Chapter Seven: Failing Grade
Peter woke up and found himself out of bed, crouched to meet an attack. The Osborn mansion was silent and dark as he burst out of his room and sped lightly through the halls. He barely broke stride to check Harry's room—empty—before vaulting over the hall landing and heading to the other side of the house, where he'd left Harry in his father's study two hours earlier. As fast as he was moving, his spider-sense was pushing him to go faster and he reached the study door convinced that he was too late.
The day had been long and tense. Peter moved through his classes on automatic pilot, his brain struggling with assassins and plots, his heart over at Queen's Mercy hospital. School was unreal, meaningless. He listened to his professors lecture from behind a solid wall of worry.
Later, he had visited Aunt May at the hospital for a short fifteen minutes. She was glad to see him but tired quickly, smiling and nodding when he said it was time to go instead of protesting. Peter spent most of the afternoon trying to track down a doctor to update him on her condition, but ended up doing nothing more than leaving messages with several office secretaries. He called Aunt May after dinner, woke her up to wish her good night and reassure her he would be by to see her in the morning.
While Peter tried to concentrate on his homework that evening, sitting uneasily in the green study, Harry sat at the desk and carefully sorted his news clippings into file folders, occasionally breaking into a fierce "Ha!" and scribbling wildly with a red pen. Peter was close enough, now, to see that they were all articles on Spider-Man, including many of his own pictures heading the Daily Bugle's skewed reporting. Harry didn't say anything to Peter about them, but often looked up meaningfully at his best friend, tapping his finger thoughtfully on his lips before going back to his obsession.
By the time Peter went to bed his head was pounding and his back was knotted. He had pushed the window open, leaning his head against the screen with the cold night air rushing into the overheated room. The temptation to get out there, to stretch his tight muscles in flight, swamped him with longing. Harry would be safe for an hour or two, right? Slowly, he had pushed the window back down and gotten into his pajamas rather than his costume.
Now, he abruptly threw the study door open, leaping into the room. Harry, still seated behind the polished desk, stared at him, frozen with a glass in his hand. Peter became conscious that he'd just burst in like the house was on fire, with bare feet, wearing sweats and a loose t-shirt. Defensively, he crossed his arms over his chest and said intelligently, "Ah...um..."
Harry reacted by violently shoving himself to his feet, dropping his glass which rolled unbroken on the thick carpet, filling the room with the smell of whisky. He shoved the palms of his hands into his temples, a thin squeal coming from his mouth, before falling to the carpet behind the desk.
Peter, gaping, finally realized that the attack had come and jumped forward to help his friend. Harry was now curled into a ball, hitting himself repeatedly on the head, that unnerving squeal getting higher and sounding less and less human. Confused, Peter pulled at him, shouting his name.
Holding Harry in place as he began to thrash and convulse, Peter fought the danger sense filling his head with panic and tried to figure out what to do. The room started to swim and twist around him, Harry's shape growing huge and the desk beside him shrinking. The leather chair Harry had knocked over when he stood up started to slide limply away over the floor, which was swelling and dropping like ocean waves. Peter heard a harsh sound coming from his own throat as the disorientation pulled him in.
Peter's eyes shut and he stopped thinking at all. Instantly, his arachnid instincts took control. Blindly, he leaped from the floor to the balcony doors, running all out down the wall toward the street below. Ten feet from the ground, he bounced out from the building, tucking his knees neatly into his chest and spinning head-over-heels across the space separating him from the opposite wall. If he had opened his eyes, he might have hesitated, because there was nothing unusual visible there, but his eyelids were still squeezed shut and his brain still out of gear. His body straightened at exactly the right moment and his right foot came down solidly on a hand holding a small black box with several gleaming switches and a dial. As the box splintered under his heel, Peter's mind cleared. He opened his eyes as he swung an elbow sideways against a shadow that had an odd texture to it and was whimpering. The shape falling to the pavement hardly seemed to exist in the darkness, but Peter bent over it and groped until he had a handful of cloth. Yanking the cape off with a magician's flourish, he revealed a tall thin man with dark skin lying unconscious in the gutter. His hand, with his fingers sticking out at odd angles, was next to a flattened black box about the size of a deck of cards.
Shaking, Peter gazed blankly at Cheap Shot. It took him a few seconds to put together what had just happened, and when he did, fresh fear sank into his gut. How did I do that? I don't even remember getting down here...Peter's mouth was dry. It was one thing to use his gifts, another for his gifts to use him. As if the spider was someone else, some part of me I don't really know...He took a deep breath. His head was pounding, and the whole bizarre experience had left him off-balance. It was like the moment after a vivid dream, feeling imagined passions recede as he slowly groped for reality. Suddenly, he remembered Harry. With a start, he dropped the cape and jumped effortlessly out and up three stories, crawling quickly up to the balcony.
Inside, he saw Harry still curled on the floor, silent and unmoving. Peter checked his pulse, then sighed in relief to find it steady if a little fast. Leaving his friend in the study, he ran downstairs and searched the long halls until he found the door to the servants' section of the house. Inside he came across the houseman, Bernard, lying in his bedclothes on the hall floor. The two live-in cleaning ladies were also out cold, one tangled up in her sheets on the floor by her bed, and one still dressed and huddled in an armchair in front of her television. Each one had a strong pulse, but as Peter went from one collapsed person to the next his growing anger wiped out the fear of a few minutes before. What was the range of that thing? Was he willing to kill anyone nearby? He couldn't understand how anyone could be so callous. It was horrifying.
