Four Days of Fall

by Beck Jones

  A few hours later he had sobered up, and Liz was snoring beside him in the bed.

  He reached the crab shack just in time, just as she was leaving.

  I don’t have time for you, she had said. I have a real job, not a television job.

  And that was how she lit the fire, with her anger and contempt.

  God, the sex was so passionate.

  Why hadn’t he the one who kept in touch with her? How had he let that memory of her be all that he had kept? Such lagniappe that she’d texted him a few weeks ago to reconnect.

  The traffic noises brought him back to the present. Russ glanced up at the glittering glass monolith. It seemed to have drawn him without any effort at all on his part. He was here now.

  His destination. No not just his destination, but maybe his destiny.

  He was about to be swallowed by another giant entity, even if he was being promised a stake. Especially if he was promised a stake. You could own a thing, but a thing could also own you.

  What if he were to chuck it all and go live on the river, feel the breeze against his face, watch it ruffle Larson’s hair? His Botticelli Venus.

  He felt the smile spread across his face. What could he do on that river? He could barely swim, and he’d never had the patience for fishing. On the other hand, he could headline a damn good news operation. He could feel his blood humming along with the elevator as he rode to the top floor and entered the vast reception area.

  “Mr. Sabine is waiting for you,” the assistant said, but motioned Russ away as he started toward Sabine’s office. “He’s waiting on the helipad. This way.”

  On the roof they were greeted by a stiff wind and the dull whoop-whoop of the chopper. Russ felt buoyed. It was a good sign. The kid from Collier City never tired of flying over the city. His city. That’s how he always felt as he surveyed the gleaming urban canyons below. Towering landmarks practically close enough to touch.

  “Hope you don’t mind the doors off,” Sabine said, after Russ put on his headset. “Should I call inside to get you a coat? It’s cold up there.”

  “I’m fine, “ Russ said. “I love it with the doors off.” And he did. It was the best kind of ride. Even in cold weather. Especially in cold weather.

  “Good,” Sabine said. “I like to fly and talk, and we’ve found that some passengers tend to get air sick when they’re closed in.” Sabine smiled at him with big white teeth that matched his shock of white hair. “No puking and so far nobody’s pissed their pants.”

  Russ grinned back. “I won’t break the record.”

  “We’re headed to the Hamptons,” Sabine said. “Small domestic crisis.” He nodded toward the pilot. “Doug will take you back.” Without turning his head Doug lifted his forefinger in greeting. Then the helicopter lifted off and they were immersed in sky, the city, disordered within order, ordered within disorder, sprawled below them. It was, as always, magnificent.

  “God, what a day,” Sabine said. “I love it cold and clear. A day when you can see where you’re going.”

  Russ refocused his gaze to Sabine. “It does help you think.”

  “And where do you think we’re going with our venture?” Sabine asked.

  “I think we’re headed in the right direction.” Russ made his reply casually, stressing the “we” slightly. It was one thing to keep it zipped at the network, but Sabine clearly wanted him. And there was no point in playing coy when he had Sam and his mighty legal team to play hardball when it came to the nitty-gritty of negotiating.

  Sabine smiled again, baring those teeth that looked like they really could take a bite out of something—or someone.

  “And I think we can make a difference,” Russ added. “Do good in the world.” Why did he feel compelled to add such a saccharine comment? To reassure himself that he wasn’t just crawling into bed with Vincent Sabine for the money and the power and to give a big fuck-you to Hal and the network?

  “I’m glad to hear you say that,” Sabine replied. “That’s one of the many reasons I want you on our team. You know my dad died last week.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  Sabine shrugged. “The old bastard was a hundred and two years old. No kidding. The last thing he said to me was ‘It doesn’t last long, Vince. Make it count.’”

  “Good advice.”

  Sabine scanned the horizon with careless ease. “Yeah, I buried my dad last week. And I also played golf with a certain former secretary of the treasury and a former fed chairman. Who both sit on the Argofel board. It seems you’re stirring up a hornet’s nest.”

