Blackjack Villain (15 page)

“Right.”

“You two ever hook up?”

She was taken aback at first, then exploded into melodious laughter, “Death was psychotic. I’m not even sure he was sexual.”

“Figured you two...you know.”

“Oh, he was handsome, alright,” she said breaking our mini-staring contest and moving over to my bed and sitting. “And sure, I was attracted. Who wouldn’t be?”

One of the robots handed me a robe, but I ignored him.

“So you don’t fraternize with teammates, then?”

She turned back to me and I saw her steal a glance down at my body, and back up at my eyes.

“It’s dangerous.”

Cool screamed from across the room as the bots worked on his injury.

I laughed. “Yeah, but you like danger, don’t you?”

“Nothing wrong with living life on the edge,” she said looking down at me again. “But you’re going to need a few days to get that fixed.”

“Poor guy,” I said, following her gaze. “He never did anything to anyone.”

Influx smiled, flashing pristine teeth. “I doubt that.”

“This isn’t fair. Where’s my show?”

“Is that all you want? A show? You can get that on Sunset Avenue for twenty dollars. Or are you looking for something else?”

I thought for a moment, “A challenge.”

Influx was inches away, leaning into me. Her eyes were everything, and smelled delicious. Her face was flawless, save for a half-inch scar near her full lips, but that made her all the more attractive.

“You found one.”

She looked down at my lips, her face inviting. I inched closer, but she moved back with a smile and walked out, my eyes never wavering from her form as she strutted out of the medlab. I took the robe from the bot and sat on the bed a second, looking over at Cool. He smiled and flashed a big thumbs up, before squealing in pain again as the bots continued their work.

* * *

A few hours later, they gathered us in a conference room dominated by a large table. Through a wall-length window, I could tell Dr. Retcon’s building was moving, though I couldn’t guess how. We all filtered in and served ourselves from a lavish buffet.

Dr. Zundergrub took pleasure in the odors of the dumplings he served himself along with sticky rice that smelled a bit fermented. He also dished up some dried fish, with pickles, green chilies and onions and ladled a noodle soup into a bowl.

“Machhe bhate bangali,” the doctor said, once he sat. His eyes closed in bliss, after chewing some of the rice and fish down. He noticed me staring and smiled. “Panta bhat and Shutki,” he motioned to the rice. “You must try it.”

To Dr. Walsh he said, “You must convey my utmost gratitude to our host, your father.”

“I will, Dr. Zundergrub. Thank you. The cooks pride themselves with their regional cuisine.”

“Bengali cuisine is hard to master,” he acknowledged.

I dug my fork into a piece of dried fish and buried it into the rice so it was covered with some of the sticky stuff and ate the whole thing. It was pretty tasty, but nothing worth getting excited about. Still chewing I said, “Like mom used to make, huh?”

Zundergrub smiled again. “Yes, that’s it!”

“How is Cool Hand Luke?” Dr. Walsh asked, moving next to me and taking off the cover to a serving tray, revealing a stack of 18 ounce Porterhouse steaks grilled to how I like them, medium rare.

“He’ll be alright.” I said, serving myself a couple of thick steaks and some potatoes. “His power kept him from bleeding out, which is pretty handy. Wow, these look amazing.”

“We try to cater to your every need,” she said, a curious smile on her face. “And yourself? From what I saw, you had your work cut out for you.” Walsh motioned to the 60” HD screen at one end of the room. Mr. Haha was sitting beside the screen with tendrils from his body intertwined into the monitor as he reviewed his personal footage of the fight and edited it with some video from a local news helicopter.

“I didn’t even notice the news chopper,” I told Haha.

He turned his big rabbit head at me. “It’s understandable; you were busy.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We were all busy, I guess.”

Mr. Haha 2000 cocked his rabbit head in acknowledgement. “Give me a few moments and I’ll have a final edit for your approval.”

Influx came in late, wearing tight jeans, a black cross-buttoned leather jacket with black ankle-high leather boots. She threw off the jacket over one of the chairs, revealing a white Star Wars t-shirt underneath with Yoda shooting the viewer a three-fingered bird. The caption on the shirt read; “Try THIS”. The tee was short in the midriff, revealing almost six inches of her flawless midsection. She ignored me and went straight to the buffet, serving herself a burger with everything, and almost two pounds of French fries, with a cold beer to drink.

I noticed Dr. Walsh watching me, as I regarded Influx. The doctor averted her gaze, blushing.

“Well,” she said turning away. “I hope you enjoy your meal. We’ll start the briefing for your next mission once you’re finished.”

“Next mission? We got back from this one.”

I guess I was a bit forceful, because she was totally taken aback by me. “I’m afraid time is of the essence,” she said.

“It’s that I don’t even have a bow, or arrows,” I said, softening up. “Hell, I don’t even have a suit. That stuff takes time to replace.”

“We’ll whip something up.”

“Not like you need a costume anyway,” Influx said, taking a huge bite out of her burger. She winked and stuffed a fry in her mouth.

I sat down across from Mr. Haha.

“Great,” I said. “I’m an archer without a bow. Damned useless.”

Dr. Zundergrub chuckled to himself as he ate his food.

* * *

I ate enough for four people, but after the L.A. mission I was starving. Afterwards, we listened to the mission briefing, which seemed much easier; stealing something from some retired villain’s house. We were lucky Cool Hand was recovering in the med lab or he would’ve complained endlessly.

After the meal, we were each assigned a robot to guide us to our rooms. These robots were different than any I had seen before. They were upside-down vacuum cleaners, floating thanks to some hover technology I couldn’t identify.

I hoped Influx and I would have rooms close to each other, even timed my meal so I finished as she did, but her robot took her in a different direction. As she took a turn away from me, I noticed her gate change to a more seductive stride which accentuated her hips. She knew I was looking.

