Greetings, dear readers.
I apologize for the delay in getting the new chapter up. However, I found this very hard to get started. Funnily enough, once I got going I was able to write this in just a few hours.
My long-term readers might note this is shorter than what I usually do. Well, writing those marathon chapters is somewhat draining. So, in this fic I'm going to try and do shorter chapters that are updated more frequently.
In other words, I've decided to attempt to Makokam my usual writing style. I hope this Makokamed chapter meets everyone's approval. So everyone is OK with me doing a Makokam to the length of my chapters? Cool. :-D
Once again, reviews are my addiction. Please feed it. The more reviews I get, the quicker I tend to crank out new chapters. :-D
Happy reading and awayyyyy we go. :-)
Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl: The War on Crime, Chapter II
Dave unlocked the front door to his house and stepped in. His dad was at work, but Dave knew that he wasn't alone in the house. Putting away his coat, boots and knapsack, he descended the basement steps to The Lair.
As promised, Mindy was waiting for him. Coming down the steps, he saw her sitting on a floor mat, doing some stretching exercises. Her back was to him and she seemed completely focused on her stretches. For brief moment he wondered if it was possible for him to sneak up on her to test his stealth ability. But then, she spoke.
"You're right on time." She said cheerfully.
"How'd you know I was there?" Dave asked sheepishly.
"Please. Do you remember WHO it was that taught you to sneak up on people?" Mindy asked. In actuality, Mindy had not heard him at all. She'd heard him come in the house from the sound of his winter boots on the floor above her, but she had only been tipped off that he was approaching her when she glanced up and saw his reflection behind her on a piece of their equipment. Of course, she'd never admit that. She was Hit-Girl, and she had a reputation to uphold.
"That would be you." Dave admitted. He looked around The Lair –it had, over the last two years, been given the official title- with satisfaction. It now really looked like the secret headquarters of New York City's best costumed-crimefighting duo. They had weights, punching bags, sparring gear and a variety of bladed weapons for training. There was their computer, which they used to hack into the New York Police Department database whenever they needed extra information on a case –although, Angela had more or less taken over that job for them now. There were cameras, microphones and recording devices for both audio and video surveillance. They had various types of body armour hanging from the walls. Some were prototypes that Todd was working on for them –more or less variations of existing models. A couple were experiments he was working on that were his own creations, seeing ways he could give Dave and Mindy more Kevlar protection. To go along with that, there were a couple of Kevlar vests that they'd kept which had fulfilled their duty to the last full measure. These vests had taken bullets in the line of duty and duly stopped them. They now were in a case so they could have a reminder about the importance of body armour...as well as a reminder that they could never afford to get too overly-confidant. If that happened, they'd get careless. And, in their line of work, if you got careless you got hurt...Only hurt, if you were lucky. They even had a very basic crime lab set up. They'd taught themselves some basic forensics procedures and had put together miniature kits for scene analysis. However, they still primarily relied on the New York Police Department's crime lab for analytical work and anything to do with DNA. (The results came to them either through Marcus passing the information on to them, or through Angela's hacking ability.)
And then there was their trophy collection. Every victory he and Mindy achieved on the streets were catalogued in their crime files. However, the memorable cases were given their own private memorial. There was a Santa Claus hat, some Christmas ribbon from Harold Heffernan –aka The Santa Claus Strangler- along with newspaper headlines describing their capture of him. There was a balaclava mask worn by the Bensonhurst Rapist. There was a set of lockpicks belonging to a burglary ring in the Upper West Side they'd smashed (along with the bones of the perpetrators when they wouldn't surrender peacefully). One trophy was a pair of boots worn by a vicious home-invader who'd plagued Forest Hills for six months…until Dave and Mindy tracked him down and put him in Sing-Sing. And then there were trophies from the "villains". Parts of their costumes or weaponry that were not used in either criminal trials or sanity hearings (like the other trophies that were either not used as evidence or that were released after proceedings were completed), eventually found their way to The Lair. All in all, their trophy room was starting to get crowded. Dave wasn't sure if it was a sign that he and Mindy really were as good as everyone said they were, or that the city was getting crazier. Maybe it was both. All in all, The Lair now truly looked like a headquarters Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl could be proud of…If one discounted the washing machine and dryer in the corner by the laundry folding table.
"How long have you been here?" Dave asked his lithe partner.
"Oh, I've been here about an hour, or so. School was interesting today."
"So you said. I was surprised when you texted me. When I was going to Fillmore, it wasn't perfect by a long shot, but there was never anything like Meth going on."
"What about the steroids?"
