Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa(96)

“Oh, no,” the reporter mumbled.

In a strange kind of slow-mo, the boy looked up, paled, covered his head with his hands — and then vanished inside a purple flash a split-second before the huge sign smashed into the ground and a veil of debris billowed.

Jack blinked several times.

“Knew you’d need me,” Pretty Amazonia announced right beside him, to his left.

When Jack spun, he found she cradled the bewildered kid. “Jesus…you cut it close,” her partner muttered, a grin etching itself into his face.

“Needed to get the tantrum out of my system.”

“An old habit,” Gypsie-Ann said. “I knew she’d be back.”

“You could’ve told me,” Jack responded.

“Think I inferred.”

Meanwhile, the boy seated in PA’s arms was staring up at his saviour. “You — you’re Pretty Amazonia, ain’t you?” he finally said, eyes huge.

“Yeah, yeah,” the woman muttered, remembering to put him down.

“Wow — it’s really you! Wait’ll I tell the others! I’m Willie Marston, ma’am. Me an’ my pals, Harry and Liz, we’re putting together our own comicbook, honest to gosh, an’ we’ve almost finished issue 1 — with you in spots as the main star.”

“Get over it, kiddo. Not impressed.”

“For you, ma’am, I’ll roll over an’ stay dead.” The boy laughed out loud.

Sure, PA sounded more indifferent than ever, pushing supremely bored, but when Jack looked again he would’ve sworn she’d teared-up.

Then again, maybe it was the smoke.

The war between the Capes took a total of eight minutes to end. The pretty music trailed on thirty seconds longer, before it too subsided and there was an eerie silence.

Soon, sirens wailed and people screamed or moaned or cried, while further buildings collapsed. Entire city blocks had been ravaged, cars burned out on the streets, and there were dozens of bodies amidst the rubble.

In this context, the number of people the Equalizers had saved hardly mattered.

A crowd gathered at both ends of the street, helping survivors and clearing detritus, but when Jack approached to help they responded by pitching rocks at him. This forced the Brick to run interference, stones rebounding off his hide, as he shuffled his partner away from the scene and back to the others.

“Jack, you’re such a bleeding-heart sentimentalist,” PA complained, back to her best. “You remind me of the Big O. These people don’t want your respect — they want you off their damned property.”





#162


On the near horizon, fires still raged.

After a quick call from an undamaged payphone to see if Louise was home (she wasn’t), Jack let Gypsie-Ann get on the blower to the Patriot with her eyewitness scoop, and he joined the other two Equalizers at an adjacent bar, since they’d shot down the Brick’s recommendation of the chicken shawarma place next door.

A black sign above its front window spelled out the Neon Bullpen in baby blue luminous tube lights, and the owners had topped it off with a picture of an HB pencil. On their in-house sound system they were spinning Tom Jones’s ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’, an upbeat full stop to a long-winded evening.

“Think I need t’order one thousand, five hundred an’ seventy-four gin an’ tonics t’get over this inord’nate stink,” bellyached the Brick, squeezed as he was into a tiny chair.

“Large ones?” Pretty Amazonia helpfully suggested.

“Let’s go with jugs. Only way I’ll feel jolly again, Christmas be damned.”

Jack hopped onto a bench seat closer to the window and ventured a glance into the twilight. The skeleton of a zeppelin smouldered atop a ruined skyscraper three blocks down, and there were four red fire engines tackling the blaze. Hundreds more were down by the waterfront.

“All quiet on the Western Front,” said Jack, “aside from all the people fighting fires.”

“That’s ‘cos most o’ the Capes’re dead-meat.”

“And a whole bunch of other people.” Jack wasn’t wearing his mask. There didn’t seem any point.

“Gotta admit — I never seen anythin’ like it.”

“Soak it up. Doubt we will again,” said PA.

Jack nodded. “Agreed. God, I hope not. The costumed moppets broke way too many toys.”

“And service here sucks.”

The Brick searched about for a waiter, head swivelling this way and that at a rapid pace, which remarkably made Jack laugh.

“I wouldn’t serve us, either.”

As ‘What’s New, Pussycat’ segued into ‘It’s Not Unusual’, the woman on the other side of the table focused in on him.