No win scenario

Chapter 6.

You wake up early when you are under a bridge. The traffic and the morning sun. Well, that combined with some bum trying to steal my shoes while I am asleep. With my feet in them.

He should thank me, really. He is filthy and the swim will probably do him a world of good.

I call my bank and find out that I have exactly three hundred and twelve dollars, forty six cents to my name. I don't work until Monday and I have nowhere to stay. After calling the police to report stolen the car I had to wreck last night killing a gremlin, and checking work to find out they don't need anybody for overtime today, I check my messages and get one from late last night that I must have missed when I was crashed out.

“Hello? I really hope this is Kyle getting this message. My name is Jerry, and I was told by a friend of mine that you were able to assist with things that the police couldn't. If you could call me back sometime soon, day or night that would be great. Thanks.”

People I help pretty much know the score. People that have had the kind of problems I deal with tend to have enough of a connection to things odd and strange to get targeted again, for good or ill. They also know that if they make my phone blow up by giving my number out to morons trying to find a picture of the virgin Mary in their foot fungus or because they think aliens performed an anal probe on their parakeet, I will stop answering the phone.
Generally speaking I don't make a dime anyway. No skin off of my back.

So far, making sure that everybody knows this has kept the thrill seekers, curious, and mystic wannabe crowds at bay. So if somebody is calling me I have to assume it is serious. But damn, this is inconvenient timing.

I check the time on the phone, and find that it is just after six o'clock in the morning. I consider waiting until a reasonable hour, then remember his “day or night” comment about the same time my stomach churns unhappily as all I have had to eat in the last thirty six hours was a cup o' noodles yesterday afternoon. I climb up onto the bridge, look around, and make my call.

The voice on the other end is a little muffled. “Hello?”
“Hi, somebody at this number called my phone at about two in the morning. I figure if the problem is serious enough to pull that, calling at six ought to be OK. This Jerry?”
“Yes, it is. I am so glad you called.”

I cut him off.

“Glad enough to meet me at the diner on the corner of Elm and 2nd to tell me all about it over the breakfast you are paying me for my time?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Good. Meet me there at seven.”
I hang up and start walking that way. It won't take me forty minutes to get there, but some coffee while I wait sounds nice.

The diner is pretty dead when I walk in, it being Sunday and all. But it is starting to fill up by the time seven rolls around and I see a guy walk in, looking around a little nervously. He is maybe five foot ten with dark brown shoulder length hair and is wearing a white t-shirt and a pair of nice blue jeans, you know, the way they look when they are brand new and you can get away with wearing them at the office sometimes until the fifth or sixth washing. I wave him over and when he gets closer to the table, I say “Jerry?”

“Yes. Thank you for calling me back, I am at my wits end.”
I hold up a hand, “Hold on a minute. Let me get something in my stomach first. I am starving here.”
A minute later the waitress walks up and says “Hey, looks like your friend made it are you guys ready to order or do you need a few minutes?”
I look at the menu for a second until I see a picture I just can't go on without experiencing.
“Yeah, I am ready. I will go ahead and snag one of these happy gut bombs right here.” I say, pointing to a picture of a meal that includes an omelet of the six egg variety with a separate plate full of meat things and a third with a big waffle on it. She asks me all the important questions and then turns to Jerry, who is looking a little embarrassed and when he is shaking his head and closing the menu I say “He'll have the same. Separate checks please.”
She begins asking the questions of him, and when she walks away he turns back to me and he says “You didn't have to do that. I can cover yours, and it is only fair you get something out of this, I mean I am imposing after all.”

I look at him. “You can pay for yours, right?”
“Well, yes. I can.”

I am stirring a second sugar packet into my coffee and I say “Then quit your bitching and start telling me why we are here, you have until the food shows up to give me the basics, and two cups of this mud they are calling coffee after I am done eating to convince me to help you.”

