“Laundry and Latrine,” I said.
“That’s right. L&L, they used to call it. Then he added dishwashing and peeling potatoes. All the grunt chores that even grunts shouldn’t be wasting their time with in a war zone.”
“Some people would argue that those grunt chores teach discipline and foster a sense of interdependence among the troops,” I said.
“Stateside,” said Joseph Grant. “During basic training. But if you haven’t learned discipline and interdependence by the time you’re in the shit, halfway round the world in some piss-ant country full of savages who want to kill you, then you are well and truly fucked. A soldier in-country should not be wasting his time on latrine duty. His time, and the taxpayer’s money, are better spent killing the enemy and training to get better at killing the enemy.”
“It’s a good speech,” I said. “Good sales pitch to lay on politicians and Pentagon brass.”
“You bet it is. And it’s true. You were never in the army, I don’t expect you to know.”
I was in the KISS Army when I was a kid, does that count? But of course I didn’t give it voice. Then I auditioned, You seem to be confusing me with someone who gives a shit. Not much better.
I said, “I don’t really care if your company peels potatoes and washes dishes for the military.”
“But you don’t think we should be carrying guns and engaging the enemy.”
It wasn’t exactly a question, so I didn’t answer.
“Seriously,” said Grant, “I want to know.” Blake Sten and the talker stood watching my hands.
“What do you care what I think?”
“I’m curious to know how your mind works.” He didn’t say anything more, seemed willing to wait for an answer.
“All right, you got me,” I said. “I don’t really dig what you guys do. I think it drains skilled manpower and money from the military, and worse, it destroys accountability and subverts congressional oversight. I think, in the end, it makes our soldiers less safe and less effective. But it makes you rich and it makes a lot of politicians and generals rich. I get it. And I’m not trying to change it. So why are we having this conversation?”
Blake Sten stepped forward and dropped a newspaper on the desk, folded to reveal Delwood Crawley’s “Chicago After Dark” column.
“Don’t even pretend you weren’t the source for this,” said Grant.
“I wasn’t the source for this,” I said.
“Please…”
“But I think I know who was.”
“That’s pathetic.”
“The guy who attacked me in the mall,” I said. “I think he was the source. More accurately, his superiors in Washington.”
I paused to give Grant an opening but he didn’t speak. Just stood looking at me like I wasn’t there.
“Your clients in Washington are unhappy with your ham-fisted efforts to stop Joan Richmond from testifying to Congress. They believe you’ve acted in a way that has increased their risk of exposure. And they’ve decided to shut you down, cauterize this whole thing and stop the information bleed.” I watched Grant closely as I planted the seed. He was very good, but something in his eyes and something about his stillness told me that the seed was landing on fertile ground. I had to be careful. Such a seed is a fragile thing; if I pushed it too far, I’d crush it. And the pinkish color of Blake Sten’s burn scar was deepening as I trashed the quality of his work.
I figured I’d said enough.
I closed with, “It had to be them. Why the hell else would they send someone to kill me?”
Grant’s face changed subtly, “Nice try.” He put on a smile, but the seed had now been planted. I could only hope that it would germinate later. He glanced at Blake Sten and they sat in the client chairs across the desk.
“Blake communicated our position to you quite clearly,” said Grant, “but we obviously underestimated your persistence. Or overestimated your intelligence. Either way,” a glance at the newspaper on the desk, “you will now hand over the evidence you’ve found.”
“Mr. Grant, if I were the source of that story—which I’m not—wouldn’t the evidence already be in the hands of the congressional OGR committee?”
“We have friends on the committee. If they’d received anything, we’d know. So that leaves you.” Ever the pro, Grant gave away nothing by his tone or expression.
“Okay, so they haven’t received anything. But I haven’t found anything, either. Whatever you’re looking for, I don’t have it and I haven’t had it.”
“Bad news for you then.” A quick nod to Blake Sten, who pulled a notebook from his pocket and began reading.
“Terry Green. Reporter at the Chronicle. Lives at 1725 West Winnemac. Wife named Angela…” He flipped the page. “Vince Cosimo, former driver for Johnny Grieco, now works for you part-time. Lives at 3794 North Lakewood. Divorced, no kids. Drives a blue Ford Escort…” Flipped the page again. I could see where this was heading and felt the muscles in my neck tightening.
“Your grandfather, Willis Dudgeon. Widower. Runs a charter fishing boat out of Golden Isles Marina. Lives at 23 Austin Avenue, Saint Simons Island, Georgia. Drives a GMC pickup…” He flipped the page. My heart was now beating loud and fast.
“Your girlfriend, Jill Browning. ER nurse at Rush. Lives at 540 West Belmont, apartment 3…”
In one smooth action, I can shoot Joseph Grant in the face…maybe also get to Sten before the guy at the back of the room blows my brains out…or maybe not.
“…Jill has a younger sister, Grace, housewife, husband named Peter Edwards. Lives in England, 287 Cranbrook Road, Bristol. Two kids, Jennifer and Danny.” Sten looked up from his notebook. “Want to know where they go to kindergarten?”
I struggled to find my voice and to make it sound calm. I could hear a tremor in it when I said, “Your information is out of date. Jill and I broke up last December.”
