Deadline Man

by Jon Talton

  Amber moves into the left-turn lane, signaling. Suddenly she shoots ahead and slides back onto Broadway, three cars beyond where she started. Somebody honks. She laughs and swings into a side street, gunning it around a traffic circle and going left. It’s so dark that it’s hard to see pedestrians, who dart across in the distance as mere shapes. From the side mirror, I see another pair of headlights take the circle and come toward us, fast.

  “She’s very persistent.”

  In a minute we turn back onto Broadway and crawl along with the traffic, hitting every light red. A crowd stands in front of the order window at Dick’s, craving burgers. Amber signals again, but this time she makes the turn and we slide into the drive-in parking lot. I can see the gray Ford brightly illuminated in the streetlights, waiting on Broadway to follow us in. Then we catch a break. A Mini Cooper backs out of a space behind us, blocking the Ford’s way into the lot.

  Amber guns it again and shoots into an alley. We bump hard across a side street—I don’t even think she looked for oncoming traffic—and wind around couple of blocks and into another alley. We speed past the backs of buildings and dumpsters. A homeless guy with a shopping cart curses us. She has turned the lights off. The lots are small and the buildings uneven. After driving half a block she pulls the parking brake and turns into a dark niche. She stops the car with the parking brake. No red brake light betrays our presence. We’re in the loading area of a business, but concealed by the longer building on our right. A white delivery van is on the left. We’re six feet farther in from the front of the van. Amber turns off the engine, grabs my hand and pulls me down. We’re face to face below the gearshift and my side and back ache from the position. Amber giggles.

  “This is fun.”

  I hear the crunching of car tires, see a flash of lights, then hear a swoosh going down the alley. We just may have lost the blonde.

  Amber tentatively raises up, then starts the car and tears out after her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Aren’t you curious to see who’s pissed off at you?”

  I readjust my seatbelt and sit back. “How did you learn to drive like that? Journalism school?”

  “I was a history major,” she says. “I have brothers and I’ve watched a lot of action movies.”

  Now we’re three cars behind the Ford as she turns onto Denny Way and descends out of Capitol Hill. She winds her way through the streets to get on Interstate Five. Amber confidently follows, keeping a distance of maybe two hundred yards. The task is made easier by the Ford’s brake-light malfunction: only one works. So every time the blonde taps the brake, she signals her position.

  “Can you make out her tag?”

  I can. She tosses a reporter’s notebook at me and I write it down. Just an ordinary Washington state tag.

  The freeway traffic runs fast and thick, and the Ford accelerates quickly, changing lanes. Amber doesn’t match lane change for lane change, but keeps the same distance.

  “She’s going for I-90.”

  “Got it.” Amber moves to one of the lanes that will merge into the freeway headed east. Sure enough, the Ford takes the exit. We follow and drop into the noisy tunnel that carries traffic out of downtown and under the Mount Baker neighborhood. It’s a long, narrow run, not a time to be worrying about earthquakes, and not for the claustrophobic. Amber seems unperturbed. She hides beside an eighteen wheeler in the middle lane while the Ford takes the fast lane.

  Then we blast out of the tunnel onto the floating bridge over Lake Washington. The water is dark and at eye-level, churning white caps in the wind. The Ford is gone.

  “Do you see her?”

  “Fuck.” Amber keeps her speed constant. Ahead is an anonymous stream of red tail lights. A wave crests over the concrete barrier, splashing my door. Amber runs the wiper.

  “There,” she says. Perhaps other waves caused traffic to slow down—the one-side brake light flashes half a mile ahead. The Jetta rattles for a moment then responds, jumping up to 80 to close the gap.

  “I’m getting creeped out driving back toward the ‘burbs,” Amber says.

  We’re almost to Mercer Island, and as the lighted exit looms the Ford signals.

