Jump City: Apprentice

by MK Alexander

  ***

  Andrew Williams barreled through the front door about ten minutes later. He was a lumbering guy, well on his way to seven feet. He towered over me. I swiveled in my chair to face him and giant hands came down on my shoulders. I felt myself rising to a standing position. He just stared at me with a huge grin on his face. For a brief moment, I thought he was going to kiss me.

  “Holy crap, Patrick,” he said.

  “What?” I glanced back at his expression of great excitement. Williams was perpetually unshaven, though he never seemed to have a real beard. I can only guess that he shaved with a pair of scissors. Today, as usual, he wore a western tie and a fancy shirt. More often than not, he also wore yellow suspenders, though they were absent this morning. He was a big man, huge of girth and not exceptionally light on his feet given his relatively short legs. I suppose he could set a quick pace when he needed to. He kept staring at me. “What?” I asked again.

  Williams laughed, something that came easy to him. “Big story, eh?” he said and awkwardly gave me a bear hug. “It’s the goddamn story of the century.” He released his embrace and started to shake me.

  “You really think so?”

  “Absolutely. I just talked to Ollie. Seven cars, seven corpses… sounds like a goddamn serial killer to me. And we got the exclusive… Wayne wants to see you right away. He’s in the office. I’ll meet you there in a few, okay?”

  It was not without a feeling of dread that I walked towards Kaiser Wayne’s private office. He was the newspaper’s publisher and editor-in-chief, though not in the building more than twice a week— and usually after hours. Not that I had anything against him really, it was more about his office: the place seemed impossibly dark, lit only by the faint glow of a computer screen— and that’s only if it was on. Kaiser preferred using the typewriter on his desk instead. I sometimes heard the keys clacking from the main room. Every staff memo we ever got was typed, copied and distributed into our in-baskets, never an email or text message, and rarely did he use his telephone. Basically, we had no access to Kaiser except in person. There was a small banker’s lamp on his desk but I’d yet to see that work either.

  For some unknowable reason, the very floor, the carpet was illuminated. Its edge was dotted with tiny blue lights imbedded in the baseboard. The whole office reeked of cigars. I had to hold back my gag reflex every time I opened the door. At least one window was always wide open behind the shades; winter or summer, I was told. So much for the fabled view of the Flatirons. I hoped for a cold, fresh breeze.

  I also had to fight off my impression that Kaiser Wayne was not a real person. Oddly, he seemed like a man constantly in disguise, hidden from the world. It was probably just the beard. I always thought he might reach up and just pull it right off at any given moment. It could be the sunglasses too, sunglasses that never left his face, even in that darkened office. I took a deep breath to banish all thoughts of ZZ Top from my mind… the absurdly long, gray bushy beard, sunglasses, cowboy hat, and white leather buckskin jacket complete with fringes. Today he was wearing a bolo tie with a silver and turquoise pendant.

  “Patrick, glad you could drop in to see me. Big story, I hear. Congratulations and thanks…” Kaiser said from behind his desk. He had a gravel-voice and a gravel-laugh.

  “Well, this is all about Andrew. He sent me out there.”

  “Right… Where is Andrew?”

  “On his way, I think.”

  “Well, sit down, sit down, please.” Kaiser Wayne leaned back in his chair and puffed out a great cloud of smoke. “So… Patrick, tell me about you and the twins.”

  “The twins?” I asked, not expecting this question at all.

  “They’re complaining about you again.”

  “My politics?”

  “That and other things.” Kaiser chuckled. “But I didn’t hire them for their politics.”

  “It’s not them I have a problem with, not personally. It’s the website and the way they run it.”

  “Hmm...” Kaiser paused, he may have been staring at me but I couldn’t see his eyes. “I heard you talked to Thomas about this.”

  “Thomas, Advertising Tom?”

  He nodded.

  “Not formally. We had a couple of beers at the Catacombs last week.”

