Detective Derek Wolfe watched the dark-haired woman seated across from him carefully. She’d made her statement. It was clear and concise, without any of the additions and suppositions witnesses usually added when describing events they’d seen and heard. Her statement was to the point and added absolutely nothing new except for identifying the alleged victim. Privately, Wolfe figured they’d find Kent’s body when it washed up somewhere along the shore of the Hob’s River.
Her eyes had been unfocused when she spoke of what had happened in the club, her hands kneading the fabric of her skirt. Dark bloodstains marred the bright red dress where she had wiped a man’s blood off her hands. “They murdered my partner. The bastards murdered my partner,” she had told him when she had finished her story.
Wolfe wondered a little at her reaction. Wolfe hadn’t been with the Metropolis Police for very long. He’d moved to Metropolis from Dallas. But he’d heard of ‘Mad Dog’ Lois Lane, the brash, no holds barred Planet investigative reporter. But her reaction was more what he’d expect of a girl friend, not a co-worker – unless Kent was more than just her work partner. “Miss Lane, how about I have an officer drive you home?” Wolfe offered.
She nodded. They both jumped when her beeper went off. She checked the number. “May I use your phone, please?”
He pushed his desk phone closer to her. “Dial nine for the outside line,” he told her. He left to give her some privacy. It was going to be a long night and already Wolfe knew that he and his investigative team would be getting little rest until Kent’s killers were in custody.
0 0 0
Pain. Incredible, searing pain that made it impossible to breath, impossible to move. Every breath he took was like an ice pick stabbing his chest, twisting in his heart, his lungs. He was in an alley, somewhere, but he had no idea where he was or how he got there. All he knew was that he was in pain, and Lois was in danger.
He tried to climb to his feet, but was overcome with nausea, vertigo. He managed to crawl to the side of the alley, to the nearest building, ignoring the glass on the ground that slashed at his hands and shredded the knees of his slacks. He finally got to his feet, leaning heavily against the rough brick of the wall. Slowly, keeping his bloody hand on the wall for support, he headed for the lights on the street beyond.
0 0 0
Officer Joe Murphy and his partner, Leo Brazzel sat at one of little tables in the all-night diner, drinking coffee and finishing up their dessert. Murphy had his radio between them, listening to the reports coming through. An all points bulletin had been put out on Al Capone, John Dillinger, Bonnie Parker, and Clyde Barrow.
“What are they smokin’ downtown?” Brazzel wondered aloud. Murphy just shook his head. He had stopped wondering about the lunacy that surrounded Metropolis years before – heck the city was home to a man who could fly.
“Hey, didn’t you guys hear?” the night cook asked. “There was a couple murders not far from here tonight. The owner of some sort of gambling club was found dead in the river and then some guy was shot to death in the club. The radio said the shooter was positively identified as Clyde Barrow.”
“Clyde Barrow’s been dead for sixty years.” Brazzel said.
The night cook shrugged. “Maybe the radio guys are smokin’ the same thing as that guy out there.” He nodded to a dark-haired man who had fallen against the Metropolis P.D. panda car parked in front of the diner.
Murphy and Brazzel both swore as they headed out the door, pulling out their batons as they approached their car. The man had fallen to the ground beside the car. Murphy realized with a start that there were dark streaks across the white of the car doors, but the light from the street lamps was too dim to see much else. He pulled out his flashlight. The white light showed the stains on the car to be red, blood red, drying to blood brown.
He turned his light on the man on the ground. He was young and he looked familiar, somehow. Someone Murphy had seen before, but Murphy was pretty sure he wasn’t someone he’d arrested. The man’s clothes were of good quality, at least they had been. Now they were torn and filthy, like he’d been dumped in garbage. The front of the man’s white shirt was also stained with blood.
With Brazzel standing just out of arms reach, Murphy knelt down and checked for a pulse at the man’s throat. He didn’t seem to be breathing, and he was deathly pale but, to Murphy’s astonishment, there was a pulse. Not a strong one, to be sure, but a pulse nonetheless.
“Leo, we need an aid car here on the double,” Murphy ordered. His partner pulled out his radio and placed the call while Murphy attempted to clear the man’s airway so he could breathe.
0 0 0
“Lois, where have you been?” Perry demanded as soon as he heard Lois’s voice on the phone. “A report came over the scanner of a shooting over at Georgie Hairdo’s club. That was a more than an hour ago”
“I know, Perry,” Lois said, fighting back the tears she had refused to shed in front of the detective. “I was there.”
