Emergence (34 page)

“I don’t know. Who?”

“I don’t know, either. But I do know that back when I was Angelus, a TCA chimeric named Ursus was killed in front of the Montana State Capitol by a bullet just like that. Six months ago we might have said it was that Hathcock guy they put on trial, but he’s dead now. And a bullet like that never turned up again, as far as I know, until now.”

Jim peeled the label off his Modelo thoughtfully.

“So why would somebody shoot Lance Lattimer with a radium bullet? They had to know who he was.”

“And what would happen if they didn’t shoot to kill. Snipers don’t generally aim for the arm.”

“Maybe somebody spoiled his shot,” said Jim.

“Or maybe the shooter wanted Tantrum to come out and play. Maybe the same guy who popped the Red Wraith after the Hathcock trial incident. Maybe another player, who knows?” Father Eladio drained his beer and plunked it down. “Anyway, that’s what the defense is saying now.”

NINE

It was dusk when Father Eladio got up to prepare for Saturday evening Mass. He encouraged Jim to stay, but Jim begged off. He didn’t get much from church and the Mass was in Spanish anyway.

He pulled up his hood and lowered the brim of his cap as he walked out into the street, upstream of the tide of elderly Mexican ladies fingering rosary beads and tired-eyed men in mesh back caps and cowboy hats and wailing brown babies.

He saw the big guy in the white Stetson and smile pocket shirt on the corner, one boot heel propped up against the lamppost he was leaning on. Those boots were size 20, easy, and the cowboy’s bucket jaw and linebacker shoulders made him look like a tall tale come to life. He was big enough to reach up and bat the streetlight with one huge hand, probably put it out like a candle. He was no LF cowboy with a curled snakeskin hat and pastel blue and black bowling shirt. His huge boots were scuffed and worn, his hat sweat stained, the brown Western shirt as un-ironic as a wad of Skoal. His skin was a shade lighter than the neighborhood might’ve produced, but with his black hair and dark eyes he might’ve passed unnoticed, except for the fact that he was heads taller than anybody else in a four-block radius.

And the big fellow picked him out of the parishioners as easy as Jim had made him.

That boot slid down the lamppost and the heels started clopping heavy as Clydesdale hooves on the concrete.

Jim’s first thought was to duck back into the church, but he didn’t want to bring Father Eladio any more trouble, or risk a destructive fight around so many people.

He knew the cowboy was a chimeric, and suspected who he was.

Pecos. TCA’s own homegrown-
aw-shucks-t’weren’t nothin’-ma’am
-Texas-good-old-boy. Wade Sixkiller was his name. A part-Cherokee who’d been discovered wrestling bulls in a little traveling rodeo outside El Paso at the age of eighteen. So he hadn’t gone home to Texas after all.

Powers. He didn’t know Pecos’ powers exactly. Just knew he was supposed to be pretty strong and tough, and he had once brought down a Cessna with a cable steel lariat he didn’t appear to be carrying.

Jim turned and quickened his pace down the street as Pecos reached the curb.

“Hey, ‘pard! Hold up a sec!” he boomed over the heads of the Mexicans headed for church.

Some of them looked at him, the women and girls lingering.

Father Eladio appeared in the door of the church and called out, smiling.

“Is that Wade Sixkiller I hear? Didn’t realize you were a Catholic, Wade!” And then, in rapid Spanish, he fired off an announcement to his parishioners, the only word of which Jim caught was ‘Pecos.’

Suddenly everybody took an interest in the big cowboy. They mobbed him, the little kids running up and hugging his tree trunk legs, the girls crowding in close to sneak a feel of his hard pectorals, the men breaking into gold-capped smiles and coming in to slap his back, to touch him for luck, or just to say they had. He was a celebrity. A bona fide superhero.

Jim smiled but didn’t look back, as he heard Pecos mutter.

“God dang it, Angelus.”

“Don’t blaspheme, Pecos,
por favor
. It’ll turn the old ladies against you.””

“Hey, kid!” Pecos called over the chatter of his fans.

Jim crossed the street and headed for the alley between a bodega and a currency exchange, where the people inside were peering out the windows at the commotion, a couple of the flannel and wife beater
cholos
sitting on the curb in front of the grocery standing up and coming over.

