III: Born Under a Bad Sign

New York City, 1937

I: Eddie

Eddie Blake was glad to have a job, a real job that was on the level.

He took the subway every morning and went the building site where his company worked in a new pair of coveralls and workboots with newspaper stuffed into the toes and a shiny new lunchpail. Crazy Jack had bought into a construction company, and he grandfathered 14 year old Eddie into a job he wasn't supposed to be able to hold down until he was 16, and supplied him with the new work-clothes and boots and even the hardhat he wore that was too big for him.

Eddie was growing like a weed, he was sure he'd grow into it. He worked 12 hours a day and it was hard work, too hard and too long hours, some said, for a young man only 16, who was really 14. But he was a strong lad, big for his age, and old beyond his years.

He didn't mind working, it didn't bother him.

The important thing was that the Old Man was gone, he was gone forever.

In a couple of weeks they were going to throw the switch on the wicked old bastard and he was going to smoke and toast in that chair the way he was going to smoke and toast in Hell, forever.

He was gone, and what was left of the family was safe, safe from him, and the very idea of that cocksucker breathing his last in agony put a smile on the face of his oldest son, the person who had been his victim and his adversary the longest.

A smile that died on Eddie's lips as he scaled the third of three flights of stairs to their East New York apartment.

Familiar sounds came from behind the door.

Things breaking, the little kids crying, his mother screaming in pain and terror and the Old Man, the Old Man like a demon out of Hell, swearing and shouting in his wrath.

"…I said youse better gimme some fuckin' money, ya lazy cunt! I gotta get outa the city!"

"Fuck you, Mickey! You take that gun and shove it up your ass! You might as well kill me because I ain't got no fuckin' money and if I didn't I wouldn't give it to ya, ya fuckin' shanty bastard!"

Eddie ran up the last few steps, and burst in through the door.

His father was beating his mother with the butt of a .38, beating her to the ground as she cursed him and the little kids cowered behind Aggie in her waitress uniform and Edie, who was still dressed in the clothes she wore to work the street.

Edie lifted up her skirt, and reached into the top of her garter belt to pull out a switchblade.

She saw Eddie and they exchanged looks.

Mickey Blake didn't see his oldest living son until it was too late, and Eddie swung his lunch-bucket as hard as he could and clipped Mickey in the face with it.

The lunch-bucket was only slightly dented; Mickey definitely got the worst of it.

He went down to the floor in a shower of blood and teeth, and the gun skittered across the kitchen.

Mickey Blake was out cold.

"I'll call the cops." Maggie Blake was mumbling.

She got the gun, and Mickey's wallet, and put them in the pockets of her apron.

"Fuck the cops! This ends here!" Edie Blake insisted.

"Get the little kids and Aggie out of here, Ma. You don't want them to see this." Eddie agreed.

"Edward! Edith! That's your father! You can't!" Maggie protested.

Eddie balled his hands into fists and Edie moved next to her brother, and flicked the blade open.

"My ass! The law had their chance!" Edie snarled

"You better go, Ma. You'd better get the little kids and Aggie out of here." Eddie reiterated.

Margaret Blake picked up her youngest daughter from her high chair, and herded her four other younger children and her second oldest daughter, Agnes, down the stairs and out of the apartment.

She was promising them something, anything, through her swollen lips as tears ran down her puffy, bleeding face.

Aggie shut the door behind them.

Meanwhile, Mickey Blake slowly regained consciousness, moaning and drawing himself to a sitting position.

He found himself alone in the kitchen with Eddie and Edie, both of them black-haired and black-hearted as he was, advancing on him.

That slut Maggie didn't have the balls for it, and Aggie wasn't the type and the little kids were too little, but Eddie and Edie, they were a couple chips off the old block.

Stone cold, right down to the bone.

Mickey tried to smile.

"So, this is how it ends up? Well, better my own kids than the fuckin' chair. I raised you right, I done, you grew up to be a coupla chips off the old block. Fight fair, willya? Give you old man a chance ta get up, huh, Eddie?"

The way he spoke reminded Eddie for a minute of when he was a little kid, and he used to sit on the steps outside and wait on his father to come home.

His Old Man, the biggest, strongest, greatest man in the whole wide world.

He could pick you up in one hand and lift you up so high that you could almost reach up and grab the sun right out of the sky.

It made Eddie wonder how the fuck they had gone from that to this.

"Sure, Pop." He said.

Mickey Blake, the most feared enforcer in Hell's Kitchen, drunk, contract-killer, wife-beater, child-abuser, rapist, murderer, cop-killer, felt in his pockets for one last cigarette.

"Shit. Fucked again." He mumbled.

"Here, Pop. Have one of mine." Edie said.

Eddie lit it for him.

Mickey knew what kind of man he was and what he had done to his children; he wasn't about to ask them for mercy, and he sure as shit wasn't going to show them any.

A moment passed between Mickey Blake and his oldest living children, a moment in which birthday parties and ice cream cones and shiny new nickels and trips to Coney Island mixed in with beatings with booted feet, closed fists, coat-hangers, his belt, anything he could get his hands on, mixed with burning with lit cigarettes and a hot iron and brutal, merciless, drunken rapes in a murky pool that mingled screams of joy with screams of terror, all winding down to this, the end of all things.

Mick the Merciless finished his cigarette and drew himself to his feet to face the daughter and the son he had beaten and raped and tortured and abused all their lives.

"I'm not goin, easy." He warned.

"We wouldn't expect you to." Edie replied.

"But you're fuckin' goin, Pop. Either you or us, this is fuckin' it!" Edie snarled.

"Fine with me. I'll see the both of you in Hell."

Mickey Blake, Eddie Blake and Edie Blake all lunged forward at the same time.

A chorus of yells filtered out the window and were swallowed by the noisy summer street as Maggie Blake used the money in the wallet she had lifted from her prone husband's body to buy her younger children some ice cream from the truck on the corner.

"Ma?" Aggie asked.

"Don't say nothin', Aggie. What kinda ice cream you want?"

***

According to the report filed by East New York cops, cops who respected the memory of Maggie Blake's father, Sgt. Edward Morgan, cops who had arrested Mickey Blake for countless crimes against his family and the rest of the neighbourhood, the hated and feared "Mick the Merciless" died in his apartment while resisting arrest.

His body was quickly and quietly cremated, and the cleaning crew from the local precinct cleaned the Blake family kitchen until it was spotless.

Edie Blake spent a week in the hospital, suffering from a lacerated lung.

Her pimp picked her up at the end of it, and she went back to work on the street, continuing to come home every once in awhile, always with money for the family.

Eddie Blake returned to the building site in midtown Manhattan where he worked the next day with stitches in his face, a black eye, his broken nose taped up and a cast on his left hand; he had broken two of his fingers and three of his knuckles.

The three policemen who came to the scene had only disclosed the details to other cops, but in neighbourhoods like East New York, the walls have ears, and the word on the street travels fast.

In death, "Good Looking" Mickey Blake, "Mick the Merciless" wasn't good looking anymore.

His skull was multiply fractured, shattered, his face pulped, his very brains had been pounded into jelly, not by any blunt instrument but by human fists.

He had been stabbed at least thirty times, deep wounds that penetrated into his bones, and, some said that he had also been emasculated.

The story went onto say that when they came to remove the body and picked it up, it simply fell apart.

After that, Edie Blake had to quit her job as a streetwalker, and her former pimp had her out selling dope and putting the arm on junkies who couldn't pay; men were afraid to touch her.

As for Eddie Blake, everybody in the neighbourhood started giving him a very wide berth.

As the old strega who lived in the building across the street from the Blake family observed,

"Mickey Blake was a devil, and God's own couldn't kill him and the Devil's own wouldn't. But his children, they belong part to the Devil and part to God, so they could and they would and they did. Only time can tell whether they will choose to serve God or Satan. It's their choice."

New York City: 1940

I: Sally

Sally Juspeczyk wasn't sure what it was about Eddie Blake that she liked, but there was something.

He was just a kid, he was only seventeen, he didn't even have a license to drive.

But he didn't look like a kid, and he didn't act like a kid, even at 17, the Comedian was quite a man.

Sure, he was the kind of a man that nice girls were supposed to avoid, but the Silk Spectre didn't consider herself to be a nice girl.

He was a good-looking guy, and he was funny, in a sarcastic kind of way, and she didn't get the feeling he was looking down on her because she was a broad or because she had been a dancer.

Besides, she was only twenty, and all the other guys, they were so much older than her. They were all married, or practically married and none of them ever wanted to go out anywhere. Not like Eddie. He kept crazy hours, he was up for going out in the middle of the day or late at night, but those were the best times, when everybody in the city wasn't out mobbing places, and you could go see a decent band or a movie and have a few drinks, smoke the occasional reefer, enjoy yourself.

He never had any money, Eddie didn't, and he told her right off the bat that he didn't have any money, but since they always went out in their costumes, they got a lot of things on the arm.

You could have fun with Eddie, that was for sure, and he didn't mob you and ask for your phone number fifty times and try to get in your life and be your only boyfriend and shit like that. He was a tough guy, but Sally had grown up in Brooklyn, too, albeit a nicer neighborhood that Eddie had, and she'd met lots of young tough guys just like him, it didn't bug her.

Hollis, who acted like he was everybody's father, he was always warning her about getting too close with Eddie. You better watch out for that Blake kid, he's not like the guys you grew up with or met when you were a dancer. He's like a wild animal, and wild animals have a tendency to turn on you.

But Sally knew something all of them didn't know.

She knew why Eddie was like a wild animal.

Dancing had made Sally some good money, and, actually, so had the masked adventurer game. She had a pretty nice apartment, and her own car.

It was a used car, but it was hers, nonetheless.

It started out with Eddie saying he thought it was a nice car, and she laughingly said she'd teach him to drive, and then he ended up talking her into teaching him to drive.

Goddamn Eddie, he could talk you into anything.

On one hand, Eddie was a rotten kid, and he was showing signs that he'd grow up to be a bad man. He drove with the horn, and with his mouth; he was the kind of guy who'd get out of the car and have a fistfight with somebody. Every time she saw him he looked like he'd just been in a fight. Pain didn't seem to bother him, he took it and violence for granted, whether it was the pain and violence he inflicted on others or what they inflicted on him.