Perry seemed to sense something was wrong. “Lois, hon’, was Clark with you?”
“Clark was the one shot, Perry,” she told him. “Three slugs, point-blank range to the chest. He’s dead, Perry. Clark is dead and it’s my fault.” The tears had started. “If I hadn’t worn this damn red dress, if I’d listened to Bobby and to Clark, we’d’ve waited, found out what Capone was up to…”
“Honey, you’re sure Clark’s dead? The radio report said that the perps took the body with them,” Perry told her.
“Perry, he wasn’t bleeding, not really. I’ve seen enough to know that living people bleed. Dead people don’t bleed and Clark wasn’t bleeding,” Lois told him. “And chances are, they won’t find his body. Capone said he couldn’t afford to be linked to a murder.” She stopped trying to control her sobs.
Perry snorted. “And to think, people used to think Capone was a smart cookie,” Perry said. “Lois, do you want me to come down and give you a ride home?”
“No, Detective Wolfe is going to have an officer drive me home,” she told him. “But somebody needs to call Clark’s parents, let them know what happened. I don’t know if the cops called them or not.”
“I’ll give them a call,” Perry promised. Clark was the one shot tonight? Oh, my God. Clark is dead?
0 0 0
“Who would be calling at this hour?” Martha Kent complained as she reached over to pick up the phone. She and her husband had just gotten settled into bed.
“Answer it and find out,” her husband suggested.
She made a face at him as she picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Missus Kent?” a man with a slight southern accent asked. “This is Perry White, from the Daily Planet, Clark’s boss?”
Martha motioned for Jonathan to pick up the extension phone. “Yes, Mister White?”
She heard him take a deep breath. “Have the police gotten in touch with you yet?” he asked.
“No, why?” she asked. Her breath caught in her throat. “What’s happened to Clark?” Something’s happened to Clark? Something’s happened to my baby? How? He’s invulnerable. He’s Superman.
“Lois and Clark went to check out an illegal gaming club. There were shots fired,” Perry told them. She could tell he was fighting to maintain control as he spoke. “Clark was shot. Lois is pretty sure they killed him, but the perps took his body with them, so we can’t be a hundred percent sure.”
“Why would anyone want to shoot Clark?” Jonathan asked.
“I don't know all of the details, but I can promise you that when I find out you'll be the first to know," Perry told them. "Clark was a good kid.”
“Thank you,” Martha murmured as she hung up the phone. “Jonathan?”
“I’m sure it’s just a mistake,” Jonathan assured her. “Something happened and he’s trying to get things figured out and he’ll show up here any minute.”
“So why do I feel so scared for him, Jonathan? It's not like him not to call or show up when something's happened."
Her husband of thirty-five years simply took her in his arms.
0 0 0
“Okay, what’ve we got?” Doctor Andrew Bryant asked as he trotted beside the gurney that had just come out of the elevator onto the trauma floor. Bryant was the senior trauma surgeon at Metropolis General Hospital and had been recruited away from Atlanta only three months before. He took the paperwork that was handed to him by one of the nurses and glanced through it.
“Multiple gun shot wounds, three anterior thorax, no exit wounds we can find. Looks like a forty-five,” the trauma nurse told him. “Pulse 125, BP 80 over 60.” The rest of the team was following the protocols as they wheeled into preop. The patient had been stripped down for examination and treatment, IVs started with large bore needles. He’d been intubated in the aid car on the way to the hospital, but now the anesthesiologist was replacing the ambu-bag with the fittings for the respirator. Electrodes had been placed on his chest and the green blip on the small ECG screen bounced along in an abnormal but merry way.
Bryant checked over his new patient.. Male Caucasian, twenty-five to thirty years of age, one-eighty to two hundred pounds. He had the body of an athlete but Bryant knew that looks could be deceiving. He raised a questioning eyebrow at the injuries to the man’s hands.
“The cops who called him in think he was shot and left for dead in an alley,” one of the nurses said. “Apparently he managed to crawl away from them.”
“He’s damn lucky, then,” Bryant said.
The team started draping the patient for surgery, working quickly, efficiently. The anesthesiologist was speaking reassuringly to the patient as she worked. “Do we have a name on him?” she asked. One of the nurses shook her head. The anesthesiologist shrugged. “Hopefully he’ll be able to tell us when we’re done here.”
Bryant stepped over to the light box with the x-rays clipped to them. The films were not as clear as they normally were. “What gives with these?” The film was actually foggy in places, as though it had been exposed to radiation other than the x-rays.
