“Where is Icarus Conlan?”
The voice was cold and scary. Eddie yelped one of the words his Momma washed his mouth out with soap when he was younger, dropped his comic and knocked over his juice box, which his the floor with a hollow sound.
“Holy shi- Mr. Perkins, are you doing that costume playin’ thing again?”
Eddie stood up to his full height of six-foot three, which displayed his two-hundred-fifty pound frame fairly impressively. The guy in front of him was several inches shorter, and fit the build perfectly of one of the old folks who sometimes liked to dress up as a superhero and attempt to score with the ladies.
“I am not a resident, fool. I am . . .”
“I don’t give a fat flying frog’s ass who you are! This is private property, and you better clear the hell out or so help me-”
Eddie didn’t see him move. He didn’t know if the man in the suit jumped over the counter or ran around it. He was just suddenly there, with his hand at Eddie’s throat and another hand holding something shiny in it.
“I don’t care what you think you can do,” said the man, “I am not Perkins. I am darkness personified, I am-”
“What? Personi- wussat mean?”
“Shut up! I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if you don’t tell me what I’m looking for, do you understand?”
“Well- now ain’t that illegal? You know, they tol’ me when I signed up for this job that if’n I threatened anyone I’d be the one lookin’ at time in the slammer. Now you-”
The guy dressed all in black looked odd for a moment. His hands moved a bit, like he wanted to do something, but couldn’t, or didn’t want to.
“Hey, waitaminunte, I get it- you’re -” he looked at his comic book, then back at his interrogator, “you’re not Perkins! You’re the real thing! You’re really one of them superheroes! You’re the one who- oh, please ‘scuse me! I messed up somethin’ awful! Now, I’ll help yuh, for sure! Who were you lookin’ for?”
“Icarus. Conlan.”
“Oh, Russ! Yeah, he was here for a few years, but he signed out. They were done, and he moved out. Some pretty lady, I think she musta been his daughter, said she was taking him home and all that. She was about maybe in her late thirties, forties.”
The Dark paused. This cretin talked a lot. And he had to listen to every word. He wished the fool was an evil child molester for a moment- dangling someone off a building and dragging information out of them that way was so much more- exciting than doing things this way.
But here, now, there was only one way to do this: sit and listen. Hit record on his device on his BlackBelt, and wait.
“You will tell me more about this woman,” he said, when Eddie paused for breath and forgot what he was talking about.
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The house stood in a row with over fifty others, each the same color though there was the occasional twist in this-or-that one. This one had five bedrooms, that one had four. This one had french windows, that one had a wall. The painted-white brick stood in the heat of the summer, and the AC inside each house dared the sun to afflict the residents with discomfort. The sun, for its part, stayed outside, cooking anyone foolish enough to venture forth without generous amounts of sunscreen on or melanin in their skin.
And it was the house at the end of the suburban cul-de-sac that saw an older woman open the front door, walk to her mailbox, greet a neighbor, get her mail, and go back inside in the space of a quick minute. She was tall and shapely, looking very fine for a woman in her early seventies. If she were the type to go to parties and bridge clubs, she’d assert humbly yet audibly that she’d never had a facelift or any other ‘work done’ on her face or body, nor did her husband on himself. Their toned bodies and handsome faces were due to two primary factors: a lifestyle devoted to health and exercise, and being largely childless throughout their over forty years of marriage.
As she re-entered her house she looked at the headline of the day’s paper, and stopped in the open door.
A casual observer driving past would have noticed the beauty of the home’s interior, with walls dedicated to mirrors, granite-topped counters in the kitchen, and many other motifs, the oddest of which being a glass trophy case with a neatly folded, black-and-yellow dress on its top shelf and several figurines of knights on horses on the second shelf.
And above it all, mounted on a large plaque above the entrance to the spacious living room, was a medieval lance, the kind carried about by knights in storybooks, nearly a dozen feet long.
“Is everything alright, dear?” said her husband from the couch, looking over the lenses of his reading glasses. He’d been interrupted so many times when reading his copy of National Review that he’d begun interrupting himself when she walked in or near enough to the living room.
She looked at the paper, and looked back at her husband. “Remember the group I used to be with? I think they’re back in business.”
He sighed. “Beatrice, you’ve been worried about this off and on for how many years now? If they were going to come after you for revenge, they would have done it a long, long time ago. Honestly, compared to the psychos and losers I put away during that time? Or even afterwards? Your crew was probably the most benign group that ever existed. They never killed henchmen, never harmed civvies, and they certainly have never come after you for turning states’ evidence against them. I doubt they even know to this day that you offered to do so. Did any of them ever go to jail?”
“No,” she said, the first edge of fear in her voice soft but unmistakably there. He knew what to do.
“Let me take a look at the story, Bea- can I see it?”
She handed it to him and sat on the edge of the other couch, fidgeting slightly while he scanned the paper.
“There’s nothing in here about your old group, hon,” he said after three minutes of reading. “This could be anybody. Armored cars don’t get held up all the time, but it does happen more often than you’d think.”
“I know, but does anyone rob an armored car with a freeze gun anymore?”
“I saw that. Did you see what the witness said? Three people, two men and a woman. All Hispanic, in their late teens or early twenties.”
“One of them had a white stocking mask, just like Mitch did.”
“Mitch was a scared little boy when he ran with you guys. Now that he’s old, like us, he probably couldn’t rip off the take at a Bingo parlor. Besides, Hispanics? Aside of Miguel, your group was whiter than a cow in a snowstorm.”
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TO BE CONTINUED...