~:~:~:~
Red Mist.
~:~:~:~
"I'm going to take care of this."
"Why?"
"Because you're being reckless. You're being reckless, and you're not going to let it go. I know how stubborn you are, Chris. So I'm going to take care of it."
"Explain."
Six large crates of comics are in the corner.
The boxes themselves have become damp from trapped moisture and sag under the weight of so many issues, but each comic is sealed in a plastic sleeve, preserved on the inside. The silver case is behind the desk. I've changed the combination to one I'll remember.
This loft isn't much better than the last one.
I've been here before.
"I'm putting the word out to the dealers on the streets. They're going to keep an eye out for these two. They'll be looking to draw you out. They'll start attacking the business."
He's good. He's very good. Sarcasm.
Great Uncle Carl, you surprise me.
"Take care of it.." I resign. "But make sure they all know the risk involved. The little bitch is crazy. Kick-Ass will fold like a wet bedsheet the minute they grab him. I would PREFER alive, if they can do that."
They won't be delivered to me alive. The odds are low.
When the enforcers are bored, their trigger fingers itch.
"Chris. I know I can't keep you off the streets for long, but just don't get in the way. Let our men handle this. There's a call for blood on these two. After all... your father was a very special friend to all of us. A good man. When are you going to be able to say the same about yourself?"
The dad angle. He throws it in my face one last time.
Finally, I say what I've wanted.
"I'll own this one day. All of it. I'll leave behind something bigger than my dad ever wanted me to. Don't lie to yourself, Uncle Carl. You don't want to run things. You want to take orders. Otherwise, you wouldn't be keeping the vultures at bay for me so long. You just want someone who will reward your loyalty at the top. I know that's the fact. You're too goddamn stupid to do this yourself."
He pauses and looks at me. Something clicks. Against chance, he laughs and shakes his head.
"Well, loyalty is rewarded, and so are results." I tell him. "Deliver both, I'll take care of you."
They said I would never be like my father. Now I have spoken just like he would. I tried for a month there early on. Wore the suits. Sat in the offices taking calls. Trying to be something I didn't have passion for.
But I understood. I knew that it wasn't about the money or even about the power. It was about the legacy.
How many people know who Jack Ruby was? Maybe 3 out of 10 on a good day?
How many people know who Lee Harvey was?
Nerd? We're all nerds in our own way. Nerds would just rather collect comic books or critique movies than brag about how much we can benchpress, or how many touchdown passes that a quarterback for our favorite team averages a week.
I'm that type of nerd. I actually counted how many films Johnny Depp has done with Tim Burton vs. How many Burton had done with Elfman one afternoon with the help of IMDb.
The point is the villain.
What did the last three Supporting Actor Oscars have in common?
I wrote that threatening promise so long ago, back when I had nothing but hot air. Now, I have everything at my fingertips. When this is over with, I'll be set for life.
I make a phone call, waiting on one of the guys downstairs to bring up dinner. I peek out the window every few minutes. No hellions of death tonight.
After the late dinner, I sit at my desk and turn on the lamp. I selected one of the less valuable issues from the silver case earlier. The 1967 Silver Age Daredevil #34. Two reprints have come and gone but this is original. It's cheap compared to some of the Spider-Mans and Avengers I fould in there. Half of them have been sold. There was only one I kept. The rest are waiting to be sold, enjoyed while they last in my possession.
They've gone on to fund a lot of things, but I've been putting most of the money away.
I wait on a call back. I've given explicit instructions that I want to be called when they're spotted. I've also told them very carefully not to screw this up or kill them unless absolutely necessary.
Now it's time to wait.
~:~:~:~
Kick-Ass.
~:~:~:~
"If you're done beating up on street scum, we have work to do tonight." She says.
We store away the motorcycle and find a quiet Mom & Pop diner downtown. It's a few minutes past breakfast hours but she turns on the cuteness factor and gets waffles. A hot fudge sundae afterwards. I try to drink a cup of coffee. It's too sweet and even though it's hot enough to burn the roof of my mouth, I just slug it back.
"Eat something." She says, turning over the menu and handing it to me. I put it down and finish the coffee. Outside, a cop car drives by and I tense for just a moment before I remember the windows of the diner are tinted.
We're sitting by the window so we can see anyone coming in or going out. We're safe for now. We're just wanted by the police and the mob. It's not a big deal, right?
"I'm not hungry." I say.
There's plenty of money to burn. She tells me that her father always tipped 5$.
"It didn't matter if we just had sodas or a huge dinner. He said that 5$ was good enough for anything." She closes her eyes. Remembering. "He always used to say that until the commies took over the tax system, it could buy a pack of cigarettes."
We both smile, but neither of us laugh. She makes me take a bite of her sundae with her. Different spoon. Don't be concerned.
"I'm glad that you can do it, though." She quips.
"Do what?"