“They want you to come inside, Pecos. They want you to say the novena with them.” He apparently repeated himself in Spanish as an interrogative to the gathering crowd, and they issued an affirmative in unison.

Jim spared a look just before he disappeared down the alley, and a smirk he wished Father Eladio could see.

Pecos was swamped by his admirers. He kept glancing after Jim as he was swept in the tide up the church steps.

But something made Jim frown. He was talking into a cellphone between dumb smiles and accommodating nods at the people around him.

Jim heard car tires squeal and saw a shiny black SUV come around the corner, the engine roaring.

As the headlights flashed across him, he broke into a run.

Midway down the alley a second vehicle skidded to a stop at the end of the alley, tipping over a pair of trash bins.

The passenger and rear doors opened and two men in stereotypical black suits popped out, brandishing bulky, quite original-looking weapons.

They fired simultaneously, and Jim leapt into the air.

Something stung him in the right ankle and a metal net went skidding across the alley pavement, sparking with blue lightning as it went.

He rocketed skyward as the TCA agents or whoever they were cursed below him.

When he was a block away, he slowed long enough to inspect his ankle. There was a dart like he’d seen them porcupine Tantrum with at the stadium. It was sticking in his sneaker, the tip just poking through his sock and hiding in his flesh. He batted it out, but saw a wound. How potent were the drugs they used? Was he just imagining nausea?

He tore his belt from his pants and cinched it tight around his right thigh just above the knee.

He tore through the air, the wind rushing in his ears. His vision began to swim somewhere over Hillywood and Vane, and he had to skim the rooftops, using the garish lights below to navigate.

He heard helicopters. Were they for him? He didn’t know. He couldn’t keep flying around like this, or he’d be photographed, identified. Then what?

He tumbled into a sloppy landing on the roof of the Pantazis Theater. Whatever TCA used, it was working on him. Maybe slower than it should, but it was doing him in. He felt drowsy, drunk.

He heard sirens. Just the usual Hillywood nonsense? Fight in line at a club? Guy in a Hero costume punching out a Japanese tourist down in front of the Mandarin Theatre for not tipping?

He saw a police chopper bank in his direction a few miles out and decided to play it safe and drop down into the alley. He landed a little harder than he’d intended and crashed down on a dumpster, fell hard on his rear end.

He sat there for a minute, panting, watching the chopper light.

He dug out his phone and fumbled with the touchscreen. Everything was blurring.

The chopper was loud, getting louder.

He couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the line, just shouted in the mic, or thought he did. He couldn’t be sure if his words were clear.

He tried to tell Tink to pick him up. Tried to tell him he was behind the Pantazis in the alley.

The garbage began to blow in little tornadoes all over the alley, and he winced against the tempest of napkins and newspapers, slipped into the stage exit doorway as the alley flooded with light.

It hurt his eyes and he closed them. His eyelids were like heavy shutter doors slamming down, and when he found he couldn’t lift them, he settled into a cramped, cold heaviness, and the whir of the chopper blades overhead faded away.

Jim fully expected to wake up strapped to a cold steel slab miles underground, surrounded by glaring lights and white coats.

The silk sheets took him completely by surprise, as did the ocean view. He recognized the Malibar coastline, having been here to bust up the baby-napping thing only a few weeks ago.

The room was dim from the half-drawn vertical blinds, and the sun was slipping down toward the waves, illuminating the foam and making the beach glow orange like Tang. Dusk. How long had he been out?

There was a balcony just off the bedroom, and but for his jacket, hat, and shoes, he was still dressed.

The TCA tranks had left him groggy. His head felt four pounds heavier, and when he tried to slip out of bed and crouch in the shadows on the floor to get his bearings, it was more like his bearings got him, and he flopped down hard on the wood floor, whapping his nose so that his eyes stung and his ears rang and his upper lip ran with hot liquid copper.

The room filled with light, and he instinctively leapt up and back, into the corner of the room, his back against the ceiling.

He blinked away the light and glanced toward the glass door of the balcony.

“Wait!”

Her voice.

Jesus
.

He covered his bleeding nose with the back of his hand, splayed his fingers like a kid at a horror movie, not wanting to see the woman in the doorway, but desperate to look.

