Chapter 1

It was a seven hour drive up to Meridian City. Coastal driving. Northbound. There’s a lot of great views of the ocean going that way, if you happen to like staring out at water. As it’s not really my thing, I was just glad I had an iPod plugged into my car. Besides, I like to listen to music when I’m heading out to an interview. Y’know. Listen to their albums. Or listen to their genre.

Really, it’s the best part of the job. I sit down in the music library and cipe tracks into a playlist. Free rein at the candy store, and it’s all legal. The RIAA doesn’t have jack or shit on me. Not that’d I’d much care if they did. I find most of the people who give a shit about kids stealing their music don’t give that much of a shit about their music in the first place.

And over time I build up specific playlists depending on who I’m going to see. Cutting edge or retro, I have a music list that I can put on repeat for a couple of days before I see them. It helps me get into my own head, get ready. Think like they do so when it comes time to interview them I’m halfway there to start with.

So I’m driving. But this time I’m not heading up to interview an alt-rock or hip hop star. This time it was Leather.

Leather’s a supervillain. I don’t have a playlist for that.

I didn’t want this gig.

Seriously. I wanted a gig, sure. That’s why I went into the office in the first place. It’s a monthly ritual between me and Kyle. I walk into the Amplifier offices, hit on Teenee at the front desk, and then go back to see Kyle. And he bullshits me for a few and we spar back and forth on the state of rock today, and he tells me that he hasn’t got anything lined up, and I tell him I need to eat and if he can’t feed me, I’ll go work at Starbucks since they pay on time anyway. And we go around a few times, and then he’ll act like he just thought of some feature or interview he’d like to have done, only he’ll have three weeks worth of prep and research already lined up. We argue about the wordcount and pay rate, but as soon as he suggests it we both know I’m going to take it.

This didn’t work like that. He smiled when I walked through the door. That’s when I knew I was in trouble. Before we could even go through the opening statement he’d pitched it to me.

“She’s a supervillain,” I said. “That’s not very rock and roll.”

“Bullshit.” Kyle leaned back in his chair. “It’s not very Britney Spears pop, I’ll give you that. It’s utterly rock and roll. Think of what Tom Wolfe could have done with this in 1966.”

“It’s entirely possible her mother hadn’t been born in 1966,” I said. “I think Tom Wolfe would have some trouble with it.”

“Forest for the trees, Toddy. Forest for the trees.” Kyle pulled that out every once in a while. I’m not always sure what he means when he says it. The big picture with a supervillain involves being punched really hard. “Look. You drive up to her place for an afternoon–”

“I’m getting directions to her lair? ”

“That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?”

“She’s a supervillain, Kyle.”

“Okay, point. Anyway. You go up there. You get a few candid shots. You shoot the shit with her for a few hours. You come home and type it up. No big.”

“You’re acting like this is some pissant celebrity interview. How’d you even set this up. Did you call her agent? Does she even have an agent?”

Kyle shrugged. “Some of them do. But no, I met a friend of a friend of one of her ex-henches, and he got her to call me. She thinks it’d be fun.”

“So you drive up there.”

“That’s not how it works,” Kyle said, leaning forward and folding his arms on his desk. “I’m the editor, you see. I solicit articles and I edit them after I get them. You’re the writer. You go and you write the articles.”

“Can’t I go bug Nelly for a week or something?”

“What, you think you won’t get shot covering rap?”

“I think getting shot beats getting bitten by radioactive animals. People who visit into the supers’ world end up becoming permanent residents.” Or they end up dead, but I didn’t figure that needed to be mentioned.

“Then next month, you can interview yourself. Isn’t that traditional for journalist super heroes?”

“What makes you think I’d be a super hero? ”

Kyle snorted. “Anyway. Get a picture of her we can use, and I’ll give you the cover.”

I raised an eyebrow and leaned back. Which was a mistake, because that’s code. That means ‘I want to hear the offer,’ even though I didn’t really want to hear the offer. If I heard the offer, then I knew I’d be doing the gig.

“And a buck and a half a word.”

“Mary gets a buck ninety.”

“You’re not supposed to know what Mary gets.”

“Yeah, but I do. So why aren’t I getting what Mary gets?”

“Because Mary doesn’t suck.”

“So send Mary.”

Kyle shrugged. “Leather wants a guy. She doesn’t like talking to girls. That was part of the deal.”

“So you’re offering me a buck and a half a word and my name on the cover because I have a Y chromosome?”

“And don’t suck as bad as the other guys I have available,” Kyle qualified.

“Pass.”

Kyle arched an eyebrow, and then nodded. “Good enough. I’ll call Rob. Have a good one.”

I blinked. Kyle was off script. Kyle never goes off script. “Well, hang on. What else you got for this month?”

Kyle was punching in a phone number. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

Kyle shifted a finger to the hook, looking back at me with narrow eyes. “I have a brief window of opportunity to get an interview with a supervillain who looks and dresses like a Suicidegirl, Todd. Frankly, if you’re not going to write this, the only thing I care about is finding someone who is.”

“Oh, so now we’re playing hardball?”

“No, now I’ve given up on you. Rob’s not as good, but I can pay him one and a quarter. Hell, he might do it for free if I give him the cover.”

“So pay me one sixty five and I’ll do it.”

“No. Good bye, Todd.”

“One fifty will be fine.”

Kyle hung the phone up.

So now I was doing the gig.

Chapter 2

He’s right, of course. Supervillains are pretty rock and roll. But that doesn’t mean I knew what to listen to on my way up. So instead, I looked at the pictures we had. Leather bustier and panties — or maybe a leather leotard with boning. I couldn’t tell. Some tattoos. Stay up stockings that don’t look like they suck, which is actually pretty rare for stay up stockings. Hair that starts blue black but varies in streak colors depending on her mood. Black batwinged domino mask thing — also leather, but I have no idea how it clings to her face. Glue, I guess, which has to suck taking it off. Asskicker boots.

The thing that struck me was she was slender. Graceful, almost. Kyle said she looked like a Suicidegirl and that’s about right. She didn’t look pneumatic like the big deal Superheroines. Labriet piercing in one picture. That probably wasn’t her only one, either.

So I started loading up on Liz Phair and Punk Rock Girl and the Dropkick Murphys and hit the road, and wondered what you asked a girl who robs banks and ties super heroes to bombs for a living. I wondered if she’d go psycho on me.

I wondered if I should have left a will before I drove out there. Of course, then it occurred to me I don’t have anybody to leave my stuff to, so maybe it wasn’t a priority.

Quite honestly, the building was cool. It was an old brick power station along the coastline. It had a foghorn mounted to it but with Beacon Lighthouse just a couple of miles away this one had been abandoned for a couple of decades. So, it had distressed brick going on. I parked my crappy little car and walked up the hill. I wondered briefly if someone’d take a shot at me or scream “state your business” at me.

Instead, when I got to within twenty yards of the door, Leather came out of to meet me.

It was maybe ten thirty in the morning, and in the harsh morning sun she looked like she’d just gotten up. Her clothes bore that out — white tee shirt, plaid flannel pants. No shoes. Hair still wet from the shower. It was that same blue-accented black, and the forward streaks were a dirty yellow right now. I could see a devil’s tail tattoo extending down below her left short sleeve. I counted five rings in her left ear, six in her right, and she had a labret under her mouth.

Which was smiling. “Hey,” she said. “Find the place all right?”

“Yeah. Sure. Almost too easily, really. Won’t the cops find it too?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t send the cops directions. Besides, we’re moving at the end of the week. That’s why I wanted to do this now. You’ll see.” She sipped some coffee out of a Far Side mug. “Gifted Children,” if you know Far Side mugs. “You want coffee?”

“Sure. Sure thing.”

“Cool.” She turned on her heel and strode inside. Well, strode is the wrong word. Every time she moves, there’s this grace to it. I’d read up on her before I came up. I knew she was inhumanly fast and strong, and had an incredible agility going for her. Good traits in a supervillain. She was also cute, and that seemed weird to me.

She had a Keurig. A home model — the kind you have to put the coffee tubs into. But higher end than a Senso coffee pod machine, any way you look at it. “Rainforest Nut, Hazelnut, Lake and Lodge or French Roast?” she asked. “I don’t have decaf.”

“Hazelnut’s great,” I said. “Pricey machine.”

She looked over her shoulder, pushing the button to dispense my coffee. “I wouldn’t know,” she said, grinning a saucy grin. A naughty grin.

“You steal your kitchen appliances?” I was grinning too. It seemed so out of place — a supervillain staging a daring raid on Bed, Bath & Beyond.

“Only the good ones. Unless I get pissed off. There was this one time I was trying to buy shower curtains at fucking Wal-Mart, and I got nothing but attitude through the whole fucking store. I mean, it’s Wal-Mart. You don’t expect attitude from Wal-Mart.” She handed me my coffee, in a chipped enamel mug. “Milk’s in the fridge. I think we got Splenda if you want. I don’t have sugar. Anyway. I was so angry I went out to the car, changed in the Parking Lot, went back in and gave them the full on business.”

“Full on business?” I asked, opening the fridge for the milk. I prefer cream, but you don’t say things like that to a supervillain. Lots of fats and carbs in her fridge, I noticed. Cream cheese, American cheese, summer sausage, three kinds of bread, plastic tubs of leftover pasta.

“Industry term,” she said, and hopped up onto her table. Just like that, really. She gave a little hop that cleared four feet and landed, crouching, on her table. She didn’t even spill her coffee. “When you’re making a splash, you’re giving the target ‘the business.’ Monologues, needless destruction, terrorizing the mundanes. The whole nine yards. Loud instead of quiet. You usually give the business when you want a hero to show up, or to send a message. It’s kinda unprofessional to give it just because you’re pissed off at a Wal-Mart assistant manager.”

“But you did it anyway?”

“Oh yeah.” She grinned at the memory, shaking her head and tossing her hair out of her face. “I scooped up one of the cash registers and threw it through intimates — I must have taken out ten racks with one throw. Kicking over shelves, barreling through housewares. Raining down destruction, cleaning out their active registers, scooping the most worthless shit up into a couple of laundry bags I stole. No rhyme or reason. Just breaking shit and stealing shit.” She laughed. “I forgot the shower curtain.”

She drained the rest of her coffee and hopped back to the floor, just as fluidly. “I’m gonna grab another cup and we can go talk. Where’s your stuff, anyway?”

I lifted my backpack. It had my computer in it, my tape recorder — the whole nine yards. “All set,” I said.

“You have your clothes in there?”

“My clothes?” I asked, with a pretty dumb expression on my face.

“Well, you’re not wearing the same clothes all week are you?”

I blinked at her. “No,” I said. “I’m just here for this afternoon. If we need to do followup, we can do it on the phone or I can drive–”

“No,” she said. “I talked to a guy named Kyle Elias and told him I’d need someone up here for a week if we were going to do this. I can’t have you leave before we’re done. Jesus, you might call the cops!”

“I’m not going to call the cops. Why would I call the police?”

“Well, because if you don’t it might be considered aiding and abetting, for one. You’re supposed to stay with us until we move out. And you’re here now….”

I shrugged. “Sorry,” I said.

She paused for a moment, and then nodded. “Whatever. Want I should show you around the place?”

“Sure.”

The tour was concise. She was… bubbly, almost. She didn’t seem very evil — she just seemed young and cheerful. And while the building was clearly abandoned and just as clearly falling apart in places, it had a kind of bomb shelter chic to it. Certainly, she had taken the time and effort to make it ‘homey.’

“How long have you been up here?” I asked her.

“A year,” she said. “Though you have to be careful. Mostly, you have to make sure you don’t give people the sense you live in one place or another. So you do touring.”

“Touring?”

She nodded. “I do two or three weeks in different towns and cities around the country. Put in my time, make a few heists, stay in hotels. Usually I’ll go quiet for most of the jobs, and then give one or two the business. That keeps me in the public eye and makes it hard for the police to figure out where I actually live.”

“So why are you moving?” I asked. “I mean, it looks like you have all the amenities of home here, plus no one knows you’re here.”

She shrugged. “You get sick of a place after a while. Besides, this place sucks in the winter, and sooner or later someone’s going to notice I’ve stolen power and come looking. Or else someone’s going to want to use the land or the building.” She walked into what looked like the main building plant. It smelled of metal and oil and something burning, with an old wooden stair mounted to one wall that went up to a trap door in the ceiling. There was gear and equipment all over the place in the main section — exercise equipment and the tools of a professional malcontent’s trade. “Hey Marco!” she shouted.

Marco, as it turned out, was a six foot two Hispanic man, who had been welding plates onto what looked like a Humvee. “Yo?!” he shouted back up.

“This is — hey, who the Hell are you?” Leather said, looking back at me.

“Todd Chapman,” I called over. The name didn’t seem to impress Marco.

“Right,” Leather said. “He’s cool until I say otherwise, right?”

“Right,” Marco said. “I’m gonna need to put this thing up so I can work on the underbody. Fucking transport services fucked up the alignment!”

“Transport services,” I asked Leather quietly.

“Do it!” she called to Marco, then turned back to me. “There’s a bunch of supervillain support agencies out there,” she said. “Transport services are kind of the Black Market side of the Teamsters. That way, I can get my gear out to tours and then get it back so we can fix it.”

“What’s Marco’s story?” I asked. I didn’t ask if he was her boyfriend, though it’d crossed my mind. It’s kind of amazing. She’s a super powered criminal who I’d been scared to meet, but I still wanted to know if she was available.

“He henches for me. Same as the other guys.”

“Henches for you?”

“Yeah, they have a guild. C’mon. I wanna show you the roof.”

The wooden stairs were bolted to the wall, and didn’t seem in great shape. She bounded up them with abandon, but then if she fell a couple of flights to the concrete floor she’d probably land on her feet and walk it off. Still, they didn’t creak much as we went up, so I figured it was probably okay. And once through a blast door at the top, we were out on a roof with a low brick wall on all sides. There were a couple of standing pools of water where the tar paper had bubbled, but otherwise it was nice enough. I saw she had some plants potted on one side, next to some lawn chairs, and nearby there was a pile of what looked like rims for trucks.

“What’s that for?” I asked, pointing at the rims. “Storage for your auto body shop?”

“Nah,” she said. “Defense. Lemme show you.” She walked over, and lifted one up. I’d think she wouldn’t weigh enough to easily flip it up the way she did, no matter how strong she was, but either she weighs more than I think or she’s really good at counterbalancing. She flipped it into one hand like it was a trash can lid.

She paused, peering out. “Is that piece of shit Hyundai your car? ”

I shrugged. “Such as it is.”

“Cool. I don’t feel so bad then.”

“Huh?”

She spun around three times, the truck wheel out like she were throwing the discus. On the third she let go, and I was amazed to see it soar out, spinning like a frisbee almost. Clearly she’d practiced throwing — that’s what she meant by defense. If the cops showed up, she could rain down flying metal on them. I watched arc and angle down…

Straight for my car.

I sputtered as the rim slammed down onto the hood, staving it in and tearing through glass and metal into the body of the car itself. “My car! ”

“Yeah,” Leather said, grinning. “You’re probably going to want to call Triple-A. You do have Triple-A, don’t you?”

“You’re insane!” I shouted. “You just wrecked my car! ”

“What? You thought the whole supervillain thing was hype?” She was still grinning, perching. “You probably want to get it towed quickly. And if it’s registered in this state there’s a mandatory Powered Nemesis rider on your insurance, so no harm done.”

I pulled out my phone and wallet. Get Triple-A to come tow me and ride back with them, getting the Hell away from the psycho–

Leather bounded past me, almost a blur, doing a pirouette as she passed by me and plucking the cell phone out of my hand so delicately I hardly noticed she had done it.

I blinked. “Give me that–” I started to say, following her.

Leather giggled, closing her hand over my phone. Metal and plastic splintered, and she let the shattered remains of my phone fall to the roof.

“You bitch, ” I snarled, and I admit I tried to slap her. Look, at that point I was pretty upset.

And yeah, you’re thinking that was pretty stupid. I mean, the girl hoisted a truck rim a good two hundred yards with pinpoint accuracy. But I wasn’t thinking clearly and I was pissed.

She ducked under my slap and rolled me lightly over her shoulder. I went sprawling, but before I could land on the roof she’d rolled over me, grabbing my shoulders and pulling me into her roll, kicking up with her feet at the top of it. I was catapulted fifteen feet into the air, sprawling, and realized as I was coming down that I was going over the edge of the roof, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

I was pointed down, screaming my head off and looking at the ground a good fifty feet below me when her hand clamped on my ankle, stopping my fall and letting me dangle. The shock was nasty enough, and even though she was careful when she grabbed my ankle, I knew I’d be limping for a couple of hours.

“You want to be careful,” she said brightly. “Remember, you didn’t bring a spare pair of pants with you, so you’re going to want to retain bladder control.”

I didn’t answer coherently. I probably screamed, though I don’t clearly remember.

“Now,” she said. “Let’s go over what you did wrong, shall we?”

I distinctly remember whimpering at this point.

“When a supervillain — one who’s been polite enough to let you come up for an interview, and given you fucking coffee — tells you you’re staying for a week, you don’t argue. You adjust your plans. Is that clear?”

Whatever I said in response was hardly coherent.

“Is that clear? ” she asked. “If you don’t answer me, I’ll get bored and boredom means my grip will slip.”

“It’s clear! It’s clear!”

“Okay then. You’re going to stay for the week. Do you understand?”

“Yes!”

“You have no phone. Your computer won’t be able to access my wireless network. You’re cut off. If you find some way to get out a cry for help, I’ll break every bone in your body. Is that clear?”

“ Yes! ”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes! God, yes! ”

She giggled. “Okay!” And she hauled me back on the roof.

I threw up, but was careful not to get any on my shirt.

Chapter 3

This particular costume, Leather informed me, was her ‘formal’ wear. Meant for talking more than fighting. She said that every villain and most heroes had five or six costumes, designed for different situations. “You know how villains always seem to look good in those first few minutes of a fight?” she said. “That’s because they’ve picked the clothes for the situation. This is my fuck-me outfit.” And she was right. It was a black leotard and it looked poured onto her, all glossy, with stiletto heels on her boots and vinyl fingerless gloves. She’d teased her hair out and put on one of her masks — a black, batwing affair. “Sticky tabs,” she said. “Like spirit gum, but better.”

“Should I be taking your picture now?”

“Suit yourself, but if you’re looking for a cover shot, you’re going to want one of the high end combat suits. I look better in those.”

I blinked. “If you look better in those, why is that your ‘fuck me’ suit?”

She giggled. We were in her ‘study,’ which did have a computer and bookshelves, and a couple of nice leather chairs. The henchmen brought us coffee and didn’t interrupt. There had been an almost casual feeling to the morning so far. Now, she was on the clock, and everyone in the building knew it. I knew it too. Her ‘fuck me’ suit doubled as a ‘don’t fuck with me’ outfit. “The combat outfits take like a half hour to put on or take off. They kill the mood. Besides, they’re not all that comfortable — not good for talking in. This is what I’d wear around the tied up super hero as I told him my nefarious plans in a seductive voice. The heavy leather outfits are what I’d wear after he broke free.”

I laughed. “You have this down to a science.”

She giggled. “You have to. Look, I know everyone thinks we get up one day, think ‘I wanna be a supervillain,’ put on a bathing suit and halloween mask and everything falls into place. The simple truth is, it takes work to do things right — same as anything else. You need the right clothes, the right tools, the right connections, the right introductions — and you still actually need to be good at it.”

“So how did you decide to do it?”

She leaned back, stretching. She was inhumanly flexible, which can be distracting when she’s wearing her best ‘fuck me’ costume. “Mine’s a pretty standard story,” she said. “I went through metahuman expression in early high school, figured my powers out, and decided that I had a destiny.”

“To rob jewelry stores?”

She laughed. “To save the world.”

I blinked. “Huh?”

“Oh yeah. Check any ten super villains, and nine of them started off as super heroes. I started at sixteen years old. Red white and blue leotard, with pale tights. Cheesy as Hell, since I didn’t have a patriotic thing going, but there’s not a good ‘starter kit’ for super heroes out there. You have to grab what you can find at dance supply stores, costume shops and the like.”

“So… wait. How long did you fight crime?”

“Like two years. I was ‘Dynamo Girl.’ Well, I started as ‘Dynagirl,’ but it turns out that Sid and Marty Kroft did a TV show with a Dynagirl in the seventies.” She laughed again, shaking her head. “I stopped muggings, got cats out of trees, took down a street gang or two — even fought a couple of entry level villains.”

“Huh. That must have been something to see.”

She arched an eyebrow — I was impressed with how expressive she could be with the leather mask on — and smiled naughtily. “Oh, you like the idea of sixteen year olds in star spangled lycra beating down bad guys?”

“You make it sound perverse.”

She laughed. “Nah. It’s par for the course. We all know it. The lifestyle involves being leered at, on both sides of the aisle.”

“So why’d you give it up?”

“You mean — why’d I go bad? ” She grinned. “I wish I had a good story for you — some moment of truth where I fell from grace. But the simple answer is, being a super hero’s hard work.”

“Harder than being a super villain?”

She laughed, as though the question were silly. “Any time you make an effort, you’re trying to receive some kind of reward. That’s human nature. We do the things that benefit us. We work at unrewarding wage slave jobs because they give us money to buy alcohol and cigarettes. We do backbreaking charity work because it gives us warm feelings and assuages our liberal guilt. Being a super villain is, if anything, harder than being a super hero. But the rewards are tangible and immediate and can be spent on computers and slinky black dresses. It’s not like that for heroes.”

“So, you’re saying there’s no such thing as altruism? Of doing the right thing?”

She laughed again, and slipped a cigarette out of a pack on her desk. “Of course there is,” she said, lighting up. “But that’s the reward. That good feeling. That sense you’re making a difference. You have to understand the tier system.”

“Tier system? You sound like tech support.”

She ignored me. “See, you have your first tier heroes. The ones everyone’s heard of. Paragon. Freya. The Nightwatch. The founders of Justice Wing. The ones who make the national news every day. They get adulation from all quarters, which makes sense because they’re also the ones saving the world. Then, you have your second tier. The other guys in Justice Wing. The guys most people have heard of, but who don’t make the national news. Specialists. Transit, say. Or the Beacon.”

“That was you?” I asked.

“Not even close. Below them you have the third tier. The regional heroes. The home town boys. Guys like Darkhood, here in Meridian City. Outside their home town, no one’s heard of them, but in their home town they’re hot stuff.”

“Okay?”

“And then you have the fourth tier. Everyone else. The neighborhood heroes. Members of second rate superteams. All the guys and girls who own lycra, before they make it in the magazines. That was me.” She shook her head, breathing smoke out. “Imagine a really top notch high school quarterback. No matter how good he is, he’s still a high school quarterback.”

“So, you would need to put in the time to move up the rankings?”

“It’s not that simple. See, I was a pretty good ‘good girl.’ I saved some lives. I stopped some crime. I fought the good fight. But look at me.” She ran a hand down her stomach, sliding smoothly up out of the chair. I don’t mind saying it was easy to look at Leather. Especially in that costume. “I look good. But I don’t look ‘super heroine.’ My hips are slender, not broad. And I’m a well shaped B cup, and I can work it well, but I’m still a B cup. You look at most superheroines and they’re double D’s. You look at Freya or Paragirl — they’re double F’s. You look at any of the well known super heroines, and you’re seeing mighty tits. Hell, the only C cup in the second tier is the Beacon, and she’s so tiny they look bigger on her.”

