CHAPTER 5

Zach Feygen took yet another swallow of coffee and ran his fingers across his smooth, deep-brown scalp. He hadn’t slept in thirty-nine hours and his skin had begun to take on a grayish cast, in striking contrast to the red of his eyes. He sat in front of a desk in an office at City Hall East, across from a small, slender white man with gray hair. Feygen felt exquisitely uncomfortable.

The gray-haired man was Lieutenant Burton Jenks, and despite his diminutive stature he could intimidate the hell out of anyone he chose to. Feygen was no exception.

“He disappeared,” Jenks repeated flatly, staring.

Feygen squirmed.

Cops started calling Jenks “The Monster” after his third week on the job, and at first Feygen laughed about it. Then Jenks called him into his office one morning after Feygen rendered a piece of evidence inadmissible by overlooking a typo on a form. The evidence, a big syringe with the word “pecker” written on it in permanent marker, wasn’t absolutely essential to the prosecution, but it would have saved them a big chunk of time, and when Feygen came back out of Jenks’s office, both his ego and dignity were three sizes smaller. Jenks, with his deadpan stare and frosty voice, garnered enmity from a lot of cops, but got respect from all of them.

“I’m not saying he vanished into thin air,” Feygen said plaintively. He swirled his coffee around. “What I’m saying, my point is, he grabbed this guy, Krago, and dragged him back where I couldn’t see either one of them. And then everybody came in, and they weren’t there.”

Jenks breathed out slowly. “I don’t think you’ve made a point yet.” He flicked his eyes around the room, then back to Feygen. “Let’s review, so I don’t sound like a cretin when I try to explain this to my boss. Maurice Tell made you. So instead of selling you drugs, he decided to kill you. A couple of his boys pulled out shotguns, and you and your pal with the odd-numbered chromosomes stood there sucking your thumbs until somebody, you don’t know who, opened fire on Tell’s men. Am I right so far?”

Feygen didn’t respond. He thought about the ice and the bursts of cold, and felt certain of what Jenks would say if he mentioned them. Jenks went on.

“Okay, now this guy, this ninja warrior guy, this guy grabs one Bryan Krago and makes off with him. In a mostly enclosed space, surrounded by cops. Then, a few minutes later, the guy comes back, tosses Krago onto the hood of an ambulance and disappears again. And not one man out of twenty sees him.”

“...That’s correct, sir.”

Jenks sighed and started drumming his fingers on the table. “I don’t know whether to fire you or put your ninja on the payroll. This has got to be the most blatant display of incompetence I’ve seen so far this decade.” Jenks’s voice remained at conversational level, but the room seemed to grow cooler as he spoke. Feygen sagged. “This guy, this masked man, takes somebody right out from under you, then puts him back, and you don’t know how he did it, where he came from, or where he went. That is simply amazing.”

Jenks stood abruptly. His voice still didn’t get any louder, but Feygen nearly cringed from it. “Get back out to that theatre. Figure out where the guy went. He was on foot, for Christ’s sake.” Jenks went to the door, opened it, and motioned for Feygen to get out. “I don’t want some asshole thinks he’s Batman loose in midtown Atlanta.”

Feygen got to his feet and stepped into the hallway, and had turned around to say something else to Jenks when the older man shut the door hard in his face.

Feygen let the crash of the door fade away, finished his coffee, and threw the Styrofoam cup in a nearby trash can. “Back to the theatre,” he said to no one, and wandered down the corridor.

# # #

High above the city, Ichabod faithfully recorded Feygen’s exchange with Jenks and transmitted it to his brother, along with a verbal message: “You were right. Feygen’s getting closer.”

# # #

At roughly the same time Burton Jenks slammed his door in Zach Feygen’s face, Matt Sinclair bounded down the front steps of the LaCroix and headed up Juniper Street, a spring in his step and a smile in his eyes. He still rode the high from the previous night’s success, and the funk he’d been in the day before seemed very far away. Thoughts of Diedra Shikari were a lot easier to manage today, as well; the office was closed and locked when he passed it, so he hadn’t had to contend with her on his way out.

His destination was a little corner grocery several blocks up, where he planned to purchase the ingredients to his favorite lemon-herb chicken dish. He rarely ate meat, but he thought he owed himself something special by way of celebration. He already “had his mouth set” for it, as his father used to say, and could taste the herbed bread-crumb crust.

This is how exciting I am. Celebrating with chicken.

Matt’s thoughts abruptly derailed as his eyes fell on a copy of the Chronicle lying discarded on a bench. Not the main header, but still above the fold, were the words:

Masked man saves cops’ lives

The brief article had no art, but claimed that an “informed source within the police department” let the reporter know that a masked vigilante had stepped in last night and taken charge when a police operation went bad and endangered two officers’ lives.

