The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

I picked their business cards out of their wallets, and the driver’s licenses of the two thugs driving the truck. They never saw us, and the cameras had been discretely turned off ahead of time, imagine that.

It had a stick, but it was just a normal panel truck, and I drove it up and out onto the roads. Pete closed the loading door behind us, hopped onto the back of it, and zipped into the cabin.

“So, where are you going now?”

“The Baxter Building.”

“You actually know the Fantastic Four, too?”

I punched in a number on my Vaccine. “You know that Johnny Storm has made sure to meet every single female superhero in New York, right?”

“Ah, that flamebrain...” Peter mumbled enviously.

A grumbling voice picked up on the other end. “Who in the name a’ Sam Hill is calling me at this time of night? Don’t you know I need my beauty sleep!?”

“Mr. Grimm, you only sleep an hour a night, so wake up, you’ve got some work to do. You probably want to get Dr. Richards up, too.”

“Dynamo? What’s going on?” His anger evaporated as rapidly as it had been conjured.

“One of the lawyers working for Alderstein and Associates was murdered tonight. By the looks of it, it was supposed to be a gas boiler fake explosion, accentuated with some thermite to really take out a good chunk of the building and cover up what was done.

“I put out the fire easily, and wouldn’t you know it, some Hand ninjas decided to investigate me and Spider-Man saving the day.”

“Hand ninjas?” Ben repeated, ah, grimly. “Working for?”

“In New York, that would be Wilson Fisk again, Mr. Grimm.”

“Huh. Keep goin’. I’m getting Stretch.”

“Spidey and I zipped off to the lawyer’s offices to see if there was anything interesting going on. A couple of his legal beagle associates arrived soon after us, took a bunch of his files, some other files from the main cabinets, trucked them all downstairs, and loaded them into a truck driven by some of your fellow Yancy Street graduates.”

“And a swell bunch o’ guys they is,” he growled knowingly.

“Said truck is now on the way to the Baxter Building.” There was a loud beeping from the outside, and I shouted, “Hey, asshole! Learn how to drive!” The car squeezing past us nearly went off the road when he heard my Voice. “Yeah, keep going, numbnuts! I got your plates, and let’s see if you have any air in your tires in the morning!” I shouted at him.

If anything, the Buick headed off even faster.

“Sunday drivers. Probably drunk off his damn arse.”

Ben was laughing on the other end of the phone. “It’s pretty late on a Friday night, Dyna.” I glanced at Peter, who suddenly looked nervous at the time.

“I’m going to pull into the loading dock, and if you could relieve this poor overworked vehicle of its load, I’d be obliged. Is Dr. Richards listening?”

“He is.”

“There were accounting irregularities coming in from Rout Iron on the royalties owed you for valve designs, a reduction in the checks despite inventory records indicating an increase in shipping and a new contract with Whirlpool.” I let that hang for a moment. “Mr. Grimm, you don’t kill a tax lawyer for finding an accounting error. He had to go out and get those inventory records, so I’ve a feeling he stumbled onto something very big he was not supposed to, and paid for it.”

“What level of shorting did you observe for Rout Iron?” Dr. Richard’s voice came through.

“Thirty percent, sir.”

“That account is only about nine thousand a month, so we’re talking about three thousand a month or so. Multiplied by how long it has been going on...”

“And how many other accounts your accountants have been covering up, sir.”

There was silence for a moment on the other end. “Stretch is gonna make some calls, Dyna. I’ll meetcha down at the dock. What are you gonna do with the truck?”

“I figure if it gets parked with open doors and the keys are in the ignition anywhere in Jersey, it’s just gonna disappear.”

“Kids can use the money, sure. Webhead still there?”

“He’s out late on a Friday night, but yeah.” Grimm chuckled despite himself as I handed the phone over.

“Hello, Mr. Grimm?” Spidey asked as he took the phone.

“I’m gonna tell Johnny all about your Friday night date with Dynamo, don’t you worry, kid!”

“You’re too kind, Mr. Grimm!” Peter grinned under his mask.

-------

“Soooo... radioactive spider bite, eh?” I had to say as we were driving along.

“Yeah. I know, sounds so lame, now.” He laughed at himself. “You?”

“Woke up inside a cryogenic tube with them.”

“What? No way! When were you born?” he gasped.

“I’m not telling you that, or you’ll start making grandmother jokes or something.”

“I totally would!” he agreed promptly. “You’ve got a weird set of electrical powers, nothing like Electro...”

