“You must be high.”

  Roarke hefted the dandy’s derringer and keeping it on the three, walked past them and descended the stairs.

  Outside, the two guards gaped when he came out, unescorted and unblemished.

  “Gentlemen,” the inspector said and got in his truck and drove away.

  Back at his cubicle in the room without a number in the satellite office of the Department of Building and Safety, Roarke typed up his comments on a unsafe framing job done at a hamburger stand remodel. Cutting corners, the owner had hired his cousin, only his cousin’s contractor’s license had been lifted two years ago and the work he did showed why. While there was no excuse for half-assing the job, Roarke understood the owner was hard-pressed to pay the going rate as his cash flow was meager. If he could expand and offer sit-down meals, he might be able to combat the barrage of fast food chicken and burger chains sprouting around him.

  The notes he was preparing were intended to help the owner get a qualified carpenter to fix the crap job, and guide him through the re-inspection process. More than inferior work, Roarke despised the bureaucracy he was compelled to be part of, but was determined it not be part of him.

  “Hey, you got time for a drink later?” Ollie Weaver leaned his bulk into Roarke’s cubicle wall. “Got a couple of ideas to bounce off you.”

  “I’m game,” Roarke said, not looking up. “Where do you want to go?”

  Weaver took the dead stump of a cigar from the corner of his mouth. Idly he scratched his unshaven chin with the back of the fingers of the same hand. “How about Maxie’s on Fifth? Spotted some sweet City Hall intern tail in there last week.”

  “Any one of those girls is young enough to be your daughter.”

  “Old enough to bleed, old enough to—” and he finished his comment with back and forth motions of his hips, gripping an imaginary woman as his tongue hung out.

  “How clever of you.”

  Weaver guffawed. “See you there ’round five thirty, stud.” He sauntered away to share his sunshine with others in the office.

  Was it crazy to imagine that Weaver, McLeash’s in-the-pocket building inspector, would put something in his drink to incapacitate or even murder him? Because Weaver had never asked Roarke before to after-work drinks. Though surely even a louche like Weaver wouldn’t be bold enough to do that in a public bar. But why not? What better place to commit a crime than in full view of witnesses, but not really witnesses? For who would be paying attention to a couple of middle-aged men commiserating about their shitty work and their piss-poor futures?

  This low-intensity warfare he and McLeash’s minions had been waging for the last month had clearly ratcheted up as evidenced by today’s events, Roarke surmised later, as he took surface streets to the watering hole. The City Council would be voting next week on whether to approve the billion-plus development called Nova Park that McLeash was spearheading. Clearly he couldn’t have anything untoward exposed about him and his dealings.

  It wasn’t enough there had been press not long ago on the academically written report sponsored by the Coalition for Renters Rights and other housing organizations documenting the seldom seen McLeash’s ownership of slum buildings through false fronts. Following that there had been the requisite demand for an investigation. The mayor had dutifully convened his blue ribbon commission. And that commission after supposedly exhaustive digging, named names and scorned the greedy.

  But the named were all low-level functionaries who in the money man’s script they were all secretly following, were playing their part to be sacrificed on the altar of AM talk radio wagmeisters. McLeash knew the public had a short attention span. Its hunger for the upscale bling that his massive redevelopment promised—from a football stadium with exclusive sky boxes to trendy gallerias—would assuage their doubts.

  Musing, he stopped behind a bottled water delivery truck in the slow moving traffic. On Roarke’s passenger side a motorcycle split the gap between the vehicles and roared up beside him. The rider tossed a carton into the bed of his pickup and sped off. The cardboard box rocked as something inside attempted to get out. There was barking and the head of a bug-eyed Chihuahua poked out, then another and another.

  Seven dogs tumbled out and they romped about the bed, then climbed through the pickup’s rear sliding window. The runty canines were yipping and snarling at Roarke, their teeth having been surgically replaced with chrome fangs. As the animals were more excited and aggressive than usual, it was obvious they’d also been injected with some concoction to induce this state.

