Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel (17 page)

She slowed the car, keeping one eye on the boats and the other on the surrounding streets and buildings. Her mind automatically started comparing the scene to the images burned into her retinas. Spatial and visual inputs were what her mind liked best. When she was a kid, she loved solving her dad’s mechanical puzzles, the ones where you had to work out how to assemble or disassemble the wooden pieces. She begged her dad to give her a new one for her tenth birthday, she remembered. Had she ever gotten it? The date was sheared off in her mind by the Blind Man, neatly excised like a tumour under a surgeon’s knife.

She shook her head and returned her attention to the marina.
There.
She spotted the houseboat rocking in the water, in the same place it had been in her vision. She looked around at the streets to confirm her position. A row of abandoned shops and offices faced the sea. Yes. This was definitely it.

She drove on, watching the surroundings, but there was no one to be seen. No cars parked on the side of the road, no one out for a stroll. It made her uneasy. She wouldn’t look so out of place if she wasn’t the only one here. She parked around the corner, activated the car’s security measures, and walked back to the marina.

No gates or security guards protected the marina. She lit up a cigarette and tried to look like a tourist while she used the time to analyse the place. The marina consisted of four long floating walkways with refuelling stations at the end. Seagulls squawked atop yachts’ masts.

Exits were limited. Either take the platform back to shore or jump into the sea. Maybe steal a boat, if necessary. It’d have to do. Satisfied that no one was around, Niobe took a long drag of her cigarette, plucked it from her mouth, and made her way to the old man’s boat.

She wasn’t much of a boat person, but it looked expensive. The motorboat was white, maybe forty foot long, with a tall cabin that didn’t look very aerodynamic. The name
Wanderer
was painted on the side.

If Sam’s attacker had left any obvious signs of his presence on deck, they’d been cleared away. A pair of plastic deck chairs were folded up neatly near the entrance to the cabin, and a coil of rope sat next to the ladder. Niobe gave one more glance around and stepped down onto the deck. She stayed near the edge of the boat and gave it a quick sweep. No obvious bloodstains, and no stray hairs. She couldn’t see any damp shoe-prints, but it was hot enough that any sea spray quickly dried.

Satisfied there was nothing to see on deck, she worked the handle on the heavy door and stepped into the cabin. Sam had been upstairs when he was attacked. She felt a sense of déjà vu as she ascended the same narrow stairs as in her vision. She took off her sunglasses and emerged into a small kitchen and living area. A mirror hung on one wall, and a fridge and kitchenette unit occupied the opposite wall. But Niobe’s focus went straight to the centre of the room, where the boy had been standing when the man incapacitated him.

She crouched and inspected the linoleum floor. A single speck of blood was all that remained of Sam. The blood had gone brown and hard in the last few days. Maybe the kid had scraped his knee when he fell, or maybe he spat up some blood after the hit to the throat. Niobe’s vision had been so filled with pain and fear that the details after the first strike didn’t register. It didn’t matter. She breathed a sigh of relief that there wasn’t more blood.

She sniffed the air, but detected no scent of gunpowder. A glance at the walls and ceiling revealed no bullet holes either. Good. The kid had most likely been alive when he left the boat. Something loosened in her chest.

Sam was okay, but his attacker had been careful. She took her time, inspecting every inch of the kitchen floor, but again, no shoe-prints. He hadn’t left so much as a hair. No plates or cutlery had been left out on the kitchen bench. A worn paperback copy of
The Count of Monte Cristo
sat in a chair in the corner. There were two exits from the kitchen: the door she came through, and another stairway leading down on the opposite side of the room.

She went and followed the other staircase down. It had a kink halfway down, turning back on itself. It was narrower than the other stairway and led out to starboard, away from where the boat nestled against the marina walkway. The attacker probably wouldn’t have used this staircase to take the kid out.

She returned to the kitchen and examined the stairs leading down the other side. The guy was big, so it would’ve been easiest to carry Sam over his shoulder down the narrow stairway. She closed her eyes and pictured the events she’d seen in the Blind Man’s vision. The man had been holding his gun in his right hand, making him right-handed, so she’d assume he had Sam over his right shoulder. The stairs were steep; maybe he’d need to grip the handrail to steady himself. Was he wearing gloves? They weren’t part of the Met Div uniform, but it had been too dark to see in the Blind Man’s vision.