“So… because your breast size wasn’t big enough, you got stuck in high school varsity?”

“Exactly. You know what they call it? ‘Sidekick physique.’ In fact, that’s what most thin chicks have to do if they want to get attention — partner up with a solid second tier heroine and let their first name be “and.” Like, Darkhood and Dynamo Girl.” She shook her head. “Not that I’d partner up with an SCA reject with a bow.”

“That reject with a bow’s likely going to try and stop your jewelry heist.”

Leather snorted. “Yeah, well. Super villains fight super heroes. If you don’t want to fight super heroes find some other way of making a living. That’s one reason I’m going to pull jobs here this week. Transit’s in California at a conference all week. She’s second tier and way out of my league. Darkhood’s third tier. Maybe I can take him and maybe I can’t, but he won’t teleport me into jail the moment he sees me.”

“Gotcha.”

“Anyway. Here I was. Going out, working hard every night. And there was a night I took out two super thugs. Red Beast and Shocker, if you keep up. Anyway, that fight hurt. I was lucky not to be hospitalized. But I managed to stop them. Get them locked up. And saved a whole crowd of people.” She took a long drag off her cigarette. “I got page four of the Bay City Chronicle.”

I kind of shook my head. “So, because you couldn’t get good press, you gave it up?”

She considered, and nodded. “Yeah. See, that’s the acid test. If you realize that no one gives a shit, and you go out and keep trying to save the world? You’re a super hero. A real one. Your reward comes from inside. If you go out, kill yourself, and get upset because no one gives a shit? You’re in the wrong line of work. That was me.”

“How’d you make the transition?”

“It was my next trip out. I nailed a crook who’d robbed a big liquor store. It was a Friday night, so he’d taken like eight thousand bucks in a cloth laundry bag. I took him down. He dropped the money. He took a shot at me and missed. I knocked him into a wall, and he started running, dropping his gun. And I was all alone, in the dark, watching him run, and wondering why in God’s name I’d run after him. And there was a cloth bag full of money right next to me, and no one would finger me — who’d even believe the crook, if he got caught?” She stubbed out her cigarette. “So I picked up the bag and went home. I was living on my own then, so it was a boon. I paid my rent, paid my bills… bought new clothes.” She shook her head, laughing. “It was midway through my next shift at the restaurant that it hit me that I didn’t need to hustle for tips any more. So I walked out the door.”

“Heh. Makes sense.” I leaned back in my chair, stretching. Weirdly comfortable. “So when did ‘Dynamo Girl’ become ‘Leather?'”

“Well, I knew I didn’t want to stay ‘Dynamo Girl.’ I mean, it sounds weird, but… that was the hero thing. I know some villains keep their hero names when they cross the aisle, but that didn’t seem right to me.” She looked out the window, out over the field. “I mean, I did some good, you know? I saved some lives. Leave that part of me there. Besides. ‘Leather’ is a better villain schtick.”

“You sound like you respect super heroes,” I said. “That’s weird. You’re not gnashing or frothing about do-gooders and paying.”

Leather laughed. “I can. I’m good at it. But that’s just part of the whole theater thing. Really, not counting the real psychos like the Jack O’Knaves? Most super villains are fans of super heroes. We have to be, really.”

“Why?”

“Because they need us, and we need them.” She walked around to the front of her desk, hopping up and crouching. Which looked better in a PVC leotard than in flannel pants, it’s worth noting. “Cut either the heroes or the villains out of the equation, and you have one guy in tights showing up to do police work. It’s stupid. It looks ridiculous. But give a hero a villain and it becomes… I dunno. Cultural. It makes sense. If I’m there, robbing the bank, and I’m wearing bondage gear and making bad puns? Of course it makes sense that Darkhood shows up and shoots epoxy-spraying arrows at me. The absurdity cancels each other out.”

“But wouldn’t it be easier to just… how you put it? Work quiet? Go in, steal stuff in civvies, and get out?”

She cocked her head, and bit her lip. It was disturbingly adorable. “You don’t get it,” she said. “This is a lifestyle choice.”

I admit it. I didn’t look impressed.

“Seriously,” she said. “Take the world conquerers. If Leonardo Lucas was just after world domination, he wouldn’t build giant robots and death rays. He’d get an assload of patents, make three billion dollars, and join the fucking Republican party. He wants people to bow down before him. He wants everyone to know he’s conquering the world. And if that means he has to fight and kill Paragon to do it, so be it. Sure, I can go out, wear all black, break into jewelry stores after hours and liberate millions each year, but that’s not satisfying. When I was Dynamo Girl, I could barely get page four. Leather makes the front page whether she gets away or goes to jail.”

“How can that be,” I asked. “Seriously. Wouldn’t the heroes just stop dressing up, if that would stop the villains?”

She laughed. “They stop villains with their fists and their power rings. They don’t want to stop villainy, no matter how much they claim they do. They need us, even more than we need them. Without them, we’re weird and stupid looking, but we still steal shit. Without us, they’re just porn stars in capes.”

Chapter 4

Marco smokes a cigar before they go on a job. There’s lots of rituals they do, mind, but Marco’s is to smoke a cigar. “Why hench? Why do anything, man? Money.”

“Is the money good?”

He chuckled, shaking his head. He was wearing a biker outfit, more or less. Leather jacket and pants, with chains, over a white tank top. It was the ‘uniform’ the three henchmen wore when they went out. “You kidding? S’a good deal. We get 20% of each job, after expenses, with a two grand a month minimum.”

“Twenty four thousand a year’s a good deal? You could go to jail, right?”

He laughed full out, this time. “Twenty percent of each job’s a good deal. Take tonight. We’re doin’ a jewelry store. Assuming we don’t get super’d, we’re gonna clean the thing out. That’s about eight fifty — maybe nine hundred thousand in inventory we’ll score. Figure we get ten cents on the dollar after fencing? We’re looking at eighty thousand for one night’s work. Twenty percent of eighty k means sixteen grand, divided by four henches.” He puffed his cigar once more. “Call it four grand, and that’s just for one night’s work. Minus ten percent for the Guild, and I’m takin’ home thirty-five, thirty six hundred. And that’s for a jewel heist — jewels suck, mostly. We do a bank hit, say, and I might bring home ten or fifteen thousand for one night’s work. If it’s a good bank.”

“Four henches?” I looked around. I saw three guys in the Village People outfits, and one guy wearing a windbreaker and jeans off to the side. He looked like a college intern.

“Yeah, he’s on the job tonight too. He’s Steve.”

“His name’s Steve?”

Marco shook his head. “His job’s Steve. Every job needs a Steve.”

I looked back at the guy. “What does a Steve do?”

“Steve gets to the area before we do. He sets himself up in the crowd of rubberneckers. If a super shows, he hits the panic button so we don’t get surprised. If the cops take all of us down, or a super takes us out, his job’s to be just some college student watching, make his way out, and make the call.”

“The call?”

Marco nods. “He calls the service. The service gets the lawyers out, calls families, does whatever we need. See, we all got jobs. I’m on wheel. I drive, ride shotgun, wait — stuff like that. Those guys are bag. They’ll be scooping up the jewels and gems into bags and toting to the car. The Steve’s our insurance policy.”

The Steve certainly looked non-descript. I won’t go into too much detail — I get the feeling outing a professional Steve wouldn’t be the healthiest thing I could do. But in general, I can say that I’d never give him a second look at a mall or public walkway. If he went inside the jewelry store, he’d stand out — he didn’t look like he had the money to look at expensive pieces of rock — but wandering around outside, drinking a latte? Oh yeah. The Steve didn’t smoke a cigar before the run, but he was doing stretches and deep breathing. The two bagmen were running through some comedy routine they clearly knew better than by heart. And Leather?

Leather was freaking.

First off, Leather was right. In her full combat costume — which is the bustier/merrywidow thing I saw in the picture before I came — she practically smoldered. But bouncing around as they got ready to climb into the Leathermobile — the Humvee-like APC’s unofficial name — she looked like she was somewhere between a nervous breakdown and a meth overdose. She kept darting from one hench to the next, grilling them on the minutia of the plan — a plan that quite honestly could have come off a playground game of cops and robbers.

Here’s how it would go down. The Steve would get into the area, and then call one of the bagmen on his cell phone. They had a prewritten script that meant “I’m in position, and everything looks clear,” as well as scripts that meant “more cops than usual” or “Paragon just landed on the roof, so abort.” Once he made the call, the bagman would give him an estimated time of arrival.

The arrival itself would come when the Leathermobile drove into the storefront. The front of the car was reinforced for ramming like that. Leather would spring out, dazzle the crowd with repartee, take down any security or police who happened to be inside, and get the civilians running out of the building. Once they’d sown chaos and gotten any opposition out, the bagmen would swarm out and start scooping jewelry into their bags. Leather would be in charge of getting access to the good stuff. If all went according to plan, it would take less than five minutes. That would still be enough time for the police to arrive, so Leather would take them on while the bagmen finished up. Anyone who managed to get past her would have to deal with Marco, though Marco told me this was a ‘no-kill job.’

All Leather’s jobs were no-kill, he said. She was a thief. Other villains killed as a matter of course, but the Henches Guild didn’t like it. The Guild contract went up to 40% on ‘sanctioned’ jobs. Marco said he wouldn’t touch them, though. “You go to jail as a hench. It’s just what happens. You go up for grand theft or aiding and abetting, it’s one thing. Even multiple felony counts ain’t that big a deal. Not for the Guild. But start killing people? Then they care. And God help you, you kill a cop. You get away from a job with dead cops on the ground, you need to cash in and retire and pray no one made you.”

“What about dead super heroes?” I asked.

Marco kind of blinked at me. “Well, it happens,” he said. “Not on any of my jobs, but they go down.”

“Is it trouble?”

He shrugged. “Not really. Not like killing a cop.”

It was getting close to go time on the night’s raid. Leather had everyone come close for the pre-job prayer. It was weirdly like being backstage at a Madonna concert, just before they took stage. “What about him?” one of the bagmen asked, thumbing at me.

“He’s technically a prisoner,” Leather said.

“You want to risk bad luck?” Marco asked.

Leather made a face. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re right. Chapman — get over here. And be respectful. ”

We got in a circle and held hands, heads bowed. “Lord,” she said. “Let us have a good job tonight. Let the police be occupied with more important things, and keep the civilians safe. Let the haul be good and the press get good pictures of me. In your name, Amen.”

“Amen,” the others murmured, and I did too. I felt weird.

For the record, other than just before they went on jobs, I never got the feeling any of these guys were religious.

The last bit of Leather’s pre-job ritual was a kiss. She kissed each of her henchmen, firmly. No tongue, but a solid kiss. She kissed me too. It was nice. I noticed she smelled like perfume and the mink oil you were supposed to condition motorcycle leathers with.

The Steve scooped up a bookbag, put on a somewhat dorky looking helmet, and climbed on — I swear to God — a Vespa scooter. A good one, actually. Clearly a rebuilt classic. He putted out in a cloud of two-stroke fumes.

“Okay,” Leather said. “C’mon, Chapman. I’m going to lock you up in the bedroom until we get back.”

“What if there’s a fire?” I asked.

Leather blinked. “Then you’ll burn to death,” she said, cheerfully.

“Okaaaaay. And what if some super hero captures your whole gang?”

“No worries,” Leather said. “I let the service know you were up here. When the Steve makes the call, they’ll send someone to let you out at the same time they pack my shit up.”

“Oh. Good enough. Good luck robbing the jewelry store,” I said, walking into her suite.

Leather grinned, and shut the door. I heard a heavy lock turn shut.

So now I waited.

Chapter 5

In grey midmorning light on a rainy day, Leather looked tired and disheveled. She wore a tank top and those same flannel pants she greeted me with, and drank coffee while she worked in Microsoft Excel. “I hate paperwork,” she muttered to me, and plugged numbers into columns. Marco and one of the bagmen from the previous night were busy driving their haul to the relay point to the fence, after inventory and estimate. That meant Leather had to crunch numbers.

“Jewels suck,” she said. “It’s a perfect loud crime. Exactly what you want when you’re giving the full business, but in terms of return on investment, you either want actual antiques and heirlooms or you might as well not bother.”

The night before, at two in the morning, her tune was different. There was laughing and screaming and dancing. They played loud music until late, and giggled and recounted what happened. The Steve got high in a corner. I’d seen it a thousand times at rock concerts — you really nail a gig, and you run off that high half the night. I just hadn’t thought it applied to grand theft larceny. I watched diamond rings and necklaces spill through her fingers as she laughed and laughed….

“After seeing the inventory, the fence gave me estimates. Nine hundred and thirty two thousand retail value. They’re offering ninety one thousand dollars for the lot.”

“I thought you got ten cents on the dollar for jewelry,” I said.

Leather snorted. “I get what they offer. It’s not easy to move jewels. We all know it. I’ll make a Hell of a lot more tonight.”

“Tonight?” I asked, but she was adjusting the spreadsheet.

“Ninety one thousand. So, eighteen two goes to the Guild, and they’ll pay the henches. Fifteen percent goes to the service–”

“That’s not the Guild?”

“Nah. Whole different operation. The Guild’s all about the henches. The service is all about insurance. Most jobs we don’t need them, and they get lots of money. But when we do need them, there’s top flight attorneys and my personal belongings get dealt with. Eventually, they either arrange a release or a jailbreak, and I’m right back to work.” She tapped a few more keys. “That’s thirteen thousand, six fifty to the service. Five thousand for the escape route?”

“Escape route?” I asked.

She just smiled, and continued her breakdown. “Twenty five gallons of gas for the Leathermobile — every trip I swear we’re going to swap it out for a Honda Civic — plus wear and tear from when we went through the front of the store and servicing… call it a hundred and fifty dollars for that. Drive thru food–”

“You did McDonald’s drive thru on your way to rob a jewelry store?”

Leather shrugged. “I was craving fries and Marco likes the double quarter pounders. Anyway. After everything, call it fifty four thousand dollars for last night’s work.”

“That sounds pretty damn good to me,” I said.

Leather rolled her eyes. “Not hardly. I’m going to owe three quarters of a million dollars for transport services, setup and support of my new lair at the end of the week. I don’t have any intention of cutting into my savings.”

“You mean… you intend to come up with another seven hundred thousand dollars between now and then?”

“I intend to come up with another seven hundred thousand dollars after expenses between now and then,” she answered, grinning impishly.

“Yo, Leather!” It was the Steve — I never did learn his actual name — shouting from downstairs. “C’mere! Got something on the Tivo for you!”

“Right!” she shouted back down, and hopped up, scooping up her now empty coffee mug. “C’mon,” she said. “I think I know what this is.” She looked excited.

The television was paused when we got in. The Steve was grinning and backed up to a news break. It was local news, admittedly, but still. Naturally, it had been about the robbery. Their television station had gotten security camera footage of the Leathermobile as it smashed through the front of the store and took out one of the display cases. The grainy, black and white footage caught the bagmen as the scooped up jewels, and Leather as she danced around fleeing civilians and disarmed a security guard. I heard Leather coo with delight as she watched herself spring up a good ten feet, straight for the camera. She kissed the lens right as the feed cut out, no doubt because she had destroyed it.

“ Perfect, Leather said, pumping her arm. “That was exactly what we wanted.”

“How do you mean,” I asked.

“That’s good video,” she said. “That’ll play the rest of the week. I give it even odds the cable news channels will pick it up. Maybe even the networks.” She almost bounced in place. “That footage will show up on police video television shows for the next decade. ”

“What does that give you?” I asked.

She looked at me, rolled her eyes, and darted out of the room, no doubt to grab more coffee before she went back to paperwork.

Chapter 6

The bagmen were the ones to grab me, one to an arm. I had been trying to retreat into Leather’s private bath. They hauled me back, my arms straining my shoulders, and swung me around to face Marco. Marco didn’t waste time. He slammed his fist into my stomach, turning his body as he did it, giving his punch momentum.

It was like a bomb went off in my abdomen. This is a pain like I’d never felt. I was hunched in, and I’d have curled up into a ball if the bagmen weren’t still holding my arms. As it was, I was exposed as he backhanded me across the face. I swear he loosened a tooth and blood went flying. Lip, nose, I don’t know from where.

“You set us up, motherfucker,” he snarled, hitting me again. “How’d you do it? Huh? How’d you do it?”

I croaked something. I can’t even tell you what. But whatever it was, it didn’t satisfy the henchmen. Marco slapped me around some more, then backed up. I shook my head to try and clear it before I realized the bagmen had let me go. The reason why became obvious — Marco hit me with an uppercut that threatened to snap my head clean off and I flew backwards.

It felt like one of those moments in a boxing movie. Felt like I had gone into slow motion, with my heartbeat overdubbed on the soundtrack as I arced back, eyes going blurry as my body went rubbery and I turned in midair, before crashing onto Leather’s bed. I saw a smear where my face had left a bloody mark on her white bedspread, and I remembered thinking Leather would be pissed before the bagmen hauled me back up for another round of dancing with Marco’s fists.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.

When Leather and the boys went out on their jobs, they locked me in Leather’s bedroom. Though this was technically a lair, it didn’t have a dungeon or a prison. Leather had shrugged when I asked her about it. “I’m not a captivity kind of supervillain usually,” she said. “The times I’ve had a chance to strut in the fuck-me outfit, I’d been working with other villains. Contract work, or the occasional big heist. And I can lock my bedroom door from the outside and the only windows are too high and small for you to crawl out, so it makes sense.” She’d grinned. “All the cool personal shit’s in my study anyway. But try to resist going through my underwear drawer.”

I didn’t, for the record. Resist, that is. Hey, it’s boring to sit in a bedroom, even with DirecTV and a Tivo. Actually, her bedroom was pretty homey — television, nice stereo, comfortable bed, nice recliner with reading lamp. Bookshelf full of manga, adventure books, Laurel K. Hamilton butting up against Neil Gaiman — and if you didn’t need that mental image, well, neither did I.

For the record? She had a small selection of black lacy things, a freaking ton of sport lycra and comfortable cotton, and a disturbing lack of leather underwear. If she’s going to name herself Leather, you’d think she’d wear the part.

But my voyeurism during my captivity isn’t why the boys were introducing me to unimaginable pain. No, that stemmed from the evening’s work. It had been a quiet job, not loud like the jewelry store.

The job in question was a Circuit City, hitting not only the sales floor but the warehouse, long after hours. This job wasn’t a smash and grab, with laughter and shootouts with security and kissing cameras. This job was supposed to happen without anyone figuring it out until it was done. Preparation was everything. They had a tractor trailer they’d gotten ahold of, and they were literally going to drive it up to the building’s loading dock, head inside, kill the security system (and take out any guards, in a less lethal fashion) and load the thing from front to back with high end electronics.

“Laptop computers are best,” Leather explained. “They’re compact and expensive, and that’s a good combination. We’ll clean the place out of laptops if we possibly can. After that, we’re looking at other high end electronics. Small and pricey beats large and affordable. We’ll grab some high def televisions, but they’re so friggin’ big it’s almost not worth it.”

“How is this stuff better than jewelry?” I asked. “Given it’s such a pain in the ass?”

“Street value,” she said, stretching. She was wearing a full body suit, today. It was leather, but flat leather, not shiny, and it hugged her. Her hair was tied back, her mask larger to help cut down on the glare from her face. The henches, on the other hand, wore nondescript clothes. Jumpsuits — the kind a janitor would wear. Marco had on a blue work shirt and jeans. They looked for all the world like a warehouse crew, ready to move stock.

“Street value? You’re telling me you can fence a laptop for more than you can a five thousand dollar diamond necklace?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” Leather said. “We got over nine hundred thousand in jewels and got paid under one hundred thousand for it. If we steal four hundred thousand in electronics tonight, we’re looking at well over a quarter mil from the fence. Electronics are in demand and everyone wants a bargain.”

They didn’t take the Leathermobile. Steve was Steve, though this time he was taking a ten year old Hyundai and a girl — the girl was a “day player” that Steve worked with. Since they were going to be sitting in a parking lot watching an empty warehouse, they needed to look as ‘legitimate’ as possible, which meant a couple of kids making out in a car. Steve told me the girl would angle so he could see the warehouse at all times. I made noises about ‘perks of the job.’

Steve shrugged. “It’s just business,” he said.

Marco smoked his cigar. The bagmen did their comedy routine. Leather bounced around. We prayed, and Leather kissed everyone. Steve drove off to pick up his ‘date.’ The rest took a black SUV to get the tractor-trailer. I was locked in Leather’s bedroom. Another night of Supervillany.

Right up until the door had been kicked open by Marco and the boys. I had been watching Leather’s tivo — she had a thing for game shows, so Let’s Make a Deal had been on — and I nearly lost bowel control when they smashed in. I admit, I ran. Look, these guys are scary and they’re all bigger than I am. So I panicked. They retrieved me, and you came in for the first part of the story.

Marco was pissed. Full on pissed. And he wasn’t afraid to show it. Neither were the others. I got kicked in the sides, punched again, slammed down onto the hardwood floor, picked back up. I’d love to tell you a story of my wisecracking in the face of danger but let’s be honest here. I got my ass kicked and there was no two ways around it.

Somewhere in here, I gathered there had been a problem with the night’s entertainment. A problem named Darkhood.

Apparently, things went off well enough. They got in, the guard went down without too much hassle, the security system was taken out, and they’d set to filling the eighteen wheeler with high end electronics. That was all fine. It was as they locked up that the trouble came, in the form of an arrow with a tear gas grenade attached to it that hit the loading dock. Darkhood had been trying to eliminate the henches as a concern, and it might well have worked only Marco had been clear enough. And he’d grabbed the henches by the collars, gotten them into the cab, and pulled out and away while Leather stayed behind to fight the archer.

That was apparently standard procedure, by the way. I know, I know, you expect the henchmen to run up like ninjas in a bad 80’s movie, going in one at a time so Our Hero can knock them down. In the real deal, that was specialized work. Marco and the boys could fight — oh man, was I learning that — but that wasn’t their job. When the police or a superhero showed up… well, that was what Leather was there for. It was the job of the henches to get away, preferably with the night’s haul.

I knew that from before. I found out Darkhood had hit them during their spirited discussion with me. And it was clear that Leather herself wasn’t with them. Was she in jail? They didn’t know.

All they did know was a superhero had shown during a quiet job, and that made them suspect a rat. And there was a nice juicy rodent locked up in their boss’s bedroom.

“How the Hell would I have told Darkhood anything!?” I asked. Well, screamed. In a begging tone. “I’ve been here! ”

“You tell us,” Marco snarled, stomping down on me again. I was being curb stomped, sans the curb. “You tell us! How’d you do it, boy? Was this your plan all the long? You a cop all along boy?”

“ Marco! ”

The big man turned, his bearing shifting.

Leather was standing there. Her suit had tears in it along her abdomen and leg, and another along her arm that was obscured with blood. Her hair was a mess. And she looked pissed. “What the fuck? ” she demanded.

“Takin’ care of business,” Marco snapped.

