Unreasonable Addiction III
Chapter 2: Tinker Toy
By Yumegari and LRH, ed. Skylanth
"No..." Octavius whispered, staring at her motionless body, his face pale. "NOOO!" he howled. He whirled to face his enemy, teeth bared, insanity in his eyes, almost creating a light behind the dark goggles. The actuators whipped forward again, faster and harder, the first three missing Spider-man as he dodged, the fourth catching him by his ankle. It slammed him against the roof below them, against the chimney and the duct-work, whipping him through the air. Another slam against the roof and then Octavius drew his enemy closer, within reach of his normal arms. His breath whistled, his heart thundered. The world had shrunk to just himself and his enemy. His hands reached out, grasping Spider-man's throat, and squeezed. The other kicked and struggled, webbed Octavius' head again, yanking on it and smacking his head against the wall. His grip slipped and Spider-man wriggled free. That only served to enrage Octavius further, and he caught his retreating enemy with two actuators. Bones broke as he again slammed the other against the roof.
The world returned unpleasantly soon as Clair's eyes flickered open, staring up, back at the roof where she had been so recently. Pain so intense that it cancelled itself out made her heart beat incredibly loud, drowning out all other sound, but she could see Otto up there, flinging Spider-Man against the brickwork. The hero looked more boneless than usual, she noted in that odd, floating part of her mind, the only part that was really functioning then.
With a roar, Octavius threw his enemy off the side of the building, and Spider-man bounced off the building opposite them, flopping to the ground. Octavius followed, his actuators carrying him down, and reached out, grabbing a fistful of Spider-man's suit. "This is where you say good-bye, Spider-man," he growled, and drove the other's head against the wall with a sickening crack.
Clair saw Otto come down, but then he went out of her sight, off to one side. Fixated in her pain, she tried to turn her head to see him. The movement pulled harshly at shattered bone and torn muscle in her arm, and she screamed. The sound came out as nothing more than a high groan.
Octavius froze at that sound and turned, seeing her eyes fluttering. He dropped his enemy and knelt next to her, his hands reaching out to touch her face lightly. They were streaked with blood, as were his face and coat and actuators. "Clair..." he whispered. "Can you hear me...?"
"Hgnnn," she moaned again painfully, trying to pull her shattered arm against her chest. Her vision swam: there were two, three, no Ottos leaning over her. She closed her eyes against the light.
Looking back at Spider-man's unconscious form, Octavius returned his attention to her and carefully gathered her in his arms, holding her close. "I'll get you home," he said vaguely. One actuator picked up Spider-man as an afterthought, and all three of them scaled the wall, heading back to Octavius' home. Clair passed out once more, and knew nothing of the trip.
The door to the lab was flung open and Octavius came through it, still carrying Clair in his arms, Spider-man hanging by one actuator. He dropped Spider-man on the floor, laying Clair carefully on the table. He ran his hands along her limbs, searching for broken bones.
She moaned, trying to pull away from his hands. "Ngh," she said, half-aware. "S'broke."
"Yes, and I'm trying to fix that," he said, probing at her left shoulder. "Hnnn... "
"Aah," she protested, the pain waking her up. "That hurts." She swallowed and shut her eyes again. "What happened?"
"Not much left to describe... I thought you were dead..." His hands continued to explore the damage to her arm, then moving to the side to feel her ribs. He winced infinitesimally as they shifted under his fingers.
"No...," she said through gritted teeth as tears sprang to her eyes. It took effort not to move. "Dead wouldn't hurt this -" She broke off, gasping. "There's a painkiller... in the meds cabinet. Give me all of it, please..."
One actuator snaked to the cabinet in question, and grabbed random bottles and vials, bringing them back and searching through them. He held one up that read, "Morphine," and figured that would work, searching for a syringe.
"Please..." she hissed again. She could feel consciousness slipping away again. "You've got to set it. I think I have stuff for that…somewhere in here. Plaster and splint..."
"One thing at a time..." he grated, still trying to find a vein. Finding it with the help of a tourniquet, he hastily injected the morphine, actuators searching for the splints and bandages.
She relaxed slowly, sighing as the morphine spread out from the injection site like a soft blanket between her and the pain. She could still feel it, but it didn't seem to matter to her anymore. Floating, she reached up with her good hand to touch his face. "I'll be alright."
