In Hero Years... I'm Dead Delux Edition (23 page)

“What?”

I grabbed her arm and marched her into the bookstore. I snagged a book from a huge pile and followed the line to the back of the store. An autographing table had been set up, but according to one sign we still had a couple minutes before the author was scheduled to appear. The other sign said there would be absolutely
no
personalizations, and there was a three book limit. Both rules would be strictly enforced.

 
Ignoring complaints from two Nighthaunts and a Graviton, I pushed through the line and into the store’s stock room, dragging Victoria along with me.

There he sat, flanked by two goons, signing endless stacks of his book.

The store manager tried to stop me, but I blew past her. I released Victoria as the first goon took a step toward me, then tossed the book onto the desk. “You’ll want to personalize that one.”

Doctor Sinisterion, so slender, with an oversized head, hawk’s-beak nose, and piercing black eyes, stopped the book’s slide with a hand. “Will I?”

“Yeah, you will.” The goon stopped my forward progress with a hand to my chest. “Make it out to Victoria. Your granddaughter.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Sinisterion didn’t bother to look up. “Carl, do you know how many bones there are in the human wrist?”

The goon shook his head.

“There are eight.” He signed the book slowly. “If you persist in restraining my son, you will have sixteen.”

Carl stepped back stiff-legged and rocked from foot to foot like an unbalanced ceramic figure. He did look a little like a Toby Jug–big head, bigger girth, and just as empty.

Sinisterion closed the book and held it out for Victoria. “You’ll want to take this, child, and run along home. Ah, do not protest that you are not a child. This merely proves you
are
.”

She took the tome and hesitated, but Sinisterion was done with her. He looked at me. “I had such high hopes for you as a son, but you were a disappointment.”

Victoria snorted. “He’s no great shakes as a father, either.”

Sinisterion’s eyes tightened, then he nodded once, curtly. “Very well, child, you may remain, but you will speak only when spoken to.”

I smiled. “Given what I had to learn from, not having me around as a dad wasn’t that bad, was it?”

The snap of my father’s fingers forestalled a reply. “Anthony, you shall remain here in the back. Carl, take your position by the table. And you, my son, shall attend me.”

Victoria almost spoke, but caught herself.

Sinisterion smiled. “And you, child, shall await us in the coffee shop.”

The manager led us to the table. Cameras flashed and people applauded. Those dressed as his nemeses applauded the loudest and one woman, an ample lass who had squeezed herself into an Astounding Cat-girl costume, fainted.

My father had charisma, no doubt about that. Despite the warning about no personalizations, he chatted with people and added things to the signatures. He played coy about his book, calling it a ‘thought experiment,’ which his fans took with a wink and a nod. He complimented some on their costumes, and told others brief anecdotes which were neither in the book, nor true; but delighted them nonetheless.

If I Was a Supervillain
sold briskly, with one of the Nighthaunts coming back through the line three times, his arms heavily laden. The book covered grand criminal conspiracies, presenting case studies from the perspective of a criminal mastermind,
if
he was such. The anonymous authors of capers that had his fingerprints all over them were singled out for unstinting praise. Others were showed to have been incredibly lucky. Security companies were likely buying the book by the case to study for loopholes to close in their operations.

And several of them would doubtless hire Sinisterion as a consultant. In fact, the same online source that had told me of the signing noted that while I was dancing in the Emerald Room, Sinisterion had been the keynote speaker at the Czars of Capital City annual banquet. The mayor, as it turned out, had actually introduced him.

The manager wanted to cap the line at the end of the first hour, but my father insisted he would sign everything. Given his contempt for the common man, I should have been surprised. I wasn’t.

I was bored. He knew it. He took steps to guarantee I would remain so.

Which meant I had to escalate. And I did.

The next person in line had a uTiliPod. “Here now, wouldn’t you like to have a picture with Dr. Sinisterion?”

“Well, gosh, sure…” The guy had poured himself into a Graviton outfit. He had two less teeth than Grant had fingers. He handed me the uTiliPod then hugged up on my father and smiled broadly.

My father did not smile. In fact, his expression was, well, not easy to describe. If the husky Graviton looked at the picture before going to bed, it would be a sleepless night.

As much as my father loathed the touching–after all, Castigan’s reluctance to shake hands had come from somewhere–his allowing it drove Carl nuts. I almost sent someone to fetch Victoria so she could tranquilize him. My father noticed Carl’s agitation and dispatched him. In the old days, by dispatched I would have meant killed, but now he just had Anthony replace him.

And then, after detailing Anthony to help Nighthaunt haul his multiple bags of books to the CRAWL, my father ended the ordeal. He thanked the manager, signing a book for her, and commanded Carl to watch from afar. I think that was less because he wanted to send Carl away, than I suggested Carl should join us for ginormous Pacify tea to calm his nerves.

My father, when he wanted to, could look positively regal. Tall and slender, he wore his white hair combed back into a widow’s peak, emphasizing his head’s size. Once upon a time it had made him look imposingly intelligent. While he didn’t look like an idiot now, his body was showing its age. I wondered how he could keep his head erect on that slender neck.

We got our drinks and joined Victoria. She closed the book and, again, started to ask a question, but stopped. I’m not exactly sure why–she didn’t seem overawed by him.

He regarded me. “So they decided they were done with you.”

“Probably because they were done with you.”

Victoria raised a hand. “Can I get closed captioning on this conversation?”

