Superhero Detective Series (Book 2): The Missing Exploding Girl Read online

  “Classy joint,” Shadow murmured into my ear once we had gotten past the amorous couple. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”

  “Not as good of a time as he’s showing her,” I said.

  “Let’s keep it that way,” Shadow said. “You’re not my type. Don’t get any ideas.”

  I didn’t think it was possible, but the wall of smoke in the pool room was even thicker than it had been in the bar area. The only lights in the room were long rectangular shaded ones that hung directly over each of the five pool tables. Between the smoke and the low lighting, it was hard to see.

  But finally, I spotted Hopper. He was bent over the table to the right. The top of the cue he held rested on his left hand while his right hand moved back and forth, lining up a shot. A lit joint was in his left hand. Hopper was also chewing gum. Multitasking. Impressive.

  I walked up behind Hopper. The guy Hopper was playing against and some spectators who lingered around the table looked at me, but did not say anything. Hopper appeared to be trying to hit the seven ball in the far corner pocket. He had the angle all wrong. I watched patiently as Hopper took his shot. He missed. The seven ball hit the edge of the pocket and rebounded back towards Hopper. Hopper cursed.

  “You would have made that shot if you had given the cue ball a bit of bottom right english,” I suggested helpfully. I was Truman the Teacher.

  Hopper turned to look at me. I smiled. He frowned. His pupils were hugely dilated. The marijuana he was smoking had not done that. I did not know what he was on, but whatever it was, it slowed his reaction time. It took him a few moments to recognize me.

  “Shit,” he said once who I was managed to penetrate his skull. His gaze shifted to the emergency exit at the back wall. In an instant and with a slight whoosh of air, he went from standing in front of me to standing by the exit. He dropped the cue stick with a clatter, and ran out of the door.

  “That’s how I wanted to react when you came up to me in the gym,” Shadow said. Before I could respond, she was making a beeline for the door Hopper had gone out of, shoving people out of her way in the process. A pool table was between her and the door. Without slowing down, Shadow leapt headfirst over the table in the space between it and the low-hanging light above it. She did a small somersault in midair, and was back on her feet and out the door Hopper had gone out of in the blink of an eye.

  “Show off,” I said to her, though she was gone before the words were out of my mouth. It must have been nice to have super-reflexes.

  CHAPTER 12

  I ran towards the exit after Shadow and Hopper. I weaved through the people in the room and around the pool tables. I probably could have leapt over the table like Shadow had. I was tempted to try. But, I decided it would be beneath my dignity as a licensed Hero. Plus, there was a not inconsiderable chance I would fall flat on my face in a roomful of witnesses. How could I strike fear into the hearts of evildoers after such an embarrassment? I would have to go into hiding until the shame blew over.

  By the time I made it out the door, Shadow had a decent head start on me. The exit fed out into a narrow alley that extended through two rows of buildings. I spun around at the sound of footsteps. I saw Shadow streaking after Hopper. I ran after her.

  Shadow almost caught up with Hopper when he disappeared again. He reappeared almost instantaneously at the end of the alley. He turned right onto the main street there and disappeared from view. Hopper was a teleporter. He was limited by being able to teleport only as far as he could see. Plus, each teleportation tired him, making the next jump harder. In short, he could hop from spot to spot. Hence his alias.

  Shadow rocketed down the alley, reached the end, turned right, and disappeared. As much as I hated to admit she was faster than I, she was. My water-based powers did nothing to help me run faster. But, though my muscles were not superpowered like Shadow’s were, I was in shape. My legs felt loose and my breathing was easy as I raced after her and Hopper. It was drizzling. My hair got damp. I felt the bottom of my pants getting wet as I pounded into and out of standing puddles of water. I got to the end of the alley and ran to the right after the two.

  I could see Hopper far up ahead on the sidewalk. Though many of the streetlights in the dilapidated neighborhood were out, I could still see him thanks to the ones still functioning. Since he was not in the kind of shape Shadow and I were in, Shadow was rapidly closing the gap between him and her. But, we were now in an open area where Hopper could see far into the distance. At any moment he could hop even further away from us and perhaps elude us.

