by Rick Mofina
Ann closed her eyes, trembling at the odds mounting against her, remembering that she’d just filled her car with gas. The jewelry store called on her cell phone to say her order was ready. She’d been headed to the bank. The deposit bag was in the front, locked in the glove compartment. It had cash from her stores. She gasped in silence, choking on a sob. She tasted the salt of her tears rolling down her cheeks into Zach’s glove. She inhaled its leathery smell, which mingled with Zach’s scent from his shampoo and traces of Tom’s cologne from game nights. She heard their voices, saw them rushing off to the diamond. Ann brushed her cheek tenderly against Zach’s ball glove. Oh God. It felt as if they were with her now.
Why is this happening? It can’t be real. Would she ever see Tom, Zach, and her mother again? All Ann could feel was the metal of the handcuffs and the car’s motion taking her further and further from her life.
It was as if she were falling from earth.
God, please. Help me.
At that moment Ann tightened her fists, realizing she was still clutching the piece of jewelry she had bought for her husband.
NINE
Reed followed FBI Agent Steve McDaniel to his car. “I’ll need directions to the school,” McDaniel said. “South of the park. Turn left at the light.”
McDaniel was in his mid-thirties, dark tanned, average height and build. Wore a navy suit. Reed noticed a few stray bullets on the carpet that likely got away from him when he loaded for the standoff.
“I forgot your name,” Reed said.
“Steve McDaniel. I’m new here from LA Division.”
“You’re new to this city and you’re the case agent on my wife?”
“Sir, I’ve had three years with VCMO in Los Angeles, most of them on kidnapping cases. Before that I was with SEAFAT in Seattle. We brought in a lot of violent fugitives.”
“Make a left after the next light.”
McDaniel’s cell phone rang. He took the call, then said to Reed, “It’s the principal at Zachary’s school. She’s got him in her office. How far away are we?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes,” McDaniel said into the phone, then hung up.
Reed watched the street flow by. Watched the world continue turning even though his had stopped. Ann had been stolen and here he was giving street directions to the FBI agent on the case. Why didn’t he grab Sydowski? The old homicide bull was the best. Why didn’t he quit the Star yesterday, or sooner, like Ann wanted? He could’ve been with her today. What were the last words he’d said to her this morning? What were they? He couldn’t remember. Something was shaking. Coming apart inside. Why did they take his wife?
“Tom, did you hear me?”
“No.”
“More people will meet us at your house. We’ll get your son, then set up a trap on your home phone.”
“What for?”
“Ann might call home. You know that with a trap we’ll get a lock on the number.”
“You think she’ll call?”
“In many cases, it’s the first place people try to call if they get to a phone.”
“What about the other cases?”
“Tom, the suspects might try to contact you.”
“You really think so?”
“I do.”
“I think I know what her chances are.”
“They may have needed her car, needed her as a shield to buy time and distance.”
“They already killed a cop in cold blood and you think they’ll spare my wife?”
“Tom, a number of scenarios are possible. We don’t know what we’re dealing with just yet.”
“We do know what we’re dealing with. Cold-blooded murderers.”
The fear inside Reed began rising again, flaring with images. They could rape her. Kill her. Toss her body into a dumpster. He stared at his cell phone in his helpless hand. Silent. The green power light blinking like a heartbeat. Reed covered his eyes with one hand. Ann could be dead already.
“There it is.” McDaniel pulled alongside the two SFPD black-and-whites at the front of the school.
He badged them, passed the school security officer, who was chatting with two SFPD uniforms. McDaniel and Reed strode through the entrance, down the polished floors of the locker-lined hall. It echoed with the din of classes in progress. Passing an opened door, Reed exchanged quick glances with a male teacher, tapping chalk in his palm.
“Who can tell us what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said...”
Reed couldn’t recall the last time he had come to Zachary’s school. Ann usually took care of all the parent-teacher stuff.
He blinked at the murals on the hall walls under student renderings of the Stars and Stripes, the California state flag, the city flag. The theme was “Our Nation Is Great Because of…” Color photos of smiling eleven and twelve-year-olds beamed from their handwritten papers on topics of Love, Truth, Friendship, Freedom, and Courage. Reed stopped. Zach’s face smiled from his paper on Courage. How would he tell him?
They came to the small lobby of the main office where a tall, silver-haired woman in a coral pantsuit, holding her folded glasses in one hand, Zach’s file in the other, greeted them with concern on her face.
“Hello, I’m Lenore Lord, Zachary’s principal. Can you tell me what this is all about?”
“We’ll tell you more when we know more,” McDaniel said.
“Should I be concerned with the other students?” Her brow creased.
“This is a police matter that only involves one student.”
“Is it Zachary’s mother, Ann, Mr. Reed? Is she hurt?”
“I don’t know much.”
“Does this have anything to do with the emergency north of the park? Some teachers in the lounge said there’d been a shooting.”
“We really can’t divulge any details,” McDaniel said.
“I see.” The principal’s attention went to McDaniel’s badge. “And you’re with the FBI. Perhaps I should talk to the San Francisco police.”
“Ms. Lord, I’d like to see my son now.”
