Spider Gwen, Chapter 6.
Beta reader: Chocolateowl.
It was over dinner, namely the sub, chips, and a diet soda that he ordered, that Parker came to regret his choice to not accept that sweet sweet gangster money. Meanwhile, I was too busy being treated like a queen at the Borgar Queen next door to notice, not until Parker stuck his head through the door and asked me for a twenty.
Do you know how sweet it is to lord over high and mighty Peter "don't get involved" Parker?
Too bad for him. The money was mine, and if he wanted any he would have to ask Gary the Headphones Underground ninja gangster.
Still, I slipped him a loose $50 and went back to snacking on chicken nuggets and ranch, mostly to cover the bill, but also to lord over Parker again, just because I could.
Look, even I get cheat meals now and then, especially if my suit isn't in use.
Ok fine, that's a lie. I cheat on more meals than not. I'm in college. Sue me.
After the fiasco at Chinatown, I decided to invest into a nice pair of platform combat boots. Not only would it mean that there would be a thick layer of leather between me and the next pair of nuts I was going to have to kick, but it meant that I was now just slightly taller than Parker, and that alone was worth much more than the rough one hundred and fifty the boots had cost me.
I left Borgar Queen happy, and I picked up a salad on sale at the grocery closing up shop next door. I had my cheat meal, and the symbolite was going to make me pay for it unless I appeased the greedy little thing.
Parker wasn't in his apartment when I got back, but he had left the window unlocked, so I popped in and shut it behind me. The first thing I did was check for messages on the little brick of a phone that Gary had tossed at me. To my surprise, there wasn't anything… so night off then!
To my horror, of course, Parker's barebones apartment was about as interesting as a lawyer's office or the ninja accountant's underpants. Apart from a comfy sofa, I didn't exactly have anything to do, and that was after I considered jumping into his shower for the third time.
And then the little brick rang, and I dove on it.
"Hello?" the voice on the other end wasn't Yuri, nor was it Gary. "Is someone there?"
"Hi!" I chirped back. "Tell me you have something for me to do."
"Uhh," the voice on the other end said. "Wrong number."
Then the guy hung up. Bastard.
I sighed and slumped back to the sofa. Maybe if I imagined something in my head, I could bore myself to sleep, if I didn't bore myself to tears first.
The phone rang again, and I gave the little brick a glance that would have frozen the Hudson, but I still marched over to the phone and answered it.
"Hello?" I growled into the phone.
"Period?" Gary sounded amused. "Or is your foot still sore?"
"Gary," I said in my sweetest voice. "A period hurts more than you know. Why don't I give you a demonstration?"
"Put the guy spider on the line please," Gary muttered, defeated by my superior sass. "I doubt you can keep notes worth a damn."
"No," I glanced around the empty apartment to make sure that there wasn't a hidden Peter Parker around. You can never be so sure when living with ninjas. "They aren't home."
Gary sighed and I could almost hear him roll his eyes. Sheesh. Gary was a gangster, ninja, and a diva too. What a terrible combination.
"Fine," Gary groaned. "We were looking through a bunch of files on the computer. We need at least two of you to check out a signal."
"Signal?" I asked out loud.
"Yeah," Gary said. "The Tinkerer put some sort of GPS tracking on a bunch of important stuff, and while she took most of it to the grave, this is showing one signature still active."
That… was odd, but it was probably nothing. I had a nagging feeling I was going to find Phin's college applications or her stash of Yaoi. You never know with strangers.
"I'll take a look," I promised Gary in my sweetest, I'll-do-it-later kind of voice.
Gary groaned but sent me a location, a pretty isolated warehouse somewhere in an industrial area of New York. From what he could see from online maps, he said it was a newish warehouse, and one with no clear owner.
Spooky.
"I have no idea where the others are," I said finally. "How soon do you need this checked out?"
"What are you suggesting?" Gary sounded annoyed. "You want me to come?"
"Anyone but you, Gary," I shot back.
"Whatever," Gary muttered. "Just tell me when you plan to go."
The line went dead, and I slumped back into my chair, bored out of my mind.
Then I called Gary back.
"What the hell is it now?" Gary, gangster ninja diva extraordinaire growled into the phone.
"I'm going," I said. "Alone."
Gary swore something nasty in a language that wasn't English before he switched back. "Are you insane, woman?"
"Yes," I said cheerfully. "It's not so bad once you get used to it. The voices inside of my head have some really good ideas."
"Oh for the love of-" Gary groaned, muttering something mean in that language I didn't understand before switching back to English. "Fine, I'm coming with you, only because I don't want you blowing up half of the city."
