Deadline

by Randy Alcorn

  “Nobody’s going to walk down Morrison carrying a saw and crawl underneath your car. This took some time. Had to be done some place that wasn’t too conspicuous, not downtown curb parking with a gazillion people walking by. The high suspension on the Suburban would be easy to crawl under. In a residential area, could be done right in a driveway if someone had the guts. Say they staked you out on weekends, saw that three Sunday afternoons in a row, about the same time, you’d been driving Doc’s Suburban by yourself. Maybe they assumed this was normal. It’s hard to believe they would have done it right there in your friend’s driveway, but it’s possible. Busy neighborhood?”

  “No.”

  “Much foot traffic on a Sunday afternoon?”

  “Hardly any.”

  “Car easily visible from where you were watching the game?”

  “No.”

  Ollie nodded. “Do-able. Whoever they were going for, they probably didn’t care what happened to anybody else. Or maybe they were going for all of you, and were willing to take one or two or three at a time, whatever they happened to get.”

  This cast a cold chill on Jake. “If they were after me too, then that means their job isn’t done yet.”

  “True. Not likely, but true. I’m just covering all the bases. Wouldn’t hurt to keep your eyes open. It was Doc’s car. It was probably just Doc they wanted. Probably.”

  Ollie was about to make the left turn toward the Tribune.

  “Listen, Ollie, just drop me off on Morrison, at my car, will you? I’ll come in and get an early start on my column tomorrow. Right now I want to get started on my lists.”

  “I should have some early stuff from the lab tomorrow. See you at the deli at one.”

  Jake nodded, carefully extracting his sore body from the car. He started to say “thanks again,” but was looking at the rear end of the car. Ollie was gone.

  Jake walked down Morrison, past the tobacco shop with the magazine racks encroaching on the sidewalk, past the locksmith, and past his own car, which still had twenty minutes left on the meter. This was his beat, his turf. Each familiar crack in the sidewalk, each piece of faded gang graffiti somehow helped him think. The familiar was the springboard to the unfamiliar, the mundane the path to the creative. His best columns were born gazing into cracks on this sidewalk.

  Jake checked his watch. He knew if he stepped foot back in the Tribune, it would be another three hours before he could escape. He ambled toward the pay phone outside the convenience store forty feet past his car. He called Winston to tell him he wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t a lie.

  Across Morrison, in a blue Mercedes, a stocky, sandy-haired man in a business suit jotted notes at the bottom right hand page of an open notebook, propped up on a nifty mini-easel made just for this purpose. His left hand was holding compact Bushnell binoculars. The pages of the book had narrow columns on the left, filled with dates and times, and wide columns to the right, with detailed notations. The last three entries on the lower right read:

  1:22 P.M.—Subject leaves side garage door of central police station, in brown unmarked police car. Middle-aged heavy set man driving. Probably plain clothes officer.

  1:43 P.M.—Subject and officer pull into wrecking yard. Talked with worker, examined mangled car.

  2:19 P.M.—Tow truck pulls wrecked car, follows subject and officer to police lot on 23rd.

  The man turned the page and wrote at the top,

  2:39 P.M.—Officer returns subject to Morrison, near his car. Subject walks to phone booth by 7/11. Makes call. Prefix 636, rest obscured.

  He put down his pen quickly and pulled out on to Morrison, two cars behind Jake Woods.

  The delicious scent of mozzarella, pepperoni, onions, and green peppers from tonight’s Domino’s delivery permeated every corner of Jake’s apartment. Two empty twelve-ounce bottles of Budweiser sat on the lamp table beside him. He opened a third bottle, tempted to down it and its three remaining partners in the six pack, not because he desired them, but because a drunken stupor sounded good. When the world looks like this, what’s the point of being sober? But he thought better of it and left the other three in the fridge, the investigation providing a good enough reason for sobriety.

  Jake leaned his head backward on his favorite recliner, pale blue and worn to a frazzle, sagging back a few inches further on the left side than the right. Champ, his brown and white saucer-eyed springer spaniel, snaked around at his feet, nuzzling him and emitting occasional groans of ecstasy, making perfectly clear there was no other place he’d rather be than at his master’s feet. An occasional crust of pizza hadn’t hurt his feelings either.