I followed my guide robot reluctantly. Dr. Retcon’s lair was about 10-stories from the outside, but inside it was a labyrinth that made no sense. In fact, certain floors seemed like different buildings altogether. One was 1930s shiny brass art deco, another floor was decorated in ornamented Victorian style, yet another was a Japanese rock garden, with an open skylight. The whole place was crazy like that, a mélange of styles intermingled atop each other with no rhyme or reason.

The bot let me to an elevator up to a floor that appeared ripped straight out of the 1950s mid-century modern style. It was a mix of Bauhaus and Frank Lloyd Wright, with glass walls everywhere.

Thankfully, my room had real walls. It was an Ikea den, with a bright red chair, desk and bed, and a rattan lamp that was at least 150 watts too bright. The room was nice enough, but altogether stale and lifeless. On the bed lay a pair of faded dark gray slacks, of the same open-weave cloth material of military BDU’s and a folded black t-shirt that seemed a size too small. They had thought of my every need.

All I wanted was some company.

* * *

After a shower and shave, I dressed and lay in bed for a long while and soon discovered the building’s form of propulsion from the slow sway to and fro. The building had massive legs and it moved around like some overgrown monster from a Godzilla movie. There had to be some inertial dampeners, because the movement was ever so slight.

We had two hours until mission prep, but I was too jazzed up to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw her face, as it had been in the helicopter, inches from mine. Her smell, her hair, the flecks of gray in her cerulean eyes was intoxicating. Her wide smile and flawless jaw line danced on the edges of my memory.

But after a moment, her lovely image was replaced with the blurred distant vision of Pulsewave, slowly falling off the building to his death.

I looked over and noticed the guide robot was still hovering in the middle of my room.

“You gonna be here all night?” I joked, but it did nothing to stop me when I walked out the door. I suppose there were plenty of ways to monitor us, in case we went to the wrong place. And besides, if they didn’t want us wandering, they should’ve told us to stay put.

I left the room and roamed a bit.

* * *

I set off to find her but I only managed to get lost. Things weren’t where I remembered them, a strange feeling, as if the floors themselves were shifting.

After wandering about half an hour, I found the elevator but the floors weren’t labeled, so I hit every button and hoped for the best. The ride took a lot longer in time than it warranted for the distance it felt I had moved. The door flashed open and I stepped off the elevator onto a path that led around the neatly-raked graveled garden.

Each Japanese rock garden had its own specific composition, with the raked gravel representing different bodies of water, and the moss or rocks representing islands, in most cases, the Japanese islands. This garden incorporated the scenery to the rear as part of its design, as the pathway eventually traveled past a small classic scene of a mountain valley with a waterfall and river flowing through it to a pond where koi fish were frolicking. The walkway led to a wooden bridge over the river to a teak deck that overlooked the pond. There was a man sitting on a bench, though I only noticed him when I was almost upon him.

It was Dr. Retcon.

“You like karesansui?” he asked standing and facing me. Dr. Retcon was a tall man, taller than six-feet, with grayed hair and a weary face. His eyes were heavy lidded and dark, but I couldn’t discern their color. There were bags under his eyes, and he had prominent lines down his face. His eyebrows were almost non-existent. He had an old, thick scar above his right eye, traveling from his forehead through his eyebrow and eyelid, which must have been a horrific injury from his youth.

Dr. Retcon wore a dark gray and white three-button crossover pinstripe suit, with a slate blue shirt and a pink tie. A pin on his tie was of a dragon sigil, the marking totally alien to me. He leaned back on the railing over the pond, and I swear, his eyes bore through me like an x-ray.

“Japanese rock gardens?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Not particularly,” I responded truthfully.

“Nor do I. My daughter spends hours here, raking the gravel, picking weeds and trimming bits of moss. It gives her peace, so I endure it.” He had a sugary southern-flavored accent I could not place.

I was in standing in front of a legend, I remembered hearing that he moved the Moon out of orbit in the 60s, only to have Nostromo, Apostle and Valiant beat him and put it back. He’d gotten a twinge of national pride during the 70s, after we lost in Vietnam, and caused some havoc in that region. Then in the early 80s, he supposedly stole the Soviet Union’s entire nuclear arsenal and extorted 100 million from the Russians to return it. The big guys didn’t do anything on that one.

Dr. Retcon had been in and out of prison most of his life after getting his powers. In the early 90s, the United Nations finally built a super prison to hold him after he killed Valiant. For all I knew, and all the rest of the world thought, he was there.

I looked down at the koi in the pond and noticed the fish doing something quite peculiar; they kept at a specific distance away from Dr. Retcon, as if by a delineated boundary. The white and orange, GinRin Kohaku, white and black kumonryu and bright red and black Gin Matsuba koi swam about, but they never came within the perimeter.

“Some people gain some sort of peaceful feeling from watching fish prance about, but not me. I make them ill at ease, and they do the same in return, by reminding me that I am no longer...normal.”

“Yeah, well, what’s normal, anyway?” I asked.

He chuckled, a wet, thick cough that forced him to pull out a handkerchief.

“These days,” he continued, still almost breathless, “nothing is normal. I agree. But it is our doing, it is our fault. Mine more than most.”

Dr. Retcon smiled as he took a sip from a cup of coffee that was sitting on the arm rest of the bench and breathed heavily.

“My powers didn’t bloom until real late, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt normal,” I admitted, not knowing why I was being so forward. I guess it was how fragile he looked, while at the same time being so formidable. “I always felt like a lion surrounded by lambs.”

That caused him to cough once.

“Big as you are, I’m not surprised,” Retcon chuckled. “Maybe that is the new normal. Maybe the traditions we long for, they’re not worth saving.”

He paused and took a long sip from his coffee.