Unusual Events: A Short Story Collection

by Max Florschutz

  But at the same time, it wasn’t. An interview with Wanderer would be my golden ticket forward. Forward to where, I wasn’t really sure. But it would be a ticket to something, that much was certain.

  I couldn’t count my chickens before they hatched, though. I needed results first, and so far all I’d had to show for several months of work was a detailed and interesting wall map and a whole lot of miles on my bike.

  But I was done. I’d assembled everything I could find, gathered it all together in the most complete mapping of Wanderer’s activities that I’d ever seen. Now came the hard part, the second part of my plan: actually tracking him down based on what I was looking at.

  So I started looking for new patterns, new shapes in the data. Hundreds upon hundreds of circles dotted my map, each one numbered and color-coordinated to show the year or cycle they’d been a part of. A veritable mess of information, only kept from looking like a sprawl of children’s scribbles by the work I’d put into making it readable. Even then, it was such a lurid mish-mash of color and shape that staring at it for any length of time was almost headache inducing.

  I didn’t want to mark up my nice map now that I’d made it, so I bought myself a large, clear sheet of thin plastic and laid it over the top—perfect for writing on with a dry marker and then erasing later in case I realized I was on the wrong track.

  I started simple, drawing lines between the various blobs of colors, trying to make shapes in the mélange of interspaced dots. I drew circles, squares, things with so many sides I didn’t even know what the name for them was. My wall began to look like some sort of giant, misshapen connect-the-dots puzzle, one that had been completed by a toddler who couldn’t count past three. I spent hours at it, drawing shapes, examining them, and then drawing new ones. I was seeing the map in my sleep, imprinted on the back of my eyelids as I closed my eyes.

  But there were patterns. I was sure of it. Gradually they began to appear, deeply buried inside the different interlocking lines and points. Faint shapes began to appear—jagged, many edged shapes, but shapes nonetheless. They weren’t uniform, nor were they anything approaching simple, and several times I had to erase one or two and start over, blotting out incidents that clearly had to be outliers … but the shapes were there.

  Even better, no one online had ever spotted them. At least, not that I could find any mention of. Then again, they were so obtuse, the shapes so bizarre, that I didn’t even know where to start with naming them. They reminded me of spiroscope designs, a toy that I’d once had as a child that had made use of interlocking gears and precisely placed holes to allow me to create twisting, interlocking lines that were both complex and beautiful in their symmetry. Some were like flowers, others like stars, but always centered around a single general area.

  And again, none of the shapes were perfect. They were elongated, their sides distorted, their positioning skewed. But then again, why wouldn’t it be? This was crime I was looking at, the act of a hero stopping random criminals as they prowled the city. The fact that there was a pattern at all was a testament to my tenacity as much as anything else.

  Still, it was a pattern. A pattern I could see and follow with my own eyes. And once I could see it, some of the other pieces fell into place.

  I still couldn’t determine the cause of Wanderer’s on-again, off-again appearances, but now that I had spotted the patterns in the way he moved, there was a clear picture to his choices. He was moving around the city on a timetable. If I tried to “center” everything, make the lines and edges of each shape nice and clean, the pattern became even clearer. He was spending set amounts of time at each point of the shape before moving elsewhere in the city, sort of like a beat cop doing the rounds, only in such a convoluted manner that it felt like I’d gone half-mad figuring it out. And even then, as I stood back and looked at it, a good portion of the map still felt like guesswork; complete approximation driven only by the desire to achieve something.

  But to that end, it was something, and as I whittled away the next few free nights applying my pattern to all the markers on the map, the picture became clearer and clearer. I was seeing the lines without even drawing them now. Complex and hideous, like some deranged math teacher’s ultimate work turned into a curse for future students, but a shape I could identify all the same.

  It was a pattern.

  And it was mine.

  Now all I had to do was wait for Wanderer to reappear once more, and make my move. I still wasn’t sure what that move was going to be, or how I would pull it off, but I knew I had to make it. I had to take the chance and try something. And I had until he came out of his current down slump to figure it out.

  So I left the map where it was for a while and threw myself into my work. Reached out to a few of my friends, reestablishing old social connections and taking the time to be a normal person once more. My mother’s worried phone calls stopped—though I think that was doubtless because she hadn’t seen the wall of my apartment; the calls would have never stopped had she seen where my path was taking me. But she hadn’t, and so they quit coming as I began to take time off after work to visit her rather than pouring over my charts and data. Once again her inquiries into my life switched from concern about how hard I was working to when I was going to settle down and find myself a nice boy to have grandkids with. I smiled and nodded whenever she brought it up, but I didn’t comment on it too far. First, I didn’t want to get her going on the topic, and second, because I was focused. I had a mission.

  It was nice to catch up with everyone again and have a normal evening life, but I must admit I didn’t stop working my project completely. Covertly—and I mean very covertly—I started feeding a few of the interns at my job assignments to pull up criminal records for the entire city during select points. I spaced it out, made each assignment relatively easy and with unrelated dates so that no one would think twice about despite my current assignments not having much to do with crime, and quietly began collecting the info next to my map, a small stockpile of facts and figures to go over in the few minutes before I slept each night.

