A stakeout

11:00 pm; Martyrville

Night had fallen on Saint City. Its innocent civilians had retreated to their homes as their shadows stretched with the setting sun, but they did not leave the streets quiet and deserted. Criminal elements remained to spread their influence and thrive in the darkness. Some were mostly benign; prostitutes and graffiti artists. Others like the **** dealers, gang bangers and super criminals were not. Some parts of the city weren't terribly dangerous after dark. Martyrville wasn't one of those places. It was the sort of place the police didn't patrol on foot, a place where supers came to cut their teeth, a place reporters might search to find secrets worth sharing.

Hannah had spent her entire day going over police reports, anonymous tips and crime statistics in the hopes of uncovering a pattern, something that would point her to a story. It was when she had made a graph showing crimes rates in Martyrville that she noticed something odd. Though she had been looking for conspicuous spikes in the crime rate, she had actually found the opposite. Every third Friday at midnight the number of reported crimes in east Martyrville dropped to nearly zero. The pattern stretched back nearly a year and was due to repeat itself that very evening. She smelled a story. A Super Hero working on a schedule? A regular meetup of mob bosses keeping the area quiet? A secret pact between criminals? Aliens? Hannah couldn't be sure what was going on, but she was determined to find out.

East Martyrville was dark, the city struggled to replace the street lights faster than the locals broke them. Normally she would have never considered going to that part of town alone or at night and to do both seemed like madness. But there was a method to this madness. The massive drop in the crime rate implied an increase in safety and the darkness didn't discriminate, she could hide from view just as easily as any crook. She prowled the shadows with her camera in hand in her search for anything suspicious. But the streets were dead. The rest of the city still buzzed with activity, but that particular neighborhood had gone nearly silent.

She briefly saw two young men on the street. They were agitated, paranoid, they kept looking over their shoulders and seemed to be in a rush to leave the area. A few snapped photos preserved the tension in the air, but a picture of a pair of thugs hardly makes for interesting news. Hannah carried on.

She was not wandering aimlessly.

After finding her dip in crime she had mapped out every incident of breaking and entering, vandalism, arson and trespassing she could find for the area. It was mostly what she would have expected but now she knew not to look for the highest crime rates. There was one location in the area that stood out, a blank spot on her map of property crimes that almost perfectly overlapped a local shipping company. Despite having vehicles in the yard, packages in the warehouse, cash in the till and pristine white walls the company had never contacted the police. It seemed to be immune to the crime ridden streets around it. Hannah had decided that Black Bull Shipping would be the best place to stake out. There were dark alleys nearby that provided cover and great sight lines to the business. She had a camera, a thermos of coffee, a drive to succeed and no work in the morning.

And so her watch began.