"Let's hope so," he grunted, actuators bracing against the table as he pulled her shoulder into a better position, resetting the joint.
That hurt a little, but not much through the morphine. Her breath caught, then eased again. "Where'd the bug go?" she asked, trying to keep herself awake.
Octavius looked behind him, seeing that Spider-man was still unconscious on the floor. "I brought him with us," he said, baring his teeth as he strapped the splint to her arm. "Perhaps he can be your first test subject..."
"Hnn," she snerked, smiling up at the ceiling. "Tempting. See what it does to him." She stopped, and frowned. "I can't feel my left leg, below the knee. It's still there, right?"
"Yes," he said, reaching down to grasp her leg, hand moving to her hip, feeling the joint. "It's still here." He pulled it upward, hearing the loud pop that resulted as the joint was reset. An actuator reached for another bandage.
"Oh," she said blearily, a little startled. "Now I feel it. That's not good..."
"Do you need more painkiller? I think you have another vial of morphine here," he said distractedly, actuators bandaging her leg while he searched for another vial.
"Nnnyes..." she said on an indrawn breath. "Just a little more. I don't want to fall asleep. Concussion, must be."
He pulled the cap from the syringe with his teeth and poked it into the vial as his actuators continued wrapping her leg. Reaching for her arm again, he brought the syringe to her vein, squinting at it. She noticed, absurdly, that his tongue poked out through the corner of his mouth as he carefully injected another smaller measure of morphine. He tossed the syringe aside and went back to her leg, grasping the thigh and calf and bending them, popping the knee back into place as well. The actuators continued splinting and bandaging, almost moving of their own accord.
He turned his attention to her head, looking for the injury. A dark bruise showed in her hair-line, but the only blood on her head had come from his hands. She giggled, buoyed up by the drug. "I don't break," she said, seemingly at random, repeating a memory that drifted to the surface.
"You don't?" he asked, examining her head and pressing lightly on various spots.
She didn't explain herself, merely blinked and tried to pull away when one point above her left eyebrow caused bright darkness to flash behind her eyes. "Don't do that..."
"What happened?" he asked, peering at her intently.
"Nggnn, lights... Think it's a fracture. Bind it, ice. Keep it from swelling." She closed her eyes, and opened them again when that made her dizzy.
A hurried journey to a freezer found one of those squishy ice gel packs, and he snagged more bandages on his way back. Returning to her side, he carefully wrapped the bandage around her head a few times before lightly pressing the ice to it. "Like this?"
"Mmhmm," Drifting again, she focused on his voice. "Talk to me, Otto. Keep talking to me. Keep me talking to you."
He blinked, for once not having anything to say. Words didn't come to him, then suddenly, he blithered, "Well, I'll certainly have to build those actuators for you now, won't I? I mean, if for no other reason than to give you something to defend yourself with..."
"Yes..." she agreed. "And I'll need the hands. Gonna take Spider-Man's brain apart and put it back together."
"See?" he said, leaning down and carefully kissing her cheek. "I told you you'd replace me soon enough. You've a vendetta against the arachnid too, I'll wager." he smiled.
"Hard not to," she pointed out, smiling. She turned her head as much as she could to look at herself. "Pest."
He chuckled at that. "You could say that." He picked up her hand, warming it in his.
"Feel like a tinker toy," she said, squeezing his hand weakly. "Am I all put back together yet?"
"More or less," he said, looking her over. Then he nodded. "Yes. You're put back together. How could you not be with me here?" He smiled in a manner he hoped was reassuring.
She smiled back. "About time you had a turn." She shifted experimentally, stopping when the broken hip protested too great a movement side-to-side.
He looked down at her. "You're not going to want to stay on this table," he said after a moment.
"Nn," she agreed. "It's cold. And I should probably have these breaks elevated." The morphine was making her light-headed. "Bed, I think... Where did you put Spider-Man?"
Octavius glanced behind him again. "On the floor," he replied offhandedly. He slipped his hands under her, lifting her carefully from the table, a look of intense concentration on his face.
She bit her lip and put her good arm around his neck. The movement hurt. But he had done a good job of putting her back together; there was no tell-tale sharpness of shifting bone. She could see Spider-Man now, sprawled on the floor behind Otto. "You really thrashed him, didn't you?"
