The Deadline

by Ron Franscell

  “Can I interest you in some dinner?” she asked.

  “Can you give me an hour? I have a couple things to do.”

  “Is that sixty-minute hour, or is it one of those ‘I’ll-tell-you-an-hour-and-be-home-at-midnight’ kind of hours?”

  “Sixty minutes,” Morgan said. “Give or take a day.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” she promised him, and hung up.

  Claire never scolded him. She knew a newspaperman’s time was measured not in minutes and hours, but in irregular moments. To her husband, no two hours elapsed at the same rate and, for as long as she’d known him, his days rarely ended at exactly the same moment, although they all tended to end very late.

  Morgan locked the darkroom door behind him and flipped off the dim, red bulb that hung overhead. The complete blackness unbalanced him; he spread his invisible feet on the damp wooden floor to regain his equilibrium. He fumbled with the undeveloped rolls and wondered why he bothered to close his eyes in the darkness.

  His mind projected the faded picture of Aimee, only it wasn’t a still photograph as it flickered in the dark theater of his brain. Now it was a movie, tinted the brown of memory, unreeling in the slow motion of a dream. Yellow clouds scudded across a buckskin sky, and the earth was dusty mahogany. The light in her cinnamon eyes was like the chinook winds that seeped from the eastern slope of the mountains into the basin, ethereal, warm and soft. She turned toward him, toward the camera in his mind, and smiled innocently. Then she looked away, off to the empty west, behind the camera where a rusty shadow spilled across the margin of Morgan’s imagination. She wasn’t afraid as she held out one of her flowers to the specter. Suddenly, the wind rose and ochre dust swallowed her.

  Then the screen went blank.

  Morgan looped the movie in his head again and again, but the swirling wind always swept her away before he saw the shadowy figure lurking at the edge of his consciousness.

  Was it Aimee’s allegedly dead father, who still had not quite shaken Morgan’s suspicion? Or had it been Kate herself haunting his imagination? Or was it simply a blank, evil space for which he had no face, no name?

  Morgan didn’t know who it was, but he now knew who it wasn’t: Neeley Gilmartin. The old man hadn’t killed Aimee Little Spotted Horse, he was certain. If Gilmartin’s claim of innocence was just an elaborate con, he’d have long ago surrendered to the agony of his cancer. But another pain burned more intensely in him, and the promise of deliverance had kept him alive. There was enough room in one man’s heart for guilt or for hope, but not both.

  Lukewarm water trickled into the darkroom sink, the only sound in the humid blackness that engulfed Morgan. When he turned on the red darkroom light, there was no more movie. He finished the film and clothes-pinned the strips to a wire strung overhead in the mildewy space.

  The newsroom’s fluorescent lights stung his tired eyes. It was after nine o’clock and for the first time today, Morgan was hungry. He’d promised Claire he’d be home thirty minutes ago, although plenty of work remained to be done tonight. He thought about calling Claire and telling her to put a plate in the refrigerator for him, a request he’d made more times than he cared to remember.

  But his stomach groused. He decided to take a break and come back later. He retrieved the leather briefcase he’d hidden under his desk, turned off the lights and locked the front door behind him.

  The recalcitrant Escort sat forlornly on the empty street. It wheezed and snorted and belched, but it refused to start. Morgan slammed the driver’s door as he got out, then kicked it. He plotted a painful, rusty death as he walked home in the dark summer night.

  While Claire warmed a plate of roasted chicken and rice for him, Morgan telephoned the hospital. A tired Dr. Snyder, at the end of a long shift, told him Gilmartin had not yet regained consciousness but his vital signs had improved slightly after he was moved to the intensive care unit. She promised to call if the old man’s condition changed, for better or worse, but she didn’t expect any news before morning, a sentiment that encouraged Morgan.

  “How is he?” Claire asked as he hung up.

  “He’s better,” Morgan said, rubbing his fatigued eyes. The pungent smell of Dektol developer lingered on his hands, reminding him that his night wasn’t finished. “I think he’s going to make it. He’s one tough son of a bitch, and I don’t think he survived a world war and half a century in prison to die quietly in the night. God, I hope not.”

