With just two weeks left until the wedding, Lois and Clark were both very busy. It came as a rude shock that Clark was needed somewhere as Superman, and that trip could take more than one day. Clark heard on the news that there were little towns in the mountains of China who were having mud slides. He had lived in the area affected when he was traveling early in his career, and he knew that the residents were poor, barely existing souls who needed all the help he could give. They did not have the basics for existence, and when the rains descended and floods happened, and now the mud slides, whole villages were wiped out in minutes. He knew that these people were hard working, gentle people who loved their families, and would do anything for each other if they could. He flew off after explaining the situation to Lois, and she knew that it would be a few days before she saw him again. He extracted a promise from her that she would be very careful and not get into any trouble that she could not get back out of by herself, without Superman’s help.
Lois made a call to Jimmy and found out that he had recently purchased his apartment, the one next door, and was turning the two one-bedroom places into a three bedroom, two bath house. She was curious about the renovations he was doing to his place and asked if maybe she could come over and get some help from him, but also tour his new residence. Jimmy was living at a hotel while the work was being done, and he
consented to meet Lois at his old apartment to show off what he was able to do. He had never thought that he’d be able to purchase the place. His apartment building had gone co-op a few years before, and he had
still remained a month-to-month tenant until he suddenly had the means to purchase it.
Jimmy and Lois met and toured his new place. Lois thought that he had done a wonderful job to transform the place from the rundown one bedroom into a really nice, spacious apartment with lots of windows and very few dark corners. He had somehow managed to make all the rooms front onto the outside wall with the windows instead of being a maze of dark paths leading to other rooms. After the tour, Lois suggested they go to lunch, her treat, and then go back to either his hotel or her apartment to do a little work she needed him to help her do.
After lunch they settled into an easy work-mode in front of Lois’ computer. Jimmy was a wealth of information about how to hack into systems that had alarms and security fire walls. Lois just needed a little help to locate sites to investigate and share with the Metropolis Police Department. Jimmy helped Lois locate the floor plans for CostMart number one. It was very curious that even though the huge store was a one story building on the surface, it went down into the ground with four additional floors of the basement. There were a total of nine elevators that went down into that area. Lois was sure whatever she needed to be able to prove Bill Church was part of Intergang would be located down in the belly of the store. All she needed to do was figure how she could get into this area to snoop, and prove to herself as well as the police that the Church family and Intergang were connected.
The alarm went off in the apartment at two a.m. Lois rolled over, not really having slept with the pre-excitement of the chase, so when she heard the alarm she jumped up and got right into battle mode. She was sure that she could outsmart the head of Intergang just by being Lois Lane.
Arriving at CostMart number one at just shy of three a.m., Lois set herself to blend in with the busy bees that were restocking the shelves all over the store. Her first encounter with a person helped her get a badge. The fellow showed her where the replacement forms and label gun were so that she could get a badge, to replace the one she convinced him she forgot to bring with her, and all of a sudden she was Denise. She brought a few boxes out of the storeroom on a gurney and stocked the shelves in the cleaning supply aisle. It was the closest to the entrance of the stockroom, where she was watching the comings and goings of employees. She wanted to avoid as many nosy people as she could, so she waited until the three-thirty coffee break was over and the storeroom was cleared out before she made her way back into the corner where she knew an elevator was located. She hoped that whoever was restocking the department of sporting goods would not need to come back into the storeroom to discover her.
On the fourth level down, there seemed to be offices. Lois went off the elevator, gingerly, looking for security cameras. She managed to dodge most of them and found a cleaning cart left in a closet to help her cover her movements when she could no longer skirt the cameras. She entered Bill Church’s office and stayed for almost an hour, raking through the files. She found one that looked promising and put it out to send later. Not two files later, she found a memo attached to a CostMart invoice. The memo had the word Intergang mentioned on it. Lois faxed the two folders she found, sheet by sheet, to Bill Henderson. The cover sheet she sent said it came from a friend who knew he might like more information which could be found at CostMart number one on L4 below the store. There was more to be learned in the office of Bill Church.
Lois went back upstairs, finished her restocking work on the cleaning supplies, took her gurney back to the stockroom, and walked out the door telling another worker that she had a headache and had checked out. She would be back the next evening. The whole thing was just too easy.
