Crap.

A cop car. Lights flashing. Going down Elm, towards our boys.

“KittyKat, this is Flyboy.”

“Go ahead.”

“Bears. Bears on the march.”

“On the way, here?”

“Yep. Do your thing. I’ll do mine.”

“Got it.”

I swooped, getting my little smoke bomb ready, along with another surprise Mitch had whipped up for me on the side.

I counted ten, and then sped right to the target: a little mom-and-pop jewelry store in a strip mall, a good half-hour’s drive from where Mitch, Monty and Jake were busily drilling their way to our unearned wealth.

Scratch that, I thought. We’ve earned this a dozen times over. Every punch I took from double-A, every good little evangelical Christian boy that told a penny-Jew joke in front of me, every suit of mine that ripped up by some would-be ‘hero,’ every one of those things I dealt with was me, earning this from society a dozen times over.

Maybe it wasn’t the best way to put it. Maybe I could’ve thought of something better. All I knew then, really, was that if I wasn’t doing this right now, I’d be in a semi-drugged slumber back at the rest-home, dreaming of long-dead pretty girls and shitting my adult diapers in my sleep.

Target in sight, my goggles with their little computer gadgets let me know, a very cool set of green circles helpfully reminding me where I was supposed to drop my payloads.

Three on my belt, and a little stick with a button in my right hand. A twitch of my thumb, a click, and whoom!, the sidewalk and overhang in front of the jewelry store turned into a winter wonderland of ice, the window shattering with a sound that was a cross between firecrackers and loud, obnoxious windchimes.

Another swoop, a twitch and a click, and another away. And another little bulb dropped from my belt onto a precisely chosen spot on the asphalt, popping with a loud, echoing clap and shooting a plume of white, easily seen smoke into the sky, drawing every police car and hopefully any nosy supers for a few miles around over here to investigate.

I sped away, little jets in my pack giving me that extra push. In ten seconds I heard the sound of police sirens, and I’d landed in a nearby neighborhood, touching down on the ground and retracting my wings a good quarter-mile from the trouble I’d caused. Another five seconds and I was one of a myriad of walking ghosts along a busy street near a poorer suburb, a man in his mid-to-late forties walking home after a late-shift at work with a backpack full of tiredness and a hooded sweatshirt to stave off the night chill. I barely looked up,like anyone would, when the cop cars sped by me with their sirens screaming and their whirling cherry-colored lights turning everything around me into a flapping, on-off show of crimson and blue.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

I didn’t look at my watch. I didn’t need to. Because one minute after I started trudging I heard another whomp about a mile or two away, and another plume of white smoke climbed up into the night without any hurry. Miguel had done his work, finding someone who was sick of their business and wanted it gone for the insurance money. A few contacts made, several phone calls over a couple of days, and a nameless man [though watched carefully and unknowingly by Miguel from some post in the parking lot] blew up a food truck that had seen better days. Another distraction, ensuring that any leftover cops who might be on patrol would be finding better things to do. And even if some nosey cape went and interrupted things, or caught our little firebug, the order had gone down the line through so many layers from Latino crimelords, lieutenants, fixers, and street-level soldiers that no cop would be able to link it back to Miguel. Miguel’s friend in the underworld, if it came to that, would make certain everyone kept their mouths shut with the threat of one of those links in the chain disappearing, never to be seen again.

#

“How much longer?”

Miguel said the words to himself as the fire plumed from the sickly-looking food truck and went up into the sky. His speaker tube was tucked neatly into his collar, and the earpiece hidden the same way. No one was going to see or hear his compadres unless he wanted them to. Or unless they got a warrant to search him. 4th Amendment and all.

He looked at his watch, and saw that if the plan were still in session, they had a half hour to finish the job.

Half an hour. He tried not to think about how he was going to live life with the money- would he stay in the barrio with the gym, or would he fly off to a little cabin on the beach. Maybe in the Bahamas? He had no idea where the Bahamas actually were, but he’d seen them enough in ads on TV to know it looked like the kind of place he’d want to end up at. Warm, year round. Sunny. Pretty girls in bikinis. And if he could afford the blue rocks that Jane had . . . maybe, just maybe, find someone that could take the place of Carmelita in his heart.

No, really. That wouldn’t happen. No one would take her place. Not now, not ever. But someone new, maybe. Someone who he could start over with and maybe, just maybe . . .

The cops whizzed by, red lights flashing and engines roaring. Idiots. Total idiots. Why were they going so fast? Did they think they’d catch the guy who blew up the truck? That guy owned the truck, and wasn’t going to be admitting to it any time soon. And Miguel who’d given him the bomb? The cops had just blurred by him without a second look.

He didn’t even need his catsuit, he realized. He’d always just worn black anyway, back when he’d been in his prime. But somehow some comic-book writer had seen a picture someone had snapped of him and accidentally thought that his raised goggles were a set of cat ears. Then . . . boom!, he was the Black Tiger, master thief, and . . .

Nah. “Total crock o’ shit . . .” he mumbled to himself, as more cop cars and a fire engine blasted past him into the night....

He thought about stopping off at a small hole-in-the-wall bar for a beer, both to get off the street and out of sight and to take the edge off. He was feeling antsy, like something was going to go wrong. He’d felt that way the first time when he’d been all of five years old. He’d broken a glass on the floor, but had carefully retreated to his room in the hopes of avoiding blame. Or maybe even seeing one of his many siblings get tagged for it.

But as Miguel had rounded the corner of the hallway in their dingy little two-bedroom apartment, the blow had come with the sudden fury of a lightning strike on his forehead. His mother’d been furious, and knew he’d been responsible despite his protests.

“Yo no,” he mumbled again, remembering how he’d falsely protested his innocence over and over again, terrified at the sight of blood trailing in his mother’s footprints from the kitchen, where she’d stepped on a shard of glass and trailed it into the shabby box of a room they used as their sala.