Chapter Two- Max's Past and A Trip To Owen's
Chapter Two- Max's Past and A Trip To Owen's
The next day Max boarded a private charter jet for Las Vegas Nevada. He had spent the previous day after his and Charlize’s conversation resting and getting ready for his trip. Charlize had collected Maya and taken Max’s other car, a silver Chevy Impala out on a shopping spree with the ten thousand dollars cash contained in the white business envelope. His instructions were simple; get a decent wardrobe for each of you. Get a couple good quality cell phones and a decent laptop and generally spoil yourselves a little. Be home by supper time.
A car was waiting for Max at the airport. It took him directly to the Mandalay Bay where the staff took him under their wing for the duration of his stay. Max was a known man at the casino. He came in a few times a year, played roulette and craps but mostly high-stakes poker. He treated the staff with universal and unfailing courtesy and in one memorable instance had torn a very wide and public strip off another high roller who didn’t do the same. The fact that he invariably won more than he lost didn’t bother anyone because it helped foster the get-rich-for-free myth upon which Vegas was built. When word got out about the recent series of calamities to strike his family everyone from the parking valets to the operations manager went out of their way to express their sympathy.
Like many habitual gamblers Max had a routine he liked to follow when visiting a casino. After a quick nap in his westward-facing room with a balcony he stripped, showered and changed into completely fresh clothes. Normally a guest of his wealth and prestige could expect the room to come with hot and cold running indentured companionship. Guest services had enquired about his preferences in that regard exactly once. Max’s rather terse response had been that his preference was to have as little as possible to do with the state sanctioned slave trade and not to be insulted with offers to commit legal rape. It was the one and only time he was less than perfectly polite to the staff. He made up for it later by apologizing and placing a bet for the insulted staff member that netted them the equivalent of six months pay. The insulted employee forgave him and guest services never broached the subject again.
A black silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up, black cotton pants and mirror-shined black dress shoes made up Max’s new outfit. It was his signature look when he played. He left everything but his wallet, house keys and room key behind and went down to loot the tables.
A lot of gamblers have a system or a strategy and Max was no different. He cheated. He felt a little bad about ripping off a place like the Mandalay. The staff were genuinely nice people and he liked most of them. But he had been hemorrhaging cash and needed to fill the hole in his bank account. The knack he had spoken to Charlize about was actually a series of extra-normal abilities he had started developing at the age of six years old.
One day his grandfather, Big Max had stopped by the house with a box of comic books. Little Max had learned to read early and dove into the collection hungrily. A lot of the books were, to his mind, garbage. Stupid silly stories about kids in funny looking old cars or ghosts that were the exact opposite of scary.
The superhero books were another matter entirely. Like many boys his age Little Max spent hours pretending to be Batman or Superman or other characters. The ones that really held his attention were the books about people who got their special abilities simply by being born different. This made perfect sense to Max. Even a six year old knows that some people are just naturally faster or stronger or smarter than others. So it wasn’t that big a leap for him to think it was possible to do some of the things in the comics.
After several abortive attempts to turn into metal, shoot lasers from his eyes and fly-his mother nearly had a coronary when she caught him on the roof with a pair of white construction paper wings- Max decided to try doing what a certain very pretty red haired lady in the comics could do. She could move things just by thinking about it. In the comics the lady was always throwing around cars and tanks and other big objects so that seemed the logical place to start.
A few days later his father caught him trying to think the family station wagon into the air. He listened to Max’s explanation of what he was doing with a loving father’s patience and good humor. Then he gave the boy a quarter, suggesting that odds were the lady in the comics had started off small and Max should do the same.
Ten years later Max had progressed well past the point of moving a quarter. It wasn’t easy and it didn’t happen overnight. But it did happen. His first successes were minimal ones in the grand scheme of things; an inch or two of wobbly levitation for a few seconds followed by a splitting headache or bloody nose. Gradually, with practice Max’s abilities grew. In time he could manipulate most everyday items as well without touching them as the average person could using their hands.
Max and Melissa’s parents died in a plane wreck when the twins were ten years old. After the funeral the twins moved in with Big Max until it was time to strike out on their own. One day not long after they came to stay with Big Max the jack slipped while he was working on his truck, pinning the old man under the vehicle. Little Max tried to use the jack at first but the damned thing was broken. In desperation he tried the only other tool he could think of; his mind. The resulting mental heave the boy gave the vehicle flipped it onto its back and gave Max a two-day migraine.
