Author's note: Thanks again for the kind sentiments. As I said before a previous chapter, I'm as much a praise whore as anyone else. I apologize for the delay in adding this chapter. It took nearly 6 hours of attempting to upload it before it finally took. Thanks Wally woke with a groan and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of his little bed. Down at the end of the bed, Empress had previously climbed off him and taken up a sphinx-like pose at the foot of the bed. Wally gave her a pet down her back. "Good girl, Empress". As with all cats, she raised up on her back legs as he reached her tail. Then just stood up, jumped to the window sill and then out.

He ran one hand over his thigh, chest and shoulder. No lingering soreness, but he brought his hand back down to his lower abs. Damn, am I hungry. He looked at his cracked clock radio as he pulled on a pair of boxers.

"Ten o'clock already!" Jeez. I slept fourteen hours? Fourteen hours? But thinking it over, it didn't seem so ridiculous. He couldn't remember ever doing so much super speed running without a meal before. But to do so much of it for a call from Flash was great. Answering calls from the police was always a bit more of a chore and a duty. But helping Flash out was special. It was a chance to show what he could do to the one person who truly appreciated it. He recalled looking up over his shoulder while sprinting along a highway and seeing that he was easily getting ahead of a jet that Flash said had to be searched when it landed. And thinking about it some more, Wally smiled with pride at the realization that even a year ago he would never have been able to do so much super speeding in one day, even with breaks. No way. I'm a man, a super speeding man. I spell M . . . A . . . N . . . MAN.

He pulled on a pair of his giant pants, a t-shirt and a knit hat and made his way into the kitchen. His younger sister was in the living room with one of her two friends from the previous evening.

"Hey, look, sleeping geeky's finally up! Hahaha"

He scowled but otherwise ignored them and set up a bowl, a gallon of milk and some boxes of cereal. He kept an eye on them and set up his first bowl of cereal. They weren't watching. There was a super fast flurry of spoon activity. Done. He poured more cereal into the empty bowl and added some milk. He cast another glance at them. Not watching. Done. He let out a hearty burp as the two bowls of cereal settled in his stomach. He wolfed down seven more at super speed, having only consumed one as far as his sister and her friend knew. They left and Wally washed up thinking of Jinx.

Shoulda got her phone number! Damn! Too full of warm thoughts about her to think straight. Oh well. She won't want to wait five more days. Heck, she might've tried calling last night but got ditzy answering the phone instead of me.

He pondered, at length, their last date and all their kissing, how she felt in his arms, her arms around him and eventually, it occurred to him that he was not ready if things went even further. Oh crap. I don't have anything, in case we . . . Wally marched right out of the house and down the street, turned left at the intersection, went another quarter mile, all of this at normal speed, a kind of testament to his seriousness that he went the whole way walking like other people, and into the mega pharmacy at the intersection with the 4 lane highway. He walked in and, unsure of where to find them, wandered around a bit before seeing the display off to the side of the razors and shaving cream, other men's products that he'd likewise never used. Only then, standing there in front of the various choices on the shelf did he begin to consider the issue of what was right for him. All the jokes he'd heard in gym class started coming back to him as well as his surprise that other guys weren't nearly as . . . He remembered the juniors hazing him pointing and laughing. "That ain't right".

Okay. He sighed intently scrutinizing the various options. Some of the boxes were all shiny silver and gold, oddly glitzy and this seemed vaguely disreputable to him. Ah, there was the brand he'd always heard about. There's a red box kind annnnd a green box kind. Hmm. He inspected them further. Okay, red is regular and green is the next size up. But, to the other side of green was an empty slot in the display. Is there another kind past the greens? That's what I-

"Can I help you?"

Wally nearly jumped out of his giant pants. Ugh! Being interrupted doing such an embarrassing thing and by an old clerk who seemed positively hostile the way he asked the question.

The man was the pharmacist. He worked in the back of the store and he knew a shoplifter when he saw one. That was half the point of skinny boys like this one wearing giant clothes, wasn't it?