He picked up the paper and walked slowly, still reading. The police and everyone else knew he was out here now, which was inevitable, of course, but he hadn’t expected it so soon. He’d hoped to operate for a few weeks, a couple of months even, before anything got into print about him.

Maybe that was unrealistic.

After all, when Bernie Goetz opened fire on the subway muggers back in the eighties, he became a celebrity overnight. And that was just one incident. Matt had already successfully taken action once, and unless something drastic happened, he’d do it again.

He shuffled on his way and tried to decide how he felt about the sudden publicity.

# # #

At 10:36 that night, Kaveyah Wilson pulled her books tighter to her chest and stared out across a vast expanse of pavement. She could just see her car from the corner of the parking deck where she stood. It sat at the far end of the remote, dimly-lit, panhandle extension of the college’s central dorm parking area, cynically nicknamed “The Rape Lot.”

Kaveyah straightened her five-feet-eleven-inch frame and headed for her car. She tried not to be too conspicuous as she rearranged her keys in her right hand so that they pointed out from between her fingers as she made a fist. Just like they taught in self-defense class.

Kaveyah Wilson was a sophomore dance major. Her instructors were unsure about her future as a dancer; they thought she’d be more suited to modeling. But Kaveyah wanted to dance, and knew she had the talent, and daily thought of new places where her instructors could stick their opinions.

This is the last time I do this, she said to herself. It was after ten, and while the rest of the campus headed out for a typical night of nickel beer and pick-up lines, Kaveyah had agreed to help her boyfriend Keith, a Journalism major who wrote for the school paper, study for an Accounting test. “Study,” she said aloud, and snorted, and winced as the sound echoed around her.

He could barely be called her boyfriend. They’d only been on two dates.

That was apparently time enough, in his opinion, for things to get horizontal, and now she had to go all the way back out to her car, back out to the only parking place she could find on the overcrowded campus, alone and after dark to boot. Her eyes narrowed to slits. Under her breath she said, “Keith Gaffney, if I get attacked out here, so help me, I’ll kick your ass up around your ears.”

The car looked only slightly closer.

The lot extended to the edge of a large square of bare earth, several months earlier cleared of trees for construction. Only a single line of mercury vapor lights lit the Rape Lot. The administration thought that was enough. They had agreed, grudgingly, to assign a twice-hourly security patrol to the area after reports of two assaults were filed. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to them to close that section of the lot. Kaveyah entertained dark thoughts as she walked.

Modeling. She turned the word over in her mind. Keith insisted she was a dead ringer for a young Tyra Banks, and was missing out on a fantastic opportunity by not auditioning for modeling jobs. Yeah right. I’ve got the green eyes, but Tyra got my chest and hers both.

Four cars away from her own, she heard a sound. She stopped dead still, listening.

Kaveyah drove a gray Honda, a gladly accepted cast-off from her MBA older brother. Parked between her and the Honda were two sedans and two sport utilities. The sound seemed to have come from between the two SUV’s. She strained her ears to hear it again.

Nothing. Silence.

Kaveyah looked back toward the dorms, hoping to see the flashing yellow light of the security patrol truck, but there was nothing. Not even other people coming from or going to their cars. She turned back toward the Honda and moved into the center of the aisle, as far away from the deep shadows between the vehicles as she could get.

It might have been a cat. There were plenty of stray cats around.

But it hadn’t sounded like a cat. It sounded like something big. And it had come from between the two Tahoes, where their high, square frames cast deep shadows.

She had parked next to the farther away of the two Chevy’s, and to get to her car she’d have to enter one of those deep shadows. Kaveyah took a nervous step sideways, tried to decide what to do. She wouldn’t have thought a parking lot could seem this threatening, and surely during the day it wouldn’t be. But the sun had set long since, and her heart pumped frantically, and she realized she was terrified.

Turn around. Turn around and walk to the dorm, simple as that. Call somebody. Anybody.

No no no. Dammit, stop being silly! You’re no little girl. You handled Keith Gaffney tonight. There’s no reason you can’t walk to your car, for pity’s sake. So move. Go on. Go.

The seconds stretched out. She didn’t hear the sound again. Keys bristling from her clenched fist, she started for her car and waded into the shadow.

Nothing jumped out at her as she fitted the key to the lock.

Nothing jumped out at her as she opened the door and tossed her books in the back seat.

Smiling to herself at being so silly, she took one foot off the ground to put it on the floorboard of the Honda, and a hand flicked out from under her car and clamped around her other ankle.