  Roarke swatted one of the creatures leaping for his jugular while another lunged for his crotch. He managed to pluck this one loose by the neck and sprayed him in the face with the WD-40 he’d grabbed from atop the dashboard. The blinded dog howled and Roarke threw him at his buddies. Horns honked as he reached to get something under his seat and opened his door, falling to the asphalt, three of the dogs clutching and biting his lower legs.

  One of the dogs clawed its way up. Roarke loosened the tape measure clipped on his belt. Using the flexible metal like a rope, he wound this around the dog’s neck and strangled the little shit, its eyes protruding even more like in a cartoon. He flung the critter away and, getting to his feet, ran into the next lane and was almost struck by a family van. The grill nailed one of the Chihuahuas in mid-leap and he was grateful for the inadvertent assist.

  “What the hell’s going on?” The water delivery man had stopped and was looking back at the commotion. Roarke ran for the truck, pulled loose a plastic bottle from a rack and tossed it at the dogs. He missed and the bottle glanced off a convertible Corvette.

  “Hey, asshole,” the sports car driver yelled, screeching to a halt which caused him to be bumped by another car. One of the dogs scampered across the Corvette’s trunk, leaped and latched itself on the man’s head. He bolted from his car screaming and flailing at the beast.

  With the hammer he got from under his seat, Roarke knocked the dog off the Corvette driver. A chunk of flesh along his jaw had been bitten off. “Oh shit, oh shit.” The man held a hand to his gaping wound and stumbled about. More cars were stopping and the remaining dogs yelped and leapt at tires and fenders.

  “Bite on this,” the water delivery man said as he hosed two of the dogs with a cloud from a fire extinguisher fetched from his truck’s cab. The dogs hacked and coughed, and Roarke kicked them both skyward. One of them landed on its back and was promptly run over by a station wagon. The other came down hard and didn’t get up.

  “Dog killer,” the woman who’d been driving the family van yelled at Roarke. He was looking for the other two but they’d run off.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” his accuser demanded as Roarke got back in his pickup, his adrenaline subsiding and now feeling the dog bites.

  Ignoring her, he drove his pickup through the driveway of a gas station, while the woman screamed that she was calling the police and the SPCA. She was speaking rapid fire into her cell phone when one of the missing feral Chihuahuas suddenly appeared and barked at her.

  “Oh you poor darling,” she sympathized, opening her door and reaching down for the creature. The animal promptly latched its teeth on her hand. She howled and moaned. In his rearview, Roarke saw the water man rush to her rescue as he drove away. He took the route used by the big wheelers paralleling the concrete bed of the L.A. River. He wound his way through the industrial section east of downtown with its produce warehouses and frozen fish facilities. Here freight haulers were wheezing about but otherwise the traffic was light. He reached the small fourplex nestled near the Seventh Street bridge. There were few homes in this part of town and all of them had been built before World War II, when the zoning had been changed. Officially, Roarke received his mail and bills at another address, but this was where he lived below McLeash’s radar.

  “Hi there,” Mrs. Buscema greeted him. His landlady was a retired postal supervisor. The widow was doing her daily watering of the small lawn in her black cocktail dress, pearls and sun hat.

  “Not bad, not bad at all,” he said, hurrying past.

  “You’re bleeding. What happened?” She put down the hose and started to follow him.

  “The Masons, Mrs. Buscema. The damned Masons attacked me again.”

  She made the sign of the cross even though she wasn’t Catholic. “When I was at the market today and saw that two-headed potato, I new it was a sign.”

  His landlady was deathly afraid of the Masons. Her husband had been one. When he unexpectedly died from a heart attack, to deal with the grief, and already being a bit unsteady, she’d conjured up that he’d been the victim of a Masonic conspiracy.

  “What can I do to help?” she asked eagerly.

  “I’m going to take care of it. You keep listening, okay?” He pointed at her earpiece. She was never without her iPod where she listened to self-actualization downloads.

  “But I’m ready, I’ve been taking my lessons.” She got into what she supposed was a kung fu stance. Mrs. Buscema took a senior defense class at the rec center.

  “You’re my backup. That’s why I need you to keep a channel open in case I need to reach you.”

