Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story (4 page)

“No, silly,” Nancy smiles, running her finger down his arm a second time, “I want you to give him the interview because he’s my boyfriend.”

Turning in the aftermath of one last smile, Nancy walks away and doesn’t look back. Kid watches her go, knowing he should never have sex with her and knowing he was inevitably going to have sex with her.

4

In the old days of seven weeks ago, Jason would simply walk down to the basement and fire up one of Francis’ state of the art computers and rifle through secret government data to check out Nancy Cathall. But this was a “New Chapter in Jason’s Life,” so he sits in the public library and relies on Yahoo, HotBot, Lycos, Google, MSN Search, and AskJeeves to paint a picture of her.

There isn’t much.

She was going to be a junior. She was a local. She looked fantastic in a bikini. She was photographed at a club with Leonardo DiCaprio after the Miss Teen Nevada beauty pageant last fall. She was a member of a sorority. She’d written a series of articles for the college paper talking to out-of-state freshman about the culture shock of coming to Vegas that he printed out to read later.

There was more information about the people around her: Her father owned Cathall Construction, a successful builder of apartment complexes around southern Nevada. Donated large sums of money to the Mormon church in the name of his dead wife and Nancy’s dead mother. Her boyfriend was a back-up third baseman on the baseball team with a DUI arrest and a bad shoulder.

When he’s seen every picture of her the internet has to offer, he checks the clock on the wall and instantly forgets it. He shuts off the computer to clear his browsing information, and rises to his feet, yawning and stretching. He looks at the clock again: 6:42. Good, there is time to get dinner, shower, and take a short nap before he hits the city for his nightly patrol.

“Don’t forget these,” a young woman’s voice says.

Jason turns to see a cute, bespectacled librarian approaching him with the printouts of Nancy’s stories. “Thanks,” he says, taking them from her.

“You should be careful,” she confides in him. “We can see what you search on the internet. My boss sent me out here to check on you to make sure you weren’t some kind of pervert.”

“Um … thanks,” he says, looking at her name tag, “Becca. I was just …”

“Relax,” she grinned, giving him a wink. “You weren’t masturbating, so you’re okay.”

“Do people do that?”

“At least twice a week.”

Jason looks down at his seat and frowns. “You clean the chairs, right? I mean, not you, but someone cleans the chairs, right?”

Becca smiles. She has short brown hair and a pleasant smile, and Jason guesses she is a shade closer to 30 than 20. Her outfit of a gray skirt and white blouse marks her as a professional, and Jason decides Becca might prove useful. Heroes didn’t just cultivate relationships with reporters, after all, and in a town where few people seem serious, this is a woman who clearly has her stuff together.

Also, she’s the second woman he’s met in the past two hours with breasts so fantastic she looked like she literally stepped out of an Image comic.

“Now that we’ve established I’m not a pervert,” he asks, pouring on Kid Rapscallion
’
s charm and not reeling it back in, “do you want to get some dinner with me? Or is there some rule against librarians dating their clients?”

Becca laughs, but shakes her head. “I’m sorry, but a man has to do more than not jerk off in a library to win me over.”

Jason tries a different approach. Holding up the printouts of Nancy’s articles, he confides, “I’m new to Vegas. I was just looking for a way to get a foothold here.”

“And you got that from looking at pictures of Miss Cathall in her bikini?”

“No,” Jason says smoothly, “I was looking at pictures of her in a bikini because she’s hot and I’m a guy and I’m 18 and I get distracted easily and I don’t have the internet in my apartment, yet.”

It was Becca’s turn to look Jason up and down and saw that he had the body of a man more than a kid. “Are you an athlete?” she asks. “Baseball player at the university, maybe? Is that why you were searching that Lazlo guy? Your competition?”

“No, no, definitely not my competition,” Jason says. “I’m … well,” he adds, scratching his head to try and look half-embarrassed by what he is going to say, “I’m kinda rich. Not, like, I’m trying to decide what yacht I want to buy, but rich enough that I can live wherever I want and goof off most of the day.”

