Book II Chapter 10

Tom looked out over the rooftops, across to the silver and gold glint of the bay, above which the sun was just beginning to set. He glanced at his watch, one hour to go. One more hour until it would be dark enough for him to don his work clothes, and then take to the skies.

A cold wind swept him by, making him hunch his shoulders and shiver. This would be his first winter in San Francisco, and it looked like what everyone had been telling him was true, that it was going to be a real bitch. Fortunately Murray had planned for it, and had built a winter suit equipped with multiple layers of one of those new, space age insulating fabrics. The colder it gets, the more layers you add. He’d break it out tonight, try it with one layer first, and see if it worked as well as advertised.

He looked at his watch again. Fifty eight minutes until it was dark enough. Too long, way too long. Maybe he could try the gray day suit that they had first experimented with in Sacramento. That had worked just fine, a couple hundred feet up in the air and he’d be next to invisible from the ground. Maybe he could fit one of those thermal layers inside the day suit?

“Tom?”

He knew it was reckless, hell it was plain stupid, to even consider it. Tripping off into the wild blue yonder from a deserted stretch of road during the day was one thing, but taking off in the middle of a crowded city for no good reason was entirely different. Yet here he was, seriously considering it. God, but he needed to get out, to get away from it all, to lose himself twenty five hundred feet up. To throw himself through the air so fast that everything, the world, his life, the incredible weight on his soul, became nothing but a formless blur. To—

“Hey, Tommy.”

His teeth clenched, he stared fixedly ahead. Dammit, couldn’t Mike see he wanted to be alone right now? Maybe if he just ignored him, his brother would get the hint. Maybe if he didn’t turn around, and just—

“Hey! Ground control to Major Tom, it’s time to come home. You’ve got guests in there, wolfing down the last of the lemon chicken. We need your credit card to order more grub.”

Tom closed his eyes and hung his head, sighing. Well, that didn’t work. He turned to his older brother, sending him the darkest look he could come up with. “Go away, Mike. I’m not in the mood.”

“Hey, man, don’t do it,” Mike said, his voice taking on a pleading tone, his hands rising in a conciliatory way. “It’s not the end of the world. Please, step away from the edge. Don’t jump!”

Tom blinked, then abruptly lost it as the laugh suddenly burst out of his mouth in a release. He shook his head as he straightened from his crouch, taking a long, deep breath of the cold evening air, feeling it wash clean some of the darkness inside of him. He turned away from the short retaining wall that ran around the edge of the warehouse roof, then strode over to his brother, who had come here not to badger him or to make jokes, but out of what he knew was a deep concern for Tom’s welfare. He stopped and looked Mike in the eye, then growled, “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

“Hey, some of us are born to be heroes, some to be assholes. I haven’t figured out yet who gets the short end of the stick, have you?”

“Look… I’ll be okay, alright? I just need a little time to myself. I know you want to help, but this isn’t something you or anybody else can fix. It’s something I have to learn to live with for the rest of my life.”

“Tom, it… it wasn’t—“

“Don’t!” he snapped, holding up his hand in warning. “Don’t go there, Mike, do not say that this isn’t my fault. It’s not like the last time we had a little heart to heart talk, where you told me I can’t feel guilty about the things I couldn’t have prevented. We both know this isn’t the same thing.

“I had information that the cops didn’t, about guys who bought and sold kids out of the trunk of a car, and I did nothing about it. I didn’t act on it myself, and I didn’t give that information to the police. She’s dead and I could have prevented it, we both know that’s true.”

“But we don’t know that! Those wallets and stuff you got could be a dead end, or she could have died anyway. The cops had her in protective custody, and they still got to her. You don’t know that anything we could have done would have done any good. And even if maybe, maybe you could’ve made a difference, you can’t go taking this all on yourself. We all knew about Mingyu and we didn’t say anything, either. We’re every bit as culpable as you are.”

“You and Murray didn’t find out what happened that night until almost a week later, Mike. And it was over a month after that before Dieter and Holly joined the Committee. But I’m the one who pulled her from that trunk, and held her in my arms, and took her to the hospital. And I’m the one who abandoned her there.”

He turned away for a long moment, leaving his brother trying to find something to say, but failing. After awhile Tom muttered something that was carried away by the wind. “What?” Mike asked.

“I said… Bright Jade. That’s what Mingyu means in Chinese, Bright Jade. I looked it up on the Internet. Aww, shit. C’mon, let’s go see what you guys have got.”

Tom abruptly turned and strode purposefully towards the door to the loft, leaving a deeply concerned Mike to follow along in his wake.

