Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa(131)
“I wasn’t that funny,” Wright said, uncomfortable, as he lowered the gun a few centimetres.
“No, no, not you.”
“Not me? What, then?”
Rubbing his eyes with his left hand, laughter subsiding, Jack suspected he was about to pass out — but he needed to hold on, fight this sensation. Louise was somewhere behind, in danger, and Wright hadn’t noticed her.
“It’s this whole situation,” he said. “You, me, Heropa. Everything.”
“What in blazes are you talking about?”
“Well, for starters, I thought we’d wrapped your chapter. But here you are, a fossilised loser still getting round in tights. Hope I know better at your age — it’s not a good look, mate. Embarrassing.”
“You forget who has the gun.”
“Who cares? The entire world has Reset, yet you remain an old fart on his last legs…” Jack chuckled, a lousier effort this time. “And only a sixth of one, if you want to get real finicky.”
Standing over him, Wright lashed out with the pistol, this time bringing down its handgrip on the top of Jack’s head. As the Equalizer hit the floor, hard, someone screamed nearby, and followed up with hysterical sobbing.
“Shut up!” shouted the man formerly known as Major Patriot. “Shut your cake holes, or I’ll kill you all! In fact — I’ll probably do that, anyway. Rub you out, the wrong way, whatever takes my fancy.”
Hot on the heels of this tantrum, he looked down again and booted Jack in the ribs.
“You still with us?”
#183
It was a further half hour until Bob Kahn dashed into the Neon Bullpen, a manila folder of paperwork under his arm. He found Pretty Amazonia and Gypsie-Ann Stellar in the middle of a row about who was going to foot the excessive bill.
“Ladies,” he said as he joined them.
“Fashionably late or unfashionably tardy?” PA muttered before turning back to her sister. “I don’t exactly have room for a purse in this skimpy bloody costume.”
“Hardly my fault,” the reporter snapped back. “Why don’t you offer to wash their dishes? You could get them done in, what, two seconds flat?”
“I’m not one for dish-pan hands. Just fork out the cash, for Heaven’s sake!”
“Temper, temper.” Gypsie-Ann winked at Kahn, who smiled just a fraction. Neither gesture escaped the Equalizer’s notice.
“What’s up between you two?”
“Nothing.”
PA wasn’t sure which annoyed her more — her sister feigning innocence, or the one-eyed police officer staring down at the papers he was spreading across the surface of the next table — a cleaner place to do so.
“Where’s your coat hanger?” she asked.
“My what?”
“Forbush.”
“I left him back at the cop-shop. He doesn’t remember a goddamned thing about recent events.”
“Yet, you do.”
“You got it.”
“Ahh, Heropa. Full of surprises.”
“Anyhow,” the man braved, “we have the autopsy reports.”
“What took so long?”
“For one thing, a discrepancy.”
Leaning forward, PA searched amid the medical jargon, ugly penmanship, photos and findings outlined there. “A bullet,” she quickly discovered. “Fished out of the parietal lobe.”
“Say again?” piped up her sibling.
“The rear-end of the brain.”
Nodding, Khan pushed the paperwork toward the reporter. “All here. Doc McCoy discovered the slug stuck in the head of one of those John Does from the Patriot fire. Oh, yeah, they’re not JDs anymore, by the way. We matched dental records with Donald Wright — for all five.”
Gypsie-Ann frowned at the disclosure. “What, they’ve been eating the same food over the past five years and followed exactly the same regime of dental hygiene? Isn’t that kind of strange?”
“The stranger thing here, in the circumstances, was the bullet.”
“I suppose so.” She rifled through photographs of corpses on five different slabs. “You can barely recognize these people. Ouch. Skin burned away. Old Henry did a swell job identifying them at all.”
“This was before the Reset. Doc McCoy also couldn’t remember anything this morning. Thanks for the heads-up, Stellar — nice to be forewarned for a change.”
“You’re welcome.”
“What about the bullet?” PA asked.
“I took it this morning to Ballistics, which is one of the reasons I’m late — the other being that McCoy mislaid his report, since he couldn’t recall doing the autopsies. We had to scour the morgue from top to bottom, not the best place to do a spot of scouring. Ended up finding the folder in a toilet cubicle.”