After recovering from his initial shock Max’s grandfather took the news that his grandson was telekinetic rather well. Righting the truck and concocting a cover story were a challenge but they managed it. The next order of business was a stiff drink for Big Max and glass of chocolate milk for Little Max while they talked about the boy’s ability. This would eventually grow into abilities, plural.
As he developed more confidence with his TK Max spent more and more time exploring what else he could do. He discovered he could see in ways most people couldn’t. When he concentrated the right way he could see as well in a pitch black room as most people could with the lights on low. Concentrate another way and he could actually see through things. This had provided endless entertainment around girl’s bath and locker rooms until the time he accidentally got a look at Melissa taking a pee at school. The shame and disgust of breaching his sister’s privacy like that nailed the lid shut on his peeping Tom days. It didn’t stop him from looking into other things of course. He just quit using the ability to see people naked.
Telepathy had come early on. He had always shared a bond with Mel and the two often knew what each other was thinking. Max speculated it was simply an outgrowth of that. With a little focus he could access other people’s thoughts and memories. Physical contact made it easier but anyone he could see within fifty feet was an open book if he chose. Over the years this range would expand to one hundred yards for most of his powers.
Flight and the ability to put a force field around himself were two of Max’s favorite things. Big Max urged caution when using the first. If the wrong people noticed him he’d wind up on a dissecting table in a lab somewhere. Max had already thought of that and had shown more discretion than most young men his age probably would have. Still, the temptation was hard to resist and from time to time he would go tearing off into the sky.
Usually he went at night and aimed himself out across the lake where the odds of being spotted were slimmer but that had its own risks. He almost drowned one time when he got tired out and barely made it to within swimming distance of the shore before crapping out entirely. Another time he got so turned around he ended up a hundred miles south of the city and had to call his grandfather. Big Max’s response had been simple; he told the boy there was a ticket waiting for him at a Grey Hound station ten miles away and that he should spend the trip home contemplating all possible meanings of the phrase “grounded for a week”. Oh and next time he did something so stupid he could get himself out of it.
Testing out his force field had been trickier. Big Max obviously had no desire to hurt his grandson. He loved the boy deeply and thought his new talents were a gift to be nurtured. They finally came up with a plan. Big Max got his hands on a piece of two inch thick sheet steel a bit taller and wider than Little Max. After trimming it with a cutting torch they loaded it into the truck and took a trip up north to a fifty acre patch of land the family had owned since Big Max was a boy.Grandfather and grandson took the metal slab out into the woods along with a small arsenal of weapons. A crowbar, baseball bat, bow and arrow, wrist rocket and numerous guns were in the collection. Moving everything was a breeze . They piled the hardware onto the steel and Little Max floated everything out to a secluded corner of the property.
Over the course of the next two days Big Max threw everything he had at the metal slab while his grandson stood behind it trying to shield it. They discovered that most melee weapons couldn’t get anywhere near Max and most civilian firearms didn’t fare much better. Until he got tired everything from a .22 all the way up to a .12 gauge shotgun at point blank range just glanced off. Max felt the impact of the projectiles like punches to whatever part of his body was covered . It hurt and wore him down but at least he wasn’t injured or dead.
It didn’t take Max long to discover that he could reach out and telekinetically swat incoming rounds out of the way before they ever reached his force field. He was a smart kid and forever exploring new ways to use his powers. Along the way he discovered that he got a sensation not unlike a mild electrical surge a few seconds before he was about to come under attack . This helped Max out numerous times when dealing with his peers. He was an inveterate smartass and no respecter of the fact that pretty much everybody was bigger than him. A combination of early enrollment in a local martial arts program and extensive unarmed combat tutoring from a certain former Marine helped discourage most people from putting their hands on him more than once or twice.
One final , very taxing gift manifested towards the end of puberty for Max. He found that he could actually see a few minutes forward in time. It was incredibly tiring, about the equivalent to lifting the family truck and holding it for five minutes. But it had its uses and with time it got easier if not to the same degree as his primary gift did.
When Max graduated High School he went on to college and took the kinds of courses generally favored by people in law enforcement. He had no intention of putting on a badge for a living but he figured if you intended to spend your free time sneaking around busting up bad guys it helped to know the stuff the pros knew. He also got a degree in business management and opened what would go on to become one of the Chicago area’s most successful comic book and hobby stores.