"Um, I was-was wondering. Is there a, uh, I mean there's red then uh, then, uh green of these" said Wally pointing to the boxes in the display but unable to make himself face the clerk while asking this question. "It, uh, it-it goes red then green is-is there one um past the, uh, the, uh the green?"

"You think you need more than the greens" the man stated, not asked.

Wally tried to get a "yes" out but before he could, the man simply grabbed one of the glitzy silver and gold boxes off the shelf and held it practically in Wally's face.

"Here. If these don't do it for you, nothing will"

Wally took the box, displeased at the silly quadruple prefix name he saw on it and, discomfort at the whole process not lessened a bit, muttered a thank you then shuffled toward the cashiers at the front of the store. As he walked, he pressed the box to his shirt and covered as much of it as he could with his hand, passing by two different mothers with young girls on the way. Finally, he reached the front of the store and then the front of the line to the only cashier working. He stepped as close to the counter as he could before putting the box down, trying to hide from view of the other customers what he was buying. So, he was mortified when the clerk passed the box in front of the price code reader and it didn't beep. Nothing happened. She tried again. Nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. Five times. She raised one eyebrow. Hmmph. Then Wally saw her reach for the phone by the register.

Oh no.

"Price check!" the fiftyish woman announced over the speakers to the whole store. "The . . 12 pack of Mega . . Ultra . . Jumbo Maxx XL condoms"

Wally's head dropped to his chest. He closed his eyes in embarrassment. Stupid speedforce doing this to me! He seriously considered vibrating himself invisible and right out of the store. It seemed to take forever for anyone else in the store to respond and all the while he could just feel the other customers staring at him. That skinny boy! While waiting, he glanced over his shoulder once. Both women with daughters were now in line behind him. One had her hands over he daughter's ears. The other was scowling at him furiously. He also saw a man who lived down the street from him with his family of four in a much nicer house. "That fricken West kid" he heard the man sniff to someone else in line. When, finally the clerk who'd handed him the box came to the front and told the cashier the price, Wally didn't care what it was. As long as he had that much money he would have paid it. He nearly ran out of there with his bag and barely controlled the urge to super speed back home. He'd just regained his composure as he reached home and reproached himself for being a superhero but unable to confidently buy these things, when the phone rang.

"Hello, West residence" he answered.

"West residence? Jeez Kid. What are you, the butler?"

"Aunt Iris!"

"How ya doing Kid?"

"Gosh Aunt Iris! Great! But, um, to what do we owe the honor of this call?"

"Formality again, huh? Well, it's like this, Kid. First of all I like you. Second of all, I've been busting my tail for a week now dealing with some scum of the earth politicians and above board crooks, too. And, third, I'm waiting in this airport for a flight and I wanted to talk to somebody clean but your uncle isn't available so I called you"

"Thanks Aunt Iris. I know why he's not available, too. Justice League. I was patrolling all yesterday morning and then helped him out all afternoon and into the evening. I was wiped out"

"A good kind of wiped out I hope"
"Mmm-hmm"

"So, how're some other things going?"

Wally could almost feel her eyes looking at him through the phone lines, scrutinizing him, weighing the slightest change of expression or posture the way Aunt Iris always did. He knew exactly what she meant.

"She's officially my girlfriend"

"Oh! That's great, Kid! That's just great!"

"Every time we talk, we get closer. And I told you she was on the-the villain side of things-"

"Yeah?"

"Well, not anymore. I don't think she can be categorized that way any more!"

Wally heard his Aunt chuckling on the other end of the line.

"See Kid? Other people like talking to someone clean like you, too"

Wally just smiled bashfully a thousand miles from her.

"And tell me how that job application's gone. Did you have an interview yet?"

Wally paused a few moments. "Yeah, I did Aunt Iris"

She immediately drew all the correct inferences from his glum tone. "They didn't accept you?"

"No, they turned me down. Well, Robin turned me down"

"The boy freaking wonder? Someone called a boy freaking wonder had the nerve to turn you down!"