  ***

  Darkness is the primary matter here. The road is narrow and serpentine. On both sides, huge trees rise up to block out even the marginal light of the moonless sky. The big houses sit mostly far back, behind trees, hedges and gates, invisible except for a fleeting window or security light, but none powerful enough to penetrate far into the gloom. The water is everywhere nearby, but you’d think you were far from shore in forest primeval. Even the wind has surrendered to the overpowering blackness. The road is treacherous. As it winds around, a sharp drop-off would put a careless or unlucky driver through the roof of houses just below the grade, as the island falls off to the priciest lots near the water. The Ford drives the speed limit. Amber drives with her lights off.

  I don’t even bother to ask if that’s a good idea. She seems fine. We’ve come this far. Now we’re on the Rock, the Alcatraz for the rich in the Puget Sound region, which doesn’t lack for affluent enclaves. The isolation would drive me nuts—even though it’s minutes from downtown Seattle, if the traffic is light. No wonder Megan Nyberg took every opportunity to get the hell out. I watch the substantial homes pass by and wonder which one was hers. Yet their lights are barely visible in the overwhelming darkness. I half expect Megan’s ghost to step out in front of us. My mind is beyond addled.

  “Check it out…”

  The Ford’s reliable bum brake light burns and the car slows. Amber uses the handbrake and lower gears to reduce her speed. We’re a quarter mile behind. From the other side of the road, I see one quick flash of headlights. Another vehicle parked off to the side, facing our way. There’s actually a shoulder there, and beyond it a large house nearer to the road. The Ford angles over and illuminates an SUV. It parks front bumper to front bumper, and the blonde leaves her headlights on.

  We’re still on the road and I’m praying nobody comes flying up behind us. We’ll be like one of those teenage road tragedy movies they used to show in high school drivers’ ed. Amber slowly eases over to the left. I can’t see if the shoulder extends this far or whether we’ll hit the side of a hill or go into a gully. When the tires finally crunch on gravel I take a breath. The handbrake cranks noisily in our little cockpit.

  “Are those your guys?”

  I look ahead and my heartbeat triples. It’s them. The two are wearing suits, standing in front of the SUV, learning in toward the blonde. She’s talking. I study her face, her features. Stu slams his hand down on the hood of the SUV and shakes his head. Why do I get the impression I am the subject of this conversation. They stand this way for maybe five minutes. Then they turn off their car lights and darkness reclaims the environment.

  “They don’t look like Feds to me,” Amber whispers.

  “Why not?”

  “The way the big one slouches. The woman looks way too glam.”

  If they are walking toward us with guns we’d never know it. The only sound in the car is our breathing. Next I feel my hand on the door latch. The mechanism responds with a metallic click and the door opens. My legs start to swing out, the only sentience in my body is blind rage. My hands are palsied with anger.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Pam.” It’s all I can manage. The ground scrunches under my shoes.

  “If you get out of the car, they’ll kill you, too.” Amber roughly grabs my arm and I reluctantly slide back into the seat and ease the door shut. “Thank god, the dome light is broken,” she says. I know she’s thinking it’s a display of macho. Insanity is more like it. I climb back inside my body, breathing heavily.

  Flashlights flare. They swing like three lightning bugs, out into the road but then away from us. They move up toward the big house. It’s completely dark, not even a porch light. I can see a piece of the blonde’s coat lighted
for just a second, then they’re gone.

  Amber starts the car and slowly glides toward the other vehicles. In less than thirty seconds we’re past, with no sign of the agents. The house is tasteful and must have commanding views of the water. It also has enough of a window of light through the trees that I can make out a for-sale sign in front.

  Another quarter mile in darkness, then Amber lights up the Jetta and takes off on the windy road to the freeway. Before we get there, she pulls into a Shell station parking lot and stops the car.

  “What were you going to do back there?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Get revenge.” I am still feeling shaky from the primal instinct that took over my body.

  “Don’t be stupid.” She stares ahead, then unfastens her seatbelt and turns to face me.

  “If you want to get back at them, do it on your terms, not theirs.”

