by Nick Svolos
“Dammit, what do you want from me?”
“How about a better quote? Something that actually tells me that you’re gonna do something.”
She sighed. “Alright, fine. We’ll distribute the photo you gave me to each watch and let the patrols know to keep an eye out for him. We’ll give it to Social Services, too, so if he shows up at a shelter they can let us know. That good enough for you?”
It wasn’t much, but at least it was action. “Sure. I think my readers will like that a lot better. So, there’s one more thing. How is it this kid’s been living at the homeless camp for the last two months and you guys never knew about it?”
“Oh come on…”
“Sarge, I’m not trying to give you a hard time, but it’s a fair question, one that’s gotta be asked. If I turn this story in without it, my editor’s just gonna send me right back down here.”
“You should be talking to Media Relations.”
“They’ll just stonewall me. Come on, Sarge. I can tell you care about this. I see it in your eyes. You know something ain’t right here.”
She shook her head and fixed me with a dead-eyed bureaucratic stare. “Sorry, Conway. Talk to Media Relations.”
Damn. I fought down the urge to press the matter further. It was no use. When they get that look in their eyes, you’re done. I got up to leave. “OK. Thank you for your time.”
I stalked out of the police station in a dark mood. Panhandler was right: the cops weren’t going to be much help. What didn’t make sense was, why? It was almost like they were just going through the motions, like they didn’t want to find this kid.
My mood didn’t get any better as I reached my truck and saw an all-too-familiar envelope tucked under the windshield wiper. I’d optimistically parked in a twenty minute zone, but my little trek through the organizational maze of SMPD headquarters took way more than that. I grabbed the ticket and stuffed it in my pocket, another bill to pay.
I indulged my humanity for a couple of minutes and sat stewing in the truck’s cab. Then I got back to doing my job. I checked my phone for messages and email, but there weren’t any that pertained to either of the stories I was working on. I tried calling the SFPD permit office again, but wound up at their voicemail. I left another message.
I decided a prioritization review was in order. My search for the woman I’d taken to calling Protest Girl was stalled until the cops called me back. I needed to come up with a better way to confirm my theory that she was going to be in San Francisco. Nothing jumped out at me as a good idea, however. On the other hand, this missing kid felt like a ticking time bomb. I needed somewhere to start looking for him. A trail of some sort. I got a flash of an idea, and that decided the issue. I started the truck and headed to the beach and its tent city by the boardwalk.
As shots in the dark go, it wasn’t all that bad. The homeless camp was the last place Karl had been seen. That was where the trail would start. Sure, Panhandler had already been over this terrain, but he might have missed something. It seemed like the least I could do was poke around down there and see if I could pick up a clue.
Ten minutes later, I turned off of Pacific Coast Highway into the sparsely-populated parking lot that lies to the north of the Santa Monica Pier. I crossed the bike path and entered the makeshift village of Santa Monica’s homeless. The tent city had been here for as long as I could remember. Originally, I think it was a publicity stunt by homeless advocates back in the early eighties to put pressure on the city government to “do more” for the homeless community. The city’s long history of left-leaning social policies—they don’t call it the “People’s Republic” for nothing—made it a made-to-order mark for the activists to stage their protest by setting up a bunch of tents on public property and daring the city to do anything about it. Pretty much any other city would have bulldozed the encampment within hours, but not Santa Monica. This was a wealthy city and you could cut the white guilt with a silver pie carver. They just let them stay.
