Sidekicked (27 page)

“This place is a dump,” she says.

I can't disagree. Thirty-seven fifty-six East Fifty-fourth is an ancient apartment building. Its red brick is cracked, and a third of its black shingles are ripped or missing. The grass is cut short, and the paint on the trim is peeling through all three layers, exposing the wood at its core. One block down is what appears to be a rundown park with rusted swings. Still, this is the address.
I have something for you
. The row of mailboxes in the hall shows five vacancies and only one occupant.

J. Rediford.

I head for the stairs when Jenna's hand stops me.

“It could be a trap, you know,” she says.

“Why do you think I brought you?” I tell her.

The door to the second-story apartment only tells us it is apartment 2–B. No gold R or “Lord Bless Our Home.” No doormat that says
SUPERHEROES WELCOME
. No fancy fingertip-scanning entry device. Just a brass knocker, which I hit three times. Through the door I can hear the shuffle of feet. Then an old man's voice that tells us to go the hell away.

I look at Jenna. She shrugs.

“My name is Andrew Bean,” I say. “I called earlier and left a message.”

There is a pause. “You said you had something for me,” I add, then wait again, listening close. I can hear breathing on the other side of the door. Jenna points to her foot as if offering to kick it, but then it opens a crack and a man with more hair in his ears than on his head peers through.

He is wearing thick glasses that make his eyes look luminous and large, and his shaggy eyebrows are pressed close together, almost connected. He is dressed in an old gray turtlenecck sweater and baggy brown pants that barely reach his argyle socks. His feet are tucked into slippers made to look like frogs. One of the frogs' eyes is missing. The guy's face looks familiar to me, but I can't place it.

He looks at me, then at Jenna, then back at me.

“Andrew Bean?”

I nod twice. His eyes narrow, and he presses his face farther through the crack in the door. He looks down the hall, down the stairs, then back at me. “Prove it,” he says.

I guess I should have expected this. I reach for my back pocket, for my wallet that has my school ID in it.

“I don't need to see a picture of you. I can see you standin' right there. I said, ‘prove it.'”

Then I realize what he's asking.

I close my eyes and take a whiff. My heart skips.

He's here
. The Titan is here. In the back room. I can smell him. Which means this crotchety old man, whoever he is, is an ally or at least someone the Titan trusts.

“Come on, son, show me what you've got,” the old man says.

I take another whiff. “All right. You had a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast, followed by a glass of iced tea. You use lemon-scented soap when you wash your dishes and you've got a fondness for pickles. Also you have an irregular heartbeat and a little indigestion this afternoon.”

The old man looks down at his stomach, then grunts.

“That's all you've got?” he says.

I smile. “And one more thing. There's a man sleeping in your back bedroom. His name is George Weiss, though you and I know him better as somebody else.”

Jim Rediford shakes his head. Then he nods at Jenna. “And who's she?”

“She's with me,” I say. “She's . . . another friend.”

Jenna and the old man contemplate each other. If he's the least bit intimidated by her, he doesn't show it.

“You were told to come alone,” he says at last. “You don't listen very well.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot,” I say. For a moment I think he's not going to let us in and I'll have to let Jenna have her way with the door. Then Jim Rediford says, “Hrumph,” and steps aside.

“Welcome,” he says, “to my secret lair.”

It isn't much to look at. A two-bedroom apartment, neat but sparsely decorated. An old, boxy television sits silent in one corner of a living room. A bookshelf holds several torn mystery novels and a couple of bent-boxed board games: battleship and backgammon—the kind only playable by two. The sink is full of coffee mugs. A small circular table sits in the corner. There are no posters of superheroes on the wall.

As Jenna and I enter, Red closes and locks the door behind us. Force of habit.

“You're a little taller than I thought you'd be,” he says. “From how George described you, I thought maybe you were a midget.”

I'm not sure what to say to that, so instead I turn and look down the hall to the last door on the right. I can hear the Titan breathing, slowly and steadily. “He sent me a message,” I say. “Said he had something for me.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Jim Rediford shake his head. “He didn't send you that message,” he says. “I did.”

