14: Hearts Full of Passion (Ish)

Previously on And When Two Villains Woo, Sam Superlative Jr. has just been arrested for the apparent murder of Android Pete! Meanwhile, Candystriper has not only just shot down Captain Happily Married with the Explodanator in Android Pete’s robot arm but has reunited with the Malevolent Med-Student! Dramatic developments, to be sure! But first, as usual, the obligatory note:

As a purported hero, if John Cute wanted to find someone he had access to legitimate resources that a supervillain or even a civilian wouldn’t normally be able to call upon. Thus he smashed the steel beam in the hideout, pulverized a concrete block or two, and vented a bit, as one does. Then he had taken a moment to think and decide what to do.

The Malevolent Med-Student had wrecked the underground lab he’d taken such pains to build and made off with the thrudanium he’d hoped to use to unlock the secrets of the universe. Fine. Okay. There was more than one way to break a femur, as the proverb went. He would simply have to find the right way. Good thing he knew a guy.

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Peter A. Hawkins was not in the best of moods as he rode the Death Ray line out of the city. The Department of Engagement with Risk-enhanced Persons was stretched thin of late, what with the battle between Meg Atomic and the Malevolent Med-Student plus Lady Wagnerian’s choosing that same week to stage her annual duel between herself and Commander Cockroach, not to mention Admiral Zombie and Screaming Banshee staging a tag-team raid on the Edison City waterfront, and why they’d done that was still anyone’s guess. More precisely, it was Peter’s job to figure out precisely why they’d done it, and so far he hadn’t had much success. He’d had long late hours and precious little sleep in between all that week, and what he wanted as he clung to the hand rail staring out at the tunnel walls racing by him was, for one blessed moment, to forget he was an agent of the D.E.R.P.

Then his phone rang. It was John. Of course. “I need tracking on a bad guy,” the man said without preamble.

For a second Peter Hawkins considered hanging up on him or, even more dramatically, telling him to go to hell. He’d had more than one conversation regarding John Cute with his superiors. The man was unstable, everyone knew it. It wasn’t just the increasingly lengthy trail of incident reports of list of reprimands given, excessive force, excessive property damage, complete disregard for airspace. It was Peter Hawkins’ conviction that John Cute was cutting deals with the supervillains. He couldn’t prove it, he didn’t have the evidence, but he’d been keeping a quiet little file for some time now, code-locked and buried deep in his computer’s systems. Because of that quiet little file, Peter didn’t hang up.

“Who?” he said quietly.

“The Malevolent Med-Student,” John Cute said.

Peter Hawkins almost said a very bad word, but he was in public in a subway car and he had the reputation of the Department, such as it was, to uphold. He almost said that he knew and John knew that John Cute had busted the Malevolent Med-Student out of the secure government facility in which he had been imprisoned. He almost snapped something like the U.S. man had in The Hunt for Red October: “You lost another submarine?”

What Peter said instead, after a breath, was “Sure thing. I’ve got contacts. We’ll put people on it.”

“Thanks,” John Cute said. “I owe you.”

He clicked off. Cute wasn’t much for formalities. Peter Hawkins stared at the tunnel walls again, and now he began to wonder. He knew and John knew that John had broken out the Malevolent Med-Student. He didn’t know whether John knew that he knew. What he did know was that John Cute had done it, but now was trying to find the Malevolent Med-Student again, with government resources no less. Why? What had changed? Why had he lost him? Better yet, why did he need the guy back?

Peter was so absorbed in these questions that he almost missed his stop. As he got off the car and made his way out into the darkness of his neighborhood, he was actually smiling. Had any of his fellow passengers noticed, and known who he was, they might have been worried about that. Then again they might not have, when one rides subway lines called “the Death Ray” and “the Splitter Beam”, one tends to have a rather stoic attitude about life.

Read the Next Episode.

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