“I’ll give you an apology, you skinny little shit,” Mitch mumbled,just loud enough for both Jake and Monty to hear, “attached to the boot I’m gonna put up your skinny little con-man’s ass!”
“Mitch, back off! You- ah, sleep! Dammit…”
“That ain’t gonna work when I’m this pissed atcha! Now gimme that page so we can get-a-goin’ or so help me I’m a gonna-”
“What seems to be the problem, gentlemen?”
The voice wasn’t Monty’s. It wasn’t Mitch’s or Jake’s either. It belonged to a cop standing in front of the van, his hands in a relaxed but ready position near his belt and holsters.
Jake smiled, and opened his mouth to speak.
“Shit,” said Mitch, cutting him off.
****
“YOU DID WHAT?”
The scream roared and echoed throughout the meeting hall. Roosevelt the cook and his wife heard it two floors down in the kitchen. Zeb the mechanic in the hangar heard it while he was tuning up one of the four engines of the Mecha-man’s fantastic vehicles.
And in the meeting hall itself, Jason Primo, aka Prime, heavily rumored bastard son of The One had screamed so loud that the black hair strands of Henry ‘The Dark’ Chu had fluttered just slightly.
“I made a citizen’s arrest,” Henry said, his face utterly calm though he was somewhat worried for the first time in a long, long time. He realized in that moment how much his fearlessness had come from knowing that if he got into something he genuinely could not handle, Jason with his strength and Neema with her whole tricked-out gladiator- theme would be there to bail him out.
But now, Jason was standing up at the oval table, glaring at him. His face was red, his teeth were visible, and his blue eyes looked like they were ready to shoot out of his head and pin Henry to the wall.
And Neela, Peter, and a couple of second-stringers were at the table, all either looking blank-faced or, in Pete’s case, smirking as he downed his fourth hamburger, and glad they weren’t Henry right now. Henry pretended to be bored- blast, but this felt worse than prep school- but he was feeling ten kinds of sick inside.
“A citizen’s arrest? A CITIZEN’S ARREST?Are you fucking nuts? Pete, wipe your lunch off your face, and remind this idiot what a citizen’s arrest is.”
Peter ‘The Streak’ put down his food as Jason turned his back to look out the window. Peter grabbed and opened a thick book near him on the table and sped his finger through the pages, landing at a spot on the left page roughing in the middle of the book.
“Ahem,” Peter said with an exaggerated professor voice, “In certain situations, private individuals have the power to make an arrest without a warrant. These types of arrests, known as citizens' arrests, occur when ordinary people either detain criminals themselves or direct police officers to detain a criminal.”
“See?” Henry said. “Quit getting your green undies in a twist, Jason. The old lady pointed a gun at me, unprovoked.”
“Oh, wait, Henry, there’s more,” Peter said, taking a quick bite to swallow of his fifth and last burger on his plate. “Mmm, now, uh, ‘while arrests by private citizens are subject to fewer constitutional requirements than an arrest by law enforcement officers, there are still rules that apply. Failure to abide by these rules can result in civil and criminal liability for the arresting individual. . . uh, If a person doesn't comply with the law's requirements when making the arrest, the arrestee could allege a number of claims in a personal injury lawsuit, including wrongful death, false imprisonment, assault, and battery.’ ”
“That’s the problem, moron!” Jason roared. “You were on her property, no warrant, and when she told you to leave, you hit her with the knockout gas and brought her here! What the fuck were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that I was going to detain her and make her talk. She’s a lot more than a little old lady, you know.”
“I know exactly who she is! She’s a civilian, and a fucking celebrity! You took a high-profile target and locked her up, against her will, in our base, after you gassed her! Do you have any idea what the ACLU can do to us with this? Wrongful imprisonment, battery with the gassing charge- this isn’t some frat house that’ll lose its letters, Henry! We could get shut down, heroes might get outlawed- you could go to fucking prison for decades- not that I give a damn about that right now! But were you thinking about that?”
