Marshall Conrad: A Superhero Tale Page 5

  He wouldn’t gag her, but he would take her car keys so when she eventually escaped, she would have to walk for a mile and a half to the highway for help. The SUV he rented was hidden in a ditch next to the logging road, and it was a short five minute walk from where he’d leave her. He reckoned it would take her at least half a day until someone found her, more than enough time to return the SUV and head back home. His wife wouldn’t ask any questions, she would assume he was out of town on business.

  It seemed like the perfect plan.

  The migraine hit me at 9:30 PM. I was examining the pictures from Marnie Brindle’s stalker. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted because while she was nice to look at, she made me feel old. Then again, she did smell good.

  So sue me—I’m a dirty old man.

  Of course, she was scared to death, and now that the police were looking into one murder, I didn’t want my upstairs neighbor to become victim number two. Whoever had taken those pictures knew where Marnie lived because the last one showed her on the balcony of her apartment talking on her cellphone. Since she didn’t have any family in town, I felt there was no other alternative than to make my place available until I figured out the identity of the stalker. He would never know she was in my apartment because I usually keep the blinds drawn, and I’d warned her about going near the windows. She would be safe, for now.

  I don’t wear a costume when I’m taking out the bad guy. My outfit is a black leather jacket, leather pants and motorcycle boots. I don’t wear a mask, either. They’re tacky. Instead, I pull the hood from my sweatshirt over my head when my eyes start glowing. You’re no doubt expecting that I probably take the stairs to the roof of my apartment building and fly to the scene of a crime waiting to happen. If only it were that easy. Unlike your favorite comic book hero, I can’t fly to the scene of a crime because the Energizer Bunny is still sleeping. He usually wakes up when a perpetrator is about to make his move. That’s when I can draw on his willful intent and charge my body. I know; that’s not terribly glamorous, right? Well, it gets better.

  Willful intent acts like a compass and I am instinctively drawn to the location of a crime waiting to happen, so I will usually drive my Tempo to a secluded spot nearby. I park in a place that offers good cover, and I’ll head to the rooftops so I can silently drop down on the perpetrator. The force of gravity on my two-hundred pound frame usually knocks the guy unconscious, and if everything works out, I’ll take away his weapon, cuff him to whatever is convenient, and that’s that.

  After I’ve put down a criminal, I might spend the next few hours flying around the city. I can usually prevent a few crimes while I’m at it, but eventually the bunny likes to go back to bed and he usually won’t tell me when he’s about to retire for the evening. The downside of this is that I’ve been known to fall out of the sky into a garbage bin or crash land in a tree more than once. Adding further insult to injury, I’ll be forced to take a bus or a cab to the place where I parked my car. Take that, Bruce Wayne—this crime fighter uses public transit!

  And the perpetrators?

  More often than not, they’re discovered by someone a few hours later, and a Sheriff’s deputy is sent to unlock the handcuffs. Naturally the police are skeptical about anyone claiming they were attacked by a man in a hood with glowing eyes, so the perpetrator usually winds up getting a psychological assessment. (A part of me muses about just how many more perpetrators will report being attacked by a guy with glowing eyes before the cops start believing them. You’d think they’d be onto me by now.)

  The particular bad guy was cursing to himself as I crouched behind a ventilation shaft approximately two stories above the Rav-4. He was clearly an amateur as he tried to break into her car with a coat hanger. I heard a loud metallic snap, and I half-expected a car alarm to go off, but that didn’t happen.

  “Sonofabitch, sonofabitch...” he whispered, as he struggled to slide the hanger in through a slit in the window. I could see the rigger’s knife in a black leather sheath attached to his belt and the red plastic ties stuffed into his back pocket. He wasn’t a big man, but he looked sturdy enough—not that it would matter much. I’ve brought down criminals of every shape and size over the years, so this guy wouldn’t be a problem. Normally I would have dropped right on top of him, but I didn’t want to damage the roof of the car so I decided to distract him when I made my move.

