Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight (11 page)

The teachers managed to rein in their charges, and the doors quickly closed, granting us a little tiny bit of privacy. I undid the lock and opened the door. I motioned the cop to look inside and make sure I didn’t have a rabid squirrel or something with which to wreak havoc on the school in some bizarre revenge scheme. He looked in and nodded. I took my coat, shook it out to demonstrate I had nothing hidden inside, and put it on. I then picked up my gym bag and went to close the locker door. Let the staff collect the other books and clean it out.

“Hold on a minute,” the cop said. “Give me the bag so I can look inside.”

I had held a sneaking suspicion this was coming. I didn’t have Gym that day; in fact, I didn’t have Gym that quarter. I’d rotated out of Gym and into what passed for a Health class. This made my old gym bag a handy place to stash a Scarlet Knight costume for occasions like a couple days before. I would’ve abandoned it, but I had no way of being sure I could sneak in somehow and collect it before they cleared out my locker and discovered it on their own.

“You don’t really want to do that, officer. I haven’t had a chance to do laundry this week and … ”

His hand hovered over his gun, and I tensed. For all he knew, I could have a gun of my own, or a bomb, or some other implement of destruction in my bag, and my hesitance was feeding his paranoia.

I had no way out. My secret was going to be blown one way or the other. I figured I might as well live to tell the tale instead of being suicided-by-cop. I put the gym bag down gently in front of him, held my hands out in front of me to show I wasn’t carrying anything that could do him any harm, took a step away, and sighed. “Go ahead. Take a look.”

He picked it up, held the opening away from him, and unzipped it. When nothing exploded out, he looked at the contents.

His eyes got so wide they threatened to squeeze his nose clean off his face. At least I had the pleasure of watching his reaction. I needed a laugh right about then, and he didn’t disappoint. He stared into the bag for at least ten seconds, but to my great relief, didn’t pull the costume out for a better look. “This is yours?”

“Yep.”

He stared into the bag some more, then reached in to gently move the costume pieces around, still careful not to let anyone who might have been glancing out a window in one of the classrooms see. “This real?”

“Yep.”

“You’re—”

“Yep.”

He quickly zipped the bag up, then stood there shaking his head, as if trying to dislodge the correct words for the situation.

“You’re right. You need to go do laundry.” He tossed the bag to me, and then winked conspiratorially. I winked back.

Mrs. Carr glared at us, as if trying to figure out what was going on. I leaned in and whispered, “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.”

She threw me one of the worst “teacher” glares I’ve ever been subjected to. “Excuse me, boys, but there’s no point in hiding the contents of the bag from me. I’m not as stupid as I look. I know who Bobby really is.”

In a classroom on the floor below, some poor kid got knocked in the head by my lower jaw. “What … you know?”

“Of course I know, you idiot. Do you think guidance counselors don’t check up on the kids they’re in charge of when they start showing behavioral changes?”

The cop looked almost as confused as I was. “So all that stuff with the sword fight? I had a sneaking suspicion it was bull. You had me fooled, though. You’re both pretty good.”

My brain was recovering from smacking into a brick wall, and I was slowly regaining the ability to form sentences. “That explains why you were covering for me, but how did you find out my secret identity?”

She winked. “That’s
my
secret.”

I felt the need to retake control of the situation. “Can we get back to throwing me out of school? I don’t have all day. Oh, wait, actually I do, since I just dropped out.”

Sergeant Simpson became all business again, but there was a subtle change in his demeanor as he and Mrs. Carr walked me to the main doors. He didn’t seem quite as threatening as he had when he thought I might go on a killing spree. Right before I stepped outside, I kissed Mrs. Carr on the cheek. “Thank you for trying,” was all I could say. I pushed the door open and stepped out into the frigid February winds.

“Oh, and Sergeant?” I looked back at Simpson. “I’m in the book. Call me.” Then we winked at each other. Mrs. Carr stared at the cop, and this time it was his turn to say the immortal words.

“Don’t Ask. Don’t tell.”

