when Mitch showed up after his parents’ death and started dealing in the area. Those objections took the form of pitched gun battles between Mitch’s forces and the other guy’s. Mitch’s adversary one day disappeared. Word on the street was that he had taken up residence on the bottom of nearby Astor Bay with his insides well ventilated by bullet holes. Since then, Mitch had ruled the Tennessee Heights drug roost. Mitch apparently paid kickbacks to someone higher up in the city’s drug trade hierarchy, but I didn’t know who. Or was it supposed to be whom? I didn’t know that, either. I was a Hero, not a grammar nazi. I did know though that those kickbacks went in part toward paying the cops to keep them off Mitch’s back.
I felt Deshaun’s dark eyes on me as I mounted the short steps of our two-story row house. When it was new ages ago, the house probably had been dark red. Now the house was a faded pink, like a dollhouse that had been handed down through generations of careless children. Black ornamental shutters hung sloppily from the dirty windows, reminding me of fake eyelashes on a drunk old lady.
I pulled my house keys out of my pocket. I still felt Deshaun’s gaze as a tightness between my shoulder blades. His gaze made me uncomfortable, the way being around a dog who’d bite you if he had a chance would make you uncomfortable. Though we acknowledged each other when we saw one another, I didn’t like Deshaun. I didn’t know anything about him other than what he did for a living and who he worked for, but that was enough. I was very anti-drug. Sure, I knew there were otherwise law-abiding people who smoked a little weed after work to unwind or did a bit of coke on the weekends to loosen up with no lasting ill effect. I had also seen far too many others in my short time as a Hero whose lives had been ruined by drugs: the mother who rented her underage daughter to men for the night to score a meth fix; the father who spent his last dollar on crack and zoned out on the drug while his crying children went hungry in the next room; the fresh-faced college co-ed who died with a heroin needle in her arm and her dealer’s penis in her mouth. Those were just a few of the lives I had seen ruined by drugs. Too many. If every illegal drug in the world were piled up and doused with gasoline, I’d be the first one in line with a lit match.
I knew my dislike of Deshaun was mutual. He had offered me a free sample of his wares the first week I had moved in. With a sly smile, he had called it a “housewarming gift.” I had refused it. No dealer could get me hooked with that old “the first one’s free” gambit. I’d been forewarned by watching my fair share of reruns of after school specials as a kid. My refusal had perhaps been more firm and impolite than it should have been; I hadn’t known at the time I’d be seeing the guy almost every day. Deshaun probably thought I was the world’s biggest square. Maybe he was right. You couldn’t pay me enough to put a thief into my body that would steal my brains. Drugs and superpowers did not mix. And, though Deshaun obviously didn’t know I was a Hero, he might have come to sense after we first met, if only subconsciously, that we were on opposite sides of the legal tracks. A wolf probably didn’t have any great affection for a shepherd either, and for much the same reason.
Though neither Isaac nor I made much money, we had taken some of the
money we had saved during our tenure as Amazing Man’s Apprentices and splurged on a state of the art alarm system. The system was linked to the watches Isaac and I wore. They were part timepieces and part communicators, relics from our days as Apprentices that the Old Man (what we called Amazing Man) had let us keep. Since my watch was not going off, I assumed no one had broken into our house. Even so, before slipping my key into the lock of our front door, I used my powers to do a quick scan of the house to double check that all was well. After all, Antonio had an alarm system, and look at what had happened to him. Kinetic had made a lot of enemies in Astor City fighting crime at night. As far as I knew, no one knew Kinetic was little ol’ me, but it was better to be safe than sorry and wind up walking unexpectedly into the welcoming but deadly arms of a vengeful criminal. Besides, attempts had been made on my life before. Not only had Mechano tried to kill me during the Trials, there had been that bomb-planting blonde in D.C., not to mention Iceburn’s multiple assassination attempts. Though Iceburn was in federal Metahuman prison, whoever had hired him was still out there somewhere, presumably still grinding his ax against me. Though no attempts had been made on my life since I moved to Astor City, I never could shake the feeling that the sword of Damocles hung over my head, dangling by a thread, ready to fall and slice me open.
