Tales of the Red Panda: The Mind Master (3 page)

The sleek black car pushed forward through the city streets
at tremendous velocity. The powerful engine hummed like a contented animal as
Kit Baxter’s foot forced its way closer to the floorboards. She bounced a
little in the seat in spite of herself. The Red Panda preferred to approach
their prey by stealth, and the point was tough to argue. But when he had a
perfectly good experimental roadster at his disposal, to say nothing of a
speed-happy driver for a partner, sometimes the pneumatic tubes didn’t seem
quite as exciting as all that.

She kept her eyes locked on the road ahead as she weaved
through the traffic and past startled onlookers, who had made a late night of
it and were rewarded with a fleeting glimpse of the city’s masked
crime-fighters for their trouble. She knew that in the passenger seat he was
fiddling with one of his electric gizmos, but she was waiting to see how long
he could possibly resist showing off by explaining what he was doing. So far he
had maintained his focus for two stops, miles apart, after each of which he had
scribbled some notations and announced the next stop on their high-speed
pursuit of who-knew-what.

“Up here,” he said, glancing up from the dials of his device
at last.

“Yes, Boss,” she smiled, pulling into a convenient alleyway
and putting the high-powered braking systems to the test with the sudden stop.

“That was dramatic,” he said with a raised eyebrow and a
sidelong smirk.

“Yes, Boss,” the Flying Squirrel batted her eyelashes under
her cowl. “Fun, too.”

“I’m sure,” he said, turning back with renewed intensity to
the oblong, multi-dialed device he held.

“You’re really gonna make me ask, aren’t you?” she said at
last, a little cross.

“I really am,” he smiled. Kit felt her cheeks grow hot. He
had been playing with her, and she had blinked first. It was so hard to tell
sometimes.

The Red Panda took up the stub of a pencil and made more
quick notes on the clipboard on the seat beside him.

“If the Empire Bank was robbed tonight, why am I racing
hither and yon while you do your math homework?” she said with her nose
wrinkled crossly.

“It is a valid question,” he smiled as he wrote.

“Those look like map readings,” she said, intrigued.
“Directional co-ordinates.”

“Right first try,” he said, enjoying the game more and more
and showing it in spite of his best efforts.

“Directional co-ordinates taken from three different
locations,” she said, handing him a small map of downtown before he could reach
for it himself.

“Very good.” The Red Panda grinned as he began to mark the
locations at which they had stopped on the map.

“So you’re triangulating the location of something.” She was
trying to stay cross and failing badly.

“Yes,” he said, as he used his calculations to draw a line
from the first of their stops across the map.

“And since we’re racing around town without making a trip to
the crime scene…”

“I’ve been to the scene,” he said. “There was nothing of
interest.”

It took a moment for the silence in the seat next to him to
make an impact. He looked up as he finished drawing the line from the second
point on the map. She was holding her eyes frozen on him, her lips pursed in a
crooked pout entirely of her own invention. He was, for an instant, completely
distracted, a fact that she failed to notice, possibly due to the blank lenses
in his mask that hid his eyeline at close quarters.

“You went to the crime scene without me?”

“I was just passing by,” he said, pulling himself out of the
momentary spell. “I didn’t want to spoil your night off.”

“You know how you spoil my night off?” she asked. “You go
out crime-fighting without me.”

“I swear to you, I fought no crime,” he said, drawing a
third line on the map.

“But you visited the scene.”

“I did. Where I learned only that the robbery happened less
than an hour after the bank had closed. A small, largely secret safe-deposit
vault deep within the bank was compromised, and each of the drawers within was
cleaned out. The locks were neither finessed nor forced, suggesting the
participation of at least one bank employee, willingly or no. To say nothing of
the fact that no one could have got in or out at that hour without encountering
several armed guards.”

“But instead of investigating the guards–”

“An angle the police are surely pursuing for us,” he
reminded.

“–we’re driving around looking for… what exactly?”

“The goodies,” he beamed.

“The- you mean… the goodies, the loot?”

“The mazuma, the dough, what have you. Yes,” he nodded.

“I love it when you try to talk rough,” she purred.

“Kit Baxter, behave yourself,” he scolded gently.

