Deadline Man

by Jon Talton

  The streets around the building have less traffic and I cruise slowly around the block. The building is a new, windowless brick and concrete rectangle, bracketed on each end with small parking lots surrounded by high walls topped by curved iron bars. Through the gates I can see SUVs like the one that carried me, and one large white unmarked van with emergency lights. The only door to the street is protected by a heavy black gate. I slow and pull the car over. Saplings are planted between the building and the sidewalk. Video cameras hang off each end of the roof. It has no address. I write down the cross streets in my notebook. A building with no name, no address, where I was taken by federal agents who didn’t want to give me their names or leave their cards. They asked about Troy Hardesty, who had asked what I knew about eleven eleven. Now the memory of Rachel’s note is so real I can almost feel it in my pocket, like a phantom limb. Pieces are connecting even if I don’t fully understand them.

  A guard appears within seconds and walks quickly toward the car. He is uniformed and armed, but there are no patches on his arms. He glares at me and approaches the passenger side. I drive away and he writes down my license tag.

  Chapter Twelve

  It’s full dark by the time I get back to the newsroom. The light is still on in the managing editor’s office but the door is closed. I see Amber’s red hair in one of the chairs facing away from the glass wall. She has it down this time and it falls just below her shoulders. She hasn’t taken off her coat. The M.E. is talking and gesturing. He nods and studiously rubs his beard, something he does when he’s uncomfortable or delivering bad news. Behind him is a poster showing a reporter in a fedora, telephone to his ear, with a cartoon bubble showing the words, “Get me rewrite.” I sit in an empty cubicle nearby and wait. Most sections of the paper are finished, “gone” we would say, “put to bed.” Lifestyle, entertainment, and business are composed and waiting for the presses. What’s left is for the nightside crew: the main news section, the metro B section, and sports. The big room is quiet and tense as reporters finish their stories, work that will move to the originating editors, the night copy desk and the designers. The temperamental lead city hall reporter faces her computer terminal like it’s a creature from hell that must be subdued in mortal combat. Two metro editors lean over a reporter’s back, reading the top of his story. They make faces, comedy and tragedy. I don’t see Melinda Stewart.

  The door opens and Amber stalks out. She hesitates when she sees me. Her eyes are red.

  “You okay?”

  “No. Come have a drink with me.”

  Now I hesitate, until the M.E. closes his door and starts a phone call.

  “Let’s go.”

  ***

  We end up at a dark, expensive bar several blocks away, far from where we might run into Free Press people. It has edgy, angular furniture, not particularly comfortable. It’s packed, but we find a table.

  “Things are changing already. The paper’s not the same. Can you feel it?” Amber peels off her full coat. I take in the nicely tailored black dress she has underneath, her feet in peek-toe pumps. She looks like a million dollars untouched by inflation.

  “They want to send me to the East Side. It’s bullshit. I don’t want to cover boring suburbs. I’ve done good stuff. I’ve paid dues. I came here to cover real news.”

  I smile inside at her wounded passion, recalling myself from years before, when I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. Maybe I still don’t. The waitress brings martinis and I take a deep pull, trying to slow my heart, which is still pounding, heavy and insistent. I absently reach inside my jacket, where Rachel’s note sat before I burned it. I alternate between the liquor and a glass of ice water, trying to get the sandpaper taste out of my mouth.

  “Assholes. Fuckers.” She takes a full swig. “Have you met with the fucking consultants, yet?” I shake my head. “You’re in for a treat. Anyway, this isn’t even the worst. Something is going on with the cops. I went to pull the report on your guy, Troy Hardesty, and they wouldn’t release it. Then the same thing with Megan’s boyfriend. Nada. So I go to the M.E. to get the lawyers on it. This is freedom of information. This was their big story, the little missing blonde teen. Now they’re not interested.”

  “What do you mean they’re not interested?”

  “Just what I said.” Her voice rises. “He said I could hand it off to Kathy.” She’s another, more experienced cops reporter. “He said we’d had too much on the story lately and readers are getting tired of it. ‘There’s nothing new.’ Can you believe that? Ryan’s suicide is new as hell! Nobody has it. Television doesn’t have it. We could have a national scoop. Anyway, that’s when he tells me I’m going to the ‘burbs. Should I quit?”