"Smile. Smile so soon after. Have you really seen me smile in a year, Kick-Ass?"
Nobody is within earshot, and I feel weary to the challenge of trying to hide my identity much longer. For all I knew, the detectives have put two and two together or dug something out of the rubble that used to be my home that points me out as Kick-Ass anyway.
"No, I haven't. It's a sad time."
"Let me ask you something." She sets her spoon in the glass, standing straight up in the bottom of the dish, sticky with hot fudge.
"Go ahead."
"You said that we are who we choose to be. Does that mean that we choose our feelings too?"
"I don't understand."
"If we choose who we are. We can choose how we feel, right?"
"Yes... no..."
I picture Brett Ratner stepping into the director's chair of my life.
She scoops the rest of the fudge out and puts the spoon in her mouth.
"Yes-no?" She puts the spoon down.
"I don't know. What does it matter? We're not going to be lucky forever, Hit-Girl."
"We never were lucky. We lived to remember all of this tragedy, didn't we?"
Tender.
~;~;~;~
There were a lot of names on Big Daddy's list.
Five of them were never finished. They were meant to be stepping stones, all the way to the final boss of this entire game he had crafted for himself and his daughter.
Instead, I came along and dropped satisfaction and sadness directly on this girl's head. One day, I won't be able to live with myself.
We decide to start with those. We don't talk about killing or not. If I say no killing, there will be killing. If I remain silent, she will kill anyway.
Her decision isn't unexpected. Dead men will tell tales after all. They'll send a message. We'll go step by step through them.
As you can expect, nothing is going to go according to plan. Hell, I know that going in. There's no other choice.
We're going to let Hit-Girl do what Hit-Girl does best. For now.
At 10pm, we round the corner at Washington St. The basement apartment is crammed under the foundation of a tenement row. It's quiet, it's feared by middle-class people and it's where the Genoveses carve our their lowest common denominator. Meth and crack for the street walkers. The bottom of the barrel scraped.
I approach the door. A rat runs past my feet. I'm wearing my suit under my jacket and jeans. It's started to rain again outside. The air is still humid and hot, making the jacket uncomfortable. I knock on the door twice.
"Who is it?" A voice grumbles.
Red Mist knows who I am.
Maybe they have my picture.
But we only need to get the door open. We just need the door open, and things can start happening.
Hit-Girl waits in an alcove behind me. A coiled cobra, ready to spring.
"Louie sent me."
Of all the names I ever heard in mob movies, Louie always struck me as the least stereotypical.
"That a fact? Come on in."
I smell a trap. Hit-Girl, I hope you're ready.
This guy is tall and skinny and smells like cheap cologne and cheaper cigars, but he seems to know a Louie.
I start to step in. Behind me, a girl in purple runs out from behind the corner and sprints for the door. I pass the greeter and turn, grabbing the pepper spray from the pocket of my jeans and unloading it in his face. He screams and clutches his face. Hit-Girl jumps over me and sinks a knife balls deep in his chest. He grabs her by the neck and she twists the knife. His grip slackens.
Hit-Girl runs back into the alley and begins to circle around to the fire escape of the tenement surrounding the apartment. Seperate entrances will be violated, as perverse as that sounds.
I'm kicking the dead guy out of the way and hauling the door shut when a 300-pound Italian bull comes out to check the ruckus.
...and everything was going so well.
He goes for his gun and I slap it out of his hand. He lunges to grab me by the neck and I unload the rest of the pepper in his face. I throw off my jacket and draw the taser, firing it against his neck.
The drug dealer of the household is in the next room. There are two large satchels on the table and he's sliding small stacks of bills into each, glancing at the door to see when his guests will come back.
We didn't expect to drop in on their weekly Mob Tithe. 11%, right off the top. You've seen the movies.
Mr. Drug Dealer hears the racket and stands up. By the time I barrel into the room, Hit-Girl has already made her grand entrance through the opposite door and drawn her gun. She shoots him through the shoulder. The round exits clean and I feel a slight breeze past my temple. A spark behind me as the cop killer bores through the metal door.
He surrenders at this point. I decide to put the suit on. I don't know if any of the neighbors have heard the shots and called the police.
"Let's finish it." I say, waiting for Hit-Girl to execute him. She pistol-whips him instead, laying him out.
"Maybe the poor bastard will wake up from the smoke and escape with a few scars to think about." She mumbles. Surprising behavior.
I go back to the motorcycle and take a large container of paint thinner and gasoline mixed together. We douse every wall in every room and pour a little trail through them all. The police will never get here in time to haul up anything useful in forensics.
She strikes a match and tosses it. We watch it burn for a minute on the bike and then take off. We wait behind a Marathon station for almost 10 minutes before the sirens pass. When there's no more stragglers to go to the most exciting thing to happen since this afternoon when some kid's apartment blew up, we go back to 6th street.
