BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL
Chapter One: Doin' A County Jolt
Tijuana, Mexico, 1971
I: Tony
"Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Little Rico?"
There was no one else in the dreary, dirty, dismal cell to hear Tony Stark laugh, and the single guard on duty was asleep, so he laughed at his own little joke.
He lay on his back, draped across the filthy bunk, still, and until that moment, quiet.
What would the obituary say?
"Tony Stark, captain of industry, loved by women, feared by men…"
Loved by women. Feared by men. That was good.
Where was he?
Oh, right.
"Tony Stark, captain of industry, loved by women, feared by men… reputed super-hero, inventor of the Iron Man armour, heir to a great fortune, playboy, philanthropist, genius, inventor, president of Stark Industries died today in the drunk tank in a shitty little jail in Tijuana, of complications from a weeklong binge, boozing and balling it up with the local talent. He was thirty-two years old, and the official cause if death was heart failure and dehydration brought on by extreme stupidity."
Hmm.
Started out well, ended badly.
Oh well.
Pepper will make it sound good.
She'll say I was on a mission.
You were on a mission, Tony. Pussy patrol.
Oh, very funny, brain. When did you become such a joker?
Thinking on it Tony was fairly sure that he had been dosed in that last bar, the one the federales presumably found him lying outside.
Tony?
Oh, not you. Go away.
You're going to be serious now, I can tell.
Tony, this is your brain.
Can't you ever leave me alone? Can't I even die in peace?
No. If you die, I die. Weren't we supposed to be here working? Didn't anybody ever tell you not to mix business with pleasure? Oh, right. I did. And you only listen to me when you need me.
I need you now. Any big ideas?
Yes. Scream for help. Offer the guard money. Offer everybody money. Keep screaming until somebody comes, and pray they speak English.
Oh, shut up. You're no help at all.
It would only be another two days before the judge came to town, but Tony knew he didn't have two days.
Food and water that wouldn't make him violently ill would be nice, considering it had been about 24 hours since he had either, but what he really needed was someone with a good, solid understanding of electromagnetic radiation and a little technical know-how to help him with his biggest problem, which was that someone, probably whoever had slipped him a mickey, had also thoughtfully attempted to dislodge his chest plate.
Not being a man of science, the would-be assassin had failed to completely dislodge it, but he had monkeyed with the chest plate enough to cause it to malfunction.
Which, resulted in this slow, horrible death by inches in a Third-World toilet.
It was a real Catch-22 situation.
Had he the energy to fix it, Tony was fairly sure it would be a simple repair, but that much motion would probably kill him.
Which brought him back to his original comment on the situation.
"Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Little Rico?"
That was when some strange trickster god, Loki, perhaps, sent a most unlikely angel to save him.
"…you dirty Mex sonsabitches! One more of youse tries to touch me an' you'll get wot your friend got! I'll kill you with my bare hands and it won't be the first time or the last! I'll kill you all, you motherfuckers! I'll tear your goddamn balls off an' stuff 'em down yer throat! I don't need my guns ta kill youse all!"
Two guards shoved her into the cell as if her entire body was radioactive.
She was short and curvy and muscular, a strong, compact woman with long red hair in two ponytails than hung almost to her waist on either side of her head, and flashing green eyes that went yellow with her fury. She was dressed in an A-line undershirt and a pair of fatigue pants tucked into filthy jump boots, & her bare arms each had three tattoos on them.
One of them was a Justice League insignia
The official one that the League didn't divulge to the general public.
Could it be?
She wore nothing under the shirt, Tony could very clearly see the nipples on her rather sizeable tits poking angrily at the cloth of the undershirt as she continued to beat the bars and scream and curse, hurling herself angrily at the cell door.
He was wondering what, other than drunkenness would make the young woman throw such a fit, when the look he thought he saw the outline of a canteen in one of her pants pockets.
Clever girl.
"Miss? Miss, is that clean water? I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars for a drink. Although, I'm afraid you'll have to take a personal check." Tony croaked.
He hadn't spoken to anyone for…?
He wasn't sure how long.
She turned around, and when he got a good look at her face, he realised, yes it was.
Her name was Liv Napier, she was called Napalm by her friends and she was a fellow mask, a Justice League trainee called the Harlequin.
They both ate at the same deli in Manhattan, and had exchanged nods and pleasantries in the past.
She was, as the current patois would denote, even out of her superhero persona, a real tough chick, a motorcycle-riding, brawling two-fisted drinker whose drove fast, worked hard and played hard, and whose taste in men ran either to fellow predators, or to the kind of skinny, lanky, surly long-haired lads who were most certainly her prey.
