Deadline Man

by Jon Talton

  “And this one’s named Heather Brady?”

  “Heather Jo Brady, five-feet-five, one hundred pounds, brown hair, looks pretty from the photo on the report. Homecoming queen-type.”

  “Any connection to Megan or Ryan?”

  “Not in the report.”

  “But it did have the parents’ phone number?”

  “Got it. I’m on that.”

  “So she disappeared about the same time as Megan Nyberg.”

  “Exactly,” Amber says.

  “So what’s the bad news?”

  “The car tab from your blonde. Comes back registered to a used-car place out on Aurora. I drove by, and it’s a real business. So either you wrote it down wrong, or somebody’s going to a lot of trouble to conceal their identity.”

  “Or the car lot is fronting for somebody, like the Feds.”

  Amber doesn’t answer.

  I scan the street for the fifth or sixth time in that minute, seeing nothing out of place. “I wrote it down right.”

  “When do I get to see you?”

  I tell her later. I need to run an errand first. Wiping the mist off my face, I walk up the hill to the newspaper, to retrieve my briefcase.

  ***

  At home, I change into black jeans, black T-shirt, and a black rain slicker with a hood. Underneath, the black nylon shoulder rig wraps comfortably under both my armpits and stretches across my back. Inside the nylon holster on the left side, the revolver sits with the barrel pointed down and the grip right in line with the movement of my right arm. It is secured with a snap, which can be undone with one move of my hand. I pour out a dozen extra bullets from a cardboard box and slip them in my coat pocket.

  I stand in front of the mirror with the rain slicker open. The gun is not visible. I have slipped it on easily, with not a millisecond of moral or ethical second thoughts. It is a momentous step, opening another door that I’d rather avoid. At least this time I’m the one turning the knob. I do not feel tough or invulnerable. I feel sick and corroded, from the moment of Troy’s death, and I am the one dropping, too, dropping down a hole into an alien world without oxygen. The revolver is an accessory here. Still, I feel the revolver weight against my side. I stand there a long time watching myself, avoiding my reflected eyes. If I were like Jill, I would be afraid Pam’s face would appear to me. I reach in and touch the pistol’s grip, securely strapped into the holster, then I drop my arm.

  Outside it’s dry and the homeless guy, George, is on duty, sitting on his crate. A young man and woman walk by, cuddling against each other. He asks them for money and they ignore him. I nod to George, reach for my wallet, and prepare to take out a couple of bucks, then stop. I peel off two twenties and hand them to him.

  “What the…?” His head jerks up in surprise. “Thank you.”

  I ask him to do me a favor.

  ***

  Melinda Hines lives in West Seattle. She’s an assistant professor at the U-Dub who teaches and writes on 18th century English literature. Samuel Johnson is her hero. She’s forty-six, medium-tall, and has auburn hair that falls straight to her shoulders. I met her last year as she was going through a nasty divorce—but are there any other kinds? Melinda is a life-long newspaper reader—reads it all the way through every day—and knew me through my column. She liked a friend who could hold a conversation about books, appreciate dry, ironic humor, and one night, after a bottle of wine, she stopped me at the door and kissed me. She has given me the best compliment: that I brought out the sexy side she never knew she had, that I was someone she never thought she would have in her life.

  Everybody has his theory about the death of newspapers. Melinda Hines is no different, but hers is extravagant, wildly conspiratorial, and alluring. She calls it her Grand Unified Theory to Keep America Stupid, or, simply, “my conspiracy theory.” As in, I’ll tell her some fresh bad news and she’ll say, “Well, you know my conspiracy theory…”

  It goes like this: Newspapers consolidated and largely became owned by large companies that must deliver unsustainable profit margins to Wall Street. So they already have pressures to cut back. But they also have business before Congress, such as changing the law to allow ownership of newspapers and television stations in the same market. So they don’t want to really dig for dirt anymore. And the financial industry that controls the government already has them “by the balls,” she says, professorially. So they keep dumbing down the coverage, eliminating investigative reporting, silencing the best columnists—“except you, so far”—and playing up silly things, especially entertainment news. It helps keep the public constantly distracted, more and more ignorant about the government and the world. She says, “Do you think it’s any coincidence that the war in Iraq was waged on lies during the exact same time that newspapers began their tailspin?” And, “Technology is making illiteracy powerful.”