"It-it was just one of those things, Aunt Iris. He and I just immediately disliked each other"

"Well, then he's a jerk, Batman's little fascist protege! You're not good enough for them! You! Kid, you're good enough for anyone. Anyone. Tell me, tell me exactly what they said to you. Did they give a reason for turning you down? What'd they say?"

"Well, they didn't really say anything. When the-the interview ended, Robin stood up with this little jerk smile and said 'Don't call us, we'll call you'. Only the word 'no' itself says 'no' more than that, right?"

Wally was surprised to hear Aunt Iris cover over the mouthpiece of the phone and he thought he could almost faintly hear swearing, swearing that would put any man to shame. When she came back on, she spoke a mile a minute.

"Well, I've got my next target now, Kid. Robin the boy effing wonder and the Teen effing Titans? Who built that tower, huh? Who pays for everything there, huh? Who pays the tax bills? Whose signature is on the check? Maybe the public would like to know in whose pockets those kids are? I mean, you don't think their benefactors get better treatment from them for giving them that T-shaped palace?"

"Aunt Iris!"

"Two to one it's Wayne Corp through about five levels of holding companies. You wouldn't believe some of the things that outfit does. There were these two companies in Gotham City that hated each other and saw each other as mortal enemies and when you followed the paper trail, you found that Wayne Corp. owned 'em both but thought they produced more hating each other. Bruce Wayne has got more hidden deals going than anyone, Kid. If not for a few charity deals, the public would look at him like just another sleazy Trump type. At least Trump married. Wayne's got no wife but guardianship of a couple boys. How 'bout that? Maybe a few interviews there would turn up some dirt. He-"

"Aunt Iris!"

"He stays out of sight most of the time though, he's not a publicity hog like Trump, and he's probably a better businessman too, but he's got his fingers in a thousand pies that nobody knows about. At least they didn't until I-"

"AUNT IRIS!" After Wally's shout, the line seemed to reverberate with silence. "Aunt Iris. I don't want you to do that."

"What? Why no-"

"I don't want to hurt the group as a whole and especially not the others. I met Cyborg and he seems like a really good guy. Raven was at my interview, too, and I don't have anything against her. I don't want to hurt them. Will you do that for me, Aunt Iris? Don't hurt them."

There was a sigh and then a long pause on the other end of the line. "Just this once Kid, just for you. But, you, uh, didn't ask for me to call off the dogs on the uh boy wonder, now did you?"

"Don't hurt the group, Aunt Iris. Nothing that in any way hurts the group. Please."

"Okay, Kid. But boy wonder is not the group"

"No he's not, Aunt Iris. No he's not. But, it'd be hard to go after him and not hurt the others. Honest Aunt Iris, I'm pretty much over it. It really really hurt for four or five days there but seeing Jinx again and things going so perfectly . . " he didn't finish and just sighed.

"Who, Kid?"

"Jinx, Aunt Iris. That's the name she goes by"

"Uh oh"

"Uh oh, what? What-what's uh oh?"

"Did you see the news last night, Kid?"

"No. I got home and basically passed out from exhaustion just inside the door"

"Kid. I hate to be the one to tell you this but she was in the news yesterday, running with that HIVE group. They took down a bank in broad daylight. It's in the papers today."

"WHAT! No, that's gotta be wrong! I know her, Aunt Iris! That's not her, not any more"

"Kid, I've gotta go. My flight's boarding. But keep your head clear, Kid. Remember everything your uncle taught you. And keep a clear head. Fast as you run, you solve cases with your brains and not your buns, Kid. I gotta go, bye"

"Bye . . Aunt Iris"

Wally hung up and zipped over to the tv. He turned it on and tried to find the news. He got to CNN but they were in commercials. He tried Fox News but they were talking about some european Islamic group that had threatened bombings over a limerick with the name Mohammed in it. Rhyming Koran with whore and? He tried CNN again and after a few minutes more commercials they were back in their usual rotation of stories. He endured a few minutes of stupid hollywood talk and then, there it was.

