Chapter 7: Weakness

I found out that his name was Antonio—Tony—”Tiny” Ramirez.

I also found out that Tony was the “real” behind Ricardo and Jaime- the other guy- the ‘wannabees’. What that meant, he explained, was that he was already a part of the crew that Ricardo and Jaime had been “interviewing” to become a part of, so to speak. They’d been informed of what they needed to do, and for the most part, succeeding would have gotten them where they wanted to be. But Tony—I was still thinking of him as “Tiny”—was sent along with them both as visibly intimidating muscle, and as an observer, to see just how well Ricardo and Jaime succeeded.

“That proves you’re not as dumb as it seemed like Ricky was making you out to be,” I said to him, conversationally. He was still sitting on the floor in front of me, and I still had the remote control to the collar in my hands, and he was still wearing the collar.

“Not smart enough,” he returned, “I got caught by you.” He said it with just the barest amount of derision, of sarcasm, but I let it go. His responses were painting pictures for me, and not just of what things I wanted to know about the people he ran with.

They called themselves the Tuskegee Murder Bandits, or TMB for short. They actually called themselves the Tuskegee Muerta Banditos, but it still translated out to Murder Bandits. They were fairly new in the area, and mostly because they weren’t formally a ‘crew’, or a ‘gang’, so much as they were a nuisance, before the asteroid. But in the chaos in the immediately months right before, and since, they had grown to the point of attracting some attention from a local distributor, who was rumored to work for one of the cartels down in Mexico.

Tony was something close to being a lieutenant in the crew, and his higher ups were the ones in contact with the person who was rumored to be the point man for the cartel. Tony told me this through a few liberal uses of the shock collar. He’d learned, or so at least it seemed, that as long as he stopped trying to do anything other than what I told him, I wouldn’t shock him. I had yet to use the ‘taser’ part of things, but I was sure that it would have to happen at least once before he got the point that I wasn’t going to let him be in control, if that could be helped.

But his responses were telling me about him, too, not just about his crew. In his way of telling me what I wanted to know, he was also telling me that he was smart enough to know his usefulness and his limitations within his crew. He was also telling me that he was smart enough, but not too smart, that I would have to worry about dealing with him, if and when the time came. Either that, or he was smart enough to know how to keep being too smart a secret from me, in which case I was likely pretty fucked when the time came for me to have to try to deal with him. But, I knew a few things about him and his power—assuming that he didn’t have more than one—just from watching and observing him.

The first thing was that, whatever his power or powers, he hadn’t mastered them yet. That almost went without saying; if he’d only had his powers since “The Day”—as the news media was now beginning to refer to it—then he’d only had the last three months to have learned about his powers, and practice using them. That being said, though, I was pretty sure that with his apparent level of smarts, he wasn’t trying every day to figure out every way he could use his power. Or powers.

Secondly, I could hurt him; he could feel pain, and he could bleed. That means that he wasn’t invulnerable, and I doubted that he had an advanced healing factor, like Wolverine in the X-men comics; if he did, though, it was so slow as to be almost non-existent. Which mean that he could be injured, and even badly so, if need be.

Third- his power, or powers, depended on his concentrating on them. Even if it was just a little bit of concentration, it didn’t seem that he could do them just on the sly, while I was talking with him, or on the few occasions that I was not in his line of sight, if whatever he could do was to have some kind of effect on me, like the recently departed Ricky had insinuated by his trying to order “Tiny” to hurt me.

One of the final things I knew was that, for whatever power—or powers—that Tony had, there were a shit-ton of them that he didn’t have; no flight, invisibility, some sort of ability to mentally control me or fuck me up; no transformation abilities, no beam weapons or being able to make things materialize out of thin air; no abilities to control things like fire or metal or electricity, and definitely no super speed. What that left him with, I felt that at least for the moment, I could deal with. He might have some telekinetic abilities—again, based on what Ricky had implied—and maybe he was strong—he was big enough to be strong, and not have that be a power of some sort—but if that was the extent of his power, I could definitely manage that.

“So are you gonna kill me, too?” Tony offered in question, after a few moments’ pause. “I mean, Ricardo and Jaime are gone, so you have to have done them; you pumped me for info on my crew, so I’m assuming you’re gonna do me, too.”

“The thought’s crossed my mind,” I told him truthfully; I added, “And I didn’t actually kill either of them. Though I don’t think you’ll be seeing them ever again,” just to make sure that he understood that I had no compunctions against ending his life if I felt that I had to. “But I don’t plan to kill you unless I have to,” I concluded. I left it unsaid what “unless I have to” entailed; I wanted his own imagination to keep him from risking his life.

I had no illusions that I was going to have to deal with him at some point, but the longer I could put it off, the longer I could go without potentially having to show my hand. I wanted to keep my own powers a secret for as long as I could, and if I could keep them under wraps indefinitely, I would.

I gestured for Tony to get up from the floor, and once he was standing, I stood up as well. “Let’s go,” I said to him. “I plan to have a talk with your jefe, and see where that gets me.”

“It’ll get you dead,” Tony returned, his voice sullen but insistent. I gestured for him to turn towards the door and get walking.

“I don’t think so,” I remarked to his back, “but I guess we’ll see.”

We walked out of the motel room, heading towards their vehicle—Ricardo, Jaime and Tony’s vehicle—a convertible. He let me know in passing that Ricardo had had the keys, but apparently, he had a spare set, so we were good to go. Of course, Tony was limping, moving slowly, because I’d shot him in his knee, and so it took us a while to get out of the door, and headed towards the vehicle.

As we approached the vehicle, I could see that there was someone else sitting in it, in the back seat. I stopped and looked at Tony.

“Someone you didn’t tell me about?” I asked him, my voice low—so as not to carry—and also rough, as I was annoyed at the idea of a new potential threat.

“Don’t know who the fuck that is,” he tossed back, ever so eloquently. I gave him a bit of a shove, a signal for him to keep on going.

“Who the fuck are you and get the fuck outta my car,” Tony growled at the person sitting there, as we got to within conversational distance. It was a kid, maybe sixteen if he was even that old, dressed from head to toe in new. New sneakers, new jeans, new belt holding those jeans up just below his hips if he’d been female and had had any, new basketball jersey—for the Miami Heat—overtop what looked like a new bright-white t-shirt, and a new ball cap—again, for the Miami Heat—on his head. He gave Tony a cocky look, and barely looked at me at all.

“Take me on the other side a’ town to get some weed,” the kid seemed like he thought he was telling someone his own age what to do. “And gimme all ya money.” The kid turned his attention to me now, his body language nonchalant. “You too.”

I snorted.

“Fuck off, kid,” I shot back at him, but out of the corner of my eye, in Tony’s direction, I spotted him moving, and I turned to see him beginning to root through his pockets. I frowned, and wondered what in the hell he was doing? I didn’t think much about it; I jabbed him in the meaty part of his hip, near to where one of the shots from my pellet gun had gotten him. He jerked and gave a short scream of pain, and turned to look at me like he suddenly remembered that he wanted to lay hands on me, and not in a spiritual way.