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I shake his hand. “That’s what I’m here for,” I say, hoping he doesn’t hear the resentment in my voice. Together, we drop to our knees and peer through the small rectangle window at the bottom of the house which looks into the basement.
Officer Plummer squints to see through the dingy window. “That’s…”
“Different,” I say at the same time he finishes his sentence with,
“Not what I expected.”
Twelve men hang out in the basement of this home. A few of them watch sports on a flat screen television. Another guy is perched on a folding chair, looking intently at a laptop. The rest of them are filling glass vials with silvery liquid from a metal fifty gallon drum.
I turn to the man next to me. “How many handcuffs do you have?”
“Enough.” He unsnaps a leather strap on his utility belt and hands me a set of plastic zip-tie looking things in the shape of two circles. They’re disposable handcuffs. Humans can be clever sometimes. I slip them onto my wrist like a set of bangles.
As long as these men haven’t taken the drug themselves, and it doesn’t look like it since most dealers are in it strictly for the money, taking down twelve humans should be a piece of cake. I’ll just have to remember that humans are fragile creatures and I can’t slam them around, ragdoll style like I would do to a villain. You know, if I actually got to work with villains.
I stare at Officer Plummer. “You’re wearing a bulletproof vest and all that, right?”
He nods. “Great.” I slap my hands together and rise to my feet. “Let’s do this.”
It only takes a light kick to bring down the front door. As suspected, the house is empty. The men in the basement are just squatters, rodents who need to be exterminated. It might be an intelligent Hero move to approach the door that leads to the basement, quietly twist the door knob and silently sneak down to catch the humans off guard. But I’m not quiet and sneaky like Nyx and making a polite entrance has never been my thing.
The wooden door splits into pieces as my boot kicks a butt load of power into it. I swoop down the stairs in a blur of movement and wrap my cold fingers around the neck of the human closest to me. Shock, surprise and fear flicker across the faces of the men in the room, some of which I realize are only teenagers. “Hands in the air,” I yell, letting my superhuman voice roar loud enough to come dangerously close to busting their ear drums. “I am Hero Maci Might,” I call out, winking toward my human partner who appears at the bottom of the stairs. “And this little party you have here is illegal.”
No one fights back. No one says a word.
Officer Plummer and I handcuff every last human and line them up on one end of the room while we wait for backup officers to arrive. He collects identification from everyone and writes down some kind of human cop stuff in his notepad.
The ringleader rotates his neck, grimacing at the bruised skin where I might have squeezed him a little too hard. He’s a short man in his thirties with a Mohawk of blue hair and a body decorated in colorful tattoos. He leans against the wall, face in a permanent scowl. A few of the younger guys are crying, stumbling through sobs as they try to answer the officer’s questions.
I stand in front of the tattooed guy and bend forward, getting eye level with him. He looks toward the floor. I put one finger under his stubbly chin and lift his face back up. “Where did you get such a large amount of this drug?” I ask.
He rolls his eyes.
With my right index finger still propping up his chin, I look at the BEEPR on my other wrist. “Answer or you’ll regret it.” My eyes scan across the screen. It just shows me the time and that I have no new messages, but he doesn’t know that. In fact, humans can’t read the BEEPR screen at all. The pixels look distorted to their eyes.
“You can’t do anything to me.” The muscles in his neck loosen as he stops struggling to look away from me. He meets my eyes. “You’re a Super. You won’t hurt me.”
“You don’t want to know what I’ll do to you,” I whisper, my voice menacing. A look of pain flashes across his features but I’m not hurting him. I’m barely touching him. The pain he feels comes from somewhere inside himself.
He shakes his head. “With all due respect to you Miss Hero, I’m not telling you anything. Because I know you won’t hurt me. And they will. They’ll hurt me. They’ll hurt my family.”
The guy standing next to him, who until now had his head tilted back against the wall, looking up at the ceiling and muttering what sounded like prayers under his breath, turns to look at us. “He’s right. He can’t tell you.” His head shakes furiously and his expression turns dark as well. “They’ll hurt us, Maci Might. They’ll hurt all of us.”
Officer Plummer puts a hand on my shoulder. “Backup is on the way. I think we can handle it from here. I really appreciate your help, Miss Might.”
“I think I’d like to stay and help with the interrogation. Central is interested in the source of the pow-uh, the drug.”
He nods. “Okay then. I certainly won’t tell you what to do.”
I smile. These guys might not want to talk now, but we’ll see how they react to a little one on one interrogation by a Hero. Maybe I’ll get the information I need and then I won’t have to follow through with my earlier plan. The dangerous plan.
Maybe this way will work out better.
For an elusive moment, I swear I can feel Pepper’s spirit watching over me. And I know he’s proud of me for finding another way to get what I want.
In the seconds that follow, I’m too occupied with thinking of my deceased friend to pay attention to the sound of plastic zip ties snapping in half. But the sound of broken glass and the blur of movement from the corner of the room brings me back to attention in the blink of an eye. Two men must have snuck a vial of the power while we were talking to the leader. Now their eyes pulse, bloodshot red, and a layer of sweat coats their skin. One of them points to me. “If you leave now, I’ll let you go.”
“Ha!” My bark of laughter startles him. In a flash of speed, I slam the table full of powered vials toward the other end of the room, putting distance between it and the other humans that are still standing against the wall. “SIT!” I bellow, sparing just a split second to glare at the humans, who all comply by dropping to the floor, hands still cuffed behind their back. My attention turns back to the rogue humans who are temporarily as strong as I am.
