The Bridge

by John Skipp;Craig Spector

  “Stop it.” This was stupid. They were at a football game, for God’s sake. There was nothing she could do about it at the moment; there was no way on earth to page someone in a stadium packed with eighty thousand people. The only thing left to do was to keep the lid on here.

  And make up her mind.

  To break or not to break…

  Not so simple, she realized. She just didn’t know enough yet. And ugly words kept floating up in her mind, words like hysteria and mass panic. Laura glanced at the phone; every line was lit up like a goddamned Christmas tree. Crank calls multiplying with every passing minute.

  And Laura was stuck, understaffed, uninformed, with little more than a very bad feeling to steer by.

  “Fuck this,” she muttered, checking her Rolodex for Tom Huntington’s home number. Laura knew that the station manager and news director were sometime drinking buddies, in that good ol’ boy way that men exhibited whenever they shared power.

  Laura added it all up: it was deep into the NFL season and the games were getting semicritical in determining who would go to the playoffs. Tom and Chris were both Eagles fans. Chris had just gotten a forty-inch Mitsubishi monitor in his family room.

  If her instincts were on target she’d find them together, maybe kill two birds with one stone. They could be apprised. She would be covered.

  Either way, her butt wasn’t the only one that was going to swing in the breeze.

  Laura reached for the phone, cradling the receiver in the crook of her neck as she punched one of the line buttons.

  “Hello!” said the caller: a male voice, anxious and strident. “Hello, dammit! Can anybody tell me…”

  Click. Laura cut him off. “Sorry,” she said to dead air. “Nobody can tell you shit.”

  She dialed Tom’s number, sat back, and waited. Miraculously, the call went through the first time. It glitched, buzzed, as it patched through; some kind of interference in the signal, groundwater in the underground cable or something.

  The phone began to ring.

  Laura sighed and felt the tiniest bit better. The simple act of getting a line through was a small victory.

  In the face of what was coming, that was practically the only kind left.

  The call couldn’t have come at a worse time, as far as Chris Crowley was concerned. Week 10 of the season, with the Giants and the Eagles vying for first place in the AFC east. The game was tied up 10-10 with six minutes left in the first half, Helen was out of town visiting her mother, and the Eagles had the goddam ball on the thirty-yard line.

  It was no time to reach out and touch someone.

  The phone rang. “Jesus Christ,” Chris bitched, “not now!”

  The ball snapped. The defensive line rushed in. The phone rang some more. “For chrissakes, leave it go!” said Tom.

  “Better not,” Chris sighed. “You never know.”

  He hauled his pudgy middle-aged bulk off the couch and backed into the kitchen, trying like hell to keep his eyes on the screen. It didn’t work; the cord was just long enough to afford a view of the sofa. Chris fumbled for the phone, picked it up.

  “What?” he said, utterly uncordial. “Hello, I can barely hear you. Oh, Laura! Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he said, listening.

  In the den, Tom was bouncing up and down, yelling, “No! No! No! No!” and tearing out what little hair he had. Chris listened carefully if impatiently, nodding his head as if to hurry the conversation along. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Yes, yes.”

  On the TV the crowd suddenly roared. Tom joined them. Chris cast a baleful look at him. “Hold it a sec, let me talk to Tom,” he said, cupping the receiver to his chest and craning his head around the corner.

  “It’s Laura,” he related to Tom. “She says there’s a big story breaking. She wants to know if she should break programming to do a special bulletin.”

  “What, are you nuts?” Tom said incredulously.

  “She says it’s pretty serious,” Chris said, concerned.

  “So is a pass intercept and a sixty-yard touchdown!” Tom countered. “Look, the Giants are ahead now! How serious can it be?”

  Chris shrugged I don’t know. He looked a little concerned. “She says she’s still waiting for a report back from Kirk. Apparently it’s got something to do with a toxic spill of some sort.”

  “Tell her to sit on it,” Tom replied very carefully, as if to leave no room for doubt. “And we’ll deal with it after the game. If there’s a problem we need verification. We don’t want to start a panic.”

