There’s an old joke that every Catholic schoolboy learns about how to make the sign of the cross: “spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch.” I was doing my own version of that behind the bush as I double-checked my gear. I adjusted my new helmet, synced the night-vision attachment to the HUD on my goggles, and tested the video feed from the head camera that I swore I’d never forget again after the Miasma incident. I made sure the mobi1 strapped to my wrist—a cheap throwaway with no personally-identifying account information—was set to anonymize all wireless connections. I triggered the stun baton a couple times to check the charge, then slapped it into its holster. A splash of vinegar in the dirt told me there were no snags or blockages in the sprayer rig. Only the testicle check did I omit, for I knew I had those in ample supply.
Unlike Alex, I was glad to have taken off the last eight nights. I needed some time to recuperate and clear my head, to think about the things I’d screwed up and what I should be doing better. The helmet and the sprayer had come out of that, but I’d also started to bone up on tradecraft. I read Technophile’s blog and learned a couple things that I was doing wrong from a signals intelligence perspective; now I had some confidence that I could keep that ever-helpful Grid connectivity and still minimize the chances that I’d be tracked or identified. I tried to be more cautious about the things I said, little tells that might let an enemy figure out who Torrent is and where he came from. I gave some thought to scouting out safe houses and rally points to store gear or lay low in, though I hadn’t actually pegged any locations yet. There was a seemingly endless list of contingencies to plan for, and the learning curve was steep and dangerous, but merely being able to identify what I didn’t know and what I still had to do gave me an enormous amount of confidence. I had a long way to go, but I was really starting to feel like a professional.
I stuffed the duffel bag packed with my civilian clothes into the hollow of a tree and crunched out of the brush. The Mysterious X was waiting for me, his arms crossed and foot tapping impatiently.
“You getting ready for superhero prom or what? You’re worse than a woman!”
I waved him off. “Preparation prevents piss poor performance. We rushed last time and I forgot the camera. If not for that, we could have nailed Miasma.”
X pulled his scarf up over his nose. “At the rate you move, he’d have gassed all the hobos from here to Cleveland before you caught up with him."
“Relax. We both know we’re not going to see squat tonight. We’ve filled our weird shit quota for half the year already.”
“No, I don’t think so.” X shook his head. “I can feel it again tonight. Psycho-magnetism.”
“Psycho-magnetism?”
“That’s right. Some guys go their whole lives without ever being in a fight, never even feel the hair on the back of their neck prickle. Other guys can’t even take out the trash without getting into a running gun battle. That’s us.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “Don’t forget how boring this was a month ago. You even stopped coming out until I had the fight in Hazelwood.”
“That’s just how it works,” X said, casually tossing off my argument with a shrug of his shoulders. “It’s kind of like static electricity. It starts off so weak it can barely twitch your arm hairs, but if the charge builds up enough, you get a nasty shock. The difference with psycho-magnetism is that you don’t expend it fighting; no, every time you run into some action, it builds the charge more. So you threw down with the werecat, then we run into Thorpe a few nights later, and then we run into Miasma.”
“Law of averages. I’m certain we’ll regress to the mean.” My scoffing was instinctual, but my voice betrayed a lack of conviction. I have to admit that, standing there with the mask on, drinking in all of the nervous anticipation it brings with it, there was something inexplicably plausible about the idea.
“We’re way past the law of averages, and you know it. Miasma proves it. There’s no way we should have run into him that night. Three times is too much to be coincidence.” He nodded confidently. “We’re psycho-magnets. Who knows how it happens; maybe it’s contagious. But it sticks to you, and we’ve got it.”
“Where did you hear about this?”
“I was just reading about it in a biography of Noir, ‘The Evil That Lurks.’ And there’s lurking evil out there tonight.” He stopped suddenly, angling his head back with a peculiar expression in his eyes — and let out a mighty sneeze.
There certainly was evil in the air that night, the sort that was usually in the air on beautiful spring evenings. Clouds of spores and fat motes of pollen drifted lazily across the beams of our flashlights, and every brush of our arms against the vegetation sent eye-watering plumes of allergens swirling into the air. Combine that with the humidity and the fragrance of the young blossoms wafting on the warm breeze, and I felt like I was wading through a cup of herbal tea. I’d been high-dosing on Vitamin C, so I was doing all right, but X was another story. Pretty soon, he had to yank his scarf down so he could breathe through his mouth. The bulb of his nose was red and puffy.
