Chiron Academy

Chapter 23: butter and victory (Part 1)

Wyatt walked up the gravel patch that served as the driveway for the little house. He would normally have winced at the thick crunch the little rocks beneath him let out with every step; he generally tried not to make this much noise while approaching a house linked to a drug lord. However, he'd just spent the last hour watching the place, his eyes and ears pointed keenly at the little house, scanning for any hint of activity behind its sun-bleached closed blinds.

As far as he could tell, the place seemed pretty abandoned. The house itself looked fairly innocuous, a little one-story brick number sitting squat in the middle of a small dirt-filled yard. However, there were a few signs that let him feel safe at that point. The plywood sheets that were tacked over most of the windows did not instill the idea that the owner cared all that much about the state of the residence. More telling though was probably the way loose dirt had piled at the feet of the rolling garbage bin. That wouldn't have formed if the trash had been taken out to the street with any regularity.

Wyatt had gotten pretty used to staking places out. Superheroes were not the same as cops, you could rarely just walk up to people and ask them to talk with you. At least cops could arrest people if they said no. Wyatt couldn't even do that. Bad guys didn't have to say anything to you. For most of them, just the sight of a guy with wings flying in was enough to put them on edge.

In Wyatt's experience, saying 'Excuse me, but my name is Flyerman. Are you doing any crimes?' had never been a great way to make friends.

Resting his hand against the tan brick, he studied the closest window that wasn't covered with boards, in what Wyatt guess might be the kitchen. He thought maybe the curtains behind the glass had once been red, though the sun bleaching had reduced them to a pale yellow in the years since their hanging. He tried his best to peak in any cracks in the curtains but it was closed so completely so as to stop even a scrap of light or penetrating eyes from gleaning the goings-on inside.

He was pretty confident in his hypothesis that the place was abandoned, though he was under no illusions that that was merely an educated guess. It was extremely possible that the house merely used infrequently and that someone was inside at that very moment. This didn't sound like the worst option to Wyatt. Any ensuing fight would likely either yield information he was unlikely to get simply by looking at buildings. Barring that, even Palmer Valdez being tipped off about Wyatt poking around wouldn't be terrible. When people took defensive measures, the act of defending could tip you into locations they'd prefer you not to look into.

Then again, maybe it was just his weariness making him impatient. He had been out for almost four hours straight since he'd gotten the list from Lt. Davis, trying to wring every moment for maximum searching now that he something to turn his attention to. The initial adrenaline had faded some time ago, leaving him alone with his growing tiredness.

This was the third place he'd checked out from the list of locations with a tie to Palmer Valdez. The list itself had been bigger than he'd expected, pushing almost 20 different spots. He'd thought briefly of trying to rush through every single location tonight, he'd decided to go a bit more slowly and be thorough in his investigations.

So far he'd been to a split-level house right off of Main Street and what had looked like an ocean-themed open-court style motel off the highway. Wyatt couldn't pick up on any sort of theme to the locations, but it really did just seem like a lot of addresses with a vague tie to a certain man. It didn't cut into his hunger to pursue the case; he'd been flying around the town every night for almost a month without a target at all. Unfortunately, it also didn't do anything to curb his actual hunger.

His stomach had been grumbling since he'd left the baby blue seashelled motel and it showed no signs of letting up. His stomach seemed unwilling to let him forget that, in his haste to reach the police station before everyone left for the evening, he'd left the school right before dinner.