My phone rang as Ranger drove away. Boggart’s phone, in this case. An unknown number was making the call.

“Hello.”

“You do anything stupid yet?” Liv asked.

“Would walking out my front door in costume count?”

“Fuck.”

“Kidding,” I said. “It’s one of my fake rentals, remember? The tenant is David Boggs, and the rental agreement was signed off by one of my employees, Thomas McKinley. Notarized, of course. If anyone saw a supervillain come out of that house, there’s at least two degrees of separation to go through before they think it was Lucas Maye.”

I reached the bedroom of the fake rental house, setting the phone aside in speaker mode to start doffing Boggart’s costume.

“Seriously? Boggs?”

“Like the baseball player,” I said, grinning.

“I’m assuming neither of those people are real?”

“The paperwork always looks right.”

The phone conveyed a sigh from Olivia.

“You worry too much. I’ve got a system for these things.”

“And how’s that been working out for the last eight months?”

“It wasn’t my systems that fell through. You know that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “So, how about that job you mentioned?”

“Right. Well, it’s definitely worth six figures, minimum.”

“You know the mark?”

“Santa Clara,” I said. “Three guesses.”

“Please say a museum or something.”

“Two guesses.”

“It’s fucking Pishon, isn’t it?”

“I can’t back out,” I said. “I had to say too much to convince him I was good enough to pull it off. If I drop the job, he could ruin me.”

“You’re not good enough to pull it off.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Proving you wrong is a great motivator. That’ll help.”

“Damn it, Luke. What did you tell him?”

“My name, Bellow Street’s deal, that I have a non-specific police contact, and your power.”

There was a pointed silence. I fastened the last few buttons of the short-sleeved black shirt that I’d been wearing as a civilian today.

“So everything,” Liv said. “You told him everything.”

“I never said the police contact and Mister Spot were the same person.”

“I’ll bet you implied it.”

“That’s not how betting works,” I said.

“So you did.”

“Look, I’ve gotta deal with something else right now, okay? I’ll save this number, and I’ll keep you up to date. I do have a plan, you know.”

“Let me hear it.”

“I will.”

I ended the call, and I put the phone in the pocket of my jeans. Then I retrieved the other two phones from their positions in the suit pockets of my costume. Lucas’s phones, not Boggart’s.

Of those two phones, it had been the business line I was referring to when I mentioned having something else to deal with. Messages had rolled in during both the meeting with Davor Kolyich and the drive back. They’d asked me to come resolve a situation on Bellow Street.

I exited the Boggs rental house through the back door. There was a pot for planting potted plants next to the back fence of the back yard, but there was nothing growing from the soil in the pot. It was only there to aid in vaulting over into the adjacent backyard, which had a bench near the fence for the same reason.

I owned this property, as well, through an equally convoluted paper trail. The McKinley pseudonym did actually belong to an employee of mine, but that employee — Monty Sheridan — happened to be the same person notarizing these lease agreements. Nevada’s decision to allow online notary services had made his job much easier, since an electronic signature didn’t require any of the handwriting efforts of a proper forger. The house I was now opening the back door of, on paper, belonged to somebody named Yvette Hill. She didn’t exist, either.

The car I’d rented to replace the repossessed one was parked in the Hill rental’s driveway. A rented car was far too easy for other people to keep track of, necessitating the alternative arrangements for Boggart.

I, however, was a perfectly legitimate businessman, and the landlord of the Hill rental, which had a request on file for the owner to replace one of the faucets. I wasn’t about to approve that expense without verifying firsthand that there was a problem, so I drove down to take a look. Nothing fishy about my being here, even if someone happened to see Boggart in an adjacent cul-de-sac today.

Like I said, it had never been my system that fell through.

♜

Bellow Street. My street, in many ways. Buildings I owned lined both sidewalks, and those buildings were businesses I trusted on several distinct levels. It was the heart of my loose organization. Of course, the key to the whole thing was how hard it would be to tell, if I didn’t already know the ins and outs. This place looked just about the same as any small shopping center in Nevada. We didn’t have our own lot for parking, and for some reason the city had been inordinately evasive when I’d tried to solve that problem, but every other detail of the place made it an enviable spot for any business. Which, of course, allowed me to set my rates however I damn well pleased, for the most part.

And for the most part, the rates were surprisingly low, so long as a tenant agreed to take on some extra duties as part of the lease.