“This way.”
They followed her into the labyrinth of administration offices, before stopping at the final door.
“Give me five minutes alone with him,” Reed said before he entered.
Zach was on a sofa, hands clasped between his knees, surprise blooming on his face when he saw Reed. The parent who never came to school.
“Dad?”
Setting eyes on his son, Reed saw how much he looked like Ann. It came upon him full force, like a dagger piercing his heart.
“Hey there, Zach.”
“Why are you here?” Zach stood.
“It’s okay, you can sit down.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No, you’re not in trouble.” He put his hand on Zach’s knee. “I’m going to take you home.”
“Home? What for? Where’s Mom?”
“Zach, I’m going to need your help on something, something very important.”
“I don’t understand, Dad.”
“Son, it’s your mother.”
“Mom?” He blinked. “Mom? What? Is she all right?”
“We don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Dad?” His chin crumpled. “Where is she? What happened, Dad? Where’s Mom?”
After Reed told him everything, Zach stared at the wall with the flag, the president’s picture, the governor’s picture.
“Son, it’s very, very serious. It’s a bad situation. The FBI are going to take us home in case Mom calls, or there’s new information. They’re getting Grandma in Berkeley and bringing her to our place right away to wait with us. Do you understand?”
“She was buying you a present.”
“What’s that?”
“Mom. I heard her talking on the phone the other day. She had a surprise present to pick up today at the jewelry store. It was for you.”
“I know that now.”
Reed put his arm around Zach’s sho
ulder. “We have to be prepared, son. We have to hope for the best that she’s going to be all right, that maybe they just needed her car. But we also have to be prepared for anything, okay? You understand?”
Zach was at that awkward age, that period of passage from boyhood into adolescence just before the intense years to manhood. Yet it soothed Reed to feel his son’s arms clamp around him. He needed a hug too.
“I’m scared, Dad.” Tears rolled down Zach’s cheeks.
“Let’s go, son.”
They were joined by McDaniel when they left the school and hurried down the steps to the car. For a second Zach was overcome by the gravity of the situation brought on by the sight of the San Francisco police and second FBI car with its dash-mounted cherry flashing. He flung his arms around his father. At that moment Reed looked across the street, into the lens of the sole TV news camera shooting from the side of an SUV that didn’t have any station logo on it.
After McDaniel drove off with Reed and Zach, the woman turned to the cameraman.
“Did you see how the kid’s arms went tight around his dad? The emotion in the kid’s little face with his father next to the FBI agent? Did you get all that?”
“Got it.”
“It’s just so freaking good.” Contorting her face before her compact mirror, she engaged in a few touch-ups. Eyes, cheeks. “That’s just terrific. It just keeps getting better.” She smiled at herself and the prospect of her career skyrocketing.
TEN
At the edge of the Tenderloin District, just short of the promise of gentrification, but beyond the sidewalks dotted with syringes and islands of vomit, is San Francisco’s newest TV news bureau.
Take the creaking stairs of the old Paradise, the aging hotel that morphed into an office building now called Golden Boulevard Plaza. Go to the third floor. Head for the rear and the dark green wooden door fractured by years of police raids. Check out the sign, WORLDWIDE NEWS NOW.
That was the local flag of the new international tabloid TV show headquartered in London. Trafficking in celeb dish, scandal, gruesome crime, and tragedy, Worldwide aired successfully to some ninety million viewers in thirty-six countries including the U.S., where it was struggling to carve itself a share in the planet’s most lucrative market. To no one’s surprise, exclusive dramatic video footage, obtained by any of its bureaus, routinely activated cell and bedside home phones up the corporate masthead in time zones around the globe.
That was the case in the minutes after the San Francisco bureau shipped off its raw footage of the jewelry store murder abduction to New York, which sent the pictures to London’s night desk, who alerted the execs.
“This is New York, stand by, San Francisco,” Worldwide's speakerphone said.
“We’re standing by.”
Tia Layne, chief of the two-person bureau, put her feet on her desk, lit another congratulatory Camel, waved out her match. She squinted through her smoke stream at Cooter, the cameraman working at the computer. Tia pushed the mute button on the office phone keypad, dropped her voice as a precaution.
“This is our ticket Hear back from the others yet?” Keeping his eyes on his computer screen, Cooter scratched his two-day growth, then adjusted his foot-long ponytail. “Two San Francisco stations, affiliates to the networks.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand each. Wait. A broker in LA will go ten.”
“Tell them the all-news people are up to twenty. Stress that they think the story has legs and we’ve got access. I’m going back on speaker.”
Cooter cut a trace of a grin as he typed. After all this time, he thought he knew Tia. They’d met on the set of a “no-budget” sleaze film in Thailand three years ago. She’d got there by way of losing her job after one month as foreign correspondent. Her Sydney-based news agency fired her because she couldn’t prove several people she’d named in her stories existed. Tia then worked as a drug courier, then as an actor in multi-X-rated movies where Cooter was the cameraman. After some one hundred films Cooter thought he knew every inch of Tia. But today she was revealing something he’d never seen. She was a business shark who’d done her homework. Guess being an American caught up in a police investigation that nearly lands you in a Thai prison, or worse, kinda changes your tactics.