Aww, that was sweet. I tried to imagine Gary as a knight in shining plate mail, but I couldn't do it. The scene in my mind burned my eyeballs into slag. No. Just no.
"Don't be late," I said cheerfully into the phone before hanging up.
I took one final look around Parker's apartment before I shoved on my new boots and popped out of the window. It felt weird, having a few extra pounds at the bottom of my legs, but there's no way I'm kicking anyone again in ballet slippers. No thank you.
I found it refreshing to fly through New York behind a mask that nobody knew. It was refreshing, particularly once I reached the warehouse area, now practically deserted with everyone having gone home.
Except, of course, a warehouse that had a half dozen armed guards outside it. You know, like any normal warehouse in the city. And of course, the expensive car belonging to the ninja accountant parked in front of the warehouse.
Just. My. Luck.
I suddenly wondered if I should have called Gary and called it off, but a second later I heard something move behind me.
"Got a plan?" Gary asked.
Erm. No?
Gary sighed and rolled his eyes. Well, it seemed like I didn't have a poker face. Great.
"Well," Gary sighed. "Unless you want me to distract them, I somehow doubt we're getting in."
I looked down at the guys with guns. Yeah. I had to agree with Gary on that one.
"I recognize the car," I pointed over to the ninja accountant's expensive Staten Island car. "Maybe we wait, hope he gets the thing and-"
"Who owns that car again?" Gary asked.
"Roxxon's ninja accountant," I replied cheerfully.
Gary gave me a long, dirty look. "Roxxon's hiring ninjas? Great."
"What other plans do you have?" I asked him.
"Go to a club and blast Caramelldansen," Gary sneered.
I almost choked. Gary the fashionable ninja gangster had good taste in music?
"Maybe we don't do that?" I asked him. "You know, with some of Phin's tech still inside the warehouse?"
"True," Gary said. "But I don't think you want to fight ten men with guns."
He wasn't wrong, I guess. Guns are no fun. But that left us with nothing to talk about, and being alone on a stakeout with nothing to talk about gets awkward in three...
"You eat dinner yet?" I asked him, breaking the silence.
"Yes," Gary sighed. "Do you always think with your stomach?"
Yes, but Gary didn't need to know that.
"You have any other ideas?" I asked Gary.
Gary facepalmed and groaned. "No."
Score one for Gwen.
"Let's go then," I said, turning around, only to be rudely grabbed by Gary before I could jump away.
Ok, I'm kicking him for that. Gotta test out the new boots.
"That your ninja accountant?" Gary asked, a moment before my foot found his shin. It was a last minute misdirection, if you're going to be picky about it. My foot's initial target was going to be higher, like Gary singing Soprano higher.
Gary gave me a dirty look before he nodded his head over to the direction of the warehouse. Sure enough, the ninja accountant was walking out of the warehouse, still in that nice, expensive, ten thousand dollar suit.
"Yep," I said. "That's our boy."
"Oh," Gary said, frowning as he looked down at his phone. "Phin's tech is moving. Looks like he's got it. Any idea where to?"
"Staten Island," I said.
"Sounds about right," he muttered as the ninja accountant climbed into his car. "You couldn't get away with driving something that ugly anywhere else."
Call the Daily Bugle. I agree with Gary on something.
But we were wrong. So wrong, in fact, that I felt like gnashing my teeth just thinking about it.
Roxxon's ninja accountant man went and got dinner. In Chinatown. In a little white takeout box that he ate in his car. All in plain view of about a hundred people, which meant that we couldn't just separate him from whatever he stole and make a run for it.
"I hate this guy," I muttered, crouched on the roof of the community centre we had almost gotten shot in just a few hours prior. "Can't he go anywhere?"
"He has good taste," Gary said. "I go there from time to time, if I have the cash."
"This stakeout is probably the stupidest one I've ever done."
"Have you ever done a stakeout before?" Gary asked. "You don't seem very sneaky. I mean, you're wearing platform boots. That's the opposite of sneaky."
I closed my eyes and mentally spelled out homicide, defenestration, fruitcake, IHOP, the New York Knicks, and a half dozen other horrible things I could do to Gary before I calmed down.
"They're for kicking," I muttered to Gary, or rather, what I thought was Gary. Because I was alone on the rooftop, and Gary, along with the ninja accountant's car, were nowhere to be seen.
That bastard.
I looked around the place and tried to find purple. Being Chinatown I saw a lot of red, and being eight in the evening I saw a lot of black looking up, but no purple apart from the gang of Undergrounds breaking out of a- wait a minute! Those Undergrounds weren't Gary's bunch of cosplayers. Which meant I was going to have to stop them.
