Costume Not Included (3 page)

  Every eye in the park turned toward the disturbance. "Okay," said the demon, "fadin' you in now."

  Chesney became visible as he sat down on the bench. Nobody noticed. "See you at midnight," he said, but his assistant was already just a whiff of sulfur dissipating in the late spring air. He relaxed against the horizontal wooden slats of the bench's backrest. He looked in the direction that Melda would be coming from, and there she was: just passing the basketball court, where the usual gang of young toughs were passing the ball back and forth and offering salacious invitations to the women, usually in pairs, who walked or jogged by.

  One of the teenagers said something to Melda – or tried to; he got no farther than "Hey, chica–" before one of the others clamped a hand over the speaker's mouth and spoke rapidly and quietly into his ear. The silenced youth's eyes widened, his friend released him, and they all turned their attention to dribbling and passing the basketball.

  Chesney had watched the business. He put it into the context of what Xaphan had told him about crime rates falling. The same gang of thugs had surrounded Melda McCann as she'd walked home from work three weeks before, their intent the theft of her purse. Instead, from out of the darkness, the Actionary had appeared amid a clap of thunder and a flash as bright as lightning to bang heads together and send the muggers fleeing.

  It would have been a perfect moment, if Melda hadn't taken him for yet another threat and pepper-sprayed his eyes and nose. But, fortunately, they had gotten past that, and past the much worse things that had ensued when they'd all gone to Hell, and now Melda McCann was one of only three people – Chesney's mother and the Reverend Billy Lee were the others – who knew that he was the crimefighting Actionary.

  She arrived carrying a large plastic cooler hung from a strap over her shoulder. Chesney knew that she was slight of stature but surprisingly strong. He stood and took the cooler from her, set it on the bench, then craned his neck down to kiss her upturned lips.

  "Hi, sweetie," she said.

  "Hi, yourself."

  "You still upset about the rev?"

  "Not now," he said. He drew her down to the bench and they kissed again, a long one that resulted in Chesney having to rearrange the front of his slacks.

  Melda noticed and rolled her eyes. "Eat first," she said. She pulled the cooler closer, opened its lid and began taking out small plastic containers. Then she scooted sideways on the bench to make room between them for the food.

  Chesney looked around the park, wanting to see somebody noticing him and his girl and how cool they were with each other. But the only people looking their way were the gangstas at the basketball court. One of them, the leader, seeing he had caught Chesney's gaze, showed him an expression of exaggerated surprise, as if the actuary had just pulled off some impressive stunt.

  "Hey, 'mano!" the young tough called. He wore a gold, sleeveless shirt and red bandana tied in a torc around his forehead. A chain-link tattoo circled his throat. "You got some huevos, hookin' up with that chica." Chesney ignored the remark, but the thug continued: "You know whose girl that is?"

  "Ignore him," said Melda, continuing to unpack the cooler.

  But Chesney wasn't going to let the day be spoiled. "Yeah," he called back. "Mine."

  The gangsta showed him mock fear, his hands shaking in front of his chest. The others in the gang made
hoo
and
whoa
sounds and laughed.

  Melda handed Chesney a sandwich. "Eat," she said. She selected one for herself and took a healthy bite. Chesney followed her lead. They turned away from the basketball court to face each other and, for Chesney, that meant that the rest of the world ceased to exist.

  They ate in silence for a while. Besides sandwiches, Melda had brought cut-up raw vegetables and a dressing that she made herself out of sour cream, garlic and herbs. She dipped a cherry tomato into the little plastic tub and popped it into his mouth. He loved that, even though he had hated it when his mother used to do it at the family dinner table when he was a kid. Of course, Melda was a better cook than Letitia, whose science of the kitchen extended no farther than the need to cook everything until it was either limp and soggy or bone-dry.

  "Listen, sweetie," she said, after he had finished his second sandwich and half the veggies. "I've been thinking."

  "About what?"

  "About you and me and this thing you do." She was watching him closely and when she saw the look on his face, she said, "What's the matter?"