"The football team won about a dozen games spread over the four years I went there. I don't think they were doing any steroids if they were playing that lousy."
"Yeah, now that you mention it…The team really had a good season this year. Do you think the coach had anything to do with it?"
"I don't think so. I mean, this isn't Texas where high school football means more than basic literacy. It's Queens. You know that Coach Zoric is mainly a Social Studies teacher. It's not like his life depends on whether the football team wins or loses. He wants them to win…But I don't see him risking his whole career and maybe jail time by giving the players Juice."
"That's about what I thought." Mindy replied. She twisted her body down into a full split and leaned down over her leg. "Can you do me a favour? Can you push down on my shoulders?" She asked Dave.
Dave complied. He stepped over and placed his hands on Mindy's tank-top clad shoulders and pushed down. Mindy's torso crept closer to the floor as she grabbed her bare ankle and pulled her upper body down and held it. Dave –with a great effort- suppressed a shiver. Whenever this happened it was agony and ecstasy combined. His hands felt electrified being able to touch her warm, soft skin and exert power. On the flip side it was agony to know that he couldn't do what he truly wanted, which was to pull her into his arms and kiss her so hard it would leave her breathless, followed by ripping off every stitch of clothing from her body and then ravishing her on the training mats.
Overall, Dave didn't know how he'd kept his sanity these last two years. He and Mindy were together pretty much all the time and close proximity that was neutralized by the knowledge that he could never have her, or reveal his feelings for her, was like fire and ice; two basic elements always at odds with each other. Dave was thankful for patrols. When the frustration got too much, he found that the best solution was to pound out his frustrations on the criminal lowlifes they hunted. One day the previous summer, he and Mindy, along with Todd, Marty, Erika and Angela had gone swimming. Mindy was wearing a new two-piece bathing suit that would probably have caused Marcus to have a freak-out if he'd seen it. It had a definite effect on Dave. He'd spent a large part of that day in the cool water and that night…He and Mindy had faced off with a street gang. Dave had taken on a half-dozen of them single-handedly…and sent all six of them to the hospital, with only a few bruises of his own to show for it. Mindy had been VERY impressed at that…even if she had no clue of the part she played in it.
Mindy bit down on her lip hard as she felt Dave's strong hands press down on her bare shoulders. She squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself not to think. She wouldn't allow herself to think of what she really wanted him to do. She really wanted him to rip her purple tanktop and spandex training pants off of her, lay her on the mat and ravish her. It wasn't fair. The only person she knew she'd ever want in that way…and it happened to be partner and best friend who surely thought of her as nothing more than a surrogate little sister. (It's a shame, she thought, they don't live in Alabama.) She wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to take her, in every which way there was.
Mindy recalled the previous summer when they went swimming. She'd worn a new bikini that had caused Marcus to do a spit-take of his orange juice when he saw it on her. (She'd never seen a man shoot orange juice so far out of his nostrils like that. Personally, she thought he could get on David Letterman doing that.) Dave didn't seem to notice it though. He seemed to want to spend the entire time in the water. Mindy found herself wishing that they'd been alone. Maybe then, she'd have found the courage to do what she wanted to…to yank the swim suit off, dive into the water naked, wrap herself around Dave and confess that she loved him. At least on patrol that night, she got to watch as Dave had unleashed an unholy curb-stomping on a half-dozen brain dead gang-bangers. It was an orgy of violence that Mindy found herself actually getting off on watching. It was poetic carnage that was simply orgasmic and a sight to behold.
"So" Dave said, breaking the sexually-tense laden silence that permeated The Lair, "where do you think we should start?"
"What do you think? You're the master planner-detective here." Mindy said with a smirk as she stood up and pulled on a purple sweat top.
"I think we should, first off, go talk to the guy from the team as soon as he's awake. He can tell us where he got the stuff from." Dave said thoughtfully. "What hospital is he in?"
"I've got Angela working on that from her house. She said she'd let us know as soon as she gets all the information. We can't go until after dark, at any rate."
"Well, the sun's going down now. We'll have the cover of darkness soon enough…" Dave began to say when Mindy's iPhone rang. They both recognized the ring-tone as the one assigned to Angela.
"Angela." Mindy said as she answered the call and put it on speaker. "Dave's here and we're raring to go. What do you have for us?"
"Hey Mindy, hi Dave." Angela greeted her friends over the speaker. " Alright, Leonard Barker –the guy from the team- was taken to New York Hospital Queens. He was moved up to a room about twenty minutes ago, according to the hospital computers. Like they reported at school, he's expected to make a full recovery…But from what it looks like, I don't know if he'd be able to answer any questions tonight though."