There were a lot of bad times in the camp’s early days. Rapes, murders and general blight drove away the tourists and made the surrounding area unlivable. It wasn’t any safer for the homeless people seeking refuge here, either. As things got worse, it appeared that the city might actually bite the bullet and close down the camp, but then some drug dealers murdered a homeless couple. That turned out to be a bad move. The victims turned out to be the elderly couple who took the young Panhandler under their wing when he first showed up at the camp at the age of fourteen. Two days later, cops at the beach substation received a gift in the form of three puking drug dealers, the murder weapons and enough other evidence to put them away for a very long time. Panhandler wasn’t done, though. Over the next couple of weeks, the self-appointed sheriff of the little hobo jungle cleaned house. When he could get the evidence, the cops received it along with the suspects, ready to prosecute. When he couldn’t, well, the bad guys just went away. I’ll be charitable and assume they were sent packing to parts unknown. No bodies were ever found, at any rate, and the folks at the camp weren’t talking. It wasn’t long before things became safe enough for the city to set up a bank of portable toilets and washing stations. Community and church groups started rolling up with hot meals a few times a week. The tent city became a pretty calm, livable place, and still was.
Not bad for a guy who was about sixteen years old at the time.
I took my time, walking around the little community of about seven hundred and fifty people, talking to some of the long-time residents that I knew. Most of them knew Karl, but were a little less forthcoming with details. These folks tended to be a little suspicious of outsiders nosing around, and I wasn’t accepted enough for them to share much in the way of gossip. I did get a little break after about twenty minutes of asking around, when I managed to find someone who’d tell me which tent Karl lived in.
It was one of those cheap dome tents you can pick up at any surplus store for around twenty bucks. The light blue vinyl showed signs of wear, and duct tape sealed up a few tears. It was clean, though, cleaner than you’d expect from a teenager. There was a sleeping bag, a little backpack with a change of clothes, a battery-powered lamp and a couple of novels, A Princess of Mars and Time Enough for Love. I liked this kid already. A shoebox by the lamp held a variety of items, the usual detritus and souvenirs young kids collect, as well as a photograph of the Jorgensens in happier times. It looked like it had been taken about a year ago, somewhere with lots of trees. The happy family huddled close together and smiled for the camera. It was smudged with thumbprints, and my throat felt tight as I imagined that the kid spent a lot of time staring at it.
A voice from behind me jolted me back to the real world.
“Karl! Did it work—Hey! What are you doing?” A young woman held the tent flap open and glared at me accusingly. She was short, kind of chunky, had long black hair, way too much eye shadow and looked to be in her early twenties. Tattoos, gothic and celtic patterns mostly, covered the exposed area of her arms, and she had quite a collection of piercings. Her ears, eyebrows, nose and lower lip glittered in the sunlight. She looked like she was having a deep internal debate on whether to call some of the locals over to kick my ass or just skip the formalities and do it herself.
I kept my motions slow and dropped the photo back into the shoebox. “My name’s Reuben. Panhandler asked me to help look for Karl.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You think that gives you permission to go through people’s stuff?”
“Only if I want to find him. This is where the trail starts. I’m trying to get an idea of where he’d go next.” I placed the lid back on the box and put it back where I found it. “So, you got any ideas?” I asked as I crawled out of the tent.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether or not you’re on the level. Got any ID?”
I pulled out my wallet and produced my press credentials and my driver license. For good measure, I even gave her one of my
business cards. “That good enough for you, officer?”
She ignored my smart-ass remark and thoroughly studied the various forms of identification, carefully checking the photos to my face to make sure everything matched. Satisfied that I wasn’t a tourist who got his jollies off of burgling the tents of homeless kids, she handed my IDs back and slid the business card into the pocket of her shorts.
“So, like, you’re that reporter guy, huh? OK, I guess you’re alright. I’m gonna check your story with Panhandler, though. It better check out.”
“Fair enough. So, you sounded like you might have an idea of where Karl went.”
“Yeah, I might. Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“Panhandler thinks so. My understanding is he’s been missing from here since Sunday. He’s not at his family’s place, so I think so, too.”
“Shit,” she cursed, pacing around like she was looking for another solution. Apparently she couldn’t find one. “Alright, I’ll tell ya what I know, but, you gotta promise not to tell the ‘Handler. Karl didn’t want him to know about this. Don’t you guys have some sort of, like, confidentiality oath?”