Considering the amount of times she managed to get shot, stabbed and seriously beaten, rumours had it that she was everything from a revolutionary urban guerrilla to a government assassin.
Better yet, Liv was also a certified genius, who, at the tender age of 21 was a graduate student with a bachelor's degree in quantum physics working with Dr. Manhattan in his top-secret government laboratory.
Stark Industries had casually courted her, but the feds were more aggressive.
In 1970, Tony Stark had read her paper on Nikolai Tesla and electromagnetic fields in a technical journal, and kicked himself for not trying harder to recruit the Harlequin.
In other words, he couldn't have asked for a better cellmate to help him repair his broken life-support system and help him break out of this toilet.
Fate had smiled upon him once more.
"Oh, it's you, my dear. Fancy meeting you here. I usually get up when a lady enters the room, but, I think the effort might kill me."
Savoir faire is everywhere.
"Mr. Stark? What the fuck are you doing here?"
"Dying. Please, Napalm, call me Tony. Have a seat. I insist."
She looked at him, and swore, and sat beside him on the cot where he lay.
"Drinks are on the house." She told him.
More gently than he would have thought possible for a brute like her, the Harlequin rested his head in her lap.
"I can hardly lift my arm." He was embarrassed to admit.
"That's okay. I got you."
She propped his up with one hand and brought the canteen of clean water to his mouth with the other.
This brutal young tough pushed his sweaty hair out of his face almost tenderly, tilting his head when she discovered he was too weak to drink.
"No more. Not now. You'll get sicker. Here. Eat this. It's not much, but it's not polluted either."
It was a square of a Hershey's chocolate bar.
"My last meal. Oh well. Everyone always though I'd die in a woman's arms."
She looked curiously over his shoulder and touched the circle on his chest.
"You seem a little dim, Tony. I take it dehydration isn't your only problem."
"Yes, the lights are going out on Tony Stark. Do you think you could help me with a few repairs to my chest plate?"
"Sure. Piece of cake." She agreed in her Brooklyn tough guy accent.
She helped him take off his undershirt.
"Oh fuck!"
"How bad is it?"
Liv frowned.
"Now, if I had a soldering gun, a couple of bar magnets, some copper wire and a car battery, I'd be in business. No problem. Basic stuff."
A couple of bar magnets, a soldering gun, some copper wire and a car battery?
He thought about it.
"Of course. Broken wires. While I repair the chest plate, you could hook the bar magnets up to the car battery with the copper wires, put them in the housing for and keep me alive. Too bad we don't have any of that."
"We will. Nobody dies on my watch unless I kill 'em. Relax, I could fix that thing in my sleep."
"Are you a mechanical genius, too?"
"Yeah. I can fix anything."
She began emptying the pockets of her paratrooper pants, and produced a canteen of water, a flask, three Hershey bars, two bananas and a miniature flashlight, and hid them under the bunk.
"You stay there and think about what kinda old car you always wanted to have that you can get from the junkyard so's I can show you I can fix anything, while I go ask for my phone call and see what I can find."
"What if you don't come up with anything?"
She thought about it.
"I'll have to bust you out the way you are. I'll break into the safe where they got my guns, and shoot it out with these local pigs I can lift about one-fifty in dead weight, for sure, but if push comes to shove I think I can get youse over my shoulder. I'll shoot our way out, and steal a car and give your ass a jump from the battery, which ougtta hold youse till I can get over the border. I know a place where we can get across, no questions. That way, I might have to kill a few of these poor bastards, but, hey, better them than us."
She winked at him, and called to the guard, in Spanish, that she would like to make a phone call.
Nice girl.
***
Napalm was gone for about five minutes.
The guard locked the cell behind her and they waited until the guard fell asleep again.
"What did you come up with?"
From her pockets, Liv produced an 8 cell battery, a length of lamp cord, two large magnets she unscrewed from the inside of filing cabinet drawers, and a roll of duct tape.
"The phone wasn't working. But I can patch you up well enough to get you well enough to get us out of here with this stuff. I take it you have a spare?"
"At my hotel. But we don't need a spare if either of us you can fix those broken wires. That's not the problem."
"What problem? We don't have no problem. You need a temporary power source while I fix your permanent one. It's all a matter of execution…"
She produced a Swiss Army knife from her pocket and popped the knife.
"Time to get to work."