He looked down at the blue and red form. "Yes, I did," he said quietly. "I thought you were dead."
"No," she murmured. "You're not going to be rid of me that easily."
"I'll bear that in mind," he replied dryly, flashing a smile at her and carrying her up to their room. The bedroom, while maybe slightly more well-kept now than in recent years, still bore the randomly-constructed nest that they used as a sleeping surface. Carefully, he placed her on it, then painstakingly arranged her broken limbs on pillows and mounds of blankets.
She sank back into the nest, leaning against her favorite pillow. "This doesn't change anything. I'm going ahead with the experiment as soon as I can. I still need subjects."
He stood, blinking down at her. "Of course," he said, turning and heading for the door. "I should have a set of arms constructed in a day or so." He looked back at her.
She reached out for him with her good arm. "You don't need to start yet," she said, not pleading but only just. "Stay with me for now, please."
A pause passed, and he blinked, then crossed to the bed again. "I suppose the arachnid can keep for now," he said, one actuator closing the door. He sat next to her, looking down at her, seeming almost at a loss for something to say. He cleared his throat. "Will you be able to sleep?"
"I shouldn't, yet," she said, yawning. "Concussion." She reached for his hand. "Hey, you'll finally get to unmask him."
"I suppose I will," he murmured. "Perfect opportunity for revenge, and all that. Discover his identity. Make him and his loved ones suffer. Yes." He smiled, a shadow of his usual evil smirk. Lying next to her, he sucked in a breath and sighed. "Later."
"He's locked in my lab," she said, frowning slightly. "If he breaks anything, I'll make sure he comes out of this with nothing but his wits intact."
"Are you sure you want to leave even that?" Octavius asked, that wolfish smile back on his face. He reached out and carefully brushed a strand of hair away from her face.
"It's not much of a revenge if he doesn't know what he's lost, is it?" She scowled faintly, thinking. "I wonder if his brain is wired the same way? I think I need a tissue sample first, so I can begin to predict results."
He appeared to find her growling consternation somewhat amusing. "I think I can safely say that my brain and his are markedly different."
"Of course they are," she said, distracted. "You're a genius, and he's a bug, a... What is he? His reflexes are far too fast to be simply human. Some sort of mutation in his cerebellum and brainstem, certainly. His motor cortex too, probably." Her fingers twitched, eager to get a sample under her microscope.
He chuckled and caught the twitching fingers of her good hand. "There would have to be some kind of increased response. So much that it almost seems precognitive at times," he mused.
She thought about that for a minute, eyes narrowed. "I'd want to test that," she said at last. "Hook him up to an Tesla machine and subject him to stimuli. See if he responds before it's applied. If it truly is precognitive, then I want to see what sort of neurological structure he has to do that. Get in there and take a look."
Still grinning that wolfish grin, he leaned forward and nuzzled against her while she spoke, then kissed her. "Mmmm," he murmured against her lips. "You're playing my song, so to speak." The fingers of one hand trailed along her neck.
Suddenly, it wasn't only the morphine that made her skin feel warm and alive. She kissed him back, her tongue teasingly light against his, and conveniently forgot that half her body was currently useless.
He put his hand on the bed on the opposite side of her, leaning even further forward and deepening the kiss. His hair brushed her cheeks and he closed his eyes, savoring the softness of her lips.
She wound her fingers into his hair behind his head, and reached for his hip with her other. The unexpected pain made her cry out against his mouth, her eyes flying open.
He jerked away, blinking, then calmed himself. "Ah," he said, looking at something else. "Yes. That."
She bit back tears as the pain faded beneath the morphine haze once more, going back to its former ignorable throb. Rage at the situation began to replace the peaceful floating feeling, along with a hot fury aimed at its cause. "I am going to vivisect him," she hissed when she could speak again.
"Yes," Octavius replied, fingers lightly stroking her face. "You will. When you've healed."
She closed her eyes, gritting her teeth in frustration and clenched her good hand. "I should have let you kill him the first time I met him." she said coldly.
"Heh," he said. "Seven years ago. Believe me, I would have, had I not been ill and sans actuators."