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Clark was still in China the next day, so Lois walked around town looking for a wedding gift to give Clark. When she returned to the apartment, there was a message from Henderson asking if she knew anything about a curious fax sent to him in the middle of the night. Since there was technically not a breaking and entering, but she was guilty of entering illegally, Lois was reluctant to call Henderson until they were ready to close the file on Intergang. She knew that she could not tell him the truth, but she was in no hurry to lie to him. So, she screened her calls for the rest of the afternoon and evening. That worked in her favor because she also missed a call from her Mother with another snippy message about the cheesy sort of wedding that she and Clark were trying to pull off. The snide remarks about cost-cutting weddings that ended up like a Kansas hoedown were not nice, but when Ellen reminded Lois she was a doctor’s
daughter not a farmer’s daughter, Lois decided to rescind her invitation. She would not allow anyone so narrow-minded to share this experience. That would be the best gift she could give her groom.
The next morning, Lois awoke to a knock at her door. She was almost positive that Bill Henderson would be on the other side, but she knew that she could not run from him, so she opened the door, tying her robe tightly around herself. When she opened the door, in stepped two men with guns in their hands. One pistol-whipped her across the cheek, and the other one picked her up as she crumpled to the floor. They shoved her into a gray panel truck parked in front of the apartment stopping just long enough to tie her hands behind her and put a gag in her mouth. She was almost conscious but quickly lost reality after the strange smelling gag was placed in her mouth. The next thing she knew, she was sitting in a room with one window facing out onto a hallway, lashed to a folding chair with ropes around her middle and her hands bound to the chair. Her feet were also tied with thick yellow ropes, and she could not move at all. She was still gagged and unable to make a sound. Lois realized that she was in so much trouble because no one knew that she was missing, Clark was still in China, and she had no backup to keep her safe. She had forgotten the one rule of her profession: COVER YOUR BUTT.
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Bill Henderson’s life was not an easy one. He had some really incriminating evidence dumped in his lap without any mention of who it was from, although he was sure that Lois Lane figured into the picture somewhere. He needed to proceed on the evidence by getting a search warrant for Bill Church’s office in CostMart number one, but could not do so until he had an informant listed on the court papers. To make his life really difficult, when he went over to Lois Lane and Clark Kent’s apartment, he found the front door wide open and no one around. A few minutes later, an elderly blonde lady arrived on the doorstep yapping about an ungrateful daughter who would not take phone calls. All of this happened at the same time, and Bill was not sure whether he needed to leave an officer to sort it all out or whether he needed to get into the middle of the fray himself. He sure would appreciate it when Lois went back to work at the Daily Planet and had too much going on to get herself into these messes. If she had deadlines, and filler puff pieces about dog shows, and was juggling three or more articles at once she would not have time to make as much trouble as she did when she was concentrating on one thing at a time. Or he hoped that was true.
Henderson decided to question the lady and found out that she was Ellen Lane, Lois’ mother. When asked about her daughter’s whereabouts, Ellen told him that she was sure that Lois was just ducking her since she had said some dumb things onto the answering machine the previous day. Bill noticed that there were a few messages on the answering machine, and carefully listened to himself, Ellen, and Jimmy. Bill cringed at the message left by Ellen, but then again it explained some of the hard-core phobias that Lois exhibited. Jimmy’s message was the most curious. It mentioned that they had worked together on a project, and that if she needed any more of his specialty that Jimmy would be available to help her with her with her new project. Bill called Jimmy at the number he left and got him to confess that they had hacked into a few of the files of CostMart a day prior. Jimmy did not know where Lois or Clark were, but he was sure that if they needed help Superman would be there to help them. Bill reminded Jimmy LNN had said that very morning about Superman being over in China helping with the natural disaster. Jimmy told Henderson he did not know the specifics about what Lois was doing, but he did know that she intended to let Henderson know all she knew. That confirmed to Henderson that the fax from two nights before was sent by Lois. His next step was to make a judgment call whether Lois and Clark were in trouble, and possibly missing. What swayed him in that direction was a neighbor who saw a gray truck parked outside the apartment very early in the morning. He had then watched it being driven out of the area by two unknown men.
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