Gwen, conversely, was in awe of Micki’s balls-out courage, in everything from battling her cancer to standing by (and profiting from!) her unorthodox lifestyle decisions. Gwen thought that, with the possible exception of Gary, Micki Bridges was the strongest person she’d ever met.
In fact, as Gwen often pointed out, Micki and Gary were an awful lot alike. They both insisted on living life entirely on their own terms. Not that they were hard to get along with; but on that one point, they were utterly inflexible. You could not persuade them to violate their natures; there wasn’t enough money in the world to make them run against their own grains.
Which was probably why they didn’t get along. They were just too goddam similar.
“I don’t know about that,” Micki said, the surprisingly warm highway air tousling her hair through the moving truck’s open window. “But I’ll tell you this. I didn’t come all the way out here to sit around watching football.”
Gwen laughed, her angst-sopping mood abolished. “Okay. So whaddaya wanna do?”
“I was thinking…” Drawing the pause out dramatically, skrinching her hazel eyes. “…since it’s such a nice day, we might want to get a little, you know…lost…on the way back.”
Gwen smiled slyly. “You knew I made sandwiches, didn’t you?”
“You’re awfully predictable.”
“And only you would drag a pregnant woman who’s ready to burst out into the middle of nowhere.”
“You mean I’m predictable, too?” Micki made a horror-stricken g-force face.
They laughed. The conspiracy was ripe. Micki got serious first.
“You sure you’re gonna be okay?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Gwen said. “I’m a tough old broad.”
“Okay.” Micki braced her feet against the dashboard. “Sam Lewis?” she asked.
“Sam Lewis,” Gwen answered, without a moment’s hesitation.
“Let’s do it.”
“Weeee-HA!” Gwen hooted, stomping down on the gas, as they motored down old Route 624 toward Sam Lewis State Park, and the river that unwound like a serpent below.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
And this was how the cookie crumbled:
Blake was at the sautee table at the Lincoln Woods buffet when his beeper went off. He jumped, surprising no one more than himself.
Okay, he thought, gearing up for the worst. He’d certainly known it was coming. He was just slightly appalled with himself for having entertained the foolish hope that it wouldn’t.
Stupid, he chastised himself. Hope is the opiate of the misinformed.
Blake politely excused himself from his wife and their company, padded through the thickly carpeted pastel interior, and made the first of many calls.
Blake was a man of many hats: in his capacity as pointman for PEMA, he performed mucho community liaison. He was the Need To Know man: he determined who needed to know, what they needed to know, and when they needed to know it. When it came to local industry, no story was released in either print or broadcast form without his expressed approval.
So when 911 notified PEMA that they had called in HazMat, the girl at the PEMA switchboard paged Blake right away. He got her story, thanked her warmly, hung up, and dialed again.
Two minutes on the phone with the guys from HazMat, and Blake knew everything he needed to know.
It was, indeed, a can of worms; and it was about to open right into his lap.
Unless he got out of the way.
His next call was to Leonard. No answer. He thought for a moment, then spent the next fifteen minutes doing a little hole-plugging in advance. EPA, DER; all said no problem. Everyone would hold the line. No need to incite a panic. By the time he got back to the table, they were already on dessert.
Not to worry, he assured them.
He’d already had more than his fill.
Down at the Big Boy, Harold Leonard echoed the sentiment, magnified to the ninety-seventh power. His plateful of silver-dollar pancakes, eggs, and link sausage lay congealing in imitation maple syrup before him, barely touched. He couldn’t even think about it.
He was thinking about the future.
“Daddy?” The voice bled in from deepest space, from the seat to his immediate right. “Daddy? Daddy!”
Leonard blinked, came back to the earth plane. His three-year-old, Thea, was yanking his sleeve. “Yes, honey?” he said, on full automatic, the words a split second ahead of him.
“Daddy,” she scolded, “I learned a new song today!”
“Ah. Heh-heh,” he said, his eyes quickly scanning the table. Marge was busy feeding Wally and Timmy, the toddler twins; it was a task that demanded her total concentration. Teenage Brad and Jerry were tormenting little Harold, Jr. at the far end of the table, probably about his ears. Little Harold looked precisely like his father felt: teetering on the brink of tears.