She opened her eyes, looking up at him. "Has it really only been seven years? I was such a waif back then, naive as you get." She chuckled. "I did the best I could to stop you from killing him because he was the hero."
"That's most peoples' misconception," he said, sitting up. "And a useful one at that, I suppose."
"Useful in what way?" she asked, tipping her head to one side. "I'd judge it annoying."
"It's useful for him," Octavius clarified. "And useful, I suppose, for everyone else who feels they need a hero in their lives for whatever reason. But, yes, terribly annoying for us." He reached out and carefully pried her one eye open, then the other, looking at them. "Hmm."
"Hmm?" she answered queryingly, blinking sleepily. "What?" Her left pupil, formerly dilated and fixed, had returned to almost its normal size, still a little enlarged from the morphine, matching the right and reacting to the light, shrinking slightly.
"Your pupils," he said contemplatively. "They've returned to normal. I believe you can probably sleep, now." He looked down at her again. "Unless, of course, you'd rather not," he said, an amused look on his face.
She smiled crookedly up at him, a trifle regretfully. "I don't think I have much choice in the matter, unless you want me falling asleep in the middle of something."
"Right now I doubt there's anything you could be doing that either of us could possibly regret your falling asleep during," he replied, standing. A beat passed and he reached down, pulling a blanket over her. "I'll return in a short while," he added, turning to the door.
"Mmkay," she slurred, closing her eyes and shifting to get as comfortable as she could. "I'm not going anywhere." She said that nearly every time he left her, but her tone was sleepily ironic tonight.
He paused at the door, watching her as she drifted off to sleep. She's alive, he reminded himself. The arachnid, however...that remains to be seen, doesn't it?
Agent Martin looked up when she heard Hanover twitch open the day's newspaper. It had been a slow couple of weeks for New York's metahuman division of the FBI, and she was bored of paperwork. "Anything interesting today?"
"I'd say so," Hanover grumbled, putting the paper down on the desk and jabbing at the photo. "He's at it again."
She left her desk and came to stand at his, looking over his shoulder at the paper. "OCK ROCKS LAB!" shouted the Bugle's lurid headline above a blurry picture of "Dr. Octopus" grinning manically into a camera. "Oh. Him. What was he after?" she mused, scanning the article. "Wetware... microsurgury? That last one's a little out of his typical shopping list, isn't it?"
"Hmmm," Hanover grumbled, reaching into his desk drawer and retrieving a pair of scissors. He scanned the article, as well. "Not so sure what he'd want a microsurgery device for, but that wetware control array bugs me. It might have something to do with controlling those arms of his." He started to clip the article from the newspaper. "It might be used to give him even finer control over them, or make them faster."
Martin rolled her eyes as he clipped the article. "More material for your scrap book? Come on, Brian, admit it. You're obsessed with this guy."
"I'm obsessed with finding him," Hanover clarified. "I'm obsessed with returning Doctor Holmes to a normal life. I'm obsessed with getting his ass in prison. I am not obsessed with him. Don't make me out like some weird villain-worshiping social-outcast fanboy." He pulled the book from its shelf and opened it, finding the next blank page.
"No-one's heard from Dr. Holmes in a year," she said objectively, sitting on the edge of his desk. "And from witness accounts of her last sighting, she doesn't really want to be returned to a normal life." She hadn't been assigned to Metahuman Division back then, but she'd read the report when she was assigned Hanover as her new partner. "According to that second-hand message from Spider-Man, she seemed rather happy with Octavius. This isn't about her, this is about him outsmarting you. You're hardly the first agent he's done that to, you know, and I don't see any of them with scrapbooks."
"I can't imagine anyone could be happy with a monster like him," Hanover grated, slipping the bit of newspaper into the clear casing of the binder's sheet. "And he was lucky. He won't be so lucky when I find him again."
She blew her hair out of her face with an exasperated puff. "We're supposed to be wrapping up the last project, still. Are you going to go off hunting him again?"
"I might have to," Hanover replied, putting the book neatly back on the shelf, amongst the surroundings of his equally as painfully neat desk. "Until he's found, I'd have to at any time."
"Brian, we're not assigned to that case!" she protested. "Dr. Octavius is Miller and Morris's responsibility, you know that. You've been reprimanded for this before."