  “Okay. Well, I have to say, I’ve never seen Thomas this excited. He likes your ideas. Want to explain them to me?”

  “Is this a good time?”

  “Probably not, but I think you might be onto something no one else has thought too hard about.” Kaiser leaned forward. “Explain how this might work.”

  “Maybe we should wait for Andrew?” I asked, stalling, and hoping for an ally.

  Kaiser laughed. “We have six or seven minutes before he gets here, if I know Andy. He just went to the break room with a sandwich wrapped in cellophane that he bought at the quick-mart. He’s going to nuke it, eat it up, make a cup of coffee, and then he’ll knock on the door.” Kaiser leaned forward. “Let’s hear this idea before he comes in.”

  I could feel my palms starting to sweat. “Okay… it’s all about excessive monetization.”

  “And what the hell does that mean?” he growled.

  “It means the website sucks, it’s annoying… There’s going to be a revolt someday, and probably pretty soon.”

  “What are you going on about, Jardel?”

  “A rebellion against all the ads… or the advertisers...”

  “Go on,” he said impatiently.

  “I’d have to turn on your computer to show you,” I said.

  He motioned his permission. It took a couple of moments to start up. I imagined that Mr Wayne felt a slight disgust or at least irritation, though between his sunglasses and beard it was hard to be sure.

  “Have you seen our site lately?” I asked but didn’t really expect an answer. “You have to navigate through pop-ups, scroll-downs, sliding boxes and auto ads just to check the freaking weather.”

  My observation was met with silence, so I continued, “How loyal do you have to be to read a story when you keep getting interrupted by all these grayed-out screens? I think people lose patience. I sure do. It makes for a bad experience… Look, there’s at least a dozen ads on this page. I can barely find the lead story.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “Say you go to our site to watch a thirty second video but have to sit through an ad that’s twice as long. How is that fair? It’s frustrating. And you end up pissed at the advertiser… Yeah, right, I’m going to that store…” I slipped into sarcasm.

  “So, what did they say to all this?” Kaiser asked.

  “Who?”

  “The twins.”

  “Ad blocker,” I replied.

  “What?”

  “They told me to use an ad blocker for the site.”

  Mr Wayne leaned back in his seat. Whatever he was feeling did not appear on his face. I continued:

  “A real newspaper is passive, not interactive. It never makes any demands on you. It never requests your email… It doesn’t ask you to register, or share anything on social media. And no, for the millionth time, I don’t want to sign up for your mobile app.”

  “I’m not sure I’m understanding all this technical jargon,” Kaiser said, “but I’m hearing words like revolt, frustration, disappointment, loyalty…”

  “I think our site should be more like a newspaper.”

  “You’re saying we should take a more traditional view?” Kaiser paused. “Christ, Jardel, you’ve been here, what? like two weeks, and you already want to change our website?”

  “Yeah. As it is now, there’s a kind of greed for revenue thing going on… it smacks of a weird desperation to me. Why keep selling more and more ads at cheaper and cheaper rates?”

  “And your solution to this?”

  “Well, it’s pretty simple. Instead of a dozen dinky little ads on the front page, we only allow one… and make it a banner... or maybe a vertical ad on the right s
ide.”

  “One ad?” Kaiser asked.

  “Yeah, right on the bottom, so we don’t dilute our brand.”

  “What about the other advertisers?”

  “We can sell them the back pages.”

  “What back pages?”

  “Sports, Lifestyle… Business…”

  “Hmm… not sure we have any of those.”

  “It’s an exclusivity kind of thing.”

  “What do you mean?” Kaiser asked.

  “Our content is exclusive. We work hard to get it,” I said and tried to smile. “So… if an advertiser wants to be part of that, they can be… but they’re exclusive too. They don’t share the page with anyone else.”

  “They’d have to pay more.”

  “I agree.”

  “Hmm. So does Thomas… but he says that’s not necessarily a problem.”