Leather stormed in, shoving Marco back — he half flew back against the wall with her strength. “ Remind me,” she demanded, looking first at Marco, then at the other two. “Did I? Or did I not? Tell you idiots that Chapman was cool until I said he wasn’t?”

“Little shit ratted us out,” one of the Bagmen said. He sounded whiny. “That’s how the cowl–”

“Oh. Right. Chapman blew the gig for us. Right.” Leather turned, glaring at the bagman. “Chapman knows our address. If he could call for help, why isn’t this place crawling with cops? Why was he still here to get beat up? And how did he tell Darkhood what Circuit City we’d be at? Especially since we weren’t really at a Circuit City? ”

The bagman opened his mouth. He looked at the other bagman. Silently the two let go of me. I sort of slid down to the floor.

Leather looked at one of them, then the other, then looked at Marco, who’d gotten back up. “Well?” she snapped.

Marco shrugged. “We fucked up,” he said.

“You think? ”

“When we got back after the transfer, been so long that when you weren’t here, we thought you’d been taken out. It pissed us off. Points for loyalty, right?”

Leather snorted. “Loyalty? Loyalty is doing what I fucking say and using your fucking head! Jesus — look at this!” She stabbed her finger at the bed. “That quilt cover’s silk. You know how to get bloodstains out of silk? You been reading Hints from Fucking Heloise, Marco?”

Marco shrugged again, looking at the floor.

“You got to the transfer station?”

“Yeah,” Marco said.

Leather looked at one of the bagmen. “You made the transfer?”

“Saw the train leave and everything.”

“You got a manifest?”

The bagman nodded, fishing out a sheaf of paper wadded up in his pocket.

Leather took the papers and smoothed them out, looking them over. “For the record,” she said, “while you were doing this, I was fighting a superhero. When he was done, I had to hit the fallback point and get scanned before I came home. You know this. You know that if I’m covering you guys getting the loot to the fence, it means I’ll be a while getting home. What do you do when that happens?”

None of them spoke.

“ What do you do when that happens?! ”

“Get in, hit police band radio, listen for a paranorm pickup call, get on the security system and wait.”

“You’re God damned right. Instead, you three broke into my bedroom and started kicking the shit out of Chapman. I half-wish we had been blown so you morons would be going to jail when the SWAT team busted in here and found you guys off your fucking posts. ”

They had no answer for that. “Scanned?” I croaked.

“What?” Leather snapped her head to look at me. She wasn’t terribly happy to be interrupted.

Well, I was in a shitload of pain and I’ve never been bright, so I didn’t look away. “You said you had to get scanned before you came home.”

Leather rolled her eyes. “Darkhood’s a fucking tech,” she said. “Cowls love to ‘let’ you get away with a homing beacon or transmitter or something shoved up your ass so they can come waltzing in when your guard’s down. I have a thing set up — go there, get wanded like at an airport. Make sure when I come home I’m all by myself. Shut up.”

I took a breath and shut up. My heart was pounding and my skin was flushed — like a runner’s high, with pain.

“Right,” Leather said. “You three are going to go and do a sweep of the grounds. Make sure we’re not blown. One of you or the Steve gets on the rig and keeps in contact. One of you goes out of contact, Steve hits the panic button. Right?”

“You got it,” Marco said, and started to walk out.

“Don’t you fucking move yet. You three broke my orders. And you either broke our hostage or screwed with my guest, and either way I’m pissed. ” She looked at each of them in turn. “You understand that under the terms of our agreement I can dock your cut of tonight’s heist up to fifty percent after your Guild fees, right?”

“Fifty–” one of the bagmen started to protest.

Leather’s hand shot out, doubling the bagman over. She smoothly lifted him over her head by his stomach. “Alternately, I can fucking kill you under the disobedience and insubordination clause. I might not even have to fucking pay penalties!”

The bagman sort of whimpered.

Leather dropped him. “As it works out, I am a benevolent boss. And therefore I’m electing to go with a warning instead. That warning includes a financial penalty. Because I’m an exceptionally benevolent boss, that’s going to be twenty-five percent instead of fifty. Understood?”

The two uninjured henchmen mumbled assent.

“Understood?” she repeated to the third, as he stood up. He nodded frantically.

“Good. Now. Since this is a warning — let me give you that official warning, which I’ll be certain to send along to the Guild rep too.” She looked at each of them slowly. “If you ever, ever break my orders again… as God as my witness I will devoted whatever time I have out of jail to making your lives living Hells. I will break your knees. I will beat up your wives and kids. I will make fun of your mothers and kill your fucking pets in front of your eyes. My wrath will be as extensive as it will be disproportionate, because I have no. Fucking. Sense. Of perspective. Do you idiots hear me? ”

There was a pause.

“We hear you,” Marco said. “We’re sorry, Leather.”

Leather seemed to relax. “Cool. Get the fuck out of my bedroom.”

They shuffled out. Marco looked over his shoulder, at me this time. “Sorry man,” he said. “Nothing personal.”

I sort of nodded. Jesus, what would you do?

Leather watched them go, breathing a bit hard. And I could swear — right in that moment, having just roughed up guys who looked twice her size? She looked as young as she had to really be.

I started to get up myself, but I didn’t get far. “Don’t move,” Leather snapped. “Thanks to the fucking three stooges, you and me need to have a little talk now.” She walked over to the door. “Fuck. They broke my door. ”

“A talk?” I asked, wincing.

“Yeah.” She pushed the door more or less shut, then grabbed a chair, wedging it in place under the doorknob, as a makeshift lock. “A talk.” She turned to face me, leaning forward. “Chapman?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s no way you could have contacted Darkhood. At least, no way I can think of.” She leaned forward. “I find out there was some way I couldn’t think of, and no matter where you are, you’re going to wish you’d changed your name and face and gone to live in Barbados.”

I breathed in, somewhat labored. The adrenalin was wearing off, so if anything I was beginning to hurt far worse. “Gotcha,” I said.

She nodded. “Cool,” she said. “Now take off your clothes.”

Chapter 7

Leather was clearly unimpressed with my expression. Most days, she might have found it cute. After having to bitch out her henchmen for beating the shit out of me, — not to mention the arrow wielding superhero that had screwed with her heist — she clearly wasn’t in the mood. “Don’t get excited,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I have to see if you’re just in a shitload of pain or if you’re actually really hurt.”

“Of course,” I said. “Never thought any differently.” I started to peel out of my clothes.

“Right. Sure. You get undressed.” She opened a drawer, grabbing out flannel pants, a tank top, and a pair of panties. “I’m gonna check my own injuries and shower. When I get back I’ll give you the once-over. If you have internal bleeding, try not to die before I get back.”

“What happens if I do have internal bleeding?” I asked. I’ll admit, I was in a lot of pain now, and the idea that I might have deeper injuries was worrying me.

Leather made a face. “One guy dumps you at the hospital while we push the panic button for the service. And Marco and the boys will wish they’d never been fucking born. ” She half-stomped into her private bath, while I got undressed. It’s a little weird. I hadn’t been beat up — I mean, really beat up — since I was a kid in junior high. Seven years of covering rock and hip hop, I never took a punch from anyone. Now, every inch of my body hurt. My skin hurt. My stomach hurt, and my ribs hurt, and my arms and legs hurt. My face hurt and my lip was swollen and my eyes felt like there were ants crawling on them and the only reason I wasn’t throwing up was because I was pretty sure that would hurt too.

Fifteen minutes later, Leather came out in the flannels, the tank top, wet hair and more of a smile. Clearly, she’d calmed down herself. I noticed that she had a long ugly looking scab on her left arm, where I remember there’d been blood on her suit when she came in.

“Jesus,” I said. “You sure you don’t need a hospital?”

She grinning a bit. “Pretty damn sure. I heal fast. I’ll have a line scar by morning, then nothing by tomorrow night. I just cleaned it with iodine — it looks worse because I had to recut to get in deep enough.”

“What happened?”

“Not all Darkhood’s arrows are shockers or tear gas or have nets in them.” She smiled ruefully. “Sometimes? They’re arrows. I’m a little more durable than the average guy on the street, and I do wear heavy leather, but an arrow will screw with me if I’m not careful.”

“Jesus. You mean he tried to kill you?”

Leather snorted. “He’s oldschool,” she said, beginning to poke at me. She seemed satisfied with my cries of pain and wimpish yelping. “He wasn’t trying to kill me. He was trying to slow me down. Give me a bad flesh wound. Try to take away one of my arms to throw me off.” She half-smiled. “If he were trying to really hurt me, he’d have put a few arrows in my stomach. He’s got the aim to do it.”

“Does he ever do that? Really shoot someone?”

“No.” She began cleaning the blood off my face with a cloth she got out of a foil packet. It stung like mad.

I shivered, looking every which way at once. God help me, I was in tremendous pain and right then? I could really tell how good Leather smelled. Of course, she was damp, wearing pretty flimsy clothes and she was practically on top of me. So I tried not to look directly at her. The last thing I wanted–

She giggled. So, you know, mission failed. “Sorry,” I said.

“Hey, at least I know you’re probably not dead. But don’t get any ideas. I don’t sleep outside the fraternity.”

“The fraternity? You mean supervillains?”

“Villains, yeah.” She chuckled. “Or otherwise. I won’t pretend I haven’t had a few cowls hanging off my bedpost.”

“Really? Superheroes sleep with supervillains?”

She looked thoughtful. “Some do,” she said. “Depends on the hero, really. Or the era.”

“The era?”

“Yeah. Old school heroes? Say, the ones who started ten or fifteen years back? They’d never knock boots with a villain. Not in a million years. Sometimes they want to, but they’re all about tension. Remember back when the Nightwatch was called Nightstick? The Nightstick and Cudgel days?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, there were always rumors about him and Lady Velvet? But you just know nothing happened.” She began probing his ribs with practiced fingers. “You get one of the more recent heroes, though? A lot of them’ll go for it.”

“Doesn’t seem very heroic,” I said.

Leather shrugged. “Depends on who you get. Some heroes? They’re clearly just into it. They like the sense of danger. They get off on bad girls. Half the time, they’re trying for a whole ‘bad boy’ image anyway — you know. Lovable rascal or dangerous loose cannon. It’s all a sex thing.”

I snorted.

“Let me guess. Your naiveté has trouble with superheroes having sex. Well, they’re not all like that. Not even all the ones I’ve slept with.” She half-smiled. “The others are way, way worse.”

“What do you mean?”

She sat back, tossing the blood stained peroxide wet nap into a basket across the room. Over her shoulder. Nothing but net. For all the drama of watching Leather hoist a henchman over her head or fling a tire rim two hundred yards, it’s the little examples of her power that always stick out. Her grace. Her aim. The sense that she always has her footing, even if she’s standing on one toe. “Bad boys or fetishists? They just want to have sex. It’s disappointing on one level, ’cause you’d like to think they’re better than that, but they’re straightforward and I can respect that. Some of these guys? They think they’re rehabilitating you.”

I blinked. “What?”

“The James Bond thing. They think that when they stick the allmighty wonder penis into the bad girl, through the healing power of orgasm they’ll make her see the light, see the error of her ways, swear off badness and come to the light side of the force.” Leather snorted, looking away. “They think they’re doing you and the world a favor by getting you laid.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It was clear Leather was uncomfortable, and after the beating I wasn’t in the mood. But the reporter in me wanted to hear more. So I just kept my mouth shut.

“You know what it is?” she said, looking back. “It’s smug. No. No, it’s misogynistic. All these bad girls really need is a good hard dicking and then they’ll be sweet innocent little flowers and they’ll happily prance off into the kitchen and bake shit.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how the heroines put up with it. I really don’t. But then, I was a piss poor heroine.”

“It didn’t sound like you were a bad heroine,” I said. “It sounded like you helped some people. And like you cared.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I cared. Fat lotta good it did me. But if I padded my suit, I’d be popular and all the boys would like me and then I’d make the papers every day of the week.” She shook her head again. “Fuck that. I look damn good and I can lift a motorcycle over my head and make that look damn good.”

I bit my lip. Which hurt, so I stopped doing that damn fast. Damn thing was swollen, too. “So… what about Darkhood?”

“What about Darkhood?” she snapped.

“Is he a bad boy or does he wield redemptive genitalia?”

Despite herself, Leather snickered. “Neither,” she said. “He’s old school.” She shook her head. “I dunno if he was around back in the day or not, but he acts like it.” She smiled a bit. “It was pretty impressive. He was a damn hard fight.”

“You sound surprised.”

“He’s third tier,” she said. “And he doesn’t have anything going for him. He’s a guy with a bow and arrow and fake SCA props with circuits in them. Studded leather. Whole medieval theme going on. Guy like that gives someone with natural powers a good hard fight, you know he’s the real deal.” She shrugs. “I make a lot of fun of him. And let’s be fair, the man dresses like he didn’t quite make the Renaissance Festival cut. But….” She hopped onto the bed, crossing her legs in the air and landing in lotus. “Put it this way. Meridian City is Transit’s town. She’s the B-Lister. The second tier. Reserve member of Justice Wing. Has a power that’s damn hard to work around — what, with those teleportation gates and all that?”

“Yeah?”

“Plus, she’s a D cup. Not a Double D, but still. She’s camera friendly — got the look. The papers love her. The tabloids love her. She’s not first tier, but people all over the country’ve heard of her.”

“Sure?”

“Darkhood still goes out every night and cracks skulls. Every night. And when he saw me — and I’m a real honest to god not-normal-human who’s good at what she does — he went in shooting. And when I got the bow out of his hands, he still came at me instead of running.” She shrugged. “You asked me what a superhero was, and why I gave it up? I gave it up because I couldn’t live his life. I couldn’t be an also-ran. I couldn’t…” she waved her hands in front of her, almost helplessly. “I couldn’t cope. He can.”

“You sound like you like him.”

Leather smirked. “Jealous?”

“Does he count as ‘in the fraternity?'”

Leather laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “He shouldn’t, practically speaking, but oh yeah.”

“Why shouldn’t he?”

“You know what? Put some pants on. The examination’s over. If you die in the night, it’s not my fault.” Leather rolled over backwards, dropping onto the floor in a standing position. “I’ll get you something for the pain, and we’ll make you up the guest bed in here.”

“In here? Not the cot?”

“The cot’s down with the guys, remember?” Leather was walking back into her private bath. “Tomorrow, they’re going to be flush with cash and feeling good, and they’ll be cool with you. Tonight, I bitched them out and slapped them around a little. They’re feeling ego bruised. So let’s not push it.”

“Right,” I said. I forced myself to stand, and walked — well, charitably it was walking — to where I had my bag with the clothes they’d bought for me. I got out a white tee shirt, the sweatpants they grabbed me (and which had become my default pajamas), and underwear and managed to get them on with only a few tears and three expletives.

“Much better,” Leather said, coming out with a glass full of water and some pills. “Here. Take these and drink all the water. And you might want to go to the bathroom now.”

“What are they?” I asked, looking at the pills in her hand.

“Powerful mind control drugs. Eeeeeevil mind control drugs. Also, the marijuana that makes the kids all crazy.”

“What, you need to mind control me? I can barely stand.”

Leather rolled her eyes. “Ibuprofin and codeine, dumbass. That should make sleeping possible.”

“I thought you needed a prescription for codeine.”

“Jesus. I stole over a million dollars worth of electronic shit tonight, and you’re giving me flack over codeine? ”

I allowed as she had a point. And I took the pills.

Leather opened a side closet, and grabbed out a twin airbed. It had a built in pump which she plugged in and started inflating.

“Wow,” I said. “It’s just like camp.”

“Yeah. Tomorrow I thought we’d make lanyards and macaroni art. There’s pillows and a twin sheet in that same closet. Gimp them out and gimp them over to me so I can be kind to your gimp ass and put them on the airbed.”

I did my best not to limp. I failed. She was kind enough not to laugh as she put the sheets on. “Cool,” she said. “And guess how nice I am?”

“Way nice?”

“Way, way nice,” she said, fluidly standing and walking over to her bed. “You get to have my very best silk comforter tonight.” She pulled the bloodstained comforter off the bed. “Do you like the modern art approach I’ve taken with it?”

“I feel so connected to the piece,” I said dryly.

Leather cocked her head, looking at me as she dropped the wadded up comforter onto the airbed. “I don’t get you, Chapman,” she said.

“What’s not to get?”

“You. I know you’re here to interview me and learn what makes bad guys tick and maybe get a few sexy shots of me to sell magazines. But you just had your ass kicked and you’re asking me questions like nothing happened. Why? Who are you trying to be?”

I considered. “I dunno,” I said. “Hunter S. Thompson, I guess. Or Tom Wolfe.”

She arched an eyebrow, smirking. “Tom Wolfe maybe. You’re no Hunter Thompson.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You asked what the pills were.”

I let that one go. “Anyway. I’ve always loved that sort of thing. Truman Capote or Gay Talese. That sense of being in the presence of history, whether it’s big or small — giving a sense of the life in it. You know?”

“Sure,” Leather said. “It’s not that Frank Sinatra had a cold. It’s what effect the cold had and how life changed for so many people around it.”

“Wait, you’ve read ‘Frank Sinatra has a Cold?'” I asked, a little stunned.

That was a mistake. Leather’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, I know. What a shock. Suicidegirls don’t read Esquire, right? Go to bed, Chapman.” She half-stormed back to the other side of the room.

“Well I’m sorry,” I snapped. Maybe it was the codeine. Or maybe I really am just stupid. “I just didn’t notice In Cold Blood or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test next to Laurel K. Hamilton’s Vampires in Panties on your bookshelf!”

That stopped her. She turned to face me. And God help me, I understood right then. She was mad. Really mad. I’d crossed a line. “You should reconsider your words,” she said coolly. No laughing. No giggling. No profanity. Just an almost seductive steel with a razor sharp edge. “Otherwise, I might choose to be offended.”

I shivered, and the shivering hurt, even through the growing warmth of the codeine. “I’m sorry,” I half-whispered. “I made a judgement. It was wrong.”

Leather lifted her head, looking down at me. Looking down like she would at a bug, not sure if she found it cute or creepy. Not sure if she wouldn’t crush it.

“Okay,” she said, her bearing shifting. “Just be careful about that.”

“Okay,” I said.

She looked to the side, and as scary as she had just looked, now she just looked young. Young and lonely. “I don’t read that shit any more,” she said, quietly. “I kinda got over it.”

I cocked my head. “If I make a guess, will it get me killed?”

“Maybe.”

Well, that was fair. “Dynamo Girl read that sort of thing, didn’t she.”

Leather’s muscles tensed for a moment. Then they relaxed. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “It’s not like I hear voices or anything. I’m Dynamo Girl, just like I’m Leather.”

“Of course.” I frowned. “What’s your real name, anyway?”

“Leather.”

“You had it changed?”

“No, I just don’t care.” She fell onto her bed. “I like Leather. I like the name. If you go and look up my arrest record you’ll find the birth name, but so what? I never use it. Hell, the last time I did use it was as the secret identity. The one who waited tables while I wore red lycra and fought purse snatchers. But even then I felt more like Dynamo Girl.”

“So you have no attachment to that name? What about to your family? Or your past?”

“No family to speak of — a sister out in Wyoming, but we haven’t spoken in years. She’s norm, anyhow. S’far as I know, anyway. Folks were nice enough but they’re dead. High school was just… high school. And then I decided to save the world, and then I decided to enjoy the world instead. Go to bed. I want to turn out the light.”

I got into bed. The codeine had kicked in well now — I felt a bit spacy, and tired, and warm, and I didn’t hurt nearly so badly. “Right,” I said.

“Oh! Hang on!” She rolled out of bed and dashed back into the private bath.

I got used to the bounciness of the airbed, settling down. The codeine was feeling really nice right about then.

“Here.” She came out, holding what looked like a blue domino mask. “Put this on.”

“Huh?”

“Jesus. Just lift your head up.”

I lifted my head up, and she pressed the mask to my face, around my eyes. To my surprise, it was ice cold. I may have yelped but I didn’t move, while she delicately tied it into place. “What is this?”

“Gel mask. You stick it in the freezer until you need it. That’s why I keep the minifridge in there. Well, that and not wanting to go downstairs for soda when I crave at two a.m.”

I shivered as she stood up. “It’s cold,” I said.

“Your journalistic skills are legendary,” she said, sliding back into her bed. “It’s meant to reduce swelling. More comfortable and less ooky than putting steak on your face.”

“Why’d you have that thing?” I asked, my voice a bit remote now. I was floating, and even the cold felt distant.

“Because when you wear a shaped leather mask on your face, someone will love punching you in it. Sometimes a lot.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, he says. Good night, Chapman.”

“G’night,” I said. And you’d think that would be the end of it. I’m not even sure when the lights went out. I think I slept for a while.

In the darkness, though, I heard her say “kegels.” Just out of nowhere. At least, I don’t think I said anything first.

“What?”

“You asked me why it’s a bad idea to sleep with Darkhood, even though he’s in the fraternity,” she half-whispered. “Kegels. Well, vaginal muscles.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. It weird. Whispering about this in the dark. I thought of camp again, after lights out.

“My muscles are stronger than normal human muscles,” she said, still in that half-whisper. “All my muscles. You going to write about all this?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“Then write that too. Guys — normal guys, like you… they want to have sex with girls like me. Only I don’t have sex with normal guys like you because just having a good time can injure you. I have to be too careful. I have to relax all my muscles, all the time. It’s not worth it. It’s no fun, and I get self conscious.”

“Huh. I guess I never thought about it like that.”

“I have. It’s why I gave up the birth name. The birth name was the secret identity, but say I fell in love with someone as that girl. Say that waitress had a regular customer, and they fell in love and got married. What kind of sex life would she have? What kind of intimate relationship would she have with this guy she couldn’t ever let herself have an orgasm with, in case she broke something or bruised something. I mean, it’d be like he had sex with an industrial vice.”

“So you stick to guys like you. Supers.” I shifted, fighting to stay awake through the codeine and the fatigue and the ache.

“Yeah. Only that’s not… you don’t have a relationship like that. Supervillains make bad boyfriends. Too much competition. We’re all the stars of our own stories. We don’t want to be supporting characters.”

“And heroes?”

Leather was quiet a long moment. I thought she might have fallen asleep.

“Bad boys are worse than supervillains.”

“And the redeemers?”

“You think I could fall in love with one of them? With someone who thought he was better than me? I told you — they’re misogynists. I’d have to give up my self respect, and I’m not going to ever do that. Not for anyone.”

I shifted. The air bed bounced. It was like I was floating. Like I was on a cloud. This is what supers feel like, I thought. This is what it feels like to be floating in the air. “But you sleep with them?”

Leather paused. “Yeah,” she whispered.

“Why?”

“Who else is there?”

I didn’t have an answer to that.

I heard her turn over, and punch her pillow into shape. She sort of sighed, dropping her head down. I heard it, though I couldn’t see it in the darkness.

“Hey Leather?”

“Yeah?”

“Who did Dynamo Girl sleep with?”

No answer.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

“No one,” the whisper came back. A voice in the darkness. “She was old school.”

Chapter 8

It was a sunny day, and the light was good, and Leather had declared they weren’t going to pull a job that night. “The heat’s on,” she said. “Do a job tonight and we’ll screw with the blowoff.”