*****

Phillip Hyster pulled he BMW Roadster into the garage next to his house in Bernal Heights, putting the sleek and expensive car into park and revving the engine a few times before turning it off. A flush of pleasure went through his short, stout frame, as the deep rumble of the powerful motor faded. He hit the button on the remote clipped to his visor, bringing the electric garage door down, even as he opened the car door and climbed out. He took the camera bag with it’s all important tapes with him, but decided not to bother tonight with the two cameras in the trunk. It had been a long day, and the equipment would be fine where it was for the night. Right now, the thought of a vodka gimlet took precedence.

It had been a busy day, hell, a busy week! They had finally finished editing the barrel making documentary and sent the whole package on to post production yesterday, and then immediately started in on the next movie, shooting three scenes today. It was another one in that horrid ‘Codpiece’ series. Phillip hated producing gay porn, but it was too much of a money maker to give up, especially here in San Francisco. It was distasteful, but it paved the way for other things, making it possible for him to flex his artistic talents in the area of his true passions.

Phillip was the sole owner and operator of a three tiered business, or as he liked to think of it, a business of three masks. The first mask, Hy Star Productions, produced and sold educational documentaries. Well made around subjects that were interesting if obscure, most of Hy Star’s work ended up in school classrooms or on public television. Phil had even won an award once, for his film on bee keeping in the central valley.

But the documentaries were merely the first mask, the public one, the mask that granted Phil respectability in the local community. Phil’s second business, Crazy Harry Productions, was the one that paid for the stately old Victorian in Bernal Heights, and the cream and tan BMW in the garage. It was also what swelled the healthy balance in Phil’s off shore bank accounts. Fetish pornography was legal, and it brought in hefty profits, but the profits were even better it you didn’t have to pay so damned much tax on them.

But it was the third mask of Phil Hyster’s business that truly satisfied his artistic soul, and made all the bullshit of the other two bearable. This business, also a movie production company, was unlicensed and in fact it had no name at all. But in certain circles Phil’s work was not only well known, but also highly respected. It was thoughts of this last business, and the shoot that he was planning next week, that made the fat little man smile as he turned out the light to the garage and entered through the side door into his home.

Ten minutes later Phil hung his jacket on the newel post as he ascended the stairs to the second floor, the gimlet in his hand and also warming his belly. He yawned as the vodka worked it’s magic and loosened the knots in his shoulders, smiling in anticipation of what was about to come. One of his agents had sent an audition tape of the eight year old star of his next movie, which he could only glance through a couple of days ago. But now he had the time to give it his full attention, and to do the little darling real justice, in the privacy of his own bedroom.

Preoccupied with those thoughts, Phil pushed open the door to his bedroom and flipped on the lights, and was halfway into the room before he saw the figure there and froze. An icy oil rushed through every vein in his body when he saw the invader, recognizing him instantly. Dressed all in black, hooded and masked, the same figure that had stolen his new treasure from him five months ago, and left him lying in a filthy alley, bloody and broken. Here now. In Phil’s own bedroom.

Phil shriek, a sound of abject terror, spun around and lunged for the door. But the nightmare figure in black was across the room and on him, incredibly fast, one hand grabbing him by the shoulder and flinging him back into the room as if he weighed nothing. Phil stumbled as his feet left the ground, crashing to the carpet, hearing the door close behind him. Stunned, he struggled to get back to his feet, but two heavy hands grabbed him under his arms and jerked him upwards first. He found himself twisted around and thrown backwards against the wall, the impact knocking the breath from his lungs, as an iron bar of a forearm was pressed against his throat.

The eyes in that hideous, hideous mask glared hatred down at him, while the arm across his throat kept Phil from turning away. He heard a pitiable mewling sound, and it was a long moment before he realized it was coming from his own throat. The voice of the black clad monster was a rumbling snarl in his ear.

“I’m going to ask questions. You’re going to answer them. No other options, understand?”

Phil managed to choke out something that might have been a yes. The pressure on his throat was suddenly released, and then a hand clutching his shirt pulled him up and spun him around to fall backwards across the room and onto his bed. Phil instinctively scrambled across the mattress, until it ended with his back pressed against the headboard. He drew himself into a shivering little ball, watching the masked intruder with the eyes of a frightened rabbit.

“Four months ago I found you in an alley in the tenderloin, buying a nine year old girl from the back of some guy’s trunk. I took your IDs, but his was a fake. I want to know who he is and how to find him.”

Phil felt his insides go even colder. Oh God, no he couldn’t tell him that! Anything, but not that. Nothing this stranger could do scared him as much as the thought of crossing them.

