In Hero Years... I'm Dead Delux Edition (39 page)

The funny thing was, if he’d not pushed, I’d not be after him. More importantly, if he’d popped
me
into the vault instead of Selene, he would have eliminated the threat. Picking Selene was meant to torture me, and that meant a personal angle was complicating things.

And
personal
narrowed down candidates.

Taking the fire escape up to room 207 and breaking in wasn’t difficult. I popped the closet’s secret door and hit paydirt. Mr. Big’s uniform hung there, or a version of it. This one hadn’t been used for a bit. A pocket torch revealed a couple hairs on the lapel–black and gray respectively. More importantly, however, the shoes yielded two-inch lifts, accounting for a chunk of Mr. Big’s height.

But in that suspect pool, someone with black and grey hair who uses lifts stood out. Greg Greylan. No love lost between us, that’s for sure. He could have struck at Selene to punish her for helping me.

Then it hit me. After the memorial service he’d let it slip that Nighthaunt and I had talked. He covered himself well, but it had been a slip.

It all began to cascade together. Redhawk had worked to make the city safe and never got the acclaim for it he should have. He’d moved into politics to eclipse Nighthaunt, then term limits rejected him even though he’d done nothing wrong. By engineering a crisis, he could show the city how much it needed him. If he saved it, they’d get rid of term limits and he’d reign for longer than any old Tammany boss ever had.

I put everything back as I’d found it, even though I knew Redhawk would never return. I headed out and down to the lobby, then kicked the cage door in, surprising Bennie big time. I cut him off from the only exit. Desperate, he came at me, fists clenched.

I grabbed him by the throat, spun, and slammed him against the wall. Cracked plaster trickled to the floor. He’d have followed it, but I pinned him there.

Nose to nose, I snarled at him. “Room 207. Who?”

Bennie’s face grew purple, so I eased off on the pressure. “Rent or use?”

“Both.”

“Rent and use was one guy. Name’s in the book. Last one to use it, though, that was 217.”

“Explain.”

“Earlier today. 217 came in, said he was expecting a call. Told me to route it to 207. I asked. He confirmed. Call came in, I sent it to 207.”

“Show me the book.”

Bennie’d written a lot of stuff down in a ledger book. The hero hideout package was only half his business. The info was useful, since most of the criminals weren’t any smarter than Bennie. Greg had played it coy when renting 207. He listed himself as Jon Dough. The other guy, the one who took 217, listed himself as Howard Leslie Plunkett.

“You got a number to call if someone asks after room 207?”

He shook his head.

“You do now.” I gave him my number. “Anything, got it?”

He nodded. “I need my ledger.”

“Get a new one.”

“But…”

“You want me remembering that you sold me to the Zomboyz?”

“No.”

“Right answer.” I squeezed his face. “Be good.”

I’m not sure which I love more: smart search engines or stupid people. I checked “Howard Leslie Plunkett” on the uTiliPod and the search came up empty. The Google did offer an option, however. “Did you mean
Leslie Howard Plunkett
?”

Turns out I did. That turned out to be the name on the birth certificate of an actor. Tony Ramoso. And, like Becker, Tony hadn’t learned lesson one about how to lay low.

If I’d known before how nice the penthouse suite was at the Excelsior, I might have rented it. Sunken living room, Italian marble tile and a window-wall that revealed the city in its glory, it probably
was
worth five grand a night. The lobster buffet was extra, as were the blonde and redhead entertaining each other on the couch. From their state of undress I gathered they were the finalists to be Tony’s costar in the new Puma series.

I’m not sure who Tony had been expecting, but he answered the door very quickly. He’d half pulled on the trenchcoat he’d used as Mr. Big, but the fedora and silk mask still sat on the side-table. He made a half-hearted attempt to shut the door on me, but I shoved hard and he spilled back into the foyer and rolled down the steps to the living room.

The girls didn’t notice.

I pounced and dragged him back up the stairs. I pulled him into the bathroom and tossed him on his back in the tub. He stared up at the tap.

“Here’s how this works, Tony. You answer my questions, you live. You lie and…” I produced a shock rod. He recognized it from earlier, “…you can guess how the rest of your evening will go. Upside, you’ll appear in the Emmy Awards’ memorial montage.”

He moaned piteously. “It was all supposed to be a joke.”

“This is why you’re not a comedian. Your sense of humor sucks.” I hit the button and the shock-rod hummed. “The woman will live, so you’re not looking at a murder rap. You have thirty seconds.”

I started water trickling into his eyes.

“Okay, okay. Last year I was researching a part. I started to hang with some criminals. Research. So I party with them and the next morning I wake up in a room. The walls were covered with digital prints of compromising pictures. If those got out, I’d be ruined. He promised to destroy the files if I played along.”

“Who’s
he
?”

“A voice. A shadow.” He swiped water from his eyes. “He told me that if I did that one thing, they would go away. But now there’s another thing.”

“What other thing?”

He shrugged, then exposed his left wrist. He wore a standard plastic identification bracelet with a bar-code. “That was waiting for me in 207.”

I thought hard, but I couldn’t remember seeing it on his wrist earlier. It could have easily been hidden. “And?”

“It’s to get me into an event. I’m going to be his mouthpiece.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. He was sending guys to take me. I thought you were them.”