“So you spend it playing professional poker?”

Jason laughs at the cover identity Francis had helped him create in an attempt to stay in the young man’s good graces. “I see I wasn’t the only one stalking someone on the internet.”

Becca winked. “And unlike you, Mr. Kitmore, I have an office.” She licks her lips. “Want to see it?”

5

Blouse unbuttoned. Skirt hiked up. Bra and panties on the floor. Her back arched, her breasts pressing against her wooden desk, and his hands on her shoulders, his thumbs pressing into the base of her neck. Becca pulls him in and urges him on.

She smiles at her reflection in the mirror to her right.

6

He doesn’t hold back.

It is the first time in ages someone has wanted to sleep with Jason Kitmore and not Kid Rapscallion, and he finds this more exhilarating that he could have imagined. After trysts on space stations, with an alien princess, with Clockmaker Algebra in the White House in 1961, there was something decidedly erotic about doing it in some regular woman’s office at a library.

He remembers things he wanted to do with Belle, things he did do with Jula, and wishes he could remember more about the time he’d spent two weeks ago at the Revolutionaries’ headquarters on the moon with Duplication Girl.

He thinks of Frank and how he always told Jason not to have sex with people he didn’t know and trust.

He thinks about Nancy Cathall and what she really wants from him.

He thinks of Mrs. Overing, his high school math teacher.

He thinks of Frank’s wife and shakes his head to clear her face from his memory.

Almost absently, he thinks of Becca, who seems content to stick her ass back and let him do whatever he wants.

7

“Jason? Are you in? It’s Francis. Could you please call me when you get the chance? Don't worry, this isn’t me asking you to come back. You’ve made your decision and I respect that. I don’t agree with … sorry, that’s not what this is about. This is about a girl. I think I want my next sidekick to be a girl. Maybe then people won’t spread rumors about … well, you know how the press is.”

8

“Why me?” Lazlo Becker asks as Kid Rapscallion walks across the roof of a casino parking garage to talk to him.

“Why not?” Kid replies, shrugging. It’s night but it’s still the summer, and Jason is discovering he doesn’t like the temperature regularly being on the big side of 100 degrees. He wonders why none of the superhero scientists have ever offered to sell Las Vegas a dome that would keep things cool. “That Kira girl keeps asking me. She calls the hotline — this part is off the record right now, understand? — calls my hotline five times a day asking for an interview, pitching new ideas. She wants to talk about my childhood or how I see myself as a role model or what life is like as Rapscallion’s sidekick. Finally, last night, she tells me there’s this gambling pool and if she wins she’ll donate all $300 to charity even though she’s a broke college kid who could really use the 300 bucks.”

“She’s a bitch.”

“Yeah, well, it takes all kinds, and my guess is you’re her least favorite person in class, so I figured I’d talk to you to piss her off.”

“Nice.”

“Yes, well —”

“I thought maybe you wanted to talk to me because you’re a fucking faggot or something and heard I had a big dick. The internet says you and Raps—”

Kid sighs and rubs his temples. “No, Lazlo,” he says, deciding right then he was going to have sex with Nancy Cathall as soon as possible, “I am not a ‘fucking faggot.’ Bit of an asshole, yeah, but I am definitely not a ‘fucking faggot or something.’ Now, do you want to do this interview, or not?”

9

THE DAILY REBEL

KID RAPSCALLION: “I AM DEFINITELY NOT A F*CKING FAGGOT”

Exclusive Interview by Lazlo Becker

10

“No one wants to hear me blame the media,” Kid Rapscallion says from behind a podium in a nondescript conference room. On his left are leaders from UNLV’s LGBT Council, and to his left are from Las Vegas’ Rainbow Coalition. “I understand this, and I fully accept whatever scorn the public wants to place on me. It is important to note, however, and I have made this case to both the LGBT Council, the Rainbow Coalition, the Mayor, and other civic leaders, that I was using the language Mr. Becker used to present the question, and that my response was done in such a manner that anyone who overheard our conversation would understand my distaste for that choice of words. I request, again, that Mr. Becker release the full audio tape of our conversation and not just that one phrase, taken out of context. Further, the insinuation in Mr. Becker’s question that there must be a sexual component to my relationship with Rapscallion is, as I have stated hundreds of times, preposterous. Twenty, thirty years ago, people wanted to believe the best about their heroes, and now they want to believe the worst. It’s a sickness. Rapscallion is a good man. I want to apologize again, to LGBT people everywhere, and to announce that I have agreed to star in a campaign organized by UNLV’s LGBT Council to help spread the message of tolerance and acceptance. Thank you. There will be no questions.”