“I can make her afraid to-”
“Oh, Henry, put a fucking sock in it! You only scare fifteen year old boys who couldn’t get a date if their lives depended on it. You can’t hold her by the ankle and dangle her off a building. She’s not a baby-snatcher! She’s a- what they hell did she do, again?”
“I think she was involved in the armored car robbery yesterda-”
“You think? You think? Henry, you committed about five major felonies less than two hours ago, because you think she might have been involved? You-you know what? Fuck it. Get your shit out’ve your room, and get the hell off my base. You’re done. I’m turning her loose, and turning you in. This is too far.”
“You’re not going to turn me in,” Henry said quietly.
“The hell I’m not!” Jason said. “What, you think this is some TV show? That we’ll lose viewers if you go to the joint? No, shithead, this is the Justice Team, this is my HQ, and I sure as hell am gonna turn your sorry, pretentious, rich-boy ass in. What’s not gonna happen is you suddenly going off and poisoning me, or zapping me with a secret- I dunno, crazy-ass laser or something, just because I’ve threatened you! Get your shit outta here, and wait for the police to drop by at your giant-ass mansion on the outskirts of town. Or run. I don’t care. Somebody get me a phone.”
Nobody moved. Henry stayed still. His face was quiet and passive. Jason’s went from red to deep crimson.
“Didn’t you hear me? Get, the, fuck, OUT!”
“What if I can fix this?”
“Henry,” Peter said, trying to push his empty burger plate away quietly, “I don’t think we’re at a point where we could-”
“You’re going to give her money.” It was Neela. She’d spoken with the rich African accent every other man at the table had fallen for on the first day she walked onto the base.
Now Henry did smile, and he looked at Neela with a grin that was supposed to make him look both rakish and wise.
To Neela, he only looked like a bigger fool than she’d already judged him to be.
“You forget,” Henry said, “all of you, forget just what kind of resources I have at my disposal. I can-”
“Dear God in Heaven and Saint Peter in chains,” said Jason, “you’re gonna offer her a fucking bribe? After all this?”
“Actually, Jason,” Peter again, only this time he was wolfing down a plate of fries, and doing so quickly enough that he was able to say a word between each bite without missing a beat of the sentence. “Henry may finally be onto something that’ll work. Settling out of court is a concept that has a long, if not exactly distinguished history. Roosevelt?” his finger hit the button next to his hand, “Those were great. Could you bring me four more? Thanks. Anyway,” he said, releasing the button and turning his attention back to everyone else, “folks, I think it’s both just and workable if Henry buys her off. He’s got the cash, he’s got a good reason to do it, and all he has to do is convince an old lady that she’ll get more out’ve accepting the deal than she would dragging him into court. Sounds like a thumbs-up for me.”
Jason rubbed his eyes with his right hand for a few seconds, sighed deeply and looked at the rest of them with his hands on his hips. “What do you guys think?” he said.
“If I could, ah, contribute, gentlemen?” It was Roosevelt, carrying a special tray that could hold four plates of food at once. The lights of the room shone off his dark, bald head and glistened on his trim mustache. “I’ll admit, Mister Peter’s got the law degree, while I barely managed my G.E.D.. But it seems like Mister Henry here is the one who stepped in it, so he oughta be the one who cleans off the shoes. The imprisoned lady herself is quite cordial, and though I’ve only talked to her a mite when serving her meals, I get the impression she’s had a hard life. People with a hard life often take to hard cash, and I seriously think she could be swayed by a real sincere ‘I’m sorry’ and an offer that would make her comfortable for the remainder of her days.”
They were all quiet for a moment.
“Fine,” Jason said, throwing up his hands. “Go do it, Henry. Buy her off, get her out of here. But you’re still out until further notice. You got that?”
“Of course,” Henry said, and left the room with a sweep of his black cape.
“Put your cowl on first, remember!” Jason shouted. He looked down the hall for a few seconds, and then sat at the table with his head in his hands.
“Hey, uh, Prime-O?” Peter said, his voice trying to sound upbeat, “Buddy? When’s the last time you had a vacation?”