Vehicles belonging to the owners and employees of the businesses operating here were strategically parked along the sides of the street itself, so that none blocked signs or advertisements when looking directly across the street, and so that there wasn’t room to squeeze a customer’s vehicle into the places that were intentionally left open. Our customers would typically park at one of the major retailers nearby and then walk over here. I’d encouraged the owners of those parking lots who had complaints about that to take it up with the city, and they’d never gotten back to me about it. Even my own rented vehicle was parked in one of those lots, at the moment.

All that to say, it was unusual to find a car on this street that I didn’t recognize. Three such cars were here right now, but two had been explained already. One was Leah Valentine’s. She’d sold the pickup truck she inherited from her uncle to her brother, and she’d bought an electric hybrid to replace it. The other belonged to someone called Ryan, who had just been hired to work at Samuel Kane’s bookstore on the corner. I trusted Sam as far as I could throw a semi-corporeal flying squirrel, but looking into Ryan was still on the to-do list.

Firstly, though, there was the owner of the blue Corvette to deal with. I spotted the man on one of the sidewalks of Bellow Street.

My tenants had described him as a suspicious individual. That he was holding an umbrella in this weather forced me to agree. Nevada didn’t get a lot of rain, after all. Short of that detail, I’d think very little of seeing him here. He wore a sleeveless top with an unreadable logo, which I suspected to belong to a metal band. He had blue sunglasses on. I might, if I was the sort of person who could identify eyewear brands at a glance, guess that he was wearing Burberry sunglasses. Perhaps the BE4291 model, even. Hardly top-of-the-line, but not cheap, either.

Right, that was off-topic.

The sleeveless shirt fit the desert environment of this state, of course. What it didn’t cover was the bulk on the man’s arms. He had a swept-back hairstyle standing out against the shaved sides of his head, and the rough stubble of deliberately under-shaved facial hair.

Aside from the umbrella, I might not think he was out of place if he was at least moving. But he wasn’t. He was currently standing still, staring into the distance, and the messages I’d gotten indicated that had been the case for some time.

I approached from an angle he wasn’t actively looking, but I wouldn’t describe what I did as sneaking up on him. The man turned to face me just as I came within a reasonable speaking distance.

“Can I help you, sir?” I asked.

“Alpine ski trip, huh?” he scoffed.

Fuck. “Oh, that? What about it?”

“What kind of ski trip lasts eight months?”

“It was more like…” I paused, performing a contemplative expression. “I took a professional leave, and then I felt compelled to undertake a self-actualizing temporary relocation.”

The man raised an eyebrow that had a slit cut into the tail end.

“Y’know, zen shit?” I shrugged. “Go up a mountain, find yourself?”

“In Switzerland?”

“Can I help you?” I asked, again. “Because I’ve gotten some complaints about your presence, here.”

“I’m standing on a public sidewalk.”

“Technically, you’re loitering in a commercial district. Whatever you’re here for, you’d better make it quick. Otherwise, I’m officially asking you to disperse.”

The man pulled his phone out of his pocket, occupying the hand that wasn’t resting on the umbrella, which in turn had its point resting on the sidewalk. It amounted to him leaning on the device, which I wouldn’t necessarily trust to support my weight if I were in his shoes. But then again, I wasn’t really an expert in umbrellas. For real, not in a cagey way. I didn’t know shit about umbrellas, besides that it was weird to carry one in Red Straight of all places.

Looking at his phone, the man said, “You chose to drop everything and leave for the Alps on approximately August 15th, 2022.”

“Okay, fuck off,” I snapped.

“And you returned on April 14th, 2023, correct?”

“You got it. I missed Burning Man, and everything,” I said. “What are you, stalking me?”

“Do you have anything to say,” the man asked, “about the fact that the dates of your supposed ski trip align exactly with the incarceration period of the supervillain known as Boggart?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You know how many weddings happened on 9/11? You wanna talk about embarrassing coincidences, well.”

The man smirked. “All I want to say is that if Boggart happened to resurface, now that his sentence is over? Well, any hero that happened to see him in costume might take his history as grounds for reasonable suspicion.”

“I’ve got a reasonable suspicion that you’re a dumbass,” I decided.

“Down to name-calling, are we?”

“Also, I don’t think vigilantes are bound by that whole ‘probable cause’ thing,” I pointed out. “Kind of the problem with independent heroes, human-rights-wise.”