  Claire kneaded his shoulders. The tautness in his muscles melted away. The buoyant T.J., swinging his bushy tail in a wide swath beneath the kitchen table, nudged his hand for an affectionate pat. The Doors’ morose anthem, “The End,” pulsed low and endless on the stereo in the darkened den, on a fading cassette tape that had survived a thousand replays since Morgan’s college days.

  “Can you put something else on?” he asked. His mood was somber enough. “Anything.”

  Claire disappeared into the next room. From the dark, he heard the distant, delicate harmony of Crosby, Stills and Nash.

  Claire resumed her massage.

  “Better?”

  “Much.”

  “Will you make deadline this week?” she asked, running her fingers along the taut cords of his neck into his hair. He felt the tingle of blood spilling into the stress-pinched capillaries of his scalp as she rubbed.

  “I don’t know. There’s still a lot to do, but maybe ... right there, yeah ... I have to go back tonight.”

  “I suspected you would. I’ll make a Thermos of coffee for you. Just the way you like it: Extra sweet.”

  “Thanks. If they find me dead on the newsroom floor tomorrow morning, it was the saccharin.”

  The oven timer buzzed. Morgan opened the screen door to let the dog out, and stood to watch midges dancing madly around the backyard porch light while Claire served his late dinner. She sat beside him as he ate in silence, still consumed by a difficult day that wasn’t yet over.

  “What if he dies?” she asked.

  Morgan tried to respond, but he couldn’t. He had no answer. Crickets paused in the backyard, and his iced tea glass sweated quietly into a wet ring on the table, but he couldn’t speak.

  “Right now, right at this moment, do you think he did it?” she pressed him.

  The hot night embraced him. The pleated linen curtains over the sink hung limp, waiting for a refreshing wind to change the subject.

  “No,” he said after a moment. “I don’t think he killed her.”

  Claire touched his hand and leaned close to him. Her fingers were cool on his.

  “Then he needs you more than ever right now,” she said, comforting him. “I’ll pray, but you’ve got to be his angel. You’ve done more with less, and right now, nothing else matters. Not this freak-show militia thing, not the greedy little bean-counters at the bank, not your egotistical sheriff buddy, not even the damn newspaper. Nothing. If you really believe this old man is innocent, then you’ve got to prove it.”

  Morgan sipped his tea and traced his finger through the perfect circle of water where his glass sat. His own circle was broken. He felt lost.

  “Time has run out,” he said. “I feel sorry for the guy, I really do. If he’s innocent and he spent his life in prison ... Jesus, I don’t even want to think about it. But there isn’t time to finish this thing his way. He only gave me two weeks to solve a crime that was committed before I was born. Two weeks. It’s his own goddam fault. He let time run out on me.”

  “Don’t talk as if he’s dead. He’s still alive.”

  “Barely,” Morgan said, his voice rising in frustration. “I keep thinking the phone’s going to ring and they’re going to tell me he’s gone. I used to think that would be it. I’d be released from this thing. Now I’ve got this knot in my stomach, like I’m letting him down.”

  “For God’s sake, Jeff,” Claire snapped at him. “This is why you do it. Remember that night, that first night we were together, when you told me you wanted to tell stories that chan
ged lives? Remember that?”

  “Jesus, Claire ...”

  “I know you wanted to make lives better, and you did, but now you can change a life that’s already been lived. This old man doesn’t want to live it again. He came to you for one thing: Absolution.”

  “I’m not God. I’m not even sure there is a god, but it ain’t me, Claire. I don’t perform miracles. I can’t raise the dead. And I can’t just wipe the dirty slate of Neeley Gilmartin’s life clean.”

  It seemed an eternity before Claire spoke again. She sat silently, her hands in her lap, not looking at him. There were only the sounds of a summer night — children playing somewhere down the block, the random ticking of moths against the porch light, crickets in the grass — until she looked directly into his eyes and spoke.

  “You said you wanted to dip your finger in ink and touch hearts. Something burned inside you, some passion, and the light came through your eyes. I saw it. I fell completely in love with you that first night. Because you really believed you could touch people with your words, and you made me believe. In you.”

