The Player

by Brad Parks

  I went to the bar, grabbed myself a tasty, microbrewed IPA, then joined her at the table. In hindsight, the first thing that should have set off alarms in my head was that she wasn’t drinking. But I didn’t notice that. Not yet, anyway. We small-talked for about twenty minutes or so, until I drained my first beer. I stood and said, “I’m getting another. You want anything?”

  “I’m not thirsty,” she said.

  And that’s when I noticed she wasn’t drinking.

  “What do you mean you’re not thirsty?” I asked. “Last I talked to you, you were about to edit Buster Hays. That usually makes you parched.”

  She forced out a laugh, tucked her hair behind her ear in a way she knew I loved, patted me playfully on the arm, and said, “Just go get your beer, silly.”

  I sat back down. “Okay, now you’re trying to distract me by flirting with me. And usually that would work fine, because I’m a guy and I fall for that kind of stuff. But as you may or may not be aware, I’m also a newspaper reporter, which means I’m a trained observer of the human condition and have an inquisitive nature. So, with that in mind: what’s up, Tina?”

  She looked down at the table, grabbed the salt shaker, poured out a small pile, and began making patterns with the grains. I just sat there, waiting for an answer. Tina knew I wasn’t going to let her dodge the question.

  “So remember that night a little while ago when you came over to my house for dinner and you started rubbing me and one thing led to another?” she asked.

  I was relieved: we were finally going to talk about It. The It that had been blocking any meaningful communication in our relationship like a series of strategically placed Jersey barriers. This was good. Great, actually. Maybe not as great as sex and bacon for eternity. But it was a good start.

  “Yeah, I remember,” I said. “I believe you said later it was a booty call.”

  “Right,” she said. “And it was. Believe me, it was.”

  The unicorns and I were now hoping she was going to say that at the time it was a booty call, but she was realizing it was—and could be—so much more. Instead, she just played with salt a little more, mounding it into something resembling a circle and then spreading it out again.

  “Tina?” I prompted.

  “Yeah, right,” she said, still not looking at me. “So, remember when I said I was on the pill?”

  I felt the bottom of my stomach drop somewhere well below sea level. “Yes?”

  “Well, they give you these little warnings about how you’re supposed to take them at the same time every day, but I thought that was some kind of urban legend. I mean, how can that possibly matter as long as you remember to take it at some point, right?”

  I was too stunned to say anything. She continued: “I started off saying I’d take them first thing in the morning, but it always seemed to slip my mind. So I thought I’d just take them when I leave work every night. The only problem is, sometimes I leave work at seven or eight. And sometimes, when I’m the one who’s putting the paper to bed, I don’t leave until one in the morning. And, well, apparently, that thing about taking it at the same time? That’s not an urban legend after all.”

  “So you’re…” I couldn’t quite make myself say the word.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “How long?”

  “I was supposed to get my period on Friday. By Sunday, I started getting suspicious. I’ve never been more than one or two days late my entire life.”

  “Oh,” was all I could say, even if I wished I could be more articulate.

  She finally looked up at me with those big, brown eyes that had a surprising amount of fear in them. Tina had been planning to have a baby for years—she was the only childless woman I knew who owned nipple shields. Even if she had recently changed her mind, I didn’t figure it would take too much mental gymnastics for her to flip back to mommy mode. Yet, she looked somewhere between lost and terrified.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t want you to think I … I don’t know, tricked you or trapped you or something. I mean, there was a long time when I wanted you to, you know, get me knocked up. But I was never going to do it without your consent.”

  “Oh, I never thought—”

  “And you should know I won’t expect anything in the way of child support or anything,” she said, straightening herself. “This was my fault. It’s my baby. As far as I’m concerned, no one even has to know you’re the father.”

  “Tina,” I said. “I want to be the father. I want to be more than just the father. You know that.”

  She looked gorgeous and frightened and I just wanted to be with her. I went over to her side of the table to kiss her, hug her, do something to physically reassure her. But she jutted a flattened palm into my midsection.

  “No,” she said. “You are not taking advantage of my vulnerability that way. Forget it. I shouldn’t have told you anything.”

  “Tina, I—”

  “Look, I know what you’re thinking,” she said, and began mocking my voice. “‘Oh, poor Tina. Oh, poor single mom. Whatever will she do without a big strong man like me to provide for her?’”

  “That’s not what—”

  “You love to be Carter Ross on your big white horse, riding in to save the damsel. Well, guess what? This damsel doesn’t need saving, okay? So you can just pack up your horse and go home.”

  She stood so violently she nearly knocked the chair over, grabbed her clutch off the table, and began walking with great determination to the front door.

  “Tina,” I said again, but she wasn’t stopping. She slammed through the door and out onto the street. I gave chase until she whirled and faced me.

  “Leave me alone,” she yelled.

  “Tina, can we—”

  “I’ve got pepper spray in my purse,” she said, reaching into her bag. “Am I going to have to use it on you?”