  He didn't know. But it was as if a cloud had passed between them and the sun. The light no longer seemed so bright. "You're not…" he began, but couldn't find words to continue. He gathered himself and tried again. "You're not going to push me… like my mother and the reverend–"

  "What? No!" She shook her head as if a particularly silly idea had somehow made its way into her mind and had to be thrown off. "No, no, never. Look, sweetie, if you don't want to be a prophet, that's okay with me."

  "Oh, good," he said, and reached for another cherry tomato.

  "I mean," she continued, "where's the profit in being a prophet?"

  He stopped with the dripping red orb at his lips. "Huh?"

  "All I'm saying, is you're a celebrity now. You're the Actionary, for gawdsake. You should cash in."

  He put the tomato down. "I'm not doing this for money," he said.

  "Who said money?"

  "You did. You said, 'cash in.' Cash is money."

  She looked as if the connection had never occurred to her. "Okay," she said, "I didn't mean like get paid for crimefighting. Like, how would that even work? They'd make you a special agent for the FBI?"

  "The FBI already has special agents, thousands of them."

  "Okay, then, a super special agent. But that's not what we're talking about anyway."

  "What are we talking about, anyway?" he said. The air still seemed cooler than it ought to be in the sunshine. The disturbance in the front of his slacks was now just a memory.

  "Being a celebrity. Endorsements. Giving speeches. A book deal." Her eyes widened, "Oh, god," she said and only breathed the next two syllables: "Oprah."

  "Oprah?"

  "You could so be on Oprah. She'd love you."

  "But I don't want to be on Oprah."

  "But you'd need her," Melda said, as if explaining to a nine year-old, "for the book."

  "I don't want to write a book. Or give speeches." When he thought about it, the prospect terrified him. "Or tell people what kind of soda they should drink."

  She gave a delicate snort. "I think you'd get a better class of endorsement than Coke or Pepsi. Those big companies with the names that don't tell you what they do, the kind that used to hire Tiger Woods until it turned out he was more into sluts than putts."

  "But I don't want to do that," Chesney said. "I just want to fight crime."

  "But what are we going to live on?"

  "Well," he began, and then the pronoun she had used caught up with him. "We?" he said.

  "Well, yeah," she said. "I mean, I kinda thought, the way you like me . . ."

  "Oh, said Chesney. He realized that while he was enjoying the unfamiliar territory known as "having a girlfriend," the girlfriend in question was already picking out an address in the land of permanent relationship. Perhaps even the neighborhood called marriage. He wondered how he would feel about that, once he got over the surprise. But now he focused his mind on the question they were actually discussing. "I have a job," he said. "I make pretty good money. And you've got your thing with the nails."

  She sighed. It wasn't anywhere near as eloquent a condemnation of his intellect and character as one of Letitia Arnstruther's sighs, but it blew from the same direction. "You can't keep working there," she said.

  "Why not? I mean, the C Group has wound up, now that W.T. has decided not to run for governor." That decision by Chesney's employer, Warren Theophilus Paxton, had been prompted by the sudden nervous breakdown of his daughter, Poppy, who did not remember her own trip to Hell. Unlike Melda, Poppy had gone there unwillingly, kidnapped by her father's campaign adviser, Nat Blowdell, who'd made his own deal with the Devil, though on more traditional lines than Chesney's.

  C Group had been a special crime statistics unit within Paxton Life and Casualty, to which Chesney had been seconded. It crunched numbers to back up Paxton's candidacy, which was supposed to be based on an anti-crime platform. The campaign would have been fueled by a "missing blonde" media frenzy orchestrated by Blowdell. Young, blonde women who went missing were a guaranteed draw for the media. Every year, on the anniversary of her disappearance, the media ran retro-stories on the young journalism student, Cathy Bannister, who had been snatched from her third-floor apartment nine years ago, and never seen again.