11

“What’s the matter, stud?” an annoyed Rebecca Rokers asks, wrapping her arms around Jason’s neck and pulling him into a short kiss. “You seem distracted.”

“Long day,” he says, putting his hands on her either side of her on her desk.

“I didn’t know there were any poker tournaments going on today,” she says, reaching over to drum her fingers on her laptop.

“There’s poker tournaments every day,” he sighs, pulling out of her to sit on her chair. He looks up at the half-naked librarian and wonders if, three rounds in, he’s already bored with her. The whole thing with Lazlo has him on edge. He can’t believe he was taken down like some dumb rookie. If he was still with Francis, this would be where the old man would step in, put his arm around Jason’s shoulders, and give him a life lesson. Not to mention produce his copy of the conversation which he’d secretly recorded and they could use for his benefit.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, poker stuff. I was in a private game,” he starts to explain as she hops down from her desk and moves to a small safe tucked in the wall behind a painting of the Vegas skyline at night, “and … well, I wasn’t getting the cards I needed and couldn’t make anything happen. What are you doing?”

Becca opens the safe and turns around with two vials of cocaine. “Let’s spice things up,” she says, and tosses one of the vials to him. “And don’t tell me you don’t do it,” she adds. “You were arrested for possession last year in San Francisco.”

Jason stares at the vial and asks, “That was sealed. I was a minor.”

“It is sealed,” she says, hopping back onto her desk and spreading her legs. “Now, make me hot or I’ll find someone else.” She takes the vial of powder from him and empties it onto her right leg. “Understand?”

When he hesitates, caught between what he wants and what he’s worried about the public finding out, Becca smiles wickedly at him. “You want to know if you can trust me,” she winks.

“Um …”

Reaching to her left, careful not to spill the cocaine off her leg, Becca opens her laptop and shows Jason a page of the
Las Vegas Gazette
’s website.

UNLV BASEBALL PLAYER ARRESTED FOR DOMESTIC ASSAULT

“What?” Jason asks, sitting up to take the laptop from her. “Is this …?”

“It is,” Becca says, unscrewing the cap from the other vial of cocaine. “I did some digging, and it turns out Lazlo has had charges brought against him from multiple women, so I connected all the dots and sent the file to the same reporter I fed information to when I took down the Five of Clubs.”

“Jesus.”

“Never did cocaine,” she says, reaching a finger out to draw his eyes away from the laptop and back to her womanhood, “but you do. Snort it.”

Jason’s mind is racing. The only reason she would feed a reporter info about Lazlo was if she knew he was really Kid Rapscallion. The question he asked and could not answer was if this revelation made Becca more or less dangerous to him.

“The Five of Clubs was my uncle,” she explains, a flicker of hurt in her eyes, “and he … well, there were crimes he committed that the public was willing to believe, and crimes he committed that he never did. I helped him with the former and wouldn’t stand for the latter. I can help you,” she says. “I want in.”

“If I say no …”

“Jesus,” she says, leaning back. She snorts the coke from her vial and then tosses it aside. When it hits the wall and then falls silently to the carpet, Jason is momentarily reminded that he’s in the library. The sounds of Becca continuing to snort her nose, trying to get every last drop of powder into her system brings him back into focus. “I thought you were one of the fun heroes,” she says. “If I wanted to sell you out, I would have. I’ve known Jason Kitmore was Kid Rapscallion since the day after some kid wearing Rapscallion’s costume beat up some high school kids on Halloween night, 1998.”