“Yes, Boss.” Her cowl spread wide to accommodate her toothy
smile. “You really think we can find the ill-gotten booty before we’ve found
the ill-meaning baddie?”

“Drive there,” he said, pointing to the spot on the map
where the three lines intersected. “And we’ll find out.”

The Flying Squirrel threw the car into gear and peeled away
at terrific speed. She was still working it out.

“Those were radio signals you were triangulating,” she said.

“Yes.”

“What makes you think that the…,” she trailed off quickly.
He knew at once that she had it. “These safety deposit boxes… you say they were
secret?”

“Well, fairly secret, yes. Not general knowledge, anyway.”

“So they must have been reserved for the grand-high
mucky-mucks.”

He turned his head away as he smiled. “I suppose.”

“And since the muckiest-mucks of them all in banking terms
are ‘Old Money and Plenty of it’…,” she grinned, “one of those boxes was yours,
wasn’t it?”

“You know, I believe it was,” he said with a casualness
feigned so well, one could almost believe they were not racing through the
streets at dangerous speeds.

“And this safe deposit box of yours contained…”

“Oh, a few family trinkets and a small amount of cash.”

“Small in this case being…”

“Forty, fifty thousand,” he shrugged.

She snorted a little in spite of herself, and he instantly
felt a pang of guilt. He knew that his partner held the wealthy in a certain
degree of contempt, and was never entirely certain that he wasn’t included in
that company.

“Perhaps of greater interest,” he said, changing the subject
slightly, “is that one stack of bills had a false centre, which happened to
contain a small device that emits an intermittent radio pulse, not unlike that
used by radio buoys. Though on a much smaller scale, of course.”

“Of course,” she smiled. “So as soon as the dough was moved,
it started to cry for help.”

“More or less,” he said, putting the radio receiver away.

“So you must have thought that somebody would try this caper
sooner or later, right? I mean, why else would you hide a tracker in a drawer
full of loot?”

“For fun,” he said with a smile, and held the map up with
its three intersecting lines, showing the location of his device. “Isn’t this
fun?”

The heroes raced on, into the night.

Thirty minutes later, the sleek, powerful black car sat
abandoned, deep in shadows down a long alleyway. The streets of the warehouse
district in the city’s west side were empty now. Only the low-hanging moon kept
watch over the two masked figures on the rooftop of a derelict building.

The Flying Squirrel crouched on the ledge and peered
intently at the empty warehouse to the north through a tiny yet powerful pair
of spyglasses. Her posture was one of deadly motion captured in a still moment.
Her grey catsuit clung to her athletic form, her hair spilling out from the
back of her cowl. Her silhouette against the moonlight was an image of danger
and daring in an unmistakably feminine form.

Behind her loomed a tall figure of a man, so stock-still he
might have been a statue, an illusion only shattered by the slight motion of
his long coat in the wind off the lake to the south. Together they set a
perfect tableau of vigilance, which he finally shattered with a single, quiet
word.

“Anything?” he asked.

“Nada,” she said, folding the spyglasses back into their
compact form and returning them to her belt. “If there’s as much as a mouse
stirring down there, I can’t see hide or hair of him.”

“This feels wrong,” he said at last.

“Ya think so?” she smirked. “You just pulled off an
impossible heist and got away with the baubles of a dozen fine old families.
Your average baddie either looks for a fence or a party or both. And I don’t
think either are going to be found in this rat emporium.”

“Of course, your average criminal could never possibly pull
off a job with this level of finesse,” he countered.

“Right. But if he’s that talented, you’d think he’d have a
better hideout.”

He nodded and said nothing for the moment.

“Any chance they found your radio transmitter?” she asked.

“There’s always a chance,” he said. “But it’s only been a
few hours. And even if they’d found it, I don’t know how they’d have known what
it was, unless they expected to find it.”

“We’re probably making too much of this,” she said, drawing
herself up to her full height. Still standing on the ledge, she faced him eye
to eye, which made her dizzy in ways that their precarious perch never could.
“They probably hid the swag here until the heat died down.”

“Probably,” he nodded.

“You really think so?” she smiled, her head tilted ever so
slightly to the side.

The Red Panda grinned. “No,” he said.