She pulled her powder and brush from her utility belt and gave the whole handrail a light dusting. Nothing, not even prints from Sam or Frank. Wiped clean. So was the door handle. She chewed her lip and looked around. Okay, he came down the stairs, put Sam down outside, came back in and wiped the handrail and the door handle. Sam must’ve been unconscious, but the man couldn’t leave him for long. It was daylight; someone might see.

Her eyes fell upon the doorway. It was small, with the bottom raised nearly a foot to keep water from getting in. Sam’s attacker was big. Maybe….

She got out her powder again and dusted the metal door frame on both sides, starting at about shoulder height. She worked slowly, methodically, enjoying the work. This was honest, down-to-earth investigation, with not a psychic in sight. Then she smiled to herself.

“Gotcha,” she said.

The two fingerprints were almost perfect. Judging from their position and size, she’d guess index and middle fingers. A partial palm print accompanied them, but it was too distorted to be much use. They were on the top left-hand corner of the door frame. Frank Julius wouldn’t be likely to reach up there, not with his walking stick and shuffling gait, and the palm looked far too big to be Sam’s. Perhaps the attacker had tripped on the raised lip of the doorway and had to steady himself, or maybe he was just manoeuvering himself through the tight space with Sam over his shoulder. She put away her powder, got out some clean plastic tape, and carefully retrieved the fingerprints.

Technically, she didn’t have access to any fingerprint records. But she’d learnt long ago that technicalities were just excuses for people who didn’t know where to look. If the guy was a cape copper, his prints would be on file. The coppers were meticulous about that sort of thing. If a doppelgänger was impersonating a copper, prints might be the only way to confirm it. Doppelgängers struggled with details like that.

Of course, the records would be at Met Div headquarters, surrounded by a few dozen coppers. She should probably wait until nightfall if she didn’t want to catch a bullet or ten.

She continued her inspection of the attacker’s probable exit, but he’d made no more mistakes. No prints on the rail on deck, no clothing fibres. All right, that was as good as she was going to get on that front.

But there were still questions surrounding Frank Julius and his part in all this. Who was he really? Someone had gone to a lot of effort to kidnap his nephew, and then they’d forgotten to make any ransom demands.

She went down into the sleeping cabin where the Blind Man’s vision had begun. It looked as she remembered it: a set of bunk beds, some shelves with a few old paperbacks, and some drawers.

Strange, using a boat as home and transport. Why not just take a rocket-plane like everyone else who wanted to travel internationally? The most obvious answer was to stay under the radar. Policing the oceans was like trying to stop kids smoking pot. No matter how hard you tried, you’d never do anything but scrape the surface.

She tried to imagine spending weeks at a time confined to this boat. She couldn’t handle it.

She did a walk-through of the room and came up empty. The top bunk appeared to be Sam’s, and the bottom Frank’s. No cash under the mattress. She found a few folded wads of assorted currency—American dollars, British pounds, a few pesos—in Frank’s underwear drawer. Probably just day-to-day money, since it wasn’t enough to live on long-term. He’d mentioned bank accounts when she talked to him at the hotel, but she couldn’t find any bank statements or account numbers. Maybe he committed them to memory. Or maybe he’d cleared them out when he found Sam missing. Either way, it wasn’t really the mark of someone with nothing to hide.

A search of Frank’s drawers revealed clothes and little else. The only thing of note was an address book, but each entry was only signified by initials and a phone number. At a quick flick through she guessed there was nearly a hundred numbers there, most of them international. It didn’t take a genius to work out that anyone unwilling to be listed by their full name wouldn’t reveal information over the phone. She pocketed the address book, but her gut told her it was another dead end.

Sam’s drawers painted a similar picture. She was about to give up—she’d be meeting Solomon soon—when the corner of a slip of paper caught her eye sticking out from under a pile of T-shirts.
No, not paper
, she realised as she pulled it free. A photograph. Now that she thought about it, it was the only photo she’d found on the whole boat. If Frank had any copies of the photo he’d given her, he kept them well-hidden.

