“Shit on toast,” Jake said. “We’re fucked.”

“Are you aware of what this means?”

“That I keep driving?”

“Not just tha-, No, turn around and get away from the house, you foolish cretin! If you drive past, someone’s going to see us, and even if we aren’t arrested today it may come back to bite us later! I mean something’s happened, and we need to go to the fallback position Jane discussed with us at the beginning in case something went wrong!”

“Well, I sure as shi-sugar think this counts,” Mitch grumbled as he turned the wheel, found a driveway a few tens of yards from the house and made a relaxed, unobtrusive three point turn.

“Where was that fallback point again?” Mitch asked.

We were silent.

“Shit.” said Jake.

#

ICARUS

My flight had ended pretty much after I’d dropped those distracting bombs. I’d landed and folded my wings up into what I’d hoped was an inconspicuous looking backpack as I started hiking back to the house. I’d landed in the midst of a bunch of shut-down warehouses that was about a three-mile-and-change hike through some rather desolate and non-descript, semi-urban land. The kind of place people drive to and through every day to and from work, and don’t give a second thought to. Perfect to make a clean, nondescript getaway on foot.

I know it sounds more than a little silly, but it’s true. People don’t quite ‘get’ just how easy it is to get nabbed in a car nowadays; cops are trained in all these little tricks on how to take you down in a car chase, from T-boning you by surprise to bumping a corner of your car and making you spin out. If you’re in a car and the cops go after you, you might as well give it up there, because those chase scenes only end well for guys like you and me in the movies. In real life? Whatever they were chasing you for, running could add another twenty years or more worth of charges to, depending on how crowded the place you're running is at the moment.

So, Miguel and I were hoofing it back to the house from our spots. Mine had been dropped about ten minutes before, when Mitch and company were supposed to be barrelling out of the place with a few hundred mil in jewelry in the back.

I was a little doubtful about it, too, to be honest. But Jane had made the plan, and she’d never steered us wrong yet. It turned out she was right, at least this time. The rockets and glowy-smoke bombs had pulled the cops there at full speed, and they’d whizzed by an older man just minding his business and shuffling along the road first in an industrial area, then a run-down residential one. I could’ve been one of a thousand people walking alone at night, getting a beer from the corner store, on my way home from some joe-job that I couldn’t afford a car to take me to-and-from, or just an old guy out for a stroll on a relatively mild night.

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Police cars screamed by me one after the other. I kept my head down, raising it just enough to look like anyone else would in such a situation: mildly interested. And I kept doing that and blending into the paintwork of the world until I got to the house.

And the house had a great, big hole blown in it. And lots of yellow tape, and even more cop cars.

Fuck.

I kept walking, moving amongst the local homeowners, hoping no one was going to point me out as someone who’d lived there.

Keep walking. It was gonna be a long walk. She’d planned for this, but none of us actually thought we were gonna hafta deal with this at all. Still, I knew it was gonna mean a lot more walking, and that backpack was starting to get a little heavy, even though the wingsuit was lighter weight than anything I’d ever used back in the 30s through to the end of the 60s.

Like I said, there was a crowd of local homeowners milling around, and I took my place among them for about thirty seconds or so. Then I kept walking. When I was about fifty feet away, I popped a blue rock. It only took about a minute for the thing to start doing its work, and I was extra glad I did. After I felt the stuff flow through me, I heard someone yelling behind me. Someone saying I was one of the old guys in the house. A cop swooped over, saw I wasn’t old, not any more at least, looked at my fake I.D. and left me alone.

I kept walking. No money in my pockets. No way to get a cab or even a bus for at least a few miles. And no way was I going to be enough of a schmuck to put on the suit when there were going to be cops looking around for at least three, maybe four major-looking crime scenes, one of them just a couple of minutes behind me by car.

Yeah, a long walk, a long night.

#

“Where the hell is his place again?”

Mitchell was complaining, again. I wondered for perhaps the ten-thousandth time whatever it was that a capable, attractive woman like Jane had seen in a silly fellow like himself when she had a fine, masculine, and far more intelligent specimen such as myself to choose from on the team for a romantic partner. There’s no real accounting for taste, one can suppose.

“Stop here,” I said, “at the phone booth. What was the name of it again?”

“Well, it wasn’t ‘Black Tiger’s Gym.’”

Jake again. And, once again, he was stating the obvious in such a way that he makes everyone in the room willing to punch him and break one of his skinny little bones just to make a point and relieve stress.

Jake said, “It was something Spanish, wasn’t it? Monty, you’re Italian. That’s a lot like Spanish, in’nt it?”

“Only in the way a high British nobleman’s accent would bear the faintest similarity to the speech of some redneck in the Okefenokee swamps of the deep South...”

“Whatever, don’t care. What’s ‘Black Tiger’ in Italian?”

I thought for a moment. “Tigre, Nera” I said, pronouncing each syllable and phoneme with as much finality as I could.

“Right, look,” said Mitchell, “I’ll stop at the phone booth. Jake, hop out and look through, see if you can find an address in the phone book in the place.”

“Why me?”

“ ‘Cause I’m drivin’, Monty’s translatin’, and all you’re doin’ is playin’ bump-on-a-log with yer thumb up that skinny ass of yers. Now move! Every minute we keep this junk in the van we’re rolling the gawl-darned dice, and I wanna get money in our pockets a’fore we get snake-eyes. Now move!”

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TO BE CONTINUED...