Shad didn't see Tachyon anywhere.
Van Gogh's Irises hung on one of the walls under a row of track lights. The warning buzzer was still crying.
Shad took them all out, dropping them with hypothermia, one after another. It took a long time because Shad's body had already absorbed a lot of energy, but the targets were helpless, and he took all the time he needed. When the boy dropped with the Triumph on top of him, the joker began firing wild, bullets whanging off brick, and when Shad began consuming his heat, he held the trigger down and emptied the magazine into whatever crates were nearest him.
Shad slipped from out of hiding, searched the area for Tachyon, and didn't find him. The red metal fire door in back was open; maybe the Tachyon body had simply bolted. Shad handcuffed each of the shivering victims, cuffed their feet as well, and put a garbage bag over each head. A hand-lettered tag attached to each bag identified each as a jumper. The police or emergency-room personnel would remove the bags at their peril. The jumpers couldn't jump anyone they couldn't see.
Shad wandered for a moment amid the stacks of loot. There were lots of paintings, some of which had just taken some 7.62-mm rounds. More prefabricated detention facilities, German in manufacture, designed to be ready for use in any insurrection, revolution, or instant concentration camp. Enough weapons to start a revolution, each labeled in its packing crate-grenades, mortars, antitank weapons. Some of the lettering was Cyrillic, some Chinese. Most seemed to have been transshipped from Texas. Medical supplies. Bearer bonds. Gold bars. Serious amounts of drugs, presumably not for use, rather an investment. File cabinets filled with reports from lending institutions, credit-check companies, credit-card companies, and private detectives hired to scour the neighborhood for new victims.
It was bigger than Shad had imagined. His heart blazed. This was the kind of thing he was meant for.
Well. Time to be a hero. He got on the Triumph, started it, heard the tail pipe boom off the echoing warehouse walls. He drove to the loading dock, opened the door, rolled the bike out. The cold street waited. Shad accelerated, cape snapping out behind him, and turned the corner.
A turreted NYPD armored car sat like a squat insect on the eroded city asphalt. Police in helmets and flak jackets were setting up sawhorse barriers and stretching out yellow tape.
The Triumph's headlight rolled over them, and Shad saw them start nervously, a general movement toward weapons. Shad decelerated and held up a peaceful hand.
"Chill," he said. "I'm on your side."
A tiny Asian woman in a flak jacket-Captain Angela Ellis, he knew-gave him a narrow look. She had never met Shad, but she'd met one of his identities who had worked out with her in the same karate school. She was talented, Shad judged, but impatient. From her look, maybe the bells of memory were beginning to chime. Her M-16 was pointed slightly to the right of Shad's heart.
"Who are you?"
"The warehouse is full of loot," Shad said. "Gold bars, paintings, drugs, and a whole lot of guns. There are some kidnap victims I've let go-"
"We've picked up some." A flat declaration. "Some are wounded."
Captain Ellis nodded, raised her walkie-talkie, spoke a few words.
"I've subdued the kidnappers and bagged them for you. Some are jumpers, so be careful."
Ellis nodded again.
"They've been jumping the rich," Shad continued. "The city comptroller, Nelson Dixon, other people with access to cash. There are files in there that should give you a lot of names."
She looked at him with unforgiving jade eyes. "You never answered my first question. Who the fuck are you?" Shad's smile broadened, and he couldn't resist a low, calculated laugh. "Call me Black Shadow," he said.
She stroked her chin and nodded.
He laughed again, exultant. This was, all of it, what he was born for. He looked at her, the laughter still rolling from his throat. "Somebody else got jumped," he said. "Somebody important."
Her eyes were most unfriendly. "Who?"
What should have happened was that he spoke the name of Tachyon, ate every particle of light for about ten yards around, gunned the Triumph, and disappeared like the Lone Ranger into the night, trailing triumphant laughter. What happened instead: The world suddenly spun in his head, and then he was looking up into a starless New York opalescent night, and he could feel his own limbs twitch and spasm as if they were not his own. Shelley looked down at him with a sneer on her face. She was wearing a lot of mascara and the wrongcolored eye shadow. Her breath was warm and smelled of gin.
"Asshole," she said. "Son of a bitch. I should blow your brains out." Brandishing a chrome-plated. 38 revolver. Shots banged off hard brick walls. Shad could hear shouts and screams. Shelley grabbed him by the collar, jerked him left and right. He couldn't seem to make his body do what it wanted. Roof asphalt and pebbles grated on his back.
It wasn't Lisa Traeger doing this to him but the old Shelley, the young girl he'd first met. He recognized the bridge of freckles across her nose.
"Hear that?" Shelley said. "That's Diego in your body, and he's kicking police ass." She laughed. "Cops are gonna come looking for you."
He had been jumped. The thought pierced Shad's mind like an icicle. He gasped for breath and tried to rise, arms and legs thrashing.
Shelley laughed contemptuously and shoved Shad back onto the roof. Police shotguns boomed out. "Relax," she said. "You'll be back in your body real soon, and you won't like it."
Shad's mind whirled. He had just worked out who he was, and now he wasn't himself anymore.
The hell he wasn't.
I am Black Shadow, he thought. There had to be a way to make this body work for him. He lay back on the cold roof and concentrated on making one finger move. It seemed to do as he commanded.
Okay. A start.
I am Black Shadow, he thought.
Shelley went to the roof parapet and looked down. "Diego, shit!" she said. "Get outta there! Jump! You've made your point."
She wore a white evening dress, a fur wrap, and an incongruous pair of battered red sneakers. Her hair was longer and punked up with mousse. She and her friend had probably just come back from a night of club-crawling and seen the police setting up their barricades. You needed a twenty-one-year-old body to get into the kind of clubs where jumpers probably wanted to hang out. Shelley had provided one. Maybe that's all they really wanted her for and the trust fund was just a bonus.
Shad tried to move his left foot, was successful, and managed to move the left leg a few inches. More or less as he intended. Then he tried the right leg.
I'm Black Shadow. Black Shadow. The words becoming a mantra.
More guns fired. Shelley paced back and forth at the parapet, muttering. Shad wondered if the police were winning. "Yeah! Yeah!" Shelley chanted. "Run for it!"
A storm of fire erupted. Shelley leaned out over the parapet, apparently following someone escaping around the corner, and then she sighed. "Good." She came back to stand by Shad's side and looked down at him. "You're gonna get yours, asshole."
Black Shadow. Black Shadow. I'm Black Shadow.
He looked at the woman next to him. And you're not Shelley.
Shad moved. His coordination wasn't very good, so he chose a move that could be done without any real precision. His kenpo teacher called it sticks of Satin. He dropped his right leg against the front of Shelley's ankles, then slammed his left leg against the back of her knees. His accuracy was none too great, but the leverage was still good enough to pitch Shelley forward, landing hard on hands and knees.
Shad lunged upward and grabbed her gun arm by the sleeve, then dragged her toward him. He clubbed one fist and tried to bring it down on the back of her neck, but his accuracy was wretched, and he hit the back of the head instead. He kept hitting. Shelley struggled, almost got free, but Shad lurched atop her and bore her down to the asphalt.