“That’s priests and doctors. All I can give you is my word. If keeping whatever you tell me confidential won’t hurt Karl, I promise I won’t tell Panhandler. That’s the best I can do.”
She nodded, and looked up at me with a menacing glare. “OK, but you better keep your word, Conway. Squealers don’t last long around here.” I suppose I looked appropriately threatened because she took a breath and quietly continued. “You know about Karl’s ... abilities, right?” I nodded. “So, like, word on the street is there’s a way for people like him to get rid of their, you know, powers or whatever. Some kinda cure, maybe. So, he went to go check it out.”
It had to be a scam, of course. Karl was a natural. At least, everything I’d learned about him led to that conclusion. All the science on the subject indicated it was impossible to remove a natural’s powers, short of sticking them under a nullifier beam, and that only lasts until you turn the beam off. It wasn’t like nobody was trying to find another way, either. The last time I looked into it, there must have been at least four or five ongoing studies trying to figure out how to permanently remove or suppress superpowers. There was a lot of money to be made if they could get it right. Besides the obvious government angle, not everyone who has powers wanted them. You could probably make a lot of money promising a “cure”, even if it didn’t really work. I’m not sure how you’d handle irate customers looking for a refund, though.
I kept my doubts to myself. “I see. Why didn’t he just tell Panhandler?”
“Karl kinda felt like he was betraying him. ‘Handler’s spent a lot of time training him, taking care of him. But, Karl just wanted to go home. He missed his family. Only, he couldn’t as long as he, you know, was a danger to them. The kid’s got a lot of guilt issues, you know?”
It made sense, in a traumatized adolescent sort of way. “OK, so where are they handing out this ‘cure’?”
“One of those housing projects downtown, you know? Karl didn’t have an address.” She shrugged. “Guess he was just gonna, like, fly around until he found it.”
Damn, that was a lot of ground to cover, but at least I had something to go on. “OK, I’ll check it out. Thanks. What’s your name, by the way? In case I need to find you again.”
“Don’t worry ‘bout it. If I want you ta find me, you will.”
I walked back to the truck. A dark sense of foreboding hung over my thoughts as I shook the sand out of my sneakers. I couldn’t come up with a good reason for the kid to have not checked in during the last four days. Assuming the young woman’s account was accurate, something must have happened to him while he was in Los Angeles. I finished lacing up my shoes and dug out my phone. I had a call to make.
III
I checked my messages again, but there was still no response from the San Francisco PD. I called them and left another message. It was almost a game at this point, testing my persistence against the bureaucratic inertia of whoever was on the other side of the voicemail. Who would break first? They had the upper hand, but I had free nationwide calling. That’s OK, I like a challenge. I suspected I’d lose this battle of wills, but until I did, I could maliciously fill that mailbox with pleasant messages.
My next call was to Detective Arnold Dawson of the LAPD. We’d sort of worked together on the cape-killer case, if you could call one guy doing everything in his power to avoid being arrested by the other guy working together. Once I had most of the situation figured out, though, I dropped the whole thing in his lap. A lot of cops would have held a grudge over me ducking him for so long, but not Dawson. Instead, he played it straight. When the dust settled, Dawson got credit for the bust, as well as a nice, shiny promotion to Captain. The nice write-up I did about him probably didn’t hurt, either. I wouldn’t call him a buddy, but at least he takes my calls.
Along with the promotion, he got a new job. The LA Police Commission decided that it was time someone figured out how to make law enforcement work in a city that has superhumans running, or flying, around in it. So, they formed Task Force Eleven and put Dawson in charge of it. He and his team were tasked with finding an answer to a question that had plagued America’s cops since the spring of 1922, when a man calling himself Red Cap literally popped out of nowhere and machine-gunned “Untouchable” Tommy Malone in the bathroom of his supposedly impregnable mansion in New Jersey. Up until then, the vicious Malone Gang owned the Governor, most of the cops and judges and about half the state legislature. Once Red Cap was done with him, he wasn’t untouchable anymore. He was a bullet-riddled corpse in a blood drenched and shattered bathtub. While that put an end to a particularly murderous reign of terror, briefly cleaned up New Jersey politics; and ushered in a new, fantastic era of costumed heroes and villains, it posed new problems. Namely, how the hell do you police people that are by their very nature unpoliceable?