I don’t know if Mrs. Carr understood that we were teasing her, but the looks she gave us as I walked out into the street were almost worth all the crap I’d gone through that morning. Almost.

***

Once I was safely away from the school, I grabbed my cell phone, turned it on, and punched in Rick’s number on speed dial. I desperately needed to talk to someone, and he was the only reachable sidekick, it being school hours and all.

I heard the click as he answered and didn’t bother to wait for him to speak first. “Dude, it’s me. I’ve just had the worst day you can ever imagine, and I needed to—”

“Bobby?” His voice sounded hollow somehow, as if he’d just been punched in the stomach and was gasping for air. “Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?” Just as I asked, the beeper on my watch went off, and the face flashed red. Code one alert.

“I just found out a few seconds ago.”

“What? Rick, what’s going on?”

“Bobby.” He gasped for air again. “Mr. Zip is dead.”

Complications

I forget what college I’d been visiting when Uncle Jack died. It was one I ended up not applying to anyhow, probably due to the memories of getting the news. It was somewhere in Florida, and I only remember that much because I appreciated not freezing my ass off in the middle of January.

My tour buddy had arranged for me to stay at his frat house instead of a dorm room. Not being completely unappreciative of the social aspects of college life, and having once been described by someone who didn’t really know me as “viciously polite,” I decided not to spurn his offer.

The chemically-altered consciousness of my companions, who were out that morning trying to toss around a football and having a singular lack of success, made me discount the initial shouts of “Dude! Up in the sky!” Never having had the knack for shared hallucinations, I didn’t bother looking up, but the next bit of description made me curious. “It’s that … that dude! Ya know, the one in the white-and-gold outfit?”

White and gold? It couldn’t be. If Uncle Hank was this far away from his home turf and in his Paragon costume to boot, then something was going down. Something bad. I excused myself by saying I was going for a jog, although something told me my compatriots wouldn’t have noticed if I’d just disappeared.

After a few minutes of jogging along the highway, I saw Uncle Hank in the distance, standing by the side of the road. He’d changed out of costume—a cinch for someone as quick as him—and was staring at me. So it wasn’t a coincidence; he was in town to find me. The look on his face—a kind of profound sadness only someone as good and pure as he could have—told me which two words to use.

“What’s wrong?” I gasped once I’d managed to catch up to him.

He took my hand, in a gentle and caring way. “Bobby, I’m so sorry. It’s Jack.”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence, and I wouldn’t have heard him if he had. The numbness was settling in. I struggled mightily and found the lung capacity for four more words.

“Give me a lift?”

We arrived at one of Uncle Jack’s warehouses. I don’t think it was the same one he’d rescued me from five years before, but I was too preoccupied to properly notice. For all I knew, the gods of irony may have selected the exact same one for Uncle Jack to die in; the universe liked to do crap like that.

All the heroes were on the scene when we arrived, and most of them had kind, consoling words, but I wasn’t interested in what they had to say. The only person I wanted to hear say anything at that moment was the one person who wouldn’t feel the need to say words that didn’t matter. He was also the team’s MD, and the person best qualified to explain what had happened. I went right to Mister Mystery.

“How did he die?” Mystery liked to talk in blunt terms and appreciated that I understood his desire for other people to be as tightfisted with words as he could be, so I got right to the point.

“He was stabbed through the heart. Probably with his own sword, since we haven’t found it.”

“His breastplate should have stopped just about any weapon, even his sword.” Another look confirmed why it hadn’t; it was also missing. “Why would he not be wearing his breastplate?”

“He said it was a power source. Might the attacker have taken it?”

I looked around. “There’s something wrong here. How could someone get the jump on him, disarm him, and kill him with his own sword?”

“How can I run faster than light?” Mr. Zip asked. “How can Prism harness the spectrum to do her bidding? The questions go on.” Zip thought for a moment, which at his speed meant he’d cogitated and ruminated over more data than any of us could have done in half an hour. “The suit, breastplate, and sword were all metal, right? Maybe it was someone who controls magnetism?”

“None of our villains are magnetic,” I responded.