So. That morning was designated for photos. Which is why I had hauled out the tripod from my dead Hyundai’s trunk. It was warm already, the sun on the back of my neck, while I made adjustments to the digital camera. Marco and one of the bagmen were nearby, keeping an eye out. This was mostly because Leather was outdoors and in full combat gear, which was at best a security risk.

We cut it down by staying on the side of the power station that overlooked the water far below, which meant we couldn’t be seen from the road. Leather was smoking a cigarette between sessions. She looked damn good, having oiled (or had one of the henches oil) the good combat suit so it fairly gleamed in the light.

I know my way around a camera because once upon a time I had pretensions of photojournalism. It was helpful as a music reporter because I could get candid shots ‘on the scene.’ A practice I wasn’t encouraged to follow on this assignment, for what should be obvious reasons. At the same time, I’m not well known for model photography because I don’t really know from shooting models. So, we’d gone outside for the light and because Leather’s lair had white painted brick facing the water, and I was erring on the side of caution by taking a few thousand pictures.

Leather was game. I had wondered, briefly, if there would be awkwardness today, but there wasn’t. Not with her, not with the guys. Leather had been right — getting the fence’s money had made all well.

Really well. Apparently, they’d hit the motherlode.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “How could you get that much money? Wouldn’t the fence’s cut knock it down?”

“The laptops did pretty well and it turned out they had a buttload of them,” Leather said, crushing the cigarette out against the brick of the wall and flicking it away in an arc that might have hit the water below, for all I could tell. “Real high end shit, too. But that wasn’t the best part. We scored a prerelease video game console.”

“Huh?”

“Big launch event for one of the new next gen video games,” Marco said. He was grinning a lot today. “Apparently they had like five hundred of them shrinkwrapped in their warehouse, with ‘do not open before’ notes all over them. Works out we didn’t sign that release.”

“You’re saying a video game brought you more money than the laptops?”

“You have no idea, ” Leather said. “There are psychos out there who’ll pay ten thousand dollars a console to get it four or five days before it’s originally released. And since they’ll sell out on opening day, there’s lots of others who’ll pay three or four thousand on eBay. The fence probably came when he saw what he had.” She grinned. “We had a good night.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said. My back hurt. So did my stomach. My lip was still puffy. And while there hadn’t been any swelling thanks to the ibuprofin and Leather’s cold gel mask, I still had black eyes. Looking in the mirror after I showered that morning, I could hear myself saying “no, officer, I walked into a door. No, officer — you just don’t know her. She loves me, but sometimes I make her do things….”

Leather set a new pose, arching, lips pouty, eyes twinkling. She knew how to exploit what the costume covered and didn’t cover, and wasn’t afraid to show it off. “Let’s do this thing,” she said, and I began snapping another few dozen pictures. I would give her suggestions and she would adjust for them. And there’s one thing I realized: glamour photography was just as boring as any other repetitive work.

“Will this cover what you need?” Leather asked. “Like, do you need shit for the inside too? Or will you use these?”

“This should cover what I need. I’m gonna assume the henchmen don’t want their pictures taken, though if I’m wrong–”

“You’re not,” Marco said. “Last thing I need is proof in a magazine I work for a supervillain. My wife’d kill me.”

I didn’t follow up about his wife. I’d learned there were questions henchmen won’t answer. “Anyway,” I said. “this is pretty much it. Although….”

“Although what? Oh wait, let me guess. Tasteful nudes, right? Maybe do nude sunbathing on the roof, and after that we can go to the back seat of your Hyundai and look at your etchings?” Leather was teasing. She was in a good mood. The ever happy, ever bubbly supervillain pixie. And her bearing, her cheer, her grin meant the Henches were in a good mood too. Everything forgotten — just another night of doing business. Even the guy she’d hoisted over her head acted like there was nothing new or different. Marco gave her shit like he always did despite being thrown against a wall the night before.

It seemed weird, but then I was acting like these guys were the same guys I’d been hanging out with and interviewing all week, instead of the thugs who’d stomped me into kibble the night before. It was just the atmosphere. That was just business. They screwed up and they paid. And me?

They’d all said they were sorry. And then they dropped the matter, and I figured out I was supposed to too, so I did. It’s how the situation worked.

But Leather was waiting for my answer. “Nothing like that,” I said. “And no bikini pictures either. Unless you want bikini pictures.”

She gave me a look.

“Hey,” I said. “You can’t tell me this isn’t an exercise in public relations for you. For all I know you want a bikini spread.”

Leather smirked. “It crossed my mind, but honestly I look better in the suit. Besides, it’d break the mystery.”

“The mystery?”

“Sure. Think about it. My birth name’s in my arrest record. My hair and style and tattoos are distinctive. I want to be recognized when I rob something. So why should I wear a mask?”

I frowned. “Wait, let me guess. Theater?”

“Got it in one.” She leaned back against the wall, one arm draped up alongside it, one leg bent at the knee, and looked sidelong at me. I took the picture, then another, then another as she shifted slightly. “Me showing up, even in a leather suit, just looks like they’re being robbed by an alt/fetish model. Put a mask on my face and it becomes something more. Something grander. There is mystery, and allure, and it makes everyone more comfortable.”

“There are both heroes and villains without masks,” I said, shifting to the side to take another four pictures. I was glad I had a lot of memory cards. And glad I had a pro grade digital camera.

“Sure, but they still have a defined look. The mask is part of my defined look,” she said. “Plus, it makes things more convenient. If I want to go out and have breakfast, it’s a lot less likely I’ll be recognized and someone will call the cops, because all the news reports have me in a mask. And there’s ways to distract the folks who’ve happened to see one of the mug shots.” She smiled a bit. “You still haven’t told me what the ‘although’ was for.”

“Hm? Oh. I was wondering if you had any pictures from your… well, former career?”

“Huh?” Marco asked.

“What?” Leather said, frowning. Then she grinned. “ Oh! You want to know if I have pictures from my Dynamo Girl days!”

I blinked. “I didn’t think you’d told your henchmen about that.”

Leather snickered. “Was that your way of trying to be coy then? ‘Former career?’ The next time you try to cover for someone’s past or secret identity, try not to make it sound like they used to be in porn, okay?” She stepped away from the wall — a sign we were going on break, so I stepped back from the camera. “But yeah, I told them. It’s part of the screening procedure. You need to let the guild know if you used to play the other side of the street, so bad situations don’t come up at bad times.”

“Bad situations?”

“Henchmen go to jail sometimes,” Marco said. “And get beat down sometimes. When we’re in the whole recruitment phase, we need to know if our new boss is an ex-hero. There was some bad shit went down a few years back. An ex-cowl recruited four henchmen he’d put in jail before he crossed the river. They figured out it was him, they decided to get revenge. Guild had to pay reparations to the villain and to the henchs’ families.”

“Dumbass,” one of the bagmen said. It was the one Leather had lifted over her head the night before. “Who gives a shit if your boss put you in jail last year. If you get paid today, yesterday don’t matter.”

“That’s why I love you guys,” Leather said.

“Anyway,” I said, steering things back onto track. “It’d just be a good counterpoint to the article if I could get some pictures of you in the old costume. Unless you’d rather not.”

“No,” Leather said. “No, that’s fine. I’m just trying to think if I’ve got something. I used to scrapbook and shit, so I should have some old newspaper photos. Hm.” She looked thoughtful. “Grab some more coffee. I’ll be right back.”

We watched her bound into the building. I realized I was alone with the henchmen for the first time since the beating.

“You take milk, right?” Marco asked, heading to the back door.

“What? Yeah. Yeah, thanks.”

He paused, looking back. “How you feeling?” he asked. “Want some Advil while I’m there?”

I was pretty sore, I’ll admit. Getting more codeine would have been nice, but I didn’t want to be foggy while I was on the clock. “Sure,” I said. “That’d be great.” I tried to smile gamely. “You guys are good at beatdowns.”

He shrugged. “Not so much, really. Some of the guys are what we call security specialists? Bodyguards, mooks, call ’em whatever? They can fight. We’re just tough.”

“Heh. That much I figured out. That’s why I couldn’t be a henchman, I guess.”

Marco grinned, shaking his head. “Man, you think any one of us could go three on one and not end up tasting blood? You get down to it, you passed the only real test.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re still doing your job.” He turned and walked in. “Coffee and Advil, comin’ up.”

It was weird, but it felt good. I guess it had never occurred to me, but in a Henchman’s world, getting beat up was an occupational hazard. How you dealt with it the day after probably counted more than the day before. I nodded to the bagman nearest me. He grinned, thumbing up.

I should note that the bagmen never gave me their names. And Leather and Marco never used them around me. That’s also not unusual, I’ve come to find out. Henchmen were jobs as much as anything. The bagmen. The wheel. The Steve. Marco was Marco because he was the supervisor. It’s entirely possible that wasn’t his real name either. Earlier in the week, I’d asked one of the bagmen if that bothered him — the anonymity of it all.

He laughed at me. “Man, I get paid to haul shit. I’m like one of the teamsters. If my name never comes up, my name doesn’t end up on the cops’ lips and they don’t show up at my mother’s asking stupid questions. Let the supervillains take the spotlight.”

Back at the photo shoot, we were drinking coffee. Leather’d been inside for like fifteen minutes now, and I was a little worried about losing the morning light. And as I’d only gotten a few hundred pictures on multiple SD cards, I wasn’t sure I had enough.

“That’s far enough, boys!”

All four of us jumped, startled. One of the bagmen dropped his coffee. The voice had come from above–

She leapt from a fourth story window, a smile on her face, a blur of red as she twisted and rolled in the air. She landed smoothly, legs bending to full crouch to absorb the fall and sprung forward, doing a handspring-cartwheel combo to get on the other side of us before dropping into a fighting crouch. Her hair was brown — a wig, but a good one. Her face was covered with a blue half-mask with white accents. She wore a red leotard, more or less, short sleeved with a turtleneck top, clinging just right — a blue and white star emblem with almost military chevrons coming off it. Pale tights that showed her legs, translucently. Legwarmers and high end red and white sneakers. And the biggest shit-eating grin I’ve seen that mouth form.

She’d taken the labriet out, too.

Marco looked like he was caught between running like Hell and losing bowel control. After a half-second he burst into laughter. “Oh shit!” he shouted. “It’s Dynamo Girl!”

“Watch your language, punk!” Leather shouted, shifting to make arms akimbo. “It’s punch o’clock, and I’m late for work!”

Now all the henchmen were laughing, which I think was her point. Certainly, they didn’t feel threatened. I wasn’t, because I wasn’t sure what the rules actually were now. Did the costume mean she was on the side of the angels, even if only briefly?

Seemed unlikely, really. She was posing and joking with the henches. In the meantime, I was watching her. The lycra was, if anything more clingy than the leather she normally wore. And of course it couldn’t be shaped so easily. The effect made her seem smaller, and more human. She looked younger, too. And I’m forced to admit I understood what she had meant before, about ‘the Sidekick physique.’ I knew she was an adult and a supervillain to boot, but honest to God looking at her I wanted to see an older hero standing behind her, calling her ‘good chum.’

“Right. Let’s get these pictures underway,” she said, darting over to the same wall I had been photographing her against before. She posed again, waiting.

And I began to take pictures. “Why’d you keep the old costume?” I asked.

She giggled. “Why throw it out? I had some good times wearing this thing.” She shifted — her poses more action oriented, less seductive. She was cute, and pretty, where ‘Leather’ was smoldering and coy. Her bearing had completely changed.

“True enough,” I said, snapping a picture and then another. “So why the wig?”

“As Leather, my hair’s a big part of the whole thing,” she said. “People come to expect it. Or expect hair tricks. ‘Dynamo Girl’ had naturally colored hair, so if you want an accurate picture of the good old days….”

“No — I mean, sure, makes sense. But I meant ‘why do you happen to have a brown haired wig?'”

She giggled again. ‘Dynamo Girl’ was more of a giggler, it seemed. “Cover,” she said. “Like I said — the hair tends to be distinctive. When I’m in town just living, I don’t want to get recognized when I’m at Home Depot or having breakfast at Denny’s. So I throw on a wig. A wig, jeans, a tee shirt, flannels instead of a leather jacket — you’d be surprised how easy it is to pass as just some chick.”

I laughed. “Not that surprised. I mean, you don’t look anything like Leather right now.”

She kind of blinked. “Really?”

“He’s right, boss,” Marco said. “Total makeover. Different attitude.”

“And you don’t stand the same way, either..”

She cocked her head. “Huh,” she said. “I just figured it was dressup. Putting on the old togs for a laugh.”

“Do you feel any different?”

She considered that, stretching. “Sort of,” she said. “Old habits, I guess. I was always very careful about what I did or said in the togs.”

“You said that twice. Is that just an anachronism, or is it some kind of industry term?”

“What?”

“Togs.”

“Huh? Oh. Fighting togs. It’s what they used to call superhero suits in the old Shazam comics. So it’s what villains call hero suits.”

“But not villain suits?”

“Nah. That’s different.”

“How?”

She shrugged. “It just is.” She stretched again. “Yeah,” she said. “yeah, I do feel different. And a little weird.”

“Why weird?” I kept taking pictures.

“Well, the last time I was in this was the liquor store holdup I told you about. You know? Which means the last time I wore this was the case I lost. The failure.” She shrugged. “It’s just weird. Dynamo Girl’s last hurrah involved stealing eight thousand bucks from a liquor store. It’s weird to have the togs on again, now.”

I frowned. “Why does that have to be the last hurrah?”

The silence was palpable.

I shifted where I stood. “Seriously. I mean, you’ve already said you’re not going out and stealing anything, tonight. So instead of Leather going out, why doesn’t Dynamo Girl go out instead. Spend a night fighting crime instead of causing it. Break a few muggers’ heads and leave them for the cops?”

“I… never really thought about that,” she said, frowning. “I mean, I went bad.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, but so what? I’m not saying reform or give back the money or anything. I’m saying that if you feel bad that Dynamo Girl’s last night ended in crime instead of justice, don’t let that be Dynamo Girl’s last night. Make a different last night instead.”

She looked honestly stunned, leaning back against the wall.

“Hey, now wait a minute,” Marco said. “Look, your business is your business, boss, but we don’t do Good Guy Shit. That’s not in the contract.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” she said, cocking her head. “I mean, seriously. Super heroes don’t use henchmen. You’d still have the night off, all the usual rules in effect.”

“So long as we know that.” Marco frowned a bit more. “This wouldn’t become a thing, would it? You wouldn’t go all Robin Hood on us or have a conversion and leave us high and dry? We have a deal here.”

“No,” she said. “No, nothing would change. But Todd’s right. There’s no reason I couldn’t do this. Just for a night, but still.” She grinned. “Why not? I mean, seriously — why not? ”

The bagmen looked at each other. Marco kept looking at his employer.

“Oh, stop fretting. I’m not crossing back over. This is just a lark. It’s fun. Besides, we lived in this city for a year. You think I don’t want to see the streets cleaned up just a little?”

“They got two cowls already doing that,” Marco said. “Okay. What if you get caught?”

“What are you talking about? Who ‘catches’ a superhero? A villain?”

Marco shook his head. “Shit, man. You’re Leather, remember? What if someone figures it out and you get caught? ”

“Oh!” She considered. “Keep an ear on the police scanner. If you hear I’ve been taken in, punch the panic button like normal. Clear out, let the service take care of things.”

Marco nodded. “Good enough.” He shook his head again. “You’re really gonna do this?”

“Well… there’s some work involved. Need to dye my hair — the wig could come off. I’ll need to grab my dermacover camouflage for the tattoos…” she smiled a bit more. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I am gonna do this. Why not? One last ride into the sunset!”

Marco snorted. “Your life, man.”

“I wish I could see it,” I said.

She paused, and peeled the mask off. “What was that?” she asked?

“I said I wish I could see it,” I said, noticing that the costume looked strange on her when she wasn’t wearing the half mask. Less like a uniform, more like a costume party.

Leather got a slightly wicked smile on her face. “Who says you can’t?” she asked.

I blinked. “Well… I… was under the impression I was a prisoner here. Why would you let me out?”

“Well now, that raises an interesting question. How badly do you want to see this part of your story?” She sat down, pulling off the wig, her bearing Leather again. Amused Leather. I found myself wishing she’d put the mask back on.

“What do you mean?”

“You said you wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe,” she said. “Well, Hunter rode with the Hell’s Angels. These guys went out and they did, Chapman. Do you really, really want to be on hand for the return of Dynamo Girl? To get that story, even if no one ever gives a shit?”

I frowned. Right then, I could feel my aches from last night again. “Well, yeah,” I said.

Leather’s smile turned predatory. “Would you bet your life on that?”

Chapter 9

“We call this the collar,” Leather said, setting down what was indeed a leather collar in front of me. It had a silver disk on it, and it looked like the buckle could be locked. “It’s chock full of electronics. It has a transmitter and wiring all the way through it. Buckling it into place completes a circuit. It cost more than you’d expect.”

“Okay…” I said, looking at it. Black leather with silver accents. It looked like a Leather special supervillain gadget already. “I’m supposed to wear this?”

“You can choose to wear it,” Leather said. “If you do, you can come with me tonight.”

“That’s it? I put on a collar, and you let me come with you?”

“That’s it.”

I considered. It seemed way too easy. “This has a tracker in it?” I asked.

Marco snorted.

Leather sat across from me. She was in a tan microfiber bathrobe, her hair wrapped in brown stained towels. “Sort of,” she said. “Certainly it’s got tracking equipment in it.”

I frowned. “What am I missing?”

Leather smiled a bit more. “Marco? Show the gentleman what he’s missing.”

Marco smiled too, picking up the collar. He unscrewed one of the accents, sliding it off like a silver button and turning it over. There was a gleaming pink putty inside it, packed in carefully. “You see this?” he asked.

“Yeah?”

“It’s explosive. Not strong enough to blow a safe or a door, but you don’t want to know what that shaped charge will do to your neck.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

“So long as you stay near me, the bomb won’t go off,” Leather said cheerfully. “Or, if you can’t stay near me, you can stay near the car you’ll be in, and the bomb won’t go off. Or, you can tell Marco you’re in trouble and he’ll help you.”

“I thought Marco wasn’t coming,” I said.

“I’m not,” Marco said. “But there’s a radio transmitter in that thing. I’ll hear everything you say.”

“So, let’s say we get separated, and you’re not close to the car. Tell Marco and he’ll make sure you don’t die a grisly death!” Leather’s grin grew.

“But — but wait a second. If I can ask Marco to keep the bomb from going off, why put a bomb on me in the first place?”

“Oh, silly rabbit,” Leather said. “You missed the most important part. Marco will hear everything you say!”

“So if you call the cops, I’ll hear it,” Marco said. “If you ask for help or tell someone about the bomb collar, I’ll hear it. If you say anything to step out of line, I’ll know it.”

“And he can just as easily set the bomb off as disable it,” Leather said.

“It’s better than that,” Marco said, grinning. “If you don’t get my help, you’ll be in deep. If someone tries to cut the strap, it’ll sever a wire and break the circuit and the bomb will go off before they can get it away from you.”

“Oh, and it locks on,” Leather said. “Unlock or unhook it without Marco sending the disable code first–”

“And it’ll go off,” I answered. “It seems like a lot of these end with my head being blown off.”

“Not off,” Marco said. “There’s not that much explosion. It’ll just tear the soft tissue out.”

“Oh, and tear apart the windpipe,” Leather said.

“Well, maybe. It depends on how it sits.”

“Oh, it does not. That much blow-jelly? That’ll take out his windpipe.”

Marco rolled his eyes. “Fine. We can agree that the spine’ll be fine, right?”

“Define ‘fine.'”

“Wait wait wait,” I said. “You have to be kidding me. You’re going to put a bomb around my neck, put Marco — a guy who beat me into pudding last night — on a trigger, and I’m supposed to keep quiet about it?”

Leather snorted. “Not at all,” she said.

I breathed out. “Okay,” I said. “Because that’s what it sounded like.”

“ You’re going to put a bomb around your neck,” Leather said with a grin. “All the rest was accurate.”

I stared. “And what if I refuse?”

Marco chuckled. “Then you can join me and the boys in playing with the new video game. We kept one out when we fenced the others.”

“You are not playing that without me,” Leather said.

Marco shrugged. “You don’t have to go play at cowl,” he said.

“It’s not playing. Fine. You sleazes can play with it. But don’t you screw it up! And don’t go online!”

“We’re not stupid, ” Marco said.

I looked at the collar while they argued. I felt a little sick to my stomach just looking at it. I knew full well putting that thing on was idiotic. Hell, there was lots easier ways to commit suicide.

But I was still feeling… I dunno. Ego bruised by what Leather had said earlier. That stuff about Hunter S. Thompson.

My story — maybe the biggest part of it — was going out on the town. And I could either watch it and document it, or let my story tell me about it later.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. You’d think I’d be in too much pain to be that stupid, but we all know I was.

As it worked out, preparations were a lot simpler than preparing for a heist. After she’d finished dying her hair — it was kind of a chestnut brown as it dried, and she’d done something so it had a little less flair and a little more wave — Leather was putting her time into research. Maps of the city, newspaper articles — that kind of thing. “So what’s the plan?” I asked.

“We patrol,” she said. “I’m figuring out a good route right now.”

“Patrol?”

“Oh yeah.” She grinned. “That was actually one of the fun parts of doing the superhero shuffle. Planning your routes through the city, I mean. You wanted to make sure it was an area you could cover, and you wanted it to cross through high crime areas. At the same time, if you did it right the city could be really pretty.”

“This was Meridian City?”

Leather shook her head. “Nah. I never even visited Meridian City until I took this lair. That’s why I’m trying to soak things up. We’re not going to have a really good route tonight. Those take time to develop. But we should be able to find some trouble down in the Underlands.”

“Underlands?”

Leather nodded. “Yeah, you know the West Highlands neighborhood? Upscale. Has marketplaces, theaters, banks and stuff, all up on hillsides?”

“Sure?”

“Well, you have a lot of elevated bridges and onramps up to it. And people live along the bottom of them too. Stretches into low income neighborhoods, and then out to more industrial areas.” She half-smiles. “Tourists above, townies below. You know how it goes.”

No, I really didn’t.

What got me was how… mellow things were. The henches pretty much had the night off, of course, so they were just hanging around. That seemed strange to me — normally, there was discussion and rediscussion going on. Contingencies discussed. What-ifs for everything from ‘the police show up too soon’ to ‘Transit, Paragon and the Nightwatch happen to be having coffee across the street.’

Not this time. One of the bagmen spent his time doodling in a sketchbook. The Steve watched television. Marco worked on the Leathermobile.

And then there was Leather herself.

I told you how she builds up to a job. How frenetic and nervous she gets. She goes hyperactive, she does the prayer, there are the kisses — the whole thing. The ritual. Performance prep. I’d seen singers and actors do the same shit time and again. There’s stuff you do before a show. And there was stuff Leather did before a heist.

Not now.

Oh, she was clearly excited. She bounced around from the upstairs down to the bottom level (including dropping two stories into a crouch. The girl showed off all the time). But she wasn’t nervous. She wasn’t trying to plan out every detail. She was just psyched up.