“He’s an electrokinetic, I’m not. I’m a dynamo; I just have a lot of juice and I can roughly discharge it. Very little control of it. Lots of speed, reflexes, precise movement, enhanced strength... it’s a pretty sweet mix of stuff, so I can’t complain, and it did get me out of that tube alive.”

“You said you were an Alchemist,” he remembered pointedly.

“‘Superhero’ is not something you put down for your apprenticeship program where I’m from.” Wizard, now...

“Are you good at it? It sounds kinda like chemistry, only weirder...”

“I’ve probably got the equivalent of multiple doctorates in the disciplines related to it.” He blinked behind his mask at me in shock. “What? Surprised girls can be smart?”

“I, uh, no! I just don’t usually talk to genius girls my own age...”

“Or any age, it sounds like.”

“Do you, like, go to school?” he asked hesitantly.

“No. Primary schooling is a lowest common denominator thing that legally stops at grade eight if you can provide proof of primary education and need for entering the work force. My financial needs do not allow me to spend eight to ten hours a day regurgitating memorized knowledge edited and judged best for me by people who do not share my level of intellect or moral code. Ergo, I do not go to school, I work, and alchemy can provide a very good income, given its demands, rarity, and usefulness.”

“I would really love to be able to do that,” he sighed. “I’m-I’m kinda smart, too.”

“That a boast or a fact? Smarts are relative.”

He pulled up his sleeves to reveal his webshooters. “I invented these and the web fluid myself!” he puffed up.

Not taking my eyes off the road, I moved my hand over, and to his surprise ghosted an electrical charge over his skin and the device. “Decent engineering, good tolerances, the spinnerets are ingenious, and whatever that webfluid is was inspired. Good work. You actually invented and built all of it?”

“Well, it was a lot easier after I got my powers,” he admitted, clearly boosted by the compliment for his brains. “Steadier hands, and I think much faster now, so I was able to work through a lot of the math and chemical configurations...”

“You don’t just spin up elastic and adhesive properties like that out of thin air, webhead,” I admonished him. “You basically just skipped years of chemical testing and mixing and went straight to desired end product. That’s Weird Scientist level instincts. Congrats, you’re a brain!”

“Thanks! Feels so weird for people to actually call me that and not mean it as an insult...” he sighed.

“Meh. Your brain is far more dangerous than your fists, if you put it to work properly. After all, it tells your fists what to do. Far more rewarding to most people. In the days of our ancestors, yeah, a strong back and average intelligence was more useful than brains and average strength most of the time. That was before all those brains and knowledge built up over thousands of years and got us to where we are now.

“The careers open to the smart vastly outnumber those open to the strong, and they generally pay more. Now, the strong people don’t like that, and they will pick on the brains... right up until they have to work for them.”

He half-laughed at me. “Thanks for saying that. Now I just have to find a way to get out of school and into someplace I can use my brains...”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something, given time.” The Baxter Building was just ahead, gleaming there along the East River with the promise of the future.

----------------

I pulled into the empty Baxter Building lot, trundled the panel truck around the back, and backed it in smoothly into the loading dock, which was open with a big orange fellow in a stocking cap and oversized PJ’s standing there, cool as a cucumber.

He was tossing the back open as I put it in park, not bothering to turn off the motor. Peter swarmed out of the truck to the back, arriving just in time to catch the first box of stuff. “On the pallet, webhead,” Ben called, heaving the second one out before Peter placed the first.

Spidey juggled the boxes smoothly, setting them down and stacking them faster than they could be tossed to him by the moving boulder that was the Rock of the Fantastic Four.

“Hey, Mick!” I said after dialing a certain number at the front of the truck.

“Dealer! To what do I owe this late-night pleasure?” he answered eagerly.

“I’ve a truck here that belongs to someone in Fisk’s organization. It absolutely needs to disappear with no clues.”

“Me cousin owns a scrapyard. I’ll head over there and put it in the crusher meself.” He rattled off the address, and I zipped through my mental map of Jersey.

“Be there shortly.” I skimmed along the side of the truck with one hand and one foot as the last of the boxes came sailing out and were deposited smoothly.

Hard footsteps echoed as Ben Grimm walked out, turned, and brought the door down. “Good to go, Dynamo!” he said.

“Thank you, Mr. Grimm! Spidey, we didn’t get to beat up any super-villains tonight, but nice meeting you!”

“If the girls were around, we probably would have had to do a superhero fight, just to get the adrenaline going!” he reasoned. “I’m sure some supervillain will show up for us to do a team-up against soon!”