  Jake took his yellow pad, tore off a few dated scratchings, and wrote “Doc’s enemies.” Old enemies? High school and college rivals? Sure, but nothing serious. Doc picked up a few antagonists in Nam, got in some fights, but as far as Jake knew there’d been no contact for years. Medical school? Some teachers he couldn’t stand, some academic competitors, nameless people with hurt egos because Doc beat them out for key positions. Hardly the stuff of murders. Then Jake remembered the Texas mom who hired someone to kill the girl who beat out her daughter for the cheerleading squad. And the bizarre interviews he’d conducted in the local “Hit Men ’R Us” plot to take out the figure skater’s rival. Jake reconsidered and wrote, “Med school competitors.”

  Jake knew Doc had clashed with a few of his colleagues at the hospital. Jake scribbled “Dr. Morgan” and couldn’t remember the other name, so underneath it wrote “Dr. Doe (blond anesthesiologist).”

  Ever since he’d become chief of surgery Doc had sat on all kinds of committees, several of which he hated. Jake smirked as he thought about Doc on a committee. Action oriented, no nonsense, let’s get the job done Doc. He’d faced off with some people on a few of those committees, but Jake didn’t know their names, so made a note to check it out.

  Most of what he knew about Doc’s life on the job he’d picked up when dropping by to see him at the hospital. He knew the outside of Doc’s daytime world, but not the inside. He doubted Betsy would know much more than he did. Maybe one of Doc’s nurses would give him the inside scoop. Or Dr. Simpson, if he wasn’t still sore at Jake for sneaking into ICU.

  “Scorned women? Outraged husbands?” Ollie’s question raised a world of possibilities. Doc had been with a number of women, some of them married. Jake knew two by name, from the athletic club. He wrote “Sarah Jensen/Husband” and underneath “Barbara Doe/Husband.” He couldn’t remember Barbara’s last name, but he’d get it from Frieda at the club before meeting with Ollie tomorrow.

  Jake felt embarrassed to put these names down. But Ollie was right—somebody planned this murder. And since no one obvious came to mind, it had to be someone who wasn’t obvious, right? Jake jotted down a few more names of women Doc had been with, and descriptions for those he couldn’t name. A few were nurses, at least one a doctor. One was a hospital volunteer, very young, a teenager at the time. If her father found out, or maybe a brother or boyfriend…Jake wrote down “Jorgenson girl/Father/Brother/Boyfriend.”

  What else had Ollie mentioned? Unhappy patients? Doc often groused about patient complaints. He’d testified for another doctor in a malpractice case. Who else would know about unhappy patients? Of course. Chief of surgery involved some administrative tasks, and Doc had a secretary, Mary Ann. Jake had chatted with her a dozen times. He’d call Mary Ann tonight. She could clue him in on committees and hospital politics.

  Who else had cause to hate Doc? No one, unless… Jake froze. The protesters. Right wingers, anti-abortionists. They marched against the hospital all the time. Doc mentioned hate mail. He’d laughed about it, thought it was funny, or so he said. They’d beefed up security at the hospital. A few doctors who did abortions had their homes picketed, fliers had been sent to their neighbors. Jake used some information from Doc to write a column exposing people who imposed their morality on the privacy of families and neighborhoods. He had no patience for these people. Now he won
dered if all these “don’t murder the babies” people were capable of murdering a doctor. It had happened elsewhere. Why not here?

  But Doc hadn’t performed abortions for, what, maybe four years? When he became chief of surgery there was no reason to continue, and every reason not to. Jake remembered Doc commenting, “I got out of the abortion business at just the right time.” Doc needed more status and respectability to advance his career. Jake remembered him saying he missed the money, but was glad to get out before all the heavy duty action at the clinics, and before it was popular to picket abortionist’s homes.

