“Doing your best doesn’t mean anything unless it’s good enough,” he replied. He sounded as if his voice was coming from the other side of a canyon.
Kirby emerged from the studio with a portfolio. He paused in front of the coffee table and then said to Josh, not ungently, “Do you want to see it?”
“I thought it was done,” Kelsey said. “There were preview pages up on the internet.”
“They only had a few pages of the book at the office, and it’s all early draft stuff anyway. They sent it back; wanted me to do some more work on them. Make it…” He hesitated, as if afraid to upset Josh, and then shrugged. “Make it more graphic.”
“Graphic?” Josh echoed.
“Gorier,” said Kelsey. “He means gorier. Right?”
“Like I said, welcome to the modern age of comic books. Here.”
He set the large portfolio down in front of Josh, opened the black case so that the first page of the stack was visible, and gestured toward it. “There. Go ahead. Look through it if you want.”
At first Josh didn’t even want to touch it, but then his curiosity got the better of him. Slowly, deliberately, he read each art board and then moved it aside and started on the next one.
“See, sport?” said Kirby. “You may think that there’s some sort of…magical connection between you and Mascot. But that’s all it is, right there. Pencil and ink on bristol board. And I did it all myself, without a Magic 8-Ball or a fortune-teller. There is such a thing as coincidence, you know.”
Josh continued to say nothing. Finally he got to the part that showed Mascot plummeting to his death from the bridge. Kelsey waited for him to react, to flinch, maybe even puke. He didn’t do anything. It was like someone had flipped a light switch in his head and his personality had gone dark.
And then he said something very, very softly. “I thought,” Josh said, speaking with effort, “that maybe it would turn out that Captain Major was Mascot’s father. I wanted to believe that.”
“Why?” asked Kirby, puzzled.
“Because…” He restacked the pages carefully and zippered up the portfolio. “I guess because…because I figured that Mascot’s life was so much like my own, and if Captain Major was Mascot’s father, then maybe my own dad…” Tears started to roll down his face, and he wiped them away with his sleeve. “Maybe my own dad wasn’t just some rotten creep who ditched Mom and me, but maybe instead he was some big hero who was out doing amazing things. And maybe he might come back for me someday and train me to be just like him instead of…instead of what I am.”
There were a lot of things that Stan Kirby could have said at that moment that might have made Josh feel better. But Stan Kirby was a lonely man who long ago had been hurt by someone he loved and had never really gotten over it. Which is why all he could think of to say to Josh was “Grow up, sport.”
There was a knock at the door. “Wait here,” said Kirby. “If it’s another pizza, I’m gonna make the delivery kid wear it.”
Sheriff Tom Harrelson stood before Stan Kirby’s front door with his thumbs hitched into his belt. Zack Markus and Doris Miller were standing on either side of him.
“I’m doing this against my better judgment,” Harrelson warned them. “I was hoping not to get Mr. Kirby worked up over this.”
“He’s producing a comic book that got my son so upset, he ran away from home,” Doris Miller said. “I think Mr. Kirby is entitled to get just as worked up as any of us.”
“Yeah?” came from the other side of the door.
“Mr. Kirby, it’s Sheriff Harrelson. Mind if I come in? We have a bit of a situation.”
“Yeah? I bet I know what it is.”
The door swung open and Stan Kirby squinted in the late-afternoon sunlight. He glanced right and left and said, “Lemme guess: You’re their parents.”
Doris looked at the sheriff. “I thought you said he didn’t know.”
“They’re in here.”
“In there?” Harrelson couldn’t believe it. “How in the world did they do that?”
“I dunno. I looked up and there they were.”
“Well, they’ve been giving my entire department fits. May we come in?”
Kirby stepped aside and gestured for them to enter.
“Dad?”
It was Kelsey’s voice, and Zack almost sagged in relief the moment he heard it. It was coming from just ahead, in the living room, and sure enough, there was Kelsey, and there was the tall kid who had helped them. Kelsey looked astounded and afraid, and the tall kid just looked uncertain, and…
“Where’s the boy?” Harrelson said, his gaze darting around the room.
“He’s right over—” Kelsey started to reply, and she turned and pointed behind her.
There was no sign of Josh. There was, however, the banging of the back door, as if someone had just darted through it.
“Aw, crap,” said Kirby.
“You let him get away?!” Doris cried out.
“I didn’t let him do anything, lady!” Kirby snapped back. “He just—”
“Oh my gosh,” said Kelsey, and she was looking at the empty coffee table. “The next issue of Captain Major. It’s gone. Josh took the pages.”
CHAPTER 16
THE LAST STAND
He has them. Mascot has the plans: the supersecret plans that will prove beyond a doubt that Captain Major has been framed. The plans that further describe the enemy’s endgame, designed to result in the final, ultimate, for-all-time death of Captain Major and his faithful sidekick, Mascot.
Incredible that they were sitting there, right under Captain Major’s nose. Only one explanation for it: The Captain has himself been brainwashed by the enemy. Mascot is the only person thinking clearly in the whole town. It’s up to him to do what must be done…as soon as he can figure out what that might be.