Police in Jump City are pursuing leads on a daring daylight bank robbery by the group known as the HIVE Five. This group, which actually has 6 members, stole $2.4 million from the Jump City Bank's vault in a matter of minutes. This footage from the bank's cameras shows their leader, the girl Jinx as well as See-More, Kid Wicked, Mammoth, Billy Numerous and the midget, Gizmo. Police spokeswoman Katherine Doyle says that the concentration of meta-humans in Jump City made a switch to daylight robberies by groups like this almost inevitable.

Wally watched the footage intently. They showed just six seconds of video that moved at a fast pace and seemed jumpy. He slumped back on the couch. The video was in color. There was a pink haired grey skinned girl seeming to lead the others into the area behind the tellers. It was hard to tell with the angle of the camera work, but it looked like Jinx.

In other news, self appointed anti-war spokesperson Cindy Sheehan was in Havana today, calling the United States the 'great satan of-

Wally turned the tv off. He lay there staring at the empty dark glass of the screen with his mouth hanging open. His world was crashing down again. No Titans and now no girlfriend. He drew a couple shallow breaths, feeling panicked, before straightening up.

No! It . . No! It can't be. It can't. There's got to be some explanation for this.

"That's not what she is!" he protested out loud. "That's . . not what she is." he muttered. He went to his room and changed to his Kid Flash uniform, intending to sprint out to police headquarters but he stopped there beside his bed. He was replaying, in his head, their last date. In particular, he recalled the look in her eyes when he suggested to her that if she was on the villain side of things as a reaction against jerks who'd mistreated her growing up, and stayed on that side, then she wasn't rebelling against them, she was making them her masters and letting them determine the course of her life. That'd really seemed to hit home. And when they kissed afterward in that park, besides just how fantastic it was to kiss beautiful Jinx, there was an extra charge to it, a feeling like she was saying thank you, thank you for helping to free me from this.

There's no way she would choose to be part of a bank robbery the very next day. No way! She couldn't kiss me, a hero, like that if she was really a villain. That kissing . . that was real! That-that affection was real and it couldn't be there if she was about to rob a bank. It couldn't.

Kid Flash zoomed out of his home and sprinted at top speed toward the intersection where he'd dropped her off twice. In a fraction of a second, the western residential, shopping, downtown and eastern warehouse districts compressed into one short vista. He stopped at the street corner and looked around, oblivious to the stares and gawking and picture taking by the people around him. Then he ran multiple small circles, one and two blocks across all around the surrounding area. But he didn't see her or anything connected to her presence. He did see two police cruisers parked a few blocks from that intersection where he'd dropped her off. They were behind a run down looking building. His curiosity piqued, Kid Flash sprinted up to the third floor apartment where they were and stopped beside a police sergeant who nearly jumped at suddenly seeing the red and yellow clad super teen beside him. They told Kid Flash that they'd had a tip that Jinx might be in the area, might be there. But they were about to clear out. The woman living there denied it and there were no signs at all of the girl having been there. The neighbors were drunks and stoners who couldn't or wouldn't say anything useful either. Kid Flash nodded.

"Oh well, that's the way it goes sometimes" he said as consolation while taking a last look before leaving and noting the remains of a rose, brown petals fallen onto the kitchen table at the center of it and the sketch book wedged into the side of a futon.

Kid Flash sped off. Okay, what does that do for me? I know where she was but she's not there any more. He tried to find something useful to infer from this but drew a blank. He zipped over to a newspaper box near City Hall and pulled some quarters out from under the wrist of his uniform under his glove. He bought a paper and took up a perch on the marble beside the stairway leading up to the main entrance. He stared intently at each picture for minutes and read every word about the robbery three times over at normal speed. All the while people went up and down the steps past him doing double takes at the casual presence of the hyper athletic super teen.

