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Post By Messenger Mon Jul 19, 2004 at 01:11:06 am EDT |
Subject The Case of the Gold Coin Killer - Chapter Eight Collected Originally The Case of the Gold Coin Killer - Writers' Notes |
In Reply To Spoilers in here for those reading but not writing Sat Jul 17, 2004 at 10:29:22 pm EDT |
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The Case of the Gold Coin Killer - Chapter Eight
"Okay, Messy," swallowed Dancer. "I think this might be a really good time to recap what you did yesterday; why you met Mariel and got those scratches on your face, why you battled this - Heatwave is it?" she checked with the undead villain who barely clung to existence before them.
"Yes. Until he killed me."
"You're dead?" worried Alcheman, staring at the gory mass. "Well, I mean clearly you have the top of your head missing, but really... have you thought of lying still and rotting at all?"
"Lots of dead things are running about in Byrnewood right now," Dancer noted. "If it's stuffed or snuffed it's coming to life and attacking us. If it's still alive it's getting mind-zapped and attacking us as well. Not a good day so far." She glanced over at the postman as he stared with an unreadable face at the remains of Heatwave. "So, I think its time for Messy to share with the class, hmm?"
Messenger trembled, this vigilante who in his life had his bones broken, been shot, stabbed, burned and generally beaten within an inch of his life, now suddenly felt very vulnerable.
"I had to do it..." He winced. "I had to stop her," he held his head in agony. It hurt. Forgotten memories wiped out from the Styx secretion were suddenly coming back in a flood of vein pulsing, white knuckled agony. It was like a small bomb had detonated inside his brain. "It-... I remember now."
Dancer and Alcheman started to back away. "Remember what?"
"I was helping her..." the postman grunted. "Ah... my head. It hurts." He rubs his temples. "I was helping her crack the cult from the inside and expose to the public how all those prominent socialites were trying to sieze power for their own use. Except... she was part of the conspiracy. She was Creaseface's wife... She lured me onto McKinley's property and then launched a trap. She wanted to kill me and win points with hubby at the same time. Seventeen armed elite guards surrounded me..." Messenger continued as the rest looked on in shock. "Killed them all with little effort. She was stupid. When I came for her, however, she scratched my face and sprayed mace in my eyes. In the end, I was stupid. Really stupid."
"Did. You. Kill. Her?!" Dancer demanded in a stern, yet frightened voice. "The truth. NOW!"
"No... I didn't kill her. But you better believe I wanted to."
Dancer frowned. Messenger sounded like he was telling the truth, but... "Messy, why would she want to win points with Creaseface? She betrayed him long ago for a good story. She had no reason to..." And then the truth dawned on Dancer. "Oh!"
"Oh?" Alcheman asked, feeling totally out of his depth.
"She was using that telepathic enhancer on the gold coin from Styx. While you were fighting her hired thugs, Messy, she was reading you."
"Why would she do that?" the postman asked. "I have nothing to hide. Nothing left to hide."
"But you do," Dancer insisted. "You were in the LL. You know pretty much every superhero around, and nearly all of their secret identities - including mine. She dug that info out of you while you were distracted fighting, then fed you all that stuff about Creaseface so you'd never realise."
"She got her big ID expose scoop... from me?" Messenger growled.
"Looks like. But then... what? Something happened. Something to scare her - in a not-Messenger way, I mean. Something that had her trying to contact the Lair mansion, to call Trickshot specifically. But she never got to him, and then he got the bogus pager message that sent him to where her corpse was."
"Lovely," gurgled the wreck of Heatwave. "Now can we get to the part where he slaughtered me?"
Messenger raised an eyebrow in confusion. "That's not Heatwave's voice. I know zombies. Disco Hitler was a zombie. This crushed body is merely a lifeless vessel. Someone else is speaking... and acting for him. Using him like a puppet. Just as he used all those poor people who shot at us in Marv's house. Well, I guess I still have to kill the vessel..." He whipped out a fistful of Razor Letters each one tucked between his knuckles.
