Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel (5 page)

A walking stick appeared from the open bedroom door and rested on the carpet, followed a moment later by a foot.

“I know you’re there,” the man said, “so your options are to leave or try to fight me.”

The accent was American, educated. Interesting. Not many Americans came out to this part of the world. Not since the AAU was formed, anyway. She breathed, calming her heart.

The man took another step out. He saw the Carpenter first, silhouetted as he was against the balcony doors.

“Well?” the man said. He spread his legs and raised his cane.

Niobe flicked on the lamp in the corner of the living room. The man squinted and blinked against the sudden glare, but he didn’t let his guard down. His hands didn’t even shake. Doubly interesting.

She put him in his sixties. His cheeks sagged and the top of his head held nothing but liver spots. The little hair he did have clung to the sides of his head, a ring of black and grey. He hunched a little as he stood, but not, apparently, from fear.

“You’ve got keen ears, Frank,” Niobe said from the corner, recalling the name Gabby had given her. “Or is it Mr Frank?”

The man kept his walking stick aimed at the Carpenter. Solomon could rip that stick from the man’s hand and beat him round the head with it, but he wouldn’t. Not unless the man attacked first.

Frank’s startlingly blue eyes caught a flash of light. “What is this? Have you come for me too, now?” He was soft-spoken, but his voice didn’t tremble.

“We haven’t come for anybody,” Solomon said. “We hear you’ve got a missing person.”

Niobe nodded. “We’re in the business of finding missing people. Amongst other things.”

Frank narrowed his eyes a little, his gaze darting between them. “You’re metas?”

“Nah,” Solomon said. “We’re a pair of wandering freelance circus clowns. You don’t like the outfits?”

“I’m Spook,” Niobe said, “and the smart-arse is the Carpenter.”

“The Carpenter,” the man said. He lowered the stick a fraction. “I remember your name.”

Solomon grinned at that, but she cut him off before he could get too excited. “Time’s an issue here, Mr Frank.”

“Frank,” he said. “Just Frank. Frank Julius.” He dropped the cane to his side, but he didn’t seem to put much weight on it.

“Frank, then,” she said. “We like to stay under the radar. That means we want to be gone before dawn. Now, do you have a case for us? Or were we mistaken?”

He studied them for a moment, then turned his gaze to the purple veins running across the backs of his hands.

“The people I talked to said they would get the word out,” Frank said. “I just expected a little more notice.”

“And miss all this fun?” she said.

The man frowned. “Couldn’t you have called first?”

“That’s what I keep telling her,” the Carpenter said. “But does she listen?”

“What my partner means to say,” she said, shooting him a look, “is that we like to know who we’re dealing with. Keeps us safe.”

The man nodded slowly. He seemed to be weighing his options. It didn’t surprise Niobe. He looked out of his element, conducting shady business like this. This hotel was nice, and sure as hell not cheap. Offering them a job might be the most illegal thing he’d ever done. It might be the
only
illegal thing he’d ever done. But there was desperation in his face. She knew there would be even before she got here. If he was coming to them, it meant the police wouldn’t or couldn’t help him. He could have even gone to a normal private eye, since he seemed to have cash to burn. But there were some things only a meta could do.

They didn’t get job offers from normals very often. The crackdowns in the early ’60s still lingered in people’s minds, when offering jobs to metas could get you a prison sentence if you were unlucky. But maybe he was old enough to remember the days when superheroes kept the world safe. Maybe that was what she could see stirring behind those blue eyes.

“My nephew,” he finally said. “My nephew is missing.”

His voice was steady, but his eyes were focussed on something else.

“You got a picture?” she asked.

“What?” he said.

“A photo. Of your nephew.”

“Oh. Yes. Yes. It’s in my suitcase.” He turned went back into his room.

Niobe shot Solomon a glance. She pulled him aside and lowered her voice. “Does he seem familiar to you?”

“Can’t say he rings a bell.” He grinned. “Maybe you saw him at the pictures or something. All Yanks are film stars nowadays, right?”

She wasn’t sure. It was just a feeling, but she couldn’t place him. She shrugged. “You wanna keep an eye out while I do the interview?”

