Deadline Man

by Jon Talton

  Outside, it is preternaturally quiet. I can’t hear even a distant leaf blower or lawn mower. The nearest houses look neatly uninhabited. The doorbell sounds deep within the house. James Mandir. I should have stopped at Kinko’s and used a computer to do a Google search. I don’t remember reading his name in the story about the flawed night-vision goggles. It will have to wait. I am here to listen to him. I ring the doorbell again.

  The window glass seems slightly reflective. I can’t see anything inside, just the image of puffy autumn clouds passing quickly overhead. After the third time of ringing the doorbell and waiting, I grow edgy. Maybe this is a trap. But a slow scan around me shows nothing amiss. Not a car on the street. One white minivan parked in the driveway of the second house to the west. No humans. Maybe he just got cold feet and stood me up.

  Perhaps he’s working in the garage. I walk down the wooden stairs again. They are sturdy and make no sound. The open door is nearest to the flagstone walk. It’s wide enough to accommodate a Hummer. Inside, I can see a silver BMW in the other bay. It’s a neat garage; no clutter of lawn mower, fertilizer spreader and long-unused children’s toys. The concrete floor is spotless and the lights are off. I stand on the side of the opening and call.

  “Mr. Mandir?”

  No answer.

  I slowly step inside, my eyes drawn to the partly open white door across the bay that must lead into the house. You would reach the door by walking up a concrete step and James Mandir is sitting on it, looking at me.

  But he’s not really looking at anything. He’s dead. He’s leaning against the doorjamb, his head bent at a quizzical angle, as if he’s about to ask a question. His mouth is curiously white. A large pool of blood surrounds his feet like a stain under an old car. In the dimness of the garage, it looks like several quarts of transmission fluid, except where it reaches up to his hands and wrists and then it’s brighter red. It’s come from three long, deep slashes into his wrists—two on the left arm, one on the right. The slashes are deep and parallel to the arm, certain to reach deep and get the arteries. A box cutter, blade extended, sits in the blood just below his right hand.

  He wrote left-handed.

  I approach slowly, almost floating. A strange calm envelops me. I call his name but it’s obvious that he’s long dead. Maybe his ghost is here floating with me. Frank Sinatra said that if he wanted to kill himself, he would climb in a bathtub and slash his wrists while listening to Sarah Vaughn on the record player. I don’t know if it’s a true story. That’s one of those stories that’s too good to check, or so goes the old joke in my business. I don’t hear Sarah Vaughn. I don’t hear a damned thing.

  I break my stare-down with those dead eyes and see his mouth more clearly. Something is in it. It’s white, folded. A straw? My spinal cord turns suddenly cold and the feeling radiates out into my ribs. The blood slick is now one footstep away from me. I finally do a belated three-sixty around the garage—nothing. The lights are off but the neatness of the place makes it easy to scope out. I bend down and look under the BMW. I’m alone. Behind me, the outside world looks normal, but it’s as if I am watching it on a movie screen. Every muscle in my body wants to turn and run back through that door.

  His mouth. The object is too short and thick to be a straw. It’s a folded piece of paper. I make my itchy muscles stay and step closer. I edge over to his left, which is somehow higher ground on the concrete floor. The blood hasn’t pooled here. I make a fist and use it to lean against the doorjamb—am I unconsciously trying not to leave fingerprints? It’s a move that comes too easily. I will worry about that later. I lean in closer…closer…the blood now an inch from the tip of my shoe. My hand brushes the edge of the paper but it stays firmly in his teeth. I look behind me at the movie screen. Nobody is looking in. I touch Mandir’s cheek. It’s cold.

  Once again I lean forward, using the doorjamb to steady myself. I go lower and to the side until my abdominal muscles are aching. I reach as if I’m manipulating a robot arm, except I can feel the thick paper in my fingers and I pull.

  I lean against the BMW and unfold the paper. It is curiously without any moisture, any saliva—just neatly rolled into a small tube.

  It’s a business card. My business card. I stare at it then turn it over. The neat script in black ink stares back at me: “Eleven/eleven, asshole.” The old editor in me notices the comma. A grammatically correct killer.

  I walk out to the car, numb but somehow unsurprised. Now it’s my move. Your move, asshole.

  My feet carry me back to the car, where I lean heavily against the fender and dial 911.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The house phone is ringing when I bolt the door inside my loft a little after one. I think it might be the cops. It’s Heidi Benson.

  “Mr. Montgomery wants to meet with you.”

  I just let her hang. I’m in no mood to feel grateful.

  “Today.”

  “What time?” My pulse rate jacks up.

  “Can you be here in an hour?” She asks. “Of course, you can. You live right downtown. Check in with the guard in the lobby and ask for me.” The line goes dead and I wonder how she knows where I live.

  There’s time to take a quick shower to get the death off me and change into a suit. I keep James Mandir’s eyes out of my mind’s vision. The sheriff’s deputies were very nice. It’s amazing how a press card can still be a get-out-of-jail-free card—especially when they don’t know how many dead bodies are trailing me around. Especially when they don’t know my business card was found in his mouth. I kept my story simple: Mandir lost his job and wanted to talk to me. No, I didn’t know what about. I also didn’t mention the discrepancy between seeing him favor his left hand and that the box cutter lay near his right.