And sometimes the crooks he routed showed up at the precinct, and sometimes they floated down the river, as dead as they were ever going to be.

On the other hand, you got the idea that Eddie was trying, really trying, to learn how to be a decent person, and that he wanted to be a decent person.

For all his violent nature and his quick temper and his apparent brutality, he really wasn't a bad man, at heart.

Eddie had a heart, he had feelings, everybody does. There was generosity in Eddie, and tenderness, and Sally had seen both, not just to her, but to the family that no one knew the seemingly unattached teenager had.

Sally was driving Eddie across the bridge to Brooklyn when he took her completely by surprise.

"Hey Sal, I know I only got this permit an' I can't drive on my own, but you gotta let me borrow the car. My kid sister, she's real sick, and I gotta take her to this doctor uptown. She's not well enough for the subway. It's tomorrow, at noon."

Sally didn't even know that Eddie had a kid sister.

"You ain't such a good driver yet, Eddie. What about your parents? Can't they take her?"

Eddie got a strange look on his face, a very un-Eddie sort of look, and then, he bounced back.

"Canya keep a secret, Sal?"

"Sure."

"We got no parents. The Old Man got his up at Sing-Sing awhile ago, may he smoke and toast in Hell, forever, and Ma died last year. We usedta take care of the little kids together, Ma and me, but now, it's just me. Ya can't tell on me, or somebody'll come and take the kids away. Until I'm 18, they say I got no right to keep 'em. Fuck them, it's my fuckin' family. I'm their brother I can look after 'em, I don't want some fuckin' stranger doin' it. Over my dead fuckin' body they'll take those kids away from me. I'm all they got." He said.

"How many, Eddie?"

"Four. There was 12 of us, but only me and my two sisters who don't live with me and the four little kids made it. I trust one of my sisters with the kids, but not the other, yet. It ain't been long enough for me that she got off the street, and she's got that piece of shit pimp still chasin' her. One of these days, I'm gonna put that cocksucker on ice." Eddie growled.

Sally didn't know what to say.

She just remembered how her father used to tell them that if they thought they had it bad there were lots of kids in this city that had it a helluva lot worse than they did.

Poor Eddie, he was one of them.

"Jesus, Eddie, yunno most guys your age wouldn't do something like that. Take care of their whole family. Sure, I'll help ya out."

That was all she could think of to say, and Eddie didn't say anything at all.

***

Sally sat on the broken-down couch in the main room of an East New York apartment that smelled like cooking grease and cigarette smoke that wasn't big enough for five people to live in, trying to graciously make conversation with the four children between 5 and 12 who were clustered around her, raptly.

The place was clean, the kids were clean, and so were their clothes, which weren't overly ragged, and they all seemed to be reasonably well-fed, but it was still no way for kids to grow up, no place for them to live.

But they had probably lived there all their lives, and in worse conditions. And they didn't really have any other place to go or anyone else to look after them, did they?

And Eddie, Jesus, he was just a kid, himself, he was only seventeen.

"Are you Sally?" one of the two little boys asked her.

"Yes, honey. What's your name?"

The little boy just blushed.

"That's Mickey. Tell her how old ya are, Mickey." Eddie yelled from one of the other rooms.

Not that there were many other rooms. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen.

Little, shitty rooms.

For five people.

"I'm eight." Mickey said.

Eddie came out of one of the bedrooms, dressed in street clothes.

She could see why he always wore his costume.

The bottoms of his pants were frayed, the cuffs of his welder's coat barely reached his wrists, his shirt looked threadbare, and his cap was worn through around the brim.

He probably had newspaper on the bottom of his boots, too, they looked pretty beat up.

"The oldest, Ruth, she's 12. Mickey's 8, Jimmy's 6, and the little one, Edie, she's five. What a good lookin' family, huh?"

The three youngest children cleaved themselves to their older brother like he was the most important man in the world.

To them, he was.

"C'mon, guys, break it up. I gotta go take Edie to see the doctor. Ruthie, you watch the little guys for me until I get back, okay?"

The oldest girl, who had sandy-blond hair and blue eyes, nodded.

"Okay, Eddie. Should I make food?"

"No. You're too little, ya stay away from that fuckin' piecea shit old stove or you'll blow up the whole place. I'll make youse dinner when I get back."

***

The doctor prescribed medicine for little Edie and bed-rest.

After Sally drove Eddie back to the apartment, she watched him put the little girl to bed in one bedroom, a small one with one other bed.

The other bedroom had bunkbeds for the boys.

"Eddie, where do you sleep?"

"Onna couch. You wanna stay for dinner? C'mon, I insist."

He was fairly good at cooking, and the kids washed their hands before they sat at the table, and they all took part in setting it, but they were all rowdy, even the girl, they all smoked, and Eddie smoked, and they swore at one another until Eddie brought the food to the table and yelled at them."Shut the fuck up 'n eat, an' quit showin' Sal how tough youse are."

And everybody laughed, and they said their prayers and then ate dinner.

Sally didn't know what to think.

She got even more confused a week or two later when she got a call from Eddie in the middle of the night.

His oldest sister and his second oldest sister were in trouble. He needed the car. Would she help?

Sally didn't hesitate to say she'd be right over.

She didn't ask Eddie any questions in the car, she just drove him from East New York to Hell's Kitchen, parked in front of the building to told her to, and followed Eddie into another building, and up three flights of steps.

He knocked on the last door at the end of the hallway.

"Who is it?" asked a tough-sounding female voice.

"It's Eddie."

The girl who opened the door had red hair and green eyes, and she was wearing a waitress' uniform.

"Thank God you're here! She had no choice. He wouldn't let us alone. He's in the kitchen."

There was a rough-looking middle-aged man lying on the kitchen floor, with towels all around him and about five bullet holes in him.

He was as dead as he was ever going to be.

A very large young man with blond hair wearing coveralls was shoring up the towels with more towels.

"Did you do it?" Eddie asked him.

"No. I would have killed piece of shit with bare hands." The man replied, in broken English with a heavy Russian accent.

"Me too. C'mon, let's get this garbage outa the kitchen. Sal, lemme have that meat sack."

"Hey, I'm no stranger to dead goons. I'll help ya out." Sally offered.

Sally and Eddie and the Russian packed him up into the bag for stiffs that Sally had got from Hollis, along with the towels, and Sally washed her hands in the bathroom sink, showed to her by another girl with black hair and brown eyes like Eddie's.

"I'm the one who did it. I killed him. He used to be my fuckin' boss, he was my fuckin' responsibility." The girl said.

"Well, he's not going to bother you anymore, honey, that's for sure." Sally said.

When she came out, Eddie and the Russian took the stiff downstairs to the car, and the brown-haired girl, the one who was used to be a hooker, came with them.

"I appreciate you gettin' me outa this jam, Eddie. You know I'm out. I been out since I met Ivan. He's got his papers and he's gonna move in with us, now. I been cleaning houses, like I did with Ma. I'm straight now, Eddie, yunno I am."

"You'd better be. And I better not catch you with any more of that fucking junk. Sooner or later, it's gonna be war, and you're gonna hafta take care of the kids. I mean it. I won't send youse to jail, I'll put youse in body bags."

"Eddie, I'm clean, I've been clean for six months, I swear on our mother's grave."

"Good."

"Here. It's half his money. Take it. For the little ones."

"Are you sure yuh don't need it?"

"Nah."

"Don't worry, Eddie. I take good care of girls. They both have job, I have job. We get bigger apartment, one on fourth floor. We have nice quiet life, babies someday. Like regular Americans." The Russian assured him.

"Yeah, I hope so. I'll seeya round, okay? C'mon Sal. Let's go."

***

Eddie got rid of the body at the docks; when he got back in the car he was wiping blood off of his boiler suit.

She didn't ask him any questions.

"My sister's not a bad girl. She's just fucked up. Yunno, she's only 16 and she was with that animal since she was 12. He turned her out and got her hooked on junk, and later on he had her selling dope and shaking down the other junkies. But she was better off with him than at home. He never beat her he way our father beat her. Not to mention that the Old Man, that goddamn sick piece of shit criminal bastard, he was fucking her. His own daughter. Ever since she was a kid. He did it right in front of the rest of us, just like he did to Ma, sometimes. Just to show us who was boss. He made us and he could do what he liked with us, that's' what he used to tell us. Well, when I got old enough and big enough, I put a fuckin' stop to that. Evie and I did. He's dead and that dope-pushing pimp motherfucker, he's dead, too. Maybe now she'll be alright. Her and Aggie and that big dumb Russkie bastard, right?"

Eddie laughed, and he pushed in the cigarette lighter.

"I told that pimp bastard to leave her alone. For a fuckin' year. I told him she was straight and she didn't want nothin' to do with him. I said I'd kill him, but I never got the chance."

Sally hadn't exactly grown up in a rich family, but they were a normal family.

"Eddie…Jesus, I had no idea."

"Don't tell anybody, alright, Sal?"

"I won't. You, ah, you take pretty good care of those kids, yunno? And your older sisters, too. That Russian guy, he seems okay."

"Awww, he's not too bright, but he's a decent guy. I mean somebody hasta look after the family. It'll be niceta have another man ta help me out. We got nobody else. Nobody else gives a fuck. They never did."

They sat in silence for awhile, and then Sally put the radio on.

It wasn't long after that that Eddie got his driving license and with money finally starting to roll in, he bought a car, and moved the kids to a rowhouse in Bensonhurst.

He got them a dog, some mutt he found wandering around down by the docks, probably, and Sally went there, once, to see them all running around in the little yard full of secondhand toys with the dog, swearing and laughing and having a good time, with Eddie looking on like some kind of combination of Fagin and the Artful Dodger.

With a little Bill Sykes thrown in for good measure.

It wasn't long after that when he showed her that Hollis was right, you can't tame a wild animal, he can always turn on you.

Years passed.

Time didn't heal her wounds, it just put distance between her and the night that Eddie the loveable mutt that she left food on her porch for turned on her like a vicious junkyard dog. He was away in the Pacific, being a war hero, and she supposed that one or both of the older sisters were watching the kids while he was gone when she and Hollis got to talking about why she'd never pressed charges against him for what he tried to do to her.

