The Breaker

by Nick Petrie

  “Gosh, I really wish I could do something to help.” The man grinned like he was hearing an internal laugh track. His hands roved aimlessly at the end of his meaty arms. He wore a pair of black sunglasses folded into the open neck of his shirt.

  His van was still running, too, although its engine had an odd, off-center rattle, something definitely wrong with it. He hadn’t even closed his door.

  “Oh, you’ll help.” June raised her phone again, video still running, and captured his face, then caught the car and the license plate, too. “I’ll get myself checked out and send you the bill.”

  “Let me give you my information.” He stepped closer. “Where are you headed? Wow, it’s really raining now. Can I take you somewhere?” Happy as a fucking clam.

  “I don’t think so.” He seemed harmless, although a little off. Maybe not so bright, or not so good at social cues. She hauled her bike away from him, and behind his van onto the grass parking strip. She trapped her front wheel between her knees and pulled the handlebars back into rough alignment. Both rims still spun freely against the brakes and the quick-release hubs were locked tight, so she was safe to ride at least a short distance. She’d give everything a closer look when she got to the paper.

  He was closing in again. “Hey, I’m an Uber driver.” He pointed at the sticker on his windshield. “My name is Edgar. Let me take you. It’s the least I can do.” Why was he so damn cheerful?

  She backed away. “Jesus, no.” There was no way in hell she was getting in his car. She’d been through that before and it hadn’t gone well.

  “At least let me give you my information. Come on over, my wallet’s in the van.”

  She tucked her phone into her pocket and threw one leg over her bike. “Edgar, I’m a journalist. I have your license plate. If I need you, I’ll find you.”

  He turned to look at the steady flow of oncoming traffic, then back at her. His white shirt had become entirely translucent from the rain. Droplets streamed down his forehead. He still smiled, but his face had changed. He didn’t look harmless anymore. Not even a little bit.

  He kept walking toward her. “Lady, get in the van.” He didn’t seem to notice the rain at all.

  “Excuse me?”

  She saw him clearly now, knew exactly what he was. She still straddled the crossbar of her bike, shifting her weight.

  That strange smile got wider. “You heard me, reporter lady. Get in the van.” He was maybe twelve feet away. He took another step toward her, then another. Nine feet away. “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to talk.”

  She didn’t believe that for a second. “I don’t want to fucking talk to you, Edgar.” It was June’s turn to grin. “But I do have your picture.”

  Now he came for her, hands outstretched, but June was already in motion. Weight on her left foot, she swung her right leg clear of the seat and continued the pivot with strong arms and an easy grip on the handlebars to pