I’m your good buddy. Moose, you’re gonna have my stuff here in this office next week, and you’re gonna be so on board with my little plan, but you’re gonna keep it to yourself. Ready boys? In three, two, one…”
#
Jonas Johanson adjusted the thick, brass belt buckle on his security guard uniform and grunted for the third or fourth time since he sat down. “How much longer?” he asked, his mouth still half-full of a jelly donut.
“Give it ten or fifteen. Man, you gotta lay offa those,” said his partner, his hands on the wheel at two-and-ten, his eyes steadily on the road. “At least keep that powder shit offa my shirt, man.”
“What else’m I gonna do? We got no radio, and Jack, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not the best conversationalist,” Jordan answered, taking another bite for emphasis.
“I don’ give a shit if you think I’m a good talker or not. We get a supervisor looking us up an’ down, I don’t want none of your lunch on me, giving me demerits or some shit like that. Driving this tank’s the best job I’m prob’ly ever gonna have, and I do not want it fucked up just ‘cause you got an addiction.”
“First, Jackie, you got the best record of any guy in the company. Maybe the whole armored car biz in the city. Maybe the State. Ain’t no one gonna give you a bad rep just becau- WHAT THE FUCK!”
The armored car suddenly started sliding, out of the mainstream of traffic and into a side street.. Brakes did nothing. Cars blasted their horns as the tanklike car clipped headlights and scratched paint. Jack pumped brakes and turned into the skid.
“Stay cool, Jordie, stay cool . . .” Jack’s voice became a mantra for the next thirty seconds as he struggled to regain control of the armored car. Jordan tried to raise Central on the car’s radio.
“SCC, this is unit four. We’re skidding! Out of control and skidding! Trying to - oh God!”
Jack, trying to do everything he’d been taught to do in driving school back when he’d been a teenager over a decade ago, was still turning into the direction of the skid. However, the direction of the skid now led to . . .
“Get ready bail, Jack!”
“What the fu-!”
Jack didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence. They were headed to the guardrail on the edge of the canal.
But the metal poles in the guardrail had been broken away. Bites had been taken from it, weakening the original while not tearing it out completely. The bitten off pieces of metal were glowing red in the already blistering summer heat.
The armored car sailed through the guardrail, smashing through the partially-torn section without increasing its speed, its undercarriage scraping loudly as the front tires dropped off of the edge, and pure inertia pushing the rest of the car over the concrete lip and down to the water below.
Jordan and Jack screamed.
The armored car teetered, groaned, then slid down towards the river. The two men screamed again, one in pure terror, the other calling out the words to a prayer he hadn’t said in years and without feeling or belief since his childhood.
The world went white for them as the car dropped twenty feet and hit grille-first smack-dab in the middle of an ice-floe in the middle of the lake.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
#
“Go!” Jane whispered, gabbing a beam near her perch under the dock and pulling a rope with her other hand. Mitch was sitting on another beam, his frost-gun-gadget steaming white from the work it had done minutes ago, greasing the ground for the truck and creating the icy landing pad the armored car now poked head-first into.
Manny smiled; the twinkle in his visible eye glimmered even as his monocle beam cooled from the work it had done on the railing.
“Going,” Manny said, his monocle locking on to a point on the door a scant six inches wide by an inch deep. With a flash from his mechanical eye, the lock on the back of the truck became a smoking crater.
“Pulling,” Mitch grunted, glad for the ten-thousandth time that the little blue crystals Jane had gotten ahold of did their work so well. This kind of work wasn’t easy in a forty-something old body, but it would have been utterly impossible in a seventy-something old body, no question about that!
The car and its icy raft slid under the dock fairly quickly once some inertia had been gotten up. Then the doors to the cab burst open, and the two guards fell out as if the car had vomited them onto the ice.
“The . . . the hell?” the fat one said. The slim one had a set of dreadlocks pinned back neatly under his baseball-cap with the company logo on it. “Mother of God,” he said, his dark hands skimming over the already melting ice.
Jane cocked both her pistols. The guards looked up. “Ah’m givin; yuh to a count of three to jump off an’ swim to shore. After that, we’ll see how yuh swim with holes in -”
The slim guard was already in the water. The chubby one followed.
“Good thing for him fat floats,” Mitch mumbled as he dropped to the ice. His cleats stabbed the surface, not getting slick as the summer sun did its work. He was off balance for a second, but grabbing the line that ran from his belt to the underside of the dock near Jane’s perch steadied him.
“Okay, Mitch, let’s get rich.” Jane pulled her line that had been attached to a hooked-loop, hastily drilled into the dock the night before, and dropped to the ice-floe.
“We have perhaps four more minutes, unless our dear winged friend has succeeded more spectacularly in his mission that we have anticipated.”
“Russ never let us down yet,” Jane mumbled. “Let’s hustle just in case.”
#
They named me Icarus. Nice.
The words came unbidden as he flew towards the shabbier section of town. He didn’t need someone like Primus ripping his suit up, and he really didn’t need someone like The Dark or Gladiatrix showing up and ripping off pieces of his body and feeding them to the fish. But if Jake and Miguel had done their jobs he shouldn’t see any capes this trip.
The buildings sped below him, whizzing by as he pumped his arms. He knew his equipment was in order on his belt; he’d checked it at least five times before he’d taken off from the top of one of the skyscrapers this morning.
Russ smiled; it was a rare day when he could look out over the rooftops of the city and not think of it the way he once did; each building having loot and treasure that he could pilfer if he only had the right key, the right combination to the right safe, the right words to say to the right people.
Not today. Today, he had all those things, and he’d use them to get rich before the jobs were done.
Ironic, that he’d be wearing a newsuit, based on his old one, and for a change he was trying to get the attention of someone who’d . . .
The slap on his shoulders came quickly, quicker than he’d ever thought it would. He realized he’d been waiting and watching his shadow to see if some cape was creeping up on him, the way the Airman used to.
But whoever’d gotten to him was faster than the Airman. Faster than anything Russ had ever encountered, in fact. There were hands on his shoulders, gripping pads tight enough that he’d never break them. And he knew this as sure as he knew the sun would come up the next day, summer would follow winter, and the muggers in New York would gather in Central Park that night.
All these thoughts flew through his head in less than half a second. Before that time was up, he was on the ground and facing the black woman he’d seen on TV the other day.
“State your business,” she said. The spear was strapped to her back, the sword in a scabbard at her waist, the shield on top of her sword. No threat yet, but in a second any of those could be brought to bear. Though Gladiatrix wasn’t the killing kind, she could still be very, very dangerous if she had you made as a criminal. Or worse, as a sexist.
“How about you state yours, young lady!” I said. He’d skipped his dose of the blue stuff that morning on purpose, and he could feel the effects already. He was stooped, his face more wrinkled, his hair whiter. In short, he didn’t look his actual eighty, but he did look like an old man, wearing a costume.
“Excuse me?” she said, raising one eyebrow.
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TO BE CONTINUED....