It wasn't so much that she was ashamed, or even that she partially blamed herself.

That's what she told Hollis, but that wasn't the whole truth.

Sally knew she couldn't tell Hollis about Eddie's dead mother, and his ex-hooker sister who killed her pimp who was trying to stay clean, and the two little brothers and little sisters who depended on him, and the ghost of his father, a big, brutal, violent man, a criminal who died in the electric chair, who beat his sons and raped his daughters.

Jesus, what if it wasn't just his daughters?

"Eddie's got enough trouble, Hollis. And I'm never gonna speak to him, again. That's enough. Just let it go."

Hollis Mason, however, wasn't sure that he could let it go, and he wasn't sure that Sally could, either.

New York City, 1948

III: Sally

Like a lot of women in America, Sally Jupiter kept a picture of Eddie Blake.

Unlike most of them, it wasn't a poster, it was the picture of the two of them together, with the rest of the Minutemen.

And when her husband, who was also her publicist, who she had never really loved and was beginning to not really like too much wasn't home, she sometimes had conversations with it.

Even though she was pretty sure that the real Eddie Blake still lived in Bensonhurst, and she saw him, here and there, in the course of business, from time to time.

"Goddamn it, Eddie! This is your fuckin' fault! I'm in this mess causa you! You junkyard dog waterfront rat bastard, you! I guess I married Larry cos he was everything you weren't. Stable. Educated. Respectable. And did I say boring? Boring! Shit, he's boring all day long, and worse, boring all night. So maybe I wanted it from ya? So sue me? Was that a crime? I didn't want it then, not with everybody waitin' in the other room, and I sure didn't want it the way ya tried ta give it to me! Ya rotten bastard, couldn'tcha wait? Didn'tcha know any goddamn better? It's your fault, Eddie! All your fault!"

Of course, most of the time Sally knew that everything she didn't like about her life wasn't all Eddie's fault, and that he wasn't worth the powder it would take to blow him to Hell, and half the time she didn't even think about him.

Most of the time.

But when she did think about him, sometimes she even missed him, sort of.

One thing about Eddie, until he decided to try and beat her half to death so he could rape her, they always had a good time.

And the motherfucker remained a real good-lookin' son of a bitch, too.

Things were worse when Sally drank, and as the mask game became less and less of a real vocation to eradicate crime and more and more of a stunt to sell underwear and action figures and her marriage got worse with every passing day, Sally had more time to drink.

And one bad, drunken day, she decided to get even with Eddie Blake.

She met a guy in a bar at lunchtime, a former GI who had flown 42 missions in the belly of an airplane with her likeness painted on it.

He seemed like a nice guy, and he looked one hell of a lot more manly than Larry did.

She asked him if he wanted to go to the Biltmore to have another drink.

Sally always took the guys she picked up to the Biltmore, a girl she went to school with and had danced with worked the front desk on weekdays, and she knew how to keep her mouth shut.

He was a nice guy. Idolised her. He was starstruck that she was drinking with him, and he was starstruck that she wanted to get a room for the afternoon for them, but he wasn't too starstruck to be able to do his duty.

She was polite to him when she left, and politely skirted his efforts to make a date for another meeting, another drink, an address or a phone number.

Sally had the room for the rest of the day and she didn't mind if the guy stayed in it, she was going home.

She didn't want to get attached to any of these guys; it was easier, this way.

On the way home she had a few more drinks, in another bar, and it occurred to her that most of the guys she had her afternoon dates with, the younger ones and the older ones and the guys around her own age, the ex-GI's and the starstruck young fans, and the good-looking older guys who seemed to understand her more than the rest, they all had one thing in common.

They were all generally the same height and build as Eddie.

They were all of them Eddie but not Eddie, over and over again.

That realization made her mad, mad enough to look at her watch and see it wasn't time for school to be out yet.

Mad enough for her to drive to Bensonhurst and park a block away from the house where Eddie had lived and go pounding on the door.

He still lived there, the son of a bitch, and it was an hour until those kids got home from school and he was still in his goddamn bathrobe.

He was sure as hell a man, now, a full-grown man, six two and two-twenty, but no sooner did he let her in the door than she got that first punch in, hit him as hard as she could, harder than she had ever hit anybody before, and she knocked out a couple of his teeth.

That gave him something to think about.

Eddie hit her back. Not the first time she hit him, or the second, but he had to, because Sally was beating on him like she meant it, like he was some shitheel in the street she was trying to bring down, and when he hit her she hardly felt it, she just kept fucking hitting him, it felt goddamn good to hit him, and hit him, and hit him again, and tell him what a lousy, rotten, no-good shanty Mick cocksucker he really was.

He didn't go down until she kicked him right in the balls, like she was punting a football, and that was it.

It was over almost as soon as it started, and then whatever had got into Sally in that bar just left her as fast as it possessed her, and there she was, with blood on her hands and blood on her coat, and Eddie's goddamn front door was still open and he was in a daze on the floor, eyeballing one or two of his teeth, holding onto his nuts with both hands and swearing into the carpet.

"Fuck, that hurts! I ain't even got my shorts on, fa Chissakes! Are you done, Sal?" he croaked.

"Yeah. I'm done. That makes us even, now, Eddie." She told him.

"Yeah, but didja have to kick me in the balls? There goes my whole night."

"Considering what you tried to do to me, yeah! Here's your other tooth. I'll put 'em in a wet towel for ya. Your dentist can put 'em back in, if you get there in a hurry."

She thought he was going to hit her on the sly when he finally got up, but he didn't, all he did was close the front door, then stagger into the kitchen and use the phone.

"Hey, Edie? Can you get the kids from school? I dunno, use Ivan's truck, I'll bet he ain't workin'. No, I'm fine, I just had a coupla girls over and I lost track of time. I gotta clean up the place. No, I ain't hurt, I'm just tired. Really. Look, Edie, just go get the kids before they leave and walk back here. You feed 'em tonight and I'll come get 'em, later. Okay? Bye."

Eddie stumbled into the can, and Sally wondered what she should do, now.

She stood in the kitchen for awhile, listening to the water running in the bathroom. She wasn't sure why she wasn't leaving, so she washed the blood of her hands and her coat and then Eddie came out of the bathroom.

He didn't bother to put a towel around his waist, he just walked into his bedroom, and came out a few minutes later in fatigue pants and boots and a fatigue A-line undershirt.

He had cleaned up his face pretty well, and put a few clips on the cut over his eye; after he washed all the blood off his face it looked a little better.

Not much.

"So, the old ball and chain is going on a trip next Friday and he'll be back Saturday night. You can show up around noon, if you're still innarested." Sally found herself asking.

The crazy bastard, instead of getting mad at her, Eddie got this big smile on his face.

"Of course I'm still innarested! I got your poster right here on my bedroom wall. Yunno, where I can see it. When I'm lyin' in bed. All by myself." He leered.

"That's disgusting, Eddie."

"Ya didn't think so when I come outa the can."

"I was just surprised you didn't put something on."

"Ya looked surprised, Jesus, ya still look great, Sal. As good as ya look on that poster."

She had the feeling he was going to try and kiss her, and she ducked.

"Eddie, you crazy motherfucker, I just kicked your ass all over the place."

"Yeah, well, ya shoulda done it years ago, if that was all it was gonna take for us ta start mendin' fences. I deserved it, yunno? I had no fuckin' business, doin' what I did. So, you drivin' me to the hospital?"

"Are ya hurt that bad, Eddie?"

"Naw. I just can't drive, I'm seein' double. An' my dentist don't work on Wednesdays."

"Sure. I'll drive ya. Then maybe we can go have a drink."

"Just like old times."

"Yeah. Somethin' like that."

***

After they got through at Brooklyn General, Eddie stopped at a phone booth and told his sister to keep the kids for the night; he was out with an old friend.

Then, they went out and got blind, stinking drunk. So drunk Eddie could hardly open his front door and Sally almost crashed a few times on her way home.

She couldn't believe what she did. She also hardly noticed she had a shiner until she came home and Larry asked her what the hell happened to her and she told him she got clipped stopping some guy from stealing a coed's purse.

"Are you sure it wasn't a bar fight?"

"Fuck you, Larry. I put the food on the table around here, I'm entitled to go out and have a good time if I want to, I sure can't have one at home."

He didn't say anything.

Larry was a lousy arguer. He'd say something snotty and yell a little but if she got really mad, he'd just back down.

It wasn't so much that he believed her or didn't, it was just that as long as she was still pulling in the big bucks and nobody was taking her picture tomorrow, Larry didn't care.

The longest week of Sally's life crawled by, and left her thinking that Eddie had a picture of her, on his wall, in the bedroom, a poster, hung where he could see it while he was lying in bed at night.

Sally sat there in her apartment, wearing make-up and earrings and a low-cut dress and her best nylons, on a Friday afternoon high above bustling midtown Manhattan, thinking about Eddie Blake lying in his bed, looking at her poster, getting off.

She crossed her legs and uncrossed them, really thinking about it. He practically told her that he would look at her picture and whack off, the dirty SOB. He had big hands, Eddie did and he was a big son of a bitch, she wondered if his pecker was as big as his hands, as big as the rest of him, lying there in his bed in one of his crummy undershirts with his hand down the front of his crummy shorts, looking at her on the wall.

It looked pretty goddamn big sitting lying there asleep on his leg when he came out of the bathroom, naked.

The big bastard came strutting out of the john like he knew she was going to be eyeing him up the way a junkyard dog eyes up a nice, fresh, juicy steak.

Goddamn Larry didn't fucking look like that, naked, no he fucking well didn't.

Sally shook her head, disgusted with herself.

"What the fuck is the matter with me? What am I, some bobby-soxser with Eddie's picture on her bedroom wall? Christ!"

Then, the heavy knock on the door and she cursed herself for feeling weak in the knees as she got up and answered it.

It was Eddie, and he had a goddamn suit on, and his hair combed back with oil.

His face had healed up fast, and his teeth had stayed put.

"Hiya, Sal."

"Hiya, Eddie."

She looked both ways before she shut the door, and closed the blinds.