  “Wait, wait.” I ask her again about the police reports. “How often do they withhold this kind of thing?”

  “Never. And my good sources among the detectives clammed up. One did tell me that Troy had put his wallet and wedding ring in a plastic bag when he took the big dive.”

  I tell her Troy never wore a wedding ring.

  She exhales hard. “This is a big deal.”

  “So what did the M.E. say?”

  “He said it was ‘premature’ to do anything.” Her face contorts at the word. “Can you believe that? The Free Press has always been aggressive on freedom of information. These are public records. Suddenly they’re chickenshits.”

  Amber keeps talking and I nod sympathetically. Inside, I am making “eleven/eleven” connections, warranted or not. Sealed reports concealing what? That these supposed suicides are really homicides? I can’t decide whether to involve her, tell her about the note from Rachel. Maybe I should pay for our drinks and let her go to the suburbs and live a happy life. Maybe she’s in as much potential danger as me.

  “I want to work downtown,” she says earnestly. “I want to work with the great journalists. I can learn so much from you.” She reaches across and takes my hand. She’s a toucher.

  I interrupt her. “I need your advice, Amber. What would you think if I said the words…”

  A group of businesswomen walks by and I feel one lingering by the table. It’s Pam, wearing a chic navy outfit with a tight skirt. The Phantom’s trench coat rests innocently over her arm. I smile. She doesn’t.

  She says my name and curtly nods toward Amber. “She’s a little young for you, isn’t she?”

  I laugh the laugh of the clueless and start to introduce Amber when I feel the cold water cascade off the top of my head. Pam pours it with the slowness of a performance artist. It sluices off my shirt, down my tie, into my crotch. Ice cubes rattle off my chest onto the table. A black straw rests momentarily on my left ear before falling into my shirt pocket. One of her friends giggles.

  Pam glares at me for a long time. Then, in a low voice, “You are a monster.”

  Her blond hair flies behind her like a contrail of wheat as she hurries out the door.

  I say nothing as I stand, releasing more ice cubes from my clothes. My hair and shirt are downpour wet. At least I’m not hot anymore.

  “Excuse me for a minute.”

  In the restroom I tear out paper towels to clean up the mess. Pam is the last person I would have expected to be jealous. Not only does she have a fiancé, but she gets off on sex talk, including about other women in my life. She’s the only one who knows details of the two Melindas. Rachel, I didn’t talk about. Now Pam is suddenly jealous. I guess it makes sense in a way I will understand when I am not so damp. Thoughts of 11/11 are temporarily tabled.

  The door latch sounds and I am about to say something when I see Amber. She comes in and locks the door.

  “It says unisex bathroom.” She dabs at my shirt and coat with paper towels. Her very fair, freckled hand strokes at my tie, then she uses it to pull me to her. She is tall. The kiss evolves over long seconds and her tongue lightly probes inside my mouth.

  When we finally stop, she says, “If you’re doing the time, may as well do the
crime.”

  “Amber…”

  She kisses me again, and my resistance, not much to begin with, vanishes.

  The door jiggles and I stop. She pulls me back to her and says “mm, mmm, mmm,” in a low voice. With my hands on her slender waist, she hoists herself onto the vanity. Again using the tie, she pulls me close. Then I feel her hands on my crotch, on my zipper. She reaches into my boxers and I feel skin on skin.

  “My, my, you’re a big one.”

  I didn’t know if that is true, but if so it is the only good thing I ever inherited from my old man. The thing I do know is how good her hand feels.

  “Let’s go to my place,” I say.

  She laughs. “Right here. Right now.”

  Her skirt has already ridden over her hips, revealing that her sheer black stockings are thigh-highs. She pulls aside a black thong—she is a natural redhead—and guides me inside. I try to go slow. She pushes against me and gasps. We move at an easy rhythm.

  “You’re fuckin’ me.” Her face carries an angelic smile.