"FOOLS!" the lifeless vessel suddenly shrieked. "CHARON CANNOT BE KILLED!! THOSE WHO DID NOT PAY THEIR DEBT IN LIFE, SHALL COMPLETE THEIR TASKS IN DEATH!!" Heatwave's head jerked back and forth like he was a ragdoll as an unholy voice escaped from his lips. The corpse pulled out a grenade and pulled out the pin. Then it started to laugh.
"This is going to hurt," winced Alcheman as he shifted his body composition to water and engulfed the villain. The explosion sent droplets of him spraying in all directions - but muffled the blast to save the bystanders.
"Maybe we'd better get out of here before he reforms?" Messenger suggested. "Dancer?"
"Over here," Sarah Shepherdson called from a nearby alleyway. "Look what I found!"
She emerged dragging the dishevelled form of Tony Partisi, Marvellous Marv's house-mate. She performed a sudden Heimlich on him and he choked up a gold coin that clattered on the sidewalk.
"Good find, Dancer," Messenger admitted. "We need to get him out of here to somewhere we can question him in peace."
Sarah Shepherdson nodded agreement. Then she glanced discerningly over at the postman. "'Never really had feelings towards me before'?" she quoted from earlier. She gave him a searing, confident smile. "You so want me."
And with that she led Messenger away before the emergency services arrived and Alcheman reformed.
It wasn't the first time corpses in the morgue started moving.
Lee O'Callaghan slapped the button on her desk that controlled the sprinkler system, spraying the room with holy water.
The victims of Charon were unaffected by the deluge. They began shuffling forward, arms outstretched, fingers grasping.
The assistant coroner unlocked his desk and removed a revolver. He shot the remains of Marvellous Marv in the torso repeatedly. It's only reaction to half a dozen silver bullets was a shudder.
"We have a Code 56 in the morgue!" Lee shouted into her phone as she kept what was left of Mariel Jenson at bay with a folding chair, "Dead men walking!!"
She was distracted by a thump from the nearest metal drawer. It seemed that all the cadavers in the meat lockers wanted to join in the party.
Mariel Jenson's fingers closed around Lee's neck, and being the forensic expert she was she realised that the hand that was strangling her was actually being pressed upon by a sheath of force that made it appear to move. These corpses weren't undead in the classic sense; they were being telekinesed.
Lee just wished she had a chance to tell somebody before she suffered respitory failure from concussive constriction of the thorax.
Then CrazySugarFreakBoy! kicked jenson away, blurring overhead and calling a jaunty greeting to his old friend in forensics. Trickshot appeared at the doorway and restrained Marv with some kind of sticking paste arrow. Nats slammed Prentiss back into the drawers from which other corpses from unrelated incidents were seeking to escape.
"Telekinetic," croaked Calloway. "Dream, it's psionic... tell Nats..."
As soon as the flying phenomenon realised somebody was challenging him in his own field of specialisation he knew how to handle it. "Okay," he scowled, gathering his will. "This is going to stop!"
The shambling corpses dropped like... corpses.
"What was all that about, then?" Trickshot wondered. "Seems like a nasty trick but it was really just a waste of our time."
"While something more important was happening somewhere else!" CSFB! realised. "C'mon!"
“I had to keep taking the secretions,” Tony Partisi told Dancer and Messenger. “They gave me the power to, to please men, to make them feel good when they touched me. They made Marv love me. I – I’m nothing without Marv! Nothing!”
“Where do you get this stuff from?” Messenger demanded roughly. “Who’s your source? Is Styx still around?”
“I get them from a courier. I don’t know who he is. I give him money. I haven’t seen Styx since we broke up the Circle of Charon, back when we found McKinley was setting us up.”
“Setting you up? For what?”
“He was investigating us! Investigating Styx. And then that Jensen woman turned on her husband and Agnew was a cop and… it all got horrible. Styx vanished. I got the stuff by courier after that.”
“For you and Marvellous Marv,” Messenger surmised. “What was he doing in the Park last night when Jensen was murdered?”
“In the Park?” Partisi looked puzzled. “He wasn’t in the park. He was home all night. With me. He’s frightened of open places in the dark. Or he was.”
