6

Police detective Mac Taylor entered the fifth floor forensics of the New York City Police Department. His mind was buried in the file of Carl Anthony Tuttle, a former street thug now turned professional criminal. A few days ago, Tuttle had robbed the MacIntyre Bar And Grill over on Decatur of $375 and escaped after shooting two of the employees and locking the rest in the cooler. The week before, he was the Allegheny Restaurant as it was closing it up, killing a busboy and mortally wounding an expectant waitress. The creep was on a crime spree to fuel his disgusting drug habit and more people were going to lose their lives of they couldn't track him down and put him back in prison. Forensics expert Danny Messer was still trying to pin down a location for the grave moss off Tuttle's shoes from the last location, but in the interim, he had turned back to the warped semi-automatic picked up from off Lower Broadway where a tractor trailer had been flipped and scattered across the entry to Waverly Place. The spectacle took ten million dollars of pure crack cocaine off the street and arrested seven drug-runners wanted by the Feds. It was one of the largest police incidents in the last month with every point and reference featured across the news channels and affiliates. Everything about the bust was made public…

…except the claims about the blonde girl in the red cape who turned over the Peterbuilt truck with her bare hands before flying away…

"Mac…" Messer came strolling toward Taylor. "I pulled something off that bent semi-automatic." He revealed a glass slide and placed it in the imager to appear in the main screen.

"Epithelials…" Mac recognized them. "From whom?"

"Not from any of the guys we arrested…" Danny was both mystified and intrigued. "I have been trying to get DNA from these for over an hour. They're indestructible. I've got nothing, nada, bupkis from them… Not only that, but the mystery prints, I ran them through the system. She doesn't exist."

"You really think that all those witnesses actually saw a blonde girl in a superhero costume flip that truck and toss those guys around like rag dolls?" Mac was hesitant to believe the twenty-seven reported accounts.

"Do you recall Captain O'Neil from the Twenty-Fourth precinct?" Messer pulled another file. "He not only believed this girl existed, but before he retired, he actually talked to her. She helped him take the Bench Park Rapist off the streets."

"I know Ed." Mac stood and leaned his head back briefly. "He also told me that the newspaper took artistic license with his account, but until I meet this girl myself…" He skeptically postured a bit. "It would take a grand gesture to make me believe that some bulletproof apparition is flying around flipping trucks."

"She's not an apparition." Messer tapped the machine with the epithelials. "Do you know how much force it takes to bend a semi-automatic? Over two thousand pounds per square inch. The Mythbusters proved it. That truck… it had to weigh almost fifty tons… Do you realize how powerful a girl… not a guy… a girl has to be to do what she did?"

"It's enough to boggle the imagination." Mac grinned a bit. "But… let's try to live in the real world here."

"Mac…" Lt. Don Flack entered through the glass doors from the hall. "Have you seen what's going on outside?"

"What happened?" Mac asked, but Flack just gestured and drew the seasoned officer and Messer across the room to the windows where most of everything was covered by the darkness of night. The sky was cloudy with few stars and a faint moon on the horizon, but light-filled windows, streetlights, headlights of vehicles and flashing patrol lights illuminated most of the street below them. With them, lab specialist Lindsay Monroe came ahead of the other forensic personnel gathering at the window and looking down at what was happening. There was a fire engine with lights blaring and ladder extended to something hanging off the pole out front. Detective Stella Bonasera at the scene supervised as rescue workers climbed up and tore free the two hundred pound man hung up by his underwear. It was Carl Anthony Tuttle ready to be taken in custody. Stella looked up to Mac looking down at them. Behind Mac, Danny turned away humming the theme to the "Superman" movie soundtrack.

Several blocks away off the south tip of Manhattan near Battery Park, several New Yorkers felt the pangs of pride when they saw the bright green statue of Lady Liberty off shore standing guard over the bay like the Colossus of Rhodes. Created by French sculptor Frederick Bartholdi to celebrate one hundred years of American Independence in 1874, the famous American landmark saw thousands of tourists every single day of her existence. Illusionist David Copperfield reputedly made her vanish on television, and Ray Stantz of New York Paranormal had supposedly moved her to the front of the New York Metropolitan Museum in the late Nineties. The ghosts of long dead immigrants reportedly haunted the island she rested upon. Security guard Lou Shapiro walking his route around the base tried to be wary of those spirits, but he also felt proud to be an American when he stood below Lady Liberty standing one hundred and fifty feet tall and became emboldened by her grand visage. When he looked up upon her now, he noticed something else. There was something up high between the third and fourth spikes of the crown, and it was moving. What the heck was that? Wondering if it was a bird, he shrugged it away and continued on his rounds.

