Amped: A Kid Sensation Companion Novel (8 page)

There were two of them, both men. The first was of average height and slender. He appeared to be in his late twenties, and carried what looked like a silver wand in his hand. There was a malicious grin on his face that put me in mind of someone who liked to pull the wings off flies.

The other man appeared to be in his mid-thirties. He was a little over six feet in height, well-muscled, and had sandy-colored hair. He had a handsome face, but its attractiveness was severely diminished by the coldness of his demeanor and a certain lack of empathy in his expression. His most distinguishing feature by far, however, was a wicked-looking scar that ran from one side of his throat to the other, making it clear that he’d been on the business end of a blade at some point in his past.

The two men advanced, coming into the waiting area. Almost in step with them, I retreated – as if we were doing an odd dance – until my back fetched up against the door leading to the shop floor.

“Come along, love,” said the slender man, speaking with a Cockney accent. “Let’s not make this difficult.” He held up the wand, which I now saw had a length of unknown cord attached to it.

I contemplated how to play this. I really didn’t want to get into a fight – not because I was afraid, but because I didn’t want to have to possibly explain a bunch of bruises to Esper.

“Hey,” Riley said, interrupting my thoughts. “Your boss promised me no rough stuff.”

“Shut up,” said the fellow with the scarred throat in a raspy, but menacing voice. He looked at Riley like he wanted to gouge the shop owner’s eyes out.

Trying to take advantage of the momentary distraction, I turned and reached for the doorknob, intending to dash out onto the shop floor. A sharp crack sounded, like a thundercloud had somehow found its way into the room. At the same time, something wrapped tightly around my wrist and yanked with enough force to spin me back around.

The guy with the Cockney accent was grinning mischievously. The cord from his wand, I saw now, was what had snagged my wrist. It was plainly a whip of some sort.

“You shouldn’t try to run when someone extends you an invitation,” said the guy with the accent. “Now you’ll have to be punished.”

I couldn’t see exactly what he did, but I felt a jolt of electricity coming into my body from the cord around my wrist. I almost laughed. To just about anyone else, the whip would have delivered a stinging shock. To me, it just tickled. These two obviously didn’t know who they were dealing with, but they were about to find out.

I sent a powerful surge of electricity back into the whip. I’m not sure what kind of device the Cockney fellow had generating electricity in the wand, but my actions had the desired effect of overloading it. The wand exploded in his hand, and he screeched in pain.

I shook my wrist, dislodging the whip from around it.

“Smiley,” said the Cockney fellow. “Get her.”

The guy with the scar – Smiley – took a step forward and I blasted him, sending enough juice through him to knock the average person out. Smiley, however, didn’t go down (although he did hunch over, groaning in pain for a second). I knew then that he – maybe his partner as well – was a super.

Smiley slowly straightened up, apparently recovering from the jolt I’d given him. He obviously had some heightened level of strength, stamina, and who knew what else. Not caring to discover the full range of his power set, I sent a powerful pulse into a nearby electrical socket. A second later, the entire place was covered in darkness as light bulbs either winked out suddenly or exploded in a shower of sparks.

I felt for the doorknob, yanked it open, and dashed out into the fabricating area. I couldn’t see anything, but I could sense the bioelectric fields of Riley’s employees (who were bemoaning the loss of power) all around me. Almost immediately, there was a crash, accompanied by the sound of splintering wood and the tinkle of broken glass. I instinctively knew what had happened: Smiley, preferring not to waste time dealing with annoyances like doorknobs, had simply smashed through the door (or the wall) and onto the shop floor.

Smiley’s antics caused a bit of mild panic in the fabricating area. Unable to see anything, the workers were frantically shouting as they tried to figure out what was going on.

“Whipcord,” I heard Smiley’s raspy voice boom out. “Light.”

“You got it,” said Whipcord (which was what the Cockney guy apparently went by). A second later, he held up a hand that seemed to glow of its own accord…and get brighter by the second.