"I don't think anybody's gonna see us this far up in the air."

He was sitting there with his feet on her expensive table, leaning back on her expensive chair, smoking his stinky cigar and smirking, same old Eddie.

"I was gonna cook something, but then I remembered, I'm a lousy cook."

"That's okay, Sal. I ain't hungry."

The last time he had touched her, the only time he had touched her, he was brutal and rough and terrifying, and it scared her to think he was maybe some sicko, always brutal and rough and terrifying, but he wasn't.

He held her hard, and he held her fast, and he kissed her almost desperately, but there was no brutality in it.

Eddie's shoulders were broader than his suit, and she could feel the muscles in his back and his arms through the fabric. And although he had washed and washed and washed she could still smell him, cigar smoke and beer and sweat, honest sweat.

He felt like a man should feel, smelled like a man should smell, and she could feel the heat rising into her face.

"Jesus, Eddie, what a fuckin' man you are." She told him.

He didn't say anything but he had this look on his face, this very un-Eddie sort of look.

They had both worn complicated clothes and wished they hadn't, because they had to be removed carefully.

Eddie was so careful, very careful as he laid her down on the bed with its usually cold sheets and he still had that very un-Eddie look on his face when he said what he said.

"I'm sorry I hurt ya, Sal. I love you, ya know that, don'tcha?"

"Say it, again."

"I love you."

"Show me, Eddie. Show me all the ways."

***

They did end up having dinner, later, much later, Eddie went into the kitchen and cooked something and they didn't even get dressed to eat and ended up back in bed.

He was relentless, and inexhaustible, built like a bull and hung like a stallion, and he was very, very good and she liked it, so much she was ashamed how much she liked it.

"Ya want me to stay, tonight?"

What the hell am I doing, naked in bed with Eddie Blake, lying here with my head on his chest and his arms around me, after what he tried to do to me? What right does he have, after what he tried to do to me to be so goddamn good in the sack, to make dinner for me, to ask if I want him to spend the night?

My own husband never told me he loved me, and I sure as hell don't love him.

"That would be nice, Eddie. Nobody else does. I'm a dirty fuckin' whore, yunno. I sleep with other men alla time. Not here. In hotels. I make 'em go out and buy rubbers cos I don't trust 'em, my fans, and when I'm done, I leave."

She felt Eddie shrug.

"So? I do the same thing. But with broads. I mean, that prick you married, it's obvious he wouldn't have a cock unless he bought a fuckin' rooster. And when ya got people pantin' after you and they want it, they want it bad, they want it alla time, whaddya gonna do? Be like fuckin' Superman and light and a candle inna church an' pray for deliverance, or take cold showers or whatever he does? I wouldn't touch the kinda broads who run after me without a rubber, that's for fuckin' sure. And I sure wouldn't bring 'em into my house. I got kids livin' there, yunno? Except I gotta place uptown where I take 'em. You oughta look into it. It's cheaper than always goin' to hotels." He replied.

Sally laughed.

"You gotta funny way of seein' things, Eddie."

"I see things the way they really are. The funny thing is the way everybody else sees 'em. You oughtta getta divorce, an just go enjoy your life. Ya only live once, Sal, and you're dead a long time."

"So, I guess you still got your brothers and sister at home."

"Not all of 'em. Ruth's a teacher now, at PS 142. This is her first year. She left right after the war. Mickey moved out this year, he became a cop. In the neighborhood, in Bensonhurst. He don't live too far away. Jimmy's probably goin' to college, he's still in high school, an' he's still at home. So's Ellie. She's only in the seventh grade."

"Eddie Blake, family man. What about your older sisters?"

"They're still with the Russian. He never married either of 'em, but, hey, who gives a fuck, right? As long as they're all saying on the straight and narrow. Edie's pregnant this year with their first kid, Aggie tells me next year it's her turn. Soon, I'm gonna be Uncle Eddie. Everybody's happy."

"You did good, Eddie."

"I did the best I could, considerin' the way we came up. None of us went to jail. None of us is a piece of shit criminal. None of us ended up in the bughouse."

"Like I said, you did good, Eddie."

"Yeah. I guess I did."

***

Eddie rallied for one more encore in the morning, and he made one more meal for her, and then he put his suit back on.

He lingered as long as he could, and then, around noon, he left.

"Hey, don't be a stranger for the next eight years, Eddie. Call me, okay?"

"Sure, Sal. I'll callya."

He opened the door, he kissed her goodbye and he was gone.

Sally Jupiter closed the door, and for the first time she counted up how many times she and Eddie went at it, and she realised she didn't have her diaphragm in, and she didn't make Eddie wear a rubber, she trusted him.

Even before the curse didn't come at the end of the month, even before she started whoopsing her cookies every morning, even before her waistline started to thicken and the doctor told her to stop smoking and quit drinking for a few months, she was going to be a mother, Sally knew.

Eddie came to her retirement party, despite the dirty looks, and there was a picture of that party that said it all.

Sally was standing up, her belly sticking out in front of her, and Eddie sat beside her, looking at her with a proud smirk on his face and his smouldering stogie in his mouth, with Larry on Sally's other side, looking pissed-off as Sally ignored him.

They had a few moments before everybody left, just a few moments of Eddie in his mask and his frayed fatigue pants and his army undershirt, a moment where he put his big hand on her big belly.

"So, I guess I did that, huh, Sal?"

"Well, it sure as fuck wasn't Larry."

"Whaddya wanna do? Y'wanna ditch pencil-dick, and move in with me an' the kids?"

Sally wanted to say yes.

She really did.

But that thing he did, that terrible, unforgivable thing, she could forget about it for a day.

And she could live with Eddie and his werewolf ways, half-man and half-beast for a day, but for years?

For a lifetime?

"I got it covered, Eddie." She said.

"Yeah, I thought so. It's prob'ly for the best. I mean, the kids, after what they came up with, I'm not so bad. They got a house and a dog and clean clothes and food on the table and whatever else they gotta have. I never hit 'em with my fist, or with my hands, even. The old wooden spoon for when they get outa line. But they all smoke, and they all curse, and they're a pretty rowdy bunch, even the girls. I'm alright, but I ain't no Father of the Year. Kid's better off without me." He said.

"It's not that, Eddie. It's me. You and me, if we lived together…I dunno."

"Yeah, I know, Sal. Hey, don't be a stranger. Call me, okay?"

"I will, Eddie. I will. I promise."

"Hey Sal?"

`"Yeah, Eddie?"

"Ya know I still love you, right?"

He still had his hand on her belly.

"Yeah, Eddie. I know."

Sally put her hand over his hand, and smiled.

"She's gonna be just like us when she grows up." Sally promised.

New York City, 1974

II: Eddie

The Comedian was pretty sure that in this latest bout of troubles, Liv had really learned her lesson.

In the eight years since she put on a mask she'd been beaten up and shot and stabbed, totaled cars and broken bones, but she never came so close to dying as she did this time.

Kids her age, it never occurred to them that they could die, until it they came really close to it.

Liv had been killing other people since she was eleven years old, and she thought she never gave a shit if somebody turned around and killed her, and she didn't think about the future because she never expected to have one.

And the kid did seem to have nine lives. So it probably rattled her even more that after surviving an attack by a whacko sex freak murderer, jumping out of an airship into a suicide riot, getting shot six times and stabbed ten times and totaling three cars and innumerable fender-bender, bar fights, street brawls and the rest of it, the thing that nearly brought her down was falling on the knife of a scared kid and an ordinary Friday night bar brawl.

So, there she was, sitting quietly on the can, in her panties, with her arm above her head, watching him change the dressing on the wound that had almost killed her, sitting there and realizing that she was as mortal as anybody else and as desperate to live as anybody else, and looking at maybe another sixty or seventy years of life she hadn't counted on.

Thinking that if she was going to spend any of it with a mask on, she had better get fucking serious about doing it.

"How's it look, Eddie?"

"Good, kid. Good. It ain't drainin', anymore. Is it startin to itch?"

"Like a motherfucker."

"That means it's healin'. Put your clothes on."

"Jesus, Eddie, I don't want to put my clothes on."

He had been waiting for that.

If you're a sick motherfucker, killing makes you horny.

But facing your own mortality is a whole hell of a lot more potent than the Spanish Fly.

And Liv was the horniest broad he ever met before she looked death in the eye.

"The doctor said not till you're healed, kid."

"But I am healed, Eddie. Jesus Eddie, I…I…"

The Comedian looked at himself in the mirror.

Don't be a sick bastard, Eddie, don't make her say it. How much fucking mortality can one 25-year old kid take in one day?

Unless you want to start flapping your jaws about it, you fuck. Lotta good it did you the last time. But it was still easier to say when you were shooting the moon, wasn't it?

Turn around, you cowardly old Devil, you rotten hellbound motherfucker, and say it to somebody who's face you're gonna see age, who's hair your gonna see get turn grey. Say it to the last face you're ever gonna see in your miserable life.

Say it to your partner Eddie. Say it to the woman who's gonna push your wheelchair and hold your hand while you're dying, if you make it that far, and if you don't, who's gonna make the streets run red with blood. She'll kill the man who killed you, and everyone he loves and everyone he knows, and everyone who looks like him.

You wanna make her say it?

Say it to her.

The Comedian turned around.

Liv was laughing.

"What's so funny?"

"The joke's on us, Eddie. It really is."

She started laughing again, and it wasn't a normal laugh.

"I feel terrible. I don't know why I'm laughing."

"It's okay, kid. If everything goes right, I oughta be around for another thirty years. By then you'll be old, you'll be used to livin'. And in five years you'll be too old to die young and have people talk nice about what a shame it was at your funeral. That's just the way it is. Death ain't sexy."

Liv stopped laughing and she started to cry.

That was good.

Eddie had never seen her cry.

"Go away, Eddie! Go away, I'm cryin'! I'm cryin'!"

"Finally! Jesus, kid, you even had me thinkin' ya had no feelings."

"I don't have no feelings!"

"Sure ya do. You're cryin', aintcha? You wanna live, don'tcha? Everybody's got feelings, kid. Just because you're a bastard it don't mean you got no feelings. I wish to God it did."

