Nick Cruise/Bad Seed
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Bobby Kelly was black Irish, a wild-eyed fast-talking nervous twenty-four year old who wasn't going to live to see twenty-five unless he could think fast and talk faster. The man across the table from him was Jack Warren, a real bastard of a bounty hunter who never had any use for the last two words in the phrase 'wanted dead or alive'.
Bobby leaned forward, his eyes flicking left and right before he began "If you want to understand Nick Cruise, you have to understand -"
"- I don't want to understand Nick Cruise. I want to find him. I want you to tell me where he is and the gun you know I'm holding under this table says that's exactly what you're going to do." Warren's thick lips turned up in a shark's smile.
Bobby twitched. "Yeah, yeah. I gotcha Warren. Only here's what I think. I think I'm gonna eat a bullet either way when you're through with me so I figure it's game over for Bobby Kelly and the best I can do now is lean back, have a cigarette and tell this story like it ought to be told. I think you got that much patience, long as you know you're getting what you want."
Warren didn't answer, and that was close enough to permission for Bobby. He lit a cigarette, inhaled deep and leaned back in his chair. "Now, as I was sayin'. In order to understand Nick Cruise, you gotta understand his big brother Jackie. And in order to understand Jackie Cruise, you gotta understand Giacomo Crusetti and his little brother Niccolo.
Bobby leaned forward again, getting animated in his storytelling. "If you look at a map of the United States, it looks like it's all one thing, but it's not. The US is like a slice of swiss cheese, full of holes. Whole city blocks or backwoods hicktowns fall through, little pockets of 'not America'. Our old neighborhood in Chicago was like that, where we all grew up. So when the cancer got widow Crusetti, left Giacomo and Niccolo orphans at sixteen and six, nobody called social services. That wasn't the way things worked. They didn't bother us and we didn't call them. Giacomo was old enough to take care of the two of them. You don't step between a man and his right to take care of his own.
"Thing is, Giacomo wasn't exactly cut out to bag groceries. He was built like a bull and he had a wild temper. His mama had always kept the 'wrong kind of people' away from her boys so that meant he didn't know any of the right kind of people to get the kind of work he was suited to. He had no ties. Didn't matter though, he took to it like a duck to water. A thirsty duck. No one would pick him up, so he started his own thing. This is, you should know, not a recommended course of action and it was going to come back and bite him before this thing was over.
"He doesn't stop there. Ditches the Italian thing altogether. Starts going by 'Jackie Cruise'. Then he starts filling up his crew with whoever he wants, no respect for boundaries. He picks up all the other loose ends. He's got blacks, he's got asians, he's even got Irish. If starting his own thing was not recommended, that kind of mixing it up was downright lethal. To much bad blood and not enough fences between it.
"See, I know all this because he picks up my idiot cousin Mickey. We called him Mickey the Fist on account of this one time in grade school when he stuck his whole fist in his mouth and then couldn't get it out. He had to go to the emergency room and they stuck like a ten inch needle in both sides of his jaw to loosen it up, I swear to God.
"Most of Jackie's guys were smart, coulda been real up and comers in their own things but for certain political realities. Mickey was the exception. He picked Mickey up because Mickey made Nick laugh, and that was worth something to Jackie. Nick hadn't laughed much since his mother died. Jackie wasn't just building a crew, he was putting together a family for his little brother, and they had four good years.
"It all went to hell on Nick's tenth birthday, and when I say hell I mean capital H fire and brimstone Hell. See, Jackie gets all of his crew together in this warehouse for the occasion. It's been four years. They've fought their fights and they've stood together and they're starting to really earn. Nick's birthday is a reason for them to blow the doors off, really celebrate, spoil the kid. There were sixteen of them counting Jackie and they all get together and decorate this warehouse with balloons and streamers and stack up a pile of presents higher than the kid is tall. The powers that be decided it was time for Jackie and his boys to get what was coming to them. So they bring in some serious talent, a major league firebug. While Jackie and the boys are all in there singin' happy birthday and lighting candles this guy's outside chaining the doors shut and lighting up the building.
"I'll spare you the details. You can figure what happened. There was no way out. Jackie didn't give a single order, he didn't have to. He really had built a family, just like he'd wanted. Every one of them knew they were dead, and all they cared about was keeping Nick safe until the end, saving him long enough for the firemen to get him out. They pushed him back under some metal shelves so he couldn't get hit by anything falling and told him not to move. They soaked their shirts and coats in the melting water from the ice chests and threw them over him. Then they just fought the fire as best they could with anything they could find. And they succeeded. They did enough. The firemen got Nick out. He was the only one that got out. Every one of Jackie's crew died in that fire and that wasn't even the beginning of the real tragedy."
Bobby stabbed out his cigarette. "The rest of this I wouldn't hear for another 10 years, not until Nick and I were cellmates in the Zig."
"See, what nobody knew, what nobody could know, was that Nick was gifted. I mean capital G gifted. What do they call it? A mutant. Nick was a mutant. All that pain and terror lit up his latent telepathy like the fire that tore through the building. You could say that Nick lived through the fire, or you could say that he died sixteen times, depending how you want to look at it. What's certain is that all sixteen of those men, his family, died screaming inside his head. Then once they were inside, they shut the door behind them. It was too much. The kid's power lit up and burned out all in the same night. They're still in there, burning and screaming. They always will be. They're branded on him.