Yeah, I had mastered the art of paranoia. I was thinking of teaching a class in it.
No one was inside the house according to my powers, including Isaac and Bertrand. Well, no one human. My telekinetic touch felt the bodies of several mice scurrying in the walls of the old house. There were also a couple of rats the size of small dogs. The female rat was in the middle of “doing her wifely duty,” as my grandmother might have put it. Despite Nana’s folksy phrase, it seemed to me the male rat was doing most of the work.
I suppressed a shudder as my mind brushed over the frenzied rodents. There’s nothing like a little rat porn to start the evening off right. It was estimated the number of rodents in Astor City exceeded by a large margin the millions of humans who lived here. Big city life was even more glamorous than I’d dreamed.
I went inside, closing the door behind myself, relieved to leave Deshaun’s gaze on the other side of it. I let out a sigh of relief. I had survived another day in the big bad city. Actually, I spoke too soon. Since I intended to go out on patrol tonight, the city would get another chance to have a whack at me.
5
When Isaac and I had first moved into our Tennessee Heights rental and I had come to understand what Deshaun, Fidel, and the rest of Mitch’s drug-slinging crew were up to thanks to Deshaun’s offer of a housewarming gift, I was in a lather to put my Hero suit on and get rid of Mitch’s entire operation root and branch.
“You know what happened when they killed off the cats on Australia’s Macquarie Island?” Isaac had asked me.
“Huh? What the heck does that have to do with anything?”
“In the late twentieth century, the cats were eating too many of the island’s birds. So, they had the bright idea to shoot all the cats. Any idea what happened?”
“I’ve got the feeling that even if I don’t want to know, you’re going to tell me. You’re as bad as Neha, Mr. Know-It-All.”
“That’s Captain Know-It-All. Have you forgotten I’m a superhero? Anyway, when they killed all the cats, they solved the problem of too many birds being killed all right. But they inadvertently caused a new problem. Little did they realize the cats had been keeping the island’s rabbit population under control. Without the cats, the rabbits bred like . . . well, like rabbits, with predictable results. Pretty soon the rabbits were eating everything in sight and causing an ecological disaster.”
“And the moral of the story is what? That rabbits like to get it on? No duh. You know I grew up on a farm, right? You’re trying to teach Catholicism to the Pope. Let’s go find an Eskimo and you can tell him all about snow.”
“If I’m Captain Know-It-All, you’re Offensive Lad. It’s Inuit, not Eskimo. Try to show some cultural sensitivity, you redneck cracker. Next you’ll be calling me the N-word.”
“How come you get to call me names, but if I returned the favor, it would trigger a second Civil War?”
Isaac had smiled smugly. “Reparations. You got years of my people’s free labor. I get this.”
“Your people?” I snorted. “Your ancestors are from Jamaica, not the Deep South. You’re no more descended from slaves than I am.”
Isaac had put his hand over his heart. “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you also do to me,” he intoned solemnly. “I learned that from the Bible. Or maybe it was a fortune cookie. I forget. Anyway, we seem to be diverging from the original topic. What were we talking about?”
“The unfairness of reverse racism?”
“Before that. I remember now. We were talking about Australia. The moral of the Australia story is that you shouldn’t remove a perceived problem without carefully studying the ecology first. Crime has an ecology just like nature does. We just moved into the neighborhood. Before we blindly bull ahead, let’s first make sure taking Mitch and his minions out won’t mean he’ll get replaced with an equal or worse problem.”
Literally the next morning after that conversation, I stood on the front stoop of the house, locking up and about to walk to the subway to go to work. I saw a kid on a bike slowly peddle down the street. He couldn’t have been any older than thirteen. Long, lean and lanky, he was big for his age. He had a mini-Afro with a pick peeking out of the top of it. He peered carefully into each parked car as he leisurely pedaled by. His manner reminded me of a patient cat waiting to pounce on a careless mouse. I pretended to fumble with my keys so I could stay on the porch and watch him. Even without Heroic training, I would have known the kid was up to no good.