I had to think. No way I was going to pass myself off as Ramoso to his escorts, and I didn’t have a chase car to follow them. If Becker came through with the location and I had the bracelet, I could get in. I had to assume however Becker would flame out.

But Ramoso clearly wouldn’t.

“You get to the event, you call me.” I gave him the number. “Pretend I’m your agent.”

“But how will you get in without one of these?”

“Already got that covered, slick.” He bought the lie. It
was
a good question, but I’d figure something out.

I hoped.

Someone knocked at the door.

I hauled Ramoso out of the tub. “Go.”

He swept his hair into place, then set himself and answered the door. He collected his things and headed out.

The girls didn’t miss him.

I waited seven minutes, took the elevator down to five. I got out there, then took the stairs the rest of the way down. I came out through the lobby and immediately spotted one of the two guys waiting for me. I detoured into the bar, ordered a beer, tipped really well, then headed for the bathroom. They waited thirty seconds before they followed me, which gave me just enough time to crack a sink basin with a shock-rod and flood the bathroom floor.

The fact that I was seated cross-legged on another sink gave both of them reason to pause. Which they did while standing in a puddle. I flipped a shock-rod into it.

Two birds, one shock.

It would have been convenient if either one of them had the meeting’s address written down somewhere. No luck. I did snag a bracelet from one, then hauled them in utility elevators to the penthouse. I found all sorts of interesting bondage devices in the spare bedroom and made good use of them.

The girls never noticed.

Since Ramoso had sold me out to the goons, any call he made would be a trap. I was back at square one. Okay, one and a half, since I had a bracelet. I still had to assume Becker would fail to get the address, but his brother-in-law, Barry Halberstadt, already had it. That gave me one slender chance to learn the location.

Rule two, if you don’t want to be found: turn off your uTiliPod. Barry Halberstadt’s uTiliPod showed up on the cellular grid on the lower east side. If I’d kept my uTiliPod constantly on and sucking data down from Capital City Cellular, I could have narrowed my search more easily. That would have left me open to tracking by the same method. Definitely a non-starter. I took a couple more sneak peeks while in a cab heading down there and refined my instructions to the driver. I got out about four blocks shy of where Barry’s uTiliPod had last been reported.

I waited and watched. I picked up on people–singles, couples and trios mostly–looking around, drifting southwest. They were moving with purpose while trying to look as if they weren’t. They kept to shadows and slowed down as more people moved onto the streets. I flowed with the crowds and pretty soon we all ended up at a big warehouse complex from turn of the last century.

Guys in masks with bar-code scanners scanned the bracelets. I was told I was a ten, so once inside I looked for a gate that had the number ten above it. My bracelet got scanned again, then I got handed a Mexican Wrestler’s mask. “Congratulations, pal.” A guy in an Iguana mask he shoved a mask into my hands. “You got a colorful one.”

Looked like a phoenix, which I took as a good sign. I tugged it on and joined the masked masses moving into the rectangular warehouse’s heart. We’d entered through one narrow end. At the other they’d constructed a stage complete with a projection screen and a pile of speakers.

Music began to play, pulsing and loud, all revival-techno and neo-trance. The throng wasn’t the sort of Euro-trash chic to have chosen that music, but they began to move to it, or in reaction to it. The notes drilled straight into the brain.

Spotlights swept over the crowd and cameras hidden high in the shadows followed them. Masked faces flashed by on the big screen, a monster-mosaic. Fists pumped in the air and mouths opened in yells that didn’t rise above the music.

Then Little Miss Dragon, clad in a green-scaled bodysuit, shimmered onto the stage. She bore a microphone and raised her hands to clap above her head. She danced and pranced, and I half-expected to see the rest of the China Dolls in a chorus line behind her. Then, just barely visible in shadows, Tony Ramoso tightened the belt on his trenchcoat.

The music came down, but Dragon’s energy didn’t. “You know why you’re here. One man defies Capital City. One man to unite us. One man to make us invincible!”

The crowd roared its approval.

“He’s here tonight. The man with the plan to get all that we can!” She glanced back toward Ramoso. “I give you, Mr. Big!”

The spotlights raked their way back along the stage. For a half second Tony Ramoso’s image appeared on the big screen. His head came up. He preened.

Then the lights came forward again. From all around the warehouse they converged on one man. A Phoenix mask appeared on the screen. The crowd screamed.

And right then, pinned in place by a dozen spotlights, I learned
I
was Mr. Big.

Chapter Thirty-six

It took me a second and a half to realize I’d been set up. Figuring out exactly
how
would take another five. Calculating the repercussions of everything would take longer–eight, maybe ten minutes.

Maybe ten hours.

But hours I didn’t have. Not even minutes. Not even seconds.

Explosives blasted five holes in the roof. Corrugated tin, plywood and flaming tar paper rained down. A half-dozen ratlines snaked in from each. Capital City’s finest descended, sonic shotguns blazing away. Half of the cops hung in the air, the others landed on the catwalks and spread out.

C4 II members leaped and flew through holes on the left. The Russians boiled through on the right. Little Miss Dragon ducked away from debris, shoving the startled actor aside. She saved Ramoso from having Colonel Constitution landing on top of him.

I’m loathe to admit it, but Trey was magnificent. He landed in a crouch, his shield brandished protectively, then stood tall and proud. He pointed directly at me and snarled. “Your reign of terror is ended!”