“I didn’t say probable cause, I said reasonable suspicion.”

“And I said you’re a dumbass,” I reminded him.

Even with the Burberries in the way, I could see him rolling his eyes.

“Look, you’ve gotta be new, right? You’re new at this.”

“Depends on how you look at it.”

“That’s a yes,” I said. “I’ll cut you some slack for being new. Nobody’s told you what to expect, yet, and it’s time for a bit of a lesson.”

“You admit it, then?”

I put my hand on his shoulder, maintaining eye contact. He didn’t flinch.

“I am admitting precisely fuck-all, guy. But you are alluding to being or knowing a superhero, and you’re here as some kind of misguided threat against what you assume to be the civilian identity of a supervillain.”

The man shook his head. “Threat? More of a warning, really.”

“More of a dumbass move, really.”

I pivoted on my heel to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the man, glancing at his phone. He abruptly hit the power button on the side, turning the screen off.

“If you have any sense of self-preservation, there’s exactly one piece of advice I have for you,” I said.

“Now who’s making threats?”

I ignored him, finishing my point. “Secret identities are important.”

“There’s secret identities,” he said, “and then there’s obvious identities, if you get what I mean.”

“How about you shut up while I’m trying to help you?”

“Whatever, man.” He shrugged me off, picking up the umbrella and walking a few paces away.

“Obvious identities,” I said, my eyes scanning a plastic card tucked into the wallet in my hand. “Rolando Herrera, for instance?”

The man spun, scowling. I tossed his wallet back to him. It had been in his back pocket, but his attention had been on keeping me from looking at his phone.

“You didn’t think this through, did you?”

“What are you playing at?” he asked.

“Are you familiar with the concept of escalation?”

Rolando continued to glare at me.

“The superheroes, the supervillains. The people who dress like they’re on Project fucking Runway. Those people duking it out on the street is one thing. But when you do this? When you bring the other side of the coin onto the table, it stays on the fucking table, Rolando. Did you consider, at all, what that might mean?”

“I thought you would take the warning for what it was,” he growled.

“You came here out of costume, you talked to someone you thought was a thief without divesting yourself of anything you didn’t want picked from your pockets, and you basically made no attempt to conceal your identity. And your brilliant plan, in that set of circumstances, was to threaten me? You. Are. A. Dumbass.”

“You’re picking a fight? You’re not going to win this,” he said.

“Probably not, no. I’m not planning to fight you. I was just going to ask you to leave, since you were bothering my tenants. But I need to make it dead obvious that you do not do this. You’re going to get yourself hurt if you piss off the wrong guy in their civilian identity.”

Rolando brandished his umbrella. “I’m not so easy to hurt.”

“Look, man. You take it to this arena, it will come back to you on your terms. That’s what I’m trying to say. Turnabout is fair play. If word gets around that you’re not playing by the rules, then those rules don’t protect you. People like me don’t respect you. You don’t get to put the costume away and go home. You aren’t going to be safe in public, and you won’t be able to tell anyone they’re safe around you. How hard is going to be to find out who Rolando Herrera cares about, huh?”

He stepped forward. I stepped back, and I put a hand up.

“It’s not my style,” I spat. “I’d never stoop to that. But if this is how you deal with me, you set a precedent you’ll never live down. You won’t get any sympathy if you complain about what happens when you ignore my advice. What hero are you, anyway?”

He shook his head.

“How long have you had powers?”

“Long enough, rat man.”

“Mutually assured destruction,” I said. “You don’t have to like me, but if we know each other on this side of the curtain, you have to work with me. I’ve just explained why. Hell, I’m stuck babysitting your hero career, now, because I can’t have you trading info to get out of a loss to some mutual enemy of ours.”

“I don’t imagine a ton of overlap between my enemies and yours.”

“Your imagination seems fairly limited, from what I’ve learned while talking to you,” I countered.

Rolando slammed the point of his umbrella on the sidewalk with a huff.

“A month,” he said. “I’ve had the power for a month. You were the first obvious threat my research turned up. A supervillain coming out of a jail sentence, a notorious crime boss. I figured it had to be someone with resources, and it had to be someone the timeline worked out for.”

“Okay, nobody actually said I was a supervillain,” I complained.

“You’ve gotta work with me, here.”

I smiled. “Indeed. Come on, then. Let’s take a look at some of those resources you mentioned.”

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