The kid wiped off her eyes with toilet paper, and tried to stop crying, but it was no use. The dam broke, and she really started to keen and wail.

It made Eddie good and goddamn mad.

He knelt down beside her on the tile and he hugged her, and the poor kid cried, and cried, and hung onto him like she didn't have anybody else in the whole goddamn world.

Those lousy, rotten, no-good motherfuckers.

For how many years had those sanctimonious motherfuckers poisoned her mind and told her she wasn't normal, she was a psycho, she had no feelings? They thought he was a human garbage dump and they dumped her on him like she was so much trash.

Not the Bat, his reasons were different, but the rest of them, they looked at the name on her birth certificate and held their noses.

Your father was a piece of shit criminal bastard. A psycho. And you? You wanna be something different? Something better? A hero? The fuck you are! You're going to grow up to be a piece of trash just like your old man, you monster, you inhuman monster, get the fuck away from us. Go over there with that dirty motherfucker Eddie Blake. His father was a piece of shit criminal bastard, too. The Comedian, he's a bad man. He killed his father. He tried to rape America's Sweetheart. He shot the king of our new Camelot in the head, right in front of his wife and everybody else in America. And he did terrible things in all our wars. Especially the last one. He works for the government. God knows what he does for them. Nothing like we do, when we work for them.

You're trash, like he is. Feelings? You got no feelings. You're not even human. You go over there with him, you trash, you garbage, you little fucking sewer rat from Brooklyn. Like goes with like, you two go swim in the sewer together.

It wasn't until Eddie found himself shouting that they all deserved to die from doing to her what they did to him that the Comedian realized he hadn't been thinking all those things to himself; he'd been saying them out loud.

"But Eddie, your father was a horrible excuse for a man, and Sally forgave you and you won those goddamn wars for this goddamn country, especially the last one, and with Nixon in the White House, somebody has to mind the store so the whole country doesn't go down the shitter. Sure, you shot the wrong guy, but if you hadn't, they woulda got somebody else and you'd be dead, too. And ordinary people, on the Left and on the Right, old people and kids, college students and dockworkers, they love you. Jesus, Eddie, whether they wanna admit it or not, they know, you are America." Liv said, her voice still shaky from crying.

"I know that, kid. Like they say, that's my cross to bear."

"It's mine too, Eddie. I'm your goddamn partner."

The Comedian looked at the little red-haired girl sitting on the john with her eyes puffy from tears she hadn't cried since the first time she killed a man when she was an eleven year old kid in overalls and Keds and pigtails, there in her orange cotton panties with blue VW Beetles on them and a hole in the elastic in the back, and his face just cracked into just about the most diabolical smile he'd ever managed.

That beat the hell out of "I love you," any day of the goddamn week.

"Goddamn right you are. Ya feel better, now?"

"Yeah, I do. But, honestly my side still hurts me a little. But I still don't wanna put my clothes on. I wanna take what I got on, off."

"Yeah, me too. I won't hurt your side. I been at this since before you were born. I know what I'm doin. Wash your face, and come ta bed."

***

When Liv got in bed, Eddie was still getting undressed; he was taking off his costume, and watching him get undressed, seeing him naked, it made that old familiar dull thrill of lust go through her, but there was something odd at the top of it, something high and sharp and frail that ripped that heavy curtain of dumb lust to ribbons.

And what it let in was a whole different kind of lust, and it was a million times more powerful than even when she'd gone five weeks without it in the bush up in the Great White North when Logan came and rescued her from her own insanity, and it was worse than the lust that almost drove her to murder Eddie because she couldn't have him, it was almost a sick, terrible feeling that made everything crystal fucking clear, from the minute she jumped out of the Owlship, right up to right now.

And before she could keep her mouth from moving the words just sprang out.

"Jesus, Eddie, I figured out what the fuck's been at me since I met you! I'm in love with youse, ya son of a bitch."

Eddie got into bed like he did every night.

He shut out the light.

"Yeah, kid. I know that."

Liv sat up.

"Whaddya mean, you know that?"

"I mean, I know that. Ya didn't have to say it. It don't change nothin'. But, yeah, I know that."

"Well, I don't give a shit if you don't."

Eddie sat up, too, and put the light back on.

"Whaddya mean, I don't? I spent the last goddamn three years of my life tryin' to save your ass after they just gave you to me and threw up their hands, and I put up with you breakin' my nose and smackin' me around an' puttin' a gun to my fuckin' head and I gotcha sobered up so ya only drink like a normal person and I taughtcha everything I know and I made you my goddamn partner and toleja every goddamn thing about me an' I even saved ya when youse was bleeding to death in my kitchen an' I been lookin' after ya ever since and ya think I don't fuckin' love you? Jesus, why the fuck else would I care? Cos you were a girl? I fucked a lotta girls, kid. I still do. They don't get that kinda treatment from me." He yelled.

"Jeez, Eddie, I guess you're right. I know that, too."

He turned the light off, and rolled over, muttering to himself.

"Are you just gonna go to sleep?"

"Yeah. The doctor says wait till you're healed, anyway."

Liv swallowed the long stream of expletives she had wanted to utter and resisted the urge she had to smack him in the head, and, instead, she darted under the blankets.

Something she'd much rather do, anyway, it wasn't a chore for Liv, she liked it.

A lot.

Although he had been half-asleep, the Comedian woke up in a hurry.

She had him there.

He had to admit, as a man who had been on the receiving end of a whole lot of blowjobs from a whole lot of broads in his life, Liv was the absolute, world-champion, hands-down best.

It was enough to make a grown man cry.

The low, rumbling moan that escape his lips only encouraged her.

He was pulling her hair a little, but Liv didn't care, she figured she always pulled his hair a little too.

"Now that's what I call asking nice." He managed to gasp.

***

The Comedian had an extremely late night, involving about ten beers, several whiskies, and three cocktail waitresses, so the last thing he wanted was to be awakened at six in the morning by his cleaning lady vaccuming his apartment.

His head throbbing, he pulled on his robe and made his way out of the bedroom.

"Will you hold the goddamn carpet sweeper? What the fuck are you trying to do, kill me?"

The cleaning woman, who just happened to be the Comedian's sister, Edie, wasn't going to take any shit from him.

Especially not after what she'd been through that morning.

She turned off the Hoover.

"You do a good job of that, yourself. You've still got your mask on, for Chrissakes! Jesus, Eddie, you're fuckin' crazy! You always been fuckin' crazy! Thirty fuckin' years old and I came in here and found ya in the middle of the day with your mask on, naked, with two girls, botha them naked, bottle on the table, a reefer in your hand, listenin' rock and roll music. Now what are ya, fifty? I can still smell the reefer. And there's a Rolling Stones record and an' empty bottle on the table. But that ain't all. Take a look."

Eddie looked.

One of his guns, and his wallet, and his checkbook.

"So?"

"So! I'll give ya so! When I came in here a couple of cupcakes were trying to make off with those while the third was tryin' ta unplug your TV. I got rid of 'em. It wasn't easy. And you say the kid has no sense. You know what your problem is, Eddie?"

"Yunno what, Edie? I got a feeling you're gonna tell me."

"I sure am. You gotta bad temper and you think with your dick. Those are the only things you got in common with Pop, but you've fucked yourself pretty good with both. You coulda hadda nice life with Sally, but, you was thinkin' with your dick. That's how come you and Liv get along so well. She's got a worse temper than you, and she thinks with her pussy. Smart kid like her, too. At least you gotta excuse, Eddie, you're a fuckin' dummy who never got past the seventh grade. I just hope you don't manage to fuck things up with her, too. You piss that girl off enough, she'll fuckin' killya, and me, I'll go laugh at your fuckin' tombstone. " Edie snapped.

"Hey, Edie, who pissed in your Corn Flakes this morning?" The Comedian asked.

"Those three bitches, that's who! You think the first thing I wanna do in the morning is get into a big fight? You think with your dick, and I gotta clean up after you. Literally."

"Awww, I was drunk. And it's not like I do it every day. Every once in awahile, ya gotta have a good time, in this fuckin' life."

"Yeah, great habits you're teachin' Liv. Well, when ya do hafta get crazy, lock up the dough and the guns, huh? You wanna sleep it off? Go someplace else. I got another place to clean at noon."

The Comedian had the idea that his sister was worried about something, really worried, but he figured she'd tell him, eventually.

He took a shower, trying to wake up, and finding himself still fairly woozy, tired and hung-over, threw on his clothes and decided to drive to Wayne Manor, hoping the kid would still be in bed.

He hadn't seen hide nor hair of her for a week, and that wasn't like the kid, at all.

She was probably working pretty hard to make up for missing time, and being on her ass, but still.

The kid had her own wing of the mansion, and there was a side door that she gave Eddie a key to.

He quietly let himself in, and when he got to her bedroom, he found it was empty and her bed had not been slept in.

Now one thing he knew about Liv, she always came home to bed, no matter where she went or who she was with. He was one of only two men she ever trusted enough to lie down beside and go to sleep with, and there was no motorcycle in her driveway, so Eddie knew that Logan wasn't around.

If she wasn't at the apartment, or here, or in the room over Trivelino Mac's there was only one other place she could be.

The Doc's lab, in Washington.

He got on her phone and called John McClatchey and he said neither him or Joe had seen Liv for quite some time. So Eddie phoned the Doc's and got a receptionist, who routed him back to the Doc's apartment, where nobody answered, so he went down into Liv's bunker where she had this row of buttons that signaled the Doc to transport her places.

He pushed the one next to "Laurie's apartment", and which a flash and a whoosh, found himself there.

The racket awoke his little girl, who liked being awakened before eight as much as her father did.

She stormed out of the bedroom in a tee shirt and panties and screamed as Eddie immediately turned his head away.

"What the fuck is this? What are you doing here? Don't you know I work nights? You fuckin' asshole, you asked for it and I'm gonna kick your ass all over this room!" Laurie yelled.

"Willya put some clothes on, for Chrissake? Go ahead, take your best shot, but put some fuckin' clothes on. It ain't decent! Jesus!"

Laurie stormed back into the bedroom, put on a pair of jeans and came back out.

The Comedian had both hands over his eyes like he was playing hide-and-go-seek, and she really felt like smashing him one, but she decided it wouldn't be fair.