Almost a hundred years later, nobody has found a model that works. Some cities tried deputizing supers as peace officers, but that just opened them up to lawsuits when something inevitably went wrong. Raw firepower wasn’t the answer. Police officers, even if you armed them with military-class weapons, were way too fragile to stand up to even an average superhuman. They couldn’t just run around with that kind of firepower, anyway. It freaked out the citizens, caused a lot of collateral damage when they were forced to use them, and seriously, those weapons didn’t do much more than annoy most of these guys.
So, we’ve limped along with the rickety, Rube Goldberg-esque system we have today. Bad guys are kept in line by good guys, who mainly do so as vigilantes. As long as no one crosses the line, we turn a blind eye to the whole thing and hope insurance covers the damage. The line is drawn at inflicting civilian casualties. If someone uses their powers to hurt normals, the FBI puts a bounty out on the responsible party’s head. Bounty hunters make their living on bringing the people on The List to justice. They’ve got the power to do the job, and they don’t get paid more if their target is alive, so they don’t bother with pulling their punches. The bounty’s on the target’s head, and that’s usually about all the bounty hunters bring back.
But, the events of last summer were way beyond what we were used to. It felt like the system was falling apart. The job the brass gave Task Force Eleven was all but impossible, and they knew it. They had to restore public confidence in the police and somehow work out protocols to keep things from getting out of hand when the cops suddenly had to deal with a situation they didn’t have the equipment for. It may not sound terribly objective, but I wanted to see Dawson succeed.
His surly growl came on the line. “Conway, make it quick. I’m a workin’ man.”
“Sure. OK, try this one. ‘Paranormal Investigations Division.’ Whaddya think?” “Task Force Eleven” was his team’s official designation, mainly because nobody had come up with anything that didn’t sound downright silly. I mean, when they fir
st announced it, someone from the Times tried dubbing the new unit the “Super Division”, but it didn’t stick. Sounded like something out of a comic book. Plus, it implied that the cops had super powers, and that wasn’t a misconception the team wanted to promote. I’d made it my hobby to come up with a fitting moniker for the task force, much to Dawson’s annoyance.
“Dammit, Conway, you got nothing better to do?” he growled. I could hear him sitting down heavily in his chair, and his voice calmed a bit. “Besides, it’s no good. Makes us sound like we’re the Ghostbusters or something.” I smiled. For some reason, I just couln’t resist getting the old cop riled up. It was probably some sort of mental disorder that I should get checked out.
“Actually, I called to see if I could get some information on a missing kid. A runaway from here in Santa Monica named Karl Jorgensen. White male, fifteen years old, sandy blond hair, blue eyes. Last seen on Sunday. I got a source told me he was going up to one of the housing projects downtown.”
“Since you’re involved, I take it this kid’s got superpowers or something?”
“Yeah. It’s a pretty messed-up story. Accident at home, put his sister into a coma and ran away. He’s been living at the beach for the last couple of months, until he went missing last weekend. Santa Monica’s finest aren’t getting the job done. I figured if the LAPD heard something it would probably find its way to your desk.”
“Well, I ain’t heard anything.” He sighed with resignation. “Here, let me check the John Does. Hang on.” I could hear his fingers tapping on a keyboard. As I waited, my tension grew and finally crashed in the pit of my stomach when I heard a muttered “Damn” from the other end of the line. “You got a picture of this kid?”
“Yeah. Hang on.” I sent him an email with Karl’s photo.
After another minute or so, the Captain cursed again, “Yeah, this is probably your guy. Coroner’s ruled it a suicide. Jumped out of a window at the Jefferson Plaza Towers sometime Tuesday night.”