  This line of thought opened up new possibilities. Doc served on the committee that urged the hospital to test the abortion pill, RU-486. That was two years ago. Jake had driven by the abortion pill protesters in the parking lot a few times when picking up Doc. As chief of surgery, someone might have held him responsible for the abortion pill, maybe all abortions at the hospital. Someone with a long memory might finger him for past abortions. Could this be a case of vigilante justice—with some anti-abortionist fanatic acting as judge, jury, and executioner?

  What about Ollie’s idea they could have been after Jake too? His columns berating protests at doctor’s homes and defending the testing of RU-486 had earned him lots of critical mail. Most of the letters were signed. Unfortunately, he’d thrown them away after reading the first few sentences. Otherwise, he could have given them to Ollie.

  Jake needed specific names of anti-abortionists. Who were some of the nut cases that might do this? Where could he find out? Court records of lawsuits against protesters? Tribune clippings of clinic incidents? He could get those from Liz in the Trib library. Who could he talk to first hand? He knew plenty of pro-choice advocates on a first name basis. He didn’t know any anti-abortionists by name, except…except Finney and Sue.

  Finney had done his own sort of activism, approaching community businesses and persuading owners not to do business with the abortion clinics. He’d written a letter to the editor opposing the abortion pill. And didn’t Sue do some volunteer work with one of these groups? Finney and Sue knew the anti-abortion crowd. She might get defensive, but he’d go to Sue. Find out who she knew, who might be capable of murdering Doc.

  He sat there reflecting on what seemed more and more possible to him, that the murderer was a religious zealot trying to impose his morality on a society that didn’t need or want it. A vigilante acting like the angel of death, but too cowardly to do it in the open. Something stirred inside him. He felt like the first few kernels of popcorn, just as they began to explode in rapid succession. It was something alien yet all too familiar, a thirst for justice, a lust for revenge. He thought of Hyuk, his Montagnard friend who went out to track down and get revenge on the man who killed his mother, wife and child. Like Hyuk, Jake would get whoever did this to his friends. The possibility it was a self-righteous religious fanatic threw gasoline on the spark of his rage.

  Everything within him demanded justice and retribution. The rules of society didn’t restrain his rage, they fueled it. All the rules seemed to protect the guilty and exploit the innocent. He’d sat in court too many times, when he was a reporter on the justice beat, to be anything but jaded about his country’s legal system. The judges were cozy suburb dwellers content to keep releasing those who would rape someone else’s wife or daughter, kill someone else’s brother or father. Everyone applauded vigilante justice when the cause was right. Ollie was an officer of the law. He’d taken an oath to obey it. Jake had taken no such oath. The rules didn’t apply in warfare. If it came down to it, he wouldn’t let any rules keep his hands from the throat of the person who’d killed his friends.

  In his mind’s eye he pictured things that would in saner moments repulse him. But civilities meant nothing when good men were stripped of life with no chance to fight back. If only whoever did this had come forward with gun or knife. Then Doc and Finney could have faced their enemy, had a chance to draw blood. That it was a coward’s assassination infuriated him even more.

  An hour later Jake awoke from his furious trance. It was too late to make any phone calls now. He got up, stiff and sore from rage and recliner. He poured some milk and mixed it with chocolate, heating it in the microwave. He thought of Janet, with her favorite Cadbury mug she got on their trip to England, microwaving her nightly Lemon Zinger tea alongside his hot chocolate, begging him to watch a Bogart movie when he always had something else to do.

  The unpleasant noise of the microwave fan brought him back to the moment. He turned off the kitchen light, shuffled to his bed, put down his mug on the night stand, took off slippers and clothes, and dropped back into his waterbed like he’d watched Lloyd Bridges drop back into the water in Sea Hunt thirty-five years ago. With Doc and Finney. He turned off the light and sipped his hot chocolate in the lonely darkness, convinced that if anyone in the universe ever had a reason to be angry, and a justification for getting revenge, it was he.

  Across the street, a shadowy figure sitting in a car wrote in a notebook, “11:42 P.M.—Bedroom light turned off.”