  “You said maybe it was over. I should let it go.”

  “I never said let it go,” she says.

  I don’t know what to do. I can’t go to the police. I can’t get help from the newspaper. Maybe I’m not safe on the street or in my own bed. I just say slowly, “They won’t let it go. And Pam is dead and those motherfuckers are still taking up oxygen.”

  “Help me work my story then. They’re somehow involved with the disappearance of Megan Nyberg. Now they’re connected to the murder of your friend. If I can break this story…”

  “The paper doesn’t want it.”

  “They don’t know what they want,” she says vehemently. “They’re running scared and making bad decisions. If I—if we—can bring in this story it’s going to be a lot more than a tabloid missing-girl thing. It’ll get me out of the suburban bureau. If the paper closes, it will get me a job somewhere else. If the whole industry is dying, at least let’s go down swinging! Let’s go down with some integrity!”

  I stare into the night. “It might get you killed.”

  “Journalists are killed every day in the world. It doesn’t stop them. Fuck, I need this story!” She nearly shouts the last words. Then I feel her hand in mine. She has long fingers. She speaks quietly. “I remember as a college student walking into the Chicago Tribune’s headquarters on a cold winter afternoon. No appointment, no meeting upstairs, just a wannabe gazing in solemnity at the walls around me. All that hushed cold smell of marble, the feel of history. For me, it was a little like a visit to a historic cathedral. Even then the Tribune wasn’t the paper it once had been, but for a kid from a small town, it represented everything I held in professional reverence. I bought a reporter’s notebook that day somewhere, a real one, and just carried it around, maybe like a talisman.”

  I squeeze her hand and can’t risk trying to speak. I’ve cried enough today.

  “Help me. I need a veteran as a partner. You haven’t lost your fire like so many of the people your age.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You can’t freeze!”

  I study her face, flushed with passion. Then, quietly, “I never freeze.”

  It’s craziness. It surrounds me. I fall back on curiosity and pull out my phone.

  “Why don’t you use mine.”

  I look over at her, but her eyes are on the road.

  “Maybe they’ve tapped your phone, your computer, too. Use mine.” She slips me a sleek new iPhone. I use it to call an old source. He also happens to be the name of the Realtor on the for-sale sign outside the dark house on Mercer Island.

  Ron Pohlmeir is one of the top residential real estate agents in Seattle. He calls himself “Nine Day Ron” for the speed with which he can sell a house, although since the bubble burst he might be Ninety Day Ron. He answers his home phone on the fourth ring.

  “To what do I owe the honor of the columnist calling so late?” He sounds a little aggravated and a lot lit. I ask about the listing.

  “What, you’ve gotten a big book advance?” he says. “Anyway, I thought you were an urban type.”

  “Who’s the seller?”

  “I’m not really comfortable getting into that.”

  I needle and cajole—he’s been a helpful real-estate source, but he’s also gotten plenty of publicity by appearing in my column. When he finally gives it up, I almost can’t speak.

  “You there?”

  “Yeah, just swallowed wrong. Troy Hardesty?”

  Amber gives me a sharp look.

  “It’s been on the market for three months, and he was really on my back to find a buyer.”

  “Why? Did he seem like he needed the money?”

  “Don’t know,” Nine Day Ron says. “But that’s why his suicide shocked me so much. I got the sense he was really going to try something new. A new lifestyle, whatever.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He said, ‘I want to be on the other side of the Cascades by the second week of November.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Said it that way, and said it more than once.”

  I repeat what Ron says. I want Amber to hear every word. I feel the need for a witness now, as we speed back to the glittering city very much on this side of the Cascades.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Thursday, October 28th

  Amber and I make plans. We will use only paper—paper documents, paper files. We will do it old school, the way it was done when I was a young reporter. We will have to find a safe place to keep the work—maybe rent a storage locker somewhere. Some place.