Fortunate for him that his trusty Mascotcycle is nearby. It’s waiting there, gleaming and ready for him. He leaps astride it, guns it, and tears away from the scene.
“Daaaaaaad!” cried Bobby Flannagan, who lived two doors down from Stan Kirby. He ran into the den, gesturing wildly, causing his father to knock over a house of cards he’d been meticulously stacking.
“What is it?” demanded his father, picking up the cards.
“Some kid just ran up outa nowhere and stole my bike right outa the backyard!”
The cards forgotten, his father ran to the front door and threw it open just in time to see some kid hurtle away down the driveway on his son’s bike. “Get back here, you little thief!” he shouted. “Helllp! Police!”
There was the howl of a siren. A second later a blue sedan with a flashing police light sitting atop it roared in pursuit of the cyclist.
“Wow. That was fast,” muttered Bobby’s dad.
Stan Kirby and Paul were in the backseat of the sheriff’s car, while Doris and Zack were in Zack’s car with Kelsey. Tom Harrelson, having placed a siren atop the car, was barking alerts into his radio, letting every unit in the area know that he was in pursuit of the runaway kid who had been raising so much havoc in their town.
Josh didn’t give them a backward glance. He had the portfolio case slung over his back and was pedaling as fast as he could go. He whipped around a corner. There were teenagers in the street playing stickball. They saw him coming and stepped aside, and as they did so, Josh yelled, “The cops are chasing me and I didn’t do anything wrong!”
Seconds later, when the pursuing car zipped around the corner, the kids were standing right there, knocking the ball around. They looked up blandly as if they were unaware that a police car was coming and did nothing to get out of the way.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” shouted Harrelson. He turned hard to the right, and the car veered away from the kids and went up on the curb. The right wheels rode up for a moment and then thudded down as he went past the teens, who were obviously snickering. Zack Markus’s car followed right behind him.
Harrelson knew who every one of those kids?
?? parents were and made a mental note to have a talk with them.
Mascot hurtles into the business district. There’s more traffic. He has to be careful. This is getting tight.
There’s an intersection just up ahead. The light is red for him. Two large trucks, one transporting beer, the other soda, are entering the intersection from either direction.
The wail of the police siren behind him causes the two trucks to come to a halt, which causes the traffic behind them to come to a halt, too.
There is a gap about a foot wide between the two facing trucks.
Mascot never slows. He hears a distant, alarmed shriek that remarkably rises above the siren—a woman’s—and then he darts right between the two metal behemoths. He is through to the other side and is still moving, even as the police car slows to a halt. “Move the trucks!” a voice, obviously his pursuer’s, shouts over a built-in loudspeaker. “Back them up, move them forward, whatever, but get out of the way!”
Mascot isn’t waiting around.
He’s barreling down the street, putting more distance between himself and the cop car with every passing second…
…and suddenly another one zips out of a side street, right in his path.
Mascot angles around it quickly, almost too quickly. His bike skids. He nearly tumbles off, his foot actually touching the ground, and then he rights himself and keeps going. The police car is after him.
At the last second, Mascot sees an alley between two buildings off to his right. He hangs a sharp turn that again almost causes him to be thrown from his cycle, but he catches his balance and shoots down the alley. It’s too narrow for the cop car.
He practically leaps out onto the street—and for crying out loud, there’s the first car that was pursuing him. How did it get here so fast? They must be coordinating their attack. Perhaps Misstermind is controlling them using her telepathy.
He angles hard to the left and keeps pedaling. He has never moved this quickly in his life. The car is closing in. The sound of the sirens is deafening.
He sees a barbershop with the door sitting wide open. Quickly Mascot heads toward it, hurtling right into the barbershop. The barber is cutting someone’s hair, and he lets out a startled yell. Mascot maneuvers through the barbershop and out the back door. It opens onto a small, narrow alley. He hears the howling of the siren in the distance, but that doesn’t slow him. He speeds down the alley, and it opens out onto a back street.
And another police car seems to materialize out of nowhere.
It’s coming from behind him, moving fast, and Mascot’s legs are a blur, he’s pedaling so fast.
Now there’s a string of cars pursuing him, and he’s starting to get tired. His breath is flagging in his chest, and sweat is dripping from his forehead into his eyes, blurring his vision.
He hears the sound of traffic, lots of it. It’s coming from just down the street. Maybe, if there’s a traffic tie-up, he can quickly weave his way between the standing vehicles and lose the pursuers that way.
He cuts hard to the right, heading in the direction of the noise. He’s rewarded with the sounds of screeching tires behind him as the cars in pursuit try to course correct. It takes them a moment for them to do so, and that’s all the time he needs to put some more distance between himself and them.
The road ahead has narrowed to two lanes. He skids to a halt.
Dead ahead of him: A bridge. More specifically, a traffic overpass, built to provide access over the multilane Hutchinson River Parkway. Six busy lanes of traffic are speeding past in either direction far below. The parkway itself is accessible if one is willing to slide down the steep grass-covered embankment that leads to it…but who in his right mind would want to?
Mascot’s blood freezes, but only for a moment. Then he guns the cycle forward. This is his way out. He speeds toward the overpass as fast as he can go. There is a narrow sidewalk on either side of the overpass for pedestrians, but at the moment there are no cars coming in the opposite direction. So he stays in the street, practically flying.