And me? Well, that was simple. I was scared shitless.

Look, up until that moment I’d interviewed and profiled musicians. Yeah, sometimes the world of rock or rap gets violent, but not all that often. I sure as Hell never cruised the streets with someone looking for a fight. And let’s not kid ourselves. Leather — or Dynamo Girl — was going to be looking for a fight.

“So what am I doing on this trip?” I asked.

Leather shrugged. She was in her exercise gear now — a white tank top and blue stretch pants — practicing katas. “Does your camera work well at night?”

“With the flash.”

“Leave it at home, then.” She smirked. “A camera flash might distract some criminal lowlife. Make him notice you. Maybe shoot you. I’m not doing this to get you killed.”

“So what is my role? Am I your sidekick?”

Leather stopped, staring at me. Now, she’d been sort of flickering between ‘Leather’ and ‘Dynamo Girl’ all afternoon, and the chestnut hair just reinforced that. But that laugh was all Leather. That laugh cut me down to size. “Don’t flatter yourself, Chapman,” she said, still chuckling. “You’ve got no powers, you’ve got no training. You’ve got nothing but an annoying habit of asking questions when a sane person would shut up.”

My face felt hot. “Darkhood doesn’t have powers,” I said. I knew it sounded lame even as I said it.

“Darkhood can neuter a fly at two hundred yards with his eyes closed. You got some hidden talent you haven’t mentioned, Chapman? Some ancient combat technique you neglected to bust out when the henches were pounding you into hamburger?”

I looked down. She didn’t say anything. I realized she was actually waiting for me to answer. “Not really,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said. “Don’t you get it? You’re not Paragon or even Paragirl here. You’re Barbara Babcock, looking for a scoop and maybe needing the hero to rescue you.” She leaned forward. “But I don’t want to have to rescue you. I’m going to be trying to fight crime out there, and believe it or not, that’s not easy and that’s not safe. If you go waltzing in playing out your Nightwatch fantasies, you might get hurt. You might get killed. Or you might get some innocent bystander hurt or killed.” Her eyes were on me, intense as lasers. “We’re. Not. Getting. Anyone. Killed. Right?”

“Right,” I said softly. I thought about the collar I’d be wearing. The bomb I was strapping to my throat. Was she really unable to see the difference? Could she really be Leather enough to make me a mobile hostage and still be Dynamo Girl enough to care this much about theoretical victims?

“Good,” she said. And she grinned. “You should probably wait in the car anyway. Watch from there. Oh man, you’re going to love this car.”

“You’re not taking the Leathermobile?”

Leather snorted. “Of course we’re not taking the Leathermobile. It’s all wrong for this and besides, the cops have it on tape. Nah, I got something special for tonight.”

Tonight was about ten after eight, as it worked out. She came out, wearing a red dress with an overcoat over it. She had on pumps, but her legs were pale. The togs on under her civilian clothes, obviously. She looked like a fresh faced nineteen year old, perky and cheerful. There were no signs of her piercings — not even the holes — and her tattoos had clearly been covered. “Are you ready, Todd?” she asked.

I took a deep breath. The collar was sitting on the table I was sitting at. I was wearing jeans, a black turtleneck, and a black leather jacket — more GQ than biker gang, though. Marco had given me a pair of wraparound sunglasses. “After dark, they make things easier to make out if there’s any light at all,” he said. “Simple enhancement.” And it was a mask, but he didn’t say that.

“Yeah,” I said. I picked up the collar, and slid it around my neck. It clicked shut, and I felt a tingle. Marco was sitting near some of his gear, and I saw it flare into life as I locked the collar on. “I’m ready.”

“Good,” she said. “Roll up your turtleneck and come on.”

I got up, sliding the fabric up. Covering the deadly explosive I had willingly put on. And I followed her.

And came to a stop as she walked around the Leathermobile. She opened up a door beyond, where the next bay was. I hadn’t been in there.

I stopped when I walked through the door. I stopped and I stared.

I swear to God, she was unlocking the door on a dark blue Toyota Tercel. She looked back over her shoulder. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said, walking in. “It… it’s just….”

“Yeah?” She grinned. God help me, she looked adorable when she grinned. Which was so not Leather.

“You sounded so proud of your car earlier,” I said. “This isn’t that much better than my Hyundai?”

“Sure it is,” she said, giggling. “For one thing, my car has an engine and a windshield. Coming?” She slid into the driver’s seat.

I shook my head and climbed in. “I’m just saying–”

I frowned, then. I frowned because there was something… off about the interior. Something about the controls, the dashboard. Looking in, I wouldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. But sitting there….

She grinned more broadly. “Judge me by my size, Skywalker?” she asked. “Judge my car by its make and model do you?”

“This… is this some kind of… I dunno, supercar?”

“Something like that,” she said, grinning. She slipped a hand under the dashboard. I heard a click, and the metal garage door began opening.

I glanced back behind us. I saw Marco standing in the door. His expression was unreadable.

I looked forward then, just in time for the car to pull out. The lights came on and we rode down to the road, swinging towards Meridian City and into the night.

“It’s… smooth,” I said.

“It’s been rebuilt from the inside out,” she said, shifting gears. “I’m keeping it down right now, but we could easily do one-sixty if we had to. It’s a Q-car.”

“Q-car?”

She grinned. “It comes from Q-Ship. Old naval term. See, back in the War days, there would be U-Boat attacks on civilian ships. Raids, to disrupt shipping and hamper the war effort. So the Allies would mock up a ship to look civilian, but when things got rough it would pop out cannons and start shooting.” She ran a hand along the wheel, the other hand holding it steady. “This car looks normal, but in a pinch you’d be surprised what it can do.”

“You use this in your… night job?” It somehow seemed wrong to bring up crime right now.

Her grin softened a touch, but didn’t go away. “Not really,” she said. “It’s pretty silly. I spend a lot of money on this car. Make it better, make it cooler. But it’s not really in style for my usual line of work. Besides, I have a driver and a couple of associates. This would be a bit cramped.”

“So why do you do it?”

She shrugged. “Same reason some guy with an SUV, a pickup and a compact car buys a broken down muscle car and restores it. It’s fun.” She grinned. “And it’s perfect for tonight. Hey, I’m gonna pull over at a convenience store — grab a soda. You want? I’m buying.”

I blinked. “A… soda?”

“I always get a soda when I patrol. Start the night off right.” She grinned, then paused. “Got. Got a soda.” She giggled. “I keep forgetting I haven’t done this for a while. Which is weird. It’s not like I ever drove on patrol before.”

“Why are you driving on patrol this time?”

“Because you can’t get to the top of a brownstone in three seconds and you can’t run forty-five miles an hour.” She winked. “Besides, I didn’t have this car back then.”

She slid into a Cumberland Farms and we got out. “Hey,” I said. “What do I call you? I assume the normal name’s off limits, and since you’re not wearing the mask….”

She paused, frowning.

I paused too. I wondered if I’d just made a mistake. She wasn’t enamored of her legal name, I remembered.

She grinned. “Call me Deegee,” she said. “It sounds like a sorority girl nickname, don’t you think?”

I half-smiled. “It does at that. All right, Deegee.”

We went inside. It was a little weird. I’d been a prisoner for days, and I was still at least sore from the night before. And now here I was, dressed like a metrosexual and wearing sunglasses at night, and we were in a convenience store like normal people. Deegee made her way back to the soda cases. I looked around, surprised that the sunglasses seemed to adjust when I walked indoors. I could see myself in a security mirror, and I knew they were still black — which I realized also covered up my two black eyes, which was a good thing. But I could more or less see normally wearing them.

There was a bored looking cashier behind the counter. A couple of teenaged boys were hanging around the magazines whispering about the copy of Maxim they hadn’t gotten around to picking up. I noticed them glance over at Deegee, and one nudged another. Which surprised me a little. Glancing over, I realized that she looked so different now — so mundane, really — that I hadn’t noticed how pretty she was. The intense, smoldering sensuality that Leather brought to almost everything she did made the pretty, normal girl Deegee was pretending to be seem almost small in comparison.

“Todd!” she called across the store. “They actually have A&W Cream Soda! Score! You want?”

“Sure!” I called back. I looked around, trying to decide if I wanted a Snickers bar.

And that felt so weird to me. I was wearing a bomb, hanging out with a sociopath who wanted to play dressup one last night — and don’t tell me it was my idea. Right then, that didn’t matter — and I was vaguely considering buying a candy bar before we went out and let ‘Deegee’ punch criminals for justice.

“Hey Todd — you coming?” she asked, having reached the cashier.

I decided against the Snickers bar. “Yeah,” I said, walking behind her. I accepted the cream soda, and I followed her out. We got into the car, and both put on our seatbelts.

“Right,” she said. “Let’s go save the world.”

Chapter 10

Ten eighteen. If someone had come up to me say a week ago and asked me what patrolling Meridian City with an Honest to Christ superhero — admittedly one who was actually a supervillain heroing as a lark — would be like, I think the answer ‘boring’ wouldn’t occur to me. After a couple of hours of driving around run down sections of Meridian, though? I was beginning to wish I’d brought along a book.

Mostly we cruised, listening to the police band — Deegee had it built into her stereo — if someone didn’t know the key combinations, you’d never know it was in there. And it tracked calls and plotted them on a GPS screen that seemed to do a Hell of a lot more than be a GPS screen. “Why do you have all this?” I asked, finally.

Deegee grinned. “Well, in my usual line of work it would give us a sense of where the police were, and how we could route around them. I have trip planning software that’ll do that automatically. But really, it’s more useful for what we’re doing.”

“What are we doing?”

“Waiting for something I could be useful in,” she said. “Simple holdups or car thefts or smash and grabs won’t work unless we’re damn close — close enough that I can get there in time to ID the bad guy and take him down. If it’ll take me ten minutes to get to a crime scene without a sense of where the criminals went? I’m a pretty face in a mask with no one to punch.”

“Wow.” I shook my head. “Pretty frustrating, I’d imagine.”

She shrugged. “Depends on how you look at it. Most of these things are minor anyhow. A guy picking a pocket or taking a purse at knifepoint usually won’t actually hurt their victim. If I’m there and I can help I do, but in the end it’s not a first priority. Gang violence, on the other hand? Or real armed robbery? Or worse? That’s where someone like me can really help.”

“But if you saw a simple mugging?”

“I’d stop it. I mean, duh. That’s what the lycra’s all about.”

I looked out the window, down a long street with yellowing streetlamps and neon signs. They had metal cages they pulled down over the shops in this neighborhood, and even the convenience stores looked like an armed encampment. People were leaning against buildings. Talking. Hanging out.

“Are those drug dealers?”

“Mm? Probably.”

“Then… why aren’t you….”

Deegee rolled her eyes. “Look, I know it’s vigilante justice, but there’s a right way and a wrong way, you know? I can’t just go crack skulls because they might be selling drugs. I have to have more than that. If I don’t, then there’s too much of a chance of screwing up — of hurting someone who doesn’t deserve to be hurt. Nuh-uh. No thank you.”

There was a light tone. “Weather advisory,” the voice of the GPS said. It sounded like every other female electronic voice. I have to assume the phone company pimps that voice out for pennies. I glanced at the screen. It had shifted to a weather map, showing clouds coming in in green and yellow and red, with “THUNDER STORMS” across the bottom and a barometric pressure reading.

“Do we call patrols on account of rain?” I asked.

“Shut up,” Deegee murmured, looking out at the next block. We were stopped at a stop sign, but there was no one behind us, so she was waiting.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to–”

“Shut up. ” I realized then she was focused.

I looked across the street to what she was looking at. This block was nearly empty. There was a tall woman, wearing jeans, a white tee shirt and a flannel shirt over it. She was heavily made up and wearing heels, and half-stomping down the road.

“A prostitute?” I asked.

Deegee snorted. “In blue jeans and flannel? She’s a dancer.”

“A stripper?”

“Mm-hm.”

I looked back at her. “Um… so? That’s not against the law.”

She pointed down the block to our left, not taking her eyes off the girl. I looked where she was pointing. Six guys, wearing colors. Orange and red, whatever that meant. A gang. Or something like one, anyway. They were walking the same way. Two of them were laughing.

“What do you think is going to happen?” I asked, my heart beginning to pound.

“Dancers get most of their money in tips and private dances,” Deegee said. “That’s cash. They trade it in for twenties and fifties at the end of the night.” Deegee was watching intently. “The girl’s angry. Dollars to doughnuts she got stood up for a ride home, so she’s walking. Probably carrying a few hundred untraceable bucks, too. So, either this is coincidence that those guys are following her, or they’re thinking she’s an ATM.”

“What are you going to do?”

Deegee’s fingers tightened on the wheel. “I’m going to wait and see what they do. They haven’t done anything wrong yet.”

I watched the girl walk. Then I looked at the pack following her. And I realized right then the difference between Leather going to work and Dynamo Girl going to work. Leather planned everything in advance. She tried to work everything out — all contingencies. But after the planning, she went out and made things happen. She acted. Dynamo Girl… couldn’t do that. She didn’t know what the bad guys would do. She didn’t know what pack of toughs was just walking home, versus being vicious predators. She couldn’t act. She had to re act.

The dancer turned the corner, going down a side street. Deegee bit her lip, looking at the toughs–

The moment the dancer went out of their sight, the six began to run.

“ Crap, ” Deegee snapped, pulling out. To my amazement, she turned right instead of left — the opposite of where the toughs were.

“Where are you going?” I asked as she opened up the throttle, shooting down the road and skidding through a red light, drifting into a left hand turn with a long skid that terrified me.

“Circling the block,” she snapped. “Got to meet them on the other side! Hang on and let the car stop itself!”

“Let the car what? ”

But she was ignoring me. She had hit a switch and the car had gone onto an autopilot, driving down the road while she slid down to the floor, her unnaturally flexible body fitting near the pedals.

“What are you doing?!” I shouted as the car swerved around two other cars and squealed. Above us, the moon roof was sliding open.

“Going to work!” she shouted with an almost savage glee, coming up and tossing the dress into my lap, her mask on her face, her leg warmers pulled up. She hooked her hands onto the moon roof’s edge, swung up, curling her body around and through the hole even as the car skidded to the side once more, facing the other end of the side street we’d seen the dancer and the gang go down.

Ahead of us, I saw the dancer. She’d just been shoved down by one of the gang members. They’d surrounded her. In the sudden flash of the car’s headlights I could see the almost animal like glee on their faces.

The car surged forward twenty feet — halfway to the gang — and then slammed on its own brakes. Dynamo Girl threw herself forward at that exact moment — clearly she had some sort of remote — giving her momentum to let her fly forward, twisting in the air like the best gymnast on the planet and bowling into one of the toughs feet first, her body curled. She kicked off him into a backflip, the combination of her momentum and her leg strength throwing him fifteen feet as she landed in a crouch.

As for me? I did the one thing you’re not supposed to do in a situation like this: I got out of the car.

Look. I’m not a superhero. Leather had made that abundantly clear before we left. But she also compared me to Barbara Babcock, chasing after a scoop for the Crown City Chronicle. She had been trying to smack me with a sense of perspective, but Babcock was famous for more than being Paragon’s girlfriend. She didn’t hang back when a story broke. She ran forward. She got in trouble. She made things happen.

If I’m gonna be Barbara Babcock, then by God I’m gonna be Barbara Babcock. If that meant Dynamo Girl had to rescue me from a mad scientist tying me to a chair, then so be it. Anyway, I couldn’t hear what was going on.

“–the Hell are you?” one of the gangers shouted, swinging a chain that Dynamo Girl easily ducked under. He let the momentum swing the chain around his body for another pass. Dynamo Girl sprang up, leaping four feet over the chain as smoothly as a nine year old jumping double dutch.

“Such language, ” she said, as she twisted in the air, swinging one long leg in a circle kick into the chain wielder’s shoulder, knocking him to the side. His foot hit the curb and he went down. “You know, there’s no chance you’re getting my phone number without a little more sophistication in your approach!” She giggled as she landed between two others, ducking below one’s clumsy swing and rolling into a handspring split, her legs driving into both of their stomachs. The pair doubled over and went down even as she rolled to her feet, arms akimbo. “Though you do know how to dance,” she said, laughing again.

“We know a lot more than that, bitch!” a fifth shouted, pulling a gun and firing four shots. The dancer shrieked.

Dynamo Girl twisted and whirled, looking for all the world like a ballerina on a stage instead of on a firing line, the bullets clearly missing her despite the point blank range. She landed in a three point stance and rolled forward, turning her roll into a handspring and hooking her legs around the gunman’s shoulders. She pulled her legs back, pulling the gunman off the ground and rolling him over her body, slamming him face first into the pavement and sliding on top of his twitching body. I swear to God she reclined there, crossing her legs and putting her hands behind her head as she looked at the sixth ganger. “Go ahead,” she said with a grin. “Show me what you’ve got.”

The dancer, in the meantime, had gotten to her feet. She was shaky, backing away — precariously in her heels.

“Over here!” I shouted to her. “Come on!”

Her head snapped around to face me, and she began to run. Unfortunately, the sixth tough had been distracted too, and he whirled to face me, pulling a piece of his own.

Of course, that put him back to Dynamo Girl, who swept his legs before he could get off a shot.

I’m not sure what happened next in the fight, because the dancer had reached me. “Do you have a cell phone?” I shouted.

“What?”

“A cell phone? Do you have a cell phone!”

“Y-yes! Yes I do!”

“Then call 911 and tell them you were just attacked! And stay over here near the car!” I pulled her closer to the car — which I realized looked more like a sportscar right now than a Tercel. The license plates had been covered over by metal shutters too. Clearly, at some point when we tore ass around the block it had changed out of its secret identity the same way Dynamo Girl had.

Dynamo Girl herself was facing down three of them in the meantime. Somewhere in there the guy with the chain and one of the two she’d taken down with the split-kick had joined up with the sixth guy and all three were trying to take her out. One had a two by four, chain boy had his chain, and the other had a knife.

Dynamo Girl was clearly playing with them — sliding to one side to avoid one attack while almost casually throwing back an arm that knocked a second back. Rolling back and kicking off the wall to let her do a somersault over their heads and land in time to push the third into the other two. She wasn’t in any danger here — this was all about style. About making an impression.

And then it hit me. She was right — this was theater. But I wasn’t the audience and neither was the near-victim who was staying close to me, still half panicked. She was playing to the criminals. It was a street performance of a one woman play called Crime Gets You Beat Down By A Girl In Tights. It wasn’t just about knocking them out and saving the woman and her purse. It was about delivering a message to the criminals that even trying to commit a crime would lead to the worst day of their lives.

It was working. The three toughs were angry and scared and frustrated all at once. They got sloppier — the guy with the two-by-four nailed the knife guy, for example. And Dynamo Girl rubbed their noses in it. Just like a dog who made a mess on the carpet.

But one of the dogs hadn’t been spanked enough. The first guy she hit — the one she’d used the car’s momentum on — had made it back to his feet. He was still clutching the dancer’s purse, and he tore out of there, running back the way they came as fast as he could.

“Dynamo Girl!” I shouted. “That one’s getting away! He’s got her money!” Barbara Babcock couldn’t have done it better, I figure.

Dynamo Girl’s grin slipped. She ducked under the chain guy’s punch — he’d wrapped the chain around his hand now — and came up punching, taking him down surgically. She spun-kick the guy with the board, bouncing him off the alley wall, and she dropped an elbow into the back of the knife guy, who was still on the ground after being clocked by his friend. None of them were going to get up now.

Rain had begun to fall now. Big droplets, with thunder in the background. The last guy was still running — a good hundred feet away. Dynamo Girl dove forward, leaping over garbage cans sitting outside an alley door — the alley was too narrow for a dumpster, I guess. She curled and came up with one of the trash can lids, and she spun around like a top, or an ice skater in full pirouette. She spun so fast she blurred, and then she released with all the form of a discus thrower.

The trash can lid gleamed in the car’s headlights, arcing out, the last ganger almost around the corner….

It crashed into his legs, hitting with enough force to take his legs out from under him. He slammed into the pavement hard, the purse sliding even as a police car pulled up, lights flashing, on the far end of the alleyway.

“ Yes! ” Dynamo Girl shouted, pumping her arm. “That’s how we do it Dynamo Girl style! ”

“I… I don’t believe it,” the dancer said.

“Believe it,” Dynamo Girl laughed, cartwheeling back. “The police can take it from here, miss! You’re–”

A second police car pulled up on the other side. Dynamo Girl blinked. “Todd!” she shouted. “We got to book!” She started running for me, the rain coming a little faster now.

I turned for the car, in time to see it settle back into a Toyota, locked tight, and shift over to the side — a nice illegal park job. I blinked, figuring we were going in it, only to have Dynamo Girl grab me, slinging me up and over her shoulder as she leapt and grabbed the ladder of an overhanging fire escape.

“What are — what are you doing?” I shouted.

“Vigilante!” she shouted back, and I realized what she meant. Some heroes have sanction — they work with the police, they follow procedures, they file reports. Freelancers were vigilantes. Depending on the city, the cops might turn a blind eye to them, but technically they were breaking the law. Dynamo Girl couldn’t get the car past the blocked alley, so she had disguised it and grabbed me. And now she was swinging up, grabbing a bar on one fire escape landing and swinging up to the next, flipping the two of us in midair so she could do the trick again — but doing it all one handed because she was holding me with the other.

It was terrifying and exhilarating all at once. Less like a dangerous stunt and more like a roller coaster. I realized I knew she wouldn’t drop me. She couldn’t drop me. She knew exactly what she was doing, and she always would. And we hit the rooftop and she ran and ran and threw herself into a twenty foot leap to the next roof, and then the roof after that, and then halfway up a steep inclined rooftop. The storm broke then, with sheets of water and rain and wind all around us, and lying there on the roof I saw her throw her arms to the air and laugh with the purest joy I’ve ever seen, spinning like a schoolgirl with complete and total abandon.

I was eating a bagel at ten thirty the next morning, when Leather walked in and dropped a newspaper on the table in front of me. I looked up. Her hair was wet, and was also black again, the front streaks bleached almost white in preparation for whatever color she would add to them. Her labriet piercing was back in, and red — her fast healing meant it had largely sealed up by the time we got home, so she’d repierced it herself. Fortunately for her, she was largely immune to infection and the redness and swelling wouldn’t last an hour.

“Read,” she said, drumming her fingers on the open paper.

I looked down. It was an article on page three of the City section — the Police beat. I read.

It detailed an encounter that a Tanya Marks, a local adult dancer, had had with a group of thugs who had attempted assault and robbery. She had been saved by the timely appearance of a new super heroine — the ‘Dynamite Girl.’ It speculated that the new heroine was the partner of some experienced hero in the city, and mentioned that Darkhood had not been available for comment.

I bit my lip, and looked up at Leather.

Leather closed the paper, and tapped it again.

I looked back down, this time at the front page.

“LEATHER STILL AT LARGE: ELECTRONICS HEIST NOW ESTIMATED AT SEVEN FIGURES IN VALUE.” Underneath it, Darkhood — apparently available for this interview — made it clear he would bring the criminal in. Over twenty four hours after Leather’s last appearance in the city, and she still made the front page. There was even two pictures — a file photo of Leather fighting the Silver Horseman, and a stat of Leather’s face, about to kiss the lens of the security camera from the jewelry heist from a few days before.

