Omega Superhero Box Set

by Darius Brasher

  And despite his persona, Truman was still a Hero. As I knew all too well, the Guild didn’t hand out a Hero’s license to just anybody.

  There seemed to be no sense in further denials. “You won’t tell anyone?” I asked. Truman looked hurt at the suggestion.

  “Of course not. Snitches get stitches. Besides, it’s against the law to reveal the secret identity of a licensed Hero. I have a well-deserved reputation for following the law. It’s almost a fetish. ‘Lord the Law-Abiding’ is what they call me.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s against the law to shoot a gun at somebody.”

  “Well, you’ve got me there. I follow the law, but I’m not a fanatic about it.” Truman melted the block of ice surrounding his gun, making the water flow back into the bowl on his desk like it was a slithering snake. After a few seconds, there wasn’t so much as a damp spot on his desk. He put the gun back into his drawer, and closed it.

  “What do you do when your water bowl isn’t handy?” I asked.

  “I improvise.” His eyes flicked up to the water-stained tiles of his ceiling. “Before I started keeping water on my desk, I had to bust open the water pipes in the ceiling a few times. My landlord was less than pleased.” He put his forearms on top of his desk and clasped his hands. “So now that I know who you are, are you going to tell me what’s really going on with this Antonio Ricci character? Or are you still going to leave in a huff? If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff. I wish I could take credit for the wordplay, but I borrowed it from Groucho Marx. If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.”

  I hesitated. Though I was still in no mood to appreciate his banter, I was warming up to Truman. If he could figure out I was Kinetic without breaking a sweat, surely he could find Antonio for me.

  “Will you keep everything I tell you a secret?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s not like there’s Hero-private detective privilege the way there’s attorney-client privilege or priest-penitent privilege, but I can tell you I won’t be running my mouth about what you tell me. A detective who goes around repeating what a potential client tells him soon has no clients, potential or otherwise.”

  That settled it. I walked back over to Truman’s desk, using my powers to pick the chair I had knocked over back up. I sat down again. I told him everything I knew about Hannah and Antonio. I started with how I had suspected Hannah was a victim of abuse when we first met, included my and Isaac’s encounter with Antonio in his apartment, and ended with how I had discovered Hannah’s body and had been searching for Antonio ever since. Truman listened intently, interrupting only to ask a few clarifying questions. Honestly, it felt good to talk about all this with someone other than Isaac. It seemed these days that I spent a lot of time keeping secrets from people: from Isaac, I kept the truth of how we had both passed the Trials and how I knew it was Mechano who had attacked me during them; from Bertrand, I kept the truth of what Isaac and I spent our nights doing; and, I kept from everyone the fact that I was Kinetic. It was a nice change of pace to tell someone the unvarnished truth without evasions or outright lying.

  “Now I understand why you’ve got such a bee in your bonnet over this Mad Dog character,” Truman said when I had finished. “You feel guilty about Hannah’s murder because you think you triggered it by bracing Antonio in his place.”

  “Don’t you think I did?”

  “Maybe. Hannah being killed shortly after you confronted Mad Dog is a coincidence that can’t be ignored. But assuming you’re right that he killed her, it’s not like you forced him to do it. We’re all responsible for our own actions. If I leave my gun out, that doesn’t mean you have to pick it up and shoot someone with it.”

  “But if I did, wouldn’t you feel responsible for stupidly leaving your gun out where I could grab it?”

  “A fair point,” Truman said. “So now that all your cards are on the table, I’ll ask you the same question from before: If you hire me to find Antonio and if I do indeed find him, what are you planning to do with him? And don’t tell me again you’re just going to have a chat with him. I didn’t believe you the first time you told me that tall tale, and I certainly won’t believe you now.”

  I was on an honesty roll, and I wasn’t about to stop now. Having someone I could come clean with felt cathartic. “I honestly don’t know. I figured I’d find him first, and then cross that bridge when I got to it.”

  Truman studied my face. For a moment, he looked uncharacteristically serious.

  “You want some free advice from an old hand at this Hero business? Don’t let anger guide you. It clouds your judgment and makes you do things you shouldn’t. We’re too powerful to let our emotions sway our decision-making. Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else. You usually only wind up burning yourself.”

  “That’s quite poetic. Who said that?”

  Like a spring shower, Truman’s seriousness was gone as quickly as it had come. “Me. Just now. Weren’t you listening?” Disbelief must have been on my face because he rolled his eyes. “Fine. You’re too young to be this cynical about what your elders tell you. It’s a Buddhist saying.”

  My anger, partly toward Antonio and partly toward myself, was a dull ache in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t want it to go away. I wanted it to fuel me until the job was done. “Well I’m not Buddhist.”

  “And I’m not an electrician. That doesn’t prevent me from using a light switch. You don’t have to be something to use the fruits of that something.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not looking for philosophy or for moral guidance. I’m looking for Antonio. Are you going to help me or not?”

  “Now that you’re telling me the truth, yes. Assuming you can pay my fee, of course.” He told me how much he charged and how much of a retainer he would need for him to begin work. I gulped. Paying him would take a healthy bite out of the money I had saved. I shooed the dismay away as soon as I felt it. I would empty my bank account completely out if that meant Antonio was brought to justice.