  “It’s a better model, exclusivity.”

  “Go on,” Kaiser said.

  “There’s too much stuff on one page competing for the reader’s attention. Nobody wins. The content is completely lost, it’s just squeezed in between all the freaking ads, not to mention all the—”

  “The rest of the world keeps putting more and more ads on their pages. You’re telling me to buck this trend?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess I am.”

  “What’s the plan then?”

  “We’ve got great content that no one else has. We have loyal readers. We tell the advertisers: You become our exclusive partner… You stand alone on a nice clean page. People like us, so people like you just by association. It’s a win-win.”

  “Who do you have in mind?”

  “Me?” I asked. “Tom in advertising would know better.”

  “He did say he might get Hatfield and McCoy to advertise.”

  “Who?”

  “The high-end clothing store…” Kaiser paused for a moment. “What happened to the last paper you worked at? The Chronicle?”

  “Well…” I hesitated.

  “It went belly-up, didn’t it?”

  “No, not really, and not because of this idea.”

  “Alright… I’m going to have to think about it for a couple of days. I’ll get back to you. Where the hell is Andrew now?”

  Andy Williams was right on cue with a knock. He stepped through the door and lowered himself into a chair next to mine. He could tell Kaiser and I had been talking about something and looked at us with a puzzled expression. “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing important,” Kaiser replied. “Okay, Andrew, so tell me what we’re looking at today,” he started the new conversation.

  “A serial killer.”

  “What?” Kaiser barked incredulously.

  “Seven cars with seven corpses, all sunk to the bottom of Barker Reservoir.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Kaiser warned.

  “What else could it be?”

  “We’ll treat it as another flood story for now, until I hear otherwise.”

  Both Andy and I were startled by this and started to complain.

  “Alright, it’s a flood story with bodies.”

  “It has to be murder,” Andrew protested. “Seven cars. Seven dead passengers. It’s not the flood.”

  “It’s got to be the flood,” Kaiser repeated, and seemed strangely resistant to any other idea. He turned to me. “Alright then, Patrick, what do you make of all this? You were there as I understand it.”

  “I have to agree with Andrew. It doesn’t seem like the flood did this.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Lots of reasons… but mostly because the passengers looked to be skeletons.”

  “Skeletons?”

  “They’ve been in the water for a long time.”

  “Hmm,” Kaiser considered. “There was a pretty big flood back in nineteen seventy-six. July thirty-first, if I recall. Maybe it’s from then?”

  “One of the cars looks to be a Prius, pretty new,” Williams pointed out.

  “And there’s nothing haphazard about the whole scene. It’s all very neat, like someone drove them into the middle of the lake,” I added.

  “And how exactly do you drive a car into the middle of Barker Meadow Reservoir?” Kaiser asked.

  “That’s the big question, I guess.”

  “Must be the flood…”

  “There seems to be a pattern to it,” I said.

  “A pattern?”

  “The cars are submerged in an arc, or a V-shape that reaches halfway across the reservoir. I think it looks intentional. None of the cars are on their side, overturned. They’re all wheels down, windows up.”

  “Well, explain to me how these cars got to the middle of the reservoir then.” Kaiser leaned back in his chair.

  “I can’t”

  “You can’t?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Maybe it’s just some random thing. People crashed there, they died, and the cars accumulated over the years. Nobody noticed till now,” Kaiser concluded.

  “Not a very good theory.”

  “Why not?”

  “What about the whole dead passenger thing?” I asked. “None of those cars have a driver. Did they just up and leave?”

  “Right. No argument there. Hmm... Still… could be…” Kaiser seemed to be thinking out loud. “Maybe like in Oklahoma last year?”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Where was that? Foss Lake… They found a bunch of cars in the water with corpses in the trunk.”

  “Don’t remember that,” Andrew admitted.

  “Some sick way to dispose of bodies.” Kaiser Wayne turned to me again. “Patrick, what did you see exactly?”