“We saw him there,” Dancer argued. “He spoke to us.”
“We thought it was him,” the postman corrected her. “It looked like him. or someone made us think he did.”
Another thought struck Sarah Shepherdson. “Did you set all those people after us at Marv’s house?” Dancer wondered. “Did you control their emotions to make them hate us?”
“I had to!” Partisi grovelled, tears starting in his eyes. “He made me. He’d have cut off my supply. He’d have gone into my head and made me do it anyway!”
“He?” Messenger interrogated. “Who?”
Partisi shot him a look of terror but didn’t answer.
“Did you send those gross stuffed animals after us as well?” demanded Dancer. “And that villain that Messy killed before?”
Tony Partisi blinked in surprise. “No, that’s not my power,” he promised them. “Necromantic telekinesis is Chessington’s ability.”
Dancer and Messenger exchanged looks. “Who?”
Before their question could be answered, a bullet split open Partisi's head like a melon. Pulp and brain splattered all over Dancer's face.
She screamed. "OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!"
"Dammit!" Messenger shouted frantically. "GET DOWN!!" He grabbed Dancer and forcefully shoved her behind a dumpster. He then dived next to her as another bullet ricochets just above his head.
"SNIPER!! There's a fucking sniper..." He rasped as he whipped out two semi-automatics. He briefly peered over his current refuge and scanned all nearby windows in a vain attempt to spot the shooter.
Dancer did not respond as she sat there. She was breathing heavily and had a glazed expression in her eyes, obviously in shock. Partisi's skull fragments were still tangled in her hair and his blood on her face.
"Unless..." Messenger continued to ramble to himself. "It's another mind-controlled citizen. But..." he continued. "... no, it can't be. Partrisi is dead. Which means this is a legitimate assassin. And if it's a real assassin, I'll need him alive. I need to extract information from someone... something I neglected to do when I killed Heatwave."
Another bullet zoomed past him.
"Hmmn... This won't be easy... Stay here!" He shouted at a pale and trembling Dancer, as he barrel rolled out of his hiding place. He raced towards the safety of the lamp-post as another three bullets narrowly missed him.
"Great... a bit closer..." He whispered as he caught his breath behind the pole. "Only gotta keep on doing this, until I find exactly where he's shooting from. Easy as pie."
Dana Montrasor had finished her shift about twenty minutes before the unpleasantness started at the station house. By then she’d hailed a cab downtown and was pressing the ninth floor button in the lift lobby of the Phantomhawk Memorial hospital.
She took the elevator up to the critical ward and looked round the unattended nurse’s station to find someone that could giver her directions. Dana’s fellow officer, the unfortunately-named Spiro Agnew, was somewhere on this floor.
The nurse on the floor behind the station was twitching but quite unconscious.
Dana pulled her revolver and looked up and down the corridor. There was nobody in sight. She pulled her police radio. “Detective Montressor calling in. I need back up.” Only static rewarded her efforts.
On the whiteboard behind the desk was a floor plan with names of patients marker-penned on. Dana spotted the scrawl ‘Agnew’ in room 919 and moved there as fast as she could.
The police officer at the doorway was curled in a foetal position sobbing.
Dana kicked open the door and swung her gun round the room. Agnew was gone, his bed empty.
But his kidnapper had left behind a little trap for anyone who came to look for him.
Luckily for Dana Montresor, however, a helping hand pulled her out of the room seconds before the bed exploded from the firebomb that lay under its sheets.
"Oh, my God... I..." the detective looked up at her savior. "Thank you."
"No problem," said the nurse who had saved her. "We get these kind of things a lot, actually. You'd be surprised. By the way, my name's Grace."
"Dana," said Dana, introducing herself. "You didn't see any, er, sneaky mysterious figures here, did you?"
"We get a lot of those too. I'm afraid I can't help you with that one."
"Well, I'd better call this in. Thanks, for, er, you know."
"You're welcome," smiled the Night Nurse, and walked off.