Just my luck. The ninja accountant, the mysterious tech, the only means to track the mysterious tech, and Gary were gone. And I had to go fight bad guys. What a chore.
I leapt up from my perch, annoyed that there weren't any buildings tall enough on the other side of the street to get the drop on the five Undergrounds running down the street. Damn New York architecture.
So instead I landed in the middle of the street and crouched low. The Undergrounds were running, using their booster shoes to jump up. Clever, but those boosters can't stop me from webbing the last guy there.
And the webbing, much to my surprise, worked about as well on the unlucky guy as the equally unlucky gun about a few hours prior, because the guy launched himself up into the air for a few feet before the web attached to his shoes won and he fell back to the ground with a really heavy thud. I was about to go grab him when a little old lady shoved me aside and started whacking the guy with a broom, screaming at him in a glorious foreign language I could never hope to understand.
That is not something you see every day.
I tore my gaze from the hilarious sight to see the other four Undergrounds standing on the roof of a nearby building, and I fired a second stream of web onto the chest of one of the guys, then yanked him hard.
The guy gave out a shriek that reminded me of a six year old having a tantrum before he was grabbed by the three buddies he still had running around, trying to pull him from the edge.
When Gary called me to go after Phin's tech, I did not expect to be playing tug of war, not with four random gangsters.
The guys were pretty wimpy though, and I heard one of them, presumably the unlucky one I had webbed, pleading with the others to not let go.
I'm mean, so I let go.
A second later, I saw all four of the hapless Undergrounds disappear, and a slight thud. Two seconds after that, I landed on the rooftop, and found three confused gangsters staring back at me.
I kicked one of their guns to the curb below and rushed the first guy.
I have to say I'm really a fan of my new, heavy boots, especially how my first victim- erm, target, went down with one well placed kick to the shins, and started crying for his mother or Jesus after a second. Look, in my defence, I was too busy fighting the other two thugs to hold a microphone up to a crying man's mouth. I'm not that heartless. Or idiotic, for that matter.
To my surprise, the first of the two remaining Undergrounds was taken out with only a single kick. I was only aiming for his ribs, but he chose a really bad time to duck.
The last Underground guy fared even worse. He tripped on the unconscious guy at the end of the tug of war and hit his head on the roof before I could even test a kick I saw on TV on him. He was fine though. I dropped a pretty strong snowball on his head. Apply pressure to wounds, right?
"Nice fighting," a voice said behind me when I was trying to tie up the still conscious Underground guy. "Better than last time."
"Oh shut up," I muttered. "This is your city, why am I the one who has to clean it up?"
"You want a hand with that?" Parker asked me as I dragged the guy over to his sleeping buddies. "Three old ladies got to work on the one in the alleyway."
"Three?" I asked. "Did one call for backup or is this just your typical weekday night?"
"I called the police," Parker said. "I suppose I should thank you for getting more of these guns off the street, even if I did toss an entire warehouse's worth into the Hudson."
"Good on you," I said as I jumped from the rooftop, landing next to three happy little Chinese ladies who cheerfully waved at me while standing over a very miserable looking Underground. "You see Gary?"
"No," Parker said as he leapt down, though he played friendly with the little old ladies before he grabbed the hapless Underground guy and pulled him out of the alley. "Haven't seen him since, well, you know."
Pity. I wonder where he went? Did the ninja accountant grab him when I wasn't looking?
I stepped out into the street and heard the little phone in my pocket ring. Maybe that was him.
"Hello?" I accepted the call cheerfully.
"Air Duct Cleaning Services?"
I growled and ended the call, sighing to myself. Scam callers exist everywhere it seems.
"Gary?" Parker asked me.
"Scam," I said.
"What's the difference?" Parker shot back.
I raised an eyebrow. Parker, actually being funny? Was the world ending? I looked up at the sky to check. Nope. Moon seemed to be going in the right direction. Didn't explain the shocker that Parker was being funny for once.
Then I heard the stupid phone ringing again, and I felt annoyed that I couldn't see caller ID when I held up the phone. How cheap was Gary anyways? I thought every cell phone in the country would at least have that.
"If this is related to air ducts," I growled into the phone. "I'm not interested."
"Shut up you idiot," Gary's voice hissed back. "You need to see this."
"What?" I hissed back, fed up with Gary's ninja moves. "I don't even know where you are."
There was no response from Gary.
And then the line went dead.
Oops.
"Why does it feel like you're going to give me bad news?" Parker asked me when I looked up.
"Yes," I said. "I think Gary's been kidnapped."
Chapter 6 complete! I know it's short and took far longer than usual to pump out, but I'm not squishing the next chapter into this one.
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