  It makes more sense than many of the ideas trotted out by high-priced consultants.

  She has been in Oxford for three months, lecturing, and sending me a letter a week. I’ve been checking on her condo twice a week, making sure the plants on her balcony are watered. That’s usually not a taxing job in Seattle. Melinda is a techno-Luddite and proud of it. Don’t look for her class syllabus on the Internet. She refuses to use email for personal correspondence—being convinced that it is killing both the language and the art of letter writing. The university makes her use it at work.

  I walk four blocks to my old Toyota, climb in, and lock the door. I sit in the dark car feeling the weight of the gun under my left arm. A concealed firearms permit is in my wallet, a souvenir of a year ago when I was writing columns that caused death-threats from an anonymous anti-tax reader in Spokane. He never came over the mountains to get me, but I still have the permit. After five minutes of watching, I start the car and drive toward the West Seattle bridge.

  The bridge soars high over the Duwamish River, Harbor Island, and the port. I have to admit it: I am less comfortable with heights every year I get older, so I just watch the road. Traffic is light and in minutes I am driving along Harbor Avenue, looking back at downtown across a dark Elliott Bay. I pull into the park where the water taxis dock and choose a deserted part of the lot. A half-dozen cars are parked close to the walking path, facing the light show from across the water. I turn out my lights and sit. No one else pulls into the parking lot in the next ten minutes. I turn on the lights and drive out.

  Next I turn up California Street and drive around the neighborhood for a while. Headlights pass and turn. None seem to be sticking or lingering. It’s late enough that the sidewalks are deserted and the pleasant, postwar houses are lit with cheery, warm lights. Finally I pull into a little park. It has only a few spaces for cars and none are taken. I again wait for a few minutes, then step out and lock the car. I walk uphill carrying the briefcase past hedges and flowerbeds, then turn into an alley. What do I look like? Just a guy who got off the bus after working late. I go a hundred yards and step quickly into the space provided by a brick garage jutting out unevenly. No dogs bark. I can hear only the wind and a light rain begins. I pull up my hood, wait, and listen.

  Five minutes go by and I walk again, keeping close to the fence line, until I come to a sidewalk that runs downhill between hedges and fences. You wouldn’t know it was here unless you were one of the neighborhood walkers. A shadow suddenly materializes ahead and my gut freezes up. The briefcase is in my left hand. I wonder about reaching into the wind-breaker, just to have my hand close. It’s an older guy, thinning sandy hair, Patagonia zip-neck jacket with a company logo. We say hello and pass by. I walk faster and turn back to see him keep moving uphill.

  Another block and I reach Melinda’s third-floor condo. The locks are secure and nothing looks amiss. They don’t know about this Melinda because she doesn’t use email. I don’t turn on the lights until I am in her study. It’s an enclosed room, encased like a blast shelter by bookshelves and stacks of newspapers, magazines, academic jo
urnals, student papers—some are four feet high. I sit at her desk and turn on the lamp. It has a green shade. A photo of the two of us sits on the desk. I have been bracing myself for her inevitable break with me. The time she concludes that she wants to find a relationship that could lead to marriage, to “a future,” whatever that means. I’m surprised her latest letter from England wasn’t of the “Dear John” variety. If she used email, her subject line would be something like “re-thinking you and me.” Sometimes it scalds me for months. In Melinda’s case, it will hurt even as I wish her well. Now I have bigger worries.

  I open Pam’s Coach briefcase, the leather mournfully soft to the touch, and pull out my copies of the notes turned over to the Feds. I go through them page-by-page, line-by-line. I make four pages of handwritten notes in a fresh reporter’s notebook. Just a few reminders about my interviews with Troy Hardesty. Still nothing that creates an “oh, shit!” moment of recognition.