  Morgan tenderly touched his wife’s cheek. If anything had changed since his first night with her, it wasn’t Claire. She remained, as always, tougher than he was.

  “Do you still believe?” he asked her.

  “I never stopped,” she said.

  He kissed her, his fingers gliding across her tummy under the loose bottom of her tee-shirt. A soft breeze had come up, rustling the curtains over the sink. Claire pulled him closer and he tasted the saltiness of her neck. Then she stood up from the table and led him by the hand to the dark den, where they hid from the light and made love on the couch.

  When they finished, Claire lay against her husband, the slow rhythm of old music and a warm breeze washing over their naked bodies in the dark.

  “Aren’t you glad we kept the couch?” she asked.

  Morgan smiled in the dark. “Hey, you were the one who wanted to sell it,” he reminded her. “Fifty bucks. Remember?”

  “Do you really have to go back tonight?” she asked him, brushing her hand lightly through the hair on his chest and knowing he did.

  Before he could answer, the night erupted.

  A thundering explosion split the air, close. A flash of light pierced the darkness a split-second ahead of the sound. The blast shrieked like the collected voices of Hell itself. The windows facing the street strained and rattled against their casements, but didn’t break.

  Instantly, Morgan rolled Claire off the couch onto the floor and covered her with his body, feeling the floor rumble beneath them. A mournful keening rose as dogs began to howl throughout the neighborhood.

  He could feel Claire’s nude body shaking against him.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. He felt her nod.

  “What was that?” she whispered, barely able to speak.

  Morgan didn’t know. He reached across the rug for his pants, which he hurriedly pulled on. He crawled across the floor toward the front window.

  “Don’t leave me, Jeff,” Claire begged.

  “Stay there,” he told her. “Don’t move until I tell you.”

  Crouching in the dark hall near the door, Morgan reached up and turned off the front porch light. Then he opened the door slightly. Neighbors were already gathering on the street in front of the house, but they were looking and pointing toward the downtown.

  A glimmering orange light reflected on billowing smoke just a few blocks away. Then he heard the fire department’s siren wail, desperately calling volunteers out of their homes all over town.

  He hurried back to Claire, feeling for his shirt and shoes in the dark. The hair on his neck felt like needles as he wrapped his shirt around him without buttoning it.

  “Stay here, Claire,” he commanded her. “There’s a fire downtown someplace. Get the dog inside, lock the doors, and stay put. I’ll call.”

  Morgan grabbed a fresh notebook and sprinted out the front door toward the roaring light that glowed like a tarnished sunset just a few blocks away. Over his pounding heart and his electrified breathing, he could hear smaller, secondary explosions in the fire.

  Still two blocks away, cinders drifted to earth and smoke surged through the trees, stinging his lungs. One block away, he felt ripples of heat on his face and shattered glass from broken windows sparkled like diamonds at his feet.

  As Morgan ran across the bank parking lot, around the corner that separated the neighborhoods from Main Street, he saw flames rising high into the night sky. Sparks curled toward heaven in blistering zephyrs. The first firefighters were just arriving, shielding their faces against the growling inferno.

  His stomach clenched and he wanted to vomit.

  The Bullet was fully engulfed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  By morning’s first light, only the charred bones of the printing press stood above the smoldering remains of The Bullet. The old newspaper’s skin had been cremated and ripped away, exposing the steel spine that had always given it strength. Pools of ash-choked water from the fire engines’ hoses seeped like black blood from the mordant debris.

  The bomb had exploded inside the building, probably in the pressroom. A firefighter had already found a shallow crater, filled with black water, in the concrete floor beneath the back window. The blast had blown out the entire back wall of the building, igniting the stock of paper and ink in the pressroom. The damage wasn’t confined to the newspaper office: Buildings on both sides of The Bullet suffered the shock of the blast, their walls disfigured, their broken windows gaping like black wounds.