#
Robert took the large envelope from the UPS man, thanked him for it, and waved goodbye as he walked back to his van. As the young fellow drove off, he turned and went back into the house, shut the door, locked it, and set the perimeter security to its highest setting. If anything tried to get into the house now without his voice, retina or thumbprint giving permission, the intruder would get roughly 80,000 volts of electricity and a flood of painful electric screeches aimed directly at his ears, while an automatic 911 call would scramble the local tac-squad. They’d gotten here in only four minutes on their last drill. Sharp kids, those. Made Bea feel safe even in her darkest moments of fear.
Plus, Robby would grab the Desert Eagle hand-cannon that would pop out of the wall, and put a hole the size of two, man-sized fists into anything that managed to actually get through the titanium-reinforced door and walls, or unbreakable bullet proof plexiglass windows, or the inch-thick steel roofing that he’d has this place built with during its construction. Calamity Jane wasn’t the only one who figured out how to profit from merchandising her image, after all. And the cartoons, toys and movies based on his time as The Champion were still going strong.
He gripped a corner of the envelope, giving it a decisive tug. There was a tab he ought to have pulled to open it easier, but he didn’t bother. Even at seventy-one, with a grown-up adopted daughter and grandchild, he liked to know that he still could do things the hard way if he had to.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Once open he pulled out the envelope’s content and dropped it, empty, onto the nightstand. There was a second envelope inside the first; it had also been torn open where Robby had pulled on it. It spilled out of the larger envelope, proclaiming to the world is large, capital block letters that it was ROBERT CHELMSFORD. CLEARANCE: SI, NOFORN, ORCON.
Robert didn’t bother looking at the clearance levels, having lost his taste for all the cloak-and-dagger acronyms a long time ago. He held a sheaf of papers in his hand, several of them yellowed with age. It was the top piece of paper that held his interest now, however.
ROBERT CHELMSFORD [Ret.]
SAI TASK FORCE BRAVO
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
Robert,
Good to hear from you, old buddy. Sometime I’d like to hear from you even more for a beer-and-poker night instead of cashing in a favor.
Here are all the files we have on the folks you listed. As you can tell by the wording at the top, information on these guys has moved ‘way lower on the classification totem pole. They were all at or near ‘Top Secret’ back in the forties during the war, but now they’re down to ‘Special Intelligence,’ a fancy way of saying ‘who-gives-a-damn,’ and NOFORN, as if the Russkies would care about a bunch of seventy-somethings running around in tights. Ah, well. The ORCON designation means that I have a small piece of paper at the back of my desk saying that I know you have this, but again, it’s not any kind of big deal.
As you can see, the only ones that could possibly make trouble for you or Bea would be Hanging Judge, and maybe Calamity Jane, assuming she can still shoot straight. Possibly the Monocle-guy; he hasn’t stopped trying to sell the military his patent for his eye-lasers, even though they’ve had better stuff from the aliens for about forty years now [oops- did I let the cat out of the bag? Nah. Not really.]
I hope this was what you were looking for. You were good to me when I was starting out, Rob. You seriously took me under your wing when I was a scared new guy, and I appreciate that. I always thought the way they forced you out of the Company was bullshit, and now I don’t care who sees me say that in print, since I’m about three months shy of retirement myself. I’m glad you found more satisfaction on the force. And I’m glad for the success you and Bea had with the toys and comics angle as well. My grandchild still loves hearing stories about how grandpa blasted his way out of a Soviet Spy ring with The Champion by his side.
You take care of yourself, old friend. Expect a call from me once I am no longer chained to my desk.
Your friend always,
Rexford ‘Rex’ McAllister
NSA
Robby read the letter and smiled. After a minute or so of being lost in memory, his legs began to ache and he sat down. He looked around his house, bought with the earnings of what had become a small entertainment empire, vigorously in competition with the Calamity Jane line for decades now.