Cassidy Hollis stood there in jeans and a black sweater, her face lined with the tracks of tears.

“Oh my God,” she whispered into her own hands, and sat down heavily on the stool at the mirrored dressing table next to the door. “It
is
you. Jim.”

He saw his reflection. A fifteen year-old kid who looked thirteen, skinny, in dirty jeans sagging around his narrow waist, and a baggy t-shirt. A boy in stained socks, clinging to the ceiling of a woman’s bedroom, blood dripping down on the floor from between his upraised fingers.

He had only been able to glimpse her at Tink’s. The Cassidy he had known was in there. This was the girl grown. But she was different than she looked on television. They had covered her little flaws. When she cried on the show, there were no blemishes. She was like an alabaster statue, befitting a warrior queen. Here, her face was flushed, the hairs springing out of place, like they used to when they’d ridden their bikes together. The freckles. She hadn’t outgrown them. He’d wondered where they’d gone, watching her on TV. Of course they’d just covered them up. Hillywood covers up everything.

She totally destroyed him. She was painful to look at, like a first crush glimpsed with her children in adulthood, he imagined. But this was worse.

“Ah, fuck,” he whimpered. “Fuck!”

He sprang for the glass door.

“Pixie dust,” she said quickly.

He had his hand on the sliding door. He didn’t tear it aside and leap out over the balcony, but he didn’t turn around either. He couldn’t look at her.

He heard her weight on the floorboards, saw the ghost of her reflection growing in the glass and shut his eyes.

“You didn’t mean to call me,” she said.

“No.”

He must have dialed her in his delirium. He was used to there being only two numbers in his contacts. The tranks had muddied his brain. He hadn’t been thinking. And the chopper over the alley, he hadn’t been able to hear her voice message.

“What happened?”

“TCA agents tried to grab me. I got shot full of some kind of tranquilizer. How long have I been out?”

“A day. I didn’t think you’d be here when I got back. I thought I’d imagined you.”

Jesus. A whole day? He had thought he was out only a couple hours. TCA didn’t mess around.

“How did you get my number?” she asked. “How did you know how to contact me?”

He took the crumpled card from his back pocket and dropped it on the floor.

“Nico,” she said. “You’ve kept in touch with him, but not me?””

He didn’t say anything, though he felt his ears grow red and hot, the color spreading across the back of his neck.

“That day. The day of the bomb. Something happened to you. I’ve read…about chimerics. Or…PwP’s. Talked to some. From TCA. You know, consultants for the show. Sometimes, something terrible has to happen for them to get their powers.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

He opened his eyes, and saw her reaching one hand out to him.

“Don’t.”

“Why?” she said, though the hand hovered. “Jim…””

“Just don’t.”

The hand faded away from the image in the glass.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

To protect you,
he wanted to say. He wanted to tell her how he’d become Pan to find out who’d sent them that bomb, who’d killed their friends. He wanted to say it had all been to keep her safe.

But he didn’t say that. All of that. Pan. The green suit. Flying around, beating up bad guys. Despite all he’d seen and done, to say it, sounded childish.

“Look at me, Cass. You know why.”

“You don’t have to be…ashamed.”

Was he ashamed? Was that what it was?

“The way you’re talking to me. Like I’m a kid. I’m not a kid, Cass.””

But he hated the sound of that, too. Hated the sound of his own voice. It sounded exactly like something a kid would say.

“I know…I…”

“
Do
you know what it’s like?” he hissed. “To see you? To think about what we had, and know…it can’t ever be that way again?”

Goddamn, he sounded like a love-struck middle-schooler living out his vampire fantasy scenario. He wanted to turn around. Wanted to tell her all these things. Wanted what? To kiss her? His face flushed. He’d damn near have to stand on his toes. Would she laugh at him? God, he was terrified that she would.

“That was a long time ago, Jim,” she said slowly. “We were both kids.”

He bit down hard.

“Yeah. Except now, only I am.”

He flung open the door so hard the glass cracked. He stepped out onto the balcony.

Damn!

Could nothing go right? Everything he did and said made him feel like an idiot.

“Wait, Jim!” she called from the room. “I’m trying to understand……”