I turn back around to get a good look at the old man, trying to gauge just how much he knows. About the Titan, about me, about what's going on.

Jim Rediford points to the empty chairs at the table. I sit, but Jenna starts pacing, moving through the living room as if making a mental picture of the place. Finally she stops and hovers over a glass case with an antique-looking pistol inside. The old man watches her through his thick glasses.

“It was my granddaddy's,” Red says, taking a seat across from me. “Smith and Wesson, 1902, one of the first hand ejector models they ever produced, before John Browning came along and put revolvers outa style. Never fired it myself. Darned thing blew up in Granddaddy's face and took two of his fingers with it. It's just for lookin' at now.”

“You know a lot about guns too,” Jenna says, and the old man gets a funny look on his face.

And then it hits me: where I've seen him before. How Mr. Masters knew him. How he knew how to send me a message. Why he called this ramshackle hole in the wall his secret headquarters.

And why, of all the people in the world, it was him the Titan trusted.

I saw his face just this afternoon, in fact, on the front page of a six-year-old newspaper.

“Kid Caliber,” I whisper. Behind me, I hear Jenna's heart race for a moment, then calm again.

The old man rubs the stubble of his chin. “Maybe once,” he says. “I'm just Red now. Kid Caliber's been gone awhile, and he ain't comin' back.” The man sitting across from me, with his wisps of hair and his sagging cheeks, looks twenty years older than the picture in the paper, not six.

“But you
are
him,” I say. “I mean, you were.”

Red points to the glasses on his face. “Son, Kid Caliber was the sharpest shot with any firearm this side of the Milky Way. He could hit the backside of a bumblebee from forty yards out in the middle of a hailstorm. He was a tried-and-true member of the Legion of Justice and a menace to villains everywhere. That ain't me.” He points to the thick Coke-bottle bottoms pinching his nose. “I'm 'fraid I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a bazooka if I was sittin' right beside it.”

Jenna comes and takes the chair opposite me, both of us flanking the former Super, whose right hand shakes as he lifts his cup of coffee.

“How have you managed to stay hidden all this time? Everyone thought you had vanished,” she says.

“Or died,” I add.

Red laughs. “Not dead. Not yet, anyway. And it's easy to stay hidden when nobody's looking for ya.”

“We found you,” Jenna says.

“Only because I wanted you to,” the former Super and member of the Legion of Justice says. “Or wanted him to, at least,” he says, pointing a crooked thumb at me. “Just because the TV's broke don't mean I don't know what's going on. I know why you called. And what you're hopin' to do by showin' up here. But I also know it's not gonna work. Which is what I wanted to tell you.”

“Tell me?”

“Tell you why. Why you won't convince him to join you. Why he ain't there when you need him. Why you're better off just lettin' him go.”

Red takes off his glasses and sets them on the table, and I can see him for who he was. He still looks nothing like his collector's card, but I can at least picture him in the pose, guns drawn, one eyebrow cocked, daring crooks to make a move. “Back when they could still find me, people'd ask me why he did it. Why the most powerful Super and leader of the Legion hung up his tights after takin' down one of the most notorious criminals around. And I'd always tell 'em it was complicated, but that was a lie. Nothin' in the Code about lying, you know, and it wasn't my secret to spill. But you got a right to know, if only so that you'll finally give up and leave him be. The reason he quit's simple enough. He quit 'cause he killed her.”

I look over at Jenna, but she's actually staring out the window, as if waiting for something. Or someone . . .

“Killed her? Killed who?”

“Who do you think?” Jim Rediford, aka Kid Caliber, says with a snort. “The Jack of Hearts herself. The Dealer's very own daughter.”

“S
he wasn't much older than you, two, I guess. Taller, maybe, a little skinnier. Blond hair cut short. Like her father, she always wore a mask that covered everything but her eyes. None of us knew, not till the end. Even the other Jacks didn't know. It was the Dealer's best-kept secret—the card he never played. We didn't even know the Jack of Hearts was a she till the mask came off, and only a handful of people know that. All the papers, the books, the stories, they all got it wrong, assumed she was just another one of the Dealer's hired goons. Never guessed it was his own flesh and blood.