But Robby felt he’d won in any case; in terms of actual dollars, Jane had more. But she’d had to do a lot of helming that particular ship, pulling eighteen and twenty hour days to do it. Robby’d had the good fortune of a couple of hungry twenty-something kids coming to him and Bea, asking only for a few signatures and giving the promise of wealth.
Unlike most stories that began this way, the young guys hadn’t asked for any money, nothing beyond Robby and Bea’s signatures and the occasional appearance at a shareholder’s meeting or a comic-book convention. And the money’d rolled in.
Robby had kept it a secret at first; he actually liked being a cop and they told him he did it well. It wasn’t ‘til he drove into his last day of work in a limo that folks began to understand just what kind of money the toy biz could generate. From then on, they’d lived on easy street, and life had been smooth; smoother than it went for most retirees, anyway.
He flipped through the files, hoping for a sign or two of exactly whatever it was that may have set off Bea’s radar. Or maybe he could find enough to keep her calm, like they all relocated to sunny beaches in Santo Domingo, or something.
No. It didn’t.
It looked like they were all still stateside.
Okay- not the worst. The freezer-guy was a high-school science teacher, the hypnotizing little freak was in a carnival, the boxer-thief was running a gym- and most of them had a state or two between them. Not the kind of setup that made for any kind of reunion of bad guys. And it’d have to be a reunion of some kind; something would have to make them all decide to unite again. And it didn’t seem to -
The phone started ringing. He let it ring. His mind was starting to chase a lead. He’d been offered the gold badge of the detective, but he’d turned it down. He didn’t need the extra pay, and he’d liked hitting the streets in a patrol car. Still, more than once he’d had to use deductive skills on the fly to catch a bad guy, and his antennas were twitching now.
He let the answering machine pick up the phone. The voice was male, with a hint of gravel behind it.
“Robby? This is Rex. You should’ve gotten the package by now, and if I know you you’re in the middle of reading it and trying to put pieces together. Look, there’s some info I’ve just gotten ahold of that I can share with you that I think you’d find very interesting, but I didn’t want to send it in print. Pick up the phone, old pal, and we’ll-”
The receiver was already in Robby’s hands.
“Hey, there, buddy,” he said.
“Ah, there’s the voice I wanted to hear. How are you, Robby?”
“Been better, been worse. Whatcha got for me that you couldn’t send in the mail?”
“A bit, actually. They’ve started to put the hot sheets on computers now, and something just came up that I thought’d tickle your fancy. Seems that fellow you asked about, the Hanging Judge? He decided to just show up at a bar last night, had a beer, according to witnesses, with a fellow matching the description of the Black Tiger.”
“That so?”
“And- get this- he was sighted a week before, saving the ass of an older security guard from a beating by a bunch of rich-kid, wanna be punks. Guess who the guard was?”
“From Bea’s old crew?”
“Bingo, buddy. One Montressor ‘Monty’ Petronia, aka Mister Monocle.”
“Huh. Anything else?”
“Sightings of a guy in a winged suit over the city, smoke bombs going off crosstown when the crime’s happening- ring any bells?”
“Shit. Bea was right.”
“Yep. Icing on the cake? I made a couple of calls. Seems Calamity Jane took a month’s vacation from her business, starting a week or so before all this shit started flying.”
Robby paused. “Anything else, Rex?”
“Not much, except since we’re looking at old capes, I checked in with a friend over at taps. Seems that Primus and his crew got a little ahead of themselves. Hot sheets are talking about a little old lady renting a house in the suburbs got paid a visit by some super who blasted a hole in the place. Lady’s gone, but a bunch of calls went out an hour or two later to Justice Squad’s legal team. Know what I’m thinkin’?”
“That’s a bit of a stretch, Rex.”
“But it’s got you thinking too, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s got me thinking one of that group of young punks overstepped again.”
“So, did the Squire do good today?”
Robby smiled. “Rex, stop calling yourself ‘The Squire.’ By the time we were finished our run, you weren’t my sidekick anymore. I was practically yours.”