"I'm dressed. Since when do you give a shit about decency?"

"Hey kid, yunno, with me and your mother havin' a history, it ain't right? I'm just tryin' to find out where Liv is? She's just gettin' better, what's she doin workin' at this hour?"

"How the fuck should I know? She and Jon have been at the lab for seven days, straight! Seven goddamn days, and he hasn't come home, once! What the fuck are they doing?" Laurie seethed.

Eddie had to laugh.

"Are you fucking laughing at me, you old bastard?"

"Yeah, I am. What, you think Liv's takin' a pony ride on the big blue pole? I don't think there's much chancea that."

"Well, what do you think? I mean what the fuck are they doing there for three fucking days?"

Eddie seriously thought about what he had jokingly said, and he saw red.

The kid running around with her groupies, here and there, and that Joe Mac the grease monkey and shit like that, and his old army buddy, it didn't bother Eddie, but her and a guy he worked with?

His little girl's old man?

The Doc?

That blue bastard, did he really have the balls to cheat on Eddie Blake's daughter with Eddie Blake's partner?

Laurie was surprised when the usual smirk faded off the Comedian's face, and very briefly, before it registered rage, he looked hurt, like the very idea that Liv and Jon would betray him that way hurt him more deeply than she had been willing to give him credit for.

He didn't have his mask on, or his costume, and for a minute he was just a big tough guy in work pants and an undershirt, going from all to pieces to preternaturally angry over the idea that a man he trusted with her had been fucking around with his woman.

"Son-of- a- bitch! I'll kill 'im! I'll fuckin' tear him limb from limb! Wait, that won't work. The Doc can't die."

"You wanna bet? You never know what you can do until you try. Let's go. This way."

Laurie stormed out of the apartment.

"That's Daddy's little girl." The Comedian muttered to himself and followed her.

III: Jon

Liv had been in her office at the lab for about seven days straight.

She came out occasionally to get food and visit the bathroom, but she unplugged her phone and asked that no one come in and speak to her.

She worked almost all around the clock, Jon knew, because he spent the whole week in the lab, working on his projects, keeping an eye on her.

She had requisitioned a bed and ended up with a regulation cheap uncomfortable army cot, complete with a pillow that was carved out of rocks and the matching blanket made from sandpaper.

She usually fell asleep around three or four, but then she was up again at eight, looking for donuts and bagels with cream cheese, coffee and orange juice and a new day of work.

"Can't stop now, Jon. I'll lose my insight. Can't stop now. Almost got it figured out. Less than six months left. Gotta get started. Wasted too much time, already."

It was as if she wasn't really there at all, when she looked at you, she looked through you, still mumbling a combination of profanity and profundity, dropping papers and bringing books and files and equipment in and out of her office.

He wanted to be there at the precise moment when all of Liv's work came to fruition.

Could it be that he was…excited?

It was dawn on the seventh day when she asked him to come into her office, and asked the doctor a question that even he could not have anticipated.

"Jon, what is it like inside a black hole?" she asked.

Dr. Manhattan blinked.

He had a suspicion, considering some of the books going in and out of Liv's office and the odd paper that fell from her notebooks that she was doing space-time research, but this question was beyond even what he suspected.

"I'm not sure, Liv. I've never been inside a black hole."

"Why not?"

It was a simple question, but one to which Dr. Manhattan had no answer.

"I'm not sure. I suppose the necessity of visiting a black hole never arose." He replied.

"Well, it just did. No one else but you can go. And I've figured all of this out empirically and intellectually, but I need to know exactly what the conditions are in the center of a black hole. Actually, if would help if you could go all the way through and emerge from the white hole on the other side…where's that paper…what I'm looking for is the exact conditions at the point where matter and antimatter meet." She told him.

"In what way?"

"Fuck! Don't play mind games with me, Jon. In a physical way. In a visceral way."

She sat back in her chair, a cosmic look in her eye.

"I would also like to know what dark matter is made up of, but I don't think even you know that."

"What do you think dark matter is made up of?"

"The absence of space. I know that sounds fuckin' ridiculous, but maybe the mass of the universe that is missing is just…missing. Until someone can come up with a better theory, I'll stick to mine. So, are you going to go?"

"To the nearest black hole? Now?"

"No, not now. Not right now."

"Only if you let me in on the project. I don't want credit for your findings. I'm just curious."

Liv leaned across the table.

"When I was in college, I fucked around with the idea of a time-space suit. The way I had it figured, if it was possible for you to re-organise your physical properties at the molecular and subatomic levels, then, it might be possible to duplicate those results. Duplicate and then modify. Of course, the kicker is, how to get the effect without having to fuckin' vaporise myself. Because there's no guarantee that I could do what you've done. That's when I got the idea of constructing a suit- a space time suit- that had the same sub-atomic and molecular properties as your current physical configuration does. I've finally got it all worked out on paper, but if I want to do this fucker, I need some real-world data. I already know what you're thinkin', Jon. I must be nuts if I wanna mass produce time-space suits, but I don't wanna mass-produce them. I may want to publish my purely theoretical findings, write something up on that end of the work, but I don't want anyone to know it exists. Just you, and me. We'll build the fucker, if we can, test it, and...see what happens. If the world isn't, I dunno and all that Sci-Fi shit, ready for such a discovery, you can take it off into space after I die. I'm not concerned with whether or not the world is ready. This isn't about the world, it's about me. I'm ready."

Jon sat back in the chair for a few moments, thinking.

"It's going to take us the better part of ten years to even get a testable prototype."

"I know. But what are we really doing in this place? Jacking off. Fucking around. We can do this government monkey shit work in our sleep. Leaves us plenty of time for something important. I mean even if we just publish the theory, it will be a great fuckin' leap forward in people's understanding of the universe. With the world being the way it is, they need it. If they could all see the universe the way we do, they wouldn't feel so bad, knowing that they could all be vaporised in a matter of seconds."

Jon thought about it.

Of all the scientists he had ever worked with, Liv Napier came the closest to understanding the way he perceived the universe. It was just like her to come up with the idea for a space-time suit. That would enable the wearer to travel through space and time within one universe, but also between parallel universes. The potential for such a creation to be abused and misused by mankind was horrendous.

Yet Jon knew that Liv would be as good as her word and that she would never share her findings with anyone. Except perhaps the Comedian. But you could count on both of them to be indifferent to the promises and the needs of mankind.

The secret would be safe with her.

The research would be fascinating, the task even more so.

There was only one thing he needed to know

"Liv, why do you want a time-space suit?" Jon asked.

"I wanna go into a black hole. Witness the births and deaths of stars. I wanna see the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, and watch the French Revolution devour its own children. When I was a kid, my father used to tell me about the beauty and poetry of chaos and disorder. That was one of the reasons I studied evolutionary biology and quantum physics. I remember the Old Man saying that he read in a book that the universe and everything in it was constantly striving to move as far away from everything else as possible. He used to say, "Think of it, Livvie. Every particle, every atom, every tiny thing is in a process of constant, inexorable progress towards chaos. If the scientists are right about that, and that the entire universe is striving towards disorder, then chaos is God." Think about that, Jon. If entropy is the driving force in the universe, then Chaos is God. I'm my father's daughter. I embrace chaos and disorder. But I don't just wanna see it on Earth, the way the Old Man sees it and the way Eddie sees it. I want to see the forces of entropy that move the universe, in the impossible and vast dark heart of a tiny black hole, where time stops and matter meets antimatter. That's where all life came from. That's where all life's going to. That's how, after it ends, it will all begin again. That's the cosmic joke. God's joke. And I'd like to go and have a laugh with Him."

Dr. Manhattan sat back in his chair and pondered the words of his fellow scientist.

"Liv, I think you have an understanding of the universe that in some ways exceeds my own. I have never met another being with whom I could share my understanding of the universe, either on an intellectual level, or otherwise. That is, I thought I hadn't. How would you like to team up with an accidental demigod, and unlock the mysteries of the universe? After all the worst things that could happen to us is that we may lose our humanity and our sanity, and, well, that doesn't affect you and I, does it?" he replied.

"Jon, did you just make a joke?" Liv laughed.

"I think I did. Well?"

"What the fuck? I'll do it." She agreed.

"I have a few things to tie up, and then I'll visit the nearest black hole, and we can begin. May I read your notes?"

"Just don't take them out of this room, Doc. These are the keys for the file cabinet, and this key opens all the desk drawers except the bottom left. I value my humanity, so I'm not going with you into a black hole. If you value your sanity, Jon, don't look in that drawer."

She seemed incredibly serious.

"Are we talking Elder Gods and Necronomicon?"

"That is not Dead which can Eternal lie. And with Strange Aeons, even Death may Die. Stay out of the bottom drawer, Jon."

Liv got up and walked out of the office and Dr. Manhattan followed.

"I don't need these keys to open your drawers. But I'll leave that one alone. You look tired, Liv."

"I am tired. I gotta go home. Get some sleep. I gotta call Eddie. Maybe I'll go see Eddie. And you have to go home too. You don't wanna get Laurie too mad."

"I miss her."

"Well, ain't that nice. Go ahead, I guess, zap me to Eddie's place. If he's not there I can sleep in his bed as well as I can sleep in mine."

"What if he brings one of his groupies home with him?"

"They can use the couch. On second thought, zap me into the street. It's just gettin' to be springtime, I ain't been out in so fuckin' long, I wanna take a walk. It's a nice morning."

That was when the angry pounding on the door began, and the yelling, and the cursing.

"You gotta passcode?"

"No, I don't have a goddamn passcode. Can you break it down?"

"It's a steel door. Whaddya want, Superman?"

"Maybe if we both try."

"Why the fuck not. One…two…three!"

Smash!

The imprints of the shoulders of the Comedian and the second Silk Spectre appeared in the door, and before they could make a second assault, Dr. Manhattan opened it.

Laurie was the first one through the door.

Jon was naked, but Jon was usually naked.

"Where's Liv? Is she naked, too? Just what the hell's been going on in here?"

Liv was standing in the doorway of her office, having a good laugh.

"What do you mean, Laurie? You don't think we were-"

"That's what we thought! I mean, it ain't just there for show, is it, Doc? And who do you think you're laughin' at, kid?"