Spotting a phone on a low table, Peter dialed 9-1-1, reporting the address and giving the operator what little information he had on the problem—four, uh, five people at this address had suffered severe hallucinations, started convulsing and then passed out. He hung up as soon as he finished, without giving his name. He needed to go back up to the study. He had no idea how long it would be before Harry and the others woke up, and he should be in the last place Harry saw him, mimicking the same symptoms.
Biting his lip, Peter remembered that he'd left Cheap Shot unconscious but unsecured. Idiot. If he recovers he can just walk off. He'd must have been more shaken than he'd thought, or he would have webbed him down automatically. He could go back now, take a few seconds to pin him down and return to the study.
Then he had to wait until the cops came, pray they noticed Cheap Shot lying in a back street, and hope like crazy they figured out the connection between the man with the smashed device and the strange illness in the Osborn mansion—because as Peter Parker, he couldn't say a thing without raising suspicions. Undecided, he stared at the phone. Or I could take him to Lamont...but if I'm not here when the ambulances get here...He could have killed everyone in the house. Sprinting back upstairs, Peter had his costume on and was out the balcony doors again within seconds.
Spider-Man reached Cheap Shot and tucked him under one arm. His headache intensified as he bent over to pick up the remains of the disorienting device. The pain made him angrier. Not caring much if his passenger got bounced around, he headed for the Ninth Precinct.
"You get it, Matt," Mindy muttered, turning over and wrapping one arm over her head. Lamont forced himself to swing his feet over the side of the bed and tried to sound alert as he growled "Lamont" into the receiver.
Half an hour later, he drove up to the Precinct doors, got out of the car and stood staring at a human being fully cocooned in silvery webbing hanging from the eaves. Above, a skittering movement announced Spider-Man's presence. Lamont thought he looked sinister, perched head down in the dark over his prey. Several uniformed cops standing around on the sidewalk greeted the detective with relief.
"Care to explain this, buddy?" Lamont called up to the vigilante. Spider-Man moved closer to ground level and spoke, and Lamont decided he hadn't been misreading his body language. The web-head was mad. You could hear it in his voice.
"I brought you an early Christmas present, Detective," Spider-Man said. "I thought you'd appreciate something unique."
"Unique, right. Is he dead?"
Spider-Man pulled his head back sharply. "Of course not."
"Just thought I'd ask. What's the deal?"
Spider-Man began his explanation with an overheard conversation at Wilson Fisk's office, and went on to say he had been keeping watch over Osborn. He wound up with a description of Cheap Shot's attack. Before he finished, Lamont snapped at one of the fascinated officers to dispatch a couple of units to the Osborn mansion.
"I went over Osborn before I got here, and did a quick check of the rest of the household. Everyone out cold. I called the paramedics in to the mansion, but you might want to knock on a few neighbors' doors. Apparently this...apparently he didn't give a damn who he hurt, as long as he got Osborn." Spider-Man hid his expression, but his voice was rough. Lamont told a second officer to relay the information, then deliberately took out a cigarette and took his time lighting it before turning back to face the wall-crawler.
"So, anyone but you see this guy, witness this?"
"I told you. The thing knocked everyone out. Guess I'm just, well, kinda resistant," Spider-Man shifted uncomfortably on the wall. "It gave me a killer headache, though."
"And hanging upside down like that doesn't make it worse?"
"Oh come on, can we focus here?" Spider-Man hopped on top of a nearby post office box and sat on his heels. "Just make sure this guy gets put away."
"No can do, buddy." Lamont said blandly. "Not unless you're here to tell me you're willing to press charges and come in as a witness. I'll need your name, address, phone number..."
"Give me a break! Cheap Shot just assaulted who knows how many people, and you wanna use it as an opportunity to get to me?" Spider-Man shouted. "Check your priorities, buddy—"
"Hold on right there." Tired, frustrated, and resentful, Lamont lost his grip on his temper. He stubbed out his cigarette and walked over to get right into the vigilante's face—well, mask. "In this country? We have this little thing called the right to face your accuser. You think cops don't want to be doing their job? Go to hell. I've spent the last few days talking to widowed husbands, wives, kids that aren't going to see their moms ever again." Lamont jabbed his finger into Spider-Man's chest. "What are you thinking, huh? That we can arrest someone just because you say so?" Jab. "When you're not willing to say it in court?" Jab. "Either give me evidence that this mook's responsible for the attempted murder—any murder—or get him down." He backed off a step and set his hands on his hips, pushing his suit coat back, and glared into Spider-Man's shiny white eyepieces.
Lamont waited for him to answer. He heard his heart thud in his ears until, with an inhumanly quick movement, Spider-Man sprang to the wall over Cheap Shot, broke the web-line holding him up, and lowered the wrapped and motionless form to the sidewalk. A few hard yanks ripped the webbing away from his body, and then Spider-Man was gone, so fast that Lamont wasn't even certain which direction he took. Relaxing, he became aware he'd been holding his breath.
"All right, we need a paramedic here to look over this guy," Lamont announced. The three officers huddled near the precinct door didn't move. "I mean now, folks," he snapped. The officer who'd gone to call emergency services to the Osborn mansion went into the station again. The other two hurried forward to clear broken webs away from the former prisoner and lay him out more comfortably. Lamont looked down at him, frowning. His face was familiar, but he couldn't think from where...
"Hey, Detective?" One of the uniformed cops had come up to him. Lamont glanced at his name tag. "What, Olsen?" he said, irritated.
"Just wanted to say...I mean, that guy can throw buses around, ya know? You really got guts, telling him where to get off." Olsen sounded admiring.
Lamont gave the officer his best poker face until Olsen dropped his eyes and coughed nervously. "Get this mook's ID while he's not objecting. I want to know who he is."
"You got it." The embarrassed officer practically ran back over to Cheap Shot.