  I’m a nice guy, that way.

  Through the ventilator shaft I could hear a woman humming a few bars of some top-forty tune, and it echoed through the hallway of the building. Probably his victim leaving her office, but I couldn’t be certain. The perpetrator was getting angrier by the second as he fought with the door. I felt the now familiar surge of energy shooting through my veins. There was a loud click as the perpetrator’s coat hanger finally unlocked the door. The burning sensation in my eyes reminded me to pull the hood over my head. It was time.

  “Hey asshole!” I shouted, as I threw my legs over the edge of the building and pushed my body off the roof.

  “What the...” He choked, as he looked up just in time to see my glowing eyes slice through the darkness of the parking lot. He instinctively vaulted back against the wall of the building as I landed with a hollow thud between the perpetrator and the car.

  “W-What the hell are y-you?” he stammered, as he reached for the knife. I slowly raised myself up and cocked my head in amusement as the light from my eyes bounced off the shining steel blade of his knife.

  “A little scared, are we?” I whispered, trying to sound as menacing as possible for a bored crimefighter. “Things not working out according to plan?”

  In a flash, he lunged at me with the knife and I stepped aside as the blade bounced off the glass of her car, accidentally stabbing the man in the right forearm. He screeched like a cat whose tail was on the wrong side of Grandma’s rocking chair, as he pulled out the knife and adopted a defensive stance.

  “H-h-how did you know?” he hissed, as he jabbed the knife toward me.

  I gave him an impatient look and folded my arms across my chest.

  “This is getting boring,” I said, stepping back to avoid the blade. “Burn...”

  Instantaneously the knife became red-hot in his hand, the air took on a sickeningly sweet smell as it seared into his flesh.

  “Jeeezis!” he shrieked, as he dropped the knife and fell to his knees clutching his smoldering hand against his chest. I kicked the knife against the back tire of the Rav-4 as I grabbed his bleeding forearm and squeezed.

  “Betcha that hurts. You should get that looked at,” I said, sarcastically, as I dragged him over to the back door of the building and handcuffed him to the door handle. I could hear the woman’s footsteps as she approached the door.

  “Who are you?” he whimpered in a defeated voice.

  “Space alien,” I muttered, as I walked over to pick up the knife and put it on the roof of her car. “Thanks for ruining my night, asshole. I missed Dancing with the Stars because of you.”

  My heart froze when I saw the spiral-engraved rock on the ground beside the knife.

  Chapter 7

  The Curiosity Nook is best described as a mausoleum for oddities.

  A life-sized Boris Yeltsin cut-out in the window waves hello to prospective customers entering her store, and the first thing you see when you walk in is a magnetic sign in the foyer that reads If you don’t have an open mind then don’t open your wallet. Once you pass through the foyer, you’re greeted by a glamour portrait of Stella Weinberg that looks like it was done in paint-by-number. The words Stella Weinberg, Proprietress are engraved into a brass plate mounted in the bottom of the painting’s gilded frame.

  “I see that you’ve been immortalized on canvas there, Stella,” I said, with a hint of sauciness in my voice. “How much?”

  Stella was organizing the collection of spiral rocks in a display case and didn’t see me come in. “It’s not for sale, Conrad. You can’t afford me,” she said, as she slid the door close
d. “Did you bring it?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Well, let’s have a look at it.”

  I walked over to the display case and handed the rock to Stella. “I found this last night—it has the same spiral marking as the others.”

  Stella examined the engraving with a magnifying glass. “Where did you find it again?” she asked.

  “Oh, some parking lot downtown,” I said, vaguely.

  Stella pulled a china marker out of a cup filled with pens and pencils and wrote “24” on the bottom of the rock, then put it down on top of the display case. She gave me a suspicious look as she took her bifocals off and cleaned them with a small silk cloth. “Parking lot, huh?” she asked, with a deliberate dose of skepticism.