  Chris nodded and dutifully relayed the message; Laura’s reply damned near drowned out the Budweiser commercial now on the screen. Chris winced.

  “Laura, I…no, Laura, it’s just…Laura…” He looked to Tom.

  “Let me talk to her,” Tom sighed, and stood, donning his official I am the boss demeanor. Chris yielded the phone gladly.

  “Laura,” Tom said, his voice measured and cadenced. “Listen. We’re already on this. I’ve spoken with Emergency Management and they’ve assured me that we’ll have full information in time for the six o’clock report.”

  “Tom, there is no six o’clock report,” Laura blurted.

  “I know that,” Tom replied testily, covering his butt. “Look, I told you already. We’re on top of this. In the meantime, there’s no point in inciting a panic.”

  Laura began to object. “Laura, trust me,” he interrupted. “You’re not alone. We’re working on this. Just sit tight, and we’ll get back to you in plenty of time.

  “Remember the Heidi Bowl,” he added, then hung up without saying good-bye—a blunt and economical quashing of the debate.

  Tom turned and handed the phone to Chris to hang up. Chris looked confused. “You said, ‘we’re already on this,’” he said. “Are we?”

  Tom looked at him as if studying a moon rock. “I spoke with Werner Blake less than an hour ago.”

  “How did you know to call him?” Chris asked.

  “I didn’t,” Tom replied, grabbing another beer out of the refrigerator. “He called me.”

  Tom got a fresh pilsner glass and sauntered back out into the den. Chris followed, obviously uncomfortable with this new knowledge. “He called you? Don’t you find that a little odd?”

  “Werner’s a good man,” Tom said. He poured his beer, careful not to spill a drop. “We’re in the Chamber of Commerce and the Jaycees together. He’s responsible for bringing several of the station’s key sponsors in. Whatever the hell is going on, I’m sure he’s right on top of it.”

  Tom looked at Chris, who still seemed unswayed. “Look,” he said, shedding the cloak of officialdom, “nobody’s got more invested in this community than Werner Blake. He had ten years’ experience in the EPA before moving into the private sector. If something were going on, don’t you think he’d know about it?”

  Tom sat back and kicked up his feet, turning his attention back to the TV, where the Eagles were pushing toward the twenty-yard line. Chris weighed his consternation a moment longer.

  Then he, too, settled back to enjoy the game.

  “ ‘Break programming,’” Tom harrumphed and sipped his beer. “What, does she think the world’s going to end before the game’s up?”

  The TV blared forty inches of light and color and sound, contradicting nothing.

  Laura paced the newsroom, a portrait in frustration. ‘Heidi Bowl,’ he said. Remember the fucking Heidi Bowl.

  Who could forget? Everyone who’d ever been to broadcast school had had that one drummed into them. Some of the details had faded, but the message remained long after.

  It was in the early sixties—‘64, she was pretty sure—and NBC was preparing for the broadcast premier of the motion picture Heidi, which at that time was a pretty big deal. It was set to immediately follow a pivotal late-season NFL game—she couldn’t remember the teams right now—that was going overtime.

  Now, NBC had a lot of money tied up in Heidi-related advertising. And, as it turns out, the underdogs were getting t
heir asses kicked by the crowd favorites. No surprises there. So, with ten minutes left in the game, NBC yanked the plug on the game and cut directly to the movie.

  Of course, the underdog team immediately came up from thirty points behind to obliterate its rivals. And, of course, none of this was captured for the benefit of all those viewers at home. In the resultant flood of outraged calls and letters—literally thousands, none of them in Heidi’s favor—and in the wake of the managerial bloodbath that followed, NBC adopted the doctrine that was instantly writ in broadcast stone:

  NEVER, under any circumstances short of nuclear war, AND MAYBE EVEN THEN, do you EVER preempt a football game.

  Or, more simply put: Remember the Heidi Bowl.

  Laura clutched the receiver in one white-knuckled fist. She was wired so tight she was practically humming. Her hands were tied. Her lips were sealed. She’d been patted on the head and sent to…what? Wait for some predigested bit of information from Werner Blake and the Paradise Chamber of fucking Commerce?