“You want to hear it,” Thea told him, her pudgy little features a frightening parody of his own. He felt haunted by her shining eyes, the absolute lack of empathy in them. She had no idea what was going on inside him. None whatsoever. None of them did.
“‘I know you, I walk with you wunnsa ponna dream,’” she sang.
“Not right now, honey,” he said, his panic rising. The chinkling of silver, the inchoate gurble of voices, the featureless Muzak, and cholesterol smells collided in his head. He winced against the strobing fluorescent plastic orange decor.
“No, Daddy!” Her eyes, in his face, were huge. “It’s Seeping Booty! Listen! ‘I know you, the geamin your eyes is sofer million a gream…’” When her voice raked the high notes, it bore a drill bit through his skull.
Timmy was laughing. Wally was screaming. Marge was cooing now now now, over and over. Now now now.
“‘…An’ I know its true, I feenal my selpis alba sleem…’”
“Excuse me,” he blurted, the tears welling up now, his face hot and clammy as he skreeed back in his chair. “Excuse me,” he repeated, standing, all eyes upon him at last as he turned away quickly, ashamed of himself, and headed for the men’s room. The Muzak, the sound of other people’s families chased him, dogged him across the restaurant.
There was a vacant bank of phones in the narrow access corridor. It was there that he chose to break down. It only took a minute to sob his way clear.
Which brought him right back where he’d started from.
Not that he didn’t trust Blake; if anyone had more to lose than Leonard himself, that person was certainly Blake. It was just that he felt so helpless, so utterly out of the loop.
Not to mention guilty as sin.
Not to mention terrified.
He kept thinking about the dead boy, and wondering what had happened. The thought that he could have caused someone’s death, however inadvertently, was just too horrible to bear.
And then there was the other boy. Otis’s son. Perhaps, Leonard thought, he’s getting better. Lord, what a relief that would be!
And if not…
He had Pusser’s number, burning a hole in the inside pocket of his sport coat. He withdrew it now, punched in the number, tried to breathe normally.
“What?” snapped the voice on the other end, midway into the second ring.
“H-hello, Otis,” Leonard stammered.
“That YOU, Leonard? God damn it!” The malice in Pusser’s voice shifted, focused, went completely specific. “What the fuck are you doin’ for me and my boy?”
“W-w-well, that’s actually why I called…”
“ ‘Cause I’m about FIFTEEN FUCKIN’ MINUTES AWAY from callin’ the cops on your ass…!”
“Otis, you can’t do that.” He was striving for an authoritative tone, but the rivets that held his reality together were rattling loose.
“My boy is DYIN’! Do you understand me?” And in the background, Leonard could hear the boy mewling: a horrible sound. “You gonna find some kinda hospital can take him? He don’t have no insurance! You gonna pay the fuckin’ bill?”
�
�Listen…” He tasted blood in his mouth, realized he’d gnawed a tiny hole in his lip. “I t-talked to my people, and…”
“YOUR PEOPLE GOT ABOUT FIFTEEN MINUTES TO SAVE HIS LIFE AND KEEP HIS ASS OUT OF JAIL!” The sound blistered through the plastic earpiece. “OR YOU’RE GOIN’ DOWN, YOU STUPID FAT FUCK…!”
Leonard hung up the phone.
And stood there, terrified, weighing his options. None of them were good. If Otis rolled over, then—Blake or no Blake—the world as he knew it would surely end.
He reached up to fish around in the coin return, and stopped. Some punk had plastered a sticker over the slot, a design rendered in jarringly garish neon colors and squiggles. It was a circle-and-slash motif: the universal forbidden symbol, stamped across squiggly letters that spelled F…U…T…U…R…E.
The gestalt gelled in Harold’s quivering mind.
NO FUTURE.
“Very funny,” he muttered, jabbing a fat finger defiantly into the slot. “Very fucking funny.”
It took less than five minutes to round up the family, pay the bill, and get back in the van. Leonard fidgeted more than he customarily did in the cashier’s line, and didn’t even bother to scarf his customary handful of chalky mints from the bowl by the register. Marge knew better than to pry, and the kids never even wondered why Daddy looked so bad.