  Russ suppressed a sigh, but if this was a shot across the bow he might as well live up to the words he’d just uttered. He gave Sabine a level gaze and spoke his piece. “Well, that’s what I do for a living, Vince. I stir up hornet’s nests. That’s what I want to keep doing. And that’s what I’m going to keep doing wherever that takes me.”

  Sabine grinned again. “Absolutely. My old man was right. I’ve made my mark with money, and I’ve given millions to charity, but I want something that will last. It seems crazy to say this at a time when the old guard media is collapsing and new media is popping up like mushrooms and disappearing just as fast, but I think that we can change the world. We can change the world by the way we communicate with people. This last election showed us that. We can mold the future.”

  With that Sabine launched into a zig-zagging monologue of ideas and plans, which he still called Project X, since he wanted Russ to have input on the name. Some of the ideas were only about a quarter-baked, but some had real promise, and Russ was sorry when the chopper began its descent onto the helipad at Sabine’s massive estate. Vincent’s Versailles, it was called, for good reason.

  “Well, I’ve got a wife to mollify,” Sabine said cheerfully as he unbuckled his harness. Like Hal, Sabine was on his third wife, which had been the first thing on Eleanor’s dossier. But then Eleanor had a tendency to read too much into something like that, which was probably why she had been pessimistic about Sabine’s potential. He’s just a bored hedge funder, she had said. Russ thought her attitude might change in light of some of Sabine’s comments today.

  Sabine reached to take off his headset but stopped. “Speaking of mollifying, I have to ask you, do I have anything to worry about? Have all the shoes dropped?” He kept his hands on the headset, pressed against his ears, almost as if he were trying to block the answer rather than hear it.

  Dammit. Russ was tired of the shoe-dropping, but he kept himself from blurting out I’m not like Paul.

  “There are no other shoes,” he said, again keeping his voice neutral. How many times would he have to answer this?

  Sabine nodded. “I want you to know I don’t hold it against you about your producer. The rules changed suddenly. I had to get rid of a few people in my organization. It’s not change that kills you. It’s how you react to change. I need to make certain I’ve got a team that’s ready to work.”

  “Of course.” And of course he also knew, thanks to Eleanor’s research, that anybody who did business with Vincent Sabine could expect a “complete colorectal examination.”

  But that was fine. Completely fine. Paul was gone, and so was all his ugly, dirty baggage. The damned shoes were all dropped. They were dropped and buried. Long gone.

  “We’ll be in touch,” Sabine said. He tossed off his headset and jumped from the chopper, crouching until he could walk briskly to meet the entourage waiting at the edge of the pad.

  The chopper took off again, and Russ relished his time alone, head in the clouds. What wasn’t possible? As Long Island unrolled beneath him, in front of him a limitless future unfolded. With Project X—he really needed Eleanor and Gabe to set to work on a name—they really could make a difference in the world. And he and Liz would become truly rich. He’d never thought of money as that important, because he’d always had so much more than he ever expected. But the idea of having enough money to bequeath a genuine legacy to the kids, that was something. Burnish
the Stockton name. Yes, he had endowed a small scholarship at NYU, but with this kind of money, he could endow an entire school. Talk about lasting impact.

  The chopper took a slight sideways dip, and suddenly Russ caught a glance of the world gone sideways. It was a vertiginous perspective, where there was only down, down, down. And then the chopper was righted, but Russ still felt dizzy, and now he was cold. By the time they reached the helipad in Manhattan, his teeth were chattering.

  Back at his office, he pulled on a sweater, and Eleanor had Madison bring him hot soup. Eleanor and Gabe stood in front of his desk, trying to crowd each other, but in reality crowding him.

  “What on earth, Russ?” Eleanor said. “You’re shivering like you’ve been to Siberia.”

  “Only to the Hamptons and back in a doors-off chopper. It’s nothing. I just got a little chilled.”

  Eleanor raised an eyebrow. She might as well as have had a cartoon thought bubble over her head: So you had a little accident and bled all over your office. And you got a little chilled and now you’re shaking like a leaf.