I didn’t wait until the light became bright enough for me to be seen. Taking the initiative, I shot a bolt of electricity at Whipcord. He yelped as it blasted him into a wall, and then the light in his hand winked out, indicating that he was perhaps unconscious.

I congratulated myself on my quick thinking, but didn’t have time to gloat. The blast of electricity had given away my position. I instinctively dove to the ground – seemingly just in the nick of time, because as I hit the floor, I sensed Smiley soaring over me. A second later, a loud clattering sounded throughout the shop.

It wasn’t difficult to guess what had happened. Smiley had dove at my last known position. Instead of tackling me, however, he had banged into something else – a structure, a fabricated piece of equipment, or something along those lines. From what I could sense, he was still lying prone on the floor, groaning and barely moving. It seemed that he had pretty much knocked himself out cold.

The workers in the shop had seemingly had enough. Someone found a door that led from the fabricating floor to the outside, and they all fled. Thanking my lucky stars, I dashed out right behind them.

The door opened onto the back of the building. I circled back around the block, jumped into my car and zoomed away.

Two hours after my adventure at Riley Fabricators, I was back in Li’s room with my two partners in crime, sitting at the breakfast table. I could have been back a lot sooner, but I had wanted to make sure I wasn’t being followed, so I had spent an hour making evasive maneuvers meant to shake any tail I might have picked up. It wasn’t a skill I got to practice often, so I sincerely hoped I remembered everything the League had taught me on the subject.

“So,” Smokey said after I explained what had happened, “you’re thinking that this Riley fellow knows something.”

“I suppose he could have just seen it as an opportunity to kidnap a young girl,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure his actions related to my questions about Mary Jones.”

“So what now?” Smokey asked.

“I have to go back,” I declared matter-of-factly. My run-in with Smiley and Whipcord had firmly convinced me that Mary Jones was the lead I needed to pursue. Ergo, I wasn’t even thinking about tracking down Kerri Kerr anymore.

Smokey shook his head. “Go back? Not by yourself. Not with two thuggish supers hanging around.”

“They’re probably long gone by now,” I said. “Besides, I was planning to go by after business hours.”

Smokey groaned and wiped his face with his hand. “
Another
break-in?”

“To the extent justification is needed,” Li chimed in, “I think the assault on Electra indicates that these are indeed criminally-minded individuals.”

“Thanks, Li,” I said, genuinely grateful for the support. “By the way, can you see what you can find out about that fabricator shop – alarm systems and so on?”

Li nodded. “Of course.” He then opened up his laptop, which was on the table in front of him, and began typing.

“Li’s finished copying the data from the tape,” Smokey said, switching topics slightly. “We should take it back tonight.”

“Let’s shoot for tomorrow,” I countered. “I’d rather go back to Riley’s tonight.”

“Why tonight?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Just a feeling. Like time is of the essence.”

“You may be right,” Li interjected, causing us both to turn towards him. “I would suggest turning the television on and watching the local news.”

*****

The three of us were gathered around Li’s television, watching continuing live coverage of an explosion that had taken place on the industrial side of town just a short time earlier. To be more precise, it had occurred at a longtime business known as Riley Fabricators. The owner, along with about a dozen employees, had been killed. (Li, while researching the fabrication shop as I had asked him to do, had started seeing reports of the blast. That, of course, had led to him telling us to turn on the news.)

The cause of the explosion had yet to be determined. According to one of the firemen on the scene, “Fabrication and welding shops often have combustible dust and gases in the air. It’s one of the hazards of working in such an environment.” In other words, the implication was that the explosion was an accident.

After listening a little longer (and realizing that the reporting was starting to become repetitive), I grabbed the remote and turned the television off.

“No way is that a coincidence,” Smokey said.

“Unlikely,” Li agreed.

I didn’t say anything; I just sat there on the sofa thinking how I’d just lost my last credible lead. I wasn’t quite sure where to go from this point, but there had to be some way to pick up the pieces. I was still trying to figure out exactly how to do that when I realized that Smokey was talking to me.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “What were you saying?”