  “Well, okay,” she said, disappointed, anxious to Jet Li a few devious Masons and their ilk. He shook loose a smile and she touched his upper arm. “At least let me get my first aid kit out and touch up those awful wounds.”

  It would take longer to argue with her, so he let her be useful. In her place, she swabbed him with a smelly homemade astringent she’d concocted. Mrs. Buscema kept a Spartan household. Unlike other eccentrics, she didn’t horde newspapers or junk or cats. She didn’t have a TV, was a vegetarian, and kept a radio in each room along with a spare iPod. Something about beamed images and mind control by the Masons who ran the networks, she’d rattled off to Roarke at some point.

  Back in his quarters, he took off his pants and using a damp washcloth, cleaned the bites on his legs and applied the remedy she’d given him. The stuff soothed him and he lay on the bed on his back. He began to doze. Loaded memories of his wife crying his name, her body’s limbs at wrong angles upon the broken chunks of concrete had him awake and wiping his eyes. It was not long after that the ability, or whatever it was, had come to him—slowly at first like a beginning runner who can only go a few blocks, then a kilometer, eventually the marathon.

  Stripped down to his boxers, Roarke limped from his bedroom into the front room. Taking up one of the walls was a pieced-together map that documented the most egregious slum buildings in the city and parts of the county. Map didn’t quite describe the assemblage as it consisted of Google printouts, sections of official Bureau of Street Services maps, photos, pieces of blueprints, hand drawn renderings and his notations. He’d documented how many times specific properties had been flipped, and the strategic locations of them. Nearly one-fifth of the real estate ultimately belonged to McLeash.

  But why this day to try and kill him, Roarke wondered, staring at the map he’d all but imprinted on his inner eye. Had it just been a matter of the ruthless financier deciding enough was enough? Roarke and various housing groups had successfully goaded the City Attorney into bringing charges against some of his landlords. And the District Attorney, not wanting to be upstaged by the C.A., had threatened to level criminal charges. Even though his bosses were getting pressure from McLeash’s insider toadies to shut him down, the resultant publicity in this brief political moment had the mayor and City Council demanding more of the sort of thing Roarke was doing. Some of the Council members were up for reelection this year and had to look like they were actually doing their jobs.

  Yes, that could be it. Or, looking hard at a red circle he’d made in marker on his map, was it something else? The circle wasn’t around slum housing. This area indicated a large parcel already cleared of low-income housing and single family bungalows once occupied by the Oakies and blacks out of Texas and Alabama who came west looking for better.

  The circle was south of downtown and represented McLeash’s prestige development. Nova Park was a hotel, stadium, promenade and casino. It was the ascension of capital and consumerism, the symbol that the poor, the indigent, and for God’s sake, the homeless, were not welcome in the new city that McLeash and his allies were creating for, well, those who aspired to be like McLeash and his allies. Of course there was no plan for where the displaced could find replacement low-income apartments in a tight market, but progress had its price.

  A thin line that was not a smile shaped Roarke’s lips. On a file cabinet he kept recent newspapers and other periodicals routinely perused for clues and leads to hidden owners and their doings. He found the article in the Central City News, a mouthpiece for the developer set. On an open air floor of the hotel in progress in Nova Park, there was a gala tonight where the pols and swells would mingle and size each other up to see who really ran this city. Media would no doubt be in heavy attendance, and McLeash certainly could tolerate no potential for interference from the likes of Roarke. That had to be why he was targeted for death now. Anyway, McLeash must have planned to kill him sooner than later and had set up the means to do so.

  He must have had standing orders at his buildings if Roarke showed. The guard’s call was made to the quixotic trio to do the dirty work, but they had no direct connection to McLeash.

  Centering himself, Roarke got dressed in his night gear. He then went into his kitchen which he’d partially converted into a work area. He readied several pieces of equipment as dusk coated the buildings outside his window. McLeash would have a platoon of security in place, so a frontal assault, like using his drop cord to swing onto the open floor and attempt to mix it up with overwhelming odds was foolish. That might work for Batman, but Roarke figured he’d dislocate his shoulder holding onto the line and get his ass kicked for stopping by. Still, he locked and loaded his modified 490 Remington powder-actuated concrete nail gun. It gave him a warm feeling to know he could drive one of those bad boys through a miscreant’s hand if need be.

