Lady Superior (7 page)

Offering Emma living space was the right move, but offering to find a better place based on her new, higher-paying job was just stupid. The job at Temple came from Jane. Though Jane hadn’t said it outright, it was reasonable to assume keeping that job depended on cooperating with the woman on matters other than sitting at a security desk watching monitors. For the first time, she realized the job didn’t even make sense. Did a bank branch, in the modern era, even have overnight security? With cameras and electronic alarms capable of remote monitoring, who needed eyeballs on-site? Jane made it happen as a matter of convenience. Kristen would have a reason to be out at night. She’d have an alibi. Temple would have a method of paying her for her services that looked right come tax time.

One question answered: if she didn’t keep playing Jane’s game, she’d be unemployed. No job, no place for Emma, and possibly no place at all.

Kristen set her elbows against the wheel and planted her face squarely in her hands.
Am I being stupid?

She ran a checklist through her head. Was Jane shady? Yes. Had Jane asked her to hurt anyone? No. No one human, anyway. Which, Kristen realized, didn’t mean much. Considering what she was capable of, could she call herself human? She dismissed it. It didn’t matter. Had Jane asked her to hurt anyone who wasn’t already hurting someone else? No. Had Jane given her opportunities she wouldn’t otherwise have? Yes. Did Jane give her space when she needed it? Yes.

Kristen sat up just in time to catch a blur of motion coming toward the car. Her eyes snapped in that direction. Just Bernice. Kristen blew out a relieved breath and waved. Bernice waved back. She walked right up to the car, opened the passenger door, and hopped in. “You gonna creep out here all day or you gonna come inside?”

“I wasn’t creeping.”

Bernice eyed her. “Are you really going to make me do this?”

Kristen’s brow knit. “Do what?”

Bernice looked out the window for a long moment, then back again. “You know I know, right? Was I not clear enough before?”

Kristen tilted her head. “Know what?”

“You’re that girl.”

“What are you talking about?”

Bernice turned in her seat to face Kristen. Her words lashed like whips. “I’m not going to let you play this game with me. I know you’re the girl from the news. I know you’re the girl that was in Temple. I’m not stupid. I’ve known you my whole life. I know you better than anybody else. If you thought I wouldn’t figure it out, I’m insulted. I’m actually insulted. You don’t keep that stuff from me, alright? You’re acting like an actual comic book character. That’s a joke. You know that? You’re sitting out here like some tortured fucking soul because you’re living some kind of double life, and oh no, you can’t tell your best friend because of some secret identity crap. Don’t do that to me. Don’t lie to me. Don’t make me play pretend with you.”

Kristen rolled her eyes. “Way to be an asshole about it.”

“I’m the asshole?” Bernice gestured an arm across the car. “You’re the one acting like everything’s fine while you’re running around with secret agent lady playing superhero.”

“Number one? Pretty sure she isn’t a secret agent. Number two? I’ve barely been doing any superhero stuff. Number three? Super weird to call myself a superhero. Can we not?”

“You know a better word for a woman that can punch a car in half?”

“I’ve never punched a car in half.”

“You punched a guy in half.”

“He didn’t actually break into two pieces.”

“Kris, you ever hear of hyperbole before?”

Kristen looked out of the window, staring at nothing in particular. She dropped the volume of her voice, stifling the rush of nervous adrenaline. “Can we skip the drama if I say I’m sorry?”

“If you mean it, yeah.”

“You ruined my plan, you know?”

Bernice’s eyes narrowed. “Plan?”

“Yeah.” Kristen hit her head against the headrest. “I wanted to figure all of this out first. Like, what am I actually going to do? How does it work? Then when I figured it out, I was going to tell you. Make it dramatic, you know? You would be the only person in the world I’d tell. Because I trust you. But I wanted it to be good. I didn’t think you’d figure it out first.”

Bernice took Kristen’s hand and squeezed it. “That means a lot. But if you didn’t want me to know, you need a better disguise than that wig. I might be the only person on this earth that remembers you’re not a natural blonde.”

Kristen glanced down at their intertwined hands. “Seriously? I’ve been dying it blonde since I was twelve.”

“And I’ve been dying mine just as long. Remember? We dyed each other’s hair the first time. My mom was pissed because we did mine purple and our school wouldn’t let me go to class until I fixed it.”