  He was intoxicated not by mere feelings of joy, but by joy itself, a billion burning quasars of pure joy. All joy he had known on earth was like drinking from the partially contaminated lower waters, far from the source of the stream. Now he was drinking from the Source itself, the very fountain-head of Joy. This world was so potent and bright and overwhelming he felt it would have blinded and ripped his earthly body to shreds. The joy of heaven was like a volcanic explosion, spectacular and thrilling, but never subsiding. Not like a once-in-a-lifetime eclipse seen for a moment then gone forever, but an ongoing phenomenon, yet one whose familiarity bred neither contempt nor indifference. The longer he experienced it, the more potent it became, as if his capacity to experience joy was increasing by the moment, leaving the next instant always more rejuvenating than the previous. Like a blood transfusion, this admixture of joy invigorated him to explore the further joys of this new and marvelous world. Where should he go next, and what should he do? As always, he would ask his guide.

  Finney could see the luminous wonder in the deep-set eyes of the mighty warrior, who seemed at times tutor, philosopher, bard, and poet. Suddenly he realized Zyor was gazing deep into his own eyes, as if he saw something equally remarkable within Finney.

  “I long to understand what it means that you, my master, were created in his image. There is something of his very essence in you. Something that permits you to see things that elude my grasp. For now, at least.” Zyor’s voice took on a wistful tone as he added, “But I think perhaps forever. For there are things about Elyon’s relationship with you, things which my kind shall always long to look into, which we may never understand.

  “At the heart of the mystery, etched forever in my mind is that incredible day,” Zyor’s voice lowered to an intense whisper, “when Elyon stepped through the portal of eternity and left our world for yours. Creation was a wonder, but not a miracle. It pales in comparison to the true miracle, that he would become…one of you. The Creator becoming the creature. It could not be. And yet it was. It could not happen. And yet it did.”

  As he beheld the wonder in Zyor’s eyes, Finney realized the angel was unconsciously demonstrating the very concept he had earlier expressed—the joy of learning, and the marvel of pondering what he might never understand.

  “For a long time, as earth’s history progressed, certain things seemed predictable. My comrades and I began to think we knew what would happen next, that we understood Elyon’s plan. Then, in a moment, our presumption lay shattered. We realized we knew nothing of the ways of God. We had not comprehended the unfolding drama of redemption. It was a terrible realization to learn how little we knew, even having been with him for so long. Terrible, yet,” and Finney saw a faint but distinct smile, “wonderful.

  “He became one of you. Not merely like you as I myself have done, but one of you. Not for a moment, but for a lifetime…and for eternity. God became man. While Gabriel announced the
miracle on earth, Michael announced it to us. I will never forget his words as he pointed through the portal and we gazed upon that teenage girl. You will meet her eventually, master Finney. She was lovely. She reminded me of your Angela.”

  The angel’s fondness for Angela was unmistakable in the way he said her name. Finney was touched by the reminder Zyor had been there beside him when Angela was born and attended all her birthday parties and softball games. He’d been by her bed each night as Finney prayed with her. The valiant warrior, the loyal guardian, had come to love her. With sweet anticipation, Finney longed for the day he’d have the privilege of introducing Angie to Zyor.

  In a voice that seemed to take on Michael’s texture and tone, Zyor proclaimed the archangel’s unforgettable words of old—“The unborn child now living in this Galilean peasant girl is the Creator of the universe.”

  “When Michael saw the shock on our faces,” Zyor continued, “he added simply, ‘Elyon has become a human child. The Son of God is now the Son of Man.’”

  Finney marveled not only at what Zyor was telling him, but that the angel had never ceased to wonder at an event millions on earth affirmed in their doctrinal statements with such little wonder at all, with hardly more than a second thought. To Zyor Christmas was not making a list and shopping at a mall. It was the heart and soul of the cosmos itself.

  “And just when we thought Elyon could not surpass this greatest miracle with another, there came the greater one.” Zyor stood, and his voice trembled, not only with awe, but now with unmistakable anger.

  “That little hill, where little men were permitted to do unspeakable things to Elyon’s Son. My comrades and I jammed against the portal, begging permission to break through and strike down the cowards, to unleash the relentless wrath of heaven’s army. We longed to raise our swords as one, to destroy every atom of the dark world. All that was in us thirsted for revenge. We ached to once and for all obliterate that cancer of rebellion against the Most High God.”