“I was asking if it were possible that something you did set off the explosion,” Smokey said.

I stared at him, incredulously, and then practically screamed, “No!”

Smokey held up his hands defensively. “Alright, alright. I just had to ask. We can get back on point now, which is finding another way to track down Mary Jones.”

“There is always the phone directory,” Li suggested.

“That’s not a
terrible
idea,” Smokey said. “The problem is that Mary Jones is a very common name.”

“Hmmm,” I mumbled as a new thought occurred to me. “Maybe that’s the point.”

“What do you mean?” asked Li.

I leaned forward. “Let’s consider. We first appear to have a bogus phone number for Mary Jones, and then a bogus address. On top of that, we have the name itself – Mary Jones – which is
very
generic.”

“Assuming there is a pattern here,” Li said, “you think the name is fake as well.”

“So basically,” Smokey surmised, “Ms. Jones doesn’t want to be found.”

I nodded. “That would seem to be the case.”

“And she’s done a world-class job of covering up her tracks,” Smokey added. “We’ve got no name, no address, no phone number. We don’t even know what she looks like.”

I smiled. “But we know some people who do.”

A confused frown crossed Smokey’s face. “Who?”

“Well, she did go in for prenatal care,” I said.

Smokey shrugged. “So what does that mean?”

“The staff,” Li said, catching on. “The hospital staff would have seen her.”

It was a reach, admittedly. The hospital staff at Sisters of Mercy must have seen thousands of patients – probably tens of thousands – every year. Expecting them to remember one in particular (especially in light of how much time had passed) was worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack; it was like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles. Nevertheless, we put our backs into it. Or at least Li did.

Scouring the hospital records, Li discovered the name of the treating physician, as well as the eight nurses who were on duty, when Mary Jones had come in for prenatal care. Further research online revealed that the doctor had retired and passed away a few years earlier, as had one of the nurses. Two other nurses had retired and moved away, while a third had retired and stayed in the local area; the remaining four were still working here in the city. Li pulled all their contact info into a spreadsheet and printed it out for me.

“I’ll start with those in the local area first,” I said, pulling out my cell phone as I looked over the list of names.

“What, you’re going to do it now?” Smokey asked.

I shrugged. “No time like the present. Plus, I don’t see any additional benefit in waiting until tomorrow.”

Li offered me the use of his bedroom for privacy, but I waved him off. I was only going to tell him and Smokey everything anyway, so they might as well listen in.

The first number I dialed was the retiree, a woman named Grace Carothers. The phone was answered on the second ring by a female who responded to my query by identifying herself as a home nurse and telling me that Mrs. Carothers had advanced Alzheimer’s. In short, her ability to answer any questions was virtually nil. I thanked the nurse and hung up.

The next two numbers were equally fruitless. One went straight to voicemail, prompting me to hang up since I didn’t want to leave a long, convoluted message about who I was and the purpose of my call. The other call was actually answered by the nurse I intended to reach, but – citing patient confidentiality – she refused to answer any questions or volunteer any information that could help me. With the following call, however, I hit the jackpot.

The nurse in question was named Pilar Gutierrez, and she was actually at work in the hospital when I called. (She was currently on a night-time rotation.) It turned out that her daughter – who had recently given birth to Mrs. Gutierrez’s first grandchild – tended to have a lot of questions about caring for the baby, so Mrs. Gutierrez had taken to forwarding all calls to her cell phone when she was on duty.

I took a moment to explain who I was and why I was calling. To my great surprise, she actually remembered Mary Jones. Even more, she was willing to discuss her with me.

“But I’m a little busy at the moment,” Mrs. Gutierrez said. “If you like, you can come by my house tomorrow before my shift and we can talk then.”

Excited beyond words, I thanked her and almost forgot to get her address before promising to meet her as suggested.

After getting off the phone, I did a fist-pump and shouted, “Yes!”

Smokey laughed, and even Li cracked what appeared to be a sincere smile at my schoolgirl excitement. At last we were making some serious progress.