“Fair enough. I volunteer at the youth center downtown on the weekends and during the summer whenever I can get away from the rest of my responsibilities. Been doing it for maybe five years now. The kids come and the kids go, but in the last seven months or so they have been disappearing pretty steadily. They just don't come in one day and we don't hear from them again. At first I just assumed that the kids were moving away or something. But now, with it happening so steadily and with the kind of kids involved I am really starting to get nervous. I just want somebody to look into it and when I explained my worries to a friend of mine they said that it might be something you would want to know about.”

“Maybe. It depends on what is going on really. I mean, it is entirely possible they really are just moving away or whatever. Have you ever tried to call their parents or anything to find out what is going on?”

“Of course. We send out cards if we haven't seen one of the kids for a couple of weeks, and in a couple of cases when I have gotten to know the parents well enough to have been given a phone number for personal reasons I have called, the phone numbers that all parents give the center are for emergency use only. The ones I try to call that have given me a number I never get an answer at, or it says the number is no longer in service.”

“I guess they could be giving you bogus numbers. What did you mean when you said you were getting nervous because of the kind of kids involved? Are they lepers or something?”

He fakes a smile for my benefit, then says “Lepers? No. But they seem to be mostly coming from what I would politely term “broken homes,” if you know what I mean.”

“Nope. Elaborate for me. While I am trying to pin down potential spooky evil motives is no time to get all evasive.”

He nods, looking a little sick to his stomach. “Well, the kids in question almost never went swimming at the pool in the center, so I only know because I am with the male doctor we employ in the fall to do the physicals for all the boys that need to have one before they can play sports at school that year.”

I look up “Bruises?”

“Yeah. Some of them pretty brutal. Oh, they always have some excuse for what happened but in one case we actually found a hand print shaped bruise on the back of a kid that had a split lip. We were able to get child protective services involved in that one. As for the rest, well after you work with them for a few years it isn't hard to spot the ones that are having more than their fair share of troubles at home. Look, I don't honestly know if this is your thing. But I am scared for the kids and the police always just tell us to talk to the people at child protective services.”

“So why don't you then?”
“That's just it, we do. Sometimes it works. But most of the time it just means we don't see the kid for a week and then when we do see him again he is scared to talk for fear he will say something that will get back to his parents. Look, a lot of the kids, the majority even, have normal homes and normal families that I am sure spoil them rotten and love them to pieces. But the ones that need the most help we can't without getting them more hurt. I don't like it, but I can only work with what I have. When they started just going missing altogether though I decided to try to get something done. I don't have a lot of money, so I can't really hire a private investigator or anything. But like I said, a friend gave me your number and told me you might be able to help.”

“How many kids?”
He looks at me.
“How many kids have you lost like this?”

“Forty nine in the last three months. The center caters to around two thousand five hundred kids over the course of a week, three to five hundred any given day. But the ones that I am worried about total about ninety and forty nine were in the last three months.

The food arrives and with unspoken ascent we both dig in and stop talking. While I am eating I think on his issue. The basic problem is that I think this is going to be a waste of my time. Circumstances happen, and honestly even if he is right and those kids are going missing for reasons that ought to be investigated by somebody, that somebody probably should be the police or some other form of normal type specialist. You beat somebody long enough and eventually they don't go to things like that anymore. They tend to hermit up, find a spot without many people they feel safe at and spend a lot of time there. Definitely not healthy and worthy of being reported but not really anything I can do much about.

On the other hand, the guy seems pretty sincere. And it won't take much for me to look into it a bit. Make a couple of calls, call in a couple of favors, and hang out there for a day. At least one good reason to look into it over and above the fact that it should be easy. The kinds of things that might be responsible for a bunch of missing kids would definitely be attracted to the kind of hopelessness and despair that I can only imagine these kids felt every day.

I finish my food with a lip smack and a thumbs up to our waitress, who is stopping by to refill the coffee cups again.
I let out a loud belch and snag a toothpick from the dispenser, then look up at Jerry again.

“If I am going to look into this I am going to need some help from you.”

