Lian would have laughed at her for worrying about it, but Martha hated to hurt people’s feelings. She always imagined herself in the other person’s position and in truth she usually felt things too strongly. On top of the prowling catastrophe that was Slipp, she was now agonizing over embarrassing Ieiri. He seemed like such a nice guy – but she wasn’t dating a cop again.
She had met Dave Hughes in the small weight training room at Metropolis High School when she was 15 years old. Martha just was finishing ninth grade; Dave was visiting some old teachers after completing his first year as a criminal justice major at Metropolis City College. A weight pin fell out of the machine she was using; he picked it up.
“The key to my heart,” Martha joked as he handed her the pin.
He responded seriously, “I think it’s the key to mine.”
Lois and Clark had been troubled about the age difference at first – 19 seemed astronomically older than 15 – but Dave made it clear that he respected their concerns and that he had nothing but honorable intentions towards their daughter. He treated Martha with reverence and affection. In return, he was treated like the Kents’s second son. Dave had been a Metropolis cop for three years when he and Martha became engaged after her second year at Central City University. She let Clark fill her fiancé in on the family secret. While Dave was as amazed as any young man might be to discover that his future father-in-law was Superman – and his future wife, Supergirl, he adjusted to the news with characteristic ease. Everything seemed perfect until an hour before Dave’s shift ended on the night of their engagement party. He and his partner made routine traffic stop on a Nissan Suprema with an expired registration sticker. The driver had a bench warrant, a gun and a tendency to panic. The combination left Martha Kent not quite a widow at 20 years old.
She walked for a while, without the hologram. She didn’t look remotely like a woman who belonged in Crime Alley, but she didn’t feel remotely threatened, either and she barely noticed the blatant stares of the addicts and prostitutes she passed.
It was easier to think on her feet and she knew brains beat physical prowess when it came to tracking down bad guys. Of course, luck wasn’t a bad thing, either, Martha mused, as her eyes found a chipped, weather-beaten bar sign at the corner of M and Burke Streets: The Crooked Cobra. Even from the outside, Martha could tell the bar was screaming for a health department raid. She knew she would look out of place in her Reeboks and light green Old Navy sweater, but it didn’t stop her from entering the bar, a dark, foul-smelling cavern, and ordering a Sam Adams Light.
The bartender, who looked like he might have been rejected by the Hell’s Angels for hygiene issues, snickered nastily as he openly inspected her body. “We got Bud here, Sweetheart. And none a that light shit.”
Martha felt her face start to harden – an instinctive reaction when someone was trying to intimidate her. She forced her self to smile at the bartender as harmlessly as she could. Let him think she was stupid. He’d talk more that way.
“Do you have White Zin?” she asked.
“White
what?” The bartender’s bulbous face broke into a mocking grin and Martha winced at the rows of rotting incisors.
She felt a body slide onto the stool next to hers. A rougher – but kinder – voice said, “I think you might be in the wrong place, Miss.”
The man who sat next to her was hairy and plump and Martha thought he might be the reason the bar smelled so bad. He seemed nice enough, though, especially in comparison to the establishment’s proprietor.
“I know,” she said. “But I’m pledging a sorority and they said I had to have a drink here.” The bartender, whose evening had clearly been made, started shouting this information to a group of patrons sitting in a cluster at the other end of the bar.
The man sitting next to her ignored their guffaws and said, “I don’t think they must be nice girls, then. Maybe you’d better call a cab.” He pushed up the sleeves of his nylon jacket and took a sip of his beer. He nodded at the bartender. “Toad will call you one. He might charge you a dollar.”
He had a burn scar in the shape of a watch around his right wrist. Martha was wondering how he got it when her eyes traveled higher, to the tattoo on his forearm. Another snake tattoo. They were certainly popular around…
“Where did you get that tattoo?” she asked urgently, her voice free of every trace of the naïve sorority girl. It wasn’t just a snake tattoo, she thought. It was
exactly like one that Slipp had on his left quadriceps.