The store –and everything else in his life-was initially financed by Max’s telekinesis. It had taken him about five minutes to figure out that a regular job would seriously cramp his goal of becoming a superhero, albeit one who was virtually unknown. That daring do leaping off sky scrapers shit might work in the comics but in the real world vigilantism was illegal and governments had a nasty habit of pulling apart things they didn’t understand to see how they could make more of them.
The first order of business was a trip to a local casino. Max and his grandfather had studied various games of chance and figured out which ones worked best with what abilities. They both knew that what they were doing fell somewhere between cheating and outright theft but felt few qualms about it. The money Max took was only a tiny percentage of what most places raked in from other suckers in the course of a year and he used it in a variety of philanthropic ways. Mostly it went to keeping the store afloat and Max fed in the early, struggling days of the business. As time went on though more and more money got funneled into things like food shelves, homeless shelters and after school programs to keep kids off the streets and out of trouble. Using his powers to completely screw up the lives of various drug dealers, violent offenders and human traffickers was fun but if you didn’t attack the root causes of crime all you were doing was pissing on a forest fire.
For the most part Max kept his extra-legal activities under very deep cover. Meth labs had a tendency to burn down or explode. Money would go missing from accounts or private hidey-holes. Anonymous tips to the cops that included incriminating video or audio recordings were not exactly uncommon. And from time to time this or that particularly unpleasant career lowlife would show up at the St. Francis or Mercy emergency room with an assortment of broken bones and a sudden determination to turn his life around.
The cops knew something was up. They weren’t stupid. It was pretty obvious to the pros on both sides of the law that starting in the early nineties somebody in Cook County had decided the area needed an enema. As long as things were kept quiet and nobody got killed the law looked the other way. The bottom feeders had an understandably different take on things but whoever it was that was complicating their lives was a ghost.
Things almost went public towards the end of the 20th century. A short, vicious war was fought between Chicago’s mystery man and a ring of human traffickers who had the misfortune to pop up on his radar. For a brief period of time the windy city vigilante took a more overt hand in fire hosing the filth out “his” town. Witnesses reported a diminutive man in ninja attire breaking up business meetings and beating the crap out of entire rooms full of heavily armed Eastern European scumbags.
Dozens of homemade throwing spikes and knives were retrieved by police and ER docs. They usually needed to be extracted from legs, wrists and other painful but not fatal parts of the perps-turned-victims. Several wound up on E-bay and from there into the private collection of a certain local comic store owner.
Things finally quieted down in late 2000. The local head of the group found himself staring down at the moonlit waters of Lake Michigan from a hundred and fifty feet in the air. The shore was nowhere in sight and the scary little man somehow making the whole nightmare happen didn’t seem in a mood to screw around.
The two came to an agreement in very short order. The traffickers would move their operations the hell out of Cook County by Thanksgiving day. In return nobody affiliated with them would get the chance to make a 20 mile swim in fifty degree water after being dropped from the height of a small high-rise.
A couple other outfits tried to fill the vacuum but it was short lived. After one shot-caller lost an ear and mixed bag of fingers and toes to a midnight skinny-dip in the middle of a blizzard the message stuck. Guns, drugs and stolen goods were one thing. Selling people anywhere within the 302 area code would put those doing so in the most literal form of grave peril. The crews backed off and the emergency rooms got less crowded again.
In addition to the casinos Max branched out into other revenue streams. When you can read minds it isn’t hard to learn which stocks are good investments and which ones are headed for the toilet. You just had to hang out in the right places to overhear the necessary information.
When one of your hobbies involved derailing the lives of people who dealt in pallet-loads of cash skimming some of their ill-gotten gains was another lucrative, if not terribly ethical way to keep yourself flush with ready green. But the casinos held a special place in Max’s heart and he couldn’t keep away from them.
So it was that Max Krier found himself sitting at the Roulette table in his favorite chair across from his favorite croupier. His casino host Grace made sure he had everything he needed and then, as per the arrangement they had worked out over the years left him mostly alone. Max played for the better part of an hour, taking the house for a bit over a hundred k .
Part of what salved Max’s conscience over committing what amounted to grand larceny was a habit he had picked up early on. When he sat down at any gaming table he would scan the other players, pick out the most unprincipled scumbag in the bunch and proceed to ruin him. The casino staff had long since noticed the pattern. Mr. Krier invariably won more than he lost but the business itself always came out ahead. They didn’t understand how it always worked out that way and they didn’t much care. They just knew Max was good for their bottom line and treated the staff better than almost any of their other regular guests. That was enough.