  He ignored her silent implication.

  “Well, the bad news is that we’re heading into Argofel flak,” he said. “But that’s nothing we didn’t expect. Since when have the suits upstairs ever been different? And apparently, the powers that be have even gotten to Vince Sabine. But don’t worry. He’s solid about it, so we can just as easily take the story with us.”

  Gabe pumped his fist, but Eleanor sighed. “You know this isn’t a done deal, and just out of curiosity, who doesn’t know you’re talking with Sabine?”

  Russ turned up the soup bowl and drained it like he was a kid. Finally, he could feel warmth radiating out to his extremities. “We didn’t need secrecy. Being out in the open allowed us to see where we stand with the network.”

  “But maybe they’re just engaging in a little hardball,” Eleanor said. “Preemptive hardball,” she added, cutting a skeptical glance at Gabe.

  “Who cares?” Gabe said. “The network couldn’t offer a deal as good as Sabine’s if they tried. All the network could offer is more money. Sabine is offering opportunity.” When Gabe got excited he looked even younger, which didn’t seem possible since his hair, chubby moon face and owl-eyed glasses already made him seem like an eager teenager.

  “Well, at the risk of being the perennial party pooper,” Eleanor said, “I need to show you what came while you were out.” She disappeared and then reappeared, or rather didn’t reappear, mostly hidden by massive funeral wreath made entirely of dead blooms. A gaudy ribbon across it read “In Loving Memory.” She set it on his desk, where it hung over the edge, raining papery dead petals on the carpet.

  She handed Russ an envelope. He pulled the hand-written note from inside.

  Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

  Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

  And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  I read Page Six today in the Post. Ah, Russ, how sad it must be to contemplate the dying of your light.

  Yours forever,

  Andrew

  “I think you should show it to the cops,” Gabe said.

  “No,” Eleanor and Russ said, once again in unison.

  “But he’s threatening you!”

  “What the hell is in Page Six?” Russ asked Eleanor.

  “Just an item about Phoebe being killed in a hit-and-run. Says she was an intern for the show. Not much to it, really.”

  “He’s just showing us that he can get it placed,” Russ said.

  “So what?” Gabe said.

  So what? He wasn’t going to tell Gabe that Andrew Shrekel was communicating that he could have much worse placed if he wanted to. Once again, the knot in Russ’s gut took another turn. He was pretty sure his intestines might soon stop twisting and simply shred themselves into nothing. How much did Shrekel know about Phoebe? And where would he have gotten it?

  “He’s threatening to have you killed,” Gabe said indignantly.

  Eleanor cocked an eyebrow.

  Only my career, Russ thought. He wants to kill me professionally. A professional kill.

  And then the thought arose: Who killed Phoebe?

  How had he let her death get lost in the details of the day?

  He wasn’t that kind of man.

  Eleanor picked up the wreath, scattering more petals. “Now I need to figure out how to deep six this, not to make a bad pun. I’ve told Madison to keep her mouth shut about it. If only.”

  When he hired Madison, she seemed to have so many things in her favor: Tall, blond, blue-eyed. Great bones, great ass. Eleanor, of course, had been opposed. He would listen to Eleanor from now on.

  A half hour later, Russ, Gabe and Eleanor sat down with the rest of the staff to strategize their next moves with Argofel. Argofel’s product, a new kind of germicide, was supposed to revolutionize the course of public health and prevent the deaths of millions in developing countries. But its manufacturing facility, perched on a North Carolina riverbank, had been secretly pumping its waste onto a small island about a thousand yards downstream, and now fish were dying in the perimeter around the island. Local environmental activists had complained, but Argofel owned the island and had been refusing access. What they had managed to scare up for samples had flummoxed the environmental scientists who had examined the evidence. The upcoming trip to North Carolina would shake the tree a little.