He looks relieved, as though the idea I might take him seriously enough to bother hadn't really crossed his mind as a likely possibility. “Whatever I can do, and I will try to get you paid somehow. It may be a while though.”

“Lets see if this is even my kind of show before we worry too much about getting paid. I am going to need a list of the names of all the kids that you have that have gone missing, and it wouldn't hurt to get any of the parents names you have as well. I need a list of all the members of the staff there, as well as any other volunteers like yourself that have been around in the last six to eight months. Also, I need to know what it takes to get put on the roster as a volunteer down there.”

I am getting up from the table as he starts explaining that anybody can volunteer anytime. The hitch was that only staff were allowed to be alone with the children, to avoid any chance of somebody walking in off the street and molesting the kids, physically or mentally, and that all the volunteers needed to have somebody vouch for them that was either on the staff or had been a volunteer in good standing for at least one year.

While I am paying my half of the bill, he says “Were you going to volunteer?"
“Nope.”

I wait a few seconds for his inevitable inquiry.

“Then why did you need to know how to volunteer?”

“Going to send a friend down there in a couple of hours and you need to get her in and give her those lists.”
“Oh, so not yourself then?”
“Nope. I am going to have other things to be doing about this during that time. But she knows enough about what is up to clue me in if she sees anything bad going down.”
“What is her name? How will I know her when I see her?”
I start to laugh a little. “Her name is Tiffany, and as for how you will know it's her, lets just say it ain't tough to pick her out of a lineup.”
He looks a little uncertain as he digs a little spiral notebook out of a back pocket. “I didn't think of the staff or volunteers but I wrote down the names of the kids and parents in this in case you wanted to help. I can get you the rest of what you wanted later.”
“Fair enough.”

He pulls out a cellphone and makes a call, sounds like he is calling a cab.
I walk outside and start walking towards the corner under the diner's sign. While I do I make a call of my own.

“Hello?”
“Hey Tiff.”
“Kyle? It is seven forty five in the morning, I didn't even get home until three. Is it important?”
“No, not really. We just have a possible unknown entity of some variety and about ninety missing kids.”
“Kyle, don't be an a*s. Ninety missing kids? What's going on?

I tell her what I know, which isn't much honestly. Then I say:

“I am going to be looking into it and I honestly have no idea what the hell it could be. Since the last time I went after something I wasn't sure about I got hurt and you threatened my a*s with severe kicking if I did it again, I thought I would give you a call.”

“Of course I will help you jackass, what did you need me to do?”

“I just need somebody to keep an eye on things top side while I keep an eye under. I figure we can compare notes at the end of the day and try to get some kind of picture what is going on, if anything. So you get to volunteer to get snotted on all day while I get to sit around in shadow probably bored out of my mind. Honestly not sure which of us has it worse but I figure if it does turn out to be something reality side you have a better chance of stopping it than I do, so this is the way to split it up.”
“Same with shadow for you.”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”

“OK, I don't mind. I like kids anyway.” She laughs. “Last time I went to church with my Mom one of the kids from her Sunday school class asked me if I was related to Goliath.”

“Cute. Look, I also need you to give me a lift up to Mark's place, I want to drop off this list of the missing kids and see what he can dig up today while we are doing our thing. I figure we can get him on a three way tonight and compare notes.”
“OK, where should I pick you up?”
“Corner of Elm and 2nd downtown, and Tiffany?”
“Yes?”
“Two more things. Bring that duffel we keep at your place with a spare change of clothes in it for me, I am gonna try to scrape some dirt off me while we are at Mark's and I don't want to have to put on the same clothes again.”

I stop for a second.

“You said two things?”
“Yes, I did. I know that you think it is the height of comedy, but I also know you have spare helmets that aren't baby blue with “My Little Pony” stickers on them. So help me God if you show up with that thing again you will spend the rest of your life so scared of getting nailed by pincers you will run screaming at the sight of a plate of imitation crab salad.”

She doesn't even bother to respond to that, but she is laughing when she hangs up.

