As far as Lois Lane stake-outs went, this had been a pretty simple one. Doing her best to ignore the lingering haunted feeling from the mention of The Boss, she set her sights on the skylight ahead of her and thought, Easy as pie.
That was the instant her boot slipped on the damp, corrugated roof.
She lost her balance, pitching backwards into open air!
One leg flew free – her other foot came down hard on the brick she’d climbed.
Too hard.
Her breath caught in her chest as it crumbled away under her.
She threw an arm up, reaching blindly above her.*****
Chapter 7
Which, of course, was how she came to be here, hanging from the rusted gutter off the side of the roof, not so patiently waiting for her own personal superhero to show up before she fell to her increasingly likely doom.
“Any time now!” she said testily, risking her balance on a glance upward into the empty night sky.
She tried again to swing her leg up over the gutter. Her heart clamored when the piping shrieked, separating nearly a foot away from the wall. She gasped aloud as the gutter bowed and she slipped another inch, nearly losing her grip.
Both arms now extended above her as she hung, she couldn’t catch a deep breath.
“Any time at all!” she grumbled again.
Her palms were getting sweaty, making her hold more precarious by the second.
And her already tired shoulders were aching sharply as they protested supporting her weight .
…But she’d lose their bet if she called for him.
Straining her neck, she looked around for ways to save herself on this one.
Finding none, she huffed in irritation.
The building wasn’t even on fire! There was no countdown running. No one was shooting at her. She was just a klutz! And if she called for help now, she was going to hear about this one until she really did fall off a roof, she just knew it. She grimaced and decided to strengthen her resolve.
She’d get herself out of this.
Gripping the metal frame with renewed determination, she carefully tried to haul herself up high enough to get an elbow secured.
But the gutter dislodged even further from the wall with a grating screech, and she halted her movement, closing her eyes against the inevitable fall.
She gripped the metal firmly with both hands.
She was literally hanging on by fingertips now.
…And they were slipping.
It would be harder to collect his five bucks with a broken back, she thought.
With a last glance down to the ground, she resignedly took a breath and opened her mouth to call for Clark.
“Hi, honey,” a teasing voice came from behind her.
Finally! she thought with relief, and let go of the roof.
“Hi,” she said back a second later, looking up into a pair of smiling brown eyes. “You’re late.”
“It doesn’t seem to have delayed you much,” he said. His eyes were laughing at her now. “I think you owe me five dollars.”
“Do not,” she argued, her competitive edge kicking in. “I didn’t actually call you.”
“No, you just threw yourself off a roof,” he chuckled.
“The bet was that I had to
call for you,” she insisted. “And I didn’t! So it looks like you actually owe
me five bucks.”
“Next time I’ll let you fall first before I say hello, so that you have plenty of time to give me a shout,” he said with perfect innocence, knowing it would get on her nerves.
His playful threat was empty, but she sighed dramatically anyway. “You know, you could be helpful and take us over to that skylight.”
***
He glanced over at the roof she’d let go of a moment before. Even knowing he’d be able to catch her, seeing her fall always gave him a jolt. “So that’s where you were headed. What happened?” he asked, as casually as he could.
“It’s slippery,” she complained.
He hid a smile, depositing them lightly near the skylight. It was a little slippery, and he kept one hand at her waist as they walked across the roof toward their goal. After all, you could never be too careful with Lois.
Plus, it was nice to feel her warmth against his hand. He’d missed her today.
“If you were going to be late, you could have called, you know.”
He glanced down at his Suit pointedly before replying dryly, “I didn’t have a quarter on me.”
She turned the tables back on him by following his glance down, her eyes tracing the path with significantly more detail.
He nearly blushed.
But then she changed gears again, rivaling him for speed. “They have invented these things called pagers, you know. And new fangled devices called mobile phones are sweeping the nation.”
Her voice sounded sharper than their usual banter, and he had a guess as to where this was going.
“I don’t think they’d let me set one up as ‘Superman.’” He nudged the raised cover of the skylight and it came loose from its frame.
“You should have let me write that story,” she groused.
He nearly groaned aloud as their banter tilted closer to full-scale argument.
Whether or not to write the story explaining just how Clark Kent, non-Kryptonian, had survived point blank shots to the chest had become a familiar reprise and an increasing source of tension since Lois had learned the truth of Superman’s identity. His total reluctance to discuss it had stalled their page 8 story – along with a lot of other things.
Actually, it was the only thing that they really fought about with any heat.
It came between them, even when everything else felt so right.
“After I’d been dead for six whole months? Come on, Lois, we’ve been over this.”
“And we need to go back over it until we find a solution!” she shot back. “It’s not like we’re trying to bring
Elvis back from the dead!”
“We would’ve had to have come up with a miracle,” he said, tugging the skylight cover off and setting it aside.
“Well, a man can fly, for Pete’s sake!” she snorted, stepping into his waiting arms. “Isn’t
that more unbelievable than a man just going missing for a few months? This kind of thing happens all the time!”
“Usually the man that’s missing isn’t also the man that can fly!” He lifted off the roof and lowered them gently down into the warehouse, scanning for any security cameras that Lois hadn’t already tripped or any waiting goons that hadn’t come after her yet.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to do these investigations as Clark Kent? To actually share a byline for the stories we write? To pick up your old life?”