  There were still a few stones I wanted to turn over.

  By the time another month had gone by, I’d started to figure out some of the comings and goings of Wanderer’s vigilante sprees. Once again, there was a pattern at work, though it was disguised enough I almost didn’t see it until I was looking at the whole picture. Like his crime-fighting activities, there were clear outliers, little bits of randomness thrown into the data that were so jarring as to almost be deliberate. In fact, I could almost see a pattern in them as well, with the exception of a few breaks that didn’t quite fit anywhere.

  By the time I was caught up to the present day, all the information arrayed chronologically in front of me, I was sure I knew what most of Wanderer’s activity was controlled by, though the answer wasn’t that surprising. It was crime rates.

  But very specific crime rates. Corruption, organized crime, vandalism … none of those seemed to matter. Their rise and fall had little to do with Wanderer’s activity. What did was the metrics for more common crimes: Theft, burglary, assault, breaking and entering, homicide, rape … The kind of stuff, I noticed with a sense of unease, that the news loved to talk about.

  I started cross-correlating with crime indexes, digging up everything I could about criminal conditions over the last two decades since Wanderer had appeared. The pattern stayed the same. Wanderer was making his resurgent appearances when the crime rates got above a certain level … but only for certain crimes. Namely, the sort of stuff that news agencies ate up. When it came to other criminal activities, the kind of thing that didn’t make the news but was more far-reaching, Wanderer’s activities didn’t seem to matter at all.

  In fact, I realized with a slight pang of unease, most of the crimes I’d been studying for the past few months fit right into that mold. Small stuff, like muggings or thefts. I couldn’t ever recall a single story about our city’s hero going after something like a crime
boss or a corrupt official—and as a member of the news team, I knew there were plenty of both to choose from.

  Apparently, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, Wanderer only went after the small stuff. The kind of thing that made the news. He had a clear focus—that much was certain from the numbers I had—but only on those crimes. It was like the rest … didn’t matter to him.

  Which I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. After all, Wanderer was the city’s superhero. He’d come to us. Why would he only be interested in going after the more common criminals? My mind began to concoct fanciful explanations, but I reigned myself in before any of them could become too appealing, instead reminding myself that I could just ask Wanderer himself when I found him.

  That first interview was going to be mine. I knew it. I had all the pieces. Now I just had to put everything together. Extrapolate forward from the faint patterns I’d found, put everything into its proper place, and for once, know where Wanderer was going to show up next.

  Which left me with what I thought at that time was one final obstacle to solve. The question of “Then what?”

  I couldn’t fake a crime in the area and hope he’d show up. Too many other reporters had already tried similar tactics, though I assumed without my information. Never once had any of them come up with anything.

  I couldn’t be everywhere at once either. While I had Wanderer’s pattern extrapolated to a rough area of the city, it was still a large area, one that I couldn’t expect to police myself. Cruising around on foot all night was just asking to be another statistic, and I was all too aware that there was plenty of crime Wanderer didn’t manage to catch. Despite his efforts, crime was actually on a slow but steady rise—possibly because of his apparent lack of interest in some of the causes like the organized criminal groups or the gang heads, though at the time that was the last thing I wanted to consider.

  Still, walking around looking for trouble wasn’t a good way to go about anything, especially after dark. And I couldn’t go around asking everyone who lived in the area in advance to keep an eye out for Wanderer if he did show up. Not only would that put a lot of pressure on me, but letting Wanderer know that someone had predicted his appearance would undoubtedly invite him to change things, which would put me back at square one. And I really didn’t want to wait another ten or twenty years to be able to uncover some kind of pattern once more.

  Besides, I wanted to interview him, not catch him. And a street corner wasn’t going to be the best way to do that unless I could be sure he’d stick around.

  What I needed was some way to watch most of the common areas inside Wanderer’s next target. Something autonomous. Something simple. Something like a network of hundreds of cameras.

  It was a long shot, and I knew it. Camera nets had been tried before at various points around the city, and even the city itself was getting excited about being able to put up its own security cameras to keep an eye on everyone … but neither of them had ever had any luck catching Wanderer. Theories abounded as to why online, though most tended to agree that he either had some method of detecting the camera’s locations or a form of optical camouflage. Some argued that it was probably both, because how else could a six-foot armored superhero make it around the city unnoticed while still not smelling of sewage everywhere he went?

  Regardless of whether it was superhuman knowledge of camera positions or some form of super-effective optical camouflage, cameras had been tried multiple times and failed.

  I decided I needed something else. I just had to find it.

  FIVE

  Embarrassingly enough, it took me three days to come to the conclusion that cameras were probably my best shot. Even though they’d been tried before with little result, the only alternative I could come up with was spending all of my time in what I assumed was about to be Wanderer’s newest area of operations, something I couldn’t do unless I wanted to lose my job or could somehow convince my immediate boss that the sacrifice was worth it. That, or hire dozens of people to do the job for me—also completely out of my meager capabilities.