I give Mark a call while I am waiting for her.

“Mark here.”
“Hey, it's Kyle.”
"What went wrong now?”

Working with Mark is just a joy, let me tell you.

“I have a missing persons issue I need you to look into for me.”
“Oh? Who is missing?”
“Well, the list is long but the people are short. I got a tip concerning possible spooky operating around the youth center downtown.”
“Shouldn't you be going downtown then?”
“I am, but I have a list of the missing kids and their parents. Was hoping you could take a peak through your sources and make sure they are actually missing before I go nuts trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.” Then I explain to him what I was told over breakfast, and his response is not overly optimistic.
“I can look into it if you want, but Kyle I used to look into things like this all the time and it usually ends up being nothing. People move, they find somewhere else to put their kids for the summer, the kids get involved in other activities. It happens.”
“Humor me. Tiff and I will be by in about an hour with the list I have now, and while I am there do you mind if I use your shower?”
“Sure, but what is wrong with yours?”

I grimace.

“Did you see the news yet this morning?”
There is silence for a seconds. Then: “What happened?”
“I will tell you when I get there.”

Fifteen minutes later Tiff arrives on her motorcycle, tosses me a black helmet that I slip over my head and strap on. I hop up onto the bike behind her and she guns the chrome monstrosity back onto the road.
When we get to Mark's place I walk into the sound and smell of frying bacon as his wife is bustling around the kitchen. She looks happier than I have seen her in months, and I attribute it to the company. May is one of those genuinely nice, outgoing, eternally optimistic people person type of individuals.

She tolerates me as a business associate, at best. But she likes Tiffany. Since Mark lost his legs and got involved in the nastier side of the supernatural world she has been his support, his sounding board, his driver when she can, and to a greater or lesser extent, his legs. She weathers it well, and it is obvious that she is proud of her husband. But Mark is a driven man, driven to improve his situation, driven to see to it others don't end up in his situation, and driven to the occasional black moods when he has to ask for something off the top shelf that she will need a stool for, when he used to get for her. He keeps her pretty busy. But she was a creature made for policeman's balls, organizing fund raisers, and getting out the invites to family reunions, that kind of thing. None of which she has been able to do for three years. It is just one of those things you don't talk about, but everybody knows. Even Mark. I can see it in his face, sometimes.

“Kyle, Tiffany!” I made y'all some breakfast if you would like to partake.”
Tiffany's “Love to.” and my “I already ate, but thanks.” Come out at the same time, then I turn around and head back to the den with the duffel that Tiff brought and step in. Mark turns to look at me.

“You burned down your apartments? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Good morning to you too, and no, I didn't burn down the apartments. I failed to stop a gremlin from burning down the apartments. But yes, I am fine and thanks for asking.”
He makes a slight shrug, the most minuscule apology imaginable, and then I hand him the notebook and wander off to the shower.

You forget how nice a shower really feels until you haven't had one for a couple of days.

By the time I am showered and cleaned up Mark, Tiffany and May are all sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast and discussing the great tragedy that was my apartments burning down. I wait in the hall for a minute, curious.

Tiffany's voice pipes up “I know what it looks like, but that isn't the issue here. His place burned down and he needed a place to stay. He slept under a bridge rather than accept my help. That is messed up, and I don't buy his bullshit about how cursed he is. The only thing that would happen if he took some help from somebody is that he might have time to actually build a life for himself instead of living in this eternal tragedy he been putting up with for the last six years. Or do you actually think he burned down the apartments himself?”

Mark says “Yeah, well I don't know much about gremlins but from what I have dug up in the past they would be more than capable of this. So the easy answer is yes, Tiffany. I believe him when he says it was a gremlin. I am sure it isn't his fault the place burned down and he probably saved a bunch of lives by doing what he did. But that doesn't make everything else he said wrong. The guy is a magnet for this kind of thing. You and your mom deserve a better life than to live in the same zip code as this guy. I know he appreciates your help, but I mean come on now. He keeps me on the outside edge as much as he can too.”