He could see her eyes pleading with him even in the enclosing darkness. The pang in his chest that made itself present whenever he thought about his old life pulsed. “You know that it would,” he replied thickly.
“Well, then?” she said expectantly, finding her footing on the concrete floor.
“Well, then, what?”
“Well, then, let’s write the story that will bring you back!” She stepped away from him to tug a tarp off of a nearby crate.
He crossed his arms over his chest. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go along with her plan. Successfully writing this story would mean that they could finally get on with the rest of their lives together – first as partners at the Planet and then as partners in, well,
more. But, as they’d discussed,
in depth, they weren’t confident that they’d actually be successful in making people believe the story if they wrote it. And he couldn't risk his secret that way. Risk
her that way.
“We couldn’t come up with anything believable enough,” he reminded her. “We’ve been over this before, Lois.”
“Well, that was before!
Your memory might be unfailing and eidetic, but most people’s
isn’t. Memory gets hazy with time. I’d bet at least a third of those witnesses would change their minds about whether you were shot at all, just by hearing
one other witness swear that you’d dodged the bullets. It happens all the time! Why do you think they separate witnesses to question them?” Still fumbling with the heavy tarp, she glanced around them. “Any of these lead-coated?” she asked pointedly.
“No,” he replied, before continuing their argument, “And what about the bullets? The police couldn’t have missed –”
She cut him off, “I’ve been thinking about that, too, and —“
“Huh,” he said, suddenly distracted.
He was looking intently at the crate she’d been freeing.
“What?” she asked, diverted from her line of thought by his tone.
“I think you’ll have to see it to believe it,” he said, pulling the padlock off the hinge she’d been reaching for with a loud metallic crunch. He flipped open the lid and she climbed up the side of the container. He reached in and pulled back another tarp and —
***
“Guns?!”
“Lots of them,” he confirmed grimly.
She looked around at the crates on every side of them. It would be an awful lot of weaponry, she thought, doing some quick mental math based on the crates stacked around her.
“Are there guns in all of them?”
Her partner glanced around at the other crates that surrounded them, “All of them,” he said, with a cold note to his voice.
Guns would certainly be more lucrative than those measly little gems she saw earlier, but…
guns? Why were there
guns? And where were the rest of the diamonds for her story?
“So… there are no diamonds in any of them?” she confirmed, trying to wrap her brain around what was really happening in this warehouse.
He shook his head.
She’d been so sure! She’d seen the little satchel of rough diamonds loaded into the van before it had left. She’d even held them in her hand! But she’d assumed there would have to be more. A lot more. There was just no way that nine measly diamonds had been the whole haul. She’d thought that the satchel just held a sample for potential fences, or something. It wasn’t worth putting this whole thing together for one little packet of gems every couple of weeks, even if they were diamonds. If it was just that, they’d have to be paying out more than they were taking in on this operation.
Even a dumb criminal would figure that out eventually.
In the meantime, her partner was already getting that melty look in his eye. “Not yet!” she interrupted, throwing a hand out in front of the weapons, just as his eyes began to glow red.
She’d known early on that he hated guns. Recently, the rest of the world had gotten a fresh reminder of that, too. Without an active secret identity to protect, Superman had become slightly more opinionated over the last few months, from reporting unsafe living conditions to the city to speaking out about the clear, to his eyes, effect of cigarettes on the human lung. But his opinion on guns in the urban setting had been the most pronounced. As a rule, he’d begun unabashedly melting any gun in Metropolis that wasn’t obviously claimed by a uniformed officer.
Lois had approved wholeheartedly. She got a kick out of seeing the criminals’ faces as they stared down at the newly molten, metallic street art that had only a moment before been their weapon. She knew her hero had a more serious intent, of course. Guns ruined lives. It had been a gun that nearly separated them forever, that was still separating them in so many ways.
He looked at her, eyes clear and back to their usual deep chocolate. “What?”
“I think…” Her mind tried to interpret what was off about the pile of brand new semi-automatics she was staring at. “I think…”
What was she missing? Was there some other payment involved? Her instincts were screaming at her that this was a much bigger story than she’d initially believed.
It suddenly clicked.
The diamonds hadn’t been stolen in the first place. They’d only looked that way to Metropolis jewelers because their origin had been falsified!
They’d been traded!
“They’re smuggling guns!” she cried. “They’re sending the guns out and bringing the diamonds in. And I bet there’s more money somewhere in this, too! Electronic transfers or something! It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”
His forehead creased, trying to follow her logic. “So where are the guns coming from?”
“And where are they going?”
There were only a couple of real options. While weapons were a popular commodity basically everywhere, only a few places in the world were in a position to smuggle American artillery like this right now.
She would know. She’d caught wind of a rumor like this back when Lex had been running the Metropolis underworld, before Clark had joined the Planet. But after starting some initial research, she could never pin it down. Most of the receiving ports she’d looked into were remote, hard to get into, and harder still to get out of. You’d have to basically be untraceable and invulnerable to investigate there.
…untraceable and invulnerable, she thought, her eyes settling on the yellow S shield.
“Clark…” Her mind was suddenly moving a thousand miles a minute, faster even than a speeding bullet. “I have an idea.”
“Oh, no,” he said on a groan. “I know that look.”
She grinned at him.