Messenger sat behind the lamp-post as bullets kicked up the pavement around him.
He had counted at least twelve bullets and figured the mystery-sniper had to reload sooner or later, so he took his chances and rolled out from behind the lamp-post. From the angle that the bullets were hitting, he figured out what side of the street the gun was shooting from. He ran across a lawn to get a better vantage point, however in his rush he slipped on the wet grass. "Shit.." He grunted as he floundered and tried to get back on his feet. However it was too late.
*BLAM*
A bullet sunk into his shoulder. "Arrgh..." Messy yelped in pain. "Christ... Dancer!" he called out. "HELP ME!!"
However, the improbability Dancer was in complete and total shock as she sat behind the dumpster in the alley where Tony Patrisi's head had exploded right in front of her. She couldn't help anyone. Not even herself.
As blood pooled underneath him, Messenger managed to drag himself to the safety of an oak tree. As he did so bullets kicked up tufts of grass around him.
As he lay there, struggling to suppress the incredible pain he felt, he saw the sniper for the first time.
Detective Agnew's kidnapper carried him in his arms as he landed on the rooftop of his destination. He opened the skylight and dropped in. "You don't understand, do you?" he asked the semi-unconscious Agnew. "You don't understand why they had to die."
The kidnapper let the very injured Agnew fall to the floor. "I can make you understand," he said. He turned to a table with several sharp, jagged, and pointy instruments. "Nobody @#$%&s with Charon."
"I do," came another voice. The kidnapper turned around and found a man dressed in jet-black armor standing over Spiro Agnew. It was Michael McKinley, with his arm pointed at the kidnapper. A device was on his forearm, one that looked like it fired a very dangerous projectile. "What? Surprised? Didn't you think I could get out of an explosion like that?"
Marlowe came to with an ice cold water bottle on his desk, a cold compress on his head, and Trickshot's lawyer glancing at him with an expressionless air.
"Don't even think about a deal, Counselor", the Superintendant growled.
Instead, Pine merely shrugged, and tossed a folder onto the Super's desk. As Marlowe opened the file, he could sense something going horribly awry.
Inside the folder was a copy of his checking account and savings account records from his bank, which he thought impregnable, and an underlined, barely legibile scrawl which hissed "I know."
Marlowe got on his cell, again, and hissed "Take him now! NOW!!"
With that accomplished, he opened his safe, removed a briefcase, and called Internal Affairs. "I have irrevocable evidence of Commissioner Graham's involvement with Harry Flask, and am requesting immediate action, as I feel his involvement has corrupted an ongoing murder investigation that will, perhaps, tear this city in half."
Upon finishing his call, Marlowe placed the cold compress back on his forehead, faxed the evidence to those who'd need it, and smiled. And those fools think I actually have cancer...
Messenger's shoulder kept on twitching. He felt hot blood rush out of his open wound. It pulsed with unspeakable pain. However, for some reason his mind was not focused on this. He tore off a shred of his trench-coat and applied a make-shift tourniquet to the sticky bullet hole on his arm, almost absent-mindedly as if treating gunshot wounds was second nature now.
No, his mind was much more focused on the sniper in the black jumpsuit who sat on a nearby roof and waved.
"That face..." Messenger squinted and used a hand to shield his eyes. "That was one of the people in the photo at Agnew's crime scene."
"Feeling a bit under the weather, are we, Postman?!" a voice called out. "Losing lots of blood, yes, yes? Poor chap. I see you, on the verge of exhaustion... slowly bleeding to death... and yet you march on, determined to bring the 'bad guy' to justice like the simple one-track minded fool you are. Except things aren't that simple..."
*BLAM* a bullet blew a chunk off the tree that was shielding the postman.
"If you want to live... go home now! Truth be told, this doesn't concern you."
"You... living... that concerns... me..." Messenger muttered as he spat out bits of blood and bile.
The sniper in the black jumpsuit laughed hysterically and threw down his sniper rifle. "My god. Look at you. I don't even need this to finish the job. I have powers you can't even fathom! You don't stand a snowflake's chance in Hell against... Chessington."
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