Up high two hundred and fifty feet off the ground, Bridget sat on Lady Liberty's crown and watched the guard patrolling the island. By her side, she picked up her Subway club sandwich and took a bite of it then took a sip of her Diet Coke. She loved this view of Manhattan. In Chicago, she could sit and eat atop the Sears Tower, and in London, up top the roof of Big Ben. In Hollywood, it was the peak of Mount Lee over the Hollywood sign, but despite these grand views she saw, she wished she could share them with someone. During her brief respite, she took a chance to check her cell phone. Leonard had called her; she would call him later when there was not so much wind. Maddie in Boston had called her, and so had Lily and Piper. Between bites of her dinner, she took the time to scroll through the images she had saved and ran across the images of her and Kerry from back before her secret identity. She also had images of her mother and father with her and even one of Rory. She thought about calling them, she imagined their voices and surprise to hear her again. A slight tear fell down her face as she recalled her family. All these powers… all these abilities and the good she had done with them, and… she couldn't share them with anyone. Her eyes closed briefly with regret, her breaking heart pounded in her chest as she clicked her phone shut and placed it in her hip pouch. Before her, shadowy miles of Manhattan poured out before her illuminated by pinpricks of light. The moving sparkles of headlights drifted beyond the shadows of buildings. There were millions of sounds to keep her company but the one she wanted. She wondered what her sister was doing, what was her mother was eating tonight, what was her father watching on TV… but instead, she felt the breeze of the wind, the sound of boats in the harbor and the shrieks of the gulls flying over the water. Amidst all those sounds, a distant police siren broke through the noises of civilization. Her eyes turning toward them, Bridget sipped a portion of her drink quickly, stuffed the last bites of her sandwich in her mouth and grabbed her trash before diving off the Statue of Liberty, carrying it to slam-dunk a Liberty Island trash bin on her way. Gravity increased her descent to a hundred miles per hour, but her psychokinesis ricocheted her off the water surface to speed ten feet off the surface of water back toward Manhattan where her wake in the water was replaced by gusts of wind that blew away curbside trash bins and scattered newspapers. Her fists furled before her, Bridget sailed past cars under her at eighty miles an hour.

"Harry, watch it!" Prison escapee Marv Anglin sat in the front passenger seat as his buddy raced past the Waverly Place Submarine Shop, drove over a fire hydrant and sideswiped the Cash Cab in their way. Behind them, the blue and red police lights flashed and followed them from atop a police car. On the turns, Marv was pressed into the door as Harry sped through every opening trying to get to the Holland Tunnel for New Jersey. Behind them, another patrol car was lost behind a bus, but two more joined the chase.

"Come on!" Marv tried to hang on. "What's wrong with going back to prison?" He pleaded to his buddy. "We get warm beds, three square meals, a shower…" Their stolen Monte Carlo bounced over the curb, nearly ran over Sean Finnerty from Staten Island and clipped the side of George Constanza's brand new Ford Eclipse.

"There ain't no way I'm going back to prison." Harry Harvey Jr. screamed back as he jerked the wheel left to avoid a garbage truck with Mike Rowe and a film crew nearby. Harry had been a career thief since he was eleven when he shoplifted Star Trek toys and comic books. He had seen jail almost twenty times, but there was nothing he hated more than getting put there by an eight-year-old kid. "We finally got enough money to…." He dodged another car and raced through an alley over to Fourth Street with his brakes squealing. "…Get back to Chicago. " The police were trying a pit maneuver so he drove over a bicycle and over the sidewalk past a subway entrance past people scrambling out of the way.

"What's in Chicago?" Marv hung on to the strap above the door with his eyes widened upon the traffic in their way. "Wait, you mean Kevin? Kevin McAllister? That kid who got us caught the last two times? He's got to be grown up by now."

"I don't care!" Harry saw the signs directing him toward the Holland tunnel and raced ahead and around cars at a light. "I ain't going back until after I've taken him out!"

"Do you recall what he was like? He's got to be worse now!"

"Don't care!" Harry kept following the signs and turning the steering wheel to escape the police cars. "I'm taking that kid out once and for all!"

"Oh, yeah? What about her!" They looked up to the red and blue blonde who dropped down out of nowhere before them. Standing her ground, Bridget scowled, entrenched herself firmly before the stolen Monte Carlo roaring toward her at eighty-five miles an hour and caught the hood in her hands as the front grill work wrapped around her legs and brought the charging engine to an immediate stop. Following Einstein's rule of momentum, Harry and Marv flew screaming through the windshield, over the hood and past Bridget, hitting and rolling across the asphalt behind her. Just a block behind them, the police squealed to a stop at the scene. Grabbing their guns, they raced to arrest the perps sprawled out on the scene. Harry was moaning in pain, but Marv laid there with his injured back, bruised ribs and broken arm as a cacophony of police revolvers started appearing aimed at him. In the sky, the cute blonde was flying west toward the Hudson River.

"You know…" Marv groaned out loud to the surrounding officers. "I never just sit and look at the stars anymore…"