“That’s bullshit an’ we both know it. But hey, look, I gotta go. I’m up to my eyeballs in backlogged work, and now I’ve gotta start lookin’ over my shoulder to see if that weirdo who dresses all in black’s gonna come gunnin’ for me.”
“Any goofball cape who’s gonna try and mess with my sidekick better make sure his insurance is paid up first.”
“Thanks, Rob. Say hi to Bea for me.”
“Will do , old buddy. Take care.”
After he hung up, Rob looked out the window at the sky for a little while. It was the kind of day he loved, really; bright blue with white, puffy clouds.
Should I get involved, he thought. That’s the real question here. Bea’s old crew was up to something. Something. But would he or Bea have to worry about payback? She’d turned state’s evidence, yes, which was why their hideout had gotten burned. But did they even know that? Could they?
Dammit, suddenly he had to piss. He knew what that meant.
He made for the bathroom quick as he could, the urge growing faster than he could walk. By the time he got to the bathroom it was like a knife in his gut, demanding release. He made it to the toilet and . . .
Nothing. The urge was still there, but his bladder, pinched off by an enlarged prostate, couldn’t push out the urine that jabbed at his innards.
“Dammit,” he growled under his breath. He felt the load in his colon drop, squeezing the urethra even tighter. He reached into the medicine cabinet and grabbed the emergency bottle of magnesium citrate he kept there. He unscrewed the cap, sweating, downed half of the clear, sugary, lemon-flavored liquid and sat down on the toilet to wait.
It took the better part of a half-hour, standing, sitting, squatting and pushing from both ends, but eventually he got both his bowels and his bladder evacuated.
“God-” he started again, and stopped.
He looked at himself in the mirror.
He and Bea were both in great shape for their ages, but he still couldn’t stop the onset of the things that hit a man of a certain age. He’d been fighting prostatitis since his late forties, and had already had one scary dalliance with cancer which seemed to have gone away after some minor treatments.
But now? He looked around his neat, modest, slightly-upper-middle-class home.
With a yard in the front, and a garden in the back.
And the group of guys he met with on Wednesday nights at the local diner to eat from the seniors menu, and complained about their health and whoever was running the government that year.
And the Knights of Columbus meeting hall down the street, where he went twice a month for planning meetings.
And the gym, where he and Bea would go to-
This wasn’t his life. The thought hit with the quiet insistence of a wave on the beach.
Not the one he was supposed to have.
He’d had a good, decade-long run with the NSA, but gotten drummed out over a bullshit technicality after he’d blown the whistle on a couple of incompetent supervisors.
Then he’d gone out for being a cop, starting in his mid-thirties with a bunch of late -teen and early twenty-somethings, but still made it a good life.
And now he was here.
Bea’s old crew was up to something. And even if they weren’t going to bother her, it was something big enough that those assclowns who called themselves heroes were getting involved.
“Calling the legal department,” Rob muttered to himself. Shit, he sure as hell never needed a legal department when he was doing the job. Damn young punks, thinking they had a lock on being a . . .
He thought some more as he pulled up his pants, zipped up and pulled his belt over the slight bulge in his gut.
They thought they know about being a hero? It was more than a mask, a gun and an attitude. He’d learned that really fast, seeing some of the wanna-bes get taken down by the cops and villains. Some fat comic-book fan in the 60s, called himself the Crimson Crusader? Got himself beat-up by a couple of black leather jackets. In the hospital for a month. Or that gal who called herself Pink Princess? Even worse, what happened to her. She took down a mugger so bad he never shit right again, and he sued her for damages and won. Owned her for the rest of her life, practically. So much for being a hero in New York City.
That’s it. These little wet-behind-the-ears kids needed a lesson in being heroes, not just vigilantes. He strode back to the living room, found the yellow pages, flipped through and dialed a number.
It got picked up on the first ring.
“Don Wilshire Auto,” chirped a young man’s voice on the other end, “how can I help you today?”
“I need a car.”
“Come on down!”
#
TO BE CONTINUED...