He didn't care. All he could think of was solving this puzzle. It couldn't be what it seemed, what everybody, including the police was assuming it was. But, how? How?How?How? How do I do this? There's gotta be something wrong. There's gotta be something I'm missing. There's gotta be! She can't be . . . It was like a moment of vertigo just sitting there beside the marble steps, to even consider the possibility. He swayed to one side before catching himself. She can't be a villain. She's so wonderful. And she . . she loves me . . . doesn't she? He gradually admitted to himself that that was part of his fear, that she didn't genuinely care for him, that he was just a super athletic body and a nice face to her.

His eyes were watering over now.
"No!" he said out loud and rose to his feet. No, he repeated to himself. Gonna be a man about this. Gonna be a hero. I'm a fricking hero. If not, I've gotta have a long talk with the tailor about letting out this suit. There's gotta be something else going on with this case. He sped over to police headquarters in a fraction of a second but stopped outside.

What do I say? What do I tell them? How do I make them see my point of view about her?

He sat down on the low wall in front of police headquarters oblivious to the comings and goings of officers, lawyers and crooks, sometimes the categories overlapping, all shooting glances at the sleek, brightly attired super teen. But he didn't notice any of the scene passing in front of him. After asking himself over and over how he would figure out what was really going on, a recollection came to him.

He thought of the day after Christmas when he was 11 years old. He'd had his Kid Flash powers only a couple months. He spent the day with Aunt Iris and her husband, Uncle Barry, the Flash. He remembered the warm fuzzy feel of spending a day at their home, stoking the fire in the fireplace and their questions, over and over about how he was handling being a superhero all of a sudden. And he remembered being squeezed between Flash, in civilian clothes of course, and Aunt Iris underneath a blanket on the couch with the fire to one side and the tv on. And Aunt Iris was hugging him or rubbing his head every minute or so it seemed. He sighed with the pleasure of the recollection. But what came back to him more now was watching those rerun episodes of Columbo beside Flash. Was it two? Or did they watch three in a row? Flash loved Columbo. He said it was great training for Kid Flash and he pointed out all the clever things that Columbo did, all the principles to which Kid Flash needed to pay attention.

"See!" he pointed to the screen as the show went to a commercial. "He's right. We do that all the time. We take in one piece of information and bring aboard a raft of other stuff with it that doesn't necessarily follow"

Kid Flash, in jeans and a sweatshirt with his shoes off and feet up on the couch, knees to his chest, listened with rapt attention, eyes wide open. "uh huh"

"The secretary took the call and heard that man's voice and brought in all the assumptions about where he was but it's not necessarily true. "

"I understand"

"And motives, Wally, motives! Remember in that last one that the guy who killed the rich guy with a block of ice over the head had known about phone tapping by another guy and used it to establish a phony alibi. Why did the guy let it go on, a sharp operator like that? Because he knew he could use it later"

"Yup, I see that, Uncle Barry"

"And inconsistencies are crucial too. When a person does something one way all the time and then does that same thing a different way and a crime is involved, it has to send up red flags, Wally. You have to ask yourself if it was done differently because of the crime. That's what Columbo does. He goes over every assumption and he looks for inconsistencies"

Wally nodded and got a hug from Aunt Iris. "You pay attention to all that Uncle Barry tells you, Kid. You super speed types have to be smart about how you approach things to overcome the way you get all happy running around"

Wally had blushed because he had felt a bit like a dumb jock sometimes after sprinting around in his red and yellow. What the heck was going on inside to feel like that?

He remembered getting a cup of cocoa from Aunt Iris and discussing Columbo some more.

"What would Columbo say about this?" muttered Kid Flash in front of police headquarters. And as desperately as he wanted to solve this riddle for Jinx's sake, he now added onto that a feeling that he ought to figure this out for Flash and Aunt Iris, too, to show them that they'd taught him well. He took a deep breath and sprinted up to the desk of Winston Randolph, the middle aged african american officer who sent out calls from the communications desk to Kid Flash and who told him what each call was about when he came in.

"Winston! Please! Do me this favor. Let me see all the footage from the bank"

"What for?"