“You like it?” The man seemed pleased. “Got it not long ago. The wife don’t like it much. Coulda paid some bills with the money, she said —”
Martha was staring at the tattoo so hard that had she inherited her father’s heat vision, she might have burned it off. “Where did you get it?” she asked through gritted teeth. “I want one.”
The man was taken aback. “C’mon, honey,” he said. “You ain’t that kind of girl.”
Her blazing brown eyes bored into his and she threw two twenties on the bar. “Think they’re open now?”
Her companion eyed the bills hungrily. “It’s that kind of place. Open all night. But they ain’t nice people in there, Sweetheart.”
She stood and pushed the money into his hand. “Let’s go.”
As the door swung behind them, she heard Toad hoot, “Hey, Billy’s getting lucky. You go, Billy. Have some for me.” Billy looked pressed his lips together in embarrassment, but Martha was too preoccupied to care how her virtue might be appraised by a Crime Alley bartender.
They hadn’t overlooked Slipp’s tattoos or the probability that he’d want to complete the design he’d started on the lower half of his body. The cops had searched every parlor in Gotham, armed with photos of Slipp and his tats. No one had seen him. Nor had anyone recognized the obscure designs that were now engraved on the madman’s skin, although several tattooists commented that whoever put them there was a real artist.
Billy led Martha to a line of row houses on Tanner Street that reeked of decaying brick, mold and urine. The attached homes were visibly sinking: The stone steps leading to each threshold were cracked and uneven. Billy stopped in the middle of the block and jerked his head toward a house with a foot-sized hole in the middle of the rotting wooden porch.
“You shouldn’t do this, hon,” he said.
Martha touched a hand to his upper arm. “Billy. Time for you to go home.”
He looked crestfallen. He’d expected to join her on her ink art adventure. He thought for a moment. “Are you sure about this, hon? I got a daughter myself almost your age. I’d hate to leave her in a place like this alone.”
Martha assured him that she’d be fine. It took a daughterly kiss on the cheek – a significant price to pay considering how much he reeked – to send him on his way. As soon as he disappeared around the corner, Superwoman appeared on the darkened porch.
She popped the locks as quietly as she could. This was where she and her father parted company when it came to crime fighting. Superman would break down a door in an instant if he heard someone crying out for help, but he was adamantly against this sort of illegal search and seizure. On the other hand, she thought ironically, this was one thing Batman would not give her hell for. His regard for criminals’ rights was less generous than hers.
Laughter and rough, deep voices reached Martha as soon as she slipped through the door. They seemed to be coming from the basement. The house smelled of alcohol – both isopropyl and recreational – as well as cigarettes and cat litter. She grimaced and moved down the basement steps, making sure to keep herself alight just an inch or so above the ground so that they would not hear here footsteps.
There were four men in the basement. Three were lumber-jack sized, with pit-stained T-shirts and sleeve tattoos. Among them was a bearded man working a needle against the lower back of a shirtless customer. Even from thirty feet away in the middle of the basement steps, Martha recognized the long, lean body of Sylvester Slipp.
She didn’t announce her presence or make a big production of apprehending Slipp. Superwoman never talked much – as Midori pointed out, Martha didn’t do a great job of disguising her voice and she hadn’t ever taken the time to fully develop a second persona – and the sight of Slipp filled her with speechless rage. She simply rocketed down the stairs and grabbed Slipp by his neck. Possibly out of stunned reflex, the artist lunged at her with his tattoo gun; she swatted it away without thinking. She grabbed the inker by the belt and flew both him and Slipp through every ceiling and roof between them and the sky. She left the tattooist dangling on an old satellite dish, where the police would find him half an hour later.
Superwoman truly didn’t like to hurt people – even the bad guys – and ordinarily, she made every attempt not to do so. She made no efforts to be gentle with Slipp, however, as she dragged him down the empty corridors of Arkham. He was conscious, though barely, when she opened the door of his cell. He made the bad decision to raise his eyes to hers and work his lips together in a silent hiss and she slammed him against the padded wall hard enough to give him a concussion.
—