Eventually Grace came around and “suggested” he might like to take a break or hit the craps table. Max followed her lead as he always did. Grace was good people and it didn’t cost him anything to spread the damage he did her employers around to more than one game. As was usually the case on his visits Max finished off the night with a game of high-stakes poker. He enjoyed the game for a number of reasons, not least because it afforded him the opportunity to dig around inside people’s skulls, pick out the bottom feeders at the table and drive a bulldozer right through the middle of their finances.
By the end of the night Max was up three quarters of a million dollars. That did not include the two teenaged indents whose contracts one player wagered or the pink slip on a brand new luxury automobile another rocket scientist stupidly threw into the pot. The car got sold before he checked out of the hotel. The kids got a ride to Chicago on the hotel jet. Charlize met them at the airport and explained that the nice man who owned them was setting them free just as soon as arrangements could be made to do so.
By week’s end both were back out in the world, free citizens again. The discovery of a modest trust fund-just about half the sale price of a brand new luxury automobile- in each of their names came as quite a pleasant surprise. It wasn’t the first time Max had done something like that and was one more reason he was so well regarded by the Mandalay staff.
Max checked out Sunday morning. A couple hours later he was installed in yet another high end hotel room with a balcony and westward-facing view. He spent the day resting, reviewing his plans and catching up with Charlize. The kids he had sent her were settling in and she was already trying to track down surviving relatives who could take them in. The projects he had assigned her were moving along nicely. The possibility existed they would prove unnecessary but if not he wanted to be able to pull the trigger on Mr. Owen Chastain with a single phone call.
Monday morning Max rose early. He was full of anticipatory energy and hadn’t slept well the night before. Ideally Brandon would be free by the end of the day. If not it would mark the start of a very short and vicious war. Either way he had not seen his nephew in months. As much as he looked forward to doing so, Max also worried the kid would hate him. Just a little bit of basic planning on his part and things never would have gotten this far.
Max had a very specific plan in mind for the first part of his nephew’s retrieval. He left the hotel in the later part of the morning and timed his trip to the Chastain residence so that hopefully Brandon would be alone in the house when he arrived. Of course that was no guarantee they could actually talk. His sources had indicated Brandon’s owner was fond of caging the boy from time to time as a reminder of his station in life. If that were the case or some other wrinkle arose he had fallback plans but ideally he wanted some one on one time with his nephew before confronting Owen.
The Chastain residence was a nice looking two story house on a quiet residential street in one of the better of local suburbs. Max recognized it from the photos in his file. A slow pass by the house coupled with a multilevel scan confirmed that Owen was gone and Brandon at liberty within the house. He circled the block and parked in front of the place.
Getting out of the car took an act of will on his part. Max could never remember a time when he scared easy but at that exact moment he was terrified. For all he knew Brandon had spent every spare minute cursing his uncle’s name for the jam he was in. The slim possibility existed that the boy would tell him to drop dead and fuck off out of his life for good. Max didn’t know if he could handle that without breaking.
Finally, after several minutes of calming exercises Max screwed up his courage, exited the car and made the short trip up the front walk to the door of the house. By the time he rang the bell Max’s fear was gone, replaced by anger. He had looked through the walls to try and spot his nephew and when he did he nearly ripped the front of the building off with his telekinesis. Brandon was inside, doing housework bare-assed naked with a collar around his neck. Max had known that this was a common enough occurrence not just for his nephew but for domestic indents in general. Knowing a thing and seeing it happen to the person you loved most in the world were two different things.
A quick peek inside Brandon’s mind as he came to answer the door gave Max hope. Brandon was thinking about several things at once. His chores, the night before in bed with his owner, an upcoming trip to FanTan and his uncle. Specifically, Brandon was wondering where Max was, if he was out of the hospital yet and if so how things were progressing on his rescue. Max nearly leaped over the roof. There was never any doubt in the kid’s! Alright!
When Brandon opened the door after taking a second to put on some shorts he just stood there blinking in disbelief at first.
“Uncle Max?” He asked. Then,when it became clear that he wasn’t hallucinating his face broke into a huge grin. “Uncle Max!” Brandon swept him up into a hug, lifting him off his feet.
For Max it was both a joyous and disconcerting experience. He had changed the kids diapers for God’s sake! And here the junior moose in training was lifting him up like a case of soda. Still, it was the best thing to happen to him since he went into the hospital. Max returned the hug and laughed out loud.
“Hey kid.” He said when his nephew finally set him down. “Been awhile.”