"Miller and Morris," Hanover enunciated, "haven't got the experience with him that I do! Have they negotiated a hostage situation with him? Have they researched his past the way I have? I've dug up dirt on that man they didn't even know existed. The best man for the job isn't always the one who's assigned to said job."
She ground her teeth. "Miller and Morris are assigned to that job precisely because they're not as close to the situation as you are. Upstairs knows how personally you take this. If you go after him again, without permission, they're going to stick you in a desk job and leave you there."
"And meanwhile," Hanover grated, "Octavius will continue doing what he does because those two don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of catching him!"
"They are perfectly capable agents," she pointed out, despite agreeing with him. Miller and Morris had been on Ock's trail for almost 5 years and had never come anywhere as near the man as Hanover had.
"Let 'em chase someone else, then," came the growled reply.
"Brian, we've been assigned to the Quentin Beck case for months now. We haven't managed to bring him in. Do you really think you can take Octavius?"
"Beck is such a flake he doesn't even need tracing," Hanover rolled his eyes.
"So he's not worth your time? Is that what you're saying?" she asked acidly.
"Yeah, maybe that IS what I'm saying!" Hanover replied angrily. "Good god, I'm reduced to chasing after a man with a fishbowl on his head who announces his presence to everyone in a three-mile radius with all those ... Las Vegas special effects?"
"And yet," she pointed out disapprovingly. "We missed him. Again. Because you went haring off across town on a supposed Doc Ock sighting! This is an unreasonable obsession, Brian. Give it up."
"He was there! I just got there too late after Spider-man, and lost sight of him!"
"Whether he was there or not isn't the question," she pressed, angry. "Your job was to take Quentin Beck into custody. Did you do that?"
"That's not the issue here!"
"Yes, it is!" she yelled at him, then tempered her voice when she saw that they were attracting attention from the hall. "Yes, it is the issue. This obsession with Octavius is interfering with you doing the job that you are assigned to do. It's hurting your career, Brian. You know you're overdue for promotion. Everyone knows it."
"Hmph. Promotion-granting around here is strictly arbitrary anyway--" he broke off as the phone rang, looking at it as though it had just spoken. He reached out and picked it up. "Hanover," he said, glaring at his partner.
Daring him to argue her, Martin picked up her own extension to listen in. "'Ey, it's Spike," said the seedy-sounding voice on the other end. "I gots news fa you, if ya wan' it."
"What's your news?" Hanover asked, retrieving a pen and paper from their painstakingly arranged homes.
"You still lookin' for that Doc Ock character?"
"Of course I'm still looking for him," Hanover replied, raising an eyebrow at Martin. "What've you got?"
"My mate Torrence saw 'im, 'bout four hours ago. Right here by my haunt. Over by the fact'ries, you know where I mean? He had a kid with him."
"A kid?" Hanover echoed. "What for? Where was he taking him?"
"Mighta been a her," Spike mused slowly. "Tor wasn't seein' too straight, if ya know what I mean. Looked eleven, twelve, real little. Beats us where he was takin' 'im. He was just going from roof to roof on those arm things o' his, holding the kid. And the kid wasn't strugglin' neither. But then Spider-Man showed up."
Eleven... twelve -year -old... not resisting--why? Hanover wrote. "What happened when Spider-man showed up?" he asked, making a note of that, too. Spider-man again...
"Well, he just laid right into Ock. Webbed 'is head an' almost knocked 'im off the roof, and he dropped the kid."
Hanover stopped writing at this, his mouth open slightly. "And then what happened?" he asked, almost dreading to know the answer. He looked up at Martin with an expression that said, See!
Martin would have rolled her eyes at Hanover if she hadn't been listening so intently. Spike, whoever he was, seemed to be enjoying the attention, pitching his voice theatrically. "Well, the kid falls, right? And Tor figured he was dead, 'cuz it was at least five stories. It's the Paxton building, the one with the soup kitchen round back, right? Ock screams bloody murder and just tears Spidey a new one, flingin' him all over the place, then he throws him off the roof too! An' 'e knocks Spidey out, looks like he's about to tear 'is throat out when the kid moves. He's still alive, but he's real busted up. Leg shouldn't bend that way, right?" Spike took a breath. "And Ock picks 'em both up, Spidey and the kid, and heads back uptown, and that's the last Tor saw."