  That said, setting up cameras wasn’t much better. I knew that I’d be able to get away with putting them up as long as I did so covertly and without much fanfare, and there were probably plenty of local businesses or other places in the area that wouldn’t mind helping a newscaster out, but before I could even do that I’d need to be able to afford all of them.

  I’d have to go cheap. And even then, if I cleared out half the pawn shops near where I lived, I still wasn’t going to have enough. The area I’d marked for myself to cover was a circular zone almost a mile-and-a-half across.

  That was a lot of cameras. Even going by my plan to track specific areas that I was certain Wanderer was going to have to frequent, it was a lot of cameras. Which meant I needed extra funds.

  It was time to take my plans further than I ever had.

  I’d been at the news agency for almost two years when I walked into my boss’s office with a personal request. He looked up from his desk with a raised eyebrow, probably curious why I’d asked to see him. In the time I’d been there, I hadn’t done much out of the ordinary but work hard and do my best to make sure that hard work was as high a quality as I could manage. In fact, short of receiving new assignments or running various errands, I could count the number of times I’d actually been in my boss’s office for something out of the ordinary on one hand. Voluntary requests like the one I was about to make didn’t even require that.

  “This is a surprise,” my boss said, his level voice filling the room as I came to a stop in front of his desk. “Have a seat.” He waved a hand at one of the spare chairs sitting in front of his desk. “What can I do for you?”

  Now, I should point out that I’ve always liked my boss. He’s fair but tough, with the expectation that everyone, including himself, pulls their own weight. His office isn’t ostentatious like some of the higher-ups in the company, and you don’t ever get the impression that he’s judging you from atop some ivory throne when he talks to you. Again, unlike some of the higher ups.

  Even so, at the time I couldn’t help but feel a little nervous. So much of what I was about to ask almost sounded crazy in my own ears, especially considering that I’d already decided not to give my boss the specifics of how or why I knew what I knew—the last thing I wanted was some other member of the news agency taking my hard work and running for it. The research was mine, hard-earned, as would be the payoff. I would be the first to interview Wanderer, hero of the city.

  “I have a request,” I said, my voice catching ever so slightly as I began to speak. I cleared my throat, ignoring the sudden dry sensation that was spreading across my mouth, and spoke again. “I need some funds.”

  “Usually you go to the bank for that kind of thing,” my boss said, smiling so that I knew it was a joke. “What kind of funds, and what for?”

  “A project,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “An investigative report. I need cameras.” It went without saying that the report would be for the agency. It would be pointless to assume otherwise.

  “What’ll the cameras be for?” he asked, not even batting an eye. “What sort of investigative report?”

  Then he shook his head. “No,” he said, “let me guess.” He interlaced his fingers in front of him on his desk, leaning forward with a knowing smile. “Based on the work that got you hired here in the first place, as well as a few discreet but regular requests you’ve made over the past few months and the amount of focus you seem to have … Wanderer?”

  I nodded.

  “Camera net?”

  I nodded again.

  “Right.” He leaned back drumming his fingers against the edge of his desk. His expression was still friendly, but now there was an undercurrent beneath it, a look that promised that he was weighing and considering the options. The drumming stopped, and he leaned forward once more.

  “Based on your past history,” he said, a curious look in his eyes. “Would I be correct
to assume that you aren’t just doing what other agencies have done in the past, putting cameras out at random and hoping for some result?” He let out a short, almost barking chuckle. “Hell, we have cameras on our phones that beat anything we had in the old days and most of us still aren’t getting anything impressive on the guy.”

  “I …” After the smartphone comment I wasn’t sure how to respond. “You’d be correct. About that first part.”

  “So this is going to involve cameraphones?” he asked, his thick eyebrows lifting.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Normal cameras.”

  “Okay,” he said, nodding once more. “I’ll bite, at least enough to listen to your explanation. Let’s say I trust you enough to give you the money. How much are you going to ask for, and what are you going to do with it?”

  “I just need a few thousand,” I said, watching as once more his eyebrows made a leap up his forehead. “Maybe only just the one.”

  “How many cameras can you get with just a thousand bucks?” he asked, the look of surprise still on his face.

  “A lot,” I said. “At least around fifty.”

  For a moment he looked at me like he was crazy, and then I saw it click inside his mind, a look of realization coming over his face. “Oh …” he said, with the tone of someone who’d just solved a riddle. “Cheap cameras.”

  “Pawn shop quality,” I said, nodding. “I don’t see the point in using nice stuff when something cheap and simple will work just as well.”

  “So you’ll … what, flood the city with cheap cameras?” He shook his head. “No, that doesn’t make sense, and I know you. You’re not foolish. Too much territory, too many places.”

  I nodded. “I have … some theories. I don’t want to say much, or promise anything, but I might be onto something here.”