by Pierre Anton Taylor

Charlotte Taste was an enigma. She and her brother, Larry, were among the wealthiest siblings, barring royalty, in the world. Her wealth was old while Wayne was a second generation captain of industry, part time daredevil and rock climber, and himself an enigma. They’d been attracted to each other, he, not all that personable or outgoing as the old man, always on the sell, and she, just the opposite, impulsive, ready to jump at any opportunity, of which he was one, dark, brooding, masculine. She did not share his interest in high risk sports. Her high adventures were mostly cerebral. And she ran with a jet-setting Euro-trash crowd of minor aristocrats always on the lookout for new thrills and new playgrounds. Yet they gelled as a complimentary couple, as that was how they were depicted on the society page. “Post-debutante and popular hostess Lottie Taste seen here with young Wayne Bruce, antique car collector, world traveler, and Bruce Enterprise’s VP of Research and Development, having recently returned from a mining exploration in Mali for his daddy, Wallace “Battery Man” Bruce.”

Wayne had been all set to take his place on the board of directors and help steer Bruce Enterprise into the future. He was encouraged by Linus Pall, a member of the board, and the old man’s lawyer physician advisor. Linus was also Charlotte and Larry’s guardian and manager of their trust, having served in a similar capacity to the Tastes.

It would be easy to say they’d cooked it up, but Pall and old Dad thought that he and Charlotte should enter society as a married couple as an assurance to the stockholders that the company was in stable hands and the future of BE was in stable settled hands of someone intent on making a family. He had been struck silent by their proposition although not necessarily put off. After some good natured cajoling from his two elders, he agreed to consider the option of marriage. Pall insisted in leaking the news to the gossip column as soon as he got word he’d proposed to Charlotte.

Charlotte was coy, finding it quite funny and assuring him that she wasn’t laughing at him when he told her of the plan, but at the two old match makers so out of touch, it another fifteen years it would be the turn of the century and they were acting like some feudal lords. Yet she had agreed that it was a good idea because she felt safe when he was around.

He’d left for Mali shortly after the announcement and when he returned everything had changed.

A mottled metal service door creaked open and a dark shape exited in a shaft of light and heat before the door closed again. A flame lit the profile of a chin and nose, smoke inhaled and exhaled.

The wind coursing down the brick canyons of the deserted industrial district rattled the air vents on the roof where he was perched. Once he’d recovered from the landing and gathered his gear, he rappelled down the brick wall of the old cotton factory to the street below. The street lights had been neglected or damaged and except for the ambient light glancing off of stretched of drifted snow and plowed berms, shadows engulfed the deserted road.

He had questioned Bion about the drug operation he’d encountered in locating the drug laced Whacky Waxx. Being an ex-Marine, the black man was familiar with the particulars of reconnaissance. Besides, he’d laughed, everyone knew where the factory was or had moved to because no one can keep a secret. Some people just have to brag and word gets around.

Something else Bion related had caught his attention. The drug lab was under Joe Kerr’s protection, and whenever the narcotics squad raided a location, they always came up empty handed. The word was that Penn Quinn, the owner of the tavern directly across from the Old Battery Works, had somebody, a relative, on the police force, who always had information for sale. He acted as the middle man, the man in the know, for a cut of the action.

Wayne had been suspicious of Quinn from the beginning, a pair shaped man, bald as a seal. His tavern was a den of thieves and trouble makers from the rural lands on the outskirts of the district. He’d had Robin do a deep dive into the property and business records of Quinn’s Tavern. It had potential and he could consider purchasing it and turning it into a restaurant or diner catering to visitors at the Wallace Bruce Memorial Park and Antique Motor Car Museum, change the T  in the name to a C as in Cavern.

He’d watched from the shadows of an alleyway. A mottled metal service door creaked open and a dark shape exited in a shaft of light and heat before the door closed again. A flame lit the profile of a chin and nose, smoke inhaled and exhaled. Wayne had come across lookouts at the front of the building and a car with a motor running down the street. If they were narcs they weren’t very subtle, but likely they were just one more layer of eyes around the perimeter. The man at the front entrance had stamped his feet in the after midnight below zero cold.

According to Bion, the factory was on the third floor of the abandoned apartment building. With few exceptions all the windows were boarded over with plywood. He had tested the rough brick edifice for irregularities gaging potential for toe holds and finger grips. He was just about to begin the climb when the door opened.

