PART FOUR

Saturday, December 18 2004

With a gasp, Peter sat bolt upright in bed. His lean chest heaved as he blinked at the dreams that still swirled through his mind, not yet settled by the serious business of the day. He shifted the heavy comforter blanket aside and pivoted to sit on the deeply comfortable, broad bed. He stood, and tugged a bathrobe on, rubbing at his eyes. Hearing the echo of Aunt May's voice, seeing Kravinoff's white teeth bared in a laugh. In the background, strangely sad, Beck.

Peter shoved the night back into the darkness, and padded out into the slightly chilly apartment. In the living room, Mary Jane wore sweats. She was settled into horse stance, breathing deep as her arms drifted up then apart, then together and down. Peter crossed to the end table, and picked up the remote. Pushing a button, he turned on the gas fireplace; with a whoosh, it flared to life and licked flame across the false log.

"I smell coffee," he murmured to himself. "Blessed, life-giving coffee." He poured himself a cup and sipped at it, sitting at the table. Mary Jane strolled in a minute later, as the last of the coffee disappeared into Peter.

"What are you doing up already?" she asked with half a grin. "You didn't get back from Worthington's party until almost four."

"Well, you know," Peter shrugged.

"Yeah, I know," she said. "Bad dreams again?"

"Bah," he sighed. "I was still sleeping, wasn't I."

"Sound check is at four this afternoon," Mary Jane said as she stuck bread in the toaster.

"Sound check?" Peter echoed, vaguely confused.

"Yeah. Rio's Canteen? Salvation Army fund raiser? Tandy set it up two weeks ago? Hello?" Mary Jane smiled at him. "Eyes Open, a groovy band that you happen to be the drummer for? Any of this ringing a bell?"

"Oh yeah," he said.

"Tandy once told me it's a damn good thing I live with you, or you'd forget to show up," Mary Jane sighed.

"Well, in my defense, it was your idea in the first place," Peter pointed out.

"All the good ideas do seem to be mine, don't they," she mused.

"That's why I married you," he grinned. He stood, giving her a kiss on the cheek. "Okay. Well, if I gotta be at the Rio Canteen at four, I better get cracking on my Christmas chores."

"And I have some shopping to do," Mary Jane said. "I just figured I'd stick around here until you were up so I could remind you of the sound check. I figured you'd remember the concert."

"Oh, it's all coming back to me now," Peter said. "You ambushed me before I was properly awake."

"These things happen," Mary Jane grinned. "Okay. I gotta go get ready." She strolled out of the spacious kitchen.

Peter sighed, and headed for the study.

"Let's see," he said, regarding the stacks and piles neatly laid out awaiting his attention. "Mailing list for Christmas cards, for Christmas baskets, cross referenced by importance to our family and to the magazine." He sat down, and started the sift.

xXx

Tyrone leaned over his guitar, plucking at the string and adjusting the tuning peg. He smiled to himself, and glanced over to where Gwen knelt on the floor taping down cords.

"Ww-want some h-hh-help-p?" he asked.

"Got it, thanks," she said, glancing up with a dazzling smile. Tandy headed up the steps onto the stage, still talking on her cell phone.

"Look, I don't know, check with Illyana. I have a show to do, and I'm off the clock." She snapped the phone shut and dropped it in her pocket. "You'd think," she started, then she shook it off. "Never mind. Just never mind. Let's get this gear checked out, clock's ticking. Where are the Parkers?"

"I'm here," Mary Jane said, shrugging off her coat as she gripped her guitar case. "Peter should be along shortly."

"Those aren't famous last words, are they?" Gwen asked with an arched eyebrow.

"My man will be here, seriously, he will," Mary Jane said. She propped her guitar case up and tossed her coat over an amp. "He's… harder to distract than he used to be." She checked her watch. "And he's got thirty seconds until four o'clock."

The backstage door opened, and Peter ducked in as he brushed snow off his shoulders. He hopped up on the stage.