"You, Eddie! You oughta see the look on your face! I swear, I swear on my father, the only thing goin' on here is science." Liv managed, between giggles.

Eddie stalked over to her.

"You better quit that fuckin' laughin'!"

"Or what? You gonna smack me one? Big deal. If ya wanna fight, we'll fight, it's been, what, three years since the last one? Go ahead, throw the first punch. But I don't wanna fight with you, Eddie, and I fuckin' know you don't wanna fight with me. Let's go home."

"Can't. Edie's cleanin'."

"Then we'll go to my place."

"There was nothing sexual going on here. At all. I wouldn't do a thing like that."

Dr. Manhattan was rather shocked at the accusation.

"Maybe not, Doc. But Liv would. And guys don't say no to Liv. Especially not guys who don't have anything but the air protecting their balls."

Eddie and Liv both had a laugh on that one.

"Would you still like to go back to the corner, Liv?"

"No, Jon. I'm tired. On second thoughts, I just wanna go home."

II: Liv

I was exhausted by the time we got to my place and Eddie looked pretty wrecked too.

I mean I didn't pass go, and I didn't collect two-hundred dollars, I just dropped my clothes onto the floor and fell into my bed.

I'd been sleeping on an army cot in my office for a couple hours a night for a week, and being in the bed was like heaven.

I wondered where the hell Eddie was, because his clothes were on the floor, but he was sitting on the end of the bed.

I went and sat beside him.

"What?" I asked.

"Tell me the truth, kid. Were you really workin' the whole time? Cos I'm gonna tell you right here, I know I don't own ya, and I never tried to. Just causa what came out the other day, I don't expect ya to turn into a nun overnight. I sure can't. Normally, I don't give a shit who you're with when you ain't with me. I mean, if I drives past here and see another bike parked outside, or somethin', I keep drivin'. All I ever ast ya is that you be straight with me. I don't gave a shit about the groupies but if somebody's gonna be sleepin' here on a regular basis, I think I gotta right ta know who I'm sharin' my partner with. But, your best friend's boyfriend? Your boss? I mean, the Doc? An' you sneaking around behind my back, and my kid's? I'm not gonna fuckin' stand for that."

Eddie really seemed hurt.

Sometimes, I forget the man has fucking feelings, just like sometimes I forget I do, too.

But we do, you know.

We are people, aren't we?

"Eddie, Jesus, Jon isn't my type. An you know the only guys I ever spend any real time with besides you is Joe Mac and Logan. I would tellya if that changed. I promised. You're may partner, ya know I'm with ya more'n anybody else. Jesus, Eddie I wouldn't do nothing ta hurt you like that. Okay?"

"You're all I got, kid. Ya know that, don'tcha? Anybody tries to fuck with that, the Doc, ten guys in a bar upstate, any fuckin' motherfucker in the world, I'll kill 'em. Kill 'em all."

I didn't hesitate to say it, either.

"You're all I got, too, Eddie. You're my partner. If you jumped out into fuckin' Hell itself, ya know I'd jump right after ya. Ya know I'd kill for ya, you seen me do it, and so help me God, I'd die for ya if I had to" I said.

And I meant it, too.

"I'd rather see you live, kid. I believe ya. C'mon, let's get some shut eye. We got work to do tonight."

***

So, I've been kicking around the idea of buying an old warehouse down by the docks, or in the Bowery to use as what the Old Man calls a to as a lair, but for right now Wayne Manor and its grounds houses both the Batcave and the Funhouse.

Yeah, I know. Harlequin, Funhouse, it's fucking corny.

Well so it Batcave , if you think about it.

I don't do much there, not compared to what Bruce does. If I ever get that warehouse together, then, well, we'll see, but right now all I got is pretty much my garage, with all my tools and machines and shit and that's where I keep all my guns and ammo.

Anyway, though, now that I got an arch-nemesis cooling his heels in the bughouse and thinking up some diabolical strategy to for when he comes out in a few months, I gotta get my shit together. Fast.

What I'd really like to do is get a place of my own, for business. Like an old warehouse. Maybe find one that has a A-Bomb bunker under it. I could set up a better garage, get my own lab together. I've got some plans for what I'd like to do if I buy a place, how I want it laid out. I mean, once I build The Suit, I'd have to be crazy to keep it on government property. I'm gonna need some serious shit for my lab, there, but the Doc can pretty much get whatever he wants out of the feds, so he says he'll help me outfit it.

I mean I had a lot to do and a lot on my mind.

Which is probably why I got really pissed off when Eddie comes over in his Caddy, the new one, the '71 Fleetwood Eldorado, and he wants me to fix his brakes.

I guess his attitude is that he just saved my ass and he didn't kick me to the curb and he was looking after me after my latest bout of Troubles, and I split for a week without so much as a phone call to let him know if I was in trouble, or shit like that, so I can at least fix his brakes. I do most of the work on Eddie's cars, now. His brother Mickey used to do it, but Mickey's a cop, not a mechanic, and he fucked the cars up pretty often so Eddie had to take then someplace else, anyway.

Normally, I'm not up to much when I'm not working, or on my mask rounds, actually, but this was different. Especially while I was under the caddy and Eddie was checking over my guns like I didn't know how to keep an M-1 in good working order, I got pretty pissed and I slid out from under the car.

"Hey, Sarge give it a fuckin' rest, willya?"

"What? Which one of us was in the fuckin' Marines, me or you? Where's the Tommy gun?" he asks me.

"It's in the Wildcat. Leave it alone."

See, that was the thing that was really pissing me off.

My big project was something I'd been thinking about for a long time that I never quite got around to doing. I was trying to get my own superhero supercar together, and I got this '63 Buick Super Wildcat I've had for years and I crashed the thing a million times and it just won't die.

Drove the motherfucker from one end of North America to another, I practically lived in it one summer and it never let me down.

The goddamn things go like a bat out of hell, and they're already built like a fucking tank, but I had some plans for mine. Bulletproof glass in the windows, reinforce the grille so I can use it as a battering ram, machine gun ports, and some body work, engine work. And som psy shit too, like cameras in the headlights, shit like that. Detailing, too.

I had it all planned out and I made drawings and shit and that's what I wanted to work on.

I was in the fucking middle of it, when Eddie decides he wants me to fix his goddamn brakes.

And it's not like he listened to me when I told him to stay away from the goddamn Wildcat. I'm under the Caddy and I can hear him over there, fucking around with it.

I'm usually not too busy when I'm not at work or at the lab, so Eddie's used to me just fuckin' around a lot of the time, but I wasn't fuckin' around now, I had work to do. I guess I should have just explained to him what I was doing, showed him my plans and all, since he is my goddamn partner, but instead I came out from under the car like the devil blew hot pepper up my ass, yelling and waving the wrench around.

"Jesus, Eddie, canya quit fuckin' with my shit! I mean I'm tryna do something in here an' first you gotta come in here with this brake job shit, and then ya gotta fuck with everything in the goddamn place! I can't get nothin' fuckin' done for myself around here! Fuck!"

So I expected him to get mad, but he didn't, he just kinda smiled at me like he knew something I had no fuckin' clue about, closed the door to the Wildcat, switched his stogie from one side of his mouth to the other and laughed.

"Okay, kid. You're workin'. I get it."

So he goes and sits down and pulls this nudie magazine out of his back pocket and starts lookin' at it while I'm finishing up the brake job.

I gave him back his keys and he puts the magazine back in his pocket.

"Ya need any hardware for your project?"

"You mean like spy shit and military shit?"

"Yeah. I can get you anything you want, if ya let me see your plans."

So I showed Eddie the plans, and he said he'd get me all the shit I needed, which was pretty cool.

Then he splits, just like that.

I got the stuff like the next fuckin' day.

All the stuff.

Even the goddamn GPS system, and Bruce doesn't even have a GPS system.

It's good to be the king, yunno?

So I was workin' on the Wildcat pretty solid for the next week or so, and while I was workin on the car, I didn't do anything but work on the car. I mean all I did was eat, sleep and work.

Just like in the lab.

But I was really on a roll, and I didn't want to stop working until I was all done. That's why I'm not gonna go to with Eddie to DC, unless I can finish the car before he goes.

Six months goes faster than you think, and they might parole the big dumb motherfucker.

II: Eddie

There was no doubt about it, the kid was really starting to come into her own.

As time went by, he'd had to keep her on a shorter and shorter chain, but she still needed somebody told hold her leash, a fact that her latest Troubles had proved.

The kid, however, was finally staring to show some initiative towards becoming her own mask, and getting off the leash and out of the doghouse once and for all.

Then Comedian had occasion to think about all of it, in his last days in New York, before he had to leave for Washington.

This was going to be the year that he was going to take the kid with him, but she was still a little fucked up from what he hoped would be her final bout of troubles, and she said she had a lot of work to do, so she wasn't going.

She said she might make an appearance or two after work if she got done with her project, but the whole thing didn't seem to interest her much.

The whole thing didn't interest Eddie that much, either. In the past they'd actually got things done at these summits, but it had been nothing more than a big show for at least a decade, and all the comedian usually ended up doing was getting drunk and fucking groupies.

Last year, one of them gave him a dose of the clap. It wasn't as if he could go back to New York and pretend to the kid that he just all of the sudden wasn't up to it anymore, and she must have laughed at him over it for six months.

She did, however, offer to find the offending chick and knock the shit out of her.

Yeah, after three years, the kid wasn't his apprentice, anymore, she was his goddamn partner.

She'd come a long way from being a dumb kid a boiler suit who was only interested in boozing, brawling, and getting her rocks off who considered being a mask to be little more than running around town in a half-assed costume knocking the shit out of people.

At this point, the kid was ready for the big leagues, or at least he thought she was before she pulled that stupid shit again, after the first time since he'd met her.

If she hadn't pulled that, she'd be going on this trip with him.

Still, the Comedian wasn't too worried about his partner.

He knew that when you're young and crazy and full of piss, wind and excitement, running around in a costume and trying to save the world, you always fall right on your ass, at some point. And that's when you figure out what it is you really want to do.