We need a hideout. With a fake waterfall, maybe holographic. A big neon symbol on the way and all of these overpriced hydraulic lifts with thousands of LEDs and a dozen smoke machines, even though nobody outside of this hideout will ever see them anyway.
We're going to need a hideout regardless. I don't have anywhere to sleep with four intact walls and neither does Mindy.
I'm 17 years old. Even if I wasn't probably wanted by the police by now for either being Kick-Ass or running away from my legal guardian pro-temps, I can't just rent a motel room somewhere.
"I saw an old place I used to know when I was going around the city the other day, while you were at school." She says. "It's not far from here. We can walk." We pack up the suits in my bag and she goes to take the rifle case with her, and stops. "Where's the medical kit?"
I just realize that hard evidence is sitting under my bed. Under the dust and rubble and all of the sheets and the mattress frame, now broken of course, there's a military-grade first-aid kit that could only be acquired by a freaky drug addict with good connections or a criminal like this 'Hit Girl' who shoots cops and blows up apartments.
The media searched for a name, and they found those old forums where Hit-Girl and I were legends. It will be too easy to demonize us both day after day until we are finally hauled in or identified in the remnants of a bloody and gruesome murder spree that will be ended when our luck runs out.
We're killing people now. Just like she and Daddy used to do.
~:~:~:~
Hit-Girl.
~:~:~:~
The crack den is a cake walk compared to the old days, when I would face crowded apartments or bistros full of fat mob suits only willing to really swing on a little girl after they watched her slaughter the first two or three.
Gasoline and paint thinner was Daddy's favorite. He said it burned really bright and it burned really fast. Of course it was also untraceable, being available at the nearest supercenter and gas station in gallons.
I lead Kick-Ass to one of our former safehouses. It's a half-constructed apartment, abandoned when the permits with the city didn't clear. It's still just like we left it. The exterior is almost finished. It's a lot warmer than the outside. The floor is a mixture of concrete slab and bare wooden supports. The one room with finished hardwood is covered in a layer of dust and there are spiders everywhere.
When we stayed here some nights that Daddy thought we hadn't taken every precaution to avoid leaving evidence behind, he sat in this room with a folding chair, watching out the small window with a rifle laid across his lap.
"Try and sleep." He tells me, sitting against the wall.
"Only if you do too."
~:~:~:~
Kick-Ass.
~:~:~:~
Sleep? I doubt it, but I'm more tired than I know, and I manage to drift off for a few moments to let her do the same.
She falls asleep using my bag for a pillow. There's a gun by her side. I stand up and walk over to sit down beside her, and my cellphone is buzzing in my pocket again.
Text message.
Please call me.
It's from Katie.
Bite the bullet. Swallow the lead.
"It's late." I say when she answers. I'm in the next room, sitting on a bundle of brown carpet that nobody collected in the corner.
"I know. I can't sleep, Dave. I'm not surprised you can't either." She sniffles. "I'm glad you called."
"You've been crying."
"Yeah. I just had a bad day."
I have the monopoly on bad days and I'm really reaching for the worst week of human existence. I think the Normandy Invasion is getting a run for it's money.
"I'm sorry. About earlier. I owe you an apology." I ramble out.
"It's okay. It's okay." She's still crying. Not for me. For herself. I'm the shoulder to cry on. "Dave, when are you coming back to school?"
"Maybe tomorrow. The world has enough problems without hearing about mine."
Big Daddy's words in Mindy's mouth in mine.
"I thought we were going to be friends again, Dave. Friends listen."
"Friends understand. You're not my friend, Katie."
"Why not, Dave?"
"Because I never really saw what you were. I just saw what I wanted." Reality is a bitch, and the pregnant girl can know no less.
"I need all the friends I can have now, Dave. It's a rough time."
"Things happen, Katie. Life goes on. My father was murdered today, remember?."
Suddenly there's a chatter of words on the other side of the line. Her mother has barged into her bedroom, catching her on her cellphone.
"I have to go." She says. "Dave, call me tomorrow."
When the men in the black car pulled up outside of the first place in Hit-Girl's plan, we had finished watching the blaze.
They had been told to pay a visit to the local crew on deck and make sure that they knew to keep an eye out for two kids that liked to dress up. They picked a bad one for last.
But now the others know, and the next one won't be so easy. Just because part of my skull is now laced with metal doesn't mean that getting pistol-whipped doesn't hurt real bad.
They wanted to follow us, but the police were about to be around the area and they wouldn't be able to slip away so easily. They let us go and promised each other to report that we had been long gone by the time they showed up.
Now that Red Mist knows what we're up to, it's just in the cards to keep at it and wait for him to slip.
My phone beeps, telling me that I have six voicemails from the past 24 hours.
The last one is my dad at work, telling me that he'll be home late so I should make myself breakfast.
I'm finally able to cry.
"Our heroes are people and people are flawed."
~Randy Milholland~