***
She worked quickly, efficiently and fastidiously, carefully stripping the lamp cord of its insulation.
She took a pen and a piece of paper out of her pockets and started scribbling.
"I can't do math in my head, I'm sorry."
She examined her calculations.
"Do you want to check me?"
"No. I trust Jon's judgment. He is a god, after all."
"Does that make me an angel?"
"Well, you are saving my life."
Then, she methodically wrapped the two magnets with exactly the same amount of windings.
She just as carefully attached the wires to the terminals, and tested the apparatus, three times, to make sure it worked.
"Will it hurt youse if I get on top of you?" Liv asked.
Tony raised an eyebrow.
"Certainly not." He said.
Well, at least if we're going to die, it will be with a pretty girl on top of us.
That's exactly what I was thinking
"Okay. Here we fuckin' go. I'm gonna take off the housing and remove the cell, now." She said, almost absently, her mind in her work.
Tony's mind was in her work, too.
"Don't lose those screws."
"They're in my pocket. Now what?"
"Take the lid by the metal part and turn it counter-clockwise three times."
The protective covering popped off of the apparatus.
"Wow. That's some kind of work, there, in the housing. What kind of metal is that, titanium?"
"Actually, it's an alloy of titanium and adamantium."
"Rust-proof and unbreakable. Alright, now I'm going to pull the, I suppose it's a battery unit, the battery unit out of the housing. When I do that, you stick the magnets to the side. Got the magnets?"
"Got the magnets."
"Okay, I'm gonna to count to t'ree. On t'ree, I'll unplug the wire from the housing to the left side of the battery, and you apply the magnet. Then, we'll do the same thing for the right. Ready?"
"Ready."
"One…two…t'ree!"
"Left magnet working."
"How do you know?"
"I felt the jolt from the power supply."
"Okay. Ready for right magnet?"
"Ready.
"One…two…t'ree?"
Tony felt Liv's battery apparatus jolt his heart out of the sluggish irregularity it had been limping through with the defective unit, and as it began to beat more normally, he jerked, involuntarily, and gasped.
"TONY!"
"I'm alright, Napalm. That was a good gasp. I can't believe it. That five dollar battery is working better than the one I invented."
She got up off of him.
"I was hoping I calculated the amount of windings right. It's working because you're actually getting current. Unlike with this…which I think I can fix. Theoretically. I mean, I knew how you built it, theoretically, but…"
For the first time since he was tossed into the cell, Tony felt well enough to sit up.
"But it would be easier if you just let me borrow your knife and held the flashlight, because I know exactly what to do."
As she watched him work, Tony realised that she was committing everything he did to memory.
Weighing, analysing, cross-checking, the wheels in her mind were spinning furiously.
"That's a beautiful piece of work. Tesla was right." She observed.
Carefully, he had spliced most the broken wiring back together and then covered the splices with strips of duck tape.
"Tesla was always right. The day I realised that was the day that everything I've ever created became possible. Okay. We're ready to reconnect. I'll lie down again, and we'll replace the unit the same way we took it out."
After the last count of three, they were rewarded for their efforts by a soft bluish-white glow.
Tony Stark took his first unhampered breath in two days.
Liv replaced the protective bullet-proof glass and titanium/adamantium circular shield back over the unit.
"It's glowing. Is it working?" she said.
"Well, considering that I'm suddenly thinking about how nice it is to have you straddling me, instead of being in tremendous pain and worrying that every shallow breath might be my last, I'd say it is."
"Don't you need to recharge your batteries?"
"You wrote the Tesla paper. You ought to know the effect is…instantaneous."
Liv got up.
"I think you need a little more rest before you take on me and the world, Tony. Now, realistically, how do you feel?"
Tony thought about it.
"Well, I feel it would be safe to have another drink of water, because I can walk to the toilet now without the possibility of cardiac arrest, but I think I'd still need help to get there."
"There's enough water here for both of us. I'll help you get up, if you need to."
***
Several times over the next 12 or 14 hours, perhaps more, Liv walked all six one and two hundred pounds of him to the unspeakably dirty toilet and back again, holding him up with her strong, sturdy rather curvy body, and then back to the bunk.
Tony didn't know how much time passed that way, with her giving him water to drink, and food, and helping him walk, and talking about Tesla and Einstein and Shakespeare and Napoleon, her fingers running quietly through his hair as he continued to sleep with his head across what he began to think of as her very welcoming thighs.
The next time he really noticed, the sun was high in the sky and he was feeling much better.