At least that was what happened to Eddie, when he got tossed out of the Minutemen for getting a little rough with Sally Jupiter.

Liv, she had just fallen on her ass, big time, and as soon as she got off it she had really gotten to work. All of the sudden she was talking about new projects with the Doc, about buying a warehouse, and she built her own "superhero supercar" from the ground up. With him out of town getting his latest assignment together, it would be prime-time for her to get her ass in gear, once and for all.

It was alright for the kid to want him around, but not to need him. It was time for her to learn to stand on her own two feet, as a mask, and as long as he was around, she wasn't ever going to get off the leash that she was just beginning to strain against.

He had an idea of how he could help that process along, a little, but he wanted to talk to an old friend of his that he grew up with, in the old neighbourhood, to see if he agreed.

***

"Eddie! Long time no see! So, how's the costumed spook business, going?"

"Picking up. I see they got you out of the padded cell today, Jack."

The Joker waved his hand, dismissively.

"Well, sometimes I get bored with making trouble for them, and I just want to come back to my lovely suite, here and enjoy my time off. Think about the future. Speaking of which, how's our Liv? If I knew that she was hurt that badly and she was going to go out and do what she did, I would have ut her in my straitjacket and called the orderlies, myself." He reproached.

"Jack, don't look at me like that. She's your little girl, what do you want me to do about it?"

"Oh, I don't blame you, Eddie. Or Batsy. He did the right thing, turning my little devil over to the likes of you. The two of you just saved her life, didn't you? And she won't tell me the name of that bar. So heroic of her. I only wish I could get out of this place a little sooner. My little girl needs her Daddy, at a crucial moment in her life like this one. But you'll do. I trust you, Eddie. Especially if you can get the Green Jackal sprung."

"I thought you might have an idea of what to do about Liv, but spring that dumb bastard? Why? He's a sick fuck. He tried some shit with her. If he tries it again, I'll butcher him."
"Eddie, don't get jealous. I'm sure that he was just a passing fancy. I'm locked up in here with the kid. He's way out of his league. I think he just pit on his siter's tights and knocked over that store because he couldn't think of anything else to do. Now, tell me you're not counting down the days till Moloch gets out of this place. I mean, how many countries can you overthrow and how many presidents can you shoot before it all becomes mundane? That's not why you put on a suit, any more than I became to Joker to make a few million bucks. Liv has to discover the thrill of being what she is, and figure out it's a bigger thrill than breaking the jaws of oafs in bars, any day of the week. And there's nothing like a supervillain to put that joie de vivre into a superhero's life, Or vice versa. Get it?"

"You got a point there, Jack."

"I've been thinking about this for awhile. I have a lot of time to think, here. You know I feel sorry for poor Batty, all alone in his cave with his wonderful toys and no one to really use them on. We're all mad, on either side of the cape, so to speak, and we need each other to appear sane. So you and I we need to get these two kids together, Livvie and Greenie. They need each other to, as my teevee likes to tell me, be all that they can be. It just might be the beginning of a beautiful relationship."

Eddie chewed his cigar, thoughtfully.

"What if he's dangerous?"

"Greenie? Dangerous? Sure he's a big kid, and I'm sure if you rubbed him the wrong way he'd slap you into next week, but, dangerous? The kid sits here all day and moons around like a melancholy cow. He's not dangerous, but anything he pulls while you're gone will give her something to do. Herself. Without you. "

"That's a good idea. Thanks, Jack."

"Don't mention it, Eddie. And don't worry. I'm getting out, shortly. If the kid tries any shit with our Liv, I'll take care of him. Take it easy, the joke's on me, this time."

"No, no, Jack, the joke's on him." Eddie replied.

III: Nowhere Man

I: Paul

HEY! STOP RIGHT THERE, BUB!

Logan?

That's right. It's me.

They call me Wolverine.

I'm the best at what I do, but what I do isn't very nice.

Okay, you heard it.

So, just what the fuck am I doing here?

Plenty.

And I'm not here to slice the giant squid into sushi, or catch my old army buddy Eddie Blake when that fucking braniac Nazimandias tosses him out his window, so you can relax.

Fucking superhero, my hairy Canadian ass! Anybody who thinks a genetically engineered giant squid killing three million people is a lasting and effective nuclear deterrent should be locked up in Arkham for life.

Or better yet, tossed out a window.

Boy, by the time the kid got done with him, I'll be he wished he followed Eddie out the window, it would have been a lot easier death. Damn I almost felt sorry for the megalomaniacal bastard…

Wait.

That's not even till the next story the Harlequin tells you.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

Point is, my name's been dropped here and there, but before this story goes any further, if you want to know what really happened, the Harlequin is going to have to talk about me.

Now I'm not trying to horn in on the beautiful story, and quit laughing, you in the back, or I'll make you into bacon strips, of how she and Eddie came to be partners. It's their story, and I'm a fairly peripheral character. Me, I don't know how Eddie ever got her in line. All I managed to do was keep her and her car rolling across the Great White North for a couple of months in 1970 and get her and the car back to New York in one piece, more or less, and anybody else but me wouldn't have been able to do it, and you had better believe that, bub.

Except, this time, it was very nice.

You probably already know that women love me.

Well, some women love me.

Okay, some women like having me around for a night as long as I'm gone by the time they have to leave for work in the morning. I'm not picky, what do I care? I can't figure out what it is about a short, hairy canucklehead like me that makes them go nuts, but I suppose it's my wit and charm.

No questions about my inside leg measurements, thanks.

You're some nosy fuckers, ain't ya?

Or maybe Eddie's right about women liking the costume.

Anyway, getting serious for a minute, there's not many men who have loved and lost as much as I have. Every time I fall in love with a woman, she ends up dead. Now, I can't stop myself falling in love with women. And I can't seem to keep them from dying.

Of course, then, I met the great love of my life, a girl named Jeannie.

We're good friends.

Just good friends.

So, you might imagine it was nice for me to run into a woman that I think could probably give even that rat bastard Sabretooth a run for his money. I'm not saying she could kill him, but I'm pretty sure she'd be able to damage the motherfucker bad enough to laugh at him a little before she took her time walking away.

I sure as fuck don't have to lie awake at night wondering if somebody's gonna kill Liv Napier. Not even when Eddie's off doing his black ops. The kid's fucking lethal.

Now, I'm not gonna say it was love that brought me and Liv together in that dive in British Columbia when we were both down and out and she was doing bare knuckle fights in Army-issue undershirts and boxers to make enough money to live, but we became friends.

Not just good friends, if you get my meaning.

Hey, I'm droppin' hints all over the place, bub.

If you want details, use your imagination.

You better have one hell of a fuckin' imagination.

Now, I don't have a whole lot of real good friends, funny enough. And when I meet somebody who's read a few books, and likes to ride and have a few beers and a good time and doesn't mind if there's a little dirt and a fight or two involved, I like to keep in touch.

And when that person is a woman, a red-haired woman, a red-haired woman whose hair is red with the hellfire the Devil forged her in, I can't help it, I'm just a man and I'm coming back for more no matter what the Justice League has to say about fraternising.

They never said anything, before.

I think they made that rule up after that thing in '72 at that bar near Arkham, the one where the kid almost bought the farm.

Yeah, while she was sick, Eddie and I got together and we went up there and found the guys who pounded that knife deeper into her body and we did to them what we used to do to Nazis back in double-U double-U eye eye.

Shit.

Fuck.

Forget I said that.

No, that was 69. '72 was something different. Someplace in the city. Anyway, some pussy who couldn't take a punch when he started the whole thing made a big stink and even though Liv had been on her best behaviour for a goddamn year, all of the sudden it didn't look right for a member of the X-Men to be "fraternizing" with a trainee of the Justice League in public.

I still remember how the Bat tried so hard not to laugh when Liv stood there and asked Superman to define precisely what he meant by fraternize.

Eddie laughed. He laughed his ass off, and he told Clark that every army on the Earth and every angel in Heaven and demon in Hell wasn't going to stop Liv from fraternizing with men, and pointed out to Supes that he tried to stop the two of them fraternising and that they had just got done fraternizing before they came to the meeting.

He kept saying fraternizing, too.

Everybody in the whole goddamn room was trying not to laugh.

Good old Eddie. He thinks life is all a big joke. That's a little sick, but the man's done some pretty bad things, and he he's had some pretty bad things done to him, and trust me, when your life goes like that, you have to find some way to rationalise it.

He thinks my recurring appearances in his partner's life are funny.

Always liked his sense of humor.

So now, if I even wanna have a goddamn beer with my good friend Liv, we have to do it in secret.

Pisses me off. I know that Clark is just desperately trying to rehabilitate Liv's reputation so that every time people hear "Harlequin" they don't think "mad, bad and dangerous to know", but that's probably what people think when they hear my name and it hasn't hurt my career, bub.

I even went and asked Cap and Iron Man if they'd have the kid in the Avengers and they didn't seem opposed to that idea, or the idea of me and the kid working together, let alone being seen in public.

Tony was pretty goddamn enthusiastic about it; I think he called the kid making her offers she couldn't refuse for a month. I'd like to think it had to do with him wanting to unite both of their brilliant minds, but knowing the Invincible Iron Man as well as I do, I think he was considering some other things he could unite over a bottle of Southern Comfort on a Saturday night.

But, Liv's first loyalty is to Bruce Wayne, and therefore the Justice League, so I know she didn't take Tony up on any of his official offers, and, long story short, that's why I'm the big secret nobody's talking about.

Not like it's a big deal. I don't get to New York a lot, and usually when Liv comes upstate it's to see her Old Man, although after what happened I think I'm gonna make a point of being in that dive every Friday night, but I wouldn't even be sticking myself in here if we weren't about to get to the point where we can't tell the story anymore without my hairy ass being in it.

Okay, just so long as we're clear on that, you can find out all about Paulie, the Green Jackal and how he really dropped himself into the shit, and what happened next, just don't be surprised when I turn up.

Or anybody else.

Thanks to Paulie, things are about to get complicated.

Author's Note: Hey! How did he get into this? If you really want to know, check out "Moonlight and Adamantium" under Comics-X-Men-Wolverine. And tune in to the next exciting chapter to find out who this Green Jackal guy is, anyway?