  I stretched out my water awareness to past where Hopper was. The sidewalk there was wet with rain. I decreased the temperature of a large patch of water that was on the surface of the sidewalk, making it icy and slick. When Hopper hit that patch of sidewalk, he slipped like a comedian making a pratfall. His momentum sent him sailing down the now icy sidewalk into overflowing metal trash bins. He hit them with a crash, making them fall on and around him like bowling pins.

  Hopper tried to get back up. He immediately slipped on the ice and fell back down, hitting his head. He didn’t try to get up again.

  Shadow slowed down a bit to let me catch up. I pulled up alongside of her. We jogged together toward where Hopper lay.

  “The ice your doing?” Shadow asked. She was not even breathing hard.

  “Yeah,” I said. I, however, was breathing hard by then. “Anybody can jump over a pool table. How many people can do what I just did?”

  “It’s not a competition, Truman.”

  We arrived at Hopper’s weakly struggling body. I fished him out of the pile of garbage. I half-marched, half-dragged him to a cinder block wall next to a closed liquor store. I lifted Hopper and slammed him against the wall, not too hard, but hard enough to make sure Hopper felt it. I pinned him against the concrete wall with my left forearm against his chest. As long as I touched him, he couldn’t teleport away. He was at eye level with me. Since he was a good bit shorter than I, his feet dangled off the ground.

  “Ow Truman, that hurts! I think you mighta broke something,” he cried out. “What are you hasslin’ me for? I ain’t done nothing.” Hopper was missing several teeth, and the ones that remained were decaying and stained brown. His breath was strong enough to rouse a corpse. It reeked of reefer, something garlicky, and halitosis. The rest of his body did not smell much better. I wasn’t sure how much of the smell was his natural aroma and how much had come from the trash he had just collided with. His eyes were still dilated, and they rolled around in their sockets like the eyes of a frightened horse.

  Was this a shining example of the highest form of human the Metahuman Liberation Front spoke of? Some master race.

  As I held Hopper in place, I patted him down with my free hand.

  “If you didn’t do anything, why did you run when you saw me?” I asked Hopper, still probing his clothes. “Is that something an innocent man does, Shadow?”

  “The wicked flee though no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion,” she said. If I hadn’t been so focused on Hopper, my jaw would have dropped. It was a quote from the Bible’s Book of Proverbs. Shadow never ceased to surprise me with what she knew.

  The name I called her pierced Hopper’s dim wits and drug haze. His eyes widened. He looked over at Shadow.

  “Wait, you’re Shadow? THE Shadow?” he asked. “I didn’t think you were real.”

  I pressed harder against Hopper. I felt and pulled a couple of items out of Hopper’s front pockets. He squirmed against me.

  “She’s real and so am I,” I said. “You never did tell me why you ran.”

  “Awww man, you know how it is. Heroes like you are always hassling people like me. It’s gettin’ to the point where a man can’t make a decent buck in this city. When I saw you, I panicked is all. Let go! You’re hurting me.”

  “If you teleport and make us chase you again, when we catch you, I’ll let Shadow here squeeze your head until your eyes pop out,” I warned
.

  “Ooooh, can I?” Shadow said as eagerly as a kid asking to play with a new toy. We were bad cop, worse cop.

  “I won’t ‘port again. Honest! Let go! I can’t breathe.”

  I let go of Hopper and stepped back. He dropped to his feet, staggered, and almost fell. He braced himself with one hand against the cement wall. He noisily sucked in air, like an asthmatic trying to catch his breath.

  While Hopper recovered, I looked down at the items I had taken from him. One was a folding pocketknife with a five inch blade. The other was a clear plastic bag that contained pills of every color of the rainbow and of various shapes, plus an amber translucent vial that contained some sort of powder. I showed them to Shadow.

  “Drugs, plus a knife that’s longer than the legal limit. How much time to do you suppose Hopper here will get for possessing this stuff?” I asked her.

