Tales of the Red Panda: The Crime Cabal (14 page)

Bert Mendel was a very nervous little man. It was just his nature
really. He had been one of those awkward children who looked like they would
jump out of their skins if you said, “Boo!”. He had grown, of course. Developed
an aptitude for the natural sciences and the sort of iron stomach that best
befits those who work in forensics. He had joined the Toronto Coroner’s Office,
risen through the ranks entirely on merit and was one of the most trusted
deputies of the operation. But somehow he had never really lost the look of
that awkward, sweaty little boy.

Many people live all their lives with such a nervous condition and
think nothing of it. They keep to themselves, or learn to avoid situations that
might cause them stress. Sadly, for Bert, this was quite impossible. Not that
he wasn’t used to working in a quiet laboratory completely surrounded by
corpses; indeed, that was the only crowd in which he was ever truly at ease.
But Bert Mendel was also an Agent of the Red Panda, and he lived in mortal
terror that someone would find out.

Two years before, Bert had, like many before him, become convinced that
he had devised a perfect system to beat the odds at games of chance. He was
certain that his system would grant him a life of luxury and ease after beating
one of the big gambling houses at their own game. What Bert had discovered was
that the only system that such games respected was one simple rule – in
the end, the House always wins.

Before long, he had found himself hopelessly indebted to some very
dangerous types. Every time he tried to gamble his way out, he only dug his own
grave a little deeper. In the end, when the men he owed knew Bert was a bad
investment, they concluded that he could best serve their business interests as
an example to others who might decline to pay. And so he had found himself on a
bridge, badly beaten and about to be thrown into the murky and polluted waters
of the Don River. He hated to think of his own desiccated corpse showing up in
the morgue in which he had worked. Of his own organs being cut out and weighed,
of his own flesh subjected to the same tests to try and learn the identity of
his killers. But it seemed the only, perhaps even the logical end.

But that grim logic took an unexpected turn, in the form of a
mysterious stranger in a red mask. With mad, joyous laughter he had disposed of
Bert’s assailants, and in short order, with his remaining problems. His debts
vanished, his lost savings were restored. He had been granted a second chance
such as few men are ever given. But it had come at a price. Bert had wanted
nothing more than to melt back into the anonymous little life that he had
gambled away. It was not to be.

“Bert Mendel,” the man in the mask had said. “I have restored your
life. It belongs to me now.”

He had heard the first whisperings of course, few in the city had not.
A mysterious being with inexplicable abilities, on a crusade against crime.
Some called him a menace, some a marvel. Some called him a Satan, some a
savior. In time, all would know his name. But Bert Mendel had been one of the
first to call him “chief,” even if he only thought of him as trouble.

At the moment, Trouble was leaning on his filing cabinet, flipping casually
through his records. Trouble’s crazy lady friend was hanging upside down from
the ceiling, packed into a tight crouch and watching Bert with that grin that
made him think she just might go for his throat. He felt a fat bead of sweat
drop from the back of his hairline and run down his spine, icy-cold. He
shivered in spite of himself.

The man in the mask looked up from the file, only slightly annoyed.

“This isn’t really what I was looking for, Bert.”

“It’s all I got!” Bert panted. “You gotta get outta here. Please.”

“Bert,” the Red Panda began with a smile as white as the blank eyes
that peered from his domino mask, “you’re a monument to Man’s inability to
learn his lesson. No matter how often I come to you with a nice simple
request–”

“Simple?” Bert sputtered. “There ain’t nothing simple about this!”

The Red Panda ignored the interruption, “–you still imagine you
can get me to leave with a few waves of your hands and some desperate
sputtering. You have information that I need. Lives hang in the balance. I
don’t really have time to do this the hard way.”

Those words seemed to hang in the air, just a little. Bert turned his
head away, to peer over his shoulder. The Flying Squirrel had not moved, had
not so much as budged. But it was just possible that her Cheshire Cat grin had
widened even more at the mention of “the hard way.”

“Hi,” was all she said.

New rivers of sweat rolled down Bert’s face. She really was
staggeringly lovely. He had never been quite so afraid of anything in his life.

“Do you think you can make her stop looking at me like that?” he
whimpered.

“No,” the masked man replied. “But you can.”

“How?” Bert gasped, unable to look away.

She cocked her head to the side, just a little.

“Make with the skinny, sweat-pea,” she grinned.