"So when they haul him out of the fire, he's just curled up, alternating between crying and screaming himself. No one can get to him, it's like he's not even there. So he spends the next couple of years drugged into a stupor. He gets a little padded room because they figure out pretty quick that if his body builds up a tolerance to the dope he goes into a wild destructive rage, a real danger to himself and others. It gets worse when he hits puberty and the rest of his mutant gift shows up in full force. If Nick in a rage was dangerous, telekinetic Nick in a rage was lethal. They up the drugs and he spends the next five years drooling on himself in a straight jacket.
"He's about eighteen when strange things start happening. They find him, still curled up, with all his restraints off. Or his chair would be in the sun when they knew they left it in the shade. Or he'd have two desserts on his tray. That coulda been anything, coulda been an orderly or something feeling sorry for the kid but not wanting to lose his job. The really weird thing was that Nick would laugh. Sometimes he'd just pop out of whatever hell he lived in and laugh for no reason. The light in his eyes never lasted long, but it was real. Then one day he's just gone. There are two security guards with bullets through their heads and he's nowhere to be found.
"He was off his meds, everything should have been getting worse. He should have been on some kind of out of control telekinetic rampage you could see a block away. But there was nothing. He just vanished. Nobody hears anything for a couple of years, the doctors and the authorities figure he's dead somewhere. Sad end to a sad story. Only it wasn't the end, because a couple of years later he shows back up.
"It's easy to kill someone, if that's all you want to do. If you don't care about getting away with it, if you just want it done and damn the consequences then nothing could be easier. So when Nick Cruise returns he walks right into this guy's house while his family's eating dinner, walks up to the table, doesn't say a word, pulls out his piece and puts one between the guy's eyes. That's how he ended up back in a cell. This time it was the Zig where I happened to be residing at the time as a result of a complete misunderstanding.
"They stick him in my cell, total coincidence. I don't recognize him. Nobody would have. Nick's not a rare name and he's put on some serious muscle, got healthy. He's not a doped up kid who spent a decade in a huggy jacket anymore. And he's covered in these ... I don't know what. Some kind of tribal tattoos. I don't think anything at all until the night that I wake up to my own reason to scream. See, I hear Nick laughing for no reason in the middle of the night and when I wake up there's my dead cousin Mickey standing there cutting up. Soon as I even start to make a noise Mickey pulls a gun, flips it around and slams it into my head and it's goodnight Irene.
"The next morning I got the whole story. I was from the neighborhood and Nick and I were gonna be together an indeterminate number of years, that calls for a certain amount of trust. So Nick tells me one day Mickey just came back, slipped out of Nick's mind and into the world. Some kind of phantom made out telekinetic energy and the piece of Mickey that was stuck in Nick's brain. Started taking care of him in the hospital, making sure he had what he needed, making him laugh, busting him out in the end. Mickey looked after him while he got strong and found a way to quiet the screams enough that he could concentrate. Then he helped him find Roger Nettles, the arsonist who lit the warehouse up, so that Nick could walk into his house and coolly put one between his eyes while his family was eating Sunday dinner. He tells me that's not all, that they're all coming back, every one of them. Mickey, Romeo, Finn, Danny Boy, Crazy Harry .... Nick's big brother Jackie .... everyone who died in that fire. When he gets his brain untangled they're all coming back.
"Now, here's the part that's gonna blow your mind. Here's what you have to know to understand Nick. It's something that I learned living in that cell. None of the bad stuff that happened to Nick made him who he is. He coulda grown up in a palace surrounded by unicorns and candy and he'd still be the total bastard he is today. He's just a bad seed. Some people are. The nightmare life made him strong, but the devil himself made him Nick Cruise and it happened the day he was born. If you don't get that, you don't get Nick Cruise. And if you don't get Nick Cruise, then he'll get you."
Bobby leaned back in his chair again, laced his fingers behind his head and smiled big. "And I'm not gonna have to tell you where he is, and you're not gonna shoot me."
Warren pulled his gun from under the table and pointed it at Bobby's head. "What gives you that delusion?"
"Oh, it's no delusion. See there's one thing I didn't tell you about Nick Cruise. I said his telepathy burned out, but that's not completely true. There's one little thing left, one little whisper, a ghost of a thing. There's this faint smell that trails him, the slightest echo of that fire, the smell of smoke."
"So you're gonna leave me with that little pearl and for that I'm not going to shoot you?"
"No, you're not going to get the chance. See, I stabbed my cigarette out five minutes ago ... and I can still smell smoke."
Nick Cruise walked out of the bar, holstering his pistols with a devil's smile on his face.
"All done playing, handsome?"
His smile broadened at the sight of his partner. "Yeah, I'm done. I enjoyed that one. You gonna ask me why I did the little guy, too?"
Kiss laughed. "Hell no, that runt had an unbelievable mouth on him. He shoulda taken the bullet. Warren's left people alive before."
"It's not the first time he's come down with diarrhea of the mouth, either. Little pissant was turning into a real problem."
Kiss smiled like the cat that ate the canary.
" .... Kiss? Something you want to tell me?"
She laughed. "I hired Warren. I figured he'd bring that little pimple to the surface so you could pop him without going to the trouble of finding him yourself. Happy birthday, hot stuff." She reached out and slapped Nick on the ass. "Don't say I never gave you anything. Now, if you're done enjoying your present the Fuggos have got what passes for their hands on some necklace that the Circle of Thorns are really hot for."
"So which side are we wiping out?"
Kiss looked at Nick, one eyebrow going up in surprise at the question. "Both, of course. I want the necklace."
"You really are the perfect woman."
"Tell me something I don't know."