  “He did himself the right way,” one of the deputies said. “Lots of fools slash diagonal, like in the movies.” Well, somebody did it the right way.

  I check the time and call the managing editor at home. He doesn’t seem happy to hear from me. I apologize for calling on the weekend. Could one big story save a newspaper? I’m not naïve enough to believe that, especially when the Sterling and Forrest heirs want to cash out. But I have a big story. I lay it out for him calmly, with the foundation being Olympic Defense Systems, a history of contracting problems, a secret link to the CIA, and now a suspicious suicide. It’s less a settled story than a line of inquiry, I know, but this is how many great exposés begin: with questions.

  Sometimes I move too fast. The biggest question is who killed James Mandir—and I know the answer: the same people who killed Hardesty and Ryan Meyers. There was no clear connection with Olympic until Rachel told me her father’s reaction when he read my first column on the company. Now this federal assassination squad has killed an employee who wanted to talk. Did the blonde do it? She had to have help. And why the hell am I going to talk to Pete Montgomery? They won’t kill me in their downtown tower. They think I know something. Otherwise, they would have killed me already. All this is far in the background of my brain as I talk to the M.E. There’s no time for doubt. I talk the story up as confidently as I can, and prepare for his questions about public records, lawsuits, documents, sources. He can’t block me with the National Security Letter because he doesn’t know that Olympic International is involved.

  He just says, “It’s too late.”

  “What do you mean it’s too late? I’ve got an exclusive interview with Pete Montgomery in thirty minutes.”

  He says my name. “You’re going to be tapped on Monday.”

  “Tapped.” That’s their management jargon for being told to take a buy-out or be laid off. I sit down, feeling as if all the organs inside me have disappeared, replaced by air.

  “I’m sorry. You’re a high-cost employee. You make one of the top salaries in the newsroom.”

  “How many other columnists?”

  He’s silent. So, none. Just me. I’ve suspected this might be coming since the day of t
he big announcement, hell, since the day Maggie Sterling died. The credibility I built up over the years, the reader following. I was the first to call the big recession, the first to see that Washington Mutual would go down. It didn’t matter. Why am I in a near state of shock now?

  He says, “I’m really sorry, man.”

  I muster enough saliva in my mouth to speak again and ask about the story.

  “That’s not going anywhere,” the M.E. says.

  I just sit staring at my tie. After half a minute of silence, he goes on, “James Sterling personally said, ‘no more Olympic stories.’ I had to fight like hell to get your second column in.”

  “Why?” The exclamation covers a world of questions in my life that moment.

  “I’ve got to go,” he says. “Come by my office on Monday. We’ll talk about what comes next. I know readers will want to have a goodbye column. The severance will be decent, not terrible. Look, I’m trying to save the newspaper, get the newsroom down to a staffing level where the consultants say it might attract a buyer. But it probably won’t happen in this environment, so I’ll be joining you in the unemployment li…”

  I hang up. Before me is the nook where I write from home. Above the desk is my ego wall, with awards and photos from a quarter century of newspapering. I look impossibly young in some of the photos. The awards include some for stories I barely remember—I only remember the hard work, the all-nighters, the sense of justification when they appeared on the front page. All gone. So many good people have lost their jobs in the past few years, and more than a few have never been able to get back to their old earnings power. Why should I have been special? But my eye goes to a photo of four men in suits, smiling and clinking glasses. It was taken years ago. One of the four is me. The other three went on to lead major newspapers. I became a columnist. I never knew how to go along to get along.

  I still don’t. I stand and grab my notebook. Then I’m not sure I want the information inside to go with me to this interview—you never know. So I stash it in a file drawer with a hundred other identical reporter’s notebooks, and pick up a new one to make notes from Pete Montgomery. I also take my small tape recorder. Heidi will be recording, so I don’t want any arguments over the accuracy of quotes. I don’t have anywhere close to the whole story put together, but there’s a start—and Olympic is scared enough to grant a weekend interview.

  ***

  George is sitting in front of the building when I step out of the elevator into the lobby. He sees me through the glass entrance and casually but unmistakably crooks his arm at a ninety-degree angle and makes a fist.

  “Freeze,” it says. Infantry hand signals. The old first sergeant then drops his arm and wraps his left forefinger over his right forearm: “Enemy.” He signals two fingers—two of them—and points to the south.

  I immediately turn and walk quickly to the back door, toward the recycling bins. I step into the alley and Stu is fifteen steps away, maybe closer. His face is set in hatred. Suddenly I feel so goddamned tired and beaten, but something inside makes my body run at him. He’s surprised to see me coming toward him and starts reaching inside his coat. But by that time I’ve hit him head-on with a body block that would be a technical foul in any contact sport. He hits the ground hard and I run toward the street, expecting any second to feel a bullet in my back.

  Instead I see a yellow play gun. It’s attached to Bill’s hand and pointed at me.