“I’ve given you everything I’ve got already,” Bert pleaded.

The girl looked at her mentor and raised an eyebrow. “Boss?” she said.

The Red Panda flipped the file open and summed up the Coroner’s report
in a scholarly tone.

“It says here that one of the four corpses pulled from the remains of
Northcott’s Greengrocery was none other than Satchel Braun, notorious racketeer
and former enforcer with Ace Ryder’s mob.” He flipped the file closed with a
smirk.

“You don’t say?” the girl said, releasing her hold on the ceiling, flipping
in mid-air and landing on her feet, soft as a kitten. “Well, that’s very
interesting.”

“See?” said Bert. “That- that’s got to be good for something.”

“Oh, sure,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Except he’s the
guy we recognized at a hundred paces, Bert. Who were his playmates?”

“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know! Did you check out the rest of the
Ryder mob?”

“The rest of the Ryder mob,” the Red Panda said sternly, “is either in
prison or in the boneyard. Case Bermel and Mitch Palmer are the only two still
at large, and neither our behemoths nor our bomber were them.”

“Look,” Bert sputtered, “you two were there! How can I tell you
anything you don’t already know? Chief O’Mally has this case locked down. If
anyone found out I was talking to… to anyone, much less to you… I’d be more
than out of a job, I’d be in the clink myself!”

“I have many Agents, Bert,” the masked man said seriously. “Some serve
me for the adventure. Some out of a sense of duty. For some it is money, some a
chance at redemption. Nearly all have some debt to repay, as you do. Many risk
their lives in my service. All I have ever asked of you is that you do what you
are already paid to do, but to report to me when I need you. Your cowardice is
often mildly amusing, but I’m afraid we just don’t have the time today.”

Bert’s ears and cheeks grew hot with shame. “I don’t – I didn’t
–”

“The names, peaches,” the girl said.

“I can’t give you names. I don’t have names.” Bert sighed. “I don’t
have much of anything on those other three bodies. The Coroner pulled the
original reports. He’s ordered fresh autopsies.”

“That alone is interesting, don’t you think?” the Red Panda said, his
gloved hand on Bert’s shoulder in a gesture of apology. “Tell me.”

Bert shook his head. “The pathology was wrong. It was… it was bungled.
That’s all.”

The Red Panda re-opened the file in his hand.

“The pathology was good enough to tell that Satchel Braun’s jaw was
probably broken before the explosion, rather than by it.” He looked up at Bert.
“I broke it.”

Their eyes locked for a long moment. At last Bert slumped a little.

“I didn’t sign off on those reports, but I helped with the work-up,”
Bert said heavily. “I’ve never seen anything like those bodies before. I mean…
there wasn’t a lot left of them you understand. Especially the one wearing the
bomb. They didn’t find enough of him to fill a shoe-box. A lower jaw-bone that
was probably his… couldn’t match the dental work, such as it was. Teeth were
pretty awful. He could have been a drifter.”

The Flying Squirrel sat at one of the stools by the workbench. The
bomber who destroyed himself with the building had haunted her a little. She
was not pleased that there was little possible resolution to his story.

Bert continued, “The two gorillas were in better shape, so to speak.
I’ve never seen guys like that. There was… they weren’t natural. Somehow,
something had… enhanced their strength I guess, but they were massive.”

The Flying Squirrel rolled her eyes a little. “We noticed that too,”
she said.

“One of the gorillas we couldn’t tell from Adam. But we had a hit on
the other. There was enough left of his face to make a positive I.D. Some guy
who worked down at the Port Authority. Big fella, sure… but not like this. He
went missing two weeks earlier. Nobody reported it. They figured he’d just
moved on.”

“No family?” asked the Squirrel.

“Not so you’d know, though I guess somewhere…,” Bert trailed off.
“Here’s the thing, though. The cops ran this guy’s record. Clean as a whistle.
If he’d ever been anywhere near trouble, nobody ever heard of it. Two weeks
later he’s twice his original size and smashing heads for the mob. Too screwy
for me.”

“Perhaps,” the Red Panda said seriously. “But for the Coroner?”

“That was different,” Bert continued. “Listen… I don’t know how to
explain it, except that if you spend enough time around dead folks, you get
kind of an instinct for it. The tissue, it didn’t… didn’t
feel
right. And I don’t just mean the explosion and the fire… I’ve
dealt with things like that before, and this was… it was wrong. It was like…
like a cadaver more than a corpse. More like something that had been in a jar
of formaldehyde. Except it was nearly a whole person. So we ran some more
tests. Everything came back the same…”

“And?” The Flying Squirrel leaned in.

