West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide (11 page)

“Two years, 3.2,”
said Seawolf calmly.

Camille paused a
moment, then nodded.

“Excellent,” said
Seawolf briskly as she stood up. “That’s all settled then. I’ll have legal draw
up the contract for you to sign when you start work - let’s say Monday. Shall
we send a jet or do you want to fly down yourself?”

“What?” said
Camille, standing automatically, her head spinning. “Ah, I guess I’ll fly. I
mean, I was already going to fly down for the funeral, so I guess I’ll just
stay on then.”

“But of course.
Don’t forget that we have a new headquarters now.”

“That’s right.” So
much had changed even in just a few years. “How is the new building?”

“Large,” said
Seawolf with a gruff laugh. “Even you shouldn’t be able to miss it.” She took
Camille’s hand for another uncomfortable handshake and walked out as Camille
sunk back down into her desk chair. Her mouth went dry as she looked at the
picture of her, Jules, and Meghan at the skating rink.
I am so totally fucked
,
she thought, and then,
but
I’m back in the game
. A smile played across her lips as she steeled
herself and reached for the phone.

4:25 p.m.,
Friday, March 29th, 2013

5809
Odyssey Court

West
Pacific, CA

It was
hard to find time for a secret identity. This was the problem that Loren
Polawsky
had struggled with for years. Being at West
Pacific College for undergraduate and then graduate school had worked quite
well, but graduation had been inevitable. Afterwards he had tried that most
classic of secret identities: a reporter. Unfortunately, he soon discovered
that being a journalist had serious drawbacks. Sure, he was usually the first
one at the scene of any crisis, but once he was there, his boss always expected
him to report, not change into a costume and save the day. He got a reputation
as being ‘directionally challenged’ after he’d too often used the excuse that
he’d gotten lost between the van and the scene. So he got demoted from reporter
to driver, which worked pretty well until he left the news van to sneak into a
crime scene and dust for fingerprints. How was he supposed to know that the
Fright was going to choose that time to threaten the city? By the time he’d
finished his investigation, the van was gone and with it his career in
journalism.

Of course, the
easiest secret identities to maintain were the ones that didn’t require you to
work at all. But that only worked for supers who were independently wealthy or
could get endorsements, or who belonged to a team and got paid for their
heroics. But for most vigilantes, especially
nonmutants
like he was, a job was a necessary evil.

He often wondered
what his fellow caped crusaders did for a living. Sometimes when he was showing
a house, like now, he would look at the clients and wonder if one of them might
actually be a secret superhero, perhaps even someone he worked with. Doubtful
with these two. The man was too loud and the woman’s fingernails were too well
manicured. Of course, that could just be a really good cover. He’d gotten up
the courage to ask Goalie once what she did for a living, assuming that she was
a professional hockey player. To his disappointment, she had said she worked in
adult daycare. Perhaps that explained her aggression out on the streets. In a way
it was comforting though. There was something worse than real estate.

From the outside
looking in, being a real estate agent seemed to have distinct advantages. You
could set your own hours and work mostly from home, with very little oversight
from the front office. On the other hand, people expected you to be constantly
on call and they had entirely unrealistic expectations. Even with his licensed
agent priority access to special listings, he simply couldn’t find a
single-family beachfront home within commuting distance of downtown West
Pacific City for under a million. No one could find that and yet everyone
wanted it. Telling people that such houses simply weren’t available didn’t stop
them from demanding to be shown property after property that both he and they
knew they could not afford. But you couldn’t refuse to show them properties.
Like it or not, he was a real estate agent for more of his life than he was a
superhero, and without at least occasional commissions coming in, there
wouldn’t be any
superheroing
at all.

“It’s very nice,”
said the woman with the well-manicured nails. “But I don’t think it’s quite
what we’re looking for.”

Loren smiled
politely.

“We were hoping to
be closer to the city,” boomed her husband from the living room.

“And we’d like a
bigger kitchen,” added his wife helpfully. “This one is so dark.”

“Well, I do have
another property I could show you… ” Loren began.