  Rod Dombeck, a lantern-jawed sheriff’s investigator who’d sped away from his teen-age son’s American Legion baseball game in extra innings when he heard the explosion the night before, had already blocked the alley with yellow crime-scene tape and he was scouring the brick-strewn parking area for evidence.

  A little after five a.m., as soon as they could see in the dim light, firefighters fanned out from the hulk of the press, probing in the mess with pikes and pry bars. Half-ton rolls of tightly rolled newsprint, once stacked four high, were reduced to feathery embers. Ink barrels had burst in the intense heat, feeding the fire with their flammable contents.

  Morgan coughed up gray-flecked phlegm as he wandered through the incinerated newsroom. The fire chief wouldn’t let him go any farther into the wreckage, which was now a crime scene. He saw nothing familiar, except a few orphaned pieces of common office hardware that hadn’t been vaporized in the intense heat: Blackened steel parts from chairs, desks and light fixtures, crushed filing cabinets, and the small safe where Crystal kept petty cash and receipts. The rest — phones, computers, desks, wooden chairs, books, even the old newspaper pages and the clock on the wall — were burned beyond recognition.

  Morgan was numb. The lingering smoke nauseated him. The smudged light of morning stung his eyes as the soul of his newspaper, his dream, rose in smoky tendrils to the sky and drifted slowly to the east in a sinuous cloud.

  The Bullet was gone.

  Somewhere in the ashes, or somewhere in the clouds above, was the last edition. Morgan tasted it in the air, a mordant bitterness that cloyed his tongue and churned in his belly. The week’s paper was certainly lost, and he didn’t know how or where he could make next week’s.

  “Over here!” a young volunteer firefighter yelled from the pile of rubble near the press.

  The boy sagged to his knees, pinching his blackened mouth and nose with his left hand. Morgan recognized him from the Conoco station, where he pumped gas after school. He’d helped Morgan push the Escort across Main Street the night before, safely away from the fire. Now, he looked ill as a half dozen other firefighters and deputies scrambled across the wreckage to his side. Morgan followed them and nobody stopped him.

  The corpse had been hidden under a collapsed wall. The boy had uncovered it when he yanked on a deformed piece of sheet-metal, and was immediately enveloped by the caustic stench of charred human flesh.

 
In the half light of the new morning, the body lay on its back, its empty eye sockets staring up at the smoky sky. In the intense heat, the eyeballs had split open and shriveled like grapes on a griddle. The soft tissues of the face had been stripped off by the fire, revealing grayish white bone beneath. Pieces of its skull had peeled away in thin, flat layers. Its jaw was frozen in a savage, silent scream at the sky.

  The corpse had no hands, but the stumps of its forearms were thrust out in front of its body like a fistless boxer protecting his seared viscera, which were exposed to the air. Skin and fat were broiled away, laying bare a hash of scorched muscles that had ruptured.

  Morgan had seen and smelled burned bodies before, but nobody he’d known in life. He tried to envision Cal Nussbaum’s long, rumpled face on the skeletal countenance in the hole. Vomit rose in his esophagus and he choked it down.

  “Get him outta here,” Dombeck barked, pointing at Morgan. “We got a murder scene now. Call the sheriff and tell him we got a ten-seventy-nine, well done. And for god’s sake, watch where you step. We might have more crispy critters under all this shit.”

  A uniformed deputy escorted Morgan away from the corpse’s shadowy hole, back to the front sidewalk where they ducked beneath the freshly strung yellow police line. Shattered glass was everywhere. A small crowd of gawkers had gathered across the street. All night, he’d seen them, standing on distant corners, parked along side streets, feeling the heat on their empty faces, watching his life collapse in flame. Now, Morgan stood with his back to them, feeling embarrassed and angry. He wanted to take them, one by one, to stare into what remained of Cal Nussbaum’s face. If they were still curious, they could trace the cracks in his bare skull where Cal’s boiling brain had seeped out.

  Morgan walked across Main Street to examine his car. Some plastic piping had melted off the front bumper and the paint on the hood had blistered before he and the young firefighter had pushed it out of harm’s way. He sagged against the front fender and peeled off some of the scorched blue paint, letting it flutter down the street.