Sten shrugged. “Oh, you broke up. My mistake. Then I guess you won’t mind if I slit her throat and set her on fire.”
I kept my hands on the desktop. I could feel blood rush to my face. My arms started to twitch and tremble. I tried to still them, pressed my hands down harder, but they just kept twitching.
Blake Sten seemed amused.
“Jesus,” he said, “don’t have a fuckin’ seizure.”
Grant nodded at him, said, “I think he gets the message.” Then to me, “You do get the message, don’t you? I don’t have to ask Blake to go through Terry Green’s brothers and nephews and nieces, Angela Green’s parents, Vince Cosimo’s sisters, Grampa Dudgeon’s fishing buddies…”
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t speak. Just sat in place, trying to control my shaking hands.
“Good. Here’s how it will work. You will call Blake before the end of the business day tomorrow and you will tell him that you are ready to hand over what you’ve found. I don’t imagine you keep it here but that should give you plenty of time to get it. When you call, Blake will tell you where to go and what time to arrive. And you will deliver. If you don’t, the people on Blake’s list will start dying. Clear?”
“I really don’t have it,” I said. My vocal cords were tight and the voice that came out of me sounded higher than my own. Like a much smaller version of me.
“As I said, bad news for you then.” Grant stood. “If you really don’t have it, you’d better find it. The deadline will not change, and neither will the consequences of failure. Good-bye.”
He left the office without looking back. Blake Sten stood, tore a sheet out of his notebook, and put it in front of me. A phone number.
“I’ll answer the phone until 5:00 P.M. tomorrow. After that, I won’t answer the phone.” He lifted the heavy doctor’s bag from the edge of my desk. “In the meantime, you can occupy your mind trying to guess which one of your people will be the first to die.”
PART III
Then stand to your glasses steady
And drink to your comrade’s eyes
Here’s a t
oast to the dead already
And hurrah for the next who dies.
—DRINKING SONG POPULARIZED IN THE 1890S
BY CHICAGO NEWSPAPER REPORTERS
SOME SING IT STILL.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
They were gone a full minute before I could even move. I got up and locked the office door and returned to the desk and hit the foot switch to shut off the video camera.
I’ve got you on tape, you bastards.
I was still shaky as hell and my hands were hard to control. After dropping a cigarette on the floor trying to coax it from the pack, I moved to the center of the room, did a hundred Hindu squats to burn off some of the adrenaline. That helped some.
I slid the hollow dictionary from my bookshelf, unplugged the wires. Placed the book on my desk, opened the cover, and pulled out the digital video camera. Flipped the screen open, set the camera to playback mode, turned up the volume, and hit Play.
The video was just electronically generated noise. A high-pitched squeal tone filled the audio track. My heart sank.
The doctor’s bag. Blake Sten had brought along an electronic signal generator, hooked to a powerful transmitter.
A jammer.
I had nothing on tape. Nothing at all.
Behind the bar at Rossi’s, there’s a sign, old and yellowed by years of nicotine residue. Not much lighting in the place but if you squint you can read the sign by the red glow coming from the neon beer logos in the wire-covered window.
A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited vocabulary.
Terry sat facing the sign, drinking scotch. And smoking a cigarette. But Terry quit cigarettes ten years ago. My eyes adjusted to the gloom as I took the battered stool next to him. His expression was grim, his eyes a little unfocused. The smoke rose from his cigarette like ghost worms in the still air of the bar.
“Angela’s not going to be happy,” I said.
“Angela’s not going to know,” said Terry. “Angela is staying at her mom’s tonight. And I’m not taking it up again.”
“All evidence to the contrary.”
“I’m not an addict like you. I’ll smoke today, forget about it tomorrow.”
The bartender came by and I nodded at Terry’s drink.
“Same,” I said.
“He’s on my tab,” said Terry, then pointed at his glass. “And hit me again.”
I wondered how many Terry had already downed; this was clearly not just his second.
The drinks were poured and the bartender moved out of earshot.
“Taking the rest of the day off?” I said.
“Yep.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“Nope.”
“Tell me anyway,” I said.
Terry blew a stream of smoke at the burn-scarred bartop. “Sure,” he said. “My editor’s sending me to Springfield for a week, maybe two. I leave in the morning. Angela is royally pissed. I promised to be there for the amnio on Tuesday. Now I’m gonna miss it.”
“And she’s staying at her mom’s tonight to register her disapproval.”
“Oh, it’s been registered, believe me. What’s going on with you?”
Where to start? “Jill and I got back together last night,” I said. “Lasted ’til she saw the news this morning.” Easier to start with that than the fact that Joseph Grant had just threatened Angela’s life.
“It would take a special kind of woman to see that and stick around. Honestly, made me a little nervous myself. It was brutal, dude.”
“I don’t get it. Didn’t you see me try to catch the guy?”
“That what you were doing?” Terry sipped his drink. “Didn’t look like it. The angle they showed, it looked like you were trying to give the guy an extra shove.”
Fuck.
“Crawley told me it didn’t look good,” I said.
“You dealing with that asshole again? I warned you about him.”