“He likes me more,” he said.

“Men never talk to men. Not about stuff like this.” She didn’t want to mention that she needed to stay busy to keep her mind off her fight with Gabby. Being lookout would only give her time to brood. Besides, the Carpenter’s eyes were sharper than hers, and he could stand lookout for hours at a time, never growing bored. Sometimes he was more tree than man.

He must’ve seen something in her face, because he pulled his hat down and didn’t argue. “Be careful. That walking stick doesn’t have as much wood as it should. It’s hollow.”

She glanced back towards the bedroom. “Sword-cane?”

“Maybe.”

Perhaps Frank Julius wasn’t as innocent as he looked. The Carpenter patted her on the shoulder and made his way back to the balcony.

She found Frank standing over his suitcase in the expansive bedroom. The soft glow of a wall-mounted lamp cast his face into shadow. The cane was on the bed, and he held a small colour photograph.

“You’re close?” she asked from the doorway. “You and your nephew?”

He nodded without looking up from the photo. “My brother died without ever seeing him. I raised the boy like my own son. I never had children of my own.”

She entered the room and stood next to him. She held out a gloved hand, and he passed her the photo. “You can keep that,” he said.

The boy was handsome. His face was narrower than his uncle’s, but he had the same blue eyes. He couldn’t have been older than twelve or thirteen. The picture had him against an ocean background, smiling a toothy, made-for-photography smile.

“His name’s Sam,” Frank said.

“Before, you asked if we’d come to take you too. You think someone took Sam?”

He nodded.

“Do you know who?” she asked. She pocketed the photo and went to the bedside table. A couple of unlabelled pill bottles caught her attention. She picked them up, rattled them, and returned them to the table. A thin wad of clean New Zealand twenty dollar notes sat there too, but she left them untouched.

“Thugs, probably,” he said after a moment. “Someone looking for a ransom. I was out when they came. Two days ago, sometime between three and five in the afternoon. They turned the place over.”

“Not this place, apparently.” There was a single suitcase in the room, and no sign anyone else had ever been here. She turned over an old gold watch that had been sitting on the chair in the corner. Nothing engraved on it. The time matched her own watch: 3:58 a.m.

“No,” he agreed. “Not this place.”

She waited for him to elaborate, but he said nothing more. She wasn’t sure if the man was being deliberately tight-lipped, but something about this whole thing was beginning to grate. Her instinct tugged at her, telling her to walk away. But she didn’t like to make decisions without having the facts.

She put the watch down and pursed her lips beneath her mask. “Was there a note?”

“No.”

“No one called with ransom demands?”

He shook his head.

“I take it you haven’t been in the country long?” she asked, and he shook his head again. She fiddled with the cigarette packet in her pocket. “Who knew you were here? Family? Friends?”

“We don’t have many of those. It’s just me and Sam these days.”

“You came to New Zealand for a purpose, presumably.”

He gave a noncommittal inclination of his head. “Just travelling. We’ve never been down under.”

She studied his face as he spoke. He wasn’t a good enough liar. Goddamn it. She couldn’t help him if he didn’t talk.

“Could someone have marked you?” she asked, trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. “At the airport, maybe? Recognised your name, or seen you flashing money around?”

He hesitated and rubbed a hand across his forehead. “We…travelled under assumed names.”

She suppressed an annoyed sigh. The rich ones were always a pain in the butt. “Any enemies?”

“None that I know of.”

He was lying again. This job was getting worse by the second. “Frank, we don’t take jobs that smell funny, you understand?”

He met her eyes and nodded.

“Then understand I’m about three seconds from walking out of here,” she said. “Is there anything else you can tell me? There’s a reason you contacted us and not the coppers.”

His hand went to his forehead again, brushing through his remaining hair. Now that she was closer, she could see he wasn’t as old as he looked. His hair was thin, but it was the bags under his eyes that really aged him.

“It might be unrelated,” he said slowly, “but Sam, he’s been showing signs. I don’t think he’s even noticed yet. He’s lived a sheltered life. But his father—my brother—was a metahuman.”

The way he said it, she could tell he didn’t just mean any old meta. He meant superhero. Or supercriminal.

No enemies my butt.