  The darts are very fast and hit me in the gut, cutting into the shirt. The worst cramp I’ve ever imagined convulses my abdomen and spreads from there. My arms are uselessly out at my sides and my legs are frozen, the muscles twirling backwards. My mind is somewhere else, where everything hurts a lot, so I can barely see it as the old cobblestones come up hard and fast.

  I do a face plant in the middle of the alley.

  “Roll his ass over…get his coat off…”

  I hear them talking above me but I can’t move. My middle still feels like it’s been folded in on itself.

  “Get his sleeve up.” Fabric comes up on my skin.

  “Can you hit a vein?”

  “Yeah.”

  One of them has a syringe in his hand. So this is how it will end for me.

  Not very creative when you think about their previous work.

  But, the end.

  I try to fight back but my arms and legs don’t work. They are abstractions, divorced from the commands of my brain. I try to pray but I just see the faces of the people I have failed, Jill, Pam, Rachel, now Amber…so many. I never doubted that I’d go to hell.

  Chapter Thirty

  Hell, as it turns out, is a cold place.

  At first, the cold is all I am conscious of. And the dark—impossibly black. The black of perdition. It would terrify me except that my body is shaking uncontrollably, my legs and arms, even my belly. Arms won’t move beyond the trembling. My skin is nothing but a scrimshaw of goosebumps so large they hurt. My jaw aches from a constant, cold-induced tremor; I hear my teeth chatter like a child’s toy dentures. When I force myself to stop, the silence is as frightening as the dark. The cold has seeped deep inside my bones, which ache with a fathomless intensity. It’s a chill so pervasive I can’t remember my past or my name. My head has a large weight attached to it, causing my neck to throb in pain. I try to lift my head and it falls backwards again, sending a freezing ache into the tendons of my neck and shoulders.

  Then I fall back down the well of unconsciousness.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  “Wake up, asshole.”

  A hand slaps my face hard. I awake to the sting rippling out into the nerves of my left cheek. My eyes are nearly blinded by the light. My body won’t move. I slowly focus on Bill, the slimmer of the two agents. He kneels before me, his moonlike face inches from mine.

  “He’s awake.”

  He backs away and I can see his partner, Stu, standing behind him, his arms crossed. They are both dressed in jeans and jackets. I am still shivering hard from the cold. Slowly, the world returns.

  We are in a long gray room that probably measures twelve feet wide and twenty feet long. The walls are gray cinderblocks. A long gray institutional table sits in the middle, a darker piece of rubber running around the edge of the top. Two gray chairs are placed beneath it. Four tall gray lockers are in the far corner. A gray door holds down the opposite corner. It has a small reflective window in it. My arms and legs are cuffed to a heavy metal chair. I catalog all this so I don’t start screaming. Moving my head still hurts, so I just try to take it all in with my eyes. Above me are hanging banks of fluorescent lights. The floor is concrete and has a drain in the middle.

  It’s never good to be shackled in a room with a drain in the middle of the floor.

  I’m completely naked, one with the chair. It seems as if it was built for it—locked down to the floor with bolts. My arms are held straight down and handcuffed to loops in the metal of the chair. My legs are similarly shackled. There’s little room to move. Between the handcuffs and the welded attachment of the chair is only one link of steel chain. The metal burns me with transmitted cold. A wide leather strap circles my chest and goes behind the chair back. Little scars sit prominently at my solar plexus. The Taser hit. My butt hurts from sitting on the metal seat—how many hours? How many days? My first insane thought is that I have a column due on Monday. Then: I missed my interview with Pete Montgomery.

  Bill pulls up one of the chairs and places it directly in front of me, chair-back facing me. He straddles it and stares at me. Stu picks up the other chair and positions himself at my right, just at the outside of my peripheral vision. My left cheek and eye are throbbing with pain. I’m shaking from the cold again.

  “You’re in violation of a National Security Letter. You have no rights. Let’s get that out of the way right now, because I don’t have time for your games.” Bill sounds very reasonable, his pastor-like face kind and reassuring.

  “You can be
held incommunicado forever if we choose,” he goes on, as if laying out the Bible study class for the next several Sundays. “We can put you in stress positions. We can put you in a box. Are you claustrophobic? We’ll find out. Maybe you’ll find out.”

  Stu’s large hand covers the side of my face and turns my head toward him. My neck muscles spasm in pain. “We can beat you and kick you all we want,” he says. “We can stick your ass on a jet and take you to Syria where they really mean business. By comparison, we’re nice guys.”

  “I’m cold.” I hear my voice for the first time.

  “You like that? We can make it colder.” Stu pushes my head back into the straight-ahead position. “We can stick you in a coffin and bury you for a day with just enough air to breathe, if you’re careful. God, I wish we could. But we don’t have time.”

  “Where’s Megan?” Bill folds his arms atop the back of the chair and watches my face.

  Megan. My mind slowly comes out of the deep freeze. Of all the pieces I have: Troy’s murder, the CIA connection, whatever funny business is going on in Olympic Defense Systems—it always comes back to the missing girl. And from his question, they believe I know where she is. I’m too cold to think it through in my head, to be clever. I try.