Leather tapped the paper once more. I looked up at her.

“That’s why I’m a supervillain,” she said, and walked out of the room.

Chapter 11

It was a particularly busy day. Henchmen — including the Steve and that day player girl he worked with before — were tearing all over the building. Things were being put into cardboard boxes and double taped. Notes were being scrawled on the outside, identifying the contents.

It didn’t take an evil genius to figure out they were packing up.

I caught up with the Steve as he was wrapping dishes in newspaper and putting them in boxes. “I thought a service was going to do all this,” I asked, salvaging a mug to grab coffee before it was too late.

He plucked the mug out of my hand, and nodded towards a package of Dixie brand ‘to go’ cups, just like you’d get in a convenience store. “In an emergency bug-out? Sure. But that costs more. And do you have any idea how hard it is to find shit that the emergency service has packed?”

“Is there a lot of breakage?”

“No, nothing’s ever broken. Think about it. You going to break a supervillain’s favorite coffee mug? Some of these guys destroy whole towns because they’re pissed off that their bacon was undercooked. But they don’t have time to organize. They never know how quickly the F.B.I. and Justice Wing will come over the hill, seeing vengeance, evidence and the occasional chance to catch a hot supervillain taking a shower.”

“So you’re packing? When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow morning. We hit the blow-off, and within five minutes of us leaving the lot to do that, the service will come, haul all our shit out, and do the necessary.”

“The necessary?”

He didn’t answer. He just went to work on the next cabinet of dishes.

I caught up with Marco next. “So the blow-off’s tomorrow? What about tonight?”

“Tonight we’re workin’ quiet,” he said. “Ultra quiet, in fact. I think Big L doesn’t want a repeat of Darkhood butting in.”

“She needs to make the rest of her money?”

“Nah, the electronics heist did that, more or less. This is the prestige job.”

“Prestige job?”

“Sure.” He set down the tool box he had been filling. “Lemme grab coffee.”

“Sure.” I followed him, my own Dixie cup needing refilling from the holy Keurig model.

“See, there’s predictable crimes, if you’re going to really work the media angle. There’s some loud crimes like the jewelry store. That way, they know you’re in town and you make the news. And there’s quiet crimes like the Circuit City. They pay the rent and usually don’t attract cowls. There’s major loud crimes where you’re baiting cops and cowls to show up. But you also need a prestige crime.”

“You said that. I still don’t know what it means.”

“It means something that’ll catch attention more than just straight money. Think about it. The jewel heist was all commercial shit. No antiques, nothing rare, nothing with a name. That means right now the highest ticket crime we’ve pulled was the electronics heist, and honestly — what kind of story is that? ‘Evil mastermind steals calculators that will sell well on the black market?'”

“It made the news.”

“Sure. It was a lot of money. But think a few moves ahead in the game. Most big money heists get forgotten, unless they’re ridiculously large or somehow novel. We remember the Great Train Robbery ’cause of the train thing. We remember D.B. Cooper because of how he left the scene. You need something for people to fixate on. I mean, why do you think supervillains steal shit like the Mona Lisa or the Hope DIamond? It’s not like those are easy to fence.”

“You mean they do it….”

“For the publicity factor. Yeah.”

“And that’s tonight?”

“Damn straight. Museum job. Mostly solo. Me, her and the Steve. She’s going in and grabbing the Mountbatten Urn. You know about it?”

“No?”

“Some archeologist named Mountbatten — not the dead Royal guy, but a cousin or something — found it in the thirties in a dig over in Greece. I guess it’s one of the best preserved Grecian urns they’ve found, and it got a lot of newsplay. Which means it’s worth more than it would be because it’s an old pot — it has a name and a backstory, and it’s on display at the Meridian City Museum of Antiquities as part of their Twentieth Century Archeology exhibit.”

“And Leather’s going to steal it?”

“Damn straight. Get it quietly, liberate it without triggering alarms, back out without breaking it, over to where I’m waiting and we beat feet out of there.”

“And then what do you do with it?”

Marco shrugged, sipping his coffee as he walked back to the shop. “Shit man, I dunno. If we still have it when we get to the new place we’ll fence it. Or use it as an ashtray or something.”

“Still have it?”

“Sure. She’ll bring it with her to the blowoff. That way, bad shit goes down with Darkhood or Transit shows up, we have insurance. Well, more insurance.”

“What other insurance do you have?”

Marco grinned, and clapped me on the shoulder. “You crack me up, man, I’m really gonna miss havin’ you around.”

It still took me a second, but then it fell into place.

“Look, it’s very simple. Just show up at five after ten tomorrow morning. No don’t be here early. No, I don’t mean ‘don’t knock yourself out getting here.’ I mean do not, under any circumstances, be here early.” Leather paced. “Because we’ve got a hostage with us. Jesus, is this your first day on dispatch or something? Look, do you want your men getting identified in a police lineup? No– answer me! Do you want your men getting identified in a police lineup? Yes or fucking no? Then you need to be here at five minutes after ten and no sooner. And if you’re late, you might not have time to do the necessary before the– no I’m not going to fucking kill my hostage to make your fucking schedule easier! Look, do I need to talk to your supervisor? Oh, he ain’t in? Gosh, what a shock. I guess I’ll just have to punch the emergency call tonight then, and make it clear to the contact team that you couldn’t settle on a schedule so no I won’t be paying the surcharges but I know someone who will.” There was a louder squak. “Friend… do you honestly think that’s the worst I can do to you? I mean, seriously? Oh, I don’t know who you are?” Leather giggled. “This is your first week, isn’t it. Right. I’ll be seeing you really soon, friend.” She hung up. “God damn I hate teamsters.”

“You’re going to track down a dispatcher?”

“Hm? No need. Give it two minutes.”

“What? Why?”

“You know that whole ‘calls recorded to ensure quality’ thing you hear on most customer service lines?”

“Yeah?”

“This service handles supervillain affairs. You think there’s a chance in Hell they let the dispatcher be the final word in customer care relations? Jesus, the Jack O’Knaves uses this service, and he once killed a waitress for bringing him half and half instead of cream.”

“So what’s our schedule?” I asked.

“Simple. We pile into the Leathermobile tomorrow. That includes you. We pull out at ten on the dot. Five minutes later the service hits and they do the necessary.”

“You guys keep saying that. What’s ‘the necessary?’ Move all your stuff out?”

“To begin with. They want to be absolutely sure there’s no clues left behind to them or to me. That’s kind of a tall order.”

“I’ll bet. What are we going to be doing.”

“Morning bank robbery. Right through their front door. Lots of shouting. Lots of taking down cops. Lots of lovely cash in cloth bags with dollar signs on them.”

“Really?”

“You sound surprised. What, you didn’t think Supervillains robbed banks?”

“Well, sure. But it seems so… unplanned.”

Leather giggled. “It’s planned. But what do you think the intention is.”

“Money?”

Leather gave me a sidelong look. Like she might look at a particularly unintelligent child.

“It’s not about the money.”

“Any money we do get is a bonus.”

“This is about Darkhood, isn’t it?”

“Of course. And the cops, but they’re secondary. We need to have a nice, public slugfest right in the open where everyone can see. The city demands it. The form demands it. He needs a shot at me fair and square, just like I need to have a chance to be dirty and sneaky and beat him in front of everyone.”

“And I’m going to be there?”

“Of course. You’re my hostage. If worse comes to worse I’ll threaten to blow your head off.”

“Blow my — I’m wearing the collar again?”

“Of course.” She giggled. “Why do you think we had it on hand in the first place. But that’s a last resort. The first threat will be to the Urn I’m stealing tonight.”

“So… what’s your intention for all of this?”

Leather grinning. “Simple–” her cell phone rang. “–hang on.” She flipped it open. “Talk to me. Hm. Well hello, sir. Yes, I do wish to register a complaint. I’ve come to expect a certain level of service from your people–”

I tuned it out, looking around. I was in her room. She was more comfortable about letting me hang out up there these days, though I’d slept on the cot down below the night before. She’d dropped books into boxes and had suitcases out with clothing shoved into them. It felt weird. Like the end of an era.

I found myself wondering if I should go with them.

Now, there’s no reason they would want me. I’m not a professional henchman or anything, and they’d hardly need a live in freelance reporter. But I’ll admit there was something about this dysfunctional gang I was going to miss. And there were so many things I didn’t understand yet. What happened on holidays? Did they get time and a half? Marco had alluded to a wife. When did he see her? He seemed to live with Leather, and they sure as Hell weren’t married. Was there a pension plan? And what did happen when they all went to jail.

I shook my head. It was weird. I’d spent time around stars before. Singers, dancers, actors — days with their entourages. I’d eaten with them, had their wine and their liquor, declined their cocaine and their women — yeah, I know. I’m not Hunter S. Thompson. But at the end of the gig, I never wanted to go with them. I preferred my mundane life of small apartments and shitty cars and take out Chinese food.

But I’ll admit I would miss Leather and the henchmen.

But then, prisoners got that way sometimes. Patty Hearst sprang to mind. And there were stories of Supervillain captives who turned, who became molls or villains themselves afterward. I guess I could see that.

Leather hung up. “It is a pleasure doing business with people scared for their paychecks and their lives,” she said. “Where were we.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Right! The blowoff. Did you figure it out?”

“Yeah.” I looked at her. “This is the climax. The eleven o’clock number. The finale. Either you go to jail, or you barely get away but he stops the bank heist and maybe gets the urn back, or he goes down and you have a huge payday and he’s humiliated.” I shook my head. “All the rest of this was just business. This one’s the real supervillain action.”

“Yup.”

“What if he wins?”

“Then I go to jail, the Steve makes the call, maybe the henches get away and maybe they don’t, and we move on. They won’t get the money for the stuff I already fenced, so I’m not really out anything except some time and I’m stuck on prison food and overly public toilets for a while.”

“But you could leave tonight and not risk it.”

She considered. “Yeah. Yeah, I could.”

“But you won’t.”

“Of course not.”

“And if you beat him? I mean, take him fully down, stop him entirely, and humiliate him?”

Leather shrugs. “Then he’ll have to rethink his line of work. And if he can’t hack it, he’ll do something else with his nights and the world will be better off without him.”

“And if he can hack it?”

“Then he’s the real deal, and he’ll be stronger next time, and when our paths next cross it’ll be glorious. ” She grinned. “C’mon, man. By now you understand how this works.”

“I don’t know that I do,” I said. “There’s so much I don’t still understand about supervillains.”

She grinned. “M0re than you know.” She went back to packing her stereo. “For example, you’ve just been hanging out with me. Maybe from here you should spend a week with some Rogues.”

“Rogues?”

“You repeat me a lot, you know?”

“Sorry. What are Rogues.”

“Supervillains — but not like me.” She lifted components down into the styrofoam packing molds. “They’re the ones who stick to one city and one superhero. The way Leonardo Lucas always fights Paragon, or the Jack O’Knaves takes on the Nightwatch, or Bandolier fights the Beacon?”

“Oh — sure. They’re different?”

“In some ways, absolutely. Think about it.” She glanced up, grinning. “I tour to other cities so my lair won’t get compromised. Their lairs get compromised six times a year, and every time they need to move to a new one. Everything they do is more expensive. Higher rates from the guild because their henches go to jail more than mine do. Higher rates from the service because they go to jail more than I do. It’s like insurance — the more you use it, the more you pay for it. And they don’t take in nearly as much money as I do, in part because their fences get a bigger cut because it’s way more likely the fences will be outed.”

“Then why do they do it?”

“Good question.” Leather stood, stretching. Despite a week with her, I stared. She was just so fluid. “For some it’s revenge. Jack O’Knaves really wants to kill the Nightwatch. Most of the Nightwatch’s rogues are psycho that way. For others it’s ego. That’s the Leo Lucas thing. He doesn’t just want to rule the world, he wants Paragon to bow before him and then die, first. For others, it’s probably some stalker thing. Or it just feels right to them. I mentioned Bandolier? He clearly likes the Beacon and likes Paramount City. There’s a whole hometown feel to it, no matter what they end up doing.” She shrugged. “I spent time with the Bandolier once. He was doing contract work, same’s me. For me, it was a break from touring. I wanted a salary and some camaraderie. For him? He needed cash something fierce, because he wasn’t making a living back home.”

I shook my head. “Why would he possibly do that if he wasn’t making a living at it?”

Leather half-smiled. “See, this is why you need to spend some time with Rogues. If you can figure that out, I’ll be glad to read it in your book.”

“What makes you think I’m going to write a book?”

Leather snorted, and went back to packing.

I looked around. “So where do I go. Greystone City?”

She snorted. “No fucking way. Avoid the psychos like the plague.”

“How do I tell the difference.”

“Read a newspaper. If there’s a body count? Stay away. And no one but no one in Greystone City’s sane. They used to be, back when it was ‘Nightstick and Cudgel’ instead of ‘the Nightwatch.’ These days, the sane ones have retired or gotten the Hell out or been killed by psychos who want their names.”

“Gotcha.” I looked off to one side. “Man. Just when I think I’m beginning to understand this lifestyle….”

Leather chuckled.

“What?”

“‘Understand this lifestyle.’ Don’t you get it?”

“Clearly not.” I was a little tired of the whole ‘don’t you get it,’ thing, but I’d learned not to express such things lest Leather’s mood change.

“You don’t understand lifestyles. You live them. And if parts of them don’t make sense to outsiders, well — that’s because they’re outsiders.”

“You make it sound like being gay.”

Leather considered. “Not quite. People can be gay without being in the gay lifestyle. And the whole metrosexual thing sort of means people can be straight and still live in the gay lifestyle. So maybe.” She shrugged. “Look. In the end, we’re supervillains. I don’t have anything more I can say that’ll explain it. Maybe the next person you interview can tell you more.”

I realized she meant it. “You know,” I said, “I interview celebrities. Musicians. This was unusual for me.”

Leather snorted. “Yeah.”

“What does that mean.”

“Nothing.”

“No, it means something. What?”

Leather shrugged. “Maybe in a year I’ll look you up, Chapman. And we can see if you spent that year interviewing rappers and teen idols or not.”

“You made it clear I’m not a superhero or a supervillain before Dynamo Girl went on the town.”

“Yup.”

“So what makes you think I’m going to risk my life for more stories.”

She smirked. “You got out of the car.”

I paused. “Well, yes.”

“Kurt Loder would have stayed in the car. He would have watched, and reported, and written a damn good story. But he would have stayed in the car.” She half-smiled. “Face it, Chapman. You crossed the threshold. You don’t go back from that.”

“So what does that make me? Barbara Babcock?”

“Don’t get airs. She’s first tier.” She grinned. “You’re still fourth. Welcome to the lifestyle.”

Chapter 12

In a way, this was going to be the blowoff to my story just as much as it was the blowoff to the week’s criminal undertakings. This was the crime scene I was going to be at ground zero for. I’d like to say I was feeling a surge of adrenalin and a cool sense of adventure, but to be perfectly blunt I felt carsick.

For the record, I was in the ‘third row’ of the Leathermobile, which was just as big on the inside as the outside. I was sitting on a bench style seat that could be folded into the floor for convenience. I sat next to a brown cardboard box which had been carefully strapped into a seat. This was the Mountbatten Urn, I knew. I’d seen it the night before — it had been snagged without a hitch.

Priceless or not, it looked like an old pot. And while she was psyched — Leather was always psyched after a job worked — she wasn’t nearly as into the Urn as she had been the commercial jewelry they still made fun of. This one wasn’t about money. It could have been any macguffin. And it was being hauled to a new crime scene on the off-chance Leather needed to distract or bargain down Darkhood or the cops.

Which is of course why I was strapped in next to it. The collar was strapped around my throat again. I’d submitted without a struggle, but I didn’t put it on myself this time. Nor did they ask me. This time, I was a prisoner, and the threat of blowing my stupid head off wasn’t to guarantee my good behavior while Leather played at superhero.

Carsick barely describes it.

Leather was drumming her fingers on the car door. “Is the MickDee’s still serving breakfast?” she asked.

“Until ten thirty,” Marco said. He was driving. Wheelman, like they said. The Bagmen were behind the two of them, with me and the urn in the back.

“We should totally get MickDee’s,” Leather said. “Who wants a McMuffin?”

“I could go for a sausage biscuit,” one of the bagmen said.

“The Steve’s halfway to the bank,” Marco said. “You sure you want to take the time?”

“Yeah. Get three egg mcmuffins, three sausage mcmuffins, three sausage biscuits and whatever people want to drink. Chapman! You want anything?”

“I’m fine,” I said, trying not to think about sausage. Of all the ways to prolong my lifespan, throwing up on a bagman seemed at the bottom of the list.

“Okay then,” she said. She was bouncing in her seat, all nervous energy. I remembered what she was like on the Dynamo Girl run — all smooth and professional. Excited but not frenetic. It must make a difference to know how it’s all going to play out in advance. Or at least know how you intend for it to play out.

The plan was, if anything, even more basic than the jewel heist. It was literally “drive up to the bank, double park, get the hostage and the urn out, hit the bank and start grabbing all the cash they could.” There was no finesse, no careful planning. This was an overt shout, taunting Darkhood and the Meridian City Metropolitan Police to try and catch Leather. And in a weird way, it was no-lose for Leather herself.

Seriously. The worst case scenario involved her successfully stealing maybe millions of dollars. If the cops showed up but Darkhood didn’t, Leather would tangle with them, probably win and escape scot free. Her legend would increase and she’d be ready to move on to her new lair and her new touring city. If Darkhood showed, then it was fifty/fifty she’d get away, they’d probably take no money, but there’d be a superhero fight to add to her resume. If she got caught but the henches got away, it would be a phone call to one service. If she got away and the henches didn’t, it would be another phone call. If they were all captured, then the Steve would do his thing. Even as we rode, the Service was pulling everything out of her old Lair, so there was no chance the cops could raid it and get anywhere. The money from her earlier jobs was all laundered and banked. Prison would practically be a vacation for them.

Really, it’s hard not to be cynical. No matter how you slice it, crime did pay for Leather and the gang. All that could happen was jail time, and it was clear Leather and the Henches weren’t scared of jail.

We pulled into a McDonalds. There were three cars ahead of us. “Oh, bullshit,” Leather said. “Someone want to go inside?”

“We could send Chapman,” one of the Bagmen said.

Leather giggled. “Tempting.”

“He’ll tip the cops,” Marco said. “I would.”

“Yeah, point. And we’re in costume.” She made a face. “Hang on.” She pushed out, flipping onto the roof and leaping from the Leathermobile. Curling into a ball, she smashed through the front window like it was tissue paper and landed inside. With the windows rolled down, I could just barely hear the screams and Leather’s demands for Sausage McMuffins. To go.

“I’m gonna be sick,” I muttered.

“What? No. Don’t. Don’t be sick,” the bagman in front of me said, turning. “Do you hear me, Chapman? You are not going to be sick. You are not going to be sick.”

They had spare cloth moneybags. The other bagman got me one in time. They threw it in one of the brown trashcans before Leather got back with a pile of meat and egg swag in paper sacks, and we headed for the real job. To her credit she looked concerned or at least sympathetic when she’d learned I threw up. The smell of cooked egg really didn’t help.

“So I don’t get it,” one of the bagmen was saying. “You didn’t want one of us going in because we’d be recognized and they’d call the police, but you were okay with breaking through the front window and stealing a couple sacks of breakfast?”

“It’s a time thing,” Leather said. “Those guys calling the cops after we’re gone means at least some of the cops will be distracted from the bank heist. If we went in and waited, they might show up before we leave.”

“You just wanted a chance to steal Sausage McMuffins and call it work related,” Marco said with a chuckle.

“I didn’t steal them. I left a fifty.”

“That window would have cost more than fifty bucks.”

“I didn’t say my actions were legal. I just didn’t steal breakfast.” She took a bite of hash browns. “Aren’t we there yet?”

Within a couple of minutes, we were. This bank was at the top of a long sloping hill in the West Highlands. One of the hilltop neighborhoods where tourists and marketplaces were thick, overlooking the Underlands Dynamo Girl had patrolled two nights before. This was an old bank, back when they made them into temples of finance, all granite columns and elaborate architecture, and “THE FIRST MERIDIAN NATIONAL BANK AND TRUST” carved into the top. Of course, all the glass down closer to the doors declared it ‘BankOne,’ the subject of one and probably more than one buyout over the past ten years or so.

Regardless, it was a bank, and a big one. The Leathermobile careened up the fifteen cement steps in the front, coming up on a top landing and skidding around. It felt like we’d driven through a potato field, and if I hadn’t thrown up five minutes before, I’d have done so right then. As it was there were dry heaves, just in time for me to be hauled unceremoniously out of the back seat by one of the bagmen.

“Remember, stay close,” the bagman hissed to me as he dragged me to the bank’s front doors. “You don’t want the collar going off.” The other bagman was setting the box with the urn in it next to the door. Leather skipped back down the steps, turned and got a full running start for the doors. She took the stairs five at a time and leapt at the top of them, curling into a ball going at least fifty miles an hour, and smashed through the doorways, shattering the glass overhead and to the sides of both the doors and blowing the doors — designed to open out — into the room.

There was immediate chaos and the sound of an alarm as she rolled seemingly chaotically through the lobby. The lie was put to her seeming lack of control when she turned it into backflips, ending with a handspring that landed her on top of one of the islands where deposit slips and chained pens lived. “Ladies and gentlemen!” she shouted. “Welcome to your very own bank robbery! Everyone down on the floor right now! We don’t want anyone to get hurt!”

There were screams, of course. Men and women alike panicked and fled. There were three security guards, but they had to recover from their own surprise before they could react. That gave Leather a chance to dive, twisting in the air and landing in front of the first. She kissed him, deftly unbuckling the belt that held his gun, mace and radio, and threw it into the corner with a twisting motion. “Be good now,” she said to him as she rolled to one side, just in time to not be maced by the second guard, who’d reacted a little bit faster.

Rather than take the risk that he might actually hit her with the spray, Leather did a backflip, landing behind a panicking businessman. “Hi!” she said, deftly lifting him up and darting to the side, keeping him between her and the guard.

“Put him down!” the guard shouted, voice shaking. “I swear to God I’ll shoot!”

Leather dropped the buisnessman to the floor, feet first, then used his shoulders to spring up and over, hooking her legs around the guard’s neck and rolling over his head, hooking and flinging him fifteen feet into the third guard, who had managed to get out his radio. Why his radio I have no idea — the alarm was already going off. But then, what would a security guard normally do when an acrobatic twentysomething began smashing things and doing handsprings in the lobby. I mean, it doesn’t come up in the training manuals, does it?

The two guards hit and went down. Leather’s lips curled into a smile as she regained her feet, sweeping up a pumppot of complimentary coffee the bank had at the front of their velvet rope line and spinning, throwing it towards the third guard’s legs. He had been running for the gunbelt she’d tossed, and she hit perfectly, making him go sprawling and rolling.

It looked like it hurt. My heart was pounding. This wasn’t like watching Dynamo Girl. These were the good guys, and Leather was humiliating and hurting them.

