He slung his trench coat over his arm and headed fearlessly out the door. Malice X might scoff at him. Maureen might doubt him. Doodlebug might pity him. But starting tonight, he’d show them all.

Jules circled his old block, scanning the street and weed-strewn lots for lurkers. Montegut Street was as deathly quiet as a Pacific atoll after a bomb test. He rolled down his windows. His nose twitched happily as it detected the familiar scents of diesel train exhaust and fermenting grain wafting in from river barges.

Jules parked. His garage appeared to be the least damaged portion of his house. If the neighborhood’s scavengers hadn’t been too thorough, he might still drive off with a couple of usable gas canisters. At least the looters had made it easy for him to get inside. A roughly five-foot-tall hole had been cut through the garage door’s aluminum panels.

He peered through the darkness at what remained of nearly a century’s worth of personal and family history. As he’d figured, every one of his power tools was long gone, along with his lawn mower and gardening implements. They’d even taken the poured-concrete lawn Madonna that Jules had wrapped in burlap and stored away after his mother died.

But over in the corner, half buried under the cinders of a pile ofLife magazines fallen from an overhead shelf, were three of Jules’s laughing-gas canisters. Obviously, the looters hadn’t known what to make of them. Jules smiled. The winds of luck were finally blowing his way. He dragged the canisters over to the ruined door and shoved them through the jagged hole.

His foot hit something hard and sharp-edged. The object scraped loudly against the concrete floor. The sudden screeching nearly made Jules’s heart burst through the top of his head. As soon as he regained his breath, he looked to see what lay at his feet. It was a box. A metal footlocker.

He bent down to open it. He hadn’t seen one like it since the war years.

Then a vague but thrilling recollection tickled the ivories of his memory synapses. Could it be-?

The footlocker’s rusty hinges gave way as Jules forced the box open. The distant moonlight revealed a bundle of carefully folded cloth, faded and musty but immeasurably vibrant. Jules’s heart leapt as he lifted the bundle out of the locker. He was certain now that his luck had changed.

Once more, after a span of half a century, he held in his hands the hood, shirt, and cloak of that fabled nemesis of saboteurs, that mysterious defender of freedom and democracy… the Hooded Terror.

Jules loathed Kenner with every fiber of his being. After dark, the suburb, penned in by swamps and airport runways, had the feel of a graveyard where even the ghosts were too bored to stir up trouble. The only exciting thing that ever happened out there was the occasional plane crash. But Kenner was where Tiny Idaho worked his magic, so Kenner was the place Jules had to be.

He pulled into the parking lot of a small, poorly lit two-story shopping strip. Its windows were boarded up and plastered withFOR LEASE signs, except for two occupied storefronts. One was an uninviting bar on the ground level called The Lounge Lizard-only it was really called The Longe Lizard, because lounge had been misspelled on the hand-painted sign next to the screen door. The other tenant, Readwood Forest Used Books and Comix, was on the second level.

Jules climbed the stairs to the second-story bookstore, barely visible as an operating business from the street. From downstairs, a jukebox voice warbled on about hunting dogs and guns, punctuated by a sharper, more distinct sound, possibly a pool stick being broken over a skull. Readwood Forest was dark, but Jules knew that Tiny Idaho lived in an apartment and workshop behind the store.

Jules rang the bell. He waited a long minute, listening to the scratchy country music from below. No footsteps. No lights turning on in the store. Jules rang again. This time, a distorted voice crackled from a weather-beaten intercom beneath the doorbell.

“The store’s closed, man. The weekly comics shipment comes in tomorrow afternoon after three. Good night.”

Jules spoke quickly into the intercom. “Hey, Mr. Idaho? It’s Jules Duchon. We done business before. I’m a buyer of your ‘special’ merchandise.”

The intercom was silent for a few seconds. “Oh yeah? Hang tight while I put on some pants. Be there in a sec, man.”

A minute later the door creaked open. “This better be important, man. You yanked me away from an episode ofAmerica’s Most Wanted. C’mon in before the skeeters eat you alive.”

Under the dim illumination of a bug zapper, Jules took a look at his host. He’d only seen Tiny Idaho in this much light once before, about four years ago, when he’d picked up his first set of laughing-gas canisters. The man’s most prominent feature was his long, thickly tangled beard, made up of curly clumps of gray and red hair that reached all the way to his outsized belt buckle. His small eyes, made even smaller by wire-rimmed bifocals, and two large, somewhat yellowed teeth were all that was visible through his abundance of hair. In overall stature, Tiny was neither small nor huge. Jules ached to ask this medium-sized man where his nickname had come from, but he thought it wisest to keep the question to himself.

“So what’s with the clown suit?” Tiny Idaho asked. “You coming back from a kiddie party?”

“I’mincognito,” Jules answered, straightening his collar. It was a good word, and he liked using it whenever he could.

“That’s cool. So what can I do you for? You need exploding balloons, or a nitrous kit for your clown car?”

“Naww. A few years back I bought some laughing gas off you. And you sold me a set of plans for installing it in my trunk and releasing the gas into the passenger compartment.”

“Oh yeah?” His host shut the door behind Jules and rubbed his hairy chin. “Yeah… I remember now. How’d it all work out, man?”

Jules decided not to go into the whole sad story. “Eh, all right. But now I got another project I need your help with.”

Tiny Idaho raised an eyebrow and grinned. “It involve explosives? I just got in some great stuff from Taiwan. These little honeys’ll peel the tread right off a battle tank.”

“Uh, no. It’s another laughing-gas deal. Only this time, I need an automatic-release nozzle that works off a timer. Think you can throw somethin‘ together for me?”

The bearded man laughed, his small eyes sparkling behind his spectacles. “That’s all? Man, you come in here dressed like that-I figure you’d give me somethinginteresting! Come on back to my workshop while I cobble something together. Unless you’d rather browse out front here?”

Jules quickly glanced around the bookshop. The closely bunched shelves were packed with books on ecology and the evils of industrialism. An entire wall was taken up by racks of comics. Jules recognized vintage copies ofZap! Comics andFabulous Furry Freak Brothers; neither of them his favorites. He followed Tiny Idaho through the door at the rear of the bookshop, into the workshop beyond.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” his host said. Jules inhaled the strong, metallic odors of machine oil and freshly tooled steel. Long wooden tables set along three of the walls were covered with a jumble of drill presses, plastic explosives, tangles of wire, and shiny green plastic motherboards. “You got one of them gas canisters with you,” Tiny Idaho asked, “or you need me to rustle you up some new ones?”

“I got ‘em downstairs in my trunk. You need me to bring one up?”

“Yeah. That’d be what we call in the biz Step One.”

Jules went downstairs to his car and fetched the canister, then spent a few minutes describing the kind of setup he envisioned. As his host listened and asked questions, Tiny Idaho rifled through a series of tool chests and parts drawers, pulling out lengths of wire, a soldering iron, and a digital timer.