  My breath comes faster as we buck against each other. From the mirror, I can see myself impaling her. I have my own smile. I lean forward to kiss her and stroke her soft hair. When I raise up she starts rocking faster, pulling me into her with her lovely legs. Her face is turned to the side and her eyes are shut tight as her moans coalesce into a sharp, percussive scream. I’m…right…there…too.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Monday, October 25th

  The first sign of my personal train wreck is not when my kinky, even-tempered Pamela pours cold water on our relationship. After all, I lose Pam but gain this luminous young Amber. I am back to three lovers; economists might consider that a manageable equilibrium. The first sign is not when I break one of my cardinal rules of romance: I shalt not bed co-workers. I even turn aside from one of my inclinations. I tend to avoid women in their twenties; they have rarely been attracted to me, even when I was that age, and now I find most of them boring and unformed. She might be young enough to be my daughter. But a night with Amber has washed away these reservations and I am feeling way too proud of myself. Later I may begin the cycle of regret over losing Pam. What if Pam had been The One? I don’t even believe in The One. Maybe Amber is The One, instead.

  “You are a monster.”

  Later I may wonder why I broke the rules that had served me so well. Was it that I was deeply attracted to this young woman, that I loved her sudden, impulsive seduction in a public place, that I was insane with worry on many fronts and needed the mysterious escape of chemistry and flesh? All that, and who the hell knows. “All men are dogs,” Jill used to say, with some fondness. “There’s no logic when they’re thinking with their little head.”

  Nor does the sign of impending ruin even manifest itself in the warning from Rachel, delivered by her father using what can only be described as tradecraft. Somehow the intensity of my night with Amber lets me set that aside for the week ahead. It’s too big, too unknown, like living under a nuclear showdown. You get used to it. You lie alone Sunday morning on sheets that still smell of Amber and read the newspaper. You read your column and it has no typos. You’ve told the world things it didn’t know about Olympic Defense Systems. The ashes of the note are down the drain. Only as the day goes on does it come back to me. I can recite it from memory.

  “You’re in trouble, even if you don’t realize it…”

  No, the first sign of my personal train wreck is forgetting the breakfast speech I am scheduled to give this morning to the Lake Union Kiwanis Club. It is the first time in my many years on the rubber-chicken circuit that I have forgotten a commitment. I tell a lie, feeling guiltier than if I had fibbed about my schedule with one girlfriend in order to spend the weekend with another. There is no excuse. My calendar was neatly laid out on my computer just as my loft reflects a Sunday night spent obsessively ordering and reordering my files.

  Now it’s Monday morning and a new column is due in less than four hours. I have done no research on anything this weekend. I am way too thrilled at having bedded Amber and that the Sunday column was the second most read article and top emailed one on the newspaper’s Web site. And yet the goddamned machine must be fed. I will have to pull out an evergreen—how is port traffic doing? What’s the latest report out of Brookings? When you write three times a week, forty-eight weeks a year, not every column will be a Pulitzer contender. I bargain with myself, in an odd paralyzed change-the-subject daydream, even as the train is tumbling off the tracks, the delicate physics of moving wheels on steel rails fatally violated, motion and gravity becoming destiny, only I don’t know it yet.

  A column is due in less than four hours but I sit on the sofa and recite Rachel’s note again from memory. Stay away from 11/11? I wanted nothing to do with it. It keeps trailing me like a bad reputation. Twenty years of journalism have taught me to be skeptical of everything. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. So could the situation really be as dire as Rachel writes? I don’t even know what the situation is. Is she trying to get me to chase a foolish non-story, maybe get payback by seeing me humiliate myself in print with a “what’s 11/11?” column? But there’s nothing vengeful in Rachel. Is it a warning that matters cosmically—a calamity on the way—or just personally, maybe an embarrassing financial imbroglio that involves her father? No, it is written with coiled violence in the background. I recite, “He’s a good man, but he knows bad ones. Long story short: you’re in trouble, even if you don’t realize it.”