“Thank the Lord.” Is May's addition to the conversation.

The conversation falters for a few seconds, and then Mark says “Look at it this way Tiffany. If he didn't care, he would probably take your offer. He does, and he doesn't want anything bad to happen to you. So he won't.”

Well. I have heard about enough of that I think. I step back a few steps and open the bathroom door all the way, letting the doorknob smack against the wall guard that was put there to stop it from damaging anything with a loud cracking sound. From the kitchen I hear “KYLE SMITH, YOU BE CAREFUL WITH MY HOME OR YOU WILL NO LONGER BE WELCOME IN IT.”

“Sorry May, my hand was wet, it got away from me.”

I walk into the kitchen and see that the breakfast spread has been almost completely demolished. I wander over to the table and take the last piece of bacon while I tell Mark, “Don't bother calling me today, I am going to be spending the bulk of it in a place with no cell service. I will give you a call when I can, and we may stop by this evening and dump off a few more names. Staff and volunteers, that kind of thing. Fair enough?”

“Sure, but it might take a while. Doing a complete records check on ninety kids and their parents could take a few days.”
“Start with the most recent entries in his log, work your way back. Let me know if you notice any kind of pattern I should know about. Catch you later May. C'mon Tiff. Let's go.”

She stands and we head out to the bike. A quick ride later and we are downtown. It is pushing nine o'clock by the time we get there and the place is just crawling with little snot machines. Tiff takes off her jacket and puts it in her hard leather saddlebags, then uses a padlock she got from in the bag to seal it shut. She is wearing a t-shirt covered in sequins that sparkle in the sun with the words “I am a PRETTY princess” on the front in flowery letters.

“Okay Tiff, if you see anything too messed up, drop down and find me. I will be around.”

She nods and heads in while I head to shadow.

In shadow the place looks just weird. There is a lot of energy here, but it is all so mixed up with so much other energy that it comes off as just a pale white glow that emanates softly from the building. I walk in the next time the door opens and start looking around. There are spirits here, but they are tiny. The size of flies, flitting around randomly. More like points of light than anything else. They do seem to mostly be in areas that see a lot of human traffic. Either they are attracted to people that are looking to have a good time, or maybe they are simply the reflections of those people. But regardless, they are harmless.

Though I find that they tend to avoid me. It isn't obvious. Takes me almost an hour to notice it. But they give me about a six foot personal bubble at all times. Maybe they are shy.

Basically I spend the rest of the morning wandering around the place bored almost to tears. Then I see something odd. The little light echo things, whatever they are, hide. They hide behind the counter, against the lights in the ceiling, more than a couple break the bubble and hide behind me. Then I hear something coming down the hall. Something with wheels. I armor up, and as I open my eyes again I see a boy by the front desk, leaning lightly with one foot on a skateboard and the other on the ground. Maybe fifteen years old. He is beaten bloody, the red stains on his clothes mute testament to the damage sustained. His head is the worst though. His eyes are half closed from the swelling and everything under his nose is a mask of blood. He has a massive lump over his right eye that is large enough to be easily visible under a mop's worth of unkempt and stringy hair. He smiles a smile that has no warmth in it and I see he is missing about half of his teeth.

“Out of the way old man, I am not here for you and I don't have time for your bullshit.”
“Who are you here for then?”
“That wasn't getting out of my way.”
“No. It wasn't.”

He kicks off from the counter and comes at me, picking up speed as he does over the forty feet or so that separate us until he is rocketing along at probably fifty miles an hour. When he reaches me he puts up one hand in a balled fist and when it hits me I am thrown back into the outside wall of the building hard enough to feel my back pop in multiple places and my head to crack on the wall bringing stars to my eyes for a good minute or two. By the time I can see clear again he is long gone, and I am in serious need of a handful of Excedrin.

Thinking that he might be coming back, I wait in the lobby for the rest of the day for my chance at a rematch, but he doesn't show up.