  She shrugged.

  “Five years? Maybe half that with good behavior,” she said.

  Hopper had recovered enough to see what I had taken off of him and to hear my exchange with Shadow.

  “Hey, you can’t take that stuff off of me,” he said. “You ain’t got the probable cause to search me.”

  “Probable cause?” I repeated. “Our man Hopper is a lawyer now,” I said to Shadow.

  “They’ll let anyone into law school these days,” she said.

  “Tell you what, Hopper,” I said. “How about I give you this stuff back, we’ll trot over to the nearest police station, and I’ll tell them how you took a swing at me. They’ll book you for assault, search you when they process you, and find the drugs and the knife. Then they’ll also book you for drug and weapon possession. Everything will be nice and aboveboard, your legal sensibilities won’t be offended, and your due process rights won’t be violated.”

  Hopper looked at me with bulging eyes. Shadow and I had him backed up against the concrete wall, with the two of us facing him.

  “Assault you? I didn’t assault you. You assaulted me!” he said.

  “Yes, but I’m a licensed Hero famous for my veracity. You’re a crook with a rap sheet as long as my arm. Take a guess as to whom the cops will believe,” I said. I let my eyes widen a little, as if I had just remembered something. “Now that I think about it, aren’t you on probation for battery? If you get arrested again, that’ll be a probation violation. It won’t be five years you’ll be facing, it’ll be thirty.” I shook my head in sadness. “Thirty years is a long time, Hopper. By the time you get out, you’ll be an old man.”

  “Shit man, I ain’t do nothing wrong,” Hopper said. “The pills are just so I can have a good time. As for the knife, you can’t expect me to walk around this kind of neighborhood without some kind of protection. We don’t have to get the cops involved. Maybe we can work something out.”

  “Maybe we can,” I said. “I hear you’re a member of the Metahuman Liberation Front.”

  Recognition of the name passed over Hopper’s face.

  “I ain’t a member of nothin’. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. Sober, Hopper was a bad liar. High, and he was as transparent as his bag of drugs.

  “He’s screwing with us, Shadow,” I said. “Let’s take him to the cops and let them deal with him.” I grabbed his right arm; Shadow followed my lead and grabbed his left.

  “Okay, okay, okay, I’m a member of the MLF,” Hopper said, trying to shrug us off. “But, it’s supposed to be a secret, so don’t tell anybody I told you.”

  Shadow and I let go of Hopper.

  “That’s better,” I said. “Don’t lie to us again. I’m looking for your leader, the Pied Piper. Where can I find him?”

  “I don’t know,” Hopper said. Shadow and I grabbed his arms again. Hopper yelped in protest. “Really, I don’t know. We operate on the cell system—you know, I only personally know the two people in my cell and one person in the cell below and above me in the hierarchy. That way, if the cops or a Hero hassles one of us, we can’t expose everyone in the organization. I’m telling you the truth, honest.”

  “All right,” I said, “can you at least get a message to the Pied Piper?”

  Hopper nodded.

  “I can pass a message to the guy in the cell above me and he’ll do the same, so on and so on, until it gets to the Pied Piper. But what do you want to bother the Pied Piper for? He’s a great man. He’s fightin’ for your freedom just as much as he is mine. He and the MLF are going to see to it that us Metas run things, just like we’re supposed to.” Hopper sounded like he believed what he was saying. He had actually drunk the MLF Kool-Aid.

  I shook my head.

  “Never mind the sales pitch. Just get a message to the Pied Piper. Tell him I want to talk to him about a Metahuman named Clara Barton,” I said. “Clara Barton. You got that?”

  “Clara Barton,” Hopper repeated. “Yeah, I got it. But, the Pied Piper is an important man. Why would he want to talk to you? Besides, how will he even find you?”

  “Tell him to look me up in the phone book under ‘Implacable,’” I said.

  “Huh?” Hopper looked at me blankly.