"Hey gang," he said, and he slid out of his coat and hung it on a strut that supported the lights. He sat down in the drum trap, and tapped at the drum heads with his fingertip, listening.

"Fifteen seconds to spare," Mary Jane noted.

"Said I'd be here, didn't I," Peter mused, focused as he tapped gently at each of the heads. He nodded. "Drums are good."

"Dd-don't you want-to be s-ss-sure?" Tyrone asked. "Big r-room."

"I'm sure, trust me," Peter grinned. "So. Want to go through some practice songs?"

"Yeah, let's warm up. Mary Had a Little Lamb. You ready?" Tandy asked as she flicked the keyboard on. She tossed back a mouthful of water from her bottle, then cleared her mind and her throat. "Let's go."

They launched into the jazzy swing of the song, and as Tandy swirled keyboard notes all around it, Tyrone jammed the theme out and Mary Jane slammed base chords into place to hold it together. Peter's drums sizzled into, through, and around the beat and the thrust of the music, and they whipped through twice before the consensual conclusion.

"Hot damn we rock," Mary Jane observed with satisfaction.

"Sounds great," said a man in a trench coat, standing unobserved by the front of the stage.

"Detective Brilhart," Mary Jane faltered. "What a pleasant surprise. Uh… who are you here for?"

"Peter Parker," he said. "Do you mind if we chat for a minute?"
"Am I in some kind of trouble?" Peter asked without getting up.

"No, nothing like that," Brilhart said, shaking his head. He was lean to the point of gauntness, a fairly young man with eyes that were older than the rest of his face. "Please, just a minute of your time."

"We have a concert tonight. Can it wait?" Peter asked, stubbornness pushing to the fore.

"Please," Brilhart said. He turned and wandered back a short way from the stage, and he turned to watch Peter. The other band members threw nervous glances at him, and Peter sighed.

"Fine," he muttered, rising and leaving the stage. He followed Brilhart to a table on the mezzanine, a raised level to the side of the main floor.

"What," Peter demanded flatly.

"I have a case," Brilhart said slowly. "I was wondering if we could talk about it."

"The spider ghost left town," Peter replied, his voice low and hard. "There is no more Special Crimes Unit."

"I'd like to have a word with you anyway," Brilhart pressed on. "I know you settled the slasher, and I appreciate that. I hear you were spotted near where Fisk's body was found. I don't know what you had to do with that, but the gangland hits stopped, so thanks for whatever part you played there."

"Yeah, I was involved, but that was the end of it, okay?"

"Okay," Brilhart said soothingly. "Okay, fine. But I want to show you this one last case. Hear me out, at least," he added, as close as he could come to begging.

"I can't believe I'm even thinking about this," Peter said, running his hands through his hair as he stared at the table. "Look. I'll hear you out, on the condition that you stick around for our performance tonight. It's for the Salvation Army, it's for a good cause. Deal?"

"Deal," Brilhart said. "I'm not really into that kind of music."

"How do you know? All you heard us do was 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.' It's our signature piece." He grinned.

"Right," Brilhart said. He pulled a folder out of his thin bag. "I'll keep this quick," he said, "and you'll see why I wanted to run it by you. Three o'clock this morning. Neighbors reported screams, by the time the cops showed up the victim was dead. Pinned to the wall, ice picks through wrists and ankles. Disembowled. Cause of death, shock. He was on the north wall of the living room of an apartment in the Norfleet Building."
"Gruesome," Peter noted, glancing at the picture. "So?"

"The victim was Derrick Wilson," Brilhart said. "So we check out his bio, and find out he used to be a trigger man for Fisk's outfit. Assume 'alleged' is attached to all this," he confided. "So I checked the address out. In two days, it will have been a year since there was another gristly murder in that apartment. It's where Heath Fawkes and his ten year old son Adam lived. December 20 last year, the little boy was found pinned to the wall with ice picks and shot through the face, badly beaten. Fawkes himself was dead, facing the boy, duct taped to a chair with a bullet wound in his right arm, right leg. Head chopped clean off."