“Still standing by in San Francisco,” Tia said. “What’s going on?”
“London’s the holdup. They want William in on this.”
Tia raised her eyebrows and began jotting numbers on a pad, recalling how not so long ago her life had gone to hell in Bangkok. Her dream of starting her own production company died when all the money she’d saved from her “acting” career was seized by the Royal Thai Police during a huge money-laundering probe. Her manager was washing her earnings with those of his drug lord friends.
Never again, she vowed.
She and Cooter got back to the U.S. a week before the entire Thai crew would have been charged and jailed. They arrived in Los Angeles penniless and out of work. In the early days, Cooter fell into a hazy California shell-shocked type of existence crashing and getting high with his old TV news friends who worked at LA’s biggest news stations.
Through Cooter’s friends, they learned Worldwide News Now was searching for freelance stringers in San Francisco. They’d helped Cooter make Tia a few on-camera audition tapes that created the impression she had a little “on-camera” experience. Well, it wasn’t really a lie. Some of the LA gang vouched for them.
At twenty-seven Tia looked good, possessed a naturally sultry voice that she used as a tool of seduction. She would give those hairdo college girls a lesson in how to perform in front of a camera.
Tia and Cooter got the job. Sort of.
They weren’t staff; instead they got a twelve-month freelance contract. No salaries. They’d be paid for assigned stories but could negotiate a price for anything they generated themselves, provided Worldwide had first right of refusal. Tia had worked out the deal. Bangkok crime lords had taught her well. Nobody would ever screw her again. At least not without her consent and their contribution. Tia crushed her Camel with the heap of others in the take-out wrapper on her desk.
“Hello, America.” The speakerphone came to life again. “This is London. Love your pictures. Stand by.”
Tia shook her head, glanced at her watch, reread their contract again. They had been with Worldwide three months. Given the show had more than seventy bureaus around the world all competing to get their work on a daily thirty-minute program, it was a victory just knowing the execs were considering your work.
“Seth in New York, are you there? It’s Nigel in London.”
“Go ahead.”
“William Banks will be joining us. He’s at a convention in Monaco. We just picked up five more countries, so he’s very positive. He’s on a yacht.”
“Nigel, Banks here. Let’s get going. Everyone ready?”
“Ready in San Francisco.”
“The pictures are good,” Banks said. “Can you brief me?”
Layne tapped a nail to Banks’s photo in an annual report. He headed Worldwide’s entire news operation. The top news guy.
“It’s your stuff, Tia, go,” Seth in New York said.
“We had a line that several Hollywood names were charting their movie choices under the advice of a low-profile San Francisco fortune-teller.”
“I like that,” Banks said.
“We were in her neighborhood getting establishing shots, b-roll, when a jewelry store was robbed, a San Francisco police officer murdered, and the wife of a celeb reporter taken hostage. We got it all.”
“Yes, I saw your pictures. Outstanding,” Banks said. “How old is this?”
“Couple of hours.”
“Too late for tonight’s show in America. How exclusive is it?”
Cooter had been monitoring the Bay Area casts. Nothing.
“Absolute exclusivity,” Layne said.
“Yes, well, what about security cameras or amateur footage?”
&
nbsp; “Police are holding a news conference soon. We’ll learn from them what they have.”
“Right, we could start teasing Worldwide for tomorrow’s show. Nigel? Seth? Set it up for Europe and buy extra time in America.”
“Certainly, William.”
“Fine then,” Banks said. “Very nice work, sorry, your name in San Francisco?”
“Tia Layne and we’re not done here, Billy.”
From New York to London, to the yacht on the Mediterranean at Monaco, the silence fell thick on the line.
“Excuse me, Miss Layne?”
“I’ve got our contract in front of me. All I’m required to do is give you first right of refusal on our work. Which I did. Now you tell me how much you’re going to pay for it, because I can get thirty thousand from the U.S. networks. This is supreme stuff and this story could go long.”
It took about half a second for Banks to realize he was dealing with someone nearly worthy of his time.
“Who did you say this celeb reporter was, whose wife has been taken hostage?”
“Tom Reed, a San Francisco Star newspaper reporter, Pulitzer nominee, a big crime reporter.”
“Never heard of him. Have you, Nigel?”
“Not at all, sorry. Seth, is he relevant to Americans?”
“Well, he was on Larry King, he’d broken a few big crime stories.”
“San Francisco?” Banks said. “We’ll go fifteen.”
“Thirty, because I know that’s what the U.S. brokers can get us.”
“And how would you know that? Have you been shopping?”
“I’m aware of the market.”
“Ms. Layne, is it? I get the feeling you’re extorting us and, to be blunt, I don’t much like it”
“To be blunt your annual report states the corporation earned one hundred million dollars in profits last year and your challenge is to secure footing in the U.S. market. Now my deal requires me to offer you first right of refusal on our work and release it to you if we’ve agreed on a sum. If we don’t agree, I’m free to shop it. Now, I’ve showed you our work and I’ve told you our sum. Thirty thousand.”
“Twenty.”
