I’d just found something every giant robot, super-powered nazi villain and every other nutjob Gladiatrix had fought had wanted to find, but never did:
Her weakness.
She was a normal woman. One with super-powers, but the TV and the press had her out to be some kind of goddess-princess. Suddenly I saw her in my head as a girl in her African village, going to get water, doing laundry on the side of the river and talking to her girlfriends. She was all dressed up in finery, but she still was who she was, and she knew it, and now I knew it.
She took off, shooting into the sky like she’d been blasted from a cannon, almost before she’d finished the ‘d’ in ‘needed.’ No matter; I’d delayed her enough. I hit the button and folded my wings. This had been a good day, no question. Time to go to where I’d stashed my clothes, take my hit of rock-candy-blue, and the old man who Primus or The Dark would start looking for as soon as the Big G finished crying to herself in the girl’s bathroom [or whatever they had in the lair for capes] and told what happened? He was gonna disappear, along with the wrinkles and the white hair and the two or three inches of height I’d lost over the years. The stuff really could turn back the clock, and I wasn’t gonna let it go to waste. Jane had told us that after a month’s use, the effects were permanent and we wouldn’t need more hits. Maybe. I didn’t see her mixing any blue sugar in her coffee, but who really knew?
What mattered was that it was gonna work, today, and I was gonna be half my age and untraceable in about ten minutes.
If all went well.
#
“Jorge? Come here. Got something for you.”
The lunkhead rolls his eyes and saunters over to me. He came back to the gym after drilling poor Emiliano the other day in the ring. I wonder for the ten-thousandth time if this is a good idea. If I’m gonna scare this kid straight or send him up the river or down the fast-lane to prison hell. His daddy took a train to nowhere before he was born and his momma’s too strung out to know he’s alive. I’m the closest thing to a dad he has, but he doesn’t care. I’ve tried talking to him about making good choices in life, and he doesn’t care. Maybe I can just get him to see what life is like for a vato, and he’ll change out? Maybe.
In the meantime, he could be useful.
“What?” he says, still trying to look tougher than me. Acting as if he’s the only one who’s ever been in a fight, been hassled by cops for no reason, been jumped by a gringo for hanging out in too nice a neighborhood or jumped by one of our own for being out alone after dark.
I’ve seen the look a thousand times. Wore it myself when I was his age. I may be steering him wrong, but right now I need him. If it works right, I’ll be saving him. If it goes to shit, he was on his way to the joint anyway.
But I still hear Sister Lupe’s voice in the back of my head, telling me not to use people as things, or I’d risk God’s wrath upon my head, her ruler on my hand, and the anger of men on my hide..
Don’t matter how Meat Loaf sang it; two out of three can be quite bad indeed.
“I got a friend, needs about five guys your age for a job. No chchifo, nothing like that. Moving some stuff out’ve a truck. Money’s good, no worry about cops or anything like that. You get five of your buddies together, you get a bonus.”
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“How much?”
“They get two-hundred each. You get five. Four hours work.”
“What’s the catch?”
“No catch. All legal. He hates putting stuff on the books, and he likes giving jobs to his own people first. Plus, union’s is trying to screw him. He needs strong backs and he knows I got plenty of those here. You in or I go somewhere else?”
He looks around, catches the eyes of several other guys in the gym his own age, maybe a little younger. They’re hooked. I’ve got a sap to be my upline in case things go bad; a thug who hires kids alla time for quite a few chchifo works with pervs. If little thug life here gets nabbed by a cop or a cape, I’ve got someone I can pin it on, and my hands are clean, just trying to give kids what I was told would be honest work, officer.
At least, that’s what I hope is gonna happen.
#
“You kin get this thing open, then?”
“Shit, Jane,” I say, looking up at her from my freeze gun and the lock on the back door of the armored car, “this ain’t like the comic books where I just point and shoot. I hafta squirt just the right amount ‘a juice in here. To little and I hafta start over again. Too much and I might get some on me and say bye-bye to a few fingers, gloves’r no gloves. Now let me work, willya? The ice is meltin’!”
“That’s just why I’m sayin’. The ice is melting, and I don’t know if we’re gonna get caped or not!”
Sheeeit. Jane’s worse than my wife right now. ‘Course, I can’t say as I blame ‘er. She’s got as much to lose as anyone if a cape shows up. I dunno if I’m gonna have the stones to ice a cape again like I did back when I was a stupid, green teen. I look at the lock again through my goggles, calibrate the nozzles on my winterbeam [dear God in Heaven, that name sounds so cheesy now!], and . . . I wonder if I should say a prayer; Preacher Davis over at Faith Tabernacle would say not, but didn’t the Catholics say there was a patron Saint for everything? Even thieves? I offered up a little, tiny supplication, just in case someone like that was listening up there, pulled the trigger, and-
A small, hissing leak of liquid nitro slowly squeezes out of the gun’s nozzle. It slides without any hurry into the crevices, nooks and crannies of the complicated lock in the back of the truck. A few seconds and I hear the delicate crackle and crunch as temperatures near absolute zero do their work on metal whose freezing point is about ten or twenty degrees above what’s hitting it now . . .
“You done yet, freezer boy?” Jane asks. Scratch her being like my wife; she is my wife right now, right down to making the casual, nasty nicknames for me when she’s frustrated with me.
So I act just like I do when I’ve gotta get my wife’s attention that, yes, her husband does know what he’s doing in this world, despite making less money than her father or any of her brothers or any of her sister’s husbands, I can-
“You can what, Mike?”
Crap. I started talking to myself again, and I let it spill out from my head to my mouth. “Nuthin’,” I said, “I think I’m-” and I don’t finish the sentence. I take Winterbeam by the nozzle, think better of it and holster it instead. I take out the sap from my belt and give the lock a good, solid rap on its now-brittle jaw. The lock shatters into dust and flakes, and I’ve got the door open in a second.
There’s a guard inside. His gun is out. He couldn’t be more than twenty-two. He’s wearing a wedding ring and he looks more scared than an alligator in a handbag factory.
I quick duck behind the door as he panic-pulls the trigger, and the bullet ricochets off the armored door.
“Well, shit.” I say, as the armored car starts to take a forward dip, and the young guard begins screaming.
“I told you I should have just melted the lock,” Monty says, his feet dangling from the beam he’s lounging on under the dock, safely out of range of the panicked guard. His calm, relaxed tone all the more annoying because of the background noise of the guard who must have shot himself.
“Yeah, and you woulda either burned or melted the money too, moron! Now get the kid outta there, or we’re gonna have the FBI and every cape from here to Kookamonga after us for murder!”
The kid was still screaming. The car was still dipping, and we were at least thirty seconds over time. Cra...no.
Shi-
Sugar.
Sugar-an’-Salt.
---------
TO BE CONTINUED....