  “GAAARRGGH!” she railed in rage and frustration. She felt utterly, ethically compromised; it was her experience that when higher-ups got together, it usually ended in some kind of coverup. One dead cameraman, one missing cop, more busy signals at the EPA and PEMA, and a loose cannon of an ex-reporter out there doing God knows what to God knows who…

  This was not shaping up to be your average NFL Sunday, that was for sure.

  She stopped, the levity like chalk dust on her tongue. Yeah, her conscience piped up again, it sure isn’t every day a real live twenty-two-year-old cameraman gets ground up for local coverage, alrightee…

  “Stoppit,” she whispered, forcing it back down. It wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t have stopped him, and she sure as shit couldn’t bring him back.

  So what fucking good are you?

  Laura thought a moment longer, then flipped through her Rolodex until she found Clifford, Mike and pulled the card. On the back was the little in case of emergency contact…line; on it was typed, f—Richard, J.l.m—Sheila, E. The number was the same.

  God, she realized, he still lives with his parents.

  Correction: lived.

  Her conscience was a bloodthirsty thing. Laura swallowed a knot the size of her fist as she got an outside line and dialed.

  On the fourth ring a woman’s voice answered, filtered through an extremely bad connection.

  “Hello, Mrs. Clifford?” Laura said, her voice thick with suppressed dread. “Hello? Yes, this is Laura Jenson over at WPAL.” She paused. “I’m afraid…”

  Pause. Interference crackled on the line.

  “I’m afraid,” she said, louder than she would have liked, “that I have some bad news for you. Yes, I said bad news…”

  Laura faltered a little and blinked back tears, tasting the bitter words on her tongue.

  Not for the last time.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Blake was just finalizing his vacation plans when he realized he had forgotten to turn off the paper shredder.

  His Lexus was already warming in the driveway. His bags were packed and stowed in the trunk. His emotions were likewise stashed away, until such time as he could once again afford the luxury.

  At the moment, it was all he could do to keep them down.

  Maybe it was because he never really expected for everything to come apart like this, one thread unraveling another until the old cheap-suit metaphor came chillingly true; maybe it was because he knew that his vacation could very likely turn permanent.

  Either way, his world was coming apart at the seams, and that fact left him more than a bit rattled. He was about to walk away from his house, his position in the community, and virtually everything he valued in the world. Forced to start over, by the skin of his teeth, which was just about all he’d have left.

  That, and the attaché case full of kickback money he’d kept stashed away. For that rainy day.

  Which had finally come.

  Blake finished his rounds on hold, cordless phone pressed anxiously to his ear. Unfortunately, travel agents didn’t work Sundays, but a quick scan of the phone book had yielded the direct ticketing numbers for several major airlines. He was booking flights on all of them, just to be on the safe side.

  In his study, the paper shredder was quietly humming near his desk; a garbage bag full of important ex-papers lay mulched beside it. As he switched it off, the ticket agent came back on.

  “Mr. Blake, you’re confirmed on American flight 141 leaving Baltimore/Washington International at 5:45, changing in Miami to Viacao Airlines flight 61 for Rio de Janeiro,” the agent said, a model of pleasant efficiency. “Will anyone else be traveling with you?”

  Blake paused, proceeded to count off the number of people he honestly cared about in this world. It didn’t take long; in fact, if he were brutally honest he could do it on the fingers of one hand. Or, more to the point, a single finger.

  “Just me,” he said.

  Five minutes later, Werner Blake locked the front door for the last time, turned his back on a former life.

  And froze, as the ACTION-9 News car pulled up.

  “Yes,” Kirk jubilantly hissed. “Thank you, Jesus.…”

  The whole way up the hill, he’d been terrified that things just weren’t going to pan out. Blake wouldn’t be there. Blake would be dead. Blake would somehow prove to be the Archangel Michael, and therefore impervious to harm.

  But no. There he was. And, like a blessing from God, his engine was running and his trunk was open. This was a man who was going on a trip. Under major duress.