  I don’t know what to do. Now even my determination to talk to the M.E. and explain the 11/11 weirdness evaporates. Doing so might endanger Rachel. Look what happened to Troy Hardesty and Ryan Meyers. Both had an 11/11 connection, whatever that means. They may have been murdered. The police have sealed their death records. So why not go to the police? And tell them what? Eleven/eleven makes me sound like a paranoid, like a lunatic. Like my sister. No wonder I told Amber nothing about it in our time together. I need to call Rachel, and yet I don’t dare. It puts me into a neat loop of paralysis. I think about Amber as I knot my tie.

  I walk back into the living room as the front door flies open, pieces of doorknob and lock skittering across the floor. The sound is like a bomb has just gone off in front of my face.

  I stand there feeling nothing but terror and timelessness as figures move quickly toward me. Two men aim guns into my face, the barrels looking impossibly large. They are the feds from the anonymous office. Before my brain can react they turn me and one drives a foot behind my right knee, dropping me hard on the floor. A bundle of nerves in my kneecap sends an urgent message to my scrambled brain. The pain shoves me suddenly, excruciatingly, into the moment.

  “You can’t…” It’s the first words I can manage.

  “Shut the fuck up, asshole.” The barrel of the long silver handgun sits cold against my ear. Stu holsters his gun and pats me down, digging his hands into my pockets. He spends long minutes looking through my wallet. He tosses it on the floor.

  “Get up.”

  With no similar help from them in rising, I pull myself up. I’m afraid to even touch my aching knee. They push me into a chair at the dining table. Stu is wearing a suit today. The guy who looks like a kindly preacher—I still don’t know his name.

  “Fathers and sons, they never stray too far apart.” He pulls out a chair and sits opposite me. He leans close. His face is pleasant, self-satisfied. He speaks softly, like a high-school counselor talking to the kid who can hope for nothing more than to drive a delivery truck. “You can’t outrun your DNA. Your father was a criminal. You’re headed that way, too. All your compartments.”

  “He was a nutty tax protester. Fuck you! Why couldn’t you knock?” I feel my temples throb with useless anger.

  “You’re potentially dangerous. You were Army Intelligence,” Stu says, leaning against a counter.

  “Are you nuts? I was an Army journalist.”

  His lips go pale
in a small smile. “Right.”

  “You can’t just break into my home!”

  “We can do whatever we need to do in a terrorist investigation.” Stu gives the briefest predator smile. A glacier flows suddenly into my lower legs.

  “Terrorist?” They’ve said that magic word. I’ve read enough of our own reporting to be irrationally afraid, as if they have thrown me into a fairy tale where one word can bring destruction.

  Stu leans toward me, fists on the table. “How long did you know Ryan Meyers?”

  I tell the truth. They demand to know why we went to his apartment, how we discovered the body. I tell the truth again. This goes on for an hour as they try to catch me in any discrepancy. Neither one makes notes. They don’t mention Hardesty, their previous obsession. This is not about a hedge fund. It is about eleven/eleven. Stu wanders, opening cabinets, tossing books off their shelves. He has a heavy, wide-legged walk. He sits at my desk, opens my laptop, dumps a pile of files on the floor. Next he goes into the bedroom and I hear the closet doors slide. He’s out of my view for a moment, then I see him again, digging his hands into the pockets of my pants, suits, and coat. Drawers come out of the dresser and their contents are dumped on the floor. He looks underneath the drawers, as if expecting to find something hidden there. He lingers at my bed, pulling back the comforter, looking at the sheets that still smell of sex and young woman. The safe retreat of my Seattle loft feels forever violated.

  Slowly, my body recovers from the shock. I watch Stu nervously play with his tie, his collar. He doesn’t like the suit. They are really lousy interviewers, doing nothing to build rapport. The other one reaches into his coat and retrieves an envelope. He slides it across the table. I open it and see the letterhead: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Stamped above that is the word “SECRET.” I scan it: Below my name, address and a salutation (“Dear…”—how quaint), are dense paragraphs that look as if they were produced on a typewriter. “Under the authority of executive order 12333…” I am ordered to produce all my notes, tapes, e-mails, and research, for all dates, on Troy Hardesty and his hedge fund. I am ordered to produce the same for Ryan Meyers and Megan Nyberg. And there’s a new name: Heather Brady, no one I know.