Fear Her Wrath II: Crucible of Glass

Chapter 27

Three weeks later.

"So it's a house party?"

Dad and I were sitting around the breakfast table. It was Friday, and the radio was recounting the results of last night's boxing match in a buzzy mumble. We had both finished our omelets, and I had decided for some reason to leave this awkward conversation to the very last minute.

"It's really not," I said unconvincingly. "I mean, it is a party, and I guess it's at a house, but, like... Anaya wants me to go. You trust Anaya, right?"

Dad took a long sip of tea. I was drumming my fingers against my mug, just to make this whole thing look as suspicious as possible.

"You're not going to accept a 'no,' are you?"

"No, I... look, if you really don't want me to go, I won't go. It was Anaya's idea anyways. I don't really care."

That last statement was a lie, which surprised me. Despite all the bitching and moaning I'd done when Anaya first proposed the idea, I was actually warming to the thought of hanging out with my old basketball friends again. Maybe I'd finally moped over Simon long enough and I was ready to put myself out there.

Okay, no. Not even close. Even thinking "I'm starting to get over Simon'' provoked a visceral reaction that made me want to throw up or punch something. Just because I wasn't crying myself to sleep every night did not mean I was okay. I still carried that horrible empty feeling around in my stomach. I still scrolled through our old text messages.

I still hadn't gone to visit him as a friend.

But I did want to give "normal" a try again. Now that everyone knew Simon was innocent—or something pretty close to it—life at school was almost tolerable, and maybe hanging out with my old basketball teammates would actually be fun. It was the kind of thing old me—the Maggie Hunt that existed before Icemane stabbed Anaya in the spine—would have wanted.

And... new Maggie kinda wanted it too.

"Home by 11 o'clock," said dad, obviously going against his better judgment. "At the latest. Any alcohol or drugs, you come home immediately. Understood?"

"Yes sir," I said, just barely restraining myself from breaking into a victory dance. "I'll send you a text every thirty minutes so you know I'm okay."

Dad chuckled. This had been our usual arrangement when I went out with friends back in middle school. He was letting me off too easy, and I wanted to show him that I wasn't just taking advantage of him.

Even though I kinda was.

"Are you running to school today?" he asked, glancing at his watch.

"Yes," I said, hastily checking my phone as I almost dropped my cup of tea. "Crap. I... Ugh, I need to get my stuff."

I winced a little as I got up from the table. I'd told Dad I twisted my ankle sparring with Ben at the fight gym, but actually I'd taken a wrong step tussling with the Mahoney Boys—the local Irish mob. I had been trying to get some information about the heist at First National Bank three days earlier—following a lead that, as usual, turned out to be a dead end.

Oh, right. I guess I have some recapping to do.

It was around 10 o'clock—before the lunchtime rush hit the largest bank in Marbrose City. They arrived in an inconspicuous black delivery truck—never the kind of vehicle you'd want to see parked outside of a bank, I would think—and they were at the teller windows before anyone realized what was happening. They blew the vault, rifled the security deposit boxes, and made off with several million in cash.

One of them shot a nun in the face, apparently in cold blood and for no other reason than because he could. Otherwise, no one was so much as bruised.

It took the police a really long time to get there. Somebody was broadcasting misinformation over the dispatch and jamming the police frequency downtown—somebody on the inside.

That was the first clue that these were the same people who stole our score from under us on the night of the train heist. The second clue was that they used the same stolen guns to hold up the bank.

The gang wore masks of translucent glass—harsh, angular, and strangely skull-like—to conceal their faces. For several of them, though, it was a pointless gesture. It wasn't that hard to get a positive ID.

The woman who blew the safe was Iris Baker. Well, I should say her left hand, which seemed to have a mind of its own, blew the safe. Baker was a former patient at Arvonia Psychiatric Hospital. She had been slated for transfer to Rothko once it opened—that is, until someone sprung her with bogus transfer papers. Her left hand—she called it Mordaunt—was usually kept restrained in a reinforced wooden box, since it had a bad habit of killing people of its own volition. Baker had been reduced to acting as the interpreter for her criminally-insane limb, which used American Sign Language when it felt like talking to the staff at the mental hospital, where it was apparently the star patient.

The security footage of Iris Baker was... weird. Lots of angry one-handed ASL. At one point, Baker apparently had second thoughts, and her left hand responded by beating her over the head with her own gun, cracking her mask in the process. But, when it came to blasting safes, they were an efficient team. That bank vault never stood a chance.

Louise and Lillian Caprice kept their guns on the hostages while the others emptied the vault. If Iris Baker's identity was easy to work out, the fact that the Caprice sisters wore masks was almost insulting—which other set of conjoined twins with bank robbing experience did they hope to be confused with? When last I'd seen them, the Caprice sisters were singing at the Midnight Rider, favored nightclub of both Montagnese made men and masked freaks. Someone must have offered them a pretty sweet deal to entice them out of retirement.

Speaking of retirement, the Triptych Gang—a trio of defrocked Catholic priests with an impressive portfolio of criminal experience—served as the muscle, hauling the bags full of cash out to the delivery truck. It was their vanity that gave them away, naturally enough. I probably wouldn't have recognized them at all if they hadn't customized their glass masks to fit their aliases—demonic horns for Inferno, a crown of thorns for Purgatorio, and a halo for Paradisio.

A little too theatrical? Sure. But I couldn't judge.

That leaves the leader of the gang and the guy who shot the nun. I'll start with the nun-killer. He served as lookout, pacing marble floors near the bank entrance and pointing his gun at anyone that moved. He would've been the least interesting member of the gang—probably just some local muscle brought in as a hired gun—if it weren't for the thing with the nun. It came out of nowhere. There was an elderly sister in line to make a deposit when the masked gang stormed in, and she hit the floor like everyone else. I don't think she so much as peeked for the entire six minutes they were in the bank, but as they were leaving, our unknown goon stopped with a bag of cash over his shoulder and ordered her to stand up. She complied—trembling from head to toe—probably assuming she was about to be taken hostage. Instead, he shot her in the forehead.

I'm sure you can imagine all the screaming.

Finally, there was Glassface. That was what the Evening Examiner called him, and they were first to the punch with their 2 o'clock extra. He was tall, well-built, and well-dressed. That was about all we could say about him. He conducted the heist in absolute silence, but he was obviously the one in charge, and the others deferred to his slightest gesture. He held his rifle with experienced confidence. So, ex-military. Or a mafioso. Whoever he was, he was thumbing his nose at the Montagnese family and the mayor.

Several caporegimes and city councilmen had their safety deposit boxes looted.

Once again, I found myself tracking a fellow enemy of the New Imperium. I complained about it to Corrigan, and Ellie, and Ben, and even Emery. But I was still out there—meeting my underworld contacts, roughing up informants, and generally making things difficult for the criminal underworld.

Nobody knew anything. I didn't like that. Glassface and his gang weren't just ordinary crooks. They had a plan—a long game. I needed to figure it out before the Montagneses did.

But... I was still going to that party.