“Just another one of those things,” the trauma center radiologist. “That new x-ray system we’re testing did a better job. Looks like two of the slugs shattered, sent shrapnel all through his chest, but managed to miss the major arteries. The third one is lodged against his heart. What I don’t get is why the pieces are showing up like this.” The metal was showing on the films as hard bright stars. “Unless the slugs were radioactive.”
“Dear God, I hope not,” Bryant said, heading in scrub up for surgery. “This kid is going to have enough problems as it is.”
0 0 0
Clark is dead. Lois found herself repeating in her head. A uniformed officer drove her to her apartment, made sure she made it inside before heading back to headquarters. Once inside she took off the red dress and placed it in a garbage bag. They hadn’t asked, but she was sure the police would want to check the blood on her dress, match it against Clark’s blood.
Clark is dead. She stripped to the skin and took a shower, scrubbing away the feel of Dillinger’s hand on her, scrubbing away the dirt from being close to the animals that killed her friend, scrubbing away the blood – Clark’s blood – on her hands, on her body. Scrubbing away the guilt for talking him into going to the club even though she knew he hadn’t really wanted to be there.
She knew he had gone to humor her, to keep her safe when she decided to jump into an investigation without really thinking it through. That was the way he was. He was her spear-carrier. He followed and helped, advised and warned. Why had he started towards Dillinger? He knew she could handle herself. She’d done it for years before he came along. Was it some macho over-protectiveness? He wasn’t Superman, after all. Bullets didn’t bounce off Clark Kent.
She washed her hair three times to get the stink of Capone’s cigar out of her nose, her hair, her skin. The water helped hide the fact she couldn’t stop crying. Finally she climbed out of the shower shivering, threw on an old nightgown and crawled into her cold bed. After a moment, she climbed out from under the covers and grabbed the black and white teddy bear from the corner of her dresser. It was the one Clark had won for her in Smallville the year before.
She hugged the bear to her chest as she went to the unlocked window of her balcony and looked out, straining to see a blue and red flash in the darkness. “Superman,” she said aloud to the darkness. “I know you can’t be everywhere at once, but why couldn’t you be there for Clark? I thought he was your friend, too.”
There was no flash of blue and red. No sign of Superman. Tears started down her face again and she padded back to her bed.
“Oh Clark, what do I do now?” she murmured as she cried herself to sleep.
0 0 0
It was a beautiful morning but Perry White hadn’t noticed. He had hardly slept at all and he knew he looked like hell. Everyone in the newsroom looked like hell this morning. Clark had been well liked, well respected. He looked over the front page mock-up on his desk. ‘Reporter Killed In The Line Of Duty’ the headline read.
Jimmy Olsen knocked on the office door then walked in carrying some papers. “CK asked me to do some research for him and Lois. On Hamilton’s clone project.” He dropped the printouts on Perry’s desk. “I guess he won’t be needing it now.”
“We don’t know that,” Perry said. “What did he want you to find?”
“How Hamilton was able to give the clones the personalities and memories of the originals.”
“And?” Perry prompted.
“Well, Hamilton used to work for LexLabs. LexLabs had this weird research project going on soul transference, had gurus brought in from India,” Jimmy explained. “Hamilton had this idea that a clone would be able to tap into some sort of soul memory thing since it wouldn’t have any memories of its own. It sounds weird, but I guess Hamilton was right. Not that helps CK any.” If possible, Jimmy looked even more upset than he had before. “It’s not fair, you know. It’s not right for somebody to check out before he’s thirty.”
“He is, was, one of the best journalists I’ve ever had the privilege to work with,” Perry told the young man. He fought the lump he felt growing in his throat then he smiled sadly. “I remember the first time he walked in here looking for a job, full of that confidence you get when you don't know any better. I remember thinking... this kid is me. And now...”
There was a knock on the door. Gil opened the door and stuck his head in. “Mr. White, the caterer's on the phone. He wants to know when we're going to reschedule the party.”
Perry sat back in his chair as he considered the message, the caterer, the already scheduled party. “Tell him it's still on for tonight.”
Gil gave Perry a surprised nod and closed the door.
“Chief,” Jimmy said. “I don't think anyone's really in the mood for a party.”
“Jimmy, the Daily Planet is more than just paper and ink,” Perry told him. “It's people like Clark... and you... doing what's right for the city and getting damn little in return. By honoring the Planet tonight, we honor Clark... and everything he stood for.” Perry looked down at the mockup on his desk one more time before handing it to Jimmy. “Now, take this down to the press room. We got a paper to put out.”