  I stopped five feet short of her. I didn’t really want to spend the next half hour of my life in agony, gasping for breath, wiping snot and tears off my face. More to the point, I recognized that, just perhaps, Tina was not yet in a place where she could have meaningful discourse on this subject.

  Without another word, she turned from me, walked another twenty feet to her car, started the engine, and tore off.

  * * *

  For at least five minutes, I stood there on Halsey Street, contemplating what had just transpired. In one short snippet of conversation—most of which I spent watching a woman make patterns with salt—I had the profound sense that everything about my life had changed, even if I didn’t fully understand how.

  I had observed it in other parents, though. There was a kind of wisdom that having children seemed to bestow on them. Something about replicating life put their own existences in a drastically different perspective. I had seen it in my friends who had kids, who tried to explain to me what it was like—and how it had changed them—and after tossing out a few well-worn clichés, they just gave me that look that said, Yeah, you won’t get it until you’ve been here. I had also seen it in the young—often too young—parents I had written about in Newark. For as much as I exceeded them in terms of education, life experience, and worldliness, they had a certain knowledge about humanity that I plainly lacked. It felt like they knew what It—the big It—was all about. And I couldn’t even guess.

  Yet, here I was, suddenly thrust onto that path. For whatever Tina had to say about it, I knew absentee fatherhood wasn’t an option for me. It never had been, which is why I had never taken Tina up on the offer to be her sperm donor in the first place. Once Tina cooled down, she and I could sort out what this meant for us. But I was going to have a relationship with my child. That I knew.

  I also knew that meant there was a time in my suddenly immediate future when I was no longer going to be happy-go-lucky bachelor Carter. And I wasn’t just going to be a newspaper reporter, either. I was going to be someone’s dad.
If there was a more important-sounding job title, I hadn’t heard it yet.

  Okay. So. Fatherhood. I had thought it was like the promise of more-energy-efficient cars, ignoring that most major automakers already offer hybrids.

  I couldn’t really wrap my head around it. Right now, inside my colleague, editor, and sometimes-friend Tina Thompson, there was a small seed of a human being that was one-half me. In six weeks, as I’d learned from friends who had gone through this whole thing, that cluster of cells would have its own heartbeat. Sometime a little later—in time to be able to pick colors for a nursery, anyway—we’d know the gender. And then, if all went well, roughly nine months after an evening that started with an innocent booty call, an actual human being would come bursting out, howling and bloody and primed for a lifetime in which the world would change more than any of us could possibly imagine.

  And I was going to be one of the two people explicitly charged with preparing the little bugger for it. I imagined it would start with the relatively simple stuff, like eating and pooping. Those are about the only tricks babies come out with, right? But I was reasonably sure more-complex operations would soon have to follow. Like walking. And riding bikes. And throwing balls. And being turned down for the prom. And writing college essays. And …

  They were thoughts that, quite frankly, terrified me. I was barely a responsible cat owner, for goodness sake. Merely having to take Deadline to the vet once a year felt like an awesome burden. Was I ready for an undertaking roughly a million and fifty times more challenging? Could I honestly say, standing there on Halsey Street in Newark, New Jersey, that I possessed even one-tenth of the wisdom, patience, and stamina to deal with that?

  Hell no.

  The only thing that allowed me to so much as put one foot in front of another was the sneaking suspicion there were several billion other parents in the planet’s relatively recent history who weren’t ready for it either. Yet, it happened to them all the same. So I might as well get used to the idea that it was about to happen to me.

  As best as I could see it, I had two short-term options. One, I could go back into the bar and get so mind-blowingly drunk I didn’t have to remember the shame of being shoveled into a cab several hours later. Or, two, I could settle my tab and head to Tina’s place in Hoboken—and make it clear to her I had arrived not on a white horse but in a used Chevy Malibu.

  I have to admit, I was undecided as I stumbled, feeling a bit light-headed, back into 27 Mix and got the bartender’s attention.

  “Want another?” he asked.

  And then it struck me: this was what fatherhood was about. It wasn’t about having to figure out, right at this very instant, whether eleven was an appropriate age to get your ears pierced or whether it was okay to sleep over at Jackson’s house. It was about trying your best, which you did by attempting to make one good decision at a time.

  “Actually, I’ll just take the check,” I said.

  I was feeling like a father already. That was good decision number one. Number two was going to Tina’s house right now and insisting we talk about this. Yes, it was her fetus—possession being nine-tenths of the law and all that. But it was going to be my baby, too. And it wasn’t fair of her to think she had the monopoly on all the worry, work, and anticipation that came with that.

  Having made that decision, paid my check, and gotten back into my car, I pointed myself toward I-78 and Tina’s place. There was a Devils game getting out of the Prudential Center, so I eschewed Broad Street and instead went through the neighborhoods to reach the highway.

  And that was the only reason I happened to bump into the large collection of police vehicles congregated near one of the entrance ramps. I slowed when I saw that all the activity seem to be concentrated on the corner of the McAlister Arms construction site.

  I glanced at the clock. I was perhaps ten minutes behind Tina—less, if she had gotten caught in hockey traffic. Deciding she could use a little more time to cool off, and perhaps a little too lost in deep and ponderous thoughts to make the more rational decision—like that this was a story I should have just sat out—I grabbed a fresh notepad and hopped out of my car.

