Swastika by Michael Slade Read Free Book Online Page B

a short distance. Car dates were frowned upon. It’s dangerous for hookers to corner themselves in cars.
    But the Criminal Code was changed in 1986 to make it illegal to communicate in public for the purpose of buying or selling sexual services. Climbing into cars to transact business became the best way to beat that law. Soon, most street hookers were being driven away to who knows where for whatever sexual acts were ordered by their captors. Lock the doors of a car and it becomes a prison …
     
    Last week, the joint McQueen-Jantzen byline amalgams had ended with this:
The Less Dead
By Bess McQueen and Cort Jantzen
     
    Vancouver targets prostitutes. It always has. There are now close to 2,000 prostitutes working the strolls of Vancouver, and they may as well have bull’s-eyes on their backs. To politicians, the police, and the pious, prostitutes are a nuisance. Vice laws are designed to drive them from one location to another, in the vain hope that one day they’ll simply disappear—and if one does, mission accomplished. That’s one less to worry about.
    Out of sight, out of mind. That’s how most people view them.
    To pimps, pushers, and predators, prostitutes seem like easy prey. All the talk of ridding our city of prostitutes gives those who victimize them a reason to do what they do. Kill a prostitute and does anyone really care? It’s not the same as killing a policewoman or a nurse. Good riddance to bad rubbish is the theme we send to predators. We expect the police to focus on crimes against the “more dead,” not the culling of the “less dead.” Those we physically marginalize by forcing them into darkly lit industrial back streets where serial killers hunt …
     
    The series had been a success. It had raised circulation. The public had reacted with a lively flow of letters, pro and con. That had prompted the managing editor to go to the well again … well, actually two more times, as Bess McQueen and Cort Jantzen had been sent out separately—“A little friendly competition,” according to their boss—to try to scoop each other with the best incendiary follow-up to their joint-byline series on Vancouver’s “disposable people.”
    Friendly?
    Ha!
    That bitch!
    Cort Jantzen had filed first with this story:
Sex Trade a Leghold Trap for Kids
By Cort Jantzen
     
    What begins as a game of catch-me-if-you-can for runaway kids ends as a leghold trap for those snared by the sex trade.
    They come from troubled families or a background of sexual abuse. “It’s easy to vanish down here,” says a twelve-year-old girl. “Lots of cheap rooming houses where I can hide during the daytime, then come out at night.” What brings her out at night is the need to turn tricks. Sex is all she has to barter with to pay for her room and her fix. Within a month of leaving home, that girl was a heroin addict.
    The Internet has helped to make Vancouver a well-known destination for sex tourists. Pedophiles sneak in to stalk the “kiddie stroll” and “boy’s town.” Websites provide the locations and a price list for sexual acts …
     
    The following day, Bess McQueen had filed this story:
Is a Killer Stalking “Boy’s Town”?
By Bess McQueen
     
    Too many boys have gone missing from one of the city’s prostitute strolls. Since the early 1990s, at least thirty young males known to have offered themselves for sex with men who cruise the “boy’s town” area of Homer Street have lost all contact with friends and family …
     
    The day before yesterday, Bess McQueen’s story had appeared on the front page of The Vancouver Times , and before the morning was out, the paper had received a request from Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq of Special X to brief the reporter of the “boy’s town” piece on the status of the Mounties’ investigation. Suddenly, that story had taken on dimensions of the Story of the week, and possibly the year, and that—given how pushy the queen bitch was—had resulted in