Well enough to get up and walk across the cell on his own and then return to the narrow cot and wake Napalm.
She sat up, and rubbed her eyes, and yawned.
"I see you're feeling better, today."
"Much. In fact, I feel fine. I'm hungry, and thirsty and it's taking my breath away how much this place stinks and how much I stink. I'm ready to go back to civilization. If only I had a drink."
Liv passed him her flask.
"Well, this isn't usually how I start the day. I usually have coffee, as well. Still, bottoms up."
He took a drink.
"Remy-Martin? Good choice of brandy."
"I never drink cheap booze. Gives you hangovers."
"So, how do you feel about checking out of this dump, Napalm?"
"I like that idea. The service here is fuckin' lousy."
She looked over at the guard.
"Where's the suit?"
"On standby, in my hotel room."
"And I take it that's your briefcase over there that the guard has his feet on."
"Yes it is. And the remote is in my briefcase."
Liv grinned.
"You ever break outa jail, before?" she asked.
Such savoire faire.
Such mad, merry joie de vivre.
Such a lunatic.
A woman after his own swashbuckler's heart.
"No. But I imagine it's going to be a lot of fun." Tony replied, that old Errol Flynn twinkle in his eye.
"Right. I have a plan. I need you to be desperately ill."
"You mean in a method acting Marlon Brando sort of way or in a ham actor Lionel Barrymore sort of way?"
"Ham it up."
Tony gasped, and clutched his stomach.
He made a choking, gurgling sound , and started twitching, then he hurled himself onto the floor and began convulsing, quite convincingly, clutching his chest, now, and moaning in mock pain.
Liv rushed over to the bars.
"Guard! Guard, this man is very sick! He had a bad heart! He needs the doctor! Please, help! Help!"
The guard was the sort of unpleasant man who did little to dispel the stereotypes of sadistic prison guards or greasy frito banditos.
"So, gringa, now you need my help, for your new gringo friend, eh? Okay. I help you. But if you want me to be nice to you, you have to be nice to me." He oozed.
"Please, no. Not that!"
Liv wrung her hands and clutched them together, close to her heart, shrinking from the bars.
Tony nearly laughed.
Liv was doing some fairly good melodrama, herself.
He decided to get into the act, and laboriously lifted his head from the ground, reaching out one arm, vainly, as if to protect the poor little white woman from the clutches of the evil bandito.
"No! You monster! You filthy animal! I'll…I'll kill you if you touch her!" he gasped.
The guard actually laughed, evilly.
"Shut you fucking mouth, gringo! You can't even stand up. If you know what's good for you, you'll lie there quietly and turn your face to the wall, or better yet, maybe I make you watch."
He leered at Liv.
"As for you, I seen you sitting on this one's useless pinga. Forget about this drunk. I got what you need. I know you gonna like it."
Liv took off her undershirt, and whipped up some quick tears.
"Don't worry, darling! This man can have my body, but he'll never touch my soul, the way you have!" she cried.
Tony! Did you see those tits?
Yes, brain. I sure did.
Now how am I ever going to get into the suit?
The guard made haste to come to the cell, and as soon as he was within arm's reach, Liv dropped the act.
She thrust her fist through the bars and into the man's solar plexus with such force that Tony could hear the impact on the guard's flesh.
He folded up around her fist, gasping.
"Ya know somethin', chief? You're right. I do like it."
The guard fell to his knees, and Liv grabbed him by the back of his neck and smashed his head into the bars until he crumpled in a heap on the ground.
It was very quick, very brutal, and very professional.
She turned around, still naked from the waist up, with blood on her hands.
"I hope this doesn't scare you off." She said.
"Not me. I like a woman with spirit." Tony quipped
"Throw me my shirt."
She wiped her hands on the wall, put her shirt on and got the guard's keys.
They dragged him into the cell, and tied his hands and feet with duct tape, and put a square of it over his mouth.
Then they locked him in.
As Tony went for his briefcase, Liv unlocked a drawer from which she produced a double shoulder holster, an ankle holster, two nickel plated .45 automatic Colt pistols with pearl handles, one Saturday night special, and a Buck clasp knife.
After re-arming herself, she pulled a denim vest with patches and buttons of dubious repute all over it out of the drawer, and also a wallet.
She put the vest on and stuffed the wallet into a pocket of the fatigue pants and buttoned it.
"Ready?"
"And you need me to have the Iron Man suit because…" Tony joked, as he programmed the remote.
Liv crossed her arms and rapidly pulled both guns.