“Those gorillas? They’d been dead at least a week. The bomber too.”

“What?” she sputtered. “Bert, we were trading punches with them an hour
before!”

“Well, I didn’t know that at the time. So we put forward the theory
that they were… plants of some kind. That it was part of some caper–”

“What kind of caper would that be?” she asked incredulously.

“Yeah… that’s where we kind of ran out of steam too. Anyway, the
Coroner flipped his lid. Said we were all idiots and ordered new pathology.
Told us all in no uncertain terms that if any of us breathed a word of this
we’d be out on the street. Now we’re up to our elbows in fresh bodies from the
Golden Goose–”

“–and you’ve got four more that tested the same as the others,”
the Red Panda finished the thought.

“How in blazes did you… Yeah… yeah, that’s right,” Bert said,
wide-eyed. “And none of us knows how to tell the Coroner. Or what to tell him.
It’s all crazy.”

“Boss?” the Squirrel began, “Do you know what the screaming blue heck
is goin’ on here?”

“I just might have an idea,” the masked man nodded. “But I need those
reports, Bert.”

Bert sighed and pulled a thick folder from the lower drawer of his
desk. “The boss took all the copies of the first reports. These are the test
results on our pickled eggs from the Goose. Even some tissue samples on slides.
I figured you’d be around eventually.”

The Red Panda smiled and placed his hand on the folder. Bert did not
let go of his end. He met the mystery man’s blank eyes and held them.

“It’s not a little thing you ask of me,” Bert said, seriously. “No man
may serve two masters.”

“One day, Bert,” the Red Panda said, “I hope that you will see you have
only ever served one.”

Bert’s brow was still furrowed in confusion ten seconds later when both
heroes were gone without a trace. Clearly today was not to be that day.

“You wanna let me in on it?” Kit said, sitting on the worktable
swinging her feet. The Crime Lab was not the most diverting place in the world
when one was sitting quietly, which she never really enjoyed at the best of times.

“Hmmm?” he said, peering through the microscope.

“You never teach me the science stuff,” she said under her breath.

“What?” he said, surprised.

“Well…” She felt childish for having brought it up. “You taught me half
a dozen martial arts, you gave me Static Shoes and Gliding Membranes…”

“Because I thought you liked flying and… hitting things,” he said.

“What’s
that
supposed to
mean?” she howled in protest.

“Are you telling me you
don’t
like–”

“Of
course
I like flying and
hitting things.” She was genuinely cross now. “Who wouldn’t? But…”

His brow was furrowed in confusion. She sighed.

“You don’t think I can do it,” she said, as though admitting something
she was ashamed of.

She looked at her shoes, as if she hadn’t actually said anything
revealing, but had noticed something very interesting on the side of her foot
for the first time. She almost never displayed any sort of vulnerability. She
might do it more often if she ever realized he found it as irresistible as her
cowl-head.

He watched her for a moment. The man who now thought of himself only as
the Red Panda hadn’t learned much from his father, beyond exactly what sort of
man he didn’t really want to be. But there was a single truism that he could
still remember being told when he was very young.

“It may not always be
convenient, but the truth is easy to remember.”

He gave her a little chuck under the chin, and was quietly impressed at
how steady his hand was.

“Did it ever occur to you,” he began, “that if I taught you everything,
you’d never give me that look like I just did something particularly clever?”

Her eyes sparked to life. “You like that?” she mumbled.

“It’s entirely possible that I have invented any number of things
expressly to get that look.” He turned back to the microscope.

“Could you hedge your bets a little more?” she smiled.

“If I have to,” he said stepping back from the microscope. “Look at
this.”

“Honest?” she said, unsure now if this was a worthy trade for the
moment he’d just backed away from, but unwilling to give up the chance to learn.

“Go on,” he waved her in.

“All… right…” She hovered over the microscope. “Er… what am I looking
at?”

“One of the specimens we got from Bert. This was one of our playmates
from the Golden Goose. Or rather, a very small part of one of the very small parts
of him that were left.”

“Which one was it?” she asked, for lack of a better question.

“Not sure. I was taking a little nap as you’ll recall.”

“Ah yes,” she smirked. “So what’s so interesting about this?”