The photo showed two men in front of a log cabin. Forest stretched behind them in great sweeping valleys. She pulled a small torch from her belt and held the picture up to the light. It was black-and-white, faded, most of the detail lost. One of the men was a younger Frank Julius. His hairline was already receding. Who was the other man? Sam’s father?

Frowning, she took a miniature hand lens from her belt and used it to magnify the photo. The other man’s features seemed familiar, but she couldn’t place him. A roguish grin was plastered to his face and a pork-pie hat sat atop his head, casting shadow over his eyes. He was slimmer than Frank, with an easy demeanour to him. Probably fancied himself a ladies’ man.

She pocketed the photo and returned her tools to her belt. She gave the room another quick once-over, then paused. Her gut gnawed at her. There was something she’d missed. Then she saw it. One of the wooden panels in the corner near the bed was slightly askew, not quite flush with the wall. A few narrow scratches ran along one end, like it’d been scuffed a few times. She’d been in enough supercriminals’ lairs to recognise a hidden compartment.

She crouched and studied it. It didn’t seem to be booby-trapped. Why did he need a compartment like this? Maybe it just held his cash. Maybe. One way to find out. She retrieved her pocket knife from her belt, flipped out the blade, jammed it into the crack, and levered the panel open.

No cash, no diamonds. Not even a gun. She shone her torch into every corner of the compartment, but there was only one object in there, sitting in a foam cut-out. A ring.

It was a simple ring. Probably only silver-plated. It had lost its shine, and the large green stone didn’t look precious. She picked it up and turned it over. No inscription. It didn’t look like an engagement ring. It looked more like…a signaller.

When Niobe joined the Wardens, they gave her a small button disguised as a pendant. She’d kept it around her wrist since she didn’t like the feel of things around her neck. She turned it in when she quit. Something about this ring reminded her of it. The device was designed as both a simple transmitter and receiver. If you had an emergency, you pressed the button and the group would assemble, or you could hook it up to a radio transmitter to deliver a message. Likewise, if someone needed help, the thing would flash or start playing a message.

She thought back to her first meeting with Frank. He said Sam’s father was a metahuman. Logic would suggest this was the signalling device his group used. That didn’t necessarily put him on the side of superheroes; some of the more organised supercriminal groups had adopted the method. But for argument’s sake she decided to assume he was a hero. If Sam was around thirteen and never knew his father, that gave her a time-frame for when he was alive. Superhero organisations were already crumbling thirteen years ago. Maybe Gabby would be able to have a look at the ring and track down who manufactured it. She wasn’t eager to bring Gabby into this mess, but the sooner they solved the damn case and got the kid back, the sooner they could be off this planet.

Niobe was no thief, but she pocketed the ring anyway. If it turned out to be nothing, she’d return it. For now, it was one of the few leads she had.

She exhaled and checked her watch. Time to get back to Solomon and the informant. She closed the hidden compartment and turned her back on the room. The ring felt strangely heavy in her pocket. She went back out onto deck, replacing her sunglasses as she went.

Only a few scattered clouds marred the blue sky. The shore was still deserted, but a couple of yachts were off sailing in the distance. She took a few more deep breaths of the sea air. At least she had something. The gulls squawked at her again as she climbed back onto the marina walkway and started making her way towards land. She was ready to get somewhere that didn’t smell like fish.

If she hadn’t stopped to light up another cigarette, she would have missed it. Sunlight glinted off something small in the second-story office directly opposite the marina. A curtain fluttered.

Her mind spun. Sniper? No. No, of course. Someone was watching to see if Frank Julius came back. That wasn’t a scope. It was a telephoto lens.

And someone had just got a clear photo of her face.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!
She tossed the cigarette and broke into a sprint, pumping every bit of energy she had into her legs. Her bloody civilian shoes flopped as she ran, slipping on the damp walkway. How could she have been so dumb? She should’ve come last night, when she could use the darkness, but she’d stayed with Gabby. Damn it!