"Isn't anybody gonna come and shoot it out with us?" she complained.
"We don't need to have a shootout. Not when I've got the suit." Tony said, absently, looking at the screen on the remote in his hands.
She's like the centrefold for Soldier of Fortune.
"You might want to put the armoury away, and get under that desk right about now."
They hid under the big wood and metal desk.
"So, should I make a discreet little hole just big enough for the suit to come in and then us to go out, or should we leave a big, insulting hole and take out the whole roof?"
"Let's make it as messy as possible. Can I push the button? I like destroying things as much as I like fixing them."
"Sure. Push that button. Right there. Now, duck."
There was a lovely big BOOM as the suit remotely blew a large, insulting hole in the roof, and the suit landed, directly in the desk's chair.
"I hear shouting from the other room. I'll barricade the door."
Liv leapt out from under the desk.
Tony was thinking how glad he was that he had programmed the remote to disassemble the suit and reassemble it on him as he watched Liv push the file cabinet across the room and then tip it over in front of the door.
"That was fast." She commented.
Tony put his helmet on.
He crouched down.
"Alright, Napalm. Time for a piggyback ride. Are you afraid of heights?"
"Shit, man, the only thing I'm afraid of is that they'll outlaw fucking and bring back Prohibition." Liv replied.
She got on his back, wrapped her arms tightly across his chest and her legs tightly across his waist.
Tony noted, for future reference, that she had a very good grip.
"Now, as Clark says, up, up, and away!"
He was so glad to be in the air and alive and out of jail, he almost forgot that he had a passenger.
"The trick is not to look down. There's a microphone where my ear is, talk into that. "
"You sound like when somebody talks into a fan."
"I know. I'm working on a better voice chip for the helmet. Are you alright?'
"Fine. I've flown with Clark, before. Can you get a fix on my car? It's over the border, on the American side. 1963 Buick Super Wildcat. Black, with chrome detailing."
"What's the plate?"
"Napalm."
"Of course. Got it. We should be there in a few minutes. Is that part of your Justice League training? Flying with Superman?"
"No. I was on the expressway, coming back to the city from upstate, in my '67 Stingray. I was drunk, and I took a curve too fast and shot through the guard rail and over the embankment. The car flipped and landed on the roof and I was trapped inside, and then I smelled gas. So I got on the Superhero Defence Network and called for help. Clark had to come and rescue me in a big fuckin' hurry. That was the worst accident I ever had. I broke my arm, my leg, and my collarbone. I managed to save the Stingray, though. I had to rebuild the SOB from the ground up, but I gottta way with cars. If it hasn't blown up, I can fix it."
Iron Man landed smoothly beside the Wildcat, which was parked in the brush.
"Take this baby. I bought it from a guy at the junkyard, when I was 16. It was wrecked. But I took one look at it and fell in love. I knew I could bring it back to life. And look at him now. He's perfect. My little tank."
Liv carefully removed the branches that she had use to hide the car as Iron Man packed his suit and the remote into his briefcase.
Tony noticed she was limping a little.
"Are you hurt?"
"Naah. I hadda little leg injury recently in this fight. It's okay. I'm pretty much better."
She ran her hand over the gleaming black hood of the car like she was giving and old friend a big hug.
"I got, like, seven cars and three motorcycles, but this is my baby. Before I got my hands on it, the engine had three speeds. Fast, Super-Sonic, and Warp. You wouldn't believe how it goes, now. And I've been shot at in this car, I've driven it through buildings, hell, me and Wolverine pretty much lived in it for a couple of months. Nothing stops it."
"You did a beautiful job, Napalm."
She opened the trunk for him and it was packed with gear, including a violin case.
"Do you play the violin?"
"Nope."
Liv smiled, evilly.
She opened up the violin case, and inside it was a well-oiled and painstakingly cared for Thompson submachine gun.
"You have a chopper. I can't believe you have a fucking chopper! You're insane, you do realise that, don't you?" Tony said, admiringly.
He nestled the suit on top of some camping equipment, closed the trunk and got in the car with Liv.
The interior was canary yellow leather, polished and buffed to a soft matte sheen.
"Where to?"
"Well, I was staying in LA, but let's go to San Diego. It's closer. I need a bath. And a decent meal. And a good night's sleep. And a drink."
"Open the glove compartment."
Tony opened the glove compartment to find a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels.
"I never leave home without it." Liv joked.
"You're a fine girl, Napalm."
"Nope. Just a drunk."
Tony grinned and took a long pull.
"I'll drink to that." He said.