"Uptown?" Hanover echoed. He turned to look at the map of the city on the wall behind him, easily finding said Paxton building. "Uptown..." he repeated. "Did Torrence see anything else?"
"Yeah. When the kid moved, Ock was at his side fast. Like he cared or somet'in'" Spike sounded skeptical, Martin thought. "But that's it. Like I said Tor wasn't seein' too straight. Still isn't." There was a soft thud of shoe on flesh and a drunken moan. "Dumb sot..."
Hanover began to suspect. "Did he say if this ... kid was maybe thin?" he asked.
A moment of conferral, just inaudible over the phone line. "Yeah. Like a stick-drawin', he says. You know who it is?"
"That wasn't any kid, that was Holmes," Hanover growled. He sighed, a long frustrated sound. "Uptown from the Paxton building maybe narrows things down a little. Thanks." He hung up after that, dropping the phone on its cradle and looking at the map again.
"Who the hell survives a five-story fall?" Martin burst out. "She's got to be pretty badly hurt. Should we keep an eye on the hospitals? If he cares about her, he'll probably bring her into an ER somewhere."
Hanover nodded. "All the ERs downtown. We need to troll for eyewitnesses, too, anyone who might have seen him on the rooftops and remembered where he went. Maybe someone who follows Spider-man..." He thought for a minute. "Maybe that Parker kid."
She sighed, knowing that he wouldn't be deterred now. The paperwork would wait for them, at least, instead of escaping back into the underworld of the city. "Let's get going, then. He's got four hours head start on us." She turned to the bulletin board over his desk, reading Parker's phone number off the post-it there. The kid was practically a departmental resource. "You want to call him, or should I?"
"You call him," Hanover replied, searching his desk. "I have things to get together. Faster this way."
Martin nodded and picked her phone back up, dialing the number labeled "Parker - home," and putting the phone to her ear, watching Hanover while it rang.
The phone rang three times before it was picked up, and a loud, brash voice she could have sworn was New Zealander answered. "'Allo? 'Onest Ed's Mortu'ry, you kack 'em, we pack 'em!"
"Er, hello." Martin said tentatively. "This is Agent Martin, FBI, and I'm calling for Peter Parker. Is he there? Who's this?"
"Nope, and Big John!" the other replied cheerfully. "And wot're you doin' later to-day?" he asked, dropping his voice into what he thought was a suave purr but really hadn't changed much at all beyond a campy lowering of pitch.
"Do you know where I could reach Mr. Parker?" she asked, her voice gone frigid.
"At four in the mornin'? Y'might wanna try that newspaper 'e works at. Orrrrr 'is girlfriend's... or 'is aunt's or..." he trailed off, apparently trying to think, as he repeated these options to himself. "Girlfriend... aunt...paper..."
"Do you have these phone numbers?" she asked impatiently. The thinking sounded like hard work.
"Errrr... half a tick..." The sound of rummaging could be heard. More rummaging. "OI! ANY OF YOU GOT PARK-O'S NUMBERS!" Martin closed her eyes and prayed for patience. She hated dealing with civilians.
More sounds, another voice. "Roight, phone book, sorry," Big John boomed. Flipping. "Parker...Parker...Parker...Too many Parkers... 'Ere it is, 555-5263, it's 'is aunt, but I don't think she's gonna be up this late... oh! 'Is girlfriend... " he searched some more... "Dun think we've got it, sorry..."
"Do you have her name?" Patience, patience, she repeated silently to herself, wrapping the phone cord around a pencil until the utensil snapped. "We can look it up."
"Mary Jane... errr... OI! WOT'S 'IS SHEILA'S NAME?" A pause. "Watson. Mary Jane Watson."
The name twigged something in her memory, but she couldn't remember what. "Thank you. And I know the paper. Sorry for disturbing you this early... John. Thank you for your help."
"No problem!" Came the cheery, if loud answer. "Glad to 'elp! Bye, now!"
Relieved, she hung up, already dialing the Bugle. "He's not there," she told Hanover. "I've got a few more numbers to try, though."
"Who were you talking to?" Hanover asked, riffling through files. "I could hear him all the way over here."
"One of Parker's house-mates," she said, listening to the phone ring at the Bugle. "'Big John.' Glad I don't live with him; I'd have to cite him for noise pollution. Come on, pick up."