“I told you to take some decongestants,” I said.
He turned his head and fired a snot rocket into the bush. “Nothing helps a deviated septum.”
“Oh, the ongoing perils of being a bad boxer,” I said. “So where’s your psycho-magnetic compass pointing?”
X looked thoughtful. “West,” he finally said. “Oakland is usually full of scumbags this time of year.”
I thought that was pretty funny, because Oakland is full of scumbags all year round.
We arrived in Oakland via a shortcut through Schenley Park, then stuck to the shadowed side streets, since masked men creeping around residential neighborhoods tended to draw attention. It was very quiet. The noise of the highway was swallowed up by the trees and the distance. We could hear the brooding frogs chirruping in the muck, and the soft trickle of the tiny brooks and freshets hidden in the wooded margins. While I kept one eye open for mischief, I had the other tuned to the heads-up display on my goggles, tracking the progress of the Highlanders game.
“What’s the score?” X asked.
“Nothing yet, but we have runners at the corners. One out. We may get something here,” I said.
“Shh! Do you hear that?” X grabbed my shoulder and we stood still, listening. “I can’t tell if that’s someone shouting or the radio. Sounds like gibberish.”
“It’s Spanish,” I said. At first, I could only pick up a few words, but as I listened, it became clear that there were two different voices, two people shouting over one another. Once I realized that, it was easier to pick out snatches of conversation: “Why don’t you ask that whore…”, “Get off me!”, “Don’t raise your voice to me!”, and so forth. It was still hard to follow because both of them were slurring their words and there were a few inarticulate screams crammed in. “Sounds like a lover’s quarrel,” I said.
X’s shoulders slumped in disappointment. “Do you want to check it out or pass on by?” The inflection of his voice made it clear that he preferred the latter option. I sympathized; in my experience, no good ever comes of interfering in those sorts of spats, especially when someone’s drunk. For one thing, it’s damn near impossible to figure out who should get punched. Nevertheless, I would have felt negligent if we didn’t at least take a look.
“Let’s show our faces,” I said. “Maybe they’ll quiet down when they see us.”
X made a sour face. He twirled his baton, slapped it back into its holster, and sighed. “Fine, but let’s make it quick.”
I shook my head as we walked toward the commotion. “You talk like we’re going to bust up a KRAKEN lair. This will be the most exciting thing you see tonight, mark my words.”
“There’s no thrill in wailing on rowdy drunks.”
“Nor is there a need to,” I said. “De-escalation.”
We turned the corner on a rough-looking street. It was lined with old one-car garages backed up against the woods. Everything looked overgrown; there were tree branches thrusting into windows and out of collapsed roofs. The narrow, uneven pavement was so choked with weeds it was hard to see the concrete beneath. Even the tall street lamp was swallowed by the weighed-down branches of the maples and sycamores. About thirty yards on, the street terminated in a dead end, blocked off by a guardrail with a pair of orange blinkers whose slow flashing illuminated a man and a woman arguing in the middle of the street. The former tottered drunkenly as he lunged and grabbed at the girl, who towered over him in stiletto-heeled boots. The guy was squat and pudgy. Even at this distance, I could tell he was ugly, with his hair buzzed down to his scalp, no more than a rough field of stubble over a lumpy skull. Every bit of him looked the street thug, right down to his baggy jeans and heavily inked forearms.
The broad, on the other hand, was something else entirely; tall, curvy, and dressed in a leopard-print body stocking that showed off a magnificent rack. She had lustrous blonde hair shot through with orange highlights that flowed down to her mid-back. OK, so she looked like a hooker, but a high-class hooker. I tell you this only so that you understand my less-than-measured reaction to the scene. Could anyone stand by and watch a goblin paw such a beauty and still call himself a man?
X called out to them, his voice calm but firm. “Is there a problem we can help you—”
“Take your fucking hands off of her, you runty bag of shit!” I boomed.
X snapped his head sideways, his eyebrow cocked up in surprise. “Okay…”
The troll released his grip on the girl and staggered backwards, muttering curses as he pulled his hand down his sweaty face. “There’s no problem here, man. We good.”
“No, meng, we ain’t good,” I replied, imitating his uncouth accent. All this time, I was striding toward him, staring down his beady, darting eyes. “Get away from her before I kick your teeth in.”
X quickly caught up with me. “What’s this about de-escalation?” he said out of the side of his mouth. His fingers were already tightening on the handle of his nightstick. He may have been dubious, but he was rolling with it.