“I know how this
works,” interrupted the loud husband. “You show us a bunch of places that don’t
meet our criteria and then one that does, but is way out of our price range. I
saw an investigative report on how you people work.”

Loren kept his smile
intact as he tried to explain. “No, I assure you that we at You’re First
Realty! are committed to showing our customers houses that they… ”

“The thing is,” the
wife interjected sweetly, “what we’re really looking for is a three-bed,
two-bath, with an ocean view, but close enough to the city that we can drive to
work within an hour.”

“And for under a
million!” yelled her husband.

Loren nodded
sympathetically. Every buyer was convinced that somewhere out there was more
house, in a better location, for less money. Every seller was convinced that
somewhere out there was a gullible buyer loaded with cash. And caught in the
middle were the poor real estate agents, nodding sympathetically as they
watched their own bank accounts dwindle.

He dropped them back
at their condo and checked his messages in the parking garage. It was the
cardinal rule of
You’re
First Realty! that agents
were absolutely forbidden from taking calls when they were with clients. “Our
clients want to feel that you’re totally focused on them,” Mrs. Barton had
explained on his first day. “And that means, no chatting on the cell phone when
you’re out in the field.”

“But what if a new
listing comes available?” countered Loren, who hated to think of being out of
touch for hours at a time. “It could benefit the client if I find out about a
new listing.”

Mrs. Barton waved
her hand imperiously. “No calls,” she barked. “You take a call when you’re with
a customer, you’re out of a job. Remember Michaels.”

Loren remembered.
Michaels had started work one week before him and got fired after his second
showing. The clients had revealed in one of Mrs. Barton’s infamous follow-up
customer service calls that Michaels had answered his cell phone while they
were trying to determine whether the Jacuzzi tub had a cracked seal. No matter
that his wife was expecting their first child. No calls meant no calls.

Five new messages.
Loren sighed. Real estate was turning out to be journalism all over again.

Three were from the
office. Loren was beginning to suspect that
Frannie
,
Mrs. Barton’s secretary, liked him. At least she seemed to call him a lot more
than the other agents, from what he’d been able to determine. She was cute, but
Loren thought she had a roommate. Relationships were complicated enough as it
was without trying to figure out that dynamic. Loren had his own cardinal rule
when it came to dating: the girl had to have her own place. There was simply no
way that he could bring anyone back home with him.

Two of the calls
were simply setting up times for showings this weekend. The third was more
interesting: “Hi Loren, it’s
Frannie
again! I just
thought you’d want to know that a bunch of new beachfront just hit the special
listings. Some of them are really reasonable, must be someone motivated to
sell. I know you’re showing a client right now, so… well, you know what? I
actually have a lot to get to this afternoon. I might not be able to let the
other agents know until Monday morning… Okay, well, good luck out there!”

This was good news
and Loren brightened. It was about time that he caught a break. Maybe some
developer was on the verge of going under and was selling off a whole lot of
single-family beachfront homes within commuting distance and at cut-rate
prices. That could mean commissions, and commissions meant his half of the
mortgage payment, brake repairs on his car, and maybe even the new Daedalus
Consulting XR1300-series Multifunctional Monitoring System. He smiled to
himself. This was really great. Maybe he should make an exception for
Frannie
…

The fourth message
was from his mom. He needed to pick up milk on the way home, they were out
already. He made a mental note and turned to the fifth, which didn’t register
on caller ID. He inputted the key code for the Daedalus Consulting Universal ID
system but found the number still blocked. This was interesting; it must be
someone using the Daedalus Consulting Universal Block system. His pulse
quickened as he heard a faint husky voice. He pressed the phone close against
his ear and turned up the volume. “Midnight at Industrial Island,” the husky
voice said. There was nothing else.

Loren jumped into
his car. Thank God the Quick ‘n Good was on his way home. He had
heroeing
to do.