The hand felt like stone, and jerked her shin into the doorframe. She lost her balance and bounced off the side of the Tahoe, and the pavement slammed into her and drove all the air out of her lungs, and she gasped as a man pushed and pulled his way from beneath the Honda like a giant slug and fell on top of her.

He was big, huge, a massive wall of soft rounded flesh encasing muscle and bones like steel beams, and she couldn’t believe he’d squeezed himself under her car. Kaveyah drew in a shocked breath and wished she hadn’t, he smelled so bad, dirt and sweat and urine ground into his clothes and his skin. She got one flashed look at his eyes: they were palest blue, almost gray, and very wide, whites visible all the way around. With a lurch she recognized him as one of the college’s landscapers. She’d seen him working around the dorms, and once or twice around Five Points, drinking and laughing with three or four other university employees.

He wore a work shirt with the name Glenn stitched above the pocket.

“Black bitch.” Guttural. “Black bitch, black bitch.” He curled one huge arm around her neck and hauled her to her feet. She clawed at the arm, gasping, weak and unable to take another good breath, and he dragged her backward toward the edge of the lot. He told her in broken, muddled sentences some of what he wanted to do to her, and she tried to scream, but the air couldn’t get past his arm.

She kicked as well as she could, breathing in hitches, but it was like kicking a mattress. She tried to slam a foot down onto one of his insteps, but he held her almost completely off the ground, and her feet couldn’t reach their target. Glenn twisted sideways, pulled her between the cars, still toward the trees. He began pawing at her with his free hand, shoved it inside her blouse, mashed her breasts. She made tiny hissing noises as the cartilage in her neck began to give way.

Then Kaveyah heard a sound, like a big book slapped down on a tabletop, and the mercury-vapor light directly above them went out. Glenn still chanted in her ear, but he let go of her breast and turned his head. The sound cracked out again, a little louder this time, and the next light down the line went out and buried them in darkness.

Glenn stopped his chanting and stared up toward the dead lights, and his grip relaxed the tiniest bit, but he still held Kaveyah pinned. He made a strange, confused trill in the back of his throat—and his arm sprang open convulsively. Kaveyah heard another sharp sound, different from the first two, but couldn’t tell what it was, and Glenn staggered away from her, out into the aisle between the cars.

Kaveyah had no idea what was happening around her, but she did know she was free, and suddenly realized she still gripped her keys in her fist, forgotten till now. She stumbled to the Honda and climbed in, jammed the keys into the ignition, slammed her door and locked it, turned on the headlights, and the twin beams lit the scene before her perfectly.

Glenn and another man stood not five feet from the front of her car.

Glenn kept his feet, but just barely. A long, freely-bleeding cut curved down across his forehead and onto one cheek, and a narrow metal spike of some kind was lodged in his right wrist. The other man had Glenn’s left arm in a punishing joint lock, and Kaveyah gasped.

The man was all in black, in something like a close-fitting jumpsuit, and wore a black full-head mask.

Relays clicked over in Kaveyah’s mind, and she realized this must be the guy from the paper. The vigilante. The man who, until now, she hadn’t really believed was real.

The vigilante turned his head and looked at her through the windshield with blank white eyes, and she didn’t know who to be more terrified of, him or the man who’d attacked her.

Glenn let out a scream like a rockslide and the two men broke apart. The vigilante fell back, half-crouched. Frozen, she watched as Glenn knotted up a fist like a wrecking ball and slammed a punch at the vigilante’s head.

The vigilante twisted aside and caught Glenn’s wrist as it passed him, pivoted, brought the arm up over one shoulder and snapped it cleanly at the elbow.

Then he shoved the huge man a pace backward and gave him the most devastating kick to the groin Kaveyah had ever seen, in movies or real life. Glenn doubled over, his mouth huge and his great round gut heaving.

The vigilante glanced back at Kaveyah, and her stomach contracted. He pushed Glenn out of the way of her car. The huge man fell to the pavement with a thick, meaty smack that she heard as clearly as she’d heard his scream. Smoothly, with a minimum of motion and effort, the vigilante stooped and pulled the metal spike free from Glenn’s wrist.

As Kaveyah trembled, the man in black came to her door—she realized the window was rolled down a crack, and scrambled to put it back up, couldn’t find the button—but he only spoke to her.

“You’re safe,” he said gently. Kaveyah stopped fumbling for the window control and looked up at him. “But you’d better go now. Report this.”

Bizarrely, for a bare instant, Kaveyah thought she smelled lemon chicken. Then the man backed away from her, into the shadows, and faded from sight.

For about a second she stared, tried to see where he’d gone, but couldn’t.

Kaveyah jammed the car in gear and got the hell out of there.


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