The Black Enigma: Raven, part 1

For the previous chapters in the story, click The Black Enigma tab at the top of the page.

"The computer is reading the bullet as being four floors below you, Enigma," Harvey's voice tells me through the earpiece in my right ear. "That's the forty-first floor. Looks like some sort of suite according to the blueprints I'm looking at."

"Your computer's a pile, Harv," I tell him bluntly. "I'm on top of a damn skyscraper. How would that car get this far up?"

"He may have found the bullet," Harvey says. "You should investigate either way."

"Whatever," I sigh irritably.

My city is restless tonight. The moon is ominously bright, and the sky lit up with the blinking neon mask that Pulopolis wears with unashamed vanity. The wind whips my through my hair and makes my trenchcoat flutter like a black flag defiant of surrender. The howling air chills me to the bone, and it causes eerie concrete screams to swirl from the corners of dead-ended alleyways. I shiver in the night.

I fire a harpoon line into the roof of the building and tug on it to make sure it's secure. Then I lower myself slowly down the side of the wall, the small motor mounted on my wrist whirring as it lets out more line. Step by step I walk down the glass panes. After what seems like hours of trying to not look down, I finally reach my floor. Cupping my gloved hands around my mask, I peer inside. The room is a very expensive looking penthouse. There are no lights on, and it appears to be absent of life.

I pull a small laser out of my pocket and cut a big circle in the glass and push it into the room gently. It lands with a dull thud on the thick carpet and I step inside.

"Harvey, I'm in."

I peek inside the side rooms but there are no occupants. I find a desk in the bedroom and begin going through the drawers. They are all empty, except the last one. I pull a normal white envelope out of the drawer and open it. My tracking bullet falls out and clinks on the desk, followed by a folded letter. I unfold it and click on a light.

Hello there, it reads in a flourished handwriting. I imagine you're one of the Farleone's goons, come to find me. Slick little bullet you have there. Not too subtle though. Better luck next time. Well, that is if you can survive the next thirty seconds to even have a "next time." Sincerely, The Black Enigma.

"Oh shit," I say, dropping everything. I sprint out of the bedroom toward the window. There's a deafening boom, and I dive through the hole I made just as the heat from the bombs in the room hit me. I exit the window at the same instant that it shatters and I grab for the rope I had climbed down on.

I miss.

I look down.

Forty-one floors down, a man on the sidewalk looks up at me, and I imagine his face looks the same as mine does right now.