It
didn’t take long to gather the supplies he would need for tonight’s adventure.
His lair had started out as a two-car attached garage, but when he moved back
home after grad school he had convinced his mom to let him use it as his living
place. The arrangement suited her; she had plenty of room in the house and the
weather was rarely bad enough to regret not being able to park inside. Loren
knew his mom was a little worried about his idiosyncrasies, particularly his
insistence on keeping the garage off limits at all times, but he was a devoted
son, he paid half the mortgage payment, and most Friday nights they watched the
Super Channel movie together over take-out Chinese. All things considered, they
were happy.

The living portion
of his lair was the smallest, just a bunk bed and an easy chair. But that was a
small price to pay to have a complete laboratory and forensic investigation
center on the other side of the makeshift dividing wall. His masters was in
physics, but the last couple of years the other vigilantes had started to rely
on him more and more for all manner of scientific analysis. He had really
earned his stripes after Melody Lane retired from WPPD forensics
investigations, after decades of running a backdoor fee-based vigilante
consulting service. Her retirement sent ripples through the community. She
assured everyone that she would continue to be available via the internet from
her new condo in Myrtle Beach, but they all knew it was never going to be the
same.

So Loren taught
himself about blood stains, fingerprints, and DNA sampling. Daedalus Consulting
made it almost ridiculously easy for anyone with an actual background in the
hard sciences. Most of their products came with beautiful technical manuals,
and as a preferred customer he was eligible to log on to the many webinars that
explained more advanced product uses. Sometimes he felt like he was back in
school again, not that he minded. He had always enjoyed school; it was life
after school that had proven so challenging.

The Whisperer’s
message had said
Midnight
at Industrial Island
, which probably meant that the vigilantes were
meeting at midnight tonight, though of course, it could be that the vigilante
Midnight wanted to meet him on Industrial Island. Either way, the meeting place
would be the Fun
Plex
on the northern end of the
island. It was a favorite meeting place for the more social vigilantes of West
Pacific City, both because it was easily accessible via ferry or metro from the
mainland and because the place was so run down and filled with freaks that no
one paid attention to a couple more. As a matter of principle and personal
security, vigilantes didn’t meet up regularly, though Cupid liked to host the
occasional karaoke night and Midnight was pretty big on strategy sessions to
exchange information. Still, they didn’t get together more than once a month.
For the Whisperer, the most secretive of them all, to be calling the invites
meant that something big was going on. Loren could barely contain his
excitement.

He got off the ferry
in a crush of half-drunk teenagers and made for the abandoned shooting gallery
behind the Ferris wheel. The place was pretty trashed already, not unusual for
a Friday night; he passed two kids making out by an arcade and another one
vomiting into an overflowing garbage can. Back in high school, he’d brought a
date here once, but he never made that mistake again. The place didn’t used to
be this bad, though. Industrial Island really had gone to hell.

Loren’s vigilante
persona was
Truthfinder
, not the catchiest of titles,
but it was hard to pick a name. Most of the really good ones were taken. There
actually had been a
Truthfinder
back in the 70s, but
Loren didn’t think his estate was going to track down a minor West Pacific
vigilante just to raise a stink over it. His
Truthfinder
costume consisted of a black trench coat, which had enough hidden pockets to
stash his most valued tools. On outings like this one, he also carried a
briefcase with more high-tech analysis equipment. He thought it gave him a
menacing professional look, maybe like he was part of the Russian mob. He was
saving up his money for an ultimesh body suit, but in the meantime, he made do
with a bullet-proof vest from the military surplus store.

The first person he
recognized was Cupid, playing lookout and trying to act casual. Of course there
was nothing casual about a midget with a quiver strung over his back, leaning
against a darkened shooting range. “Hey there, Cupid,” Loren said with a smile
as he headed up.

Cupid frowned back.
“The name’s Don Juan tonight,
capiche
?” he said,
laying one finger alongside his nose and speaking in an outrageous Italian
accent.

“Right,” said Loren.
Cupid loved secret identities and he was always trying out new ones; Loren had
learned it was best just to play along. “So where is everyone, Don?”

“Bumper car
building,
señor
,” Cupid replied, jerking his thumb in
the direction of a neighboring building. “I’m waiting for Samurai. He got stuck
at some belt ceremony or something down at the dojo. You go ahead.”