  “Well, there’s this…” I smiled and held up a thumb drive.

  “What do you have there?”

  “Doc Ollie’s sonograms. Seven cars, seven corpses.”

  “Well, well, well, isn’t that something?” Kaiser said with some genuine interest. “Seems we do have an exclusive after all.” He paused for the briefest of moments. “Andrew, call up this friend of yours. I want to talk about publishing rights.”

  I’m pretty sure I saw a smile under Kaiser’s beard.

  “Patrick, get your butt back out there, before they dredge the whole goddamn reservoir.”

  “Won’t be till tomorrow.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Officer Mendez told me.”

  “Mendez, eh? Okay, he’s pretty reliable.”

  “You know him?”

  “Of course I do. I live there,” Kaiser said and probably glared at me, but there was no way to be sure.

  “How come they just let you go? Aren’t you a witness or something?” Williams asked.

  “Mendez said someone would contact me… for a statement, I guess.”

  Andy turned to Mr Wayne. “Should I call Douglas? He’s back tomorrow and it’s his beat.”

  “No,” Kaiser grumbled. “Drummond picked a helluva time to go on vacation, didn’t he?” He paused to let his anger subside. “This is Patrick’s story. He broke it.”

  “It’s really Andrew’s… He put me on to it first,” I protested.

  “You’re a goddamn eye-witness now, Patrick,” Kaiser said with a gravelly bellow then sat back in his seat. “I don’t care, Douglas is going to have to bend on this. We’ll give him follow-ups, local color or something, clean-up stories… Fact is, Patrick, you’re better at the hard news anyhow.”

  Williams nodded then glanced at me. “It’s going to be a circus tomorrow. You ready for that?”

  “I guess.”

  “We’ll have to do the whole social media thing too,” Williams said, then turned to me. “You good with that, Patrick?”

  “Not really...”

  “You want Cindy to take it?”

  “She’ll do a better job than me.”

  “She doesn’t have your eye for police stuff…” Wayne interrupted and sat forward in his chair. He paused for a long time. “Think maybe, I’ll p
ut you both on this story. Partner up with her, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “She’ll be in charge of the social media end. Shame though, you take better pictures.” He paused again. “Still, she’s got more followers than Jesus.”

  “Should I get Cindy in here?” Williams asked.

  “No, I’ll speak with her. I want you and Cindy on the scene tomorrow at first light.” Kaiser puffed on his cigar. “Get the twins in on this too. They’re supposed to be good with all this social media crap.”

  “Right,” Williams said. “What about a hashtag?”

  “You two come up with something…” Kaiser rose from his chair, something he rarely seemed to do. “Okay, well anyhow, it’s a sure bet that this is going to be a long and complicated investigation.” He let off a sigh. “Gonna have to guess here… the District Attorney’s office will probably pick up the ball. I don’t really have an in there.”

  “Probably fall on Morris,” Andrew said.

  “Morris?” I asked, as the name seemed familiar.

  “Captain Jamal Morris, Boulder PD, deputy chief.”

  “Do you think you can work with him?” Kaiser asked.

  “I can try. It’s hard to say since I’ve never met him.”

  “You never met him?”

  “Don’t think so…” I paused. “I’d like to go in asking, what can I do to help?”

  “I doubt that’s gonna work on Jamal.”

  “Well, we certainly can’t rely on what’s that prick’s name? The Public Information Officer… He won’t give us shit…” Kaiser complained.

  “You’re going back there tonight, you know,” Williams said to me.

  “I am?”

  “Trustee meeting, Nederland, seven o’clock. Find out what you can.”

  ***

  Later that night, feeling a bit sleepless, I ran a quick search for the Hindenburg. It did, as I imagined, crash at the Lakehurst Naval Station on May 6, 1937 in a fiery explosion: Of the 97 people on board (36 passengers and 61 crewmen), there were 35 fatalities, and the death of a groundsman.