Kristen cracked a smile; she couldn’t help it. “I remember that. Man, I’m glad we didn’t go to a Catholic high school.”

“My mom was pissed about that, too. But if I didn’t go to the same school you were going to, I just wasn’t going to go.”

“Does Joel know?”

Bernice pulled her cigarettes from a pocket. “No, I don’t think so. I love that boy, but he’s dumb as a rock sometimes. Wanna go outside?”

Kristen shifted her hands up and down as if they were pans in a scale. “On one hand, we’d be discussing my life-changing secrets out in the open. On the other, we’d be enabling your crippling and cancer-causing addiction to cigarettes.”

Bernice opened the door and stepped outside. “If I don’t have a cigarette every two hours on the dot, I turn into a big green monster. You don’t want to see that.”

Kristen hopped out and circled around the car. She leaned against the vehicle next to her friend. “I need your advice.”

“Go ahead.” Bernice lit her cigarette and took a drag. “I’m always up for talking business.”

“It’s about my new job.”

Kristen told her everything. It didn’t take as long as she thought it would; Bernice’s cigarette was only half gone by the time she was done. Her cigarettes were as reliable as an hourglass.

“Gotta admit, I’m surprised.” Bernice blew smoke from the side of her mouth. “You usually don’t take shit from anybody. Why start now? Why’s Jane special? If your boss is jerking you around, you put your foot down. That’s not the best idea when you’re easily replaced, but if you’re a specialist, you can get away with it. You know Tara, right? The girl that fixes up the arcade machines for us? I don’t know anybody else who can do that job like she does. I can give her a pile of scrap I got off the Internet for ten bucks and she can turn it into a mint. If she needs something from me, I’m gonna do it. I don’t care what it is. If I lose her, that’s game over. But if Jack gives me shit? He’s out. Anybody can work a cash register.”

“So you don’t think I should quit?”

“Not before trying to fix the problem. You obviously have a skill she needs. If you ask her questions and she won’t give you answers, you ask again. You don’t do shit for her until she does what you need her to do. If she never does it, then you do your own thing.”

Kristen glanced skyward. “That’s the problem. Emma needs a place, and I need the money. Walking away isn’t an option.”

“Think a little.”

“What?”

Bernice waved her cigarette toward the Otherworlds sign. “You’re an honest-to-god… what you are. I own half of that. Technically three-quarters, but whatever.”

“So what, I become your mascot or something?”

Bernice dropped her cigarette and rubbed it out with the toe of her shoe. “Honey, step into my office.”

Kristen followed Bernice inside. Jack stood at the register, busy with a customer. He offered Kristen a sheepish glance, and she pointedly looked away. Bernice led her across the store and through the Employees Only doors, back into the corner of the loaded storeroom where two desks faced one another, a double-sided bulletin board separating them. Pictures of barely-clothed superheroines covered Joel's side of the board. Bernice's side wasn't any different. Bernice sat at her desk, riffled through a stack of comics and magazines, and moved one to the top. She folded her arms over it to hide the cover. “You know how I feel about Kerplow Comics, right?”

“They have the worst name in the world?”

“Yeah, that’s true. But I don’t think you understand how much I hate them. They’re vultures. Total vultures. They still sell at ninety-nine cents. You know how? They sucker people into doing work for free. They get writers and artists who’ll do their job for exposure, and make those people think they’ll get to move on to something better. They’re just screwing people. And their stories? They pull that straight-from-the-headlines stuff. They have the corniest characters ever and just switch them in for real people on the news. And they sell like crazy because they’re cheap. Parents think they’re doing their kids a solid by taking them to a comic shop, freak out because a comic costs five bucks, and buy them the ninety-nine cent trash instead.”

“Don’t you sell them here?”

“Yeah, I sell them.” Bernice shrugged. “We’re running a business. Sometimes you have to check your morals at the door.”

Kristen’s lip curled. “But if you sell them, you’re just perpetuating it, right? I mean, if they weren’t on the shelves…”

“Then parents would walk out of the place, their kids would leave crying with nothing, and they’d never come back. I’ll take a penny profit over someone walking out with empty hands.” Bernice shook her head. “Don’t distract me, alright? Here, look.”