“It did sound a little too good to be true, didn’t it?” she
said, reaching up and pulling down the flight goggles that were on the top of
her head. “Whaddya say I take the high road and you take the low road?”

“Ah,” he said, pulling a Grapple Gun from his belt and
aiming it across the open space. “Such strategy. Napoleon himself–”

“–would tell you to stuff a sock in it,” she sassed.
In a single, smooth motion she turned neatly in place, lifted her arms high to
each side and made a gesture with her hands that tripped a mechanism within her
costume. Before he could pull the trigger to fire his Grapple, she threw
herself gracefully off the rooftop, just as the retractable gliding membranes
built into her costume slid forth, filling the space between her hand and her
foot on each side with a tough, lightweight filament. With the ease that comes
only of long practice, she caught the wind as she fell and turned the motion
into a slow, silent glide through the open space to the rooftop of the
warehouse beyond.

As she neared her target, she pulled her feet forward,
pointed them at the roof and instantly made another motion within the gauntlets
of her costume. There was a sudden spark that flew forth as she fired the
remarkable Static Shoes which her partner had invented. Created originally to
hold them to sheer surfaces with the power of static electricity, they had
learned to use them with finesse in a variety of situations. In this case, she
sent a wave of opposing power from the soles of her feet, not strong enough to
repel her from the roof, but enough to slow her descent and allow her to land
noiselessly.

An instant later, she was across the rooftop and through the
access door. She rolled in and along the catwalk in a double somersault and
came up in an on-guard stance with a red boomerang in one hand and a throwing
star in the other. For an instant she was totally still as her eyes adjusted to
the pitch darkness, and she waited for any noise. Any motion.

Nothing. She slid the throwing weapons back into her belt.
If this were a bushwhack, there’d have been someone at that door. She listened
intently for sound from below. There was nothing. She smiled. If the Boss were
rushing the building, silence is what you might expect to hear, at least until
he found someone. Then there was usually an unholy ruckus. Maybe they had been
wrong about this after all.

Quickly and quietly, she padded along the catwalk and down
the metal steps that led to the warehouse’s second floor. She paused and
adjusted a ring outside her glove on the right hand. The Red Panda had tuned
her Radio Ring to the frequency of the miniature transmitter, and it was
registering a strong signal from the building’s east end.

The Flying Squirrel raced forward, watching both sides as
she ran. There was no sound and no sign of life. Her heart almost jumped into
her mouth when there was suddenly a motion right beside her, and she flipped
back effortlessly head over heels to give herself room to react. An instant
before she threw the first of what would have been a long and painful series of
kicks she realized it was him. She froze in her stance, slightly embarrassed,
her heart still pounding hard.

“Hello,” he said quietly.

“Hi,” she whispered.

“All clear?”

She nodded, and pointed towards the door at the end of the
passage. It seemed to lead to a small office space, probably once used by a
foreman. The smoked glass in the door was now broken, and the open space filled
in with cobwebs.

She glanced at her Radio Ring. “Gotta be in there,” she
whispered.

The Red Panda glanced at his own tracker and nodded.

She peered through the cobwebs. There was clearly no one in
the office.

“It doesn’t look like anyone’s been in there for months,”
she hissed.

“No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t. But one way or another,
someone must have opened that door in the last few hours.”

“Which means someone went to a lot of trouble to make it
look like nobody had opened that door in months,” she said, the sideways
grimace returning to her mouth.

“Which is the sort of thing you’d do if you wanted to make
us feel safe opening the door,” the Red Panda added. “And I can only think of
one good reason for that.”

She nodded to a small window twenty feet away. “That one
okay with you?” she asked. “For the inevitable dramatic exit?”

“Fine,” he agreed.

She pulled a small metal ball from a pouch on her belt and
threw it carelessly through the cobwebs into the office. A second later, they
heard the first hiss of a fuse as the motion detector was tripped, and they
raced as one for the window she had indicated.

An instant later the office tore itself apart in flames, and
the shock waves brought the derelict warehouse down in moments. The deathtrap
was brutal and massive in scale, consuming the entire building and threatening
the block with its flames. A chaos of sirens descended upon the quiet streets,
and of the two masked heroes there was not a single sign.