“You're about to call me a liar, of course. Surely we woulda noticed somethin'. But when you're dodgin' a sword determined to separate your noodle from your neck, you don't worry so much about who's swingin' it. We only knew that she was powerful. Probably more powerful than the three other Jacks combined. When it was all over, when they were all captured, then we'd be able to take off the masks and get her whole life story.

“But we never got the chance. We tracked the Suits all the way back to their hideout, a little compound on some god-forsaken island in the middle of nowhere. No caverns or craters or volcanoes or anything, just a couple of square steel buildings tucked away in the middle of some mosquito-infested jungle. It was an even fight, five on five, but somewhere along the line we got split up. Corefire, Venus, and Mantis took on three of the Jacks, while the Titan and I chased the Jack of Hearts and the Dealer into a laboratory of some kind. He had been hard at work on somethin', you could tell. Rows of computers and two or three huge tubes, like glass coffins sittin' upright, all connected with cables like a scene straight outa Frankenstein.

“So we barge in blazin', the Titan crushin' everything in his path and me blastin' away with both barrels. The Suits had slipped through our fingers on a half dozen occasions before, the Dealer always one step ahead. But not this time. This time we knew we had him cornered. We get inside and see him workin' the controls of some machine. Lights are blinkin' red, there's a hum of electricity, there's smoke comin' out of pipes. I'm thinkin' maybe I shot somethin' I wasn't s'pposed to and figure the whole place is about to come apart. The Titan sees the Dealer and goes to grab him when the Jack of Hearts jumps us from behind.

“I didn't even see her comin'. That's how good she was. She sneaks in behind me, and next thing I know I'm on the ground, both my legs crushed, my guns out of reach. I tried to crawl after 'em, but it was everything I could do just to keep from blackin' out. Then it's just her and the Titan, head-to-head, smashin' everything around them, calling down the thunder and lightning. Fists flying, glass shattering, the whole room electrified. The Titan's in his prime, mind, yet the Jack of Hearts keeps step with him, blow for blow, almost like they're dancin'. And for a moment, I think maybe he's met his match.

“Then it happens. I didn't see it, only caught the look on the Dealer's face when she hit the ground. Just dropped like a sack of flour, falling outa the Titan's hands.

“When the Dealer saw her fall, he let out the kinda cry that squeezes your gut so hard you can't breathe, and he crawls over to her on hands and knees and rips her mask off, and we both see what she is at last, just a girl. A teenage girl. And the Titan's lookin' at her and at his own giant hands and he don't even care that the Dealer himself—the man he's been chasin' for years—is kneelin' right there in front of him. We've won. But the Dealer looks up, his eyes burning through that gray mask of his, and tells the Titan he killed her, killed his only daughter.

“And then the alarms start blaring and some voice from the computer says something about a power overload. The room shakes, and fires pop up all around us. And the Titan finally snaps outa it and says it's time to go. But the Dealer just drags his daughter by the shoulders to one of them giant glass tubes and places her inside, like Snow White. And I'm yellin' that we probably got less than a minute left to get out, but the Titan's just standing there watchin' his nemesis laying this dead girl in that glass coffin, kissin' her once before sealin' it tight.

“The next thing I know, the whole room is full of smoke and the Titan's liftin' me up and throwin' me over his shoulder and we're runnin' through that place as it's comin' down on top of us. And I look back to see the Dealer standing in front of his daughter as the ceiling collapses around him. That was the last I ever seen of him. Of either of them.”

Red finishes the last of his coffee and puts his glasses back on. “We barely make it out to find the rest of the Legion waiting for us, the other three Jacks captured. One of 'em, Mantis, I think, he looks at the Titan and asks him what happened, where the Dealer is and the Jack of Hearts, but all he says is ‘I did it' over and over again. ‘I did it.'”