  I pulled out my checkbook and wrote Truman a check. As I wrote out the dollar amount, it occurred to me that working for a newspaper and being a Hero on the side was a sure path to the poorhouse. Being a Heroic private detective was where the money was.

  I put the completed check down on Trump’s desk and slid it forward toward him. Before taking my fingers off it, I realized I was letting a golden opportunity to kill two birds with one stone pass me by. The Sentinels had hired Truman a few years ago to investigate Avatar’s murder. Maybe he could tell me something about them and Mechano that would help me decide what to do about Mechano’s attempts on my life.

  I pulled my check back. Truman looked at me with amusement.

  “Firing me already?” he said. “You wouldn’t be the first client to do it, but you’re certainly the fastest.”

  “I may need to hire you for more than just this Mad Dog thing. Rumor has it that you were offered a membership on the Sentinels after you solved the mystery of Avatar’s murder. Is that true?”

  “It is. And they took their sweet time about it too. You’d think they would have offered me a spot the moment I passed the Trials. Instead, it was over a decade before they got around to inviting me. They were probably afraid I’d upstage them.”

  I ignored most of what he had said. If I continued to spend time around Truman, I realized I would have to do that a lot.

  “And yet you turned them down.” As far as I knew, Truman was the only person to ever have turned down a membership offer from the Sentinels. A Hero turning down an offer from the Sentinels was like a judge turning down a spot on the United States Supreme Court.

  “And give up all this?” Truman said, gesturing expansively at his run-down office. I wondered what Truman spent his considerable fees on. It certainly wasn’t his decor. “Why are you asking about the Sentinels?”

  “Because Antonio Ricci isn’t the only person in this city who’s a killer.” I told him a
bout Mechano’s attempts on my life during the Trials and how I needed to find out if he was also connected to my father’s death.

  And do you know what the strangest thing was about me telling Truman that a member of the world’s greatest team of Heroes had tried to kill me?

  He wasn’t even surprised.

  12

  “I’ve been quite the busy beaver the past couple of days,” Truman said. He was behind the wheel of his car, driving us to someone he said could help me figure out what Mechano had against me. The city’s night lights flicked by as Truman drove. Though it was almost midnight, I was well-rested. I had caught up on some much needed sleep since I’d turned locating Antonio over to Truman.

  “I should hope so. I’m certainly paying you enough.” Between paying Truman to look for Antonio and to help me untangle why Mechano had tried to kill me, my savings had taken a major hit. We drove through a traffic light. The green lights briefly illuminated Truman’s clothing: black jeans, a button-down untucked blue and white dress shirt, and brown cowboy boots. “I thought PIs wore fedoras and trench coats. And whoever heard of a detective tooling around in a Nissan Altima?”

  “You watch too many old movies. I don’t drink, call women dames, or describe their legs as gams, either.”

  “One by one, all my cherished illusions are being shattered.”

  He shrugged. “Welcome to adulthood. Now stop interrupting while your elders are talking about the fruits of their labor. I looked into Antonio’s background, hoping it would give me a clue as to where he disappeared to. One thing I found out is that if your boy Antonio isn’t in the running for a Bad Guy of the Decade award, he should be.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “When he was eighteen, he went to prison for a few years for arson and possession with intent to distribute cocaine and PCP. He has a juvie record too, but of course those records are sealed. I wonder what kinds of shenanigans he got into when he was a kid. Setting little girl’s pigtails on fire, maybe. Anyway, him going to prison at eighteen apparently is where he got hooked up with the Espositos.” Truman shook his head. “The problem with our prison system is that people enter it with a bachelor’s degree in crime, and often graduate with a master’s or a PhD. Antonio was no different. Him hooking up with the Esposito crime family transformed him from a young knucklehead who slung a little dope and recreationally set fires into an adult douchebag who breaks legs and gouges eyes. Over the years since he left prison, he’s been arrested at various times for assault, battery, arson, sexual assault, kidnapping, animal cruelty, obstruction of justice, and murder. His rap sheet is as long as Santa’s Christmas list, but it’s all naughty, no nice.”

  “He was arrested all those times, but not convicted?”

  “Not once since he started work for the Espositos. His cases never even went to trial. With each arrest, the authorities either dropped the charges because of lack of sufficient evidence or the people who witnessed Antonio’s crimes recanted their initial stories, refused to testify at trial, or turned up dead under suspicious circumstances. The Esposito crime family protects its own, especially when one of its soldiers is operating on its behalf, which apparently Antonio was doing in most of the instances he was arrested. The cops and the assistant State’s Attorneys I spoke to said there was definitely the invisible hand of the Esposito family at work in each instance the evidence against Antonio evaporated. For example, one of those murders Antonio was arrested for a couple of years ago was that of a Maryland judge. Judge Blake. The judge was scheduled to preside over the trial of one of the Esposito family’s top lieutenants. The Espositos were looking to tip the scales of justice in their favor a bit by influencing Judge Black. The problem was, unlike some of our other distinguished jurists, Judge Blake wasn’t already in the pocket of the Espositos or any of their allies. And he refused all of the Espositos’ subtle and not-so-subtle attempts to bribe him. His personal life was as clean as a hound’s tooth, so he wasn’t susceptible to blackmail either.