“Who was Sam’s father?” she asked. “Anyone I’d recognise?”

Frank nodded and said nothing.

“Hero?” she asked. “Villain?”

“What’s the difference?”

She ground her teeth together. This added a whole new layer of complicated. But she understood now why he was being so evasive. She was no different. A few metas managed to operate off-grid since the Seoul Accord crushed the rights of metahumans across the world. Niobe was one of them. By law, the children of metas had to be tested and monitored. It was a public safety measure, and the carrot they waved at the metas was the healthcare they offered when the inevitable lymphomas and leukemias arose. Now that there were no more battles to fight, the leading cause of death in metas was cancer. Dr Atomic himself had died of throat cancer.

But there were costs to being a legal and duly-registered meta. And they were costs not everyone was willing to pay. That must be why he refused to contact the coppers.

Half the puzzle pieces were missing, but she had to work with what she had. This kid’s father was a meta. That meant revenge was a possible motive. There were plenty of folks still around that’d been put in prison by heroes. And plenty more that had been betrayed or hurt by a supercriminal. Was someone looking to take his anger out on the kid? But why would they be in New Zealand, of all places? And how did they know where Frank and Sam were going to be? Was Frank a meta as well? She’d assumed he was a normal, but now she wasn’t sure. Most metas with this much cash to throw around now lived where the normals couldn’t persecute them.

Frank’s idea of giving her a lead seemed to raise more questions. He was hiding a lot from her, but she got the feeling that asking more questions would get her nowhere. That was okay. She had enough to get started, and there were other ways of getting information. But they didn’t come cheap.

“Our fee—”

He waved a hand. “Never mind your usual fee. I have fifty thousand dollars in a New Zealand bank account. Get my nephew back and it’s yours.”

Niobe’s mind ground to a halt. She opened her mouth to speak, but the words were stuck.
I misheard him
, she tried to convince herself, but she knew it wasn’t true. He wasn’t looking at the ground anymore. His eyes were fixed on hers, filled with icy intensity.

“Please,” he said. “He’s all I have. Please.”

“Fifty thousand?” she finally said. What the hell was his game? It made her hackles rise, even as the number sang to her. It was absurd. It had to be a ploy. But what kind, and for what purpose? She wanted to help him. She wanted to help the kid. But what else did he know about this job that he wasn’t telling her?

“Spook.” A hand gripped her shoulder from behind. She glanced back to find the Carpenter staring at her, his lips downturned. She recognised that look. He cocked his head at her, the brim of his hat flopping to the side. “You okay?”

She refocussed her gaze on his stubble and nodded. She could just make out the scent of his cologne through her mask. “What is it?”

He jerked his head towards the balcony and led her out through the French doors, leaving Frank standing in silence.

“There,” he said, pointing into the night, but she’d already seen it. The northern highway was choked with a convoy of black vans, sedans, and station wagons. They raced into and out of view through the gaps between buildings. Blue and yellow lights flashed on several roofs, but no sirens pierced the night.

“They’re not coming for us,” she said, though she knew he already knew that.

Frank’s footsteps pattered behind them. “What’s going on?”

She ignored him. “The radio,” she said to Solomon, hands gripping the balcony rail. “The police radio in the car. On our way here….”

“Nearly silent,” Solomon said.

“Yeah. Shit.” She turned to Frank. “You’re staying here the next few days?”

“Yes, but—”

“Good,” she said. “We have to go. We’ll call you about the job. We might have a few more questions before we decide whether we’re going to take it. And if you’re lying about that money….”

He nodded, frowning. “Of course, of course. What’s going on?”

Niobe readied herself to return to shadow form. A tree branch stretched out over the balcony, groaning as it moved. Solomon took hold of it and stepped up onto the railing. He tipped his hat at Frank. “Always nice meeting a fan.” He jumped, letting the tree carry him down.

Niobe put a hand on Frank’s shoulder and gently pushed him back. “Go inside, Frank. We’ll be in touch.”

“What is it? What’s happening?”

“It’s a raid. The cape coppers are raiding the Old City.”

She sucked in a lungful of air, dropped into shadow, and left Frank Julius alone on the balcony.