“Dinah, Moe, and Humm are all locked up good and tight,” Mystery offered about the magnetic triplets he’d wrangled with, “in plastic cells none of them can get out of.”

“As is Mr. Monopole,” Clytemnestra confirmed about her magnetic villain.

“Then we’ve probably got a new villain in town with some power we haven’t heard of.” Zip sat down, something he didn’t do more than he needed to since he tended to be in constant motion. “I don’t like puzzles, and that’s what this is becoming. I wish we had some answers.”

At the time, I hadn’t wanted any answers, I hadn’t wanted more questions, and I hadn’t wanted any more sympathy. I’d wanted to go lock myself away and be alone for a while.

That was a month before, and this time I didn’t have that kind of luxury. Mr. Zip would never get the answers he’d wanted back then, but maybe I could.

***

I don’t think I’d ever changed into costume so quickly. Of course, part of that was probably due to
where
I changed—the construction site porta-john across the street from the school, and the nearest place I could get any degree of privacy. Trust me, that odor was all the inspiration I needed to change clothes as fast as I could and signal for an emergency teleport to wherever I was being summoned. Getting away from that stench was worth the agony of being yanked apart and slammed back together in Professor Smith’s office.

A few glances around the office, however, and I wished I was back in the porta-john. I’ll spare you the description.

Paragon and Mister Mystery were already on-site, collecting data. Paragon was using that intensive vision thing of his, trying to spot any microscopic details as to the perpetrator’s identity, while Mystery was doing a medical work-over of what was left of the Professor. I tried to take in as much of the situation as I could, but with the two of them on the job, I would just be in the way. When Clytemnestra and Prism jumped in a moment after I had, they seemed to come to the same conclusion and just stood back. Morgaine followed a couple of minutes after, and, without even bothering to speak with anyone else in the room, set right to casting spells to try and reveal the identity of the murderer or reconstruct the crime a bit. It was the same basic procedure they’d followed a month before at the scene of Uncle Jack’s murder.

That was when I finally broke the silence in the room. Under normal circumstances, I probably would have asked for details like who found the body, what we knew already, and so on. But those were the furthest things from my mind. “Has anyone told Tommy?”

Clytemnestra and Prism gasped in horror, not because I’d been so bold as to ask the question, but because neither of them had thought of it first. Mystery answered me. “I sent Shadow to take care of it.” That was a relief. Tommy wasn’t as tight with the Professor (who actually
was
his uncle) as I had been with Uncle Jack, but I was certain he would be taking it hard and would have been devastated if word of the death had come from a disinterested party, or worse, the six o’clock news.

“You discovered the body?”

“Yes,” Mystery said while still not turning his attention away from the job at hand. “He managed to push his panic button, which rang down in Headquarters. I called Paragon and teleported here right away, but as you can see, I was too late.” He pulled out a little digital-voice recorder. “Apparent time of death: 9:32 AM, Mountain Standard Time.” That made it official. By the end of the day, the signature of Dr. Lawrence McBride would grace Professor Seth Smith’s death certificate, the same way it graced Jack Horner’s. A cover story would be worked up, and no one beyond the six of us would ever know what really happened. Assuming we could figure out what
had
really happened.

Mystery narrated his findings into the recorder, and Paragon completed his scans. “Lots of DNA scattered around here. I’ve ignored any that looked like it came off us.” It impressed and disturbed me that he had apparently not only scanned all the Justice Federation’s genetic signatures but also committed them to memory. “I imagine the rest belong to his students. Far too many people have been in and out of this room over the past few days to really nail anything down. If one of his students did this, then we might never figure out which one it was.”

“I seriously doubt any of his students could have pulled this off,” I said, surveying the damage to the body and surrounding room. “Unless one of them is in our league, and we don’t know about them yet.”

“Is there any kind of marker you’ve seen before? Anything that would point to someone we’ve dealt with in the past?” Clytemnestra always knew which questions to ask. If it weren’t for the strength, agility, and other stuff, her inquisitive mind would have been enough of a super power to put her on the team, as far as I was concerned. “Especially anything that would suggest someone from Mr. Zip’s rogues gallery?”