Two days after the beating they had come here, to his house. Two of them, not the one’s he had already met, but others. They had asked him questions and slapped him around some, but the marks of the beating seemed to convince them that he really had had nothing to do with the robbery. They had then pressed upon him the importance of never telling anyone about them and their business. They didn’t even bother to threaten him, instead they had taken him outside and down the block to show him what was in the old Impala they were driving.

Another car, another trunk, another child. Only this one looked up at him from one sightless eye. A boy, he was probably exquisitely beautiful in life, but his violent death and the beatings that had preceded it had left him a horror. Phil had crawled back to his house and hadn’t left it for four days.

“I-I-I d-don’t know…what you mean,” he stuttered, looking away. He heard a sound, a metallic snikt!, and looked up in time to see the metal club that had magically appeared in the intruder’s hand just before it slapped into the mattress inches from his foot. Phil screamed, and tried to scramble even further away, but a hand that gripped like steel grabbed his leg and dragged him back as if he was a child. Then the grip shifted to his shirt front, pulling him upright, and Phil found himself once more staring into the ice cold grey eyes behind the mask.

“I’m not giving you any choice, asshole.”

Phil struggled to talk, finally gasped out, “I – can’t.”

Tommy shoved the fat little pedophile away, pushing himself up and stepping back, watching as the thing that only looked like a man scrambled back against the wall where he once more cowered and shook. The massive amounts of adrenaline that coursed through his body made him feel like a string that was going to snap, and left both his arms and legs quivering. He clenched his teeth, and for a moment he imagined the taste of blood in his mouth.

“I-I—I can’t!”

God, but he wanted to pound on the man so badly! He wanted to scream and curse and beat on him until he had quenched the hatred in his heart in the fat little man’s blood. He wanted to hurt him, and he wanted to do more.

“They’ll kill me if I talk!”

Tom Blackwood wanted to kill him.

Tom forced himself to take another step back, and then a deep breath to help clear his head. He really wanted to kill this guy, the first time in his life he had actually felt that way. You could hate someone, rage at them, and even think you wanted to kill them, but it wasn’t the real thing. And at the moment he was just sane enough to realize that most of it was from his own self hatred, although that didn’t make the feeling any less real.

Yet this wasn’t some pimp with a razor, or a gang banger with an Uzi. This guy posed no danger to him at all, he couldn’t even defend himself. Tom knew that there was a .38 revolver in the nightstand by the bed, he had found it and left it there while he had searched the place during the three hours he had waited here for Hyster to come home. But he also knew that even if he turned his back the pathetic lump on the bed wouldn’t try for the gun, and end up giving him the excuse he needed to vent his tumultuous rage. No matter how much the monster deserved it.

And Hyster did deserve it. During that three hour search Tom had found a lot of the man’s secrets. He had found the DVD’s in the bookcase and played some of them, and had read the secret business ledgers in the den on the first floor. And even more, he had seen what was in the padlocked bedroom next to this one.

So yeah, Phil Hyster probably deserved to die, or at the very least be put into a hospital and fed through a tube for the rest of his life. And although almost everything Tom Blackwood was screamed at him to do so, another part that was his soul said that if he did, he would lose something he could never replace, a large chunk of that very soul that was protesting so hard. And as the two parts of him warred, a curious thing happened.

There was a rushing in his ears that drowned all other noise out, which then morphed into a trip hammer thumping that he recognized as his own heartbeat. The beat seemed to slow, and Tom found his whole attention sharpening, focusing on the figure in the bed, whose actions also appeared to be moving at a crawl. Hyster’s mewling cries seemed muffled, as if heard through a thick blanket, and yet Tom was suddenly aware of traffic noise from outside that he had not been able to hear before. He could also hear the sound of Hyster’s nails scrabbling against the fabric of the bedsheets as loud as the sound of sawing wood.

The shaking of the bed frame knocked a glass off of the nightstand. Tom watched it as it fell in slow motion, hit the carpet and bounced once, a tiny spray of water drops like jewels fanning out before dropping to the ground and then disappearing, all in incredibly fine detail.

What the hell…?

He blinked, and the moment was gone. The blood still rushed in his ears but the pounding was gone, and the world was moving again at it’s normal rate. Tom shook his head, wondering at what had just happened, but then angrily pushed it aside. He would think about the strange experience later, right now he had work to do.

He dropped the baton to the bed, then reached out with the fingers of his left hand to the back of his right. He slid a knob forward and two small metal pins appeared and stuck out past his knuckles. There was a faint click as the switch locked in place and the circuit closed.