At five o'clock I exit the building and warp back to reality while hiding in the bushes out front. Then I make a couple of calls.

“Hello, this is Mark.”
Hey, it's Kyle. Tell me you have a record of a white kid, about fifteen years of age, that was beaten to death. Male, about five feet tall, and he liked skateboards.”
“Nope.”
“Really? Well what do you have then?”

“I have vital signs on every kid on this list. They are all alive and doing well, according to their school records.”
“You have nothing? That doesn't make any sense at all. I saw something today, something serious.”
“Yeah, I'll believe that. I didn't say I have nothing. I said I have no dead kids. The parents of seventy five out of this ninety showed up in the “Missing Persons” reports over the last seven months. No clue where they are. Half of those seventy five are now wards of the state, the other half are living with relatives. You say that all of these kids were going to that same youth center?”

“Yes.” My mind starts working in overdrive. We have something that is a guardian, or at least out for vengeance, rather than the predator I had assumed at first. “Look, can you get me the addresses of the last few parents that disappeared, home and work? I need to check something. I will get you that list of staff and volunteers tonight. Thanks again for the help, I owe you one.”

“No you don't owe me anything. I will keep digging. Maybe I can find this skate punk you are talking about.” Then he gives me the addresses I asked for. I write them down on my arm with a ball point as I don't have any paper with me.

I hang up and call Tiffany.

“About damn time you called. I have been waiting around for four hours.”
“What? I thought you were volunteering? Did the ankle biters scare you off so fast?”
“Of course not. The kids were great. But when my sponsor had to get hauled off to the hospital for his third grand Mal this year they told me I needed to leave, since there was nobody else there that could vouch for me.”
“Grand Mal? You mean he had a seizure?”
“Yeah, big time. I am surprised you didn't know, he wears a bracelet for it and everything. Apparently the staff are pretty used to it. He can't even hold a real job, that is why he volunteers. It keeps him busy. He is on disability.”
“When did the seizure happen?”
“About one o'clock, give or take a few minutes. I was kinda busy making sure he didn't hurt himself.”

There is a sinking feeling in my stomach.

“Where are you at?”
“Out front, where I have been for the last four hours.”

I stand up, and sure enough I see her over by a park bench laying on the grass. The remains of a burger run laying next to her, talking on her phone. I hang up and walk towards the bike. She sees me on the way and gets up herself, meeting me there after dumping her garbage off in the can on the way.

“Good thing you finally called, I was starting to worry you weren't going to make your six o'clock appointment.” She has a sly smile on her face that vanishes instantly at my response.

“I won't.”
“But you promised.” She looks more confused than hurt.

“Tiff, Mark looked into it. Those kids are still alive. It is their parents that are missing. Even if we assume that half of them were being raised by single parents that is still over a hundred suspicious disappearances in something like six months, and I think I met the thing doing it on the other side today. We've got things to do. Dinner and movies can wait.”

She nods, her face ashen, and hands me her spare helmet.
We stop by Mark's place long enough to hand him the lists that Jerry gave us, with Jerry's name circled with the words “Start Here” next to it. Then we take off to the first address.

It is a nasty third floor apartment that it looks like hasn't rented out again yet, or at least there is no name yet on the mailbox down at the entrance to the building. I drop to shadow here and for a change I ask Tiffany to come with me. Good odds there will be at least one or two security cameras in the building and I would rather we were not seen.

I have to mangle the lock on the front door and the one on the apartment itself to get in, but I know there is something wrong from the hallway outside. It's the smell. Something is dead behind these doors, and it is dead here in shadow. When we walk in we can see that there are two people laying in the middle of the floor. A man and a woman. They are dead, but more than that they are beaten. Badly. They are laid out side by side with their arms at their sides and their clothing straightened out. Suddenly it becomes clear.

That kid was hauling them into shadow and then beating them into comas. The would lay there, all but dead and not moving, for long enough to become scenery here and then when they actually did die they would just stay here. So the people cleaning the place wouldn't even notice the stains. In a few months or years the bodies would degrade and disappear, the room once again reverting to it's natural state, an echo of the actual contents of the room in reality, without the pair of corpses lingering around.