  More than likely, it would be another senseless, heartbreaking, run-of-the-mill ghetto shooting—some ’banger killing another ’banger for reasons that couldn’t possibly matter as much as the value of the human life being lost. It was tragedy that was both unremarkable and unfathomable. If a newspaper actually tried to make some shred of sense out of it for its readership, we would exhaust every column inch of our news hole every single day and still barely scrape the surface. So instead we brushed it off with three quick paragraphs and a weary shrug. It would take me no more than ten minutes to gather those paragraphs and send them in.

  There were floodlights up, but the police hadn’t had time to set up crime scene tape. So I wandered as close as I thought I could get away with. I spied a uniformed cop who was just standing around, only slightly less guilty of loitering than me, and approached him. He was black and young, a rookie for sure. That was perfect, because it meant he wouldn’t recognize me.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “Homicide,” he said. “It’s actually one of yours.”

  “What do you mean, ‘one of mine’?”

  “It’s a white guy,” he said.

  “No kidding,” I said. It wasn’t unheard of for white people to be killed in Newark. Every once in a while, a suburbanite in town to buy drugs would be shot during a deal gone bad. Or it could be a bum who got rolled by a car whose driver hadn’t bothered to stick around. But it was just unusual enough that my curiosity was piqued.

  “Young guy? Old guy?” I asked.

  “Somewhere in the middle,” the cop said. “My partner is the one who found him. We were just driving along and we saw the body.”

  I was going to ask more questions, but a sergeant started steam-walking in our direction. “Hey, no reporters! This is private property,” he barked.

  I took three steps backward onto the sidewalk and grinned at him. “And now it’s public property,” I said. “Good evening, Officer.”

  He glared at me, but I walked away before he could invent some new reason why I was breaking the law. I continued on my way, rounding the corner, seeing if I could position myself for a better look at things.

  Shortly thereafter, I got it. And it caused me to utter a phrase that would not be printed in a family newspaper. The blow-dried blond hair was the first thing I saw, followed by the sharply tailored blue pinstripe suit and the expensive Italian loafers.

  The corpse was facedown and the back of its head was conspicuously concave—an arrangement that was likely made sometime around the time of death—but there was no question in my mind:

  It was Vaughn McAlister.

  They set him up, then they put him down.

  Vaughn McAlister had been working late, poring over some contracts, when his office phone rang. It was an internal extension, from downstairs. The front security desk at McAlister Place.

  “Yes, what is it?” he said, annoyed.

  “There’s a courier delivery here for you, Mr. McAlister,” a man said. The voice wasn’t familiar to McAlister, but he didn’t give it much thought. The security company he used was constantly shuffling in new people.

  “Okay, just tell him to leave it with you. I’ll be down later.”

  “He says he can’t,” the man told him. “It’s urgent and he needs to get the signature of the addressee. That’s you.”

  “Oh, for the love of … Fine, I’ll be right down,” McAlister said. He wasn’t expecting any urgent courier deliveries and the ones that came unexpectedly were seldom good news. Especially at this time of night.

  McAlister took the elevator one story down to the lobby. The moment he emerged, the back of his head became impressed with the blunt end of an old-school Louisville Slugger, the heavy kind preferred by the home-run hitters of yesteryear and the thugs of today. McAlister immediately cru
mpled, falling forward. Two more swings finished him off.

  From there, the cleanup job started. A towel was wrapped around McAlister’s head to soak up the blood. Another towel wiped down the few stray blood spatters. Then McAlister’s body was tossed into a janitor’s trolley and covered with trash bags—lest anyone come walking by.

  Not that anyone did. It was late enough that the only people who hadn’t already gone home were the workaholics who wouldn’t leave their offices for a while yet. The security guard who worked in the lobby had been instructed to take a walk for a while, and he certainly wouldn’t say anything. After all, he didn’t see anything.

  The body was loaded into a car, which soon left the parking garage. This led to the last dangerous part of the job. Ordinarily it was in the best interest of a killer to want a body never to be found. The Atlantic Ocean was invented for such things.

  This killer was different. This killer wanted the body to be found—needed the body to be found. The world had to know Vaughn McAlister was no longer among the living. And quickly.

  And there seemed no better way to make sure that would happen than by depositing the corpse on the work site that bore his family name.

  CHAPTER 3

  I never did make it to Tina’s house that night, which was probably just as well. While we had much to discuss, I hear getting pepper spray out of khaki pants can be a real bitch.

  Despite my certainty that the body I had seen was Vaughn McAlister, the Newark Police took their sweet time confirming it for us. It was sometime after midnight when they finally told me the victim was McAlister and that he had suffered a blunt force trauma to the head. I got the news into a few late editions and didn’t get home until 2 A.M. I can’t say the extra hours spent down at the scene helped me better understand why someone would want to bash Vaughn’s blow-dried head in, but they sure did make me happy to crawl under the covers when it was all over.