"Alright, Chuckles, off to the 114th Precinct," Spidey muttered, grabbing Jack by the back of his heavy coat collar. "They got a cozy holding cell with your name on it. And hopefully some industrial solvent for that web on your face."
THWIP!
Spidey shot a line at the corner of a nearby brick clocktower and launched them both straight into the night air.
Usually, when Spider-Man swung a civilian across Queens, they did one of two things: screamed their lungs out, or held onto him like a panicked koala.
Jack did neither.
The second they hit sixty miles an hour in mid-air, dangling three hundred feet over traffic, Jack started flailing his arms like a flightless bird trying to do the macarena.
MFF-MFF-MFFFFF!
"Dude, hold still!" Spidey yelled over the rushing wind, adjusting his grip as Jack nearly wriggled out of his coat. "You're ruining my aerodynamics! And stop doing that with your legs, you look like a broken lawn chair!"
Jack grabbed Spidey’s waist with his good arm and leaned right up against his web-masked ear. His mouth was still sealed shut by the thick wad of latex, but his chest was vibrating with hysterical, muffled laughter.
MFF-MFF... DARE... MFFF... TO FLY... MFF-HAHAHA!
"Did you just muffled-whisper 'dare' into my ear while we're falling?!" Spidey shrieked, swinging hard to avoid an oncoming overhead billboard. "Who DOES that?! You're a biohazard to my mental health!"
They swept low over an intersection, skimming ten feet above a yellow taxi cab.
Jack reached into his pocket, pulled out a half-crushed tube of glitter lip balm he'd stolen from Felicia's bag, popped the cap with his thumb, and dumped the pink sparkles directly into Spidey's eye-lenses.
"Agh! What the—is this glitter?!" Spidey sputtered, his swing wavering violently as he hit a patch of blinded aerial navigation. "Why do you have glitter in your pocket?! Are you five?!"
THWIP-CLANG!
Spidey’s next web-line hit a rusted water tower flagpole instead of the brick ledge. The sudden momentum yanked them both off course, sending them spinning out of control toward the flat, gravel roof of a three-story bakery.
They hit the gravel together, rolling through a pile of empty flour sacks and crashing into a metal air-vents stack with a loud CLATTER-BANG.
"Ow..." Spidey groaned, sitting up and shaking flour off his mask. "My spidey-sense didn't even warn me about the glitter... that's how utterly stupid that move was..."
He looked around the flour-dusted rooftop.
The coat was there. The wad of sticky webbing was lying on the gravel, ripped clean off Jack's face along with a chunk of his dried stubble.
A few feet away, the rooftop access door was hanging wide open, swinging gently in the cool breeze. Scrawled in white flour across the rusted red metal of the door was a sloppy, grinning face with X's for eyes, and a short message underneath:
THANKS FOR THE LIFT, SPIDEY! DARE TO SWING AGAIN!
From down in the alleyway below, a raspy, echoing cackle drifted up through the Queens night—a wild, unstoppable sound that made three nearby stray cats sprint for cover.
"HAHAHA! DARE, PETE... DARE TO CATCH ME NEXT TIME!"
Spider-Man collapsed backward onto the gravel, staring up at the cloudy sky and letting out a long, exhausted sigh through his mask.
"I need a new job," Spidey muttered to himself. "Or a raise. Or a whole tub of sanitizer."
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