"We're going to try anyways. He might be willing to talk to us more than he would talk to the police when they decide to question him." Dave said.
"Seriously?" Angela asked. From what she'd seen of the jocks at the school, they seemed to have little or no regard for any authority figure, school faculty, parent or police.
"You have no idea how much more responsive people are when they're asked questions by people in costumes who wear masks and have reputation for applied violence than they are a city employee who has to file paperwork on everything." Mindy replied with a smirk.
"Ok" Came Angela's reply. "Good luck with Leonard. I'll be standing by here. Do you need me or Todd to help with anything else?"
"No thanks; at least, not for now." Dave replied.
"We'll keep you posted if we get anything. Later." Mindy added as she disconnected the call.
"So, I think we should get over to the hospital soon. We want to get there before the police question him and they might also sedate him for the night."
"Damn straight. If we leave now, we should get there just when the shifts are changing too."
"We can't really go through the lobby or hallways in costume though. Oh, maybe we could do Plan Shortbread." Dave said hopefully, if not seriously.
Mindy laughed in response. "First off, I don't have any made. Secondly, you know they don't let you go selling stuff inside of hospitals like that. Why'd you even ask?"
"Your shortbread is so good." Dave said simply as Mindy laughed.
"Fine, I'll be making it for Christmas again. But what about tonight at NYHQ?"
"Let's go with Plan-A" Dave said as he walked over to large wardrobe that had been built against a wall. He opened up a door, rummaged around and pulled out two bundles. He opened up one that colour-coded green for him and examined the contents making sure everything was in there. He handed Mindy her own, purple marked bag. She did her own inspection and saw that they had everything needed to pass as hospital volunteers, including wigs. Dave would become blonde with the wig, while she would now have curly red-hair. (They got the idea for the new hair colours from reading how they were depicted in the comic "Kick-Ass" that was still a top seller at all the comic stores in the city.) "Let's suit up and then we just have to put these on over them."
Mindy smiled and shook her head in admiration. Over the last two years, Dave had put together various disguise kits for just about every likely scenario. "Dude…You really are into being crazy prepared, aren't you?"
"And this is coming from someone who owns just about every weapon known to mankind?" Dave responded with his own grin.
"A girl has to accessorize." Mindy responded evenly.
"That's your story and you're sticking to it?"
"Damn straight!" Mindy said as Dave laughed while they went upstairs to change.
An hour later, the Mistmobile (They now no longer even thought of changing the name of the car) pulled in front of a parking meter three blocks from the New York Hospital Queens, in Flushing. Dave set the parking brake and turned to Mindy. She was looking up and down the street. It was clear.
"Ok" She said. The two crimefighters removed their masks and –in Mindy's case- wig. They pulled on their other wigs and tucked their masks away in inside pockets of their outer clothing. Next, they put on large-framed glasses. The glasses were un-stylish enough that anyone who looked at them would be distracted by the extremely 'un-cool' eyewear. The frames made what Steve Urkel wore look cool in comparison, but what they wanted was something that would distract anyone who saw them from noticing their actual features. The lenses were glass that had just enough of a tint that it altered their eye colour.
Dave and Mindy then swiftly exited their car, placed some coins in the parking meter, and began to walk to the New York Hospital Queens.
Thirty minutes later, Dave and Mindy emerged back out onto Main Street.
"Shit" Mindy grumbled.
"You said it." Dave sighed.
"You'd think that when a guy has a near-fatal reaction to drugs, they wouldn't sedate him."
"Maybe they wanted him calm for the night? Or maybe he's just drained from all that happened today?"
"Yeah, but how're we supposed to question him when he's out cold until morning?"
"I guess the doctor in charge didn't figure on Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl dropping by." Dave said reasonably as they began to walk back to the Mistmobile.
"And the police will be here in the morning to question him, while we can't come back here in costume until tomorrow night and…" Mindy began to rant when Dave cut her off by grabbing her arm.
"What?" Mindy asked as she ignored the electrical ecstasy that came whenever Dave touched her.
"Coach Zoric." Dave said gesturing down the street. He saw tall, dark-haired man in his thirties walking down the street from the hospital visitor's parking lot towards the main entrance.
"Think he might know something? You said it yourself, he wouldn't be giving them anything."
"That's right, and I don't believe he is. But, maybe he saw who some of the guys on the team were hanging with and didn't realize anything was going on until now." Dave pointed out.
"It's worth a try, I guess." Mindy admitted as they darted into the shadows to remove their outer garments and pull their masks back on.