  “Yep.”

  Stella frowned. “All right then, a parking lot it is. Have a look around the store, I’ll be right back.”

  As she disappeared into the backroom, I wandered over to a ten-foot high bookcase decorated with NASCAR stickers. Each shelf was overflowing with everything from phallic statues to Coca-Cola memorabilia, and I couldn’t make up my mind if Stella’s curiosity shop was spooky or downright tacky. The walls were plastered with antique photographs in hardwood frames and the ceiling was a mosaic of 1950s-era travel posters advertising affordable trips to Rio in a comfortable DC-3. I noticed an eerie green glow coming from the radio dial on the ancient Philco that was playing a comedy skit from The Jack Carson Radio Show, and I did a double-take when I saw that it wasn’t plugged into the wall.

  “Nice,” I muttered.

  “Ya like that?” said Stella from behind her counter. “Genuine haunted radio—it gets them every time.”

  I peered behind the Philco to find its power source, only to find a brass plate screwed into the floor with the words made you look engraved in three-inch font.

  “You have a strange sense of humor,” I said, dryly.

  “That I do,” Stella laughed. “So here’s the thing, Marshall. I’d like to know if you found that rock in the same parking lot where the cops found a guy handcuffed to a door this morning.” She tossed a copy of The Greenfield Examiner on top of the counter.

  I looked at the front page of the paper. The headline read Man Charged with Attempted Abduction, and there was a paragraph-long snippet saying it was the twelfth person found handcuffed by police this year.

  “Not sure what you’re getting at, Stella.”

  Stella gave me a stern look and then dropped a large leather scrapbook on top of the newspaper. “Not sure, huh? Have a look inside—maybe it will jog your memory.”

  I opened the scrapbook to see headlines and articles from The Greenfield Examiner dating back to 1995. The first one read Missing Child Found: Mother Charged, followed by another story about a teacher who was found mysteriously handcuffed to a dumpster and subsequently charged with attempted rape of a seventeen-year-old student.

  “It looks like the Greenfield Sheriff’s Department has been doing its job for the past decade,” I said, as I flipped through the pages. “How much for the book?”

  Stella snatched the scrapbook from the top of the counter. “It’s not for sale.Why would you want to buy it from me?”

  I gave her a sour look.

  “We’re not going to talk about those rocks, are we?” I said.

  “Eventually. Right now I am more interested in where you were last night.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m curious to learn if you know anything about our resident vigilante.”

  I leaned against the top of the display case and gestured for Stella to come closer. “Shh. I’m an undercover cop,” I said, in cryptic tone. “I’ve spent the last ten years handcuffing bad guys to inanimate objects as a means of positively influencing the public’s opinion of the Greenfield Sheriff’s Department.”

  Stella looked unimpressed. “Want to know something?”

  “What’s that?”

  “If you had a secret, it would be safe with me,” she whispered. “I am the most open-minded person you’ll ever meet in your life, and I might know some people who could help you find the person who killed Stephen Hodges.”

  I sighed heavily. “What are you getting at, Stella?”

  “I’m suggesting that those headlines in my scrapbook point to something much more interesting than a crazy vigilante,” she said. “I make it my business to keep track of anything that can’t be explained by conventional means, and I have access to resources that most people would scoff at.”

  “You’re not one of those wacky people who submit bizarre stories to The Weekly World News, are you, Stella?” I asked, sarcastically. “You know, ‘Werewolf Baby Born in Taxicab’ and all of that?”

  Stella rolled her eyes. “All right, Marshall, go lock the door and then sit down over there,” she said, pointing at a leather lounging chair next to the bookcase. “I have something I want to show you.”

  Stella once again disappeared into the back of her store as I walked over to the front door and flipped the lock. I was becoming increasingly concerned by her insistence that I had something to do with Greenfield’s low crime rate, and it was clear she knew more about me than I liked.

  “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen or heard in your life, Marshall?” she shouted from the backroom. “This is important!”