He was doing more than killing them, he was erasing their existence. They were just gone, at that point. Not even ashes to bury.

“Tiff, we need to get back and talk to Mark, and we need to do it right now.”

“What is it?”
“I think I know what is going on. If I am right this is going to just continue unless we do something I really don't want to do.”
“What are you talking about Kyle? Do what?”
“I need to find out what Mark knows. Let's go.”
We leave the apartment and head back to Marks place, while we are in transit my phone rings.
“Stop the bike, it's Mark. I need to take this.” I call out to Tiff.
We pull into a parking lot and I answer the phone just before voice mail would have picked up.

“Kyle? You there?”
“Yeah, what do you have for me?  It's only been an hour.”

“That guy you had me start with? Jerry Turner? He is your kid I think. About ten years ago he was anyway. Good kid, from the reports. He was competing and winning junior skateboard competitions for a year before his father beat him comatose. He was a resident of county medical for four years, life support and the whole nine yards. Even after coming around he has severe brain damage that appears in the form of a serious epileptic condition. He draws disability for it. But here is the kicker. His dad did a couple of years in jail and the parents split up while he was out of it. They lived in different states until about seven months ago, then they became the first set of missing parents. They both just vanished one day. No trace.”

I ask “Did Jerry file the missing persons report?”

“Nope. Coworkers, in both cases. When he was asked about it he said he had sent them letters, gotten the one from his dad back unopened and never heard back from his mother. According to the nurse on duty he was released from county a couple of hours ago, I imagine he is home now. Look, I think I know what you are going to do. Just don't talk to me about it. I can't lie by omission if I don't know.”

“Fair enough. Can you get me his address?”
“Already dug it up.”

He gives me the address, has me repeat it back to him, and then hangs up.

I turn to Tiffany. “Can you drop me off at this address?” I say, pointing at my arm where I have it written down.
“I will take you there.”
“You will drop me off.”
“You aren't the one with wheels, you will shut up or you will walk it.”
“Then I will walk it.”

I turn away and start walking, and I drop to shadow after a few steps. Bad enough that this has to be done. I will be damned before I will let her watch.

It takes me two hours to walk it in shadow, keeping an eye out in case she decided to follow me.
I don't see her.

When I arrive I go ahead and let myself into his ground floor apartment. The place is dismal. It smells of rot and decay, there is a visible black fog. Not enough to impair vision much, but easily enough to be annoying. I look around until I find the bedroom. When I do I see the kid again, sitting on a chair next to a bed. He is still beaten. Still bloody. But he looks like it took this time. He looks tired. Not the confident dynamo of energy and power I saw before. He looks up when I enter the room. He is crying, and the tears are blood. Barely a whisper, he says:

“Why? Why do you defend them?”

I think about that for a second. Then a minute.
“Because I believe in second chances and I am the only one that can.”

“I knew you would say that. What kind of second chance did he get?” He says, pointing to the bed, empty to my eyes. “He got beaten near to death and I ended up locked in a part of his memory he doesn't even remember. He can't remember what it is like to fly on wheels, what it is like to not go to the emergency room eight or nine times a year. He never got to graduate high school. He won't ever get a good job and raise a family of his own. He can't even have parents that give a s**t about him. Don't talk to me about second chances. I am creating second chances every time I do my thing, and I am creating them for people that deserve them. Not scum that beat their kids, like you want to.”

“I don't disagree. But that doesn't give you the right to do what you are doing. These people need help, sure. But you aren't helping. You are killing. You are murdering people by the dozens.”

He stands up. “You know the only way to stop me is to kill him, right? So you are going to kill him for things I am doing?”

“It looks that way.”
Then I drop out of shadow and I pull my gun. I stand there for a few seconds, making the hardest choice I have ever had to.

Then I fire, and I leave.
Hell has a special place for me, I am sure.