“The rate of cellular decay,” he said. “Or rather, the lack of it, in
some ways. Bert’s formaldehyde analogy isn’t that far off. These cells weren’t
alive, they were preserved.”

“But Boss,” she protested, “that’s crazy. We fought them. They broke
two of your ribs.”

“I have a vague recollection of that, yes,” he grimaced.

“So what? Did somebody pull a fast one on us?”

He approached with a tray full of fresh slides. “Look at these.” He
fixed a slide into the viewer. She lowered her head, suspiciously.

“Okay,” she said. “What am I looking at now?”

“An unrelated sample of healthy muscle tissue,” he said.

She peered at him from just above the eyepieces. “Does it matter whose
it is?”

“Well,” he began, “I suppose it would have mattered to him quite a bit,
but for our purposes, no. It’s just for contrast. You see it’s quite a bit
different.”

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

“What? I don’t know… no well-stocked Crime Lab should be without one
really. This is what forensic analysis often consists of. You examine the
norm,” he gestured to the slide on the viewer, “and then you examine the
evidence.”

At this he changed the slides again and waved her back in. “And you ask
yourself, ‘How is this different, and what could have caused it?’ And then you
say the answer out loud and your partner looks at you like you’re particularly
clever. Go on.” He waved again, gesturing her back into the microscope.

“It’s the first slide again,” she said, confused.

“Is it?” he smiled.

“Isn’t it?”

“Look again.”

She scowled at him a little. Flying and hitting were definitely more
fun. She squinted again through the viewer.

“Okay… it’s a different slide, but it’s from the same body.”

“No,” he said, “it isn’t.”

“Then it’s from one of the other corpses from the Golden Goose?”

“Good guess,” he said, really enjoying himself. “Wrong, but good guess.”

“But Bert said there weren’t any samples in that envelope from the St
Clair explosion.” She was slightly irritated with him now, but he didn’t play
games very often, and she did find it fun to watch.

“That he did. That he did indeed.” He looked at her over the
non-existent rims of his non-existent glasses and waited.

“But…,” she said frustrated, “since this slide is different from the
normal tissue in… in exactly the same ways as the first one…”

“Yes…”

“Then whatever this slide is from… that must be the answer!”

“Yes!” he folded his arms as if they were done.

“But what is it?” she said crossly.

“What is what?” He seemed lost for a moment. “Oh, the slide.”

“Yes, the slide.” She was exasperated.

“Oh, that’s just a tissue sample from one of the many undead henchmen
of our old friend–”

“–Professor Zombie!” she finished.

“Yes,” he said. “Simple when you get right down to it, isn’t it?”

“It kind of is,” she said.

He looked mildly disappointed.

“But why would Professor Zombie be working with the mob?” she asked.
“It’s not her M.O. at all.”

“No, it isn’t. She works exclusively with her own zombie henchmen. She
doesn’t trust anyone else and no one else trusts her.”

“So why the change?” Kit said, puzzled. “The leopards don’t change
their spots ‘round here all that often.”

“No they don’t,” he agreed. “But the last gang in town… whoever they
are… they might have thought they needed more muscle. They might have made a
deal.”

“Think she’s double-crossed them yet?” Kit said, tying her hair back in
preparation for the cowl.

“Couldn’t say,” he mused, looking at the first slide again. “But this
tissue is definitely preserved with Necronium. There’s something else in here…
an agent I don’t recognize. It might be the cause of the zombies’ enormous
size.”

“She’s been fiddlin’ with her formula? That doesn’t sound like
Professor Zombie either.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he agreed. “And I can’t say for sure, but it might be
some sort of growth agent applied while the cells were still living. Whatever
it is, we’ve seen the effect. These zombies are faster and stronger than any
we’ve ever dealt with.”

She snapped her fingers in revelation. “An’ this is why they’re wearin’
makeup! To hide that grey-green complexion her monsters get.”

“Of course!” he smiled. “We’d have recognized them in an instant
otherwise, and then this fiendish alliance would no longer have had the
advantage of secrecy.”

“So what should we do?” Kit asked. “Should we do some… some tests to
see what the growth agent is?”

“I think we’ve been cooped up in the lab long enough for the moment,”
he said. “Now that we’ve got an idea what we’re dealing with, I think a little
exercise is in order. After all, all work and no play makes Kit a dull
Squirrel.”

She gave him a look as if he were particularly clever.

“Ah,” he said, “there it is.