At the same time, I have to admit she looked fantastic. Her movements were freer than Dynamo Girl’s had been. She did riskier moves, and spent more time setting up elaborate strikes. Now, satisfied that the security guards were down, she did cartwheels to the front of the line. “Don’t you just hate a linecutter?” she asked the woman who was crouched on the floor at the front of the line. “How’s it goin’, boys?”

“Not so bad,” one of the bagmen shouted back. They were handing cloth bags to tellers, and getting money dumped into them. The tellers looked freaked but did what they were told. And no doubt were dropping dye bombs or setting off more alarms as they did it. Clearly Leather and the others didn’t care about that, though.

“Good! We need to hit the vault?”

“Can’t hurt!”

There were sirens outside.

“Hold that thought! Got to make the donuts!” she shouted, running for the door. She blew me a kiss on the way and dove through the shattered facade.

Me?

I followed.

I know. I’m an idiot. But I’d come all this way, I had a bomb on my throat, there was bad shit going down all around me and all I knew was the lead of my story was diving towards police. I wasn’t going to miss this. I had my camera out and everything.

By the time I’d gotten out, Leather had dove down the steps for the cops. Which is smart, if you think about it. She didn’t want them to set up perimeters behind their cars, shooting bullets and tear gas at her. She wanted to be close at hand so they’d have to engage her — especially since there wasn’t any chance they could beat her in a fight.

She made a show of it. Spinning around, pushing off one officer’s bulletproof vest, grabbing the arm of the next and whirling him around, forcing that officer’s own taser onto another while she kicked her legs out and nailed two more as they got close. Movie moves. The kinds of things you never see in real fights because they’re dumb, but when you’re so much faster, stronger and more durable than the people you’re fighting you can do dumb things if you want.

I snapped pictures. My heart was racing. I have to admit, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know who to root for. This was Leather. I’d been living with her for a week. I’d seen her go out and save a woman’s money and maybe her life. We’d made jokes together and she’d opened up to me. I knew her, at least a little.

But she was a criminal, and these police officers were trying to stop her. And watching her beat and even humiliate them, I felt a little ill. Is this how villains see us? As opportunities to show off?

“Boss!”

It was one of the bagmen. They were coming out, sacks laden. I couldn’t imagine how much money was in those things. Leather turned to look at him, which is when I realized there weren’t any more cops. She’d taken them all down. And what’s more — and perhaps more incredibly and more frighteningly, all at once — I could tell she hadn’t really hurt any of them. She’d bloodied their noses and encouraged them to lie down and be in pain or unconscious, but I doubted any of them would miss a day’s work over this.

I felt small, and tired. Oh, and there was a bomb around my neck. But by now that was old news.

“You ready?”

“Oh yeah! We’re rolling in it!”

“Right! Then let’s hit the Leathermobile and get the Hell–”

It looked like a missile, and when it hit her back it exploded into sparks powerful enough that one arced out to a metal garbage can nearby. Leather convulsed and went down on the steps, her body spasming.

I turned, back against the wall. Somehow I managed to take a picture.

Darkhood was across the way, up on top of a bus that had been stopped by the onrush of police cars. His clothing was rough cut brown and black — it looked medieval, but his gauntlets were modern archery gloves and his bow was pristine. He had turned to cover the bagmen, standing tall, his hood back enough so we could see the domino mask that covered his eyes. “Put the bags down, boys!” he called. “You made a good run of it, but it’s over now!”

I looked back at the bagmen. They looked at each other and dropped the bags.

“Now that’s a good pair of thugs,” he said, dropping to the ground fluidly. He managed to land in a crouch, never changing his aim. “Now, you understand I’ll need to bag you up, of course. It’s nothing personal, but I need to bind up your boss before she comes to, and I can’t have you two sneaking off.”

“Hey man, just don’t hurt us,” one of the bagmen said. “This’s just a job, you know?”

“You might want to rethink career counseling,” he said shifting his grip–

Leather rolled forward, grabbing the nightstick off one of the downed cop’s belts, and threw it at Darkhood. We’re talking a seriously mighty throw — the kind of thing the Big Unit would sell two children and a controlling interest in Roger Clemens’s memorabilia to be able to throw.

Darkhood rolled to the side, firing his arrow at the club and nailing it in midair. His net deployed even as it was knocked up into the air, and Darkhood rolled forward. As he came out of the roll he had another arrow nocked and he fired it, forcing Leather to dive and roll over it — she’d been running for him. As she came up from a roll he shot another arrow at her feet. This one exploded — a concussive charge that threw her back towards the police cars. She twisted in midair and tried to land on her feet, but she misjudged the landing and rolled back over the vehicle. I saw her head hit pavement and winced.

And because I was there, I took another picture.

Leather managed to roll to the side. I could see her looking under the car, watching Darkhood run — he was circling behind, keeping a wide arc. He wanted a clear shot, and he wanted to keep his distance away from her. It hit me that’s what this fight would come down to — Darkhood wanted distance so he could nail her with arrows. Leather wanted to close so she could kick his teeth in. And so far he was ahead on points.

“I got a lot of woozy cops here!” Leather shouted. “So if you intend to shoot a tear gas arrow or a flash arrow or another bomb, don’t let me stop you! I’m sure they’ll feel lots better without eyes or spleens or whatever!”

“Worry not, fair lady,” Darkhood answered. His voice was calm. Measured. He made the ‘fair lady’ thing sound normal too — like this was how people talked. “I’ve got plenty of arrows for all occasions.”

“Yeah? Let’s find out, mumbletypants!” And Leather threw herself backwards, landing on her hands at the base of the stairs and handspringing with enough strength to clear her to the landing at the top. Not ten feet from me.

Right next to the box.

As she flipped, she also had twisted, avoiding a fired arrow by inches. It impacted above us with an electrical discharge. Darkhood ran to the side, another arrow nocked as he jockeyed for position.

“Hey spiky!” Leather shouted, tearing the box and lifting the Mountbatten Urn where it could be clearly seen. “Is this what you’re looking for? Huh? ”

Darkhood skidded to a stop. “Leather! Put that down — gently! We can talk about this!”

“Yeah, about that? So not my style!” She giggled. “Think fast! ”

I stared, my hands working my camera almost mechanically, as Leather did a forward in air roll and flung the priceless urn out and away from herself, far over Darkhood’s head.

Now, I’ve looked at the pictures, and I know intellectually what happened. I know that somehow — somehow Darkhood threw himself backwards, managing to drop the arrow he was holding, nock two arrows at once, fire them while the Urn was almost exactly over his head, draw, nock and fire a third arrow, and hit the ground at a horrid angle, stretched out and back-to his enemy. I know that somehow, the two arrows he fired first had a cable connecting them, and embedded themselves both in telephone poles, the cable retracting taut. And I know the third arrow deployed a net that snagged the urn at the precise instant the net would also hit the cable and wrap around it.

I know that. I’ve gone through it. And I have a horribly blurry photo of the net arrow being launched with the other two arrows still in the air. I also know Darkhood doesn’t have superhuman powers. He’s just that. Damn. Good.

But at the time, all I know is he threw himself backward, arrows going flying, and then the urn was tangled up in a net sixteen feet in the air, swinging in the breeze in the middle of the street.

Leather didn’t stop to stare or be agog. She just ran forward, with all that superhuman speed, straight at Darkhood. And that’s why she did it. The urn wasn’t a ransom item, it was a distraction. So long as she was at a distance, Darkhood could take her. But get him focused elsewhere, not moving, back-to her and sprawled on the ground, and she could close the gap. By the time he’d started to turn over, she was in the air, over him, and dropping an elbow hard into him.

I thought it was over, but he twisted and kicked, and she rolled off and they squared off. He snapped something on his bow and it segmented into two halves, the string retracting until he had — mm. Not really nunchucks. Call it a flail. And he laid about with it. She twisted underneath it, sweeping his legs. His footing went out, but he went down into a handspring, kicking up. She rolled under it and got her footing. They closed, striking and punching. Her inhuman grace. His staggering training. He went in with a taser. She ducked and twisted and struck at his ribs. She hit but he seemed to absorb it — body armor of some kind maybe. They turned and struck, and he went around and tagged her with the taser. She went rubbery, and he went over her–

I don’t know if it was panic or what, but as she fell backwards she curled up and thrust out with those powerful legs, and he flew. She got her feet–

And froze. I froze. We all froze, watching. She had kicked too hard. He was a good fifty feet in the air, and he was going over the edge — the long clifflike edge of the ramp. We were at the peak of the West Highlands neighborhood. Leather had kicked Darkhood out to where he would fall to the underlands.

She was staring, her hand clenched. Her body tense. She didn’t move, watching him twist around as he fell. It looked like he was doing something with his flail — maybe trying to get it back into the bow. Get some kind of line arrow….

He fell below the edge of where we could see. We stared. My heart was pounding.

It felt like forever, but with a thunk we heard and saw an arrow slam into the retaining fence at the edge. An arrow with a line on it.

Leather pumped her fist. “ Yeah! ” she said, and looked around. The cops were beginning to get to their feet. “Okay, book, ” she shouted to the bagmen. “Leave the bags, hit the Leathermobile! We’re gone! ”

The bagmen didn’t complain. They ran. Leather ran after them.

“ Wait! ” I shouted. “The collar! You can’t leave me or–” I stared. The dumb bitch had forgotten the bomb around my neck!

Leather skidded to a stop, right at the door of the Leathermobile. She stared at me for a second, then burst into laughter. “Jesus, Chapman,” she shouted back. “There isn’t really a bomb! Who do you think we are?”

I stared as she ducked in, and the car tore out. Stared as the recovering cops opened fire as it escaped. I sunk to my knees, staring, and watched the Leathermobile leave. They got no money from the bank, but they got away. And Leather and Darkhood crossed swords in the light of day. And people would talk about this for weeks. And I wasn’t wearing a bomb.

After I could no longer see the Leathermobile, I did the only thing I could think of. I leaned forward, so I was on my hands and knees, and I threw up again. And then I waited for a policeman to come rescue me or arrest me, depending on how he saw things.

Chapter 13

Inspector Harris sat down, dropping the collar on the table. “Yeah, it’s safe,” he said. “There’s a couple of wires looping through it, but they just lead from a watch battery to a little capacitor. As near as we can tell, it’s designed to give the wearer a tiny jolt when it’s first put on. So they think it’s… I dunno, active.”

I noticed the cap that had what Leather and Marco called the ‘blow jelly’ under it was off. “You found the gel?” I asked. “The one I told you about?”

Harris smiled slightly. “Oh yeah. We found it.”

“So… it wasn’t anything… dangerous?”

“Well, it could certainly have been turned to illegal purpose.”

“It could?”

“Sure.” He grinned more. “See, if you spread it over your favorite newspaper comics, it would capture the image and lift it off. That’s copyright infringement. There’s laws against copyright infringement, Mister Chapman.”

I closed my eyes. “Silly Putty. They put a collar with a watch battery and Silly Putty around my neck. I must look like the biggest idiot you’ve ever seen in here.”

Harris chuckled. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. If it were me, I’d have done the same thing. I mean, how are you going to test a bomb around your neck? Set it off?”

“Yeah, okay.” I took a deep breath. It had been a long afternoon. The police had debriefed me, to make sure I wasn’t working with Leather. It didn’t help my case that apparently Kyle hadn’t told them I had been kidnapped — and why should he? He knew I’d be gone a week. He just didn’t tell me.

But they established that yes indeed, I had been a prisoner of a supervillain for several days. And I spilled my guts on everything I saw there.

And maybe that seems weird to you. I mean, there’s a way in which Leather, Marco, the bagmen — even the Steve had been almost friends. And yeah, there would be things I missed. Not counting the beating, of course. But at the same time, I wasn’t a henchman or a villain. I’m a reporter, and it’s not like I was protecting my sources here. I was interviewing them, and there was nothing from that week off the record. Hell, they knew I was going to write it all down and publish it in a magazine anyway.

So, there was no reason not to spill everything. It would be dumb not to.

They had me checked out at a hospital before the debriefing started. The beating I’d taken had left some marks and some pains, but there was no sign of lasting trauma. Otherwise, I talked to some very nice policemen and I was as forthright as I knew how to be — up to handing my notes over. To be copied, mind. I wasn’t about to lose the story I spent a week being held prisoner to get.

And then we took a ride out to the lair. And it wasn’t just me and several police cars. In fact, I rode in a van, and across from me rode Darkhood himself.

Darkhood is generally serious. He’s a solid looking man with kind of remarkable physical conditioning, and you get the feeling he’s always keeping his eyes open and staring right through you. Having seen the man execute some of his trick shots, I can believe it.

I suppose they left me alone with him so he could glean any information off me I had neglected to tell the cops. But, you know. I’m a journalist, doing a story on a supervillain called Leather. And here I had someone on the other side, who’d just had a knock down drag out fight with her. Like I was going to miss a chance like this.

“You okay?” I asked him.

“Hm?” That piercing gaze flicked to me.

“I saw the fight. That was a pretty brutal kick.”

His lips quirked into a smile. “Body armor took the brunt, and I ragdolled to absorb some of the rest. I’ll be sore for a while, and I thought I’d pull my arms out of their sockets when the line went taut.”

“I was wondering. You know, if it was a bungie thing or–”

“Composite cord,” he said. “Some give but not much. I made the anchor shot and tried my best to turn it into a swing. Which managed to jolt my arms and then hook me under the overpass, smacking me into the underside.” He shrugged. “Not the most fun I’ve ever had.”

“So she won?”

“How do you figure?”

“She got away.”

He shrugged again. “Her men were carrying close to seven million dollars in those bags. This is one of BankOne’s central distribution hubs, and they had access to the vault and a lot of packaged hundred dollar bills. They left that money behind. They left the Mountbatten Urn behind. No civilians were hurt, the bank guards were just shaken up, and even the cops didn’t have more than bruises and one broken nose. I’d rather have captured her, but that’s still a good day’s work.”

“But you have to know… I mean, this was the blow-off.”

Darkhood looked at me. How I knew a man in a hood and domino mask had arched his eyebrow was beyond me, but that was clearly the case.

“She was there for publicity. She didn’t really expect to get the money. She was there–”

“To fight me,” Darkhood finished.

“Yeah.”

“I know.”

I looked away, slightly uncomfortable. “She says that you guys… you heroes need villains.”

He snorted. “I’m sure she did.”

“Seriously. I think she’s a fan more than anything. She says that without villains you guys would look silly. You’d be a joke. She says–”

“Paragon and the Nightwatch both started their careers before there were any costumed villains. The Lieutenant fought commandos and mercenaries long before Blackmask showed up. And you honestly think I’d stop doing what I do just because supervillains stopped showing up?” He shook his head. “Six nights out of seven — no, twenty five days out of thirty I don’t see anyone in a costume. Sometimes more. I see thieves and toughs and gangs and drug pushers.” He half-smiled. “You interview celebrities, right?”

I shrugged. “I work in entertainment journalism.”

“You ever interview a comedian?”

“Sure.”

“What did they think of hecklers?”

“Generally? They hate their guts.”

“Why?”

“Because they spent weeks or months or even years refining and fine tuning an act, and some drunk in the back of the room is screwing with it.”

“That’s right.” He leaned back against the van, looking at me. “You talk to a good number of those hecklers, and they think they’re helping. They really do. And because the comedian’s good at what he does, he makes their ‘help’ funny. But that doesn’t mean he likes them, and that doesn’t mean his act depends on them. In the end the hecklers are just deluded. They want to be the center of attention, and they justify crappy, selfish behavior by claiming it helps. ”

“Huh.” We rode quietly for about thirty seconds. “So it wouldn’t bother you if all the villains disappeared tomorrow?”

“Bother me? I’d throw a party.”

“Really?”

“Really. I mean, think about it, Mister Chapman. Let’s say that she was right, and that I’d feel… what was it? Silly? Silly showing up in costume if there were no costumed villains.” He looked at me. “So we reduce crime. We protect lives and civilians, and we get metahuman and paranormal criminals out of the equation, and the only price is my embarrassment? You think I wouldn’t take that deal in a second? ”

I chuckled. “I guess you would. So, she’s just wrong?”

“Mm.” He leaned back. “She’s wrong headed. In a number of ways, but there’s a specific case in this one. We don’t need villains to be heroes… but some villains — like her? They need us to need them.”

“Huh?”

“It’s how she sleeps at night. She wants to go out and steal whatever she likes. But she pretends she has a conscience, and it’s bothered. But if she decides that she’s enabling heroes to be heroic and inspirational, she can put her conscience to rest and steal whatever she likes.”

“So it’s safe to say you don’t like her?”

“What do you think?”

“She likes you.”

He shrugs. “For some value of like that includes aggravated assault and attempted murder.”

I frowned. “I don’t think she meant to kill you with that kick. She got–”

Darkhood laughed. “I don’t care what she meant to do, Mister Chapman. She used lethal force in our fight, and it came damn close to either killing me or crippling me.” He looked at me. “Let me guess. You’ve tagged her as one of the safe ones.”

I looked away. “I got my ass kicked while I was there. And sometimes she scared the Hell out of me.”

“Yeah, but you figure she’s not really hurting anyone, right?”

I paused. “Well, she isn’t, is she? She doesn’t kill anyone. She just steals things.”

“Heh. Just.” He looked away. “She stole nearly a million dollars in jewelry at the beginning of the week. That means the corporation that owned that jewelers has to make a major insurance claim. Someone has to pay for what she took, Mister Chapman. And that means their rates go up and they have to fix their building, and that’s assuming the company doesn’t just close that branch and fire all the workers. You saying that doesn’t hurt? ”

I flushed. “Yeah, but–”

“Or even better. She robbed Fry’s Electronics out on 40th. It was a good target, because their warehouse is built into the same building as their sales floor. And she stole over five hundred video game consoles, six days before they actually are scheduled to be released.”

“So?”

“So?” Darkhood laughed, slightly bitterly. “Mister Chapman, all those consoles were preordered. And sure, some of them were preordered by speculators, and they don’t get to have one now — but even if they get their money refunded they no doubt were counting on the markup they could do on eBay. And some of them weren’t preordered by speculators. They were preordered by people who want those games. Hardcore gamers maybe. Or kids, Mister Chapman. Kids who begged their parents and were so excited because they actually got one of the preorders before they were closed, and now they were guaranteed the newest and greatest game.” He snorted. “Doesn’t hurt anybody. Leather stole an eleven year old’s birthday present — something he’s been excited over for months. You think his father getting their money back will make up for that?”

I didn’t answer. I felt two inches tall.

“In the end, Leather doesn’t care what her crimes do to other people, Mister Chapman. She wants her lifestyle and she’s more than happy to let other people pay for it. No, I don’t like her. I’m glad she tries not to kill people. She’s not brutal like some I’ve faced. But that doesn’t make her nice and that doesn’t mean her line of work doesn’t hurt innocent people.”

“So you fight her,” I said quietly. “And you drive her off. Or you put her in jail. But you know she’s going to get away or break out. You know that. How do you keep doing it?”

He looked at me. “Someone has to,” he said.

It was my turn to snort.

“What?”

“That’s not an answer. It’s an aphorism. It’s what you say to shut people up. But you don’t have to. Especially not in Meridian City.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning this is Transit’s town. She’s a high powered heroine. You’re always going to be in her shadow. Second fiddle.” I thought back to my conversation with Leather on the subject.”No matter how good you get, you’re going to be high school varsity and she’s going to be the major leagues.”

“And?”

I shrugged. “How do you put up with it? Put up with getting page fourteen instead of page one? Put up with her getting the glory? Put up with–”

“Good Lord, you make it sound so petty, ” he said. “I don’t put up with Transit. I thank the Good Lord Jesus she’s here every day, and when she has to be away I bust my ass trying to cover for her. When she’s here, she generally handles the high powered threats, the city-wide dangers, and for that matter I can call her when I get in over my head.” He stared at me. “Do you think just because Transit can teleport a street gang into Meridian Bay, I feel worse about taking them down with stunners and net-arrows?”

I looked at him. “No,” I said. “I guess I don’t think that.”

“Good. You shouldn’t.” He looked to the front of the van. “We’re almost there?”

“Looks like.”

We rode for a few moments.

“I wish she’d been around today,” he said quietly.

“Why?”

“Because alone I stopped the bank heist. With Transit, we’d have taken them all in.” He chuckled. “Hell, Transit could have taken Leather all by herself, with one hand behind her back. I could have concentrated on taking her henchmen down and safeguarding the cops and civilians.”

“You feel guilty for letting her get away?”

“Not really.” He continued watching the road ahead. “I did what I could. If I hadn’t been there, she’d have gotten seven times the payday than all the rest of her crimes put together, and I got the Mountbatten Urn back. I’m not going to beat myself up because she got away this time.” He looked at me. “But I wish Transit had been here, because then she wouldn’t have gotten away. And next time, Transit or not? She won’t. ”

And looking in his eyes, I believed him.

Seeing what was left of Leather’s lair was almost shocking. The Service wasn’t content to strip it clean. They wanted to be sure it wouldn’t contain clues, so they burned it to the ground.

“This whole area is still smoking,” Inspector Harris said. “Do we have the MCFD on their way?”

“Yeah!” One of the crime scene investigators called back. “But we need to tag the place before we spray it down!”

“Good luck with that,” Darkhood murmured.

“You don’t think they’ll find something?”

Darkhood shook his head. “Villains have these support services they spend an incredible amount of money with. They’re very good at eliminating evidence. They won’t find anything.”

I looked at the chunks of smoldering brick. “What could do this? A bomb?”

“More likely they lined the roof of this place with thermite and set it off. Let it burn down through all the floors and scour everything clean.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“So you know about the Service?”

Darkhood nodded.

“Why don’t you shut it down? Or the Henchmens’ Guild. Or Transport Service?”

“Not that easy,” he said. “They work cell style. Every link in the chain at most knows two or three other links. Everyone gets paid really well, so they don’t have a good reason to rat out what they do know. Plus, the penalties for squealing are horrific. It’s as hard or harder than cracking the Mafia, because at least the Mafia’s actively committing crimes. Running drugs or numbers or protection rackets. Yeah, their teamsters service is aiding and abetting, but they look like any other truckers or moving companies, and if you search their trucks, almost all their stuff looks normal at first glance.”

“I suppose.”

“Sometimes we get lucky. I know the Lieutenant did serious harm to the Mid-Atlantic organization a couple years back. But they always close ranks and get things back running. And sometimes it makes it harder to fight the real criminals when we hurt the businesses.”

“What? Really?”

“I know one or two heroes who’ve infiltrated their local branch of one of the support services,” Darkhood said. “They get to keep their ear to the ground. Hear when a villain’s touring into their city. Be pro active instead of re active.” He shrugged.

“Do heroes have anything like them?”

“Not really. There’s a few covert organizations that gather intel and pass it on to us, though it’s hard to be sure they’re really on our side. Justice Wing’s arranged a few things, too. Medical assistance options. I know of one hero who had his identity made, and Justice Wing got him and his wife into something like the witness protection program. Things like that.”

“Seems unfair.”

“Not really. They’re for-profit. Of course they need infrastructure. We’re volunteer.”

“Right.” I looked to the side. “Looks like they left my car.”

“Yup. Want to go check it out with me?”

“Shouldn’t we avoid touching it?”

“Probably.” Darkhood walked over to my Hyundai. After a moment, I followed.

