Fic: Blah, Blah, Meow, Meow: Part Two
Brrr, Brrr, Brrr
Max paced the floor of Terminal City’s HQ, her cell phone pressed to her ear and her hand on her hip.
“Pick up the phone, pick up the phone,” she chanted under her breath.
“Hi. You know who you’ve called and you know what to do.” Beep.
‘Goddamn it, Alec!” Max snapped her phone shut. There was no point leaving him another message. She’d already left five. If her 2IC didn’t call her on the strength of those…and the, uh, fifty-eight missed calls…he wasn’t going to call.
Probably couldn’t call. Images of Biggs strung up upside down over a burning X battered their way into her mind from the dark corner where she tried to keep those memories walled off.
“Goddamn it, Alec!” she said again, trying-pretty unsuccessfully if she were honest with herself-to hide her fear behind a veneer of anger.
“Max!” Mole called her across to the main console. “Logan for you.”
Max was a blur of speed. “You’ve got something?” She leaned forward, her palms on the desk and her eyes fixed on the monitor.
Logan nodded. His glasses were askew, he was unshaven and his hair looked like it hadn’t seen a comb in days. Max might’ve found it adorable if not for the grave expression on his face. “I’ve had an email from him.”
Max blinked. “An…email? Oh. That’s nice. An email?” She straightened up and folded her arms across her chest. “Just thought he’d get out of town for a while, did he? Take a vacation.”
“Max?”
“I should’ve known,” Max plopped herself down in the desk chair and glared at the monitor. “Should’ve known he wouldn’t stick around and help once it got hard. When the going gets tough, Alec gets going. He-”
“MAX!”
Max met Logan’s eyes in the monitor. “What? You’re not gonna defend him, are you?”
Logan made that prissy face, lips twisted, eyebrows drawn in; the face that meant she was trying his patience, but he was trying to be mature about it.
“It’s an SOS, set up the day he went missing and programmed to auto-send if he didn’t reset it in three days.”
Oh. Max’s face tightened. “What does it say?”
Logan took his glasses off and massaged the bridge of his nose before pushing them back into place slowly. “Uh, well, to paraphrase, he’s been on the trail of an ex-Manticore geneticist by the name of Virginia Rossi. She was responsible for your barcodes apparently, and Alec got on to her through his contacts in the steelhead underground. He was going to try to make contact with her at a bar called Cherry Sundae. He said if I got this email, it meant he was in trouble.”
“Cherry Sundae,” Max stood up. “Got it.”
“Max wait! If that’s where Alec disappeared from…you shouldn’t go in alone, it could be dangerous.”
Max rolled her eyes. “Relax. I’m just gonna do a little recon. I’ll check in with you later.”
Max hurried away from the monitor before Logan could start to nag. She knew how to do her job; she had this. And besides, it could be dangerous. She couldn’t ask somebody else to take the risk.
Logan copied another snippet of information into the Virginia Rossi folder on his hard drive, read over it, and then frowned. He scrolled back up the very long document until he found the photograph of Dr Rossi that he’d liberated from the DMV database and pasted to the top of the file. His lips thinned and he swore under his breath. He rolled his chair across to one of his other computers and opened an Eyes Only file that he’d started a few months ago.
Matt Sung had called him about a set of thirteen-year-old identical twin girls who’d gone missing out of Chinatown, abducted, witnesses said, by armed men in a black town car. Logan had traced the car to Frankie Moretti, a small time mobster who specialized in the flesh trade. Frankie ran brothels and high class call girls and boys, as well as a lot of the local street trade. Rumor had it that he took special orders too. Logan had begun to do research on the guy, and then White had traced one of his Eyes Only hacks and Logan’d had to pack up as much as he could and get out of his condo, fast. He’d only just finished setting himself up in Joshua’s old place when the Jam Pony siege had occurred and the shit had hit the fan about Transgenics in a big way. Logan had barely had time to breathe lately, let alone follow up on his open cases.
The pile of facts that he’d managed to dig up on Virginia Rossi included the information that she and Frankie Moretti shared the same Godfather: Deputy Mayor Antonio De Luca (a corrupt official who had his own Eyes Only file). That could probably be explained away; Little Italy wasn’t that big and the Italian community had a tendency to choose community leaders to be Godparents. But in the file that Logan had started on Moretti, there was a surveillance photo that showed him having a breakfast meeting with an unidentified dark-haired woman; a woman who Logan had just recognized was Virginia Rossi. And Logan couldn’t think of a single good reason why a kingpin of the sex industry would be meeting up with a geneticist.
Logan turned to roll back to his other computer and nearly had a heart attack. Max was leaning against the wall, dressed from head-to-toe in black, her hands encased in black leather gloves.
“You look like shit,” she said. “Did you get any sleep last night?”
Logan ignored the question. “Knocking,” he said. “Knocking works. Or calling out when you come in. I swear I’m gonna put a bell on every damn one of you Transgenics.”