Sinisterion leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. “You will find, child, that you learn nothing with your mouth open. Ears and eyes, on the other hand, are invaluable. Unless you are a congenital moron–and I submit that no child born of my son’s loins possibly could be–you are aware that he has been away from Capital City for a long time. I would vouchsafe he missed all your birthdays. With that knowledge to contextualize what we have said, our meaning should be abundantly clear.”

I rubbed at a temple. “That’s his way of saying that some of his enemies decided I could be used to restrain him. Problem is, he has
lots
of enemies, and they passed me around like the bedpan in a pauper’s ward.”

My father shook his head. “What has happened to you? You were raised to be better than that. The finest schools, the finest tutors.”

“Nature versus nurture, dad, and nature won out.”

“You seek to scourge me with that, but I do not take it so.” He smiled indulgently. “Your work, through the years, was impressive. Stockholm. Mumbai. Mombassa.”

“You forgot Lhasa.”

“No. I didn’t like it. Pathetic.”

Victoria flipped to a chapter titled
Tibetan Turmoil.
She looked at me, a question in her eyes.

My father laughed. “Yes, child, that was your father’s work. Not the making of the plan, but its execution. Had I been on the other side, the results would have been significantly different.”

“Keep telling yourself that.” I sipped my coffee. “After you wrote the book, they had no use for me. You must have cut some hell of a deal.”

He shrugged. “I would have preferred a larger advance, but the royalty is substantial and I retained foreign, audio, film, game and electronic rights.”

“You know what I meant.”

“If I were the man they painted me to be, I might have amassed, down through the years, a legion of files on a variety of figures–much like the files J. Edgar Hoover once possessed. In fact, his files
might
have been the foundation of my collection. Certain figures might have realized that as damaging as the evidence they had manufactured against me might be; salacious revelations would hurt them even more. Most all of us have secrets we don’t want revealed.”

He glanced at Victoria. “Do you know of your father’s early career?”

She slowly shook her head.

“Let me tell you how he broke my heart. The finest schools. The greatest opportunities. I had the means to provide him anything he desired. I shaped a path for him, a path along which he could grow and attain greatness.” My father paused for the sake of drama and looked into the depths of his cup. “He could have had anything, achieved any height. Everything they attribute to me would have been but a fraction of what he could have accomplished. And yet he chose to break my heart.”

“You don’t have a heart.”

“You see how cruel he is?”

Victoria smiled, warming to Sinisterion. Natural allies.

“I’d shaped him, you see, to be everything I could not.”

I held a hand up. “Let’s cut the bullshit right here, shall we? You shaped me to be a suicide-bomb aimed right at your arch-nemesis.”

Victoria blinked. “He sent you after Nighthaunt?”

My father snorted. “A coward who hides in shadows? Hardly.”

“Remember, the only time he saw the inside of a prison was when Puma put him away.”

I don’t think Victoria noticed the venomous expression that flickered over my father’s face. That was good. She needed her sleep.

I sighed. “He sent me out to commit a string of heists. He didn’t tell me why, but demanded blind loyalty. I hit a series of socialites’ houses. Then, on my seventh outing, he tipped Puma. He knew Puma well, knew how he operated, and knew I could kill him.”

I looked at him. “And I might have, but you didn’t trust me.”

“You justified my lack of faith.”

“Rationalization after the fact.”

Victoria grabbed my hand. “What happened?”

“Puma caught up with me. We fought. Real knock-down, drag-out stuff. Cage match without the cage. We were going at it pretty solidly, when a dozen other guys showed up. Think Carl, but with big guns. And bigger dreams about reaping the price your grandfather slapped on us both.”

She stared at my father. “You put a bounty on your own son’s head?”

“A pragmatic choice, child. If my men arrived and Puma was dead, my son would have been a success and doubtless would have slain them. If he hadn’t finished Puma or, worse, if Puma defeated him, the boy would have been inferior and deserved to die.”

“Dad always had a rather robust zero-tolerance policy for failure.”

Sinisterion held a finger up. “
If
I oversaw a criminal organization, such a policy would have kept it sharp.”

I looked at him and chuckled. “Sure, play the game. They turned their guns on us. Puma and I had to team up to eliminate them. We did, then Puma suggested we go have a beer and a slice. We talked. He made some things abundantly clear and told me…” My voice failed.

Victoria squeezed my hand. “He told you to ‘be good.’”

I nodded.

My father applauded mockingly. “A mawkish end to a mundane tale of mediocrity snatched from the jaws of immortality. Would you like to know, young lady, the most galling part of it all?”

“Sure.”

“Puma, may he rest in torment, had the temerity to write me a note. A
thank you
note! In it he expressed his gratitude to me for sharing my son with the world. He praised your father and said he would be a fine and upstanding citizen, a real credit to the community and even the world. Can you imagine? The ignominy!”

She tapped the book. “I didn’t read anything about that in here.”

“One must save some material for a sequel.”

My eyes became slits. “That going to include how you set up Puma’s death at the Hall of Fame?”

“Oh, bravo, bold gambit, take me by surprise like that.” Sinisterion swirled the coffee in his cup. “Ask yourself why I would care about Nighthaunt’s toadie. He was beneath notice. The Hall operation had audacity going for it, but little else–though the China Dolls have promise. If you think, however, I was behind it, this is because you have overlooked the focus of that operation.”

Victoria frowned. “Humiliate Redhawk.”

“Merely a side benefit, child. Panda-moanium wanted to kill that actor, Ramoso. While his execrable performance as
Gravilad
might have justified his death, had I wanted him dead, there are a hundred other ways I could have guaranteed it. As for Puma, if I wanted him dead, I’d have killed him years go.”

“You’d have had to find him first.”