  When I am finished, I slide the notes back into the briefcase. I put the fresh reporter’s notebook in my slicker pocket. From the kitchen I retrieve a plastic garbage bag and drop the briefcase inside. I double-bag it, then fold all this into a neat rectangle. Out on Melinda’s balcony, the soil in her pots is moist. It’s starting to rain heavily. I unlatch a heavy plastic storage bin she uses for gardening tools and pack my rectangle at the bottom. Somehow I feel as if I am interring Pam. I don’t count the minutes I hold tightly onto the cold metal of the balcony, far beyond the time when my hands have started to ache.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Friday, October 29th

  “Hello, Writerman.”

  Rachel raises her face and I kiss her without hesitation. I love the way Rachel kisses, as if the muscles in her mouth were made for it. She takes my hands.

  I feel warm looking at her. I can’t help it. She’s like a well-made cocktail. “I didn’t know if you’d cut class for me.”

  “That’s what substitute teachers are for.” Then the music is gone from her voice. “I’m worried about you.”

  The last thing I had done before going home the previous night was to stop at a 24-hour Kinko’s and pay cash to use their computer. I signed up for a Gmail account. The Feds couldn’t track me that quickly—we’re talking about the government here. I had sent Rachel a message: “Please meet me where we first kissed. Urgent.” This morning I had arrived at the paper early and banged out my Sunday column, a report card on how the governor was handling the recession. I can write outrage. I can write heartbreak. But I had written the thing I wasn’t feeling: cool analysis, and I had filed it by eleven. Faith had given me the Samsung Blackjack, newly encrypted. Then I had driven out to Ballard, past the locks and Ray’s Boathouse, to the park. I had scoped it out for thirty minutes before Rachel might arrive. Then I had walked up the slight incline from the water, across the parking lot, and into the tunnel.

  Now it is three p.m. and we stand in a small tunnel that carries a hiking trail from Golden Gardens Park under the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks.

  “We’re taking a terrible chance by meeting,” she says.

  “Am I in that much trouble?” I try to say it light, like a joke. She says nothing and lets my hands fall away like regrets.

  The tunnel is just long enough to go under the double tracks of the main line, and it is wide and filled with light. Outside a low cloud cover shelters the sky. Puget Sound is dark blue, the color of Rachel’s eyes, and three sailboats cut through the water half a mile or more from the shore. Across the water, the Olympic Mountains are jagged and purple. It’s far too beautiful an afternoon to harbor the sinister, so I am on edge. Still, something about her eases me. What is it about a blue-eyed brunette, contrasts that work so well together?

  “Why no suit?” she asks.

  “Casual Friday.” My suits aren’t cut large enough to conceal the gun, so under the black windbreaker, I am in khakis and a blue shirt.

  “You hate casual Fridays, and I love you in a suit.” She glances both ways.

  To allay Rachel’s fears—and mine—I position her so she is on the outer edge of the tunnel, facing toward the woods and the neighborhood to the east. I am inside and can go west, toward the parking lot and the shore. We’re close enough to talk, but at a 90-degree angle from each other. I tell her if anyone suspicious approaches, just walk away and I will, too. It seemed like a clever plan this morning. Now it seems a little silly. So far, the park is nearly deserted—a few dog-walkers close to the water. No one is on the trail. We take our positions.

  I hear her voice from my side. “I asked you not to contact me.”

  “Rachel, what happens on 11/11?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Rachel…”

  “I don’t know!” I glance around to see the back of her head. She runs a hand through her thick, curly dark hair. “I don’t know! Dad dictated that part of the note to me! He was trying to keep you out of trouble.”

  “It’s too late.” She turns in and reaches for me, shaking her head in concern. I gently turn her back to watch her side of the approach.