He stopped almost in front of our house, leaning on his bike next to the car owned by my neighbor Saul. Saul was a public school teacher married to another teacher. Their row house shared a wall with ours. The kid pulled a metal rod off his bike. He smashed the rear window of Saul’s car. He stuck his hand inside the car, pulling out a laptop that Saul had stupidly left there.
Before pedaling off with the computer tucked under his arm, the kid looked up and locked eyes with me. His unashamed and unafraid eyes held a challenge, as if to say, “What do you think you’re gonna do, white boy?”
If he only knew.
I was about to give the kid’s bike a discreet sideways push with my powers to send him sprawling when my intervention was made unnecessary. Deshaun was on drug slinging duty that morning, as he was every morning. As the kid approached where Deshaun sat, Deshaun hauled to his feet and took a couple of casual steps forward between two parked cars. Deshaun grabbed Saul’s laptop from the crook of the kid’s arm as he pedaled past, simultaneously yanking hard on the kid’s elbow with his other beefy hand.
The bike went one way and the kid went the other. The kid collided with a loud thump into the back of a parked car. He slid down and sprawled on the ground, yelling bloody murder all the while.
Deshaun looked down at the kid dispassionately. He told the kid to shut up as he’d wake up the entire neighborhood. When the kid didn’t, Deshaun kicked him in the ribs a couple of times. The kicks didn’t appear to come from a place of anger. Deshaun’s manner was more like a doctor administering a needle to a patient who needed a vaccine.
With one arm, Deshaun dragged the kid off the ground. The kid struggled. Deshaun let go of him long enough to smack the back of his head with an open palm a few times until the kid stopped squirming. With Saul’s computer in one big hand and the back of the kid’s neck in the other, Deshaun then frog-marched the kid down the sidewalk and up the short stairs to Saul’s porch. They were now on the same level as I was and about ten feet away. The side of the kid’s face was already beginning to swell from where he had slammed into the parked car.
Deshaun nodded at me in brief acknowledgement. He pounded on Saul’s door with his foot. Since it didn’t look
like I needed to intervene, I just stood there and gawked. It was like watching a play.
After a few moments, Saul opened the door. He was a Hispanic guy a few years older than I. His surprise at the tableau in front of him was evident on his brown face. The surprise increased when Deshaun thrust the computer into Saul’s hands.
“This here’s Mr. Saul. Tell him what you did,” Deshaun rumbled at the kid.
“I ain’t do shit,” the kid said sullenly.
Another meaty slap to the back of the head. The kid cried out and recoiled from the blow, only to be jerked upright again by Deshaun’s hand, which had quickly resumed its place around the back of his neck.
“Mind your fucking language,” Deshaun said. “Show some respect when talking to your elders. Now again, tell Mr. Saul what you did.”
The kid said, “I found that computer on the street under the busted window of a car. Picked it up and was gonna turn it into lost and found with the cops.”
That tall tale elicited more smacks from Deshaun and more howls from the kid. Saul glanced at me, disbelief at what he was witnessing evident on his face. Finally, the actual story of what the kid had done was loosen by Deshaun’s blows. The truth spilled out of the kid’s mouth like a waterfall.
“Tell him you’re sorry, and that it won’t happen again,” Deshaun said after the kid finished.
“I’m awful sorry Mr. Saul. I won’t do it again. Promise.” The kid had been smacked so many times I believed that he actually was sorry.
Saul went out to his car to assess the damage. Meanwhile, Deshaun and the kid spoke for a few moments at the foot of Saul’s stairs. I lingered, not even trying to pretend that I wasn’t listening in. It’s only eavesdropping and therefore rude if people don’t know you’re listening. I think I read that in an etiquette book somewhere.
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