Tom reached forward and snagged Hyster’s ankle once again in his left hand, and pulled the squealing man back across the bed. Before Hyster could begin to struggle effectively and start to kick, Tom pressed his knuckles and the too pins into the exposed flesh of Hyster’s leg, thumbing the now active button mounted on the index finger of his glove. Instantly one hundred thousand volts at a low three milliamps of wattage arced between the two electrodes and into Phil Hyster, causing his body to spasm and jump on the bed as the electricity overloaded his nervous system and completely scrambled it. Tom held the button down for a three count, enough to render the pedophile unconscious, then let the button up. Coldly he checked to make sure Hyster was still breathing, then flipped him over on his stomach. He retrieved two plastic cable ties from his tool belt, and quickly secured Hyster’s wrists. He took a case from one of the pillows and pulled it over the unconscious man’s head, then pulled him up and hefted him over one shoulder.

Philip Hyster, kidnapper, pornographer, and pedophile, was about to go for a ride.

*****

Phil awoke to pain, and to a bone chilling coldness. His hands were immovable behind him, and the uncomfortable position he was in told him he was being carried over somebody’s shoulder. His face was covered, shrouded by cloth that smelled faintly of lavender, and he could hear wind whistling past and muffled sounds of traffic. He had figured all of this out before his memory came back, and he realized just how royally screwed he really was.

Phil squawked, and started to struggle, but a knuckle or something just as hard jabbed him on the inside of his thigh with enough force to leave a bruise. “Knock it off, asshole. You really don’t want to make me drop you right now.”

Phil froze, thinking about the words of his captor, and for some reason being completely sure that the man was correct. Something about the way the night sounds echoed told him that the ground was actually a lot farther away than he was used to. And the smell, he was definitely smelling the ocean now. He held himself still as he sensed them both moving, although there was no up and down motion as if the masked man who carried him had been walking. Phil was desperately fighting a feeling of nausea when the sense of moving wind stopped, and the maker of pornographic films found himself suddenly dumped off his captor’s shoulder, and onto a hard metal surface that slapped the air our of his lungs and rang hollowly under his weight.

Hard hands turned him over onto his front, something slid between his bound wrists, tugged, and then they were free. The pillowcase over his head was snatched away, and Phil found himself staring through a metal railing to a night shrouded ground far, far below. Phil gasped, an acute fear of heights that he had never experienced before grabbing at his stomach and making his head swirl with vertigo. He twisted frantically and scrabbled away from the railed edge, finding his back against another hard metal surface, cold and wet from the night. He lay there for long minutes, his eyes closed tight, fighting the whimper in the back of his throat that threatened to turn into full blown hysterics.

“Open your eyes, Hyster,” a voice growled, at the same time something hard nudged him none too gently in the ribs. “Open them.”

Phil swallowed, but did as the voice commanded. He looked up, to see the dark figure of his captor looking down on him, from where it crouched on top of the iron railing that overlooked so much empty space. Crouching, not sitting, his arms going between his knees to grasp the railing, like some sort of bizarre gargoyle out of a Gothic nightmare. Phil groaned, but managed not to close his eyes and roll himself into a tiny little ball.

“You said you can’t answer my questions, Phil,” the gargoyle said, in a voice colder than the metal they both rested on. “You said that they’d kill you if you talked. So let me ask you just one question then, Phil. Just one.”

The figure in black suddenly leaned forward, impossibly far forward, until his face was only inches from Phil’s.

“What makes you think I won’t kill you if you don’t?”

Fifteen minutes later Tommy once more used the stun gun built into his glove to put Hyster to sleep, then carried him down to the hard stone courtyard below. He left him there to wake on his own, then took to the skies and headed back towards the city. Mike and Pablo would be sorting through all the information he had gotten out of Hyster, comparing it to the police databases they had hacked, and would have a complete report for the committee by tomorrow afternoon. Until then there was nothing requiring his abilities or presence, and Tom was feeling a need, a restless energy that had to be burned off before he could go home. The flying man sped onward into the night, over the bay to the back alleys of the city, and a chance to find someone on whom he could vent a lot of the poison in that troubled soul.

*****

It had been a busy morning for Molly Wu, even though the clock in the Violent Crimes bullpen said it was barely ten thirty. She and her partner had already finished booking three male prostitutes who had branched out into running a protection racket on some local storekeepers. The busts had gone down early this morning, and she had no sooner finished the paperwork on that then the DA’s office had called her to send them a copy of her personal notes on the Bruschetti assault. But then came the call from the house on Bernal Heights, from where she had just returned. Now she had to write up a quick report on that and bring a copy to her boss, Lieutenant Burke. A post it note stuck on the computer screen at her desk told her she wouldn’t have time to write up that report, Burke wanted to see her in his office as soon as she got in. With a sigh she dumped her coat and purse, and left for the LT’s office with her notes and the file on Hugo Danner.