The toad grew more agitated as we closed in on him. “Back the fuck up, gringos! I warn you!” he yelled, but the fear came through in his cracking voice.
He bolted suddenly for the nearest garage. Its door was rolled all the way up. I sprinted to cut him off, but he ducked in just before I could grab him. I was sure he was after a gun or a tire iron, but instead he turned around and leaped for the handle of the garage door. He was far quicker and more nimble than someone with his body had a right to be, and he may have even made the grab if he wasn’t drunk. But as it happened, he misjudged the leap, bashed his wrists off the door frame and tumbled back outside.
With one hand on his sweaty shirt collar and one on the waistband of his sagging pants, I yanked him up and drove my knee into his kidney. Then I heaved him head-first into the guardrail.
Meanwhile, the broad screamed her head off in Spanish and English, growing more emphatic and inarticulate by the second. I should have been paying her more attention, but the thought never occurred that she was directing that tidal wave of vituperation at me. It was only X’s shouted warning that saved my skin.
I turned just in time to see her charge. Her face contorted, lips curling back over her teeth like a wild animal, literally slobbering with rage. You could see in her eyes that she’d lost it. I was taken by surprise, and I admit, a little scared.
Then I saw the point of that narrow blade she held in her upraised fist and I got very scared.
Friends, this is what happens when you try to play white knight for a strumpet. Remember that lesson well, and don’t say Torrent didn’t warn you.
I threw up my right arm instinctively to bat her away, but as I swept her back, the edge of the blade bit into my forearm.
Oh, mama, did it hurt!
I knew that I would be slashed or stabbed at some point during my vigilante career, and I thought I was prepared for it. I had, at various times, cut my fingers with a hobby knife or metal shears, and of course nicked my face with a razor; in my heroically-tinted imagination, a four-inch knife wound was in the same category as these. I was wrong. The pain was terrific, but the most acute sensation was exhaustion. All strength fled my arm and, soon, the rest of my body. Whether it was a shock reaction to the pain or a product of sudden, profuse bleeding, my limbs and reactions were leaden. The exhaustion was not just physical, either; it brought on a strange complacency, almost to the point of psychological surrender. I was indifferent to being stabbed. I knew that I did not want to die, and yet doing anything except standing there and letting myself be ripped apart seemed not worth the effort.
At the same time, the pain drew my other senses into sharp focus. I heard my sleeve rip very crisply, even over her shouted obscenities. A little later, I think I heard my muscles and tendons rip along with it. That sound had a different sort of crispness: wetter and heartier than the thin fabric of my hood. I remember clearly how I felt my own blood seeping out of my arm with my hydrokinetic sense, a new and unsettling experience.
It was this novelty which finally shook me out of my fatigued apathy. I twisted and threw my shoulder into her ribs, knocking her back a few feet. I pinched my arm behind the elbow to staunch the blood and took a breath, but she came back, slashing at my head before I could even exhale. I kicked her hard in the shin. She fell forward, but caught herself by wrapping a flailing arm around my waist. In my peripheral vision, I saw the knife hand fly up again; she was going to stick me in the back of the leg and there was nothing I could do about it.
Before that knife point landed, though, the whore’s head jerked back with a sharp yell. I turned to see the Mysterious X muscling her back, her long hair clenched roughly in his fist. “That’s enough out of you, bitch!” he yelled and thumped her wrist with his baton. She screamed and let the knife fall. Alex promptly kicked it away from her.
“Did she cut you?” he asked.
The question annoyed me. I glared at him, slowly raising my injured arm above my head, figuring the fast trickle of blood raining down from my arm would suffice as an answer. With my other arm, I rummaged through my first aid pouch for the roll of InstaClot. I had no idea how deep the wound went, but I was bleeding so much I was afraid she’d nicked my ulnar artery. I knew there was a trip to the hospital in my future, and already I was trying to come up with a suitable lie to explain it to my parents.
The next thing I knew, I was on the ground again. My left leg had been swept out from beneath me and my shoulder slammed hard into the pavement. I saw the troll scrambling to his feet, his scrunched-up face even uglier and more malicious now that it was covered in a curtain of blood that hung down from the gash over his eye. I realized he must have kicked me in the back of the knee. I didn’t know whether he was trying to run away or go for the knife, but I wasn’t having any of it. I stuck out my left arm and emptied a bladder of vinegar onto his face. He screamed as he staggered backwards, his palms pressed into his eyes, then toppled blindly over the the guardrail.
