Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa(33)
Jack struggled to a sitting position, swayed unsteadily, and realized he had on his costume. Handy. Where the mask had got to, however, was another matter. He wiped sleep from his eyes, thought about Louise, smiled, and stepped off the bed.
Eventually finding the mask scrunched up under that same piece of furniture, Jack considered himself lucky it was made of an oddball fabric that didn’t wrinkle.
He tucked the thing into his belt and went upstairs to the giant hangar in the roof, where his three teammates were twiddling thumbs, already settled in on the dirigible.
Predictably, the atmosphere was strained — Jack could sense they’d again been quibbling — which meant all was well in this world.
“SC, where were you last night?”
That was Pretty Amazonia piping up, albeit in a tone of feigned indifference, without looking his way. She was staring instead at sweet nothing through the porthole, perhaps studying rivet formations in the hangar wall.
This made Jack think again of Louise.
“Getting acquainted with the city.”
About their second kiss, once more on her doorstep, longer, but on this occasion initiated by both at the same time. He felt overwhelmed with his bravery — never thought he had such enterprise in him. His face overheated just rewinding it.
She hadn’t recognised him again — this was like dating Groundhog Day style. They’d once more discussed Twilight Over Hoboken and he’d reissued the invite, this time with more confidence since he now knew she liked him.
“Do tell,” PA said in the same flat style — a worrying one. Jack glanced at her.
“All aboard?” hollered the Great White Hope from a comfy, leather-bound captain’s chair up front. His passengers were forced to content themselves with unpleasant canvas seating.
“Nah, bwana.” The Brick crossed and then uncrossed his gnarled, rock-ribbed legs. “I left me stomach at the breakfast table. Whaddaya reckon? Course we are. Let’s go.”
“So — the game is afoot!” their leader declared in an over-energetic, gleeful manner that made Jack more tired.
The ceiling slid across with loud grating that could be heard inside this iron carriage suspended beneath the blimp’s rubberized cotton fabric, and in seconds their transport lurched through the exit and hung above a shining city of cement and glass.
When Jack took a glimpse out of a small round window, at the drop to the pavement thousands of feet below, his stomach churned. He tightened the seatbelt and again looked across the aisle at Pretty Amazonia.
“PA?”
“What?” The woman had moved on from rivets and was preoccupied with the passing outside world.
“Are there any Capes who’ve gone missing?”
Silence. Then, “How do you mean?”
“Like, well, disappeared.”
“God — dozens of them.”
“Huh?”
Having sighed loudly, the woman peeled off her white satin gloves, took out a nail-trimming kit, and began to file. “Haven’t you checked how many heroes there are in the rogue’s gallery?”
“You mean that hallway with all the pictures at HQ?”
“Yes. So, haven’t you?”
“Haven’t I — what…?”
“Counted? Darling, sometimes you have the attention span of a gnat. I have. Totted them up, I mean.”
PA honed in on a particularly troublesome nail on the ring finger of her left hand.
“Bugger,” she said with a frown, and then her eyes darted over to her teammate. “Yep, well, there’re eighty-nine people on the walls. Eighty-nine previous and current members of the Equalizers. You’ll be number ninety, once we get your mug shot sketched up.”
The woman placed the nail file in a plastic sleeve, and straight after took out several different bottles of coloured varnish. One big flask had the words ‘Miracle Liquid Nail Formula #35’.
“We’ve kept track of thirty-seven of those people. Five are dead, and only one of them an accident so far as we know — Little Nobody. Capes come and go; I guess people get bored or find new ways to entertain themselves…and they stop coming back. More recently, they simply die.”
The blimp was drifting a hundred metres above the crater they’d explored a few days before, the one on the corner of Crestwood and Standard, where Harvey’s Gems once stood.
The Brick whistled — Jack had no idea how the man did that with a gob full of stones.
“Well, well. Will ya lookit that.”
All of them were already gazing downward, even the pilot.
“Looks like the same hole to me,” Jack said, stifling a yawn. “Cleaner, maybe.”
“That’s precisely our problem, dodo,” PA snapped, slipping into one of her intemperate moods precisely as she stuck the gloves back on.