  Dark blue khakis, utility bandolier, dark blue work shirt and black jean jacket, his prescription night vision goggles around his neck, Roarke checked himself out in his bathroom mirror as he settled a black cap on his head. He’d also bought a kind of scarf mask like the one Douglas Fairbanks wore in the silent screen Zorro at a prop store. But he needed to see with his glasses, and his eye condition was such he couldn’t wear contacts. But this would be his first foray into public, and if his picture was taken, he’d be cooked as far as keeping his day job went. For as far as Roarke knew, there was no pension plan for masked adventurers. Then again, he might not live past tonight so the precaution might be for naught.

  Better to be optimistic he decided. With his goggles he’d wear his 3M 6000 series half-face respirator safety mask over his nose and mouth; thus his visage would be properly obscured. But he’d wait until he’d driven closer to the event to disguise himself. No sense getting Mrs. Buscema worked up in case she spotted him.

  Roarke took deep breaths while his stomach roller coastered. Did Spider-Man go through this before he battled the bad guys? Off he went in his fifteen-year-old Dodge pickup with the rebuilt transmission. Several blocks from the event he parked and slipped on his goggles and mask. A homeless woman pushing a shopping cart with her belongings overflowing the basket passed by.

  “Here you go,” he said through his mask, giving her a dollar. She didn’t register any alarm at his getup and went on. Checking his sewer line map, he used a pry bar to remove a manhole cover and descended. His mag light on, Roarke made his way in the calve-deep water. The project required repiping and there were new sections he’d memorized from blueprints that took him to his destination.

  Up he went on the service ladder to come out inside the skeleton of the hotel in what would be the main sewer line. Above him on the open floor, he could hear a live band playing and the din of the partiers swirled about the construction site. There were uniformed security guards roving about the exterior, making sure no Skid Row denizen should happen by and breathe on the Jags and Benzes that were parked on the dirt expanse around the structure.

  Moving through the gloom, Roarke weighed how to sneak a view of the upper floor the guests milled on to work his plan.

  “Knew your dork ass would show,” a voice said before he was kicked in the head and went down, hurting. It was the tatted woman from earlier. She stomped at his head but Roarke rolled out of the way. She unsheathed a butterfly knife and threw it into Roarke’s chest. He sank to a knee and she pounced on him, pulling the blade free.

  “What the fuck?” she blared, noting the lack of blood. Roarke wore a lightweight flak jacket purchased, along with the Taser, from a disaffected Iraqi War vet under his shirt.

  “Sucker,” he said as she made to stab him in the throat. He’d already gotten his nail gun out from its rig under his jacket and drove two into her unprotected chest near her heart. She fell off him and onto her back, gasping. In the heat of the fight, it had all seemed so abstract, so Captain Americaesque. But now, standing and looking down at the wounded, maybe dying woman, Roarke understood there was no turning back. He had to quickly remove his mask and vomit.

  “Is that any way for a superhero to be?” an accented voice taunted.

  Mask back on, Roarke confronted a man shorter than he in form-fitting acrobatic pants and a colorful, studded vest, no shirt, wearing slippers like a genie in a fairy tale on his small feet. He sported a full handlebar mustache.

  “How lucky for you we can’t use guns, even silenced ones as it wouldn’t do if a stray bullet clipped one of those blue bloods.” He looked up then at Roarke, smiling.

  Roarke brought his nail gun up. “Stand down or get what your friend got.”

  The smile broadened on the other man’s face.

  Roarke aimed for a soft spot. There was a blur as his target grabbed the nail in flight. Two more shots and two more blurs of his hand and the same result. Before he could formulate a new mode of attack, the man pinwheeled across the distance and clobbered Roarke with another blow to his temple. He was going to have to wear some kind of headgear. How did Daredevil get hit so much and not suffer concussions? Plus that blow cracked his goggles, making it hard to see clearly.