“You wanted to see me, LT?” she asked, peering through the open door of his office. Burke was on the phone, but he gestured her in. She closed the door and took her accustomed seat, waiting patiently until her superior had finished with his call and hung up.

“Molly, I got something here I want you to look into. Seems one of the guards out at Alcatraz reported finding some guy wondering around the old prison out there. They said he had no coat and was half frozen, claimed somebody had kidnapped him and dragged him out there, then apparently just dumped him. He also claimed that whoever snatched him had originally dangled him off the top of the old water tower there, but the guard says he’s lying. Apparently the ladder to the tower rusted apart years ago. Anyway they arrested him for trespassing on Federal property, and are holding him pending a psychiatric evaluation. I want you to go down and have a talk with him.”

Molly frowned, thinking about her current caseload, and wondering what this had to do with her. She said as much.

“Why does this concern us, LT? Alcatraz is under the Parks Service, anything that happens out there is Federal jurisdiction.”

“Because I asked a friend of mine down in Vice to keep me informed about anything strange happening regarding child prostitution. And it seems our trespasser, one Phillip W. Hyster, is suspected of being one of the major producers of kiddie porn on the west coast. So I’m wondering if this might somehow connect to your boyfriend, Danner.”

Molly grimaced, she really hated it when Burke referred that way to the mysterious Federal Agent who had rescued her. She also knew from experience that it would do no good to say so, so instead as usual she chose to ignore the comment. Instead she concentrated on the sudden implications of what else Burke had just told her.

“No need to wonder if Danner is mixed up with your guy on Alcatraz. I just came from Hyster’s home in Bernal Heights. It’s a crime scene, and I was about to make a call to Vice myself.” She didn’t bother to hide her grin of satisfaction at the way the LT’s eyebrows rose. It was good to catch the old man by surprise once in awhile. “Dispatch called me this morning, and said they had had an anonymous call last night that tested positive on our filter,” she explained.

Burke nodded his understanding. Many of the incidents they had attributed to Freddy the Fed, or Hugo Danner as he had named himself, had been accompanied by an anonymous phone tip to the SFPD. Each phone call had been made by an entirely different voice, suggesting either that they were real calls from eyewitnesses that just didn’t want to get involved, or else Danner’s team was a lot larger they had ever suspected. However, a third possibility arose when they had the phone tapes examined by the Forensics lab. Although the human ear could not tell the difference, each call had actually been generated by a machine, and was not made by a living human voice. How this was possible the lab techies could not say, but the traces were obvious when examined with the right machinery. Burke had ordered that all anonymous calls to the SFPD emergency line were to be run through a filter every morning, and that Inspector Wu should be informed of any positive hits right away.

“An unknown female voice called in just after midnight, and said there had been shots fired and the sounds of a fight at the Hyster residence. Patrol cars responded, and found the front door open and the interior lights on. They identified themselves and entered, and found a recently fired .38 Smith & Wesson revolver lying in plain sight on the stairs. They secured the downstairs, then headed to the upper floor where they could hear sounds coming.

“In the master bedroom they found a television with a DVD playing, and several others lying scattered on the floor and bed. The subject on the screen appeared to be the owner of the residence, having sexual relations with two female minors, both under the age of ten years old.” She hesitated a moment, before telling him the rest. “Next door to the master bedroom there was a guest bedroom, made up for a little girl. Frilled bedspread, lots of stuffed animals. MY Pony wallpaper. And chintz drapes over a window that had been boarded up. There was a hasp on the outside of the door for a padlock. We may not have found one of the kidnappers, LT, but I’m pretty sure we found one of their clients.”

Burke leaned back in his chair, and began toying with a pen, his distracted gaze saying that his thoughts were on something not in that room. After a while he asked, “And what is your take on this whole incident, Inspector?”

A test, her boss had already come to a conclusion, but wanted to see if she had come to the same one. “I think Danner and his team somehow found out that Hyster did business with Ricardo Wing’s people, and they snatched him from his home. They took him out to Alcatraz to question him, and when they did they made the 911 call and left the house the way it was so that we could find all that nice, highly incriminating evidence in plain sight. What I can’t figure out, though, is why did they bothered taking Hyster all the way out to the island? They must have plenty of places locally they could have taken him. Or for that matter why not just question him right there in his own home, it was private enough.”

“Intimidation. You ever been out to the Rock? Grim. At night, it must be one of the spookiest places on earth. The guards who picked him up at Alcatraz said he only had a few bruises and scrapes on him, so nobody got really rough. And if what we hear about the way Wing operates is true, it would probably take a lot to scare this guy into opening up. You’re right, having to haul him out of his house, across town, into a boat and then smuggle him onto the island must have been a fucking pain in the ass. But then again, it is the kind of cowboy stunt we’ve come to expect from these guys.