  Blessed was not the word. Kirk felt downright sanctified.

  He was out of the car practically before it stopped. Blake’s eyes, in that moment, were huge. Kirk would have given a million dollars to have captured that look, but it was gone forever. By the time Kirk got the camera up and running, Blake was halfway to his car, and his face was made of stone.

  Kirk knew better than to say a fucking word. This was the kind of footage you ran as video verité—bona fide documentary footage—left to speak for itself and ask questions of later. No way did you do anything other than walk as fast as you possibly could, never letting the subject escape for one second from the camera’s gaze.

  They were on an intercept course, a race to see who could make it to the open trunk first. Blake was closer, by about twenty feet, but he could only move so fast without looking pretty goddam silly on the tape. Kirk, on the other hand, liked the urgency that moving fast gave the footage; it had a muscular, war correspondent-like feel.

  And the fact was, it did goose Blake into walking chust a leetle beet faster than one normally might. Which was to say, stiff-legged. Unnatural-looking.

  Which was to say, guilty as shit.

  Very nice, Kirk thought, grinning. Now give us a nasty look.

  But Blake was slick, a seasoned public official. He wasn’t about to acknowledge the camera, and his face gave nothing away. Worse, he and his car were just slightly uphill, which meant that Kirk couldn’t get that peek into the trunk he really wanted unless he moved just a little bit faster himself.…

  You little sonofabitch! Blake wanted to scream. Not an option. All he could do was get to the trunk. Until then, he couldn’t so much as let his eyelids flicker, much less track Bogarde’s movement or plan his next move.

  And the distance was closing now. Seven yards, six. He kept waiting for the prick to step in front of him, nail him with a tight closeup and say CHEESE…!

  And suddenly he heard the words “Excuse me,” and it was like a bolt from the blue. Something sparked to brilliance in his mind, illuminated the path that he must choose…

  …and before Kirk could say another word, Blake jumped, stopping and turning toward the camera with such genuine surprise on his face that, had Kirk not known it was utter bullshit, there’d have been no way of knowing. Kirk found himself stopping, too, stunned into commiseration.

  “JESUS, Kirk!” Blake yelled. “What’s the matter w
ith you?” Then he let out a perfectly modulated, natural-looking sigh, made of equal parts exasperation, laughter, and forgiveness. “You,” he continued, “scared the hell out of me!”

  And it played; that was the horrible thing. The camera was utterly fooled. Kirk could feel his boner of opportunity dwindle even as he spoke. “Mr. Blake…”

  “Werner,” Blake corrected him, stepping closer. “Good to see you, young man!” He leaned forward and out of frame to pat Kirk, too hard, on the shoulder. Then, without warning, he turned back toward the car and started walking again: not too fast, but purposefully.

  And Kirk realized that it didn’t matter who got to the trunk first anymore. In fact, Blake aimed wide of the trunk and straight toward the passenger side, all but inviting Kirk to follow.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have time to talk,” Blake said, over his shoulder. “As you can see, I’m about to leave on a business trip.…”

  The camera took its eye off of Blake to look in the trunk. A couple of suitcases.

  What did you expect? Kirk screamed at himself. Bodies?

  Blake was really starting to enjoy himself now. The expression on Bogarde’s face was absolutely priceless. He hated to leave just as it was getting good. But he did, after all, have a plane to catch.

  “So if you’ll excuse me…” he continued.

  “Mr. Blake,” Bogarde interrupted, doing his best self-important Sam Donaldson routine. “Are you aware of the illegal dumping at Black Bridge?”

  “My God, haven’t you spoken with Tom?” Blake asked, looking puzzled. “I just talked with him less than an hour ago. Everything’s under control.”

  He opened the rear door, almost into the lens. Kirk backed off, jerked the camera skyward. Blake tossed his briefcase in and slammed the door.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Blake,” Kirk pressed, “but what does that mean? ‘Under control’?”

  “It means it’s taken care of.” Letting a beat of annoyance slip. “Does your station manager know you’re up here?”