  Still, now he knew he hadn’t been flying under the radar, not with Sabine and not with Argofel. And now he was certain that Argofel was going to use all the firepower available to them to shoot down the investigation. And that was a whole lot of firepower. It was a knotty problem, but just the kind of knotty problem Russ loved to solve, and soon enough the sun was lowering in the sky and he was headed to Central Park West. Even though he hadn’t checked his email all afternoon, he decided to give it a pass now. He had better things to think about than #YouToo.

  He had Amanda.

  THE PRO

  He needed to get moving. He hadn’t meant to read this much. Steeling Gold. Scarlett Sharpe’s first best seller, and he could see why.

  Damn, that main character Northrup Gold didn’t take shit from anybody, not from his board of directors, and definitely not from his chick Arial. Pounding her pussy on the conference table. It shouldn’t have been a surprise considering those crazy blue eyes, but Scarlett Sharpe could write smoking hot sex scenes.

  Mr. Ph.D. at Community College might look down his nose at Steeling Gold, but even with his fancy education that dipshit couldn’t write like Scarlett Sharpe.

  He turned on some music. He needed to stop thinking about it.

  Girl, you looks good, won’t you back that azz up

  You’se a fine motherfucker, won’t you back that azz up

  Call me Big Daddy when you back that azz up

  Hoe, who is you playin wit? Back that azz up

  He’d like to tell Amy that one day he would have the money and the power to pay somebody, a ghost writer they were called, to write his own story. How he worked his way up the ladder, from chicken shit drug dealer who did his first hit to pay off a juice collector for a bad investment, to something…something bigger.

  He should have said that to Amy last night. I will be big, way bigger than some cock monkey at community college. But there was the smell of Mr. Ph.D.’s sex on her. It shot up his nose like coke, and then his heart was pounding and there was nothing but color, deep red color, blooming in front his eyes. And all the words in his head just blew out.

  He hated what Amy had done to him.

  He hated that he would miss her.

  And he wished Selena would text or call him back. Everything about this job was starting to feel sticky somehow. Not that it mattered who took out the contract. Or that Selena wo
uld even tell him. And Selena was probably pissed that he had texted her on her line.

  Most of all, Selena would not understand sticky. Only stuck is you, she would probably say.

  Not that he was really stuck. He had already ticked a lot of boxes. He’d taken a drive alongside the river and up to the front entrance of the state park. To go inside he’d have to pass the ranger’s hut where camping licenses were sold. No need for that. He could see the park was thickly wooded, and he knew it went for miles. The river was back there somewhere, too. For body disposal, he was spoiled for choice.

  He’d also given Scarlett Sharpe a little once over. He now knew that before she started writing novels, Scarlett Sharpe had been a journalism student and an intern for Russell Stockton’s Take Stock show where someone with the first name of Eleanor was on the production staff. Phoebe Shapiro had been an intern there, too, before she went to work in public relations. And one more thing: Take Stock’s executive producer had just been kicked to the curb for grab-assing females.

  Judging from Scarlett Sharpe and Phoebe Shapiro, Stockton picked his interns by their looks, and that would be easy pickings for a network news star. That meant the two targets most likely fell into the category of inconvenient, extremely inconvenient, for a guy probably shitting his pants right now over the whole #MeToo thing. When it came to tit-touching and grab-assing, the who was a big fucking crowd. Lots of guys in that crew. No reason to assume it didn’t include Russell Stockton.

  So yes, Stockton was most likely the signatory. But then again, there was this Eleanor. The terrier. Somebody sure knew a lot about these chicks. Selena was right: he’d been given times and places, everything but an invitation. And who else could have told Selena the right details about the sudden relocation unless it was this Eleanor King, the owner of the house? Made sense that Stockton and his terrier were in it together. They were a little on the high side of the pie shell to be Selena’s clients, but that sort of thing was hard to predict.

  Anyway, he should stop thinking about Selena. Stop thinking about Amy. Stop thinking about everything irrelevant. What mattered is that he got the job done tonight. And he would. Scarlett Sharpe must want to talk about Russell Stockton, or she wouldn’t have suggested they meet. He would let her talk, gain her trust. She would get in his car, or invite him back to the Victorian. A date gone wrong. Happened all the time.