“Keep on this. Call Vice and let them know about the possible connection between Hyster and Wing, but don’t mention anything about Danner. Go down to holding and question Hyster, do it before Vice has time to charge him with the kiddie porn and pedophilia. He probably doesn’t know we have that evidence yet. Check the registration on that handgun, and if it isn’t in his name check for proof that it is his, that would give us an extra charge we can offer to throw out if he tells us about Wing or Danner. It’s a longshot, but worth a try. By the way, did you finish running Danner’s name yet? Any hits at all?”

Molly’s lips quirked wryly as she gathered her files and notebook and rose to leave. “You can say I’ve had some luck. I ran the name through AFIS and every other official data base I could think of, and didn’t find much. No known law enforcement personnel by that name, and only one reference to a small time bootlegger from Cincinnati who died in a Florida retirement home in 1975. But then I decided to take a chance and ran it through Google. I got almost five thousand hits.

“Hugo Danner was a character in a science fiction book called ‘Gladiator’, written by Phillip K. Wylie back in 1930. He’s famous in sci-fi circles for being the very first super hero in literature. Batman, Superman, the Shadow, they all came after Danner. Freddie was just having another laugh at us, LT.”

Burke’s face began to darken as she talked, and Molly was beginning to think that he was going to be angry, but he surprised her with a sudden bark of laughter. He leaned back in his chair, chuckling and shaking his head. “Cowboys,” he said, grinning. “You just gotta love ‘em.”

*****

The next meeting of the Planning Committee had a different twist. Rather than the inconvenience of having two or more members travel over a hundred miles for the meeting, Mike had installed video conferencing on the personal computers at his house, Murray’s workshop, the loft, and Dieter and Holly’s apartment. The five members now sat comfortably in their own homes, as Tom and Pablo finished the after action report on the previous night’s events.

“So after Tom dumps the perv where the State Parks people can find him, he heads back to the guy’s house in Bernal. He gets out the perv’s personal stash of kiddie porn movies, including the ones he starred in, and leaves them out all over the bed and pops a disc into the player and cranks up the sound. And get this, he even leaves some hand towels and an open jar of Vaseline on the nightstand!

“Then Tom turns on all the lights in the house and opens the front door. He takes the perv’s pistol, shoots two rounds into the couch, then leaves it on the stairwell in plain sight for the cops to find, still covered with the perv’s fingerprints since Tom wore gloves. Then I used the artificial larynx program to make an anonymous call to 911, while Tommy slips out an upstairs window. Oh, crap, man, the cops must’ve thought it was Christmas, the way we wrapped that baby raper up so nice and neat for ‘em. Tom, you should’ve stuck a big red bow on his ass, buddy.” Pablo was grinning so hard that for once he looked more like a jolly elf, rather than the crotchety old gnome most people in the movie business thought him.

Dieter and Holly were not quite as amused as Pablo, but they were both grinning widely and chuckling at the tale, the expression still a bit of a novelty on the dour German’s face. Tom grunted an acknowledgement, but otherwise gave back nothing. Mike, however, seemed more annoyed than pleased about the previous night’s events.

“Oh yeah, it was a pretty good run last night. You not only got all the info we needed out of the greaseball, but you managed to shut him down and send him to jail, too. Up to then everything was just peachy. But then you had to turn around and spend the rest of the night on a rampage, didn’t you, hotshot?”

From his workstation on the warehouse loft Tom looked back at the computer screen and scowled, but otherwise held his tongue. Holly and her father shared a puzzled glance, then the beautiful young woman asked the question. “I don’t understand, we didn’t hear anything about after the mission. What’s this about a, a rampage…?”

“Mike is exaggerating again, trying to make a point. I did not go on a ‘rampage’, I just spent the rest of the night on patrol, like I usually do.”

“You put five people in the hospital and you call that business as usual?!”

“How do you know any of them went to the hospital, huh? Besides, they were drug dealers, and they were operating across the street from a middle school.”

“It was two o’clock in the freakin’ morning! School was out, you stupid ape. And what about that guy in China Town, you broke his jaw. And his leg.”

“He was a pimp, and he was slapping one of his girls. Christ, Mike, you saw her, she couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. Why are you defending these guys?”

“It’s not them I’m concerned about, you dope, it’s you. You couldn’t come up with an excuse to kill that pedophile Hyster, so you took to the streets looking for someone, anyone, who could give you a reason to pound on them. Try telling us you weren’t out of control last night.”