Kristen watched closely as Bernice unveiled the Kerplow! Comic. Emblazoned on the cover were the words CREAM CITY CRUSADER in Impact font. A busty woman in a black spandex catsuit stood atop a skyscraper, posed in a way that managed to show off her rear and her chest simultaneously.

“Why did they make me a redhead?”

Bernice eyed her. “That’s your only problem with this?”

“Well, no.” Kristen pushed Bernice’s arm down by the wrist, hiding the cover from her own sight. She hoped if she couldn’t see it, it would stop being real. “Can they do that? They can’t, right? You can’t just put a real person on your book cover. Right?”

“What can you do about it? Sue them? First, you’d have to identify yourself to go to court. Second, you never actually picked some kind of hero name. And they did make her a redhead. You don’t have red hair. It’s not you. It’s not the woman on the news. As far as the law goes, it’s their original character. And they’re going to make bank off of it.”

Kristen grabbed the chair from Joel’s desk and wheeled it over. She fell into it. “That footage was only on TV yesterday. How fast do they work?”

Bernice threw the comic facedown onto the desk. “That was your third appearance. They’ve probably been working on this since the first time you showed up. You gave them months to do it. You’re in the headlines—now you’re in their book. People are going to eat it up. I won’t be able to keep it in stock. And they’re going to sell posters. And toys. And you can bet your sweet ass that your sweet ass will be on every single cover because these people aren’t satisfied with the T or the A. They need both.”

Kristen stared at an advertisement on the back of the comic book—some video game she’d never heard of before. She wanted to laugh, but it wouldn’t come out. “Someone is seriously going to make money off of me?”

“A lot of it.”

“And I can’t do anything about it?”

Bernice broke into a Cheshire smile. “Honey, you know I always have a plan. Have you ever heard of a guy named Harold Kleczka?”

Kristen wrinkled her nose. “I think there’s a funeral home with his name on it.”

“Different guy.” Bernice paused. “I think so, anyway. Nah, Harry makes his own comics. Writer, artist, editor, printer—the whole thing. He’s old as hell. He’s been doing this since he was a teenager during the forties. He consigns his books with us, and keeps talking about how they’ll make him rich someday so he can buy his grandkids a house.”

“Is his stuff any good?”

“They’re terrible. And they don’t sell for shit. Honestly, I think he loses money printing them. I don’t know how he still does it.” She shuffled through her stack of books and pulled out another. She passed it to Kristen, who leafed through its pages while she listened. “He never grew out of the wacky phase. We’re talking dudes with stereos for a head. I don’t really know my history, but this guy says Milwaukee used to be the big time, and he thought it’d always be like that. In his books, Milwaukee and Chicago grew so big they became one place, the Milwaukee-Chicago Metropolitan. The worst part is he shortens it down to MCM, like it’s LA or NYC or something.”

Kristen grimaced at a page: a full-page splash of a hairy man in a loincloth wielding a two-handed sword, riding a sea monster while decapitating it. In the background, a modern city skyline rose into the clouds. “This is supposed to be a superhero comic? Seems a little more Conan the Barbarian.”

“Harry calls that guy The Rhinelander. Every character he has is themed around something local. Rhinelander’s a town up north, I guess. And it’s German. So that guy’s supposed to be German. Or Germanic, I guess.”

“Well…” Kristen flipped through the pages again. “Considering he’s an old guy, at least it isn’t a Nazi?”

“The Rhinelander fights a lot of Nazis.”

“Figures. What does hairy-man-with-big-sword have to do with me again?”

Bernice snatched the book back and tossed it onto her desk. “What’s in his books doesn’t matter. What matters are his trademarks. Trademarks are solid-fucking-gold in this business, because all the good names are taken already. A trademark might as well last forever. That’s why new indie comics usually have characters with terrible names, or they drop the hero thing and just give them a real name. Joe Blow instead of Super Badass. But nobody wants superhero comics for Joe Blow. They want Super Badass. That’s just what the genre is, you know?”

Kristen nodded. “So I have to start wearing a loincloth so this old guy can buy his kids a house?”

Bernice chewed on her lip. Her gaze traveled up and down Kristen’s body with exaggerated infatuation. “Is the loincloth out of the question?”

“Do you really want to start trouble with the lady who can rip a car apart?”