  “Never mind. I’m easy to find. I have an office downtown. I’m sure a great and important man like the Pied Piper will be able to figure out how to find me. As for why he’d want to talk to me, I will make it my life mission to be a royal pain in his ass if he doesn’t get into touch with me. And you know from personal experience just how big of a pain in the ass I can be, Hopper. You tell him I said that.”

  “Yeah, I’ll tell him,” Hopper said. He straightened up a bit. Talking about the Pied Piper—whom Hopper clearly admired—had stiffened his spine. “But you should know that the Pied Piper ain’t scared of you,” he said to me. He looked over at Shadow. “You either,” he said to her.

  Shadow had been listening quietly to me talk to Hopper. A slight smile had been playing on her lips, as if she was enjoying listening to music only she could hear. Without the expression on her face changing, her right hand rocketed out almost faster than my eyes could follow. Shadow chopped the side of her hand into Hopper’s throat, next to his Adam’s apple. Shadow’s left fist then shot out, hitting the cinder block wall with such force I felt the vibration through the sidewalk. She left a fist-shaped crater in the wall about two inches deep.

  Hopper fell to his knees like a marionette with its strings cut. He grabbed his throat, choking and gasping. Shadow grabbed him by his hair, and twisted his head around and back to look at the hole she had punched into the wall.

  “You should be scared of me,” she said to him. Her tone was conversational, as if she was giving a lost tourist directions. “If you don’t do exactly as Truman told you, I’ll come back and hit you again. But, next time, I’ll hit you as hard as I hit this wall. Understand?”

  Hopper couldn’t speak. But, he nodded feverishly as he coughed and wheezed.

  Shadow and I turned and walked away. We left Hopper kneeling on the sidewalk. I noticed Shadow winced a little the moment our backs were to Hopper. We walked further away from Hopper, and turned a corner. I dumped Hopper’s knife and drugs into a trash can. Shadow flexed and unflexed her left hand.

  “Hurt your hand a little punching that cement wall, didn’t you?” I said.

  Shadow grimaced.

  “Yeah. I was trying to make an impression. Got a little carried away.”

  We navigated our way back to my car. I was somewhat surprised to find it was still there.

  CHAPTER 13

  I was having dinner with Ginny Southland at Gino’s, a steakhouse in Astor City. Ginny was a woman I had met while investigating another case over a month ago. She worked during the day at Zenith Fitness, and went to Astor City University Law School at night. In addition to all that, she occasionally spent time with me, to my delight. She had red hair, blue eyes, and curves I could not imagine getting tired of examining. Though we had gone out several times, I felt a slight lump in my throat every time I saw her.

  We were not quite
boyfriend and girlfriend yet. That was partly because we had not yet dated long enough, and partly because using the terms “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” at my age seemed ridiculous. If I called Ginny my girlfriend, it sounded like I should be taking her to prom and then the malt shop afterwards.

  “Do boys still take girls to malt shops?” I asked Ginny.

  “Yes,” she said. “They take them to those shops, drink malted beers until they’re on the verge of passing out, and then go back to their place where they proceed to try to put their penises inside the girls’ assholes.”

  “Yikes!” I said. “Unless the youth of today are radically different than I was, those are not the kinds of malt shops I was talking about.”

  Ginny grinned at me. She had a nice smile, wide and open with a hint of naughty, and I liked it. I also liked the cleavage that peeped out from her aquamarine blouse, which hinted at the treasures that lay below. I had seen those treasures before, but that did not detract from them. I had high hopes I would see them again.

  Ginny’s crystal blue eyes sparkled in the muted lights of the restaurant.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I must have misunderstood the question.” She cut off another piece of her steak. I watched as blood oozed out of it. Her steak was so rare I was afraid it would start mooing. I wanted to avert my gaze from the bloodbath taking place on her plate. But, I did not. I was a licensed Hero. I was supposed to be tough. I had a reputation to uphold.

  “Aren’t you at all afraid People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals will jump out of the woodwork and accuse you of cruelty to animals?” I asked as she raised a bloody chunk of meat to her mouth. She opened her mouth and chewed. “I’m pretty sure your food is still twitching.”