  “I went to see a hedge-fund guy named Troy Hardesty for a routine interview. The next thing I knew he was falling out of his office onto Fourth Avenue. He mentions eleven/eleven in our conversation—asked me if I’d ever heard of it. Later that night, a bag lady on the street yells it at me. ‘Eleven/eleven.’ She says, ‘You’ll get yours.’ I found it tattooed on the leg of a dead man. He just happened to be the boyfriend of this girl who’s missing, Megan Nyberg. Then I get your note. Eleven/eleven, again.”

  A hundred yards away, a black Lab drags a woman to a minivan. They get inside and in a moment the car starts up and backs out. I wait for Rachel to say something, to make some sense of it. When she’s silent, I continue.

  “After Troy’s death, I got picked up by federal agents. They flashed badges but never showed me their credentials again. They took me to an unmarked building in SoDo, asked what I knew about Troy, then they let me go.” I instinctively look down at the scar on the top of my hand. “A couple of days later, they kick down my door. They burn my hand with a cigarette and show me a National Security Letter. It demands all my notes and emails regarding Troy, Megan Nyberg, the boyfriend Ryan Meyers and someone else, Heather Brady. Do you know those names?”

  “Only Megan, from TV.”

  “This guy’s a hedge fund boss, and they’re teenagers. Both girls are missing and Ryan’s dead. The paper gives up the notes without a fight. I can’t believe it. The Seattle Free Press!”

  “Please let this go!”

  I curse and lower my voice. “It’s too late, Rachel. These agents are killers…”

  “What do you mean, killers?”

  “I need to know what happens on eleven/eleven. We’ve only got thirteen days.” Jill would have said that’s a bad omen in itself. I catch my wandering mind. “I learned that Troy Hardesty had his house on the market. He told the Realtor that he wanted to be on the other side of the Cascades by the second week in November. We’re back to eleven/eleven, and none of it sounds good.”

  I hear a train whistle in the far distance and look around to see if Rachel is still there. She is looking back mournfully.

  “We could just run away.” Her lips make a sad smile. “It wouldn’t be awful.”

  “It would be wonderful, but you deserve way better than me. Soon-to-be unemployed journalist.”

  “I know you think I’m just acting like a doormat. I’m not. I know you better than you think. Being with you felt right, righter than anything in my life. I just can’t let go of this vision I have about us. I went to a fortune teller a year ago…”

  “I know.”

  “She told me I would fall in love with a writer and he would be a righter of wrongs, too.”

  “I know.”

  She steps to face me and takes my hands. She has lovely hands, pale with long, sculpted fingers. She could be a hand model.

 
; “And he would be a very worldly man who would scare me a little. But he’d be just what I needed. I like to tell that story. But I would have had this vision without the fortuneteller. I had it that day you kissed me, right here.”

  I look at her and my chest constricts. Is this what they mean by heartache? In the long moment, I know I’ll miss her forever. I know I’ll look back and ache and wish I had done differently, been a different man. It passes and I place her hands at her side brusquely. I never had a sixth sense. I do have an essential intuition necessary for journalists and cops. I can tell when someone is lying to me.

  “Goddammit, Rachel, lives are at risk here.” I advance on her and her loving face suddenly shows fear. “I know you’re lying to me. Your father invested in Hardesty’s hedge fund. Don’t you get it? I’ve got blood on my hands! Somebody’s going to pay! I want the truth!”

  She says my name over and over, denying she knows anything, retreating as I match her step for step. A part of me, deep inside the bastard, is watching that she doesn’t trip.

  “Tell me!”

  She starts crying. She looks behind her, to see an avenue of retreat. But I take her shoulders and make her face me. Then she whispers, just audible above the noise of the wind.

  “Dad was in the CIA.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  I had only met Craig Summers once before the encounter at Pike Place Market. Rachel had taken me to meet her parents for dinner. The “meet the parents” thing had set off my worry meter, but I had enjoyed the evening. Summers didn’t live at all like the stereotypical Seattle tech mogul. He and his wife owned a Victorian painted lady on Queen Anne Hill. It was beautifully restored and tastefully furnished, but honestly, too, as if real people lived there. The parents were nice people. I should have expected no less considering their daughter.