“Okay, I’m driving this thing off to Jersey to get lost. Have a good night!” I headed back for the door, jumped in, and put it in gear.

----------

“Johnny is gonna be so envious, webhead,” Ben Grimm chortled as he moved a pallet truck under the boxes. “He’s been tryin’ ta get Dynamo to go out with him since he met her. Total fox there, and you beat him to the team-up!”

“A team-up in a box!” Peter agreed despite himself. “Okay, I’m gonna get home. My aunt and uncle get worried if I stay out too late, even in this business.”

“Be worse if they weren’t worried,” Ben pointed out, waving him off. “Night, Spidey!”

“Night, Mr. Grimm!” He bounded out the door, up the side of the building, and was off and swinging.

Ben Grimm looked at the boxes of incriminating material, wondering exactly what they were going to find out. They weren’t hurting for money, but if a man was killed over this, the amount of money at stake wasn’t small.

Not small amounts of THEIR money. How long had they been doing business with Alderstein? The feeling of having a knife stuck in his back, bleeding them and treating them as oblivious suckers, stuck in his craw.

He had the feeling this matter was going to get bigger pretty quick, in all the quiet, rumbling ways.

------------

I changed Masks and outfits halfway there, depositing my Bites in my Masspack and going to the croupier’s outfit. I went across the George Washington Bridge with the thin late-night traffic, thinking.

I pulled into the scrapyard about twenty minutes later, and the Mick closed the gates behind me as I rumbled inside. He ran past me as I paused, pointing at the compactor ahead, and I crept the truck up alongside.

“Mick!” I called out to him before he fired the contraption up. All business, he paused and turned at my words. “I had a thought.”

“What kind of thought, my lovely Dealer?” he asked with his flair for the dramatic.

I pointed at the truck. “We can destroy this and make it go away, creating a mystery. Or, we could make a HELL of a lot of trouble for someone who totally earned it by giving this to them.” I lifted both of my hands. “It’s a big neighborhood, and I don’t know the people. What would you like to do?”

He regarded me thoughtfully, eyes flicking back and forth between me and the old panel truck. “How hot are we talking?”

“At a guess? Eight, maybe nine figures.”

His expression got real serious, real fast. “Ye’re not pulling me leg now, are ye?”

“You know the name Alderstein and Associates?” He thought it over, and shook his head. “They’re one of the very big private accounting firms in New York. Got their own building and everything.”

“Puffed-up top cats, aye? And so?”

“I think they work for Wilson Fisk, and are skimming off their clients. One of those clients is the Fantastic Four.”

“Jesus H Christ and Mary his fucking Mother,” he swore, staring at me. “Even Fisk wouldn’t dare that, unless there’s a lot of money ta be made.”

“I agree.”

He looked away from me, thinking. “Okay, ye’ve not spoken with The Mountain about this, aye?” he asked.

“I’ll tell him when I get home. It’s been a busy night.”

He nodded once. “And ye’ve magic and whatnot, right?”

“Yes?”

“Then the play here isn’t who to get the Kingpin angry at. Nah, what ye want t’ do is get everyone else mad at the Kingpin. There’s the money!”

He was right. Alderstein couldn’t have restricted themselves to the FF. Even relying on their whitebread reputation so the only recourse would be legal means, they wouldn’t be able to resist doing the same to other companies. Furthermore, if they were being directed to do this, they’d be directed to work for other companies of Fisk’s for equally white-collar things, like tax fraud.

The Mick took a gander at the sky. “I dunno how much time ye’ve got, Dealer fine, but if you can get ahold of the client list of that company, I absolutely guarantee you there is a phenomenal amount of money to be made, and Mr. Hill be a perfect delivery mechanism for doing so.”

I considered that, and flicked out two business cards and two driver’s licenses. “I left these folks on the loading dock at the Alderstein building. Might they come in useful? They should still be unconscious there.”

He smiled widely. “They should indeed!” he agreed. “Now, give your boss a call and ask him how he wants to play this. I’ll not breathe a word without his say.”

I glanced at the truck. “Drive it out back and throw a tarp over it. I’ll call you soon.” I flicked up a Card, and a Seven of Clubs appeared, sweeping over me and transporting me away.

Misters Dridenweitz, Cragston, Martoni, and Isegivi were going to have some rotten days, and a spell or two to open up the sleeping minds of the first two should either get me the information I needed, or where to find it.

And some drunk driving a car whose license plate I could totally lock onto was going to wake up with all his tires deflated, damned if he wasn’t!