"Daily Bugle, Robertson," A voice said after a few more rings.
"Ah, hello. This is Agent Martin, FBI. I'm looking for Peter Parker. Is he there, by any chance?"
"Parker?" the voice responded. "He's never here this late. He in some kind of trouble?"
"No, nothing like that." She put on her "good cop" voice. "We just have a few questions for him. If you see him, could you please have him call us?" She gave him her cell phone number, checking that he wrote it down.
"Okay," Robertson said a little dubiously. "This have anything to do with Spider-man?" he asked after a beat.
"I'm not at liberty to say," she said, going by protocol. "Thank you for your help, Mr. Robertson. Have a nice day." She hung up again, lifting an eyebrow. "Strike two. Where in the world is he, at four in the morning?"
"Beats me," Hanover replied. "I'd say, 'out chasing Spider-man,' but we'd have a hell of a time finding him if he was."
She nodded, dialing the aunt, getting a similar, but more worried response, and then looking up the girlfriend, Miss Watson. "If you hear from him," she said again, after getting the fourth negative, "Could you please ask him to give us a call immediately?"
"Oh, uh, sure," Watson said. "Bye..."
Hanover looked at Martin as she hung up. "Nothing on Parker?" He pulled his coat off the hat-stand by the door.
"Nothing." She said, dropping the phone harshly. It landed half in the cradle, and she didn't care. "Complete strike out. So we go anyway?"
"We go anyway," came the decisive response. "Who knows, we might find the kid, tailing Spider-man." He opened the door and walked out through it.
She fixed the phone, grabbed her coat, and followed him. As they took the elevator down to the parking garage, she sighed heavily. "What is it about New York? This city attracts ninety nine percent of the freaks and weirdos in the entire world, I swear."
"Bigger population means more weirdos per capita," came the response.
"I've got to move outta here," she said reflectively, getting off in the parking garage. Taking one of the agency's black sedans, they headed east to the Paxton building. The neighborhood around it was more or less abandoned, which didn't speak well for finding additional witnesses. She turned up her collar against the chill pre-dawn wind as they scouted around the building with flashlights, looking for anything out of the ordinary.
Walking in the alley between the Paxton Building and its neighbor, Hanover stopped near a large Dumpster. "Hey, over here," he said, kneeling.
She jogged over, adding her flashlight to his on the site. The blood looked black against the cement, and was mostly dried. Something else caught her eye, farther down the alley. "There's more over there."
Hanover was already scraping bits of the dried blood into a tiny evidence bag. He sealed and pocketed it, looking where she shone her light and then shining his up the building. "It goes up the building," he said, looking up at the roof.
She looked at it. "That's a lot of blood. If it's all Dr. Holmes', do you think she lived long enough to reach an ER?"
"Could be that it's not," Hanover replied. "The witness said Octavius laid into Spider-man pretty badly, some of this could be his." He turned and approached the other dried puddle, scraping some of that into another tiny bag, sealing it. "We'll find out soon enough," he added, rising and stuffing the second bag into a pocket. He looked up at the roof again.
"You want to see if we can go up there?" she asked, following his gaze. "The soup kitchen's open, they might have the keys."
"Easier way," Hanover replied, indicating an outside ladder, a series of bent metal bars inserted into the brickwork. Pocketing his flashlight, he started up said ladder.
She followed him up reluctantly, trying not to look down. She wasn't afraid of heights, but five stories was an uncomfortable distance between you and the ground, so it was with relief that she reached the roof. She looked back down the way they had come. "She survived that?"
"Presumably," came Hanover's reply, his flashlight following the trail of blood drops across the roof. He peered into the distance. "There aren't any hospitals very close in this direction. He might have taken her back to his hideout."
"So. Are you planning to follow the trail and see how far it gets us?" she said, indicating the blood. "Because I am not climbing up and down buildings all night on someone else's case." She scowled at him, daring him to push her any farther.
Hanover favored her with a withering stare before turning and walking back to the ladder. "Some other way, then," he grumbled, climbing back down to street-level. She could still hear him grumbling even after he disappeared from view.
She rolled her neck, sighing deeply and looking out uptown before swinging onto the ladder herself. Maybe this obsession was contagious.