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Stories from the Verse
Multiverser: The Thirteenth Story
Chapter 35: Takano 168
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Beam 207
Monday Tommy excused herself from work early. She said she had an appointment, and in response to Mister Granville's query she tried to look a bit embarrassed and said, "Girl stuff," which settled the matter.
She then changed into Truth and hastened across town, taking a perch on a roof across from the Wells Fargo office. She hoped she wasn't too late--the company ran a twenty-four hour operation, so there was always someone in the office, and they worked odd shifts. However, at around four-thirty there was a significant exodus from the building, and she scanned the crowd as they departed. They were all pretty ordinary, and she wondered what she was looking for. What did a mole look like, when it was in human form?
Suddenly she spotted him: distinctive short curly blond hair and a wiry frame, it seemed that Aceydeecy himself was the leak. He had managed to pass a security check and get himself hired in the Wells Fargo office.
Screenings obviously were not so effective in the 1950s as they were in the 1990s.
What should she do? The first thing she decided to do was read his mind, if only so she could tap into it later. His thoughts were a bit jumbled, jumping from work to home to life, things like whether he locked his desk drawer properly, what he was going to have for dinner, and who he could get to partner with him on the next job. That led him to wonder whether he could get Metalika out of jail, but then he'd need someone to help him with that, and there weren't a lot of people out there who really like Metalika, and some of those who did didn't like him.
He lined up at a bus stop on the opposite side of the road. Think. Think fast. She saw a bus coming; he would slip away soon. But there was another bus coming in the opposite direction, and the bus stop was right next to the building next to hers. Its roof was a bit lower, so it was an easy leap across the alley, and then as the bus pulled over to pick up passengers she dropped down onto its roof. Then it pulled out into traffic just as its opposite did so, and she was able to jump from one bus to the other.
Hopefully the sound of her landing would be written off to potholes or something.
She'd never ridden the roof of a bus before, but she settled down flat, partly to be as secure as possible and partly to avoid notice. Of course, if the police saw her they would assume she was on superhero business of some sort; the danger was that one of the passengers boarding would mention that she was on the roof, and so alert her quarry. At the same time, she needed to be able to see departing passengers, so she would know when he disembarked.
Many blocks turned into several miles, and they were in what she would have guessed were low-rent townhouse apartments. She watched as the curly head came into view and headed up the street. Now what? she wondered. Thinking quickly, she hooked a streetlight with her kawanaga, swung over to the light pole, and hung there a moment waiting for him to be far enough away. Then recovering her line she climbed down the pole and followed him, sticking to the row of low fences between the sidewalk and the houses. He walked about half a block and turned in at a gate. The building had two front doors adjacent to each other, and he entered the one of the left. She scurried up and checked the doorbells. Conveniently they were labeled. The lower one said Mary Dundee, but the upper one identified its occupant as Angus Young.
"Of course you are," she said, and turned to return home.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