Peter glanced at the stage. "Tragic."

"Yeah," Brilhart agreed. "Looks like they tortured the boy and made his daddy watch, then figured they had their fun and finished both of them off."

"Why?" Peter asked.

"Don't know," Brilhart said. "Fawkes was a security guard with Omnicorp. We're checking our leads and working on getting to the bottom of this. But that's all just background. We handle stuff like that all the time, they don't even call me in for that level of weird. But this? This takes it to a whole new level." Brilhart tossed a glossy photo on the table, and Peter picked it up and looked it over.

A black and white photo, badly disrupted earth. As Peter looked the picture over, he saw the fragments of a coffin shoved up out of the ground, shattering the turf and pushing it aside as though it had been crashed into from beneath, pushed clear, torn open. He saw the crooked headstone. Fawkes.

"Is this for real?" Peter asked, glancing up from the photo.

Brilhart looked him in the eye, dead serious, and a chill passed between them.

"So you think Fawkes pushed his way out of his grave and tracked down one of the guys that tortured him and his boy to death and pinned him to the same wall the boy was pinned to." Peter leaned back.

"That's pretty much what we are supposed to believe," Brilhart said, "but you and I know that this is a cover. Somebody is trying to scare somebody else. I need to get to the bottom of this and find out who the key players are. We've been rounding up everybody who we suspected worked for Fisk at one time or another, and trying to get some kind of information about what the Fawkes deal was about. But I have limited manpower. This takes time. And I suspect more people are gonna die before it's over." His eyes were deep, vulnerable.

Peter shook his head, his mouth a tight line. "I'd love to help you. Really, I would. But I'm pressed for time these days." He glanced at the stage. "Gotta play. I'm sorry, Brilhart, really."

Brilhart leaned back, and nodded curtly. "I understand," he said. "Thanks for hearing me out."

"No problem. Now you gotta stay for the show, right?" Peter clarified.

"I'll stay for the show," Brilhart replied simply. He tapped a cigarette out of a foil packet, raised it to his lips, lit it with a lighter, eyes down.

As Peter hopped up onto the stage, he saw the band was turned towards two men who had come on from backstage.

"Here's Peter," Tandy said with a gesture. "We were just talking about you," she grinned.

"Hello, pleased to meet you," said a man about Peter's age. He stepped forward, trim and dapper, and extended his hand. Peter shook it. "I'm Richard Fisk," he said. "This is my club."

"Pleased to… meet… you," Peter trailed off as he looked at the man standing behind Fisk. The man who was grinning madly, deeply amused and malicious at the same time.

"I see you know Mr. Ebony, my assistant," Fisk observed.

"We've met," Ebony said as he shook Peter's hand. "So you're the drummer for this outfit! Tell me. How much drum would a spider drum if a spider could drum drums?"

"You're looking… spry," Peter said.

"Oh, you must be remembering when I had a broken leg," Ebony replied. "Well, I got that sorted out. I'm back. And I'm bad." The two men stood glaring at each other and smiling and trying not to look like they were glaring at each other.

"I'm looking forward to your music tonight," Fisk said. "Glad you were willing to perform for this Christmas bash. You're doing carols, right?"

"Yeah," Tandy said with a brilliant smile. "Hey, we appreciate the invite."

"Eyes Open is the hottest indie thing going on," Fisk shrugged. "This should work out for everybody. Come on, Ebony. Let's leave these people alone so they can set up." Without looking back, he strolled down the steps, Ebony following.

"Peter?" Tandy said evenly. "Anything we should know about?"

"No," Peter said. "I have some history with that guy. He used to work for Wilson Fisk, before he died. The last time we tussled, I broke damn near every bone in his body. But he looks fine," Peter murmured.

"D-d-ddude, you d-did w-wh-what?" Tyrone said, startled.

"He's not a nice guy, trust me on this," Peter said, exasperated. "Look, we here to play music or twenty questions? Let's do this!"