“Don’t like that, do you? Here, have another!” I ripped the stun baton from its holster and stung him in the ass cheek.
“I’ll kill you! Let me go, maricón, so I can kill both of you!” the whore threatened. “I’ll stomp on your balls and cut your throat! I’ll—”
I gave her a squirt across the eyes; she didn’t sound so tough after that. She whimpered and flailed around so violently that Alex’s grip — and a large chunk of her hair — gave way with a loud rip.
He jerked back, blinking in confusion at the clump of orange-yellow hair still in his fist before flinging it away in horror. “Jesus! What just happened?”
His delayed reaction was priceless. Despite the pain and blood loss, I couldn’t help but let out a weak laugh. “Relax. Hair extensions.”
I jabbed the stun baton in the small of the girl’s back and watched her spasm.
X swatted my hand away. “Easy with that shit! She’s already down.”
“To hell with her!” I held up my mauled forearm. At the time, it seemed more than ample justification.
“Alright, alright,” X said, his lip curling at the sight of the gruesome wound. “You want me to make a tourniquet?”
“No, I’ll take care of it,” I sighed, my knees buckling a little. “You can zip-tie these miscreants.”
“Got it. Hey, why don’t you see what they’ve got in that garage in the meantime? He seemed pretty eager to keep you out of it. Maybe he’s hiding something that’ll pay your doctor bill.”
I nodded. After all, looting criminals was how many of the great vigilantes of yore funded their operations. As often as we talked about it, we had not, as yet, gotten the chance to do so. The closest we’d actually come to it was in considering Miasma’s bribe.
As I walked over to the garage, I took a deep breath and flushed the wound with vinegar. My eyes filled with tears. It was a real test of manhood to keep that scream bottled up, but I did it. Mostly. Then I ripped open the InstaClot and pressed a wad of it deep into the wound; if the artery really was cut, the hemostat would need to go to work there, not just at the skin. Thankfully, the overload of pain from the vinegar had numbed my arm so much that it didn’t hurt nearly as much as I expected. The gash was so wide I had to use two bandages to cover it. I bent my arm over my head (it hurt a lot less that way) and stepped into the garage.
The pull chain from an overhead light fixture jingled against my forehead. I pushed up my goggles and gave it a yank to take a better look.
My jaw hit the floor.
In the center of the garage sat a sports car, or at least what was left of it. It was propped up on four cinder blocks and reduced almost down to its skeleton, with doors, tires, fender, hood, and even windscreen removed. Some of these items were still visible on the floor, stacked and wrapped neatly, but of others there was no trace. I peeked through the door frame at the interior and saw that, besides the steering wheel, the console was entirely gutted, with dangling bundles of disconnected cables the only sign of the electronics it had once held. I looked at the engine compartment and saw that it, too, had been looted. The headlights and the road-facing cameras were gone, too. I spotted one of the cameras on a workbench alongside a lot of tools and meters I’d never seen before. Beside it were several other electronic modules, including what looked like the automatic navigator and the anti-theft transponder, locked up in a faraday cage.
“Hey, X!” I called out. “You need to see this.” I switched on the camera and started shooting video.
“Did you find cash or— whoa!” X skidded to a stop as he trotted into the garage. His eyes were wide as saucers. “Is that what I think it is?”
“A ’98 Healy Invictus?” I said. “That’s what it looks like to me anyway. I admit to the possibility of being mistaken, given that I’ve never seen one disassembled.”
X grinned at me. “It’s no KRAKEN lair, but a chop shop isn’t anything to sneeze at, either. Let’s leave a tip for the Troubleshooters to pick up these scumbags.”
I held up one finger for silence. “OK, mobi, dial South Oakland Crimestoppers. Yes, hello, I’d like to report what I believe to be a stolen vehicle. Well, it’s at a chop shop. A chop— yep, in South Oakland. Uh, where are we? On the edge of Schenley Park, a couple blocks off from Boulevard of the Victors.” I snapped my fingers to get Alex’s attention.
“The 200 block of Kernan Way,” he said, checking the street sign.
I repeated the location. I smiled when the operator urged me to use caution and not reveal my presence to the criminals. “Oh, don’t worry,” I reassured her. “We’re already leaving. I’m going to forward some video of the place now. Also, please tell the patrolmen they’ll find a man and a woman tied up outside the garage. They attacked us and I think they’re involved with the chop shop. Yes, we did. Tell them its compliments of Torrent and the Mysterious X. Good night, ma’am!”