He recognized J-van by the size and the profile in the flicker of flame, and if he was at the drug factory so was I-van, out of the hospital and crutches. It would double his pleasure to put them out of business. I-van’s threat to kill old Rick still echoed in his recent memory.

J-van banged on the door with his secret knock after he’d tossed the cigarette butt. Wayne had waited until the door closed behind the large man to reestablish his grip on a nub of rough brick to begin his climb up the sheer face of the building.

When he’d voiced his suspicions about the circumstances surrounding his father’s death to Detective Gordon James, the older man had listened politely. His advice was to leave these matters to the professionals. For one, they would not be invested in following a narrative that was not based on the facts of the evidence. Speculation was out of their purview. His hands were tied in reopening the investigation. Hearsay was not enough. He could have the body exhumed but that would take a court order for which there was no real evidence or it could be requested by the surviving spouse in the absence of evidence, and even them the result woold likely prove inconclusive. Wayne already knew that Trish would never agree to it.

On the climb up, a toe perched on the ledge beneath a boarded window, he was able to peer through a crack between the planks. A dim light shown at a distance but not enough to discern anything but shadows. And finally gaining the roof burdened with piles of snow and ice, he had carefully made his way across the field of pipes and vent hoods. What looked like the remnants of a rooftop garden confirmed his suspicion that the roof was accessed from the interior of the building. A puddle was visible around the base of one of the exhaust vents emitting a sour fetid heat. He assumed it was coming from the drug factory below. Cigarette butts littered the old mounds of snow and ice and the frozen impression of footprints led to a door inset into the brick chimney enclosure.

He examined the metal fire door and the frame. It was almost as old as the bricks surrounding it, and just as sturdy. There didn’t appear to be an outside handle. The door had to be opened from the inside. He tried prying along the edges and the bottom on the chance it was not secure, but it wouldn’t budge. The smokers must have propped the heavy door open when they took their rooftop break. He considered dropping over the side and gaining access by removing  boards from a window but the possibility of discovery was too great.

Wayne had come equipped for a different plan. From the small backpack that fit between his shoulder blades, he extracted a small vial of prank oil, often called skunk oil and sold in novelty shops along with poo-poo cushions and itch powder. Old Rick had a rack of such fare in a dusty corner of the candy store. He recalled the old black man complaining that the gag items never sold, that they were just there because Kerr’s sales rep made him carry them.

Also from the backpack, he recovered a spray can of insulating foam from the construction site at the old Battery Works. He unstopped the vial of noxious oil and prying one of the louvres on the ventilation hood open, reached in and poured the entire contents into the duct. He turned his attention to the exhaust vent, spraying foam into the opening, the white polyurethane billowing like a cloud of whipped cream effectively sealing the vent.

Wayne placed himself to one side of the door and waited. First he heard bumping and banging followed by shouts. He could tell by the noise that someone was trying to break open a window from the inside. Then he heard the distinct trample of feet on stairs amidst more yelling and retching when suddenly the door to the roof burst open. One person flew out the door, bent over, coughing, followed by another, almost crawling on all fours, gasping for breath, and running blindly into the first.

He slipped past them and descended into the brightly lit factory space, a filter mask over his mouth and nose. A woman, hair bound in a kerchief and wearing a dusty grey smock, was on her hands and knees, vomiting, He could understand why. Even with the specially designed nostril inserts, the smell of the skunk oil was nauseating. He wasted no time. Removing the thin cylinder of a battery operated atomizer from a pocket, he directed the spray at the powdery substance near a set of scales. The effect on the drug was almost instantaneous. The white powder turned an orange hue, a chemical process akin to oxidization that rendered the substance useless. He searched the surrounding tables and benches of the makeshift factory for more of the product. What he found were more Whacky Waxx wrappers and a hot plate on which a pot of a waxy substance bubbled. He ripped open a few more bags of the powdery drug and emptied them onto the table, and sprayed it with his chemical neutralizer.

The sobbing, retching woman had gotten to her feet and when she caught sight of him, screamed, knocking over the wax works as she ran for the exit at the far side of the lab. Wayne took a last look around at his handiwork and sprinted up the stairs to the roof. The two men on the roof had recovered some, coughing and wheezing, but didn’t know what to make of him, yet roused themselves to come after him. Just as one of them was close enough to grab him, Wayne dropped over the side of the roof, the man almost following him over. The line he had secured there held, and he let himself be guided down the length of rope in a quick repel.