Max rolled her eyes. “I know where Virginia Rossi lives,” she said.
“Good,” said Logan, “because the address the DMV has on file for her is a vacant lot.”
“Well, I followed her home last night,” Max’s lips twisted. “Her and the twenty-year-old boy she took home with her. And the way she was all over him,” she laughed, short and brittle, “I guess we know how Alec ‘made contact’, huh?”
“I’m sorry,” Logan said. “I guess it’s not a lot of consolation knowing that he only did it for the good of his mission. Knowing that your boyfriend-”
Max made a small, wounded sound and Logan stopped.
“Logan,” she said, “I can’t…he’s not,” she took a deep breath. “We’re not together, Logan. We never were. I just…told you that so you’d back off. You and I…we can’t…this virus…I…” She stopped and stared at him hard. Logan wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for, some sense of how he was feeling perhaps? Well good luck with that, because he wasn’t sure how he was feeling himself.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “For the record, Alec said it was a dick move. He was gonna tell you the truth, that day when he delivered those parts you needed. But after he talked to you, he said that you thinking me and him were an item was probably the best strategy; that you loved me enough to let me go if you thought it would make me happy.”
“He’s a smart guy,” Logan said, voice in neutral.
And then his eyes widened. “He’s also an incredibly attractive guy. And Frankie Moretti takes special orders.”
Logan kept his eyes firmly fixed on the elevator panel that showed the floor numbers as they passed by them on their way up to Virginia’s penthouse.
Max and Alec weren’t together. But Max still didn’t want to date him. They’d discussed it at length over the course of the day and she’d told him that being with him was too exhausting, that she was terrified all the time that she’d accidentally get too close and kill him with the virus, that she was busy now as one of Terminal City’s leaders; that she couldn’t afford to pine after something she couldn’t have or get distracted by thoughts of a cure. We’re too vulnerable together, she told him. We’ll always be friends, but we can never be more. She’d said it with such finality. Logan was still reeling from the conversation. Alec had been right. It was far easier for him to believe that Max had moved on happily, then to accept this. But it still hurt that she’d lied to him; tried to manipulate him.
Max was still and silent beside him for twelve floors and then, “Incredibly attractive?”
Logan frowned. “What?”
“You said Alec was, and I quote, ‘incredibly attractive.’”
Logan swallowed. “Just stating a fact, Max. Manticore knew what they were doing when they mixed your genetic cocktails. Most of you-the x-series, not the anomalies, obviously-are well within the standard parameters for human physical attractiveness. I guess they saw it as another tool in your arsenal.”
Max thought back to the ‘special training’ Alec had mentioned right before he went missing and felt sick all over again.
“So,” Max cleared her throat. She wanted to keep this light-hearted, to pull Logan out of his funk. “When you say that Alec is ‘incredibly attractive’, you don’t mean that you find him incredibly attractive? Or is there something you’re not telling us, Logan Cale?”
Logan took his glasses off and pinched at the bridge of his nose, trying to decide how to frame his answer.
“Wow,” Max said after the moment had stretched on a little too long. “That’s a surprise. I didn’t know you swung that way.”
“I don’t,” Logan put his glasses back on and inclined his head. “Usually. But, I’ve, uh, done my share of experimenting and, well, Alec meets certain, uh, physical parameters-”
So much for light-hearted teasing. Max huffed and folded her arms across her chest. “English translation: You don’t normally get with guys, but if you do, Alec is your type.”
Logan wondered if the conversation could get any more awkward. “Physically,” he said. “I don’t think there’d be room in my bed for me, Alec and Alec’s ego.”
Max snorted. “You do know the ego’s all front, right?”
Before Logan could respond, the elevator pinged, the doors opened and Max was out like a shot.
“You sure this is the best way in?” she said brusquely when Logan caught up with her.
Back to business then. It was probably for the best. Logan nodded. “You saw the building blueprints,” he said. “It’s well-protected against burglary. The front door really is the best way in.”
He and Max were dressed in the uniforms of the building’s security company. They’d timed their arrival to coincide with the shift change and snuck in the front door while the real security people were distracted with the handover.
“Ready?”
Max nodded. Logan reached out and pressed the penthouse’s doorbell.
It took a moment, but then a disembodied voice responded: “Yes?”
“Evening Ma’am, Building Security.” Logan held up the security pass he’d cobbled together earlier that day. “We’ve had reports of a mutant on the loose in the building. Some kind of Lizard Man.”
There was a short pause and then a crackle. “I haven’t seen anything.”
“The creature was seen heading up this way. It can climb up walls, run across ceilings, and squeeze through small gaps, Ma’am. For your own safety, we need to give your apartment a quick sweep.”
There was an audible sigh and then the door clicked open.
Virginia Rossi was fully made up and smartly dressed in a black pants suit and heels. “Make it quick,” she said. “I’m heading out shortly.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Max and punched her in the face.
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