"I-I know that girl, that Jinx"

"You know her? She is not on the hero side of things, KF"

"Well, she wasn't on the villain side of things either, not the day before yesterday. I talked to her. I talked to her for a long time. I'd heard that she was leaving the bad side of things and then I saw her so I stopped and talked to her. She was really serious about it, Winston, I'm sure she was"

Winston was not supposed to do anything with or for Kid Flash. That's what the new regime ordered. No special favors for meta-humans, even the good ones. But, damn, he'd worked with Kid Flash for 3 years now. Kid was money. They sent out the signal. Bang. Not thirty seconds later, every time, there'd be that whoosh sound coming up the stairway and there in front of him in that sort of spandexy outfit, the boy himself asking what he could do. He was not supposed to do anything for the boy but Kid wasn't dangerous. Damn! Kid was great. He found hoods and chased 'em down before they'd have gotten a car even headed in the general direction of a crime. And he always answered the call. He wondered how much Kid had given up to answer all of 'em. What was he, 15? 16 years old? Did the brass really think it was easy for a boy that age to drop everything and come running a hundred times? And Kid might've saved Winston's nephew that time in the low rent district. Where had all the other police been? Sitting in cars in the mansion district, probably. Kid was the only one there. Freddy still wore the bullet Kid caught in his hand on a necklace.

Winston looked down the hall in both directions. He pushed a disk across the desk.

"That's all we got, KF. They looked at it this morning and right away decided it was her. Are you sure it isn't?"

Kid Flash sighed. "I-I feel 100 sure based on talking to her but that clip I saw on CNN and the way they talked about it . . " he exhaled and shook his head. Winston nodded. In his time he'd seen fathers and mothers swear up and down that their little princess couldn't have done anything like what she'd been charged with. Right up to and through giving them the dna report that proved princess did it. Nobody believed that the person they knew did wrong. They thought that bad was a quality in someone else's kids or friends or spouse. But it wasn't. Hell, even Kid probably had some bad in him somewhere. But it seemed to Winston that Doyle and Brennan ought to be worrying about a whole lot of other people before being scared of Kid. He motioned to a room three doors down.

Kid Flash ambled over and pushed the door open. Inside the darkened room he saw video equipment. He started playing the tape. It was 7 minutes of footage, the HIVE crew entering the bank, well, all but Mammoth, the others dawdling inside a minute waiting for him and then Mammoth entering at which point they seemed to announce that it was a robbery. CNN may have called Jinx their leader but she seemed to be no more the leader than Gizmo or See-More. He watched the footage to the end. Billy Numerous split himself into enough clones to take the wallets and jewelry of everyone in the bank and they all seemed to crack the safe. Jinx even threw a hex at it. The footage was in color, so Kid Flash could see her pink hair, her pale gray skin, her pink eyes and even the pink energy of the hex she projected. He watched it over and over and over for two hours, trying to find something wrong, something that didn't fit that showed it wasn't her. But, the beautiful girl in the slightly grainy footage sure looked like her. He wasn't 100 sure about the identification but he never got to see a closeup of her face. From the odd angles and the distance of the cameras it looked like her. She was tallish, and slender with a nice shape, too. That shape.

He sighed and stopped watching and realized his shoulders had slumped, his whole posture had become defeated sitting there on the edge of a desk. He took a deep breath. She hexed. She hexed, too. God. And then, more trouble. He only heard the last footstep of her approach. There must have been more. Just too distracted.

"Well, what're you up to now, tight pants?"

Kid Flash turned around to see Captain Doyle in her almost police woman's uniform of a navy skirt and coat.

"They're not pants" said Kid Flash turning to face her. "It's a body suit, a-"

"I believe unitard is the word, then, for what you're wearing"

"Yeah, I think that's the term"

"And, just what are you doing, young man?"