The way in front of him is clear. There is an intersection on the other side of the bridge. If he can get to that, he can—
A police car, lights flashing, whips around the corner from the intersection ahead of him. It roars forward, and then the cop driving it cuts the steering wheel hard. The back end of the cop car fishtails, and the car skids to a halt lengthwise across the bridge, blocking any possible exit.
Mascot jams on the handbrakes, stopping so hard that he almost causes the back wheel to flip over. He looks right, left, desperately trying to see a means of going forward. There’s nothing. He jumps the cycle in a 180-degree turn, ready to head back the way he came.
Too late. Cop cars there as well.
He’s trapped.
On the bridge.
Destiny is calling him, but he swears he will not go down without a fight.
Stan Kirby let out a low whistle of amazement when he saw where Josh had wound up making his last stand. “Holy cow,” he muttered, peering through the front windshield of the sheriff’s car. “I’m starting to wonder if maybe the kid’s onto something.”
Sheriff Tom Harrelson wasn’t listening. Instead he was clambering out of the car, and he was hauling an electronic megaphone out from under the front seat. Paul got out of the backseat and then turned to help Kirby out.
Behind them Zack’s car rolled to a halt as well. Doris Miller climbed right out of the convertible, which still had its top down, and she was screaming Josh’s name. She looked frantic, out of her mind with worry.
“Everybody stay back!” shouted Sheriff Harrelson. “Everybody!”
Josh was standing in the middle of the bridge. He had unslung the portfolio from his back, and he was unzipping it. Despite the dire straits of the situation, he didn’t appear the least bit fazed by any of it. Of everybody there, he was the calmest, which was pretty impressive considering—as far as Josh was concerned—he was fighting for his life.
All the various police officers and deputies did as they were told. Harrelson brought his megaphone up and called, “Josh! Josh Miller! This is Sheriff Harrelson.”
“Hey, Sheriff,” Josh called back. He sounded calm. On the other hand, Harrelson was accustomed to gauging someone’s true state of mind from his eyes. Even from this distance he could see Josh’s eyes, darting around frantically. That spoke far more loudly to the sheriff than Josh’s voice. It told him that the boy was on the edge of panicking.
“Josh, how about you come over here and we can talk all this out. Your mother’s pretty worried about you.”
“I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry you’re worried, Ma,” he called so that his voice carried to her. “But I’m worried about me, too! I’m worried that if this comic gets published—”
“I know, Josh!” Doris called back to him. “You think you’re going to die, too! But you won’t, honey! I swear!”
“I sure won’t!” Josh replied. “Stay where you are!” He shouted that when he saw the sheriff and his mother starting to approach. And he ran to the edge of the bridge, leaning against the handrail. His mother cried out in fear but she stopped moving, as did the sheriff. Holding the sides of the portfolio tightly, he held it out over the Hutchinson River Parkway. “If anybody comes any closer, the comic book gets it!”
The sheriff lowered his megaphone and considered the situation. “Okay…as far as threats go, that’s a new one. At least he’s not threatening to jump.”
“Of course he’s not threatening to jump!” Stan Kirby said in irritation, losing patience with Harrelson. “The whole point is that he feels like he’s fighting for his life. Why would someone throw himself off a bridge if he’d just gone to all this trouble to keep living?” Without waiting for Harrelson to frame a reply, Kirby stuck out his hand and said, “Give me that thing.”
Harrelson hesitated but then handed Kirby the megaphone. Kirby brought it up to his mouth and pressed the talk button. “What’re you planning on doing th
ere, sport?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kirby,” Josh said. He kept the portfolio dangling, partly unzipped, over the bridge. “I have to do this….”
These plans for detonating every nuclear missile in America’s arsenal cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands….
“No, sport, you really don’t.”
“If this comic book gets printed, I’m done!” Josh told him with conviction. “And if you come toward me, then I…I swear I’ll dump it! I swear….”
If the villains get their hands on the formula in these documents, they’ll unleash a virus that will annihilate every superhero in the world….
“Well, sport,” Kirby said slowly, “I don’t think you really want to do that.”
“Of course I do! You think I went through all this, came this far…”
It has to be done and done now, because if the villains get their hands on this vital information, it will give them all the back-door codes to every business computer in the world and they can bring the entire financial market crashing to…
“I think,” Kirby told him, “that if what you were planning to do was destroy the art…then you would have done it. There’s no reason for you to try to keep us away from you by threatening to trash the artwork. Not if you really want to trash it. We’re too far away from you: You could just dump it all down below and let cars run over it and destroy it all, and your job is done, right? Except…here’s the thing…you don’t really want to do that. Because coming up here and trying to get me to change my mind, well, that’s one thing. But stealing another man’s property, destroying it…that’s something else again. That’s not what heroes do, is it, Josh?” He paused and then said, “Is it…Mascot?”
Josh hesitated. “I…”
“You know the answer,” Kirby said gently. “You know that’s what the bad guys do. Don’t you get it? If you act like one of the bad guys, then no one can tell you apart from the bad guys.”