  Paxton hadn't known that Blowdell meant the "missing" descriptor to transmute into "found murdered." A missing blonde daughter of a socially prominent millionaire who subsequently turned up dead would have whipped the media into paroxysms of overkill. A skilled operator like Blowdell could have ridden the grieving father like a surfboard on a wave of frenzy, straight into the governor's mansion. From there, Blowdell had intended to position Paxton for the next big wave, whose froth just might have carried them into the White House; once there, Blowdell meant to somehow use his insider position and infernal connections to rule the world.

  Chesney had put a stop to that. Now Nat Blowdell was just another damned soul in Hell. Xaphan had wiped away Poppy Paxton's memory of the incident, as well as that of a Major Crimes Squad lieutenant named Denby, Police Central's liaison with C Group. But the young woman's emotional trauma was too deep-seated, so Xaphan explained it, that he couldn't "clean her up completely widdout she's gonna lose some of her marbles."

  Faced with a suddenly depressed and nervous daughter and the mysterious disappearance of his key campaign adviser, W.T. Paxton had abandoned the idea of running for governor and closed down C Group. The group of hotshot number crunchers, of whom Chesney was the hottest and crunchingest, had been sent back to the actuarial cohorts. In recognition of his outstanding work, Chesney had been upgraded to a level three actuary, which qualified him not only for a raise and more benefits, but an actual fourth-floor office – though not on a corner and with only one window.

  "So I've got a pretty bright future with Paxton's," he told Melda.

  "Not once the ice queen starts to remember what happened," she said.

  "She won't," the young man said. "And you shouldn't call her the ice queen. She's had a rough time."

  "Who hasn't?" said Melda. Her small face under straight-cut brown bangs compressed its fine features in thought. "Maybe Poppy won't remember," she said. "But she's going to get a sick turn every time she runs into you. It won't be too long before she gets daddy to turf you out."

  Chesney's instinct was to deny the likelihood. But he checked himself. Melda was better than he was at this kind of thinking. Human nature was one of her pools of light and she could spot details he would always miss. He'd only seen Poppy Paxton once in the two weeks since the events that had cost the young woman her memory and her ability to sleep through the night. She'd been sitting in the back of her father's limousine, the long black car idling at the curb, waiting for W.T. to come out.

  Chesney had come down the front steps of the Paxton Building. She had glanced at him through the tinted window, and their eyes had met. He'd seen her react, her already pale face going white and her eyes widening. She'd looked away, and said something sharply to the chauffeur. The car had driven off.

  "You may be right," Chesney said, "but still, I can get a good job somewhere else. I have a thing for numbers."

  She was going to say something, but didn't. "Eat your tomato," she said, pushing the food gently back toward his lips, "before it drips on your shirt. We can talk about this some other time."

  Chesney ate the tomato and the last half sandwich. He deliberately did not think about the things they'd been discussing. Melda passed him a soft drink and he washed the food down, while she repacked the empty containers in the cooler. After she closed the lid, she said, "What'll we do now?"

  "Um," Chesney said.

  She made a little noise in her throat. "That's what I thought you'd say." She stood up. "Your place is closer."

 
 

 
 
 

The demon appeared on the stroke of midnight, its everpresent Churchill sticking out the side of its jaw, behind one of the sabertooth fangs. Xaphan removed the cigar, drained the tumbler of rum in its other hand, then tossed the glass into the air. It rose, stopped, and disappeared. "Costume?" the fiend said.

  "Costume," said Chesney and instantly he was clad from head to foot in skintight blue and gray – he liked Batman's colors – with a half-mask that left only his eyes, mouth and chin showing. He had modified the outfit after his original outings: the long gauntlets had proved cumbersome so he had replaced them with wrist-length gloves of gray; the original calf-high boots were now something like a low-cut deck shoe. Somehow the effect was more modern.

  He checked himself in the full-length mirror in his bedroom and for a moment was distracted by a memory of scenes that had been reflected in that same length of glass only hours before. Melda had stayed through the afternoon and they had ordered in pizza for supper. The pause for food gave them renewed energy; and it was past nine o'clock before the rumpled young woman had called a cab and gone home. Chesney had collapsed back on the bed and slept a deep and dreamless sleep until the alarm woke him just before midnight.