"I was reviewing the footage from the bank of the robbery"

"Leaving aside the question of how somebody not entitled to that disk got a hold of it, why would you bother"

He hesitated to tell her. She was already smiling at him as if she knew. God! Can every woman tell if I'm in love with a girl with just a glance? And this'll just reinforce her notion that none of us are good or bad, just financially troublesome.

"I met her. Since you and I last spoke I met her and spoke to her about coming over to the hero side of things. And she was going to"

"Well, she didn't come over very far, did she?"

"Look, I'm not convinced that that was her or if it was that she wasn't being blackmailed to be there"

"Blackmailed? Maybe you think she was hypnotized or-or brainwashed or something, too" she chuckled.

"Captain. I spoke to her and she was completely serious about not being a part of crime again"

"Girls'll say a lot of things to get their arms around a three thousand mile per hour boy with such a handsome face. You think lying only goes one way?"

"I never lied to her and I don't think she ever lied to me. The-the point is that I was the person working to get her away from all that. I can't just ditch her because things look bad"

"Well, loyalty is a good quality. It's nice to see. People don't expect it from the prettiest boy in the pack. Now, let's just put that disk back where it belongs and close up this room".

Kid Flash did as requested following her down the hallway.

"Just one thing" he said, before speeding off. "That's enough of those pretty boy cracks and stuff about my uniform and all that crap. I'm doing something serious here. Spare me the verbal games"

With that, a red and yellow blur whooshed away from her and down the stairwell in a fraction of a second. But he didn't leave the building. He went down to the records desk run by a very pretty, red haired woman in her early thirties, very pretty despite being a bit heavy. Something in the eyes thought Kid Flash.

"Hi, Shirley" he said with a slight smile over the counter.

"Hey, Kid, what's up?"

"I was wondering if you could do me a favor, Shirley"

"Doyle or Brennan around?"

"Don't know about Brennan. Doyle's six floors up"

"Shoot, then"

"Can I get a copy of the list of every call, every reported anything, including moving violations and parking tickets for the last 3 days?"

She didn't say a word but went over to the printer furiously printing away in the corner of the room and separated the sheets on the tractor feed already done from the one being printed and reached into the box below, thumbing past some sheets then stopping and tearing. She walked over to the counter and handed the inch thick stack of sheets to Kid Flash. "That's what was printing. And, oops. Some of the sheets printed bad. I'll just have to do 'em over"

Kid Flash smiled from ear to ear. "Thanks"

"Go away now. I threw those sheets out. And don't show me that smile for long, either, okay. Oedipus's mom thought it was a good deal, too, with her young guy. Go away."

He zoomed away at super speed with his list. He'd wanted it because of another piece of counsel that Flash had given him. A lot of times, Flash told him, crooks do some other minor thing wrong just before or just after a crime and nobody really pays attention to it because they don't realize the two events are related. Anything from a parking ticket near a place they're casing out to a disturbing the peace call for a party to celebrate a heist. Nothing might come of checking them all out, but you've got super speed so why not make use of it.

So, Kid Flash did. He raced around Jump City checking out every single parking ticket issued the last 3 days. He sprinted to the location of every paranoid neighborhood watch call to the police. He went to the location of every drunk and disorderly arrest and asked someone there about Travis and Bob and Curtis and Nolan and Ted. He super sped to the location of every single report of every crime. But nothing had any connection to the HIVE's bank robbery. Nothing had any connection to Jinx.

And the longer he sprinted around the City in vain while having no answer to the visual evidence of Jinx being a criminal, the worse he felt. Never mind solving the case or bringing the HIVE to justice, he needed a reason, a solid reason to believe in her innocence to keep himself from cracking. Emotional certainty was not enough. As the minutes and then hours ticked by he began to feel a bit like one of those crackpot conspiracy theorists. It's not Jinx! It's . . uh . . it's the HIVE on a grassy knoll! It's her evil twin! It's a trick of the cameras. That last one stuck in his head for a bit. So, he zoomed at mach 5 to the Jump City Bank. The Bank was closed and had yellow crime scene tape around it. Walking in with hands clasped behind his back, he presented himself to the security guard and asked him about the girl Jinx who'd been there yesterday. Did she look like the one who'd been in the papers before. He didn't know. A teller who'd been there during the robbery stepped forward and said that it was the same girl. Kid Flash nodded. He asked if they'd ever had any trouble with their cameras. She shrugged. Not that she knew of. Kid Flash thanked her and left.