Tom gritted his teeth so hard they ached. Mike had completely hi-jacked his report to the committee, and was turning it into an inquisition! He sensed the dark rage that was never too far from the surface these days, churning in his gut. Fighting to keep it down, and not let it make him lash out at his brother. He was only partially successful.

“Mike, I’m only going to say this once. I do not want to discuss this, not right now, so let it drop.”

“Tom, you can’t put this off forever, and you can’t hide from it, either. What would you have done last night if you couldn’t have found that pimp or those dealers, huh? Would you have taken it out on some tagger, put a kid with a spray can in the hospital? Crippled some shoplifter? Hell, why stop there, maybe you could’ve maimed a jaywalker—“

“MIKE!!”

The older Blackwood finally stopped, retreating into a sullen silence. Tom glanced at the rest of the committee, saw that they were now quiet too, watching him warily. The way you would watch a friendly dog that was starting to foam at the mouth. For the first time he realized that Mike wasn’t the only one here who was concerned about his actions, and was beginning to wonder about him. To question his decisions. He took a deep breath, glad that the web cam did not show how he clenched his fists until they shook.

“Okay, let’s get on with this. I questioned Hyster and got the low down on his business, where he gets the kids he abuses in his movies. Most of them have a parent who’s an addict, or a prostitute who’s too worn out or diseased to still make it on the streets. But he also has a couple of suppliers who run foster homes, too. Fortunately he kept pretty good records, including names and addresses. It was all in the stuff I left the cops, and I feel they’re better equipped to handle pulling those kids out and rounding up those implicated. If we got any further involved, I think we’d just run the risk of getting in their way. Agreed?”

Slowly, the others nodded, not saying a word but agreeing. Surprised, he knew, that this new and volatile Tom Blackwood would voluntarily let the police have first crack at a list of people who prostituted their own children. He sighed, hurt, knowing that he had brought this distrust on himself.

“Look… I know, I’ve been acting more than a little but crazy over this. I hate these people, more than I ever thought it was possible to hate anyone. But I’m not so far gone that I would endanger these kids just so I could be the one that saves them. It would take me weeks to work down that list, while the cops could do it in a couple of days. I’m not even going to pretend I have a choice in something like this.

“But Mingyu Tanchez is already dead, and there’s not much information that the cops could run with. Hyster only gave me one lead on the people who sold her. I know you guys are having doubts about me, and I probably earned them. But I’ve thought about it long and hard, and I honestly believe that we’ve got the best chance to bring these bastards down. Does anybody disagree, or have a problem with that?”

There was a long moment of silence while the other four considered his words, sharing looks in the disjointed way peculiar to video conferencing. When a quiet consensus was seemed to be met, it was Dieter who spoke for them. Dieter, the only one of the group other than Tom who had a military background, and knew how much they needed an undisputed leader if they were to carry on.

“It’s what we all came together to do, isn’t it? To help people, by doing what the police cannot. Yes, we have our concerns, but we also trust you, Tom. So tell us, what do you need us to do?”

He sighed, feeling the tension in the meeting begin to dissipate as the others nodded. It seemed his first crisis as a leader had come and past, at least for now. Still, he knew he had damned well better get his head on straight, and start concentrating on the job. His hands began to flick over the computer keyboard, minimizing the four images from the conferenced computers and moving them to the corners of the screen, and opening up another, larger window as the background. The picture was of a classic police mugshot, full face and profile, of a man in his twenties with blond hair in punk-style spikes, sharply contrasting with his dark brown eyebrows and goatee. Miles away, the images were mirrored on the other three screens.

“David Anthony Bennett. I had Mike pull his file from our backdoor into the police computer systems. Arrested twice for possession of narcotics, three times for pandering, once for felonious assault. Also has a sealed juvenile record we haven’t been able to access yet, but I don’t see that as urgent. Most of the charges against him have been dropped or pleaded down, the longest jail time he ever did was about six months in a county lockup. Nothing at all for the last two years, and the cops have pretty much dismissed him as a small time bottom feeder.

“Bennett is pretty heavy into the Vampire/Goth crowd, not a major player, just a hanger-on, but he’s gone all out on it. Has his skin regularly bleached and shelled out some serious bucks to have his canines capped into fangs. Goes by the title of ‘Lord’ Bennett, but lord of what nobody seems to know. Hyster met him about six months ago at a new club in SoMa called ‘Bitten’. He was there doing a documentary on some of the alternative party scenes in San Francisco. Bennett makes his money selling dope and ecstasy, but according to Hyster he’s also a middle man. You want something you can’t get, anything, you go to him and he hooks you up with those who can supply it. Drugs, guns, prostitutes. Little girls. Anything.