They wouldn’t have understood it if he’d told them.
Nobody did.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Getting the tape out of the edit deck was easy.
Getting the hell out of the studio was impossible.
It had been a mess, alright; the tape had committed harikari, spilling its innards into the guts of the deck in nasty little inextricable knots. Mike was right about the decks: the Sony had seized up like it was holding the cassette for ransom; it took twenty minutes to free the hostage.
Gary stood at his bench in the repair bay behind Studio B, putting the edit deck back together. The bay was his domain: a garage-sized space housing repair benches stacked with ripped-down gear, plus storage space for the bulky microwave relays and other accoutrements of broadcast technology maintenance.
He screwed the last screw into place and did the mental math of his redemption. It would take him ten minutes to get across town, give or take a stoplight or two. Add that to the ten it took to get there and twenty at the bench, divided by the time Micki’s flight was due in over the square root of Gwen’s pregnancy…
…equals a world of shit, he thought. God, she’s gonna be pissed. He sighed, picked up the phone and tried again.
Again: no answer.
Oboy, he groaned, wincing, then shrugged it off. He’d deal with it later. There was certainly nothing he could do about it now.
Gary hefted the deck and carted it down the hall. The nattering buzz of the newsroom was tangible from all the way down the hall. It made his gut rumble. He stopped at the doorway to Studio A and stuck his head in.
On the home monitor, the closing credits for WWF Superstars of Wrestling were rolling by. This Is the NFL was less than three minutes away. John Bizzano was tending to the changeover with his customarily laconic aplomb.
“Mornin’, Gar,” he said, not even looking up as he cued up the commercial tapes. “What’re you doin’ here today?”
“Beats me,” Gary grumbled. “Misplaced sense of duty, I guess.”
“Don’cha hate it when that happens?” Bizzano replied, presiding over the switch as they cut from World Federation Wrestling to a five-second station ID and a thirty-second commercial for toilet bowl cleaner.
John Bizzano was a burly bear of a man, with a bushy black beard and no visible neck, but his fingers were pure magic. John was the Iceman, ‘PAL’s Amadeus of the digital crossfade. No task fazed him; he could orchestrate the mix of two live feeds in different time zones, with satellite uplink, taped outtakes, and special effects, and load and cut to sixteen commercials. Never bumping his blood pressure up a single point on the stressometer.
Never blowing a fucking cue.
John was cool.
“Hmmm,” Gary began, offhandedly scanning the bank of monitors above the console. “Anything weird happening here today?”
“Hmmph,” John scoffed. “Ask a stupid question.”
“No, I mean weird weird,” Gary amended.
“Sorry, bro’,” John replied. “It’s dead.” He reclined back in his chair and watched as little cartoon scrubbing bubbles raced around a bathtub like it was the Indy 500. “Dead, dead, deadskies…” he drawled in a passable Michael Keaton-Bee-tlejuice growl. “Why do you ask?”
Gary shrugged. “I dunno. Just a feeling, I guess,” he said, and ambled off down the hall.
A minute later, he entered the newsroom. “Here you go,” he said. “All better now…”
And stopped.
It was like walking into range of an enormous field generator: the police scanners all cranked and buzzing, the tension so charged it stood the short hairs of his arms on end. He clammed up as if he’d just stumbled onto a live soundstage.
But it was only Laura, pacing and smoking up a miniature smog bank.
“Ahem…” Gary said cautiously. “Deck’s back up.”
“Uh, thanks,” she said, looking up as though just noticing him. “Just set it up, okay?”
“You got it,” Gary said, putting the deck back in its place. So much for gratitude, he thought. News was big on making nice when they needed something—a quick fix, a rush edit, or some effects generation—but give them a hot story and watch everything else drop right off the map.
A garbled transmission squawked across the police scanner; Laura bolted to the desk, pen and notebook in hand. “County to Adam-sixty, come in please…Adam-sixty, please respond…”
“Shit!” Laura hissed. “That little bastard!”