The battle among his own sentiments was a scary thing to him now. He had lost control of the way he felt about her innocence. His emotional understanding was 100 one way. The facts were the other way. He couldn't just assert what he wanted to be true, what he felt from talking to her, from kissing her and feel that point of view all the way to his bones. There were pictures. There was the teller. As he zoomed along from place to place his mind whirled with terrible thoughts.

He sighed and returned to his printout. He was down to the last sheet now, calls from the day before the robbery. He checked on the location of two burglary calls and a domestic abuse call. He stood outside the apartment where that call had been made, feeling like his eyes might get watery if he got through the list with no progress toward exonerating her.

"What's left to check?" he muttered to himself trying to force a cheerful mood through a cheerful tone of voice. And as he sped off at the top speed his speedforce infused body could go, again, trying to keep his mood up through whatever chemical reaction the use of super speed had in him that made him feel euphoric, he slowly got another shot of stimulant.

Wait! Left to check. Left to check. A picture of Jinx formed in his mind. It was at their third date, in the diner. She was calling for the check. She made the usual motion for that, a writing or signing motion in the air. She did it with her left hand. Jinx is lefthanded. Jinx is lefthanded. Oh my god. Jinx is lefthanded!

Kid Flash arrived at the site of the very last listing, a tanning salon in the middle of a strip mall just outside the warehouse district. He slowed to a halt in the middle of the parking lot and shouted.

"She's lefthanded!" and grinned at this piece of information, because in the first minute of the video that the police had, the other HIVE members had tried to kill time just inside the bank, looking pretty ridiculous in the process, and he thought there might be a moment there of the supposed Jinx pretending to fill out a withdrawal slip, pretending to fill it out writing with her right hand.

The staff at the Tropiskin Tanning Salon weren't sure what to make of the teen superhero who walked in and asked them questions about their call to the police the other night. Were these super types always that happy the owner wondered. Course, a boy who looks like that is pretty likely to be happy, isn't he, she decided.

No, the police hadn't done anything, they told him. Said the alarms must be faulty but there'd never been a false alarm before. Nothing was gone, though, so how could there be a break in?

"Say, why don't you sign up for some rays? Nobody'll look while your mask's off or the rest of your uniform. You're kinda pale, aintcha?"

"Yeah, but it's part of my charm" said Kid Flash. "A teen of the people! I don't get any more sun than the average guy. Less, in fact to judge by how pale I am. Besides, it's a package deal with the orange hair. I'm stuck this way. I'd probably burn anyway"

"Oh no! We can spray your tan on in the mist room, now."

"Thanks anyway" said Kid Flash and he was almost out the door when he overheard another woman, an employee tell the owner "Don't be offering the mist to people just yet. I still don't have all that light gray crap out of it"

Kid Flash was in the process of pushing outward the bell laden glass door. He turned around and came back to them. Gray? Gray crap? The woman explained that they'd tried to use it the morning after the alarms had gone off and all the nozzles stuck. They thought it had been the ditzy part time girl trying to clean 'em. Kid Flash asked to be shown some of this gray crap. The second woman led him to the mist room and showed him the dried stuff she'd gotten out of the nozzles. You have to clean it after every time or it clogs up. She said that the part time girl must've run this cleaning stuff through it and left it there without shooting a rinse through it. Kid Flash sniffed it. It didn't smell like a cleaner. He sniffed the usual tanning spray. It smelled just like that only it was light gray colored. He got the woman to give him some bits of it which he wrapped in the last sheet of the police printout. He seemed really happy now and gave both women a kiss on the cheek to go with his thanks.

He sprinted back to police headquarters to see the video again with Winston.