  “Since the carrots hadn’t worked, the Espositos tried the stick. Literally. Judge Blake was beaten to death in his home three days before the trial was scheduled to start. They beat his wife too, but were careless and didn’t finish the job. She survived and, from her hospital bed using a photographic lineup, fingered Antonio and another known Esposito enforcer as her husband’s murderers.”

  Hannah’s death had erased any guilt I had been nursing over beating Antonio; what Truman said made me wish I had beaten him more. “So why isn’t Antonio in prison?”

  “Even though the judge’s wife and their two elementary aged kids were placed in protective custody, the Esposito family must’ve gotten to the wife somehow. Maybe they threatened her kids. Maybe they promised to set her and her kids up for life if she forgot what she saw. A judge doesn’t make very much money, you know, not if he’s honest like Judge Blake was. Regardless of why, a couple of weeks after she implicated Antonio and his buddy, Mrs. Blake changed her story. She said those two hadn’t killed her husband after all. She said she had been in so much pain from her injuries and so distraught over the loss of her husband that she picked Antonio and the other guy out of the lineup by accident. Everybody knew she was lying, but the cops and the prosecutor couldn’t get her to admit it and go back to her original story. That, combined with the fact six people came forward and swore up and down they saw Antonio and his buddy in a bar watching the Astor City Stars get their butts stomped at the time the judge was beaten to death meant there was no way the state would be able to get a conviction. So, the charges were dropped and Antonio and the other guy went free.”

  I felt my jaw clench. “That’s not going to happen this time. I’m not going to let Antonio walk away scot-free from Hannah’s death.”

  “Though I understand the sentiment, you might not have much of a choice. I also spoke to the detective in charge of the investigation of Hannah’s death. Other than that 911 call you made which pointed the finger at Antonio, they have exactly zero leads on who killed Hannah. No one in her building saw anyone coming or going from her unit around the time of her death, nor did they hear anything. There’s also no forensic evidence at the scene which points toward Antonio. Like I said, it appears that Antonio has gotten his PhD in crime. Practice makes perfect, I guess.”

  “No forensic evidence,” I scoffed in disbelief. “How about that giant hole in Hannah’s chest?”

  “Yeah, but there’s no proof that Antonio did that. You say he has the power to spit balls of energy, but there’s no evidence that Antonio can do that. I checked with the Guild. Antonio is not registered as a Metahuman, energy-spitting or otherwise.”

  “A murderous mob enforcer isn’t a stickler for following the mandates of the Hero Act?” I said sarcastically. “I’m shocked. It doesn’t matter, though. If the authorities find Antonio, they can test him for the Metahuman gene and discover his powers. That’s how the USDMA determined I was telekinetic when I went to register as a Meta. They’ll realize Antonio is talking and eating out of the murder weapon.”

  Truman shook his head. “To draw his blood without his consent, they’ll need a court order. To get said court order, they’ll need probable cause connecting Antonio to the crime scene. Like I said before, there isn’t any. On top of all that, how much do you want to bet that when I find Antonio and ask him where he was when Hannah was killed, people will come out of the woodwork to swear on a stack of Bibles he was at church with them, praying to the baby Jesus and thinking pious thoughts?”

  I felt like punching something. “What you’re saying is that even if you find Antonio and I turn him over to the cops, he’s likely to go free. Again.”

  “The way things look right now, yes.”

  The car was silent for a while as I chewed that over. Despite my anger and frustration, it was impossible to not notice that Truman was driving us into Dog Cellar, one of the city’s worst neighborhoods. Run-down and boarded-up buildings slowly collapsing in on themselves had taken the pl
ace of well-lit and thriving edifices.

  “How do you stand it?” I asked.

  “How do I stand what?”

  “This city. Being a Hero. How dirty and sordid it all is. I used to think being a Hero was a pretty simple matter: Find the bad guy. Punch the bad guy in the face. Take the bad guy to the cops. Thinking about how it really all works makes me want to take a bath.”

  Truman thought about that for a minute.

  “It’s not just this city, nor is it just being a Hero. It’s the world. You just didn’t realize it when you were young and in a small town because you were insulated from it all by age and by geography.”

  I felt my jaw tighten in frustration. “How a smart, educated women like Hannah could be with an animal like Antonio still boggles my mind.”

  Truman shrugged. “Hybristophilia,” he said.

  “Was that a word or a sneeze?”

  That got a slight smile out of Truman. “The former. It refers to the concept that a lot of people get off on being with dangerous folks. If that describes your friend Hannah, she’s hardly alone. A Rogue I helped put away a few years back named the Pied Piper was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people. Despite that—or probably because of it—he got more fan mail than a boy band when I put him behind bars. The gallery of the courthouse during his trial was full of so many adoring women, it looked like a teenaged boy’s wet dream come true. You’d think they would’ve been there to see me. I am an intrepid Hero, after all.

  “You’d think. There’s no accounting for taste.”