“That’s what he had to offer Hyster. Not just the chance to sexually use a child for a few hours, but to actually own one, one that the cops don’t know about and aren’t looking for. He paid Bennett five grand, and Bennett brings him to meet the same guy in the alley. They met in an empty building round the corner from Bitten, and this guy showed up with a photo album and a price list.”

Mike swore, incredulously. “A photo album? Tom, are you saying this guy sold Hyster a little girl out of a fucking catalog?!”

“Exactly. Hyster said that it had several pictures of about fifteen different girls, all between the ages of seven and ten years old, which is what Hyster had asked for. They told him they also had catalogs for girls up to thirteen. He picked Mingyu right there, and they didn’t meet again until that night in the alley. Hyster says he never knew his name, and that Bennett only referred to him as ‘this guy I know’. Which means the only link we have now is Bennett. Mike?”

The older Blackwood grunted, picking up a notepad from his desk and briefly flipping through it before responding. “Tom didn’t tell me what this was all about, he just called me this morning before the meeting and asked me to get what I could on this. I’m glad he didn’t, I don’t think I could have kept Cathy or the kids from knowing something was wrong if he had.

“Okay, Bennett has been off of parole for over a year now, so he doesn’t have to report his whereabouts to anybody. His records from before that show that he has a tendency for moving around, something like four different addresses in twelve months, none of them in his name, usually he just moves in with whatever girl he happens to be stringing along at the time. I’m checking his last known address, but there’s almost no chance at all that he’s still living there.

“I got lucky, though, when I ran his name through incident reports from Vice. He’s a middle man, so I guess he has to hang out someplace where customers can find him. They say he hits most of the Goth clubs during the week, but on Fridays and Saturdays he only goes to the hard core Vampire clubs. The two he prefers are Bitten and Catacombs.”

“Which means we can probably track him down there three days from now,” Holly put in.

“Exactly,” Tom answered.

“And when we do, what then?” Mike asked, quietly, looking directly at his brother. “Do we torture him, too?”

Tom stared briefly at his brother, but otherwise ignored the dig. “Pablo, you remember those appliances you created for that helicopter gig you once told me about? It was some sort of metal palm grapple or something, that attached to a harness underneath the shirt. Know what I’m talking about?”

“Uhh, yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean,” the little man answered, rubbing his jaw with one thumb as he thought. “We had this one stunt where the hero jumps at a helicopter as it takes off from a rooftop, grabs the skid, and hangs on as it flies off. Usually for a gag like that we’d combine three different shots; the hero leaping for the copter on site, a close up of him grabbing the skid but shot inside the safety of a studio, and then another one on site with a stuntman hanging from the copter as it flies off. Stunt guy would actually have a harness under his clothing with straps going up his arms to the skids, hidden by his hands. But this director wanted to do it with one shot, jumping, grabbing, and hanging on as it rises.

“’Course, you’d have to be nuts to do that. The twisting, the torque, the sudden G-forces, no one could keep their grip through something like that. And without a safety harness? Forget it.”

“So what’d you do, Murray?” Mike asked, interested despite himself.

“Like the Flyboy said, I made these grapples out of titanium that fit over the palms of the hands, and are attached to a safety harness. They’re articulated, you can close them by flexing your fingers and making a fist, but the joints have a locking ratchet system. You can tighten the grip as much as you want, but it won’t let loose or open unless you hit a hidden button with your thumb. We covered the whole thing with a leather glove made to look like a real hand, it was a little bigger, but you couldn’t tell he was wearing an appliance unless you got a close up.”

“So what happened, did it work?” asked Tom.

“Didn’t get a chance to try. Couldn’t find a stuntman willing to risk it. But yeah, I’ve still got the palm grapples here in my shop. Why?”

“I had an idea. In the comics the super hero grabs the bad guy and carries him to the top of a building to ask him questions. Impressive, but it doesn’t work so well in real life. When I was carrying Hyster across the bay he woke up and started struggling, and I barely kept from dropping him. His record says that Bennett is only about five six and a hundred sixty pounds, so the weight isn’t a problem. But if he struggles even a little bit there’s too much chance of me dropping him. I’m hoping you’re rig will be able to fix that.”

“Uh, yeah, it probably would. But why? I mean, it sounds like you intend to take Bennett for a ride, but I thought we all agreed not to ever let anybody see you fly. What, are you going to put a pillowcase over his head like the pervert?”

“No, I want Bennett to see everything that’s going to happen to him. I just want to make sure that he puts a different interpretation on this. And then I’m going to offer him the thing he wants more than anything else in the world,” Tom answered, his voice going grim and his eyes cold as he explained. After a while, Pablo Murray’s face split into a huge grin.

“Oh, shit, man. We’re gonna Gaslight the little blood sucker!”