The commotion had brought a crowd of factory workers and residents of the derelict squat milling around outside in the freezing AM street. There was loud talking and exclamation of disgust and a lot of swearing. Wayne slipped from shadow to shadow distancing himself from the scene as the men on the roof were shouting warnings of the intruder to those below. But it was too late. The damage had been done, and he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do.

The reasoning behind the stealth of his action, the risky wingsuit flight from the penthouse, other than another opportunity to recharge the adrenaline, was that he was certain he was being watch, followed. Even as he made his way to the Battery Work along the deserted streets, the sirens wailing in the distance, fire and police, he stayed out of sight, reversing his path, scaling walls, cutting through alleys. He saw no one, but then the temperatures were freezing in the dark AM.

The alert doorman at the Regency had made a comment in passing as he’d exited the lobby out to his waiting car recently. Wayne had greeted the man with his customary “what’s new?” but this time rather than replying “every day is a gift,” the doorman had observed that the phone company was back fixing the problem they hadn’t fixed the last time, giving a slight nod of his head in the direction of the pale blue van near the open manhole across the street. A man in olive green coveralls had emerged from the service access. Something didn’t fit about the manner of the man and who he was supposed to be. He had a sixth sense about these things. He was not a workman, an engineer perhaps, upper management, but not your run of the mill tech.

He’d asked his secretary once he got to his office at Bruce Enterprise to check with the phone company and  inquire about any telephone repair work being done in the vicinity of the Regency Arms. The reply came back negative. And when he used his own transportation to travel around the city and out to the Battery Works site, he’d begun noticing a pattern of utilitarian vehicles floating up into his rearview and then dropping away to be replaced by different yet similar sedans with maximum horse power under the hood. Someone was investing a lot of manhours in tracking his routine which varied little, occupied with the business of renovation at the old Battery factory and his duties overseeing the BATS Lab. On the other hand, there were some activities he didn’t want others to know about.

Wayne approached the silent darkness of Penn Quinn’s Tavern, a red neon knot in one window flickering. The two story brick building consisted of the bar and some storage space on the bottom floor and a quartet of residential units above the business. One of those apartments looked out across the intersection where Central butted into Battery and directly across from the candy store, its door and windows boarded in plywood to prevent vandalism. The graffiti was to be expected. It was from that window above Quinn’s Tavern that the witness claimed to have seen someone, a kid, exiting the store after old Rick was shot.

He loped across the dark street and into the alleyway behind the candy store and down to his access over the wall to the newly refurbished Lab satellite office building where he kept a private suite that included a wardrobe and facilities with a whirlpool tub.

He had taken to prowling the neighborhood, often in disguise, and at night, trying to get a feel for the dereliction and neglect that poverty had visited on the once thriving district. What he saw was petty crime and the hooligans that perpetrated it. A few times he had stepped in and thwarted whatever lawlessness he could, but he was not the police. Nor was the police much in evidence especially as the nights grew darker and colder. The press had stopped obsessing about the outlaw vigilante terrorizing the citizenry. And listening to Bion and the construction crew, he could gauge what the word on the street was saying about a foiled robbery at a mom and pop grocery store or a scotched mugging. The bad guys were a little more cautious in their criminal activities and looking over their shoulders for the phantom in black who would put the hurt on them in no uncertain terms.

Wayne was awakened by the alarm clock early that morning before the crew arrived to begin work. He started the coffee and turned on the television in what would eventually be the employee lounge. The morning news show was working a breaking story and had gone live to the scene of a three alarm fire in the industrial district. As the on-scene camera panned across the flashing lights of the fire equipment and the fire fighters directed their hoses at the smoke and flames erupting from the upper story, he knew immediately what he was looking at. It was the building he had left several hours ago, the Whacky Waxx drug factory. The on scene reporter was telling the camera that three bodies had been located in the abandoned building as it had been being used by squatters seeking shelter from the cold. Firefighters were conducting a search for more victims but were hampered by toxic smoke possibly from chemicals illegally stored on the premises. They believed that the fire was started by an overturned hot plate.

Wayne stared out the window at Bion sliding open the gate to allow the crew access to the grounds of the Battery Works. The realization that he was at least partially responsible for those deaths alighted on his shoulders like a dark winged specter.

Next Time: Interlude