  “Why?” I called back.

  “Because I don’t want you to have a heart attack in my store. It’s bad for business!”

  I stretched back in the lounging chair and thought of a decent enough lie that Stella would believe.

  “I don’t know... How about that old Todd Browning movie from the thirties about side-show freaks? That was pretty weird,” I said, as Stella returned and heaved a reel-to-reel tape recorder onto the front counter.

  “Oh yeah, that’s a good one,” she said. “I’ve got three copies of that movie if you want to buy it.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass. What’s with that old relic?”

  “A strange recording I made the other night,” said Stella as she fiddled with the volume knob. “You ready?”

  “Sure, where’s the popcorn?”

  “Just shut up and listen,” she said, as she hit the play button.

  There was a strange hissing as the magnetic tape ran through the heads on the old machine. I could hear the hum of the building’s ventilation system and a faint crackle like sparks exploding above a camp fire.

  “It sounds like the inside of your store,” I said.

  “Shh... just listen,” she ordered.

  The thumping became louder and then took on the familiar sound of hard soled shoes walking on a cement floor. The hissing abruptly ended and then I heard a masculine voice that sounded like it was talking through a hollow tube speaking in what might have been King James English:

  “Thou art immune to their hate, bring forth thy malice. Thou shalt not accept thine guilt. Thy words and thoughts are no bane to thine deeds.”

  She pressed the stop button. “What do ya make of that?” she asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders and walked over to the counter. “I don’t know, are you in the habit of speaking in a medieval tongue?” I asked. “Where did you record it?”

  “Here,” she said. “I fell asleep at my desk and I heard that voice coming from inside the store, and I was terrified to come out. I mean, how many people talk like that, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I didn’t want anyone to know I was here, so I just hit the record button.”

  “Someone broke in? Jesus, Stella, you should have called the cops!”

  She rolled her eyes again. “You’re not getting it, Conrad—it was after 11:00 PM and the doors were locked. I was alone.”

  I gave her a confused look. “So what are you saying—your store is haunted?”

  She shrugged. “If only that were the case ... well, there isn’t much use in playing cat and mouse with you, Marshall. You might want to sit down for what I’m about to reveal.”

&nbs
p; “Fine,” I said, as I slumped back down in the leather chair.

  She began walking in a circle around the leather armchair, then she stooped over and drew a white circle with a stick of chalk around my feet.

  “I’ve received some information you’re going to have some difficulty absorbing,” Stella warned. “Please try to understand that my source of information told me you’d be at the news conference.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Stella?” I asked, nervously. “You are seriously freaking me out, here.”

  “Take it easy Marshall,” she said, motioning for me to calm down. “I know this is going to sound like you’ve been set up, but that’s simply not the case. There’s a reason why I grilled you at that news conference, so don’t blow a gasket, all right? I’ve been following your exploits ever since you went to Pastor Gregory’s bible camp.”

  My blood immediately ran cold.

  Nobody outside of the Sheriff’s office could have known what happened that night when I was fourteen. It was impossible.

  “Look, I have to get going—this is just too weird for me,” I said, as I got up from the chair.

  “Sit down!” Her voice boomed through the store, causing the walls to shake. Something shoved me back into the leather chair and I struggled to get back to my feet. “I am not your enemy and you’re not the only person in the world with unique abilities!”

  Whatever force pushed me into the chair clamped down tightly across my lap, and my feet immediately felt as if they were immersed in ice. She chanted in a stramge form of Latin as she held her hands in front of her chest, her eyes fixed in concentration on my body.

  “I’m on your side, Marshall,” Stella urged. “Now please, stop struggling and listen to me—I’m trying to help you.”

  She wasn’t evil, otherwise my eyes would have started glowing. I dug my hands into the arms of the chair and pushed with all my might, but to no avail. Stella invoked a power I’d never before encountered and she wasn’t about to release me until she had a chance to say her piece.