  She is from the digital generation but apparently not of it. She doesn’t trust electronic files. Maybe part of that is her native messiness—a look at the stacks of reporter’s notebooks, files, and newspapers in the back seat of the Jetta confirms that. But she claims she has been burned by too many computer crashes, and now she believes I’m being tracked—online and on the phone.

  I have been accused of being a neat freak. Maybe that’s true, but I know I’m lazy. I want to touch a piece of paper one time and be done with it. I love my emails, search engines, and electronic files. I love being able to research a corporation’s records online through Edgar, rather than waiting for Fedex to deliver paper 10-Ks and 13-Ds from the SEC in Washington like in the days when I was a young business writer. But my digital world is suddenly toxic.

  Amber drops me off at the newspaper. The wind has eased and the sidewalk is empty. I decide to go in, using the side employee entrance, showing my ID to the security guard. I can hear the distant rumble of the presses. It is midnight. When the elevator door opens, I am visibly startled. Karl Zimmer, the old maintenance guy, is standing there, his tool belt hanging like a gun belt. I nod. He doesn’t speak. He stares at me hard. Lots of people outside the news department hold us in quiet contempt. We think we’re better than they are—that’s the sense, wrong to my mind. I always speak to the pressmen, janitors, phone operators, dispatch runners, advertising people, if only to dispel this little unspoken class war in the building. My background is probably as blue-collar as Karl’s. But like many in the building, he’s probably not unhappy to see the snots with their college degrees get theirs. He stays on the elevator when I get off.

  The newsroom is empty except for a skeleton crew of a couple of copy editors, an assistant city editor and a cops reporter. The paper has been put to bed and will only be remade if there’s major news. I feel exhaustion overtaking me, but I want to make one last check.

  Back in my office, I spend the next hour going through my files, both in the computer and the filing cabinets. I meticulously go through my electronic address book. I go through stacks of business cards. No Nybergs. Nothing that would involve Ryan Meyers. No connections. The only thing that stands out is the last quarter of a notebook from a year earlier.

  Newspaper writers use all sorts of notebooks: yellow legal pads, steno pads and a long, narrow sheaf of paper called the reporter’s notebook. I use reporter’s notebooks. They’re about eight inches long, three in
ches wide, with thin cardboard on each end and held together by spiral wire. I usually use one for all sorts of interviews, then put it in the files when it’s full, marking it by dates. I’m too lazy to write every story it was used for on the cover, unless it’s highly sensitive. In that case, it goes in a file box along with the other documents related to that story. I haven’t needed to do that since I was an investigative reporter, and the danger of being sued or challenged was ever-present.

  The notebook that catches my attention looks like all the others. But when I see its dates, I decide to thumb through it. Sure enough, the last quarter of it is notes I took for a column on Troy Hardesty a year ago. My idea had been to look at the local money men who had survived the big crash. But for whatever reason, Troy had been especially forthcoming and other column topics were backing up. So I used a cheap columnist’s trick, took a shortcut, and just profiled Hardesty. Now I hold those notes and involuntarily check behind me, making sure nobody is around. These are Troy Hardesty notes that never made it to the Feds. I slip the notebook in my pocket. Then I send an email to Faith at the IT help desk and log out for the night.

  I leave the way I came in and walk along the Seneca Street side of the building. Soon I am illuminated from the bright lights flowing out of four-story-tall glass windows. It’s the best show in this part of town and it happens every night. It’s been too long since I’ve seen it.

  Through the glass, the giant printing presses are running at top speed, turning rolls of blank newsprint into today’s Seattle Free Press, my column included. They make the sound of a distant thunderstorm. The paper shoots up and down through the gears, drums, and rollers of the towering machines as ink imprints stories, photos, and graphics. Finished papers are automatically cut, folded, collated, and set onto fast-moving conveyors that will take them to the loading docks. Pressmen in blue uniforms monitor control lights and panels on the sides of the presses. A couple of them stand scrutinizing the finished editions, page by page. They’re all my age and older. Unlike the old days, they wear fancy ear protection.