X slapped his hands together in excitement. “It’s about time we get some recognition!”
“Now let’s get the hell out of here before someone wants to ask us nosy questions. Or I bleed to death.”
~*~
The next evening, I sat in Alex’s basement, a half-empty bottle of Holtzrichter Stout in one hand, my opposite arm wrapped in bandages and propped on a mountain of pillows. Alex paused the video of the news report covering last night’s adventure in Oakland and turned to me with a supremely self-satisfied expression on his face.
“The Mysterious X and Torrent,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. “They mentioned us by name.”
I leaned back into the cushions and sighed, raising my bottle of beer in toast. “Another victory for unofficial justice. And at the cost of only $80.” I gently patted my bandaged arm.
“That could have been much worse. You said nothing was permanently damaged, right? No surgery necessary?”
I took a swig of beer. “Not that they could tell.”
“See?” Alex stood up, finished his own bottle, and flung it into the trash. “At least you get an excellent scar out of the deal.”
“Yeah, great. Now I have to wear long-sleeved shirts the rest of the school year, and just when it’s starting to get hot.”
“You mean you’re going to cover that up? The girls will go wild. Eva will cream her panties when she sees it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Eva isn’t going to see it. At least not until I tell her my secret. She was already asking questions about my black eyes.”
“Yeah, I guess people get to wondering, don’t they? Speaking of which, what else did the doctor say?”
I tilted my head, shrugged. “Nothing. Well, he said that if I was trying to commit suicide, I’d used the wrong side of my arm. I don’t think he’d have joked about it if he didn’t buy my story about the lawn mower.”
“Heh. And your parents?”
“Didn’t tell them. Used my own money.” I hastened to add, in answer to his unasked question, “I still have enough left to buy the car. As you said, it could have been much worse.”
“You got sloppy.” He pointed to my arm. “It’s a reminder not to be sloppy next time.”
“Sloppy?” It was true I supposed, but that wasn’t the descriptor I was thinking of.
He waved his hand, his eyes flashing sarcastically. “When you said ‘de-escalation,’ I assumed you actually meant to… de-escalate. Entirely my misunderstanding.”
I sat there quietly for a while, frowning, thinking. He’d put his finger on the thing that really bothered me about this episode. The wound was more than a lesson in the hazards of impetuousness: it was comeuppance, just reprisal for bad conduct. I realized I had made this error before when I attacked the hoodlums at the glass factory for the ‘crime’ of spraying paint on an abandoned building. It was the same stupid overreaction and the same bad ending, albeit with a different set of ugly injuries. God had been trying to teach me about self-control, and it was about time I paid attention.
“You’re right,” I said, eventually. “We should never have tangled with them. We should have just kept walking.”
He looked at me incredulously. “Whaaat? They were chopping cars. When this investigation is done, they’ll probably have busted up a whole car theft ring, thanks to us.”
“But we didn’t know that beforehand. We heard a couple bickering and we — I — went into thug mode. All testosterone and impulse, no thought about whether it was a good idea, no thought at all about if I was doing the right thing.”
“All I meant is that you said one thing and then did another. I follow your lead, so when you switched gears, I was two steps behind. That’s the real problem.”
“The real problem is that it happened at all.”
“They were criminals,” he growled.
“Yes, this time. The ends can’t justify the means, Al.”
He got up, fetched another beer from the fridge, and offered another to me. I declined, and he sat back down in silence.
“It’s tough for me to sit here and say this,” I went on. “I mean, the bitch carved me up and I was trying to help her. They’re lowlife gangster scumbags, car thieves. But! But… I provoked it. I was the aggressor. It’s only by accident I turned out to be the good guy.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Alex shaking his head. When I turned to look at him straight, he stopped, pretending like he’d been still the whole time.
“It’s true,” I insisted.
He nodded in that way that told me he didn’t agree, but he didn’t want to argue. “I hear you, buddy.”
My shoulders slumped as I let out a sigh. “Anyway, you’re right about the miscommunication, too. I blew it. Sorry.”
“We’re still new to this, feeling it out,” said Alex. “But that’s good. You won’t do it next time, and no lasting harm done.”
I shook my head. “I still don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Thinking?” He turned to look at me. “Thinking’s got nothing to do with it. It’s like I told you, man: it’s psycho-magnetism.”