“What’s going on?” Gary asked. Not that she was talking to him or anything.
“What?” Laura started as if she’d forgotten he was there. “Oh, nothing.” She turned toward the scanner, figurative steam hissing out of her ears. “Kirk and Mike took off chasing down a lead almost forty minutes ago,” she said, “and I told them to maintain radio contact, but Kirk is such a little goddamned asshole sometimes, and…”
And Mike’s such a stoner, Gary thought. Mike hadn’t been around too long, but Gary liked him in a my-dorky-kid-brother kind of way. In some ways, Mike reminded Gary of himself, a decade or so ago. Same goofy go-for-broke resolve, same fascination with the toys and tools of his trade.
Of course, Mike seemed spacier, but then Gary wasn’t sure how much of that was the change in himself. He could remember more than once looking down to find his face wrapped around the pay end of a bong.
“Well, if that’s all you need, then…” Gary began, easing his way toward the door.
And that was when Kirk came busting in.
Now, ten years in television news could turn the most delicate stomach lining to boot leather. Gary’s had long since made the change. Experience had sharpened his senses even as it had dulled his feelings; he picked up on the heady adrenaline-scent of disaster almost instantly. It commingled with another smell: the high nasal tang of undiluted ambition.
It didn’t take a master detective to win the first round of what’s wrong with this picture? Kirk Bogarde was one of the vainest sons-of-bitches on earth; but here he was, showing up at work spattered from head to toe in mud, his hair all unmoussed and tousled. Mike’s battered camera dangled from one hand, mud-spattered as well. Mike was nowhere in sight.
Laura turned, death rays emoting from her eyes as Kirk stumbled down the stairs. “Alright!” she yelled. “I want some goddamned explanations here!”
He blew past Gary in a shot, muttered something incoherent, and beelined for the edit room, disappearing around the corner. The camcorder carelessly went crunch against the doorjamb. Gary felt the blood drain out of his face. The signal in his head was clanging like a klaxon horn. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
�
�GODDAMMIT!” Laura bellowed, storming across the room. “Where the hell have you been? Why didn’t you maintain radio contact? Where’s Mike…?”
“Mike’s dead,” he said flatly, still banging around.
WHAT?!! Gary thought.
“WHAT?!!” Laura cried incredulously. “What…how…” She stopped, collected herself. “Kirk, what the hell are you talking about?”
Kirk’s face suddenly appeared around the corner; crazed, shell-shocked, and feral. He clutched a videocassette in his hand as if it were a piece of the One True Cross. He waved it before her, stopping her dead.
“C’mere,” he said. “I gotta show you something.”
“Jesus God, this is awful,” Laura gasped. She and Kirk stood in front of the monitor, features aglow from the screen. Mike’s chair was conspicuously empty. Gary hovered at the doorway, watching Kirk as if he were some strange and unpleasant form of bacteria.
The tape’s sound was turned mercifully down. It didn’t help.
The visuals were bad enough.
“Did you call the police?” Laura asked.
“No,” Kirk replied, his voice very small.
On the screen, the truck was ramming through the dead branches in a burst of chaotic choreography…
“Did you call EMR?” she asked.
“No,” Kirk said, teeth clenching. The truck, bouncing in and out of the jangling frame, bearing down on the camera…
“Did you call ANYBODY?!” she asked, exasperated.
“No!” The truck, swallowing everything.
“Are you crazy? Why the hell not?”
“BECAUSE I FORGOT, OKAY?” he screamed, leaning too far into Laura’s face. “I WAS KINDA FUCKIN’ BUSY!”
The screen, reduced to static.
“MIKE DIED FOR THAT FOOTAGE…!” Kirk bellowed: his nose almost touching Laura’s, her hair blowing back. The spark of terror in Laura’s eyes was all Gary needed to see.
“Whoa,” Gary said, stepping closer. He liked Laura fine, had thought the world of Mike, was none too fond of Kirk. “Boy,” he said, stepping deftly between them, one big hand coming up to land in the center of Kirk’s chest. Kirk was maybe two inches taller. It didn’t mean a thing. “Time for you to calm down.”
The Bridge Page 11
