“Go to him,” said Festus. “And we’ll be right behind you with a hammer the size of his skull!”
“You think I’m gonna help you kill him, Festus?”
“For someone who said she’s not working with him—”
“I’m not, but I’m still not gonna lead you to him like a Judas-goat—”
They shouted at each other for minutes, Syndi refusing even to take a holographic imager, tracking device, or microphone along. “And I’m not going anyway! Unless you forgot, my mother’s sick and dying in there!”
“Oh, and you’ve always been such an attentive, devoted daughter!”
After she’d drenched Festus in a steaming spew of profanity, he reminded her that saving others was what her mother would want her to do.
“If you’re going to live with yourself after…after,” he stage-whispered, even touching her forearm with a gentleness of which I hadn’t thought him capable (and even more shockingly, she didn’t flinch at his touch), “then you know that having carried out what would’ve been your mother’s final request will be what you’ll need…so you won’t spend the rest of your life with that regret crushing you like a fallen building.”
André and I were as shocked by Festus’s reasoned delicacy as Syndi seemed entranced by it.
Quietly denying a final request to bring Festus along to the rendezvous location, Syndi said she’d reveal any plans Kareem had on the condition they posed a threat. After Festus made one last effort to divine the location of the meeting, Syndi conceded only one piece of information: that Kareem had asked her to meet at a place only the two of them would know.
“Where I first kissed him,” she said, choking up, covering her face and dropping the letter.
Just before she could leave I grabbed her arm.
“Be careful, Syndi. The Kareem you fell in love with…he’s suffering. And when people are suffering, they usually hurt the people closest to them, because those are the only ones left around.”
She showed me her white-and-black smear of a face, her eyes cold and deathly. “Kareem…my mother dying,” she said. “This is all a wake-up call for me.”
The Intoxicating Ambrosia of Old Hatred (and Older Love)
The moment Syndi exited the Medical Hollow, Festus stooped to retrieve the letter but reared back when it broke up at his touch and its pieces scrambled away like cockroaches. “Disgusting!” he said.
“That’s Kreem fuh ya,” said André. “Just like a cockroach: a low-down, dirty scavenger who runs when the light’s on im.”
I hung back a few steps with the Brotherfly while Festus led us to his crime lab. “André,” I said softly, “I asked you once before, but your answer was clearly hiding more than it was revealing. So tell me at last, why do you hate Kareem so much?”
“Damn, Doc, fool be threatenin mad havoc an you aksin me why I hate him?”
“Yes, but André, you felt this way about him long before today, which is partly why you ended up being ordered into therapy in the first place.”
“André’s whole life,” he said, fussing, fidgeting, even fluttering his fly wings, “fools like him be all up in André’s face, hatin, hatin, tryinna put they cleats all up in my ass—”
“Are you sure you have an accurate picture of your relationship with Kareem? At one point you even suggested you were jealous of him for, as you claimed, having fairer skin, when you’re both obviously black. Truly, André, you seem far more antagonistic to him than the reverse.”
“Only cuz he be reservin his best behavior f’when he know he bein watched by you. Him an all his L*A*B-holes—nuthin but muhfuckin haters, fuh real!”
I tried probing further, but André was as agitated then as he had been the day in therapy he’d thundered at Kareem to cease investigating Hawk King’s death for evidence of a conspiracy. “Naw, Doc! Don’t be defendin him! Punk aint nuthin but a bigot, knawm sayn? He a hatin muthafuck who gone crackhead on his own pipe fulla hate, an he deserve whatever he gon get when we put a superstomp on his ass tonight!”
“But Syndi said she wouldn’t—”
“Trust me, Doc. You cross Festus, you gots to pay, an he always got a way. Thass how it is. André get hisself some side action for free, he aint complainin, knawm sayn?”
In the center of the Surveillance Hollow, Festus sat like a king bee in his hive, surrounded by an encompassing honeycomb of hundreds of hexagonal monitors beaming images of city streets, boardrooms, industrial facilities, public parks, elevators, libraries, mosques, bedrooms, and more. He was tracking Syndi’s path using a far more extensive network of cameras than I think anyone realized the Flying Squirrel possessed or could access, one even greater than the F*O*O*J’s own intelligence-gathering techweb.
“Damn it!” said Festus, pounding his console. “That tricky little tramp’s smarter than she lets on.”
On several hexagonal screens focused on the nearest Ditko-Train station, a knot of people suddenly melted into a contingent of shapely, black-skirted, black-haired, white-pancaked young women, each of whom headed off in separate directions for various trains heading everywhere.
“That little bitch,” growled Festus. “Doesn’t have a trusting bone in her body.”
I pulled up the only other chair in the lab (a dusty one, its back monogrammed CM) and sat beside Festus. He glared at me as if I’d used a piece of the True Cross for kindling.
I was struck again by how weary and worn he looked, slumped in his chair, his thinning hair whiter than ever and matted to his forehead. Perhaps he’d been skipping his “GI Juice” injections, or perhaps the psychemotional stress had been diminishing their effectiveness. Even inside the center of his superheroic sanctum, his legendary yet no longer “undisclosed location,” Festus Piltdown III looked like an aged farmer gazing impotently at the hailstorm thrashing toward his fields.
“This is a very hard time for you, isn’t it, Festus?”
“I can see why,” said Festus, his eyes scanning his scanners without