“I know. You see his column this morning?”
“I don’t read his shit,” said Terry. “Bad enough I gotta work at the same paper.”
Instead of telling him about Joseph Grant, I said, “What’s so important in Springfield?”
“Nothing. State budget. They asked real nice, like I was doing them a big favor, all the while making it clear I didn’t have a choice. Even with staff cutbacks, it’s total crap. I graduated from beat reporter a long time ago.”
“Nothing to do with cutbacks,” I said. “They’re sending you away until the congressional hearings are over, keeping you off the Hawk River story.”
“You know this for a fact, or is this just your usual paranoid rant?”
“I met with Isaac Richmond last night. He told me that you were no longer working the story.”
“Goddamnit. I suspected as much.”
“Hey, it’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. Thought you’d be used to it by now.”
Terry swallowed some more scotch. “Don’t start. I’m not in the mood.”
“What?”
“You ever listen to yourself? You come on with all that sanctimonious bullshit. Sure, you’re better than the rest of us. You quit, I stayed. Therefore, I sold out.”
“Whoa. I never said that.”
“You say it all the time. You say it every time you sneer about the state of the news business. Every time you talk about how you couldn’t handle the compromises, like you’re admitting some personal failing, but what you’re really saying is plenty clear. Let me tell you something: quitting doesn’t make you morally superior. I’m still in the trenches, busting my ass. And once in a while, I get a good story out there.”
“Terry…”
“Yeah, I’ve been drinking. Doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
I fished my smokes from a pocket and lit one. Drank some scotch. I didn’t want to deal with this right now. But it had obviously been brewing awhile and now it was out in the open and I couldn’t pretend he hadn’t said it.
And I couldn’t escape the feeling that our friendship was hanging in the balance.
“Okay, Terry. Maybe it is true, a little bit. No, a lot. It is true. But if I sometimes act superior, I don’t feel it. Tell me, how many people have you killed?” I dragged on my cigarette, forced myself to continue. “You want the truth? Truth is, I’m jealous.”
“Nothing stopping you from going back to journalism,” said Terry. “Hell, I’ve tried to bring you back, how many times?”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m jealous of your entire life.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, seriously. You’ve found a way to make it work for you. You’ve got a great wife, a nice home. I don’t even know how to do that.”
Terry looked at me for a long and uncomfortable moment. “Damn. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. And don’t get the wrong idea—I still think the news business is a cesspool. I just don’t think I’m better than you for not working in that particular cesspool. I’ve got one of my own.”
Terry lifted his glass, said, “Here’s a toast to the dead already, and hurrah for the next who dies.”
“Here’s to our respective cesspools,” I said, clinked my glass against his.
And with that, our friendship was back on solid ground. But the exchange left me feeling naked. I was suddenly eager to change the subject, even if it meant telling him the bad news.
“Joseph Grant came to my office today.”
“Jesus, he must be worried.”
“Brought Blake Sten and a couple of soldiers with him.”
“Sounds like a bad scene.” Terry stubbed out his cigarette.
“It was a very bad scene. And you’re not gonna like this but listen up. Because it involves you. And Angela.”
The sun had set three hours earlier and now the sky was about as dark as it gets in the big city. Five months since I’d moved back to Chicago and I still missed the black velvet blanket, punctured by countless white pinholes, that drapes itself over south Georgia at nig
ht.
In Chicago, you sometimes have to take the existence of stars as an article of faith.
I was parked down the block from Blake Sten’s Bridgeport home. Despite what you see on television, you really can’t go unnoticed in a fancy sports car, so the car was a rental and my Shelby was parked back at the office.
For the sake of poetic symmetry, I’d rented a Malibu.
Sten was home when I arrived, almost an hour ago. I was waiting for him to go out and starting to think I was wasting my time. I didn’t have time to waste, but there wasn’t much else to do.
I’d called Vince earlier and also spoken briefly with Amy. They were getting along fine and the area around her house remained quiet. Amy had agreed to meet with Special Agent Holborn and I was now waiting for him to call me back with a meeting time. I’d left a message on his cell detailing the events following his visit to my office and suggesting that the meeting take place sooner rather than later. I figured Joseph Grant’s detailed threats would get his attention.
But my phone had remained silent, except for calls from television reporters seeking my response to the mall video. Other than repeating no comment a half-dozen times, I hadn’t said much since my meeting with Terry.
He’d taken the news better than I’d expected. He was a grown-up. Even if he’d warned me about Hawk River, he’d wanted in on the story. Now he had to deal with the consequences. I promised to call him by the five o’clock deadline tomorrow and let him know the score. And I gave him the number of John Stone at Stone Security, suggested he hire an armed bodyguard for Angela while he was in Springfield, and maybe one for himself. Joseph Grant’s private army could get by a bodyguard easily enough, but they’d probably just move to another name on the list when they saw that Angela had one.
Or not.
Now I was hoping I could get into Sten’s place, maybe find something I could take to Holborn. Anything. The lights were still on in Sten’s window but I had the feeling he was settled in for the night. I looked at my watch: 10:25.
My cell rang and I picked it up and said, “Ray Dudgeon.”
Trigger City Page 22