Anthony Zoric, Social Studies teacher and football coach at Millard Fillmore High School was at the end of a very bad day. One of his players had nearly died after a steroid and methamphetamine induced rampage in the cafeteria. Then, a search of his locker had resulted in drugs being found there and two more players had come forward to admit they knew of it. He sighed to himself as he wished he'd never agreed to coach the team in addition to his teaching duties. He'd only done it- gotten into coaching- to please his father. His father was a former middle-school physical education teacher in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He'd grown up listening to his dad talk about how great coaching was. That was, of course, before the massacre at the swimming pool of the school where he'd been teaching at. He still recalled his father after that, when he spent the rest of the term on paid medical leave. After that, Gustav Zoric had lost some of his fire for coaching. He'd eventually taken additional classes and become a principal in the Los Alamos school system. He was well-regarded for his willingness to help out his students and his zero tolerance for bullying at his school. Still…He wondered what his father would think of what had happened today. He would tell his dad when he saw him at Christmas. He suspected his father would think it nothing compared to what he saw on that pool deck in March of 1983.
His silent reverie was interrupted by a harsh, rasping voice from the darkness.
"Mister Zoric?" The voice rasped out, causing him to jump.
"Who's there?" Zoric asked, clenching his fists. He'd played football himself in high school and had kept in decent shape since then.
"Us" A female voice replied, as Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl stepped out of the shadows.
"Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl?" Zoric asked in shock. His daughter loved her Hit-Girl doll. It amazed him to have met the real thing. It was as if this day couldn't get strange enough.
"Leonard Barker…Do you know where he got the drugs from?" Came Kick-Ass's reply that sounded like he was suffering the world's worst case of bronchitis.
"Like I told the police, I had no idea this was going on. I wouldn't keep anyone on my team or even in the school if they were doing that." Zoric said definitely. "By the way, are you alright? You sound like you have strep throat, or something."
"Did you see him hanging out with anyone?" Hit-Girl asked him.
"No, not Leonard…Wait!"
"You've thought of someone?" Kick-Ass growled.
"I've never seen Leonard hanging out with anyone. But, I did see Josh, who's a friend of his on the team hanging out with a former student."
"Who?" Asked Hit-Girl
"Jacob B. Jeremiah. He graduated –I have no idea how- about six years ago, not too long after I started there. He was a trouble-maker back then and I know a lot of the faculty wanted to see him expelled. I remember him showing up at school like he was on something back then. I just thought now that if he was talking to any of Leonard's friends, then…" Zoric trailed off as he mentally completed the circuit.
"Jacob B. Jeremiah? We'll check him out." Kick-Ass growled in the voice that seemed to be a mix of either bad Christian Bale mixed with bad Clint Eastwood…or he had the most heinous case of laryngitis known to mankind.
"Thank you. I can't stand the idea of anything like this happening to one of my students. Is there anything else I can do?"
"You can 'forget' about remembering our new friend Jacob for a couple of days if the police question you again about what happened." Hit-Girl said. "Oh, if you're looking to drop in on Leonard, he's out cold for the night. Don't waste your time."
"Thank you again. Oh…May I ask a small favour from you?" Zoric said with embarrassment.
"What?"
"My daughter loves her Hit-Girl doll. Do you think I could get a picture of you?" Anthony Zoric asked as he pulled his BlackBerry phone from his pocket. Hit-Girl sighed and then put on her trademark smirk as she posed for the picture. (She didn't have Zoric as a teacher for any of her classes, and thus rarely had any contact with him at school. So, Mindy wasn't worried about him noticing any resemblance between her and Hit-Girl.)
Ten minutes later, after bidding Coach Zoric farewell, Dave and Mindy were back in the Mistmobile. Dave dialed a number on his iPhone while Mindy began to do a Google search for the name they'd been given.
"Angela?" Dave said into the phone when it was answered. "We need you to run down a name for us: Jacob B. Jeremiah…"
Minutes later, the Mistmobile came to life and pulled out of the parking spot, heading for the address one Jacob B. Jeremiah.
"Do you think that this guy is doing it all himself, or he'll give someone up to us?" Mindy asked.
"I don't know." Dave responded. "I do know that he's going to tell us, one way or another." Dave said with a steely determination.
"You just love this stuff, don't you?" Mindy said with a contented smile. She knew she was witnessing a man truly in his element -Dave Lizewski on the hunt.
"Damn straight." Dave said back at her with his own smile as they bumped fists.
The Mistmobile roared through the Queens night, taking Dave and Mindy to their new prey.