It was still in bad shape, of course. The hood was still crushed. The windshield was was still just so much broken glass, and the truck wheel well was still sitting in my front seat area.

“Leather did this?” he asked me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Heh. Yeah. No victims, right?”

I flushed. “I didn’t count myself.”

“I’d think you’d be the first one counted.” He narrowed his eyes. “You have a letter,” he said.

I blinked, and walked over, next to him.

He was right. Sitting on the driver’s seat, amid glass and mold from the rain that had soaked into the upholstery over the past week, there sat an envelope. My name was on a laser printed label on the front.

“That’s new,” I said. “Should we get the cops over here? Forensics and all that?”

“This isn’t a murder case,” Darkhood said. “They’re investigating, but no one expects to find some hint of where Leather and the others went.”

“Unless that’s a hint?”

“Unless indeed.” He opened the door — at some point it had been unlocked. I suppose it hardly mattered at that point — and picked the envelope up. It wasn’t sealed on the back so he lifted the flap and looked inside.

“What is it?” I asked.

He chuckled. “You don’t know?”

“I have no clue.”

“Interesting. It’s a cashier’s check for fifty thousand dollars. Made out to you.”

I blinked. “What?”

“You heard me.” He glanced at the seat. “There seems to be a message for you, too.

I looked. He was right. It was written in sharpie, and had been covered by the envelope.

“PROMISE ME YOU’LL GET A BETTER CAR NEXT TIME!” it read, with a little heart after it.

“We… need to tell the cops,” I said. “That’s stolen money.”

“Yes we do,” Darkhood agreed. He was smirking.

“…it’s not like that. She probably felt guilty about wrecking my car at the beginning of the week.”

“I’m sure she did, Casanova.” Darkhood said, walking back towards the police. “Come on, let’s get this turned in.”

Chapter 14

Meridian City is seven hours north, driving along the coast. About halfway there you hit Bay City. I was driving there, northbound. My car was new to me — a Prius, bought used for about fifteen grand. They wanted seventeen but I paid cash and that made all the difference. My old Hyundai had been totaled out, and I had gotten a check for eight hundred and thirty four dollars from my insurance company for my troubles.

The Prius was a good ride. Better A/C. As good or better milage since it was a hybrid. Roomier on the inside. And I had GPS navigation and a CD player in it. My cup runneth over. Not that I used the CD player. I owned an iPod, after all. Who brought their CD collection in their car these days?

I had loaded up a custom playlist. I wasn’t heading to an interview this time. This was a pilgrimage. But it was the same basic theory — music to get my head in the game. Music to get me thinking about my subject and what I’d be doing.

The mix was okay, I thought. Good for the purpose. Some Bad Religion. Some Dropkick Murphys. A little dance techno and trancer music. Liz Phair.

And some other things. Things I figured she’d get a kick out of, even if she hated the music. And I was sure she’d hate some of the songs, even if she loved the sentiment behind choosing them. As I drove north and noticed a storm out over the ocean, one of those songs came on. Bonnie Tyler. Where have all the good men gone and where are all the Gods? Where’s the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?

My lips quirked into a smile. Despite myself and what little cool image I had left, I sang along. “Isn’t there a white knight upon a fiery steed? Late at night I toss and I turn and I dream of what I need!”

Don’t we all need a hero? I let Bonnie take the Chorus solo, and I sped up a little bit. I was driving north, to Bay City, where once a fourth rate super in red lycra fought low level crime under the improbable name Dynamo Girl.

Oh yeah. I have that playlist all right.

I was more than a little surprised when they actually gave me the cashier’s check, back up in Meridian City. I’d crashed in a hotel for a couple of nights at the City’s expense while they checked it out and followed up on leads. They wanted me in the area in case they had questions. It wasn’t a great hotel, but the rooms were clean and it was down the block from a Denny’s, and really what more do you need?

“You can’t seriously tell me I can have that check,” I said to Inspector Harris. “That’s stolen money.”

“We can’t prove that,” he said, shrugging. “This check was drawn two weeks ago, paid for by cash by this man.” He set a photograph down on the table of a man in glasses. It was black and white — a photo taken from security camera footage. “Was he one of the people you knew worked with Leather?”

I shook my head. “Never seen him before.”

“Us either.”

“Wait. Two weeks ago? How’s that possible?””

“As a guess? Leather got a bunch of these cashier’s checks made up. Probably using one of their support services. They’re all squeaky clean. No money trail to speak of, legal tender. And probably endorsed by the purchaser before they gave it to her. All she’d need to do is fill in the name on the check and boom — perfectly legal money for expenses.”

“But you know she gave it to me.”

“No I don’t.”

I blinked at that. “Huh?”

“We suspect she wrote the note on your car seat. That looks like it could have been her handwriting, if we make allowances for the sharpie and the weird angle. But we don’t know she left the check. Her fingerprints aren’t on it. The signature isn’t hers. And we reached the man whose signature it was. He worked for a financial service, and part of his job is getting cashier’s checks made up. We spoke to his supervisors, and each one could refer us up the chain. It’s a chain without end, Mister Chapman. And one we can’t legally tie back to Leather in evidence, even if it seems obvious.” He shrugged. “Since we can’t prove this money is stolen — especially since it was drawn before Leather committed any crimes in the city — we don’t have any right to impound it.”

I shook my head. “That seems insane. Maybe the F.B.I.–”

“We tried to get the Feds interested. They weren’t. Which makes me think supervillains have worked out a method that’s pretty warrant proof right now. Until the laws change or the loopholes get closed, anyway. So legally? That’s your money.”

I looked at it. “I don’t know that I can accept it,” I said.

“Conscience?” he asked.

“Maybe. But it could also be payola, you know? I take fifty G’s from the subject of my interview, and that compromises the interview’s integrity, you know?”

He half-smiles. “An honest man. Well, I’m not keeping the check either way. What you do with it is up to you.”

So I took the check. And I walked out the door, feeling really weird.

“You look puzzled, Mister Chapman.”

I froze, and turned.

Darkhood was leaning against a police car.

“Do you just hang out in front of police stations?” I asked him.

“Only if I figure I’m going to see something interesting.”

“Since when am I interesting?”

“Well for one thing, you’re fifty thousand dollars richer than you were twenty minutes ago. That’s interesting.”

I chuckled. “And you think it means I was working with Leather?”

He quirked a smile. “Actually, no. I overheard your talk with Inspector Harris. I think you’re a little soft in the head, but you’re basically honest.”

I started walking. He followed. “Is eavesdropping on police business legal?”

“Just as legal as vigilante justice.”

“Vigilante justice isn’t legal.”

“Well there you go. So what are you going to do with the check?”

I sighed. “I have no idea,” I said. “I can’t keep it. You know I can’t keep it.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure you can.”

“I’m a journalist. Accepting money from my interviewee is the fine line between writing up an article on a subject and a subject writing an article ‘as told to Todd Chapman.'” I shrugged. “That’s not kosher.”

“Undoubtedly. At least from one point of view.”

I stopped, turning and looking at him. “Hey what is with you?” I asked. “This is some of that money plucked from little childrens’ Christmas presents and shutting down small business, remember? It’s dirty!”

“Yes it is.” He smiled. It was an insufferable smile.

“Why do you want me to take it?”

He shrugged. “I don’t really care if you do or you don’t. But I want you to consider all the possibilities, Mister Chapman. For example — you lost your car. Are you going to write that off as a learning experience?”

“I figured I was.”

“I submit that it would not be damaging to your article’s integrity to replace the car you had trashed.”

“Even if I buy a Lexus?”

“Are you going to buy a Lexus?”

I paused. “No.”

“Then I’d say it’s not germane.”

“So I get another second hand car. Fine. That still leaves most of the money.”

He shrugged. “Donate it to a children’s fund. Or to Habitat for Humanity. Or….”

“Or?”

He looked sidelong at me. “Where do you go from here, Mister Chapman?”

“Me?”

“You.”

“Back home. I file my report, and I get my next assignment.”

“So, from a week as Leather’s prisoner to a week with Kanye West?”

I opened my mouth, paused, and closed it, looking away.

“Not so appealing?”

“That’s the job,” I said. “I write slightly sycophantic articles about entertainers. I’m actually pretty good at it.”

“Is that the article you’re going to write about Leather? Slightly sycophantic?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I pursed my lips. “Because this article’s important.”

“Why?”

“Because….” I looked off, down the street. “Because we live with you. Your kind. The heroes and the villains. We live with you and we thrill with you and sometimes we’re entertained by you and sometimes we’re terrified by you, but we don’t understand you. Not always.” I put my hands in my pockets. “Barbara Babcock’s a better reporter than I’ll ever be, but that’s just it. She reports on what Paragon and the rest of you do. Not on who you are. This… this is a chance to write about who you are. ” I shrugged. “That’s too important to blow on a puff piece drooling over Leather in a PVC leotard.”

He nodded. “So that’s it? You understand us now? One week with one supervillain and you’re done?”

I snorted. “I haven’t even started. Even Leather told me that. She wanted me to go talk to rogues.”

“Rogues?”

“You know. The villains who make a career out of one superhero?”

“Oh.” He smiled a bit. “Rogues. I kind of like that.”

“Do you have one?”

“I have a few who seem a little fixated on me, yeah. There’s this one girl with a sword and a whip? Calls herself O Gato Cinzento. The first couple of times I thought it was coincidence, but after nine fights, all against me….”

“Why does she do it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

He smiled a bit. “So are you going to dig deeper. Unearth more of the secrets and the motivations? Uncover the villainous heart? And maybe find a few things about people like me while you’re at it?”

I shrugged. “It’s not that simple. I’m doing this on assignment. My editor wanted a supervillain who looked like a fetish model on the cover. Once is a novelty, but we’re a music magazine.”

“Yeah. Damn shame, but you need to pay the bills, right?” He started walking away. “It’s not like you have the money to take six or eight months off and really research the question.”

I blinked. “Wait — are you saying–”

He looked over his shoulder. “Me? What makes you think I’m saying anything, Mister Chapman.” He spun, cloak flaring, his bow snapping out in his hand, and he fired a line arrow. It struck somewhere above, the line staying connected to the bow, and a mechanical ascender kicked in, hauling him up into a swing out above the street.

I watched him go, and then turned and kept walking. Breakfast at Denny’s sounded like a better idea all the time.

Loose ends. That’s what it’s all about. I took the second Bay City exit, just like my new GPS told me I should. I knew where I was going. I’d done some research before taking the drive. The web barely knew ‘Dynamo Girl,’ but it confirmed she’d been a Bay City heroine during her brief career, and that led me to articles in the Bay City Chronicle, and that in turn led me to put together some idea of her old stomping grounds. She’d had some good fights, it looked like. But she also first appeared within a couple of years of the battle with the Overking, when Paragirl and the first Freya were killed and Shillelagh was maimed and the whole world got turned upside down. With new heroes popping up every week, some of them with old names, and the world still caught in the sense that the entire planet might be threatened again….

I don’t know. Was it really ‘sidekick physique’ and apathy that had kept Dynamo Girl from getting attention? Or was it a shellshocked nation and giant stories hitting bang bang bang on the public consciousness?

It didn’t matter. It happened, and now I knew where it happened.

So I was on my way up. There were loose ends to tie up.

The Amplifier offices looked… smaller, somehow. Maybe a little more cluttered. It was the same place as always, with pictures of stars on the walls and people running ragged.

I don’t know. Maybe I just saw them differently. I walked through to Kyle’s desk.

He was on the phone. “–her that of course we’ll make all the arrangements,” he was saying. “Yes, of course we’ll take extra care. I know you’re not in the… I know. Yes, I know. The cover? Well, I don’t think that’ll be a problem. Heh. Of course. You too.” He hung up. “Publicists. Hey, Todd. Looking good.”

“Hey, Kyle. You’re a son of a bitch.”

He blinked, and then he laughed. “Look, I didn’t think there was any chance in Hell you’d agree to go up there for a week. At the same time, this was a chance to really connect with her, you know? So is it–”

“They beat the shit out of me, Kyle. They had a superhero almost spoil one of their heists, and they thought I was responsible, so I got curb stomped. I still ache from it.”

Kyle trailed off, and looked uncomfortable. “Well, you know… that’s a risk, right? I mean, you cover rap–”

“The police interrogated me for a good long time, Kyle. They weren’t sure I didn’t work with her. If the wind had blown a little differently, I’d be in jail right now.”

He laughed, nervously, and spread his hands. “I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry. So… did you write it?”

“Mostly. I have some loose ends to tie up.”

“Pictures?”

“Oh yeah. Good ones. She’ll melt the newsstands.”

Kyle grinned. “That’s my boy.”

“I want two-thirty a word.”

Kyle blinked. “What?”

“Two-thirty a word, Kyle.”

“You’re nuts. We’ve never paid a rate that high.”

“I’m happy to be the first then.”

“We have a contract.” He shrugged. “You agreed to it.”

“That was for an afternoon’s work. Not a week’s.”

“You’ll find the contract doesn’t specify time periods.”

I paused, and smiled. “You’re right. It doesn’t.”

“Okay then. Look, if the pictures are as good as you say, we’ll talk bonus, but I–”

“But you should know two things.” I grinned a little more.

“I should?”

“Yeah. First off? The cops wanted to arrest you.”

Kyle blinked. “ Me? ”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Conspiracy to kidnap. Aiding and abetting kidnapping. Failure to report a felony kidnapping. Reckless endangerment. Really, you pays your money and you takes your choice.” My smile was broader still.

Kyle had gone pale. “I….”

“Oh, don’t worry. I refused to sign a complaint or press charges. They considered charging you anyway, but I talked them out of it.”

Kyle breathed out sharply. “You’re a friend, Todd,” he said simply. “And… you know, she told me you wouldn’t get hurt–”

“But that leads me to the other thing. The other little factoid you should know.” I looked smug. “See, just because I didn’t press criminal charges doesn’t mean I can’t pursue civil charges.”

“…excuse me?”

“Oh yeah. There’s a ton of civil complaints I could have. I’m told by reputable sources they’d be pretty open and shut, too. So it seems to me we have a choice here, Kyle. I can turn in my story to you, as we contracted, at a buck fifty a word… and I follow that submission with a lawsuit against you, the publisher, the company that owns the publisher, the distributor and anyone else I can make a tenuous connection to all this. A lawsuit that’ll get massive press and that will almost certainly result in a six or seven figure settlement from the company to shut me up and a chance for you to see an unemployment line up close and personal….”

Kyle was silent now.

“…or, I can give you my story and you, out of the goodness of your heart and your recognition of my superior writing and the personal risks I accepted, can pay me two dollars and fifty cents a word instead, and no one involved will ever see a courtroom.”

“You said two-thirty,” he murmured, slightly in shock.

“That was before you said ‘no.'”

He frowned… and then laughed, relaxing. “Shit, Todd. Let’s call it two sixty a word. No reason to be stingy. This story’s going to be huge. ”

I grinning. “You know it, Kyle. Pleasure doing business with you.”

“Yeah yeah.” He shook his head. “You had me going there. So what was she like?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes scary as Hell. Sometimes cute as a button. She’s enthusiastic and friendly and fun. And I think she’s really lonely.”

Kyle grinned. “Perfect. We can sell that six ways from Sunday.”

I smiled, a bit weakly. “Yeah, we can.”

Kyle leaned back. “So, going to take some time off, or are you looking for work? I might have something — don’t think for a minute it’ll pay more than a buck thirty a word. I mean, Tom Waits is cool, but he’s not going to bring in–”

“Pass.”

Kyle arched an eyebrow. “So, you are going to take some time off, then?”

“Something like that. It’s been a wild few days.”

Kyle chuckled. “I bet. Anything else?”

“Mm. Oh. Yeah. One other thing. I met Darkhood.”

“Who? Oh — right. Meridian’s other superhero. How was that?”

“Pretty cool, actually. And he wanted me to give you a message.”

“Me?”

“Oh yeah.”

A window exploded behind the two of us, prompting a shriek from some guy at the photocopier. The broadhead arrow that had shattered it sailed through the room, over my head, and embedded itself in the bricks behind Elias, right in the middle of that picture of Kyle meeting Phil Spector. Given the trial and all, I felt that picture was in poor taste anyway.

Kyle, of course, freaked, spilling his coffee and falling out of his chair.

“He says that if you ever, ever hear about where a Supervillain’s lair is again, and send a freelancer to get himself kidnapped instead of calling the police? You’re going to find out just how bad an idea it is to get on a superhero’s bad side.” I grinned, putting my hands in my pockets. “See you around, Kyle.” I nodded to Don at the reviews desk — he looked like he’d just seen a snake — and I turned and walked out of the office.

I had found her old haunts by inference and legwork. The streets she used to patrol. The diner she almost certainly had worked at. I parked the Prius and did a walking tour. They were somewhat rough neighborhoods, but it was during the day and besides, I’d slept in the same room with worse than these punks. I was wearing the same outfit I wore when I rode with Dynamo Girl — the turtleneck was cool, the leather coat was nice and durable, and I was glad I got to keep it. And the sunglasses? Hey, vision enhancing glasses were the closest I was ever going to come to superpowers.

I saw the street where she took down the Seventh Avenue City Strikers. I found the building that had replaced the one that had burned down. She’d saved seven people from the fire, including one four year old girl. I bought twinkies from the corner store where she’d saved the guy from three armed robbers. I saw, at a distance, the city councilman she’d rescued from an assassination attempt. She’d dived in front of a bullet. She’d taken it in her side. No big deal with her healing as it worked out. Certainly there were no long term effects. But she couldn’t have known that when she threw herself between the gunman and the councilman. She had to know she could die, right there.

Is there an expiration date on good deeds? Does saving lives in one year excuse stealing Christmas from a kid two years later? I don’t know. I’m not a philosopher. I think Darkhood’s right. But I think maybe Leather’s right too. I certainly think she made a difference to this neighborhood. I certainly think that when a crime’s committed here now, they miss her, and they wish she’d come back.

I found one piece of evidence. Direct evidence, that once a brave young woman called Dynamo Girl had run laughing through these streets. It was on a brick wall down on Seventeenth. A mural — graffiti, really. Amid a pile of tags and Obey stencils, covered over in part by some later artist’s work.

It was a girl in a red leotard, painted cartoony, like anime. Wide eyes with a blue mask, doing a cartwheel. In dynamic motion, the biggest grin in the world on her face.

I took a picture of that piece of street art, and I looked at it for a long moment, and then I went back to the Prius and I got out the briefcase I’d bought two hours before I closed on the car.

Most of the money was going to go to living expenses. Keeping the rent up on my apartment. Keeping me in hotel rooms, at least until I had enough of the book written to get an advance for it. And keeping me in travel and cheap food while I met people. Fifteen had gone to the car. It was nice and safe — and as I’d been directed in her note to me, it was better than my Hyundai had been.

But eight thousand, one hundred and nineteen dollars had to go to loose ends.

I walked onto the liquor store on nineteenth. RIDER LIQUORS the neon sign said. I’d found it by pouring over crime sections of the Bay City Chronicle. They’d never caught the guy. It was a big store, with six cashiers. I could believe that on a Friday night they’d have a lot of money in here. In this section of town? Better believe it.

“Excuse me,” I asked one of the cashiers. “Is the owner in?”

“Yeah.” she said. “Back there.” She nodded to a black man, about fifty two years old. He was putting Scotch on a shelf.

“Thanks.” I walked over to him. “James Rider?”

“Yeah?” he asked, looking me up and down. “What?”

“You owned this store a few years back?”

“I owned this store from the day it opened. Why?” He stood, looking me up and down.

“So you were the owner for the big robbery? You lost eight thousand, one hundred and nineteen dollars on a Friday?”

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Make any changes since then?”

He snorted. “If you’re here to sell me a new security system, don’t bother. We put in drop safes after that. No cashier can get access to more than two hundred dollars at any time, and we have better cameras and–”

“I’m not here to sell you anything, Mister Rider. I’m here to make a delivery.”

He frowned. “A delivery?”

I set the briefcase down on a clear area of shelf, and opened it up. Hundred dollar bills stared back at him.

His eyes widened. Then narrowed. “What is this?”

“I’m just the messenger,” I said. “This is the eight thousand, one hundred and nineteen dollars you lost that night. It’s being returned, no strings attached.”

He stared at the money, and then at me. “You working with the guy who stole it?” he asked.

“Nope. Do you remember Dynamo Girl?”

He blinked. “What?”

“Do you remember Dynamo Girl?”

He laughed. “Of course I do. I saw her fight Red Beast! She was amazing. I thought she was dead or something.”

“Not quite. This is from her.”

He blinked again. “From Dynamo Girl?”

“Yup.” I stepped back, leaving the briefcase. “She got delayed, is all. But it’s all there.”

“You know Dynamo Girl?”

I nodded.

“Where is she?”

“I dunno,” I said.

He looked at me, then at the money. “Dynamo Girl got my money back?”

“She did.”

He chuckled, shaking his head. “Ain’t that a kick in the head,” he said.

“Yeah.” I grinned. We shook hands. “You have a nice day, Mister Rider.”

“You too. And if you see Dynamo Girl again, you tell her thank you. And tell her we miss her.”

“I hope I get the chance,” I said.

That night, I pulled out of Bay City. They don’t have a hero of their own right now. I was going to head west. I’d thought about going to Crown City and try to chase down Paragon or Washington D.C. to find the Lieutenant, or even Greystone City and track down the Nightwatch, even if his rogues were psychotic. But I don’t know. There’s an awful lot of press out there on those guys. But there’s not so much being written about some of the others. Guys like Rubicon, up in Republic City. Or Santa Domingo’s Silver Horseman. Or the Beacon herself, in Paramount. There was a real cheerleader type up in the Puget Sound area — a girl with real ‘sidekick physique,’ that what stories were written were speculating she would be teaming up with some other hero really soon, if she wasn’t already.

And there were the bad guys. Oh, I could probably interview Leonardo Lucas in prison — if he were still in prison — but he’d been interviewed lots of times. I was more interested in Bandolier, or the Red Claw. Maybe track down Lady Velvet, wherever she had retired to, or O Gato Cinzento back in Meridian City.

I didn’t know just then. I had enough money to go for a while, though. And a lot of ground to cover. And I knew I wanted it to be new ground. We all know something about the first and second tier, heroes and villains alike. It was the third and fourth tier that interested me.

I wondered, absently, if I was going to get killed along the way. Well, maybe I was.

I pulled out of Bay City and onto the Interstate. Heading for the middle of the country — the crossroads of America. And from there, we’d see what I could turn up. Who I could talk to. I had the gear, and a new phone, a computer and a camera and a good recorder. And I had quite a few months before hunger might drive me back to writing about Eminem or the latest Lindsey Lohan trainwreck.

I hit play on the iPod. No playlist this time. I wasn’t psyching myself up to see Leather or Dynamo Girl. This was my story now.

The random die was thrown. The opening strains of “Consequence Free” by Great Big Sea came on the speakers. I sped up to seventy as they sang. Wouldn’t it be great if no one ever got offended? Wouldn’t it be great to say what’s really on your mind? I have always said all the rules were made for bending — and if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?

I grinned. “Time to save the world,” I murmured, and headed down the highway to whatever showed up next.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14