"Dex," I said quietly. "Thank you."
"Will that help?" he asked, his voice again surging with smoldering rage. The sudden shift in tone made the bruisers tense up. "Will it help you kill them?"
"It might."
"Don't hesitate," he snarled. "Don't think twice. Kill them."
"Dex," I said. "You need to calm down, man. You don't want to—"
"You have no idea!" he shouted. There was spittle collecting at the corners of his mouth as his breathing became labored again. "You don't know the things I saw. You must kill them. Kill them.
Kill them all!"
He snapped on the last phrase, screaming and thrashing. The bruisers piled onto him, telling him to relax. Dex fought with more strength than I would have given him credit for, howling up a storm as he did. I felt a little bit sick. Dex had been hanging on by a thread, and all my questions hadn't done anything to make his situation less precarious.
"He's getting a little worked up," Oliver noted quietly. "Do you have any further need of him?"
"Spidey?" Felicia asked.
"I'm good," I said.
She nodded while the bruisers subdued Dex. They were careful about it, not using any more force than they had to while holding him down to prevent him from harming himself or others.
"Perhaps we should step outside," Oliver suggested.
"Good idea. Spider?"
I went out first, crouching on the roof of the van as Felicia and Oliver exited and closed the door. The noise from the van cut out at once, but I knew that inside Dex was still struggling, because the van was rocking back and forth.
I bit my lip beneath the mask, looked at Felicia, and asked, "He going to be okay?"
"Relax. They won't hurt him," Felicia said quietly.
"Unless he forces them to," Oliver contradicted her. "That young man is clearly disturbed and dangerous."
"They won't hurt him," Felicia said again, louder.
Oliver glanced at her, sighed, and then drew a cell phone from a pocket and stepped a few feet away to make a call.
"I'll see to it," Felicia said quietly.
"Dex suffered," I said quietly. "Maybe a lot more than I thought he had. He needs help. Not getting dragged off to be interrogated in the middle of the night." He probably hadn't needed to be banned from New York on pain of torment and death, either. Granted, I hadn't exactly been in a state of perfect clarity after my marathon beating from Morlun, but all the same. I hadn't seen Dex as another of Morlun's victims. Maybe I should have. It made me feel bad, that I'd added to his suffering by dragging him here.
Except that I hadn't.
I frowned. "Why didn't you just make a phone call, instead of bringing him here?"
"They were fairly close," Felicia said. "We thought it would be best for you to see him in person. He wasn't exactly the soul of cooperation."
I nodded, feeling my lips purse thoughtfully. "I need to make a call," I said. Then I turned to Oliver, as he lowered the phone and turned back to us. "Can I borrow your phone?"
Most people wouldn't have seen it, but Felicia froze in place for a tiny moment, her head tilting a fraction to one side in interest.
"Hmm?" Oliver said. "Oh, certainly. How often does one get to lend a phone to a superhero?" He offered it up to me.
"Thanks," I said. I reached down from the van's roof and took the phone from him.
"I'm impressed, Oliver," Felicia was saying behind me. "This was quick work, even for you."
"I was well motivated," Oliver replied. ''Whatever I can do to help one of New York's most colorful heroes."
Felicia smiled widely. "Two of them."
"Yes, two. Of course."
My, but Oliver had a neat phone. It had all kinds of things in it, a full PDA among them. People seem to take security much more lightly when it comes to PDAs, for some reason. Maybe it's because they're always kept safely tucked in a pocket. I opened Oliver's e-mail. Then I looked at his call logs.
The PDA beeped a whole lot while I did, and Oliver noticed it. "Hey," he said. "Hey, what do you think you're doing?" He came over and reached up as if to take the PDA out of my hands. Like that was going to happen. I held it maybe six inches out of his reach and kept going. "Give me that!"
The incoming calls all had neat identifying tags on them—except for one, which was quite conspicuously blank. I checked the outgoing calls. Ditto. Oliver kept everything neatly labeled—except for a single phone number. I dialed that one, and told Oliver, 'You got an e-mail, by the way. Your offshore bank confirms a money transfer with a bunch of zeros, Oliver."
The phone rang once, and then Mortia's voice spoke. "Do you have the cat? The spider?"
"Tick tock, Mortia," I told her in a cheerful voice. "Don't be late for our appointment."
I hung up the phone and tilted my head at Oliver. "Thanks, bud. All done. Hey, Felicia, where'd you get your phone?"
"From the company…" she said, after a moment. Then she corrected herself "From Oliver."
"His has a GPS built into it," I said. "Betcha yours does, too. And on a completely unrelated note, do you remember how we were wondering how Mortia and company found us back at the apartment? Any thoughts on how that happened?"
Oliver stood frozen for a moment. Then the traitor bolted.
Chapter 21
Oliver was awfully quick for a man his age.
Felicia let out a snarl like a furious mountain lion, startling and savage enough to make me wonder—again—about the source of her grace and agility, and she flung herself after Oliver.
His suit was an expensive one—it hid the gun Oliver was carrying to perfection. He drew the weapon and pegged a pair of shots at Felicia, slowing down enough to make sure they went more or less in her direction. She flipped into a lateral tumble—though with uncontrolled shots like that, you run almost as much risk of dodging into a badly aimed bullet as you do of dodging an accurate shot.
I gave them enough of a lead to make sure I wasn't going to be crowding Felicia, and then went after them.
Oliver darted down an alley between two apartment buildings, and I shook my head. The runners are always doing things like that. Maybe it's some kind of burrowing instinct left over from our ancestors, little mammals hiding from dinosaurs, right before a big rock fell on them. Whatever the reason, Oliver went down the alley, throwing glances over his shoulder.
One thing about the narrow alley, I supposed. Had Felicia simply sprinted after him, he'd have had a really hard time missing her when he opened fire again. Oliver might have been smart enough to have thought that through. Most of the time, though, it's just a side effect the thugs aren't really bright enough to appreciate. There are several means of ending a chase in a place like that, and Felicia employed my personal favorite. She outthought Oliver and got ahead of him.
He was a few feet from the other end of the alley when a patch of shadow erupted into movement, and the Black Cat fetched Oliver a kick to the belly that took him from a full sprint to a full stop as he folded around her boot. He went down, the wind knocked all the way out of him. Felicia, furious, stomped down on his gun hand until he dropped the weapon. She kicked it away. Then she picked him up by the front of his coat and slammed him against one wall of the alley.
"You greedy little toad."
she snarled, slamming his shoulder blades against the wall for emphasis. "What did you do?"
"Ms. Hardy," he gasped, hardly able to speak. "Contain yourself. This is not a professional means of—"
She threw him against the other wall of the alley, then popped him in the back of one thigh with a simple snap kick. He cried out as his leg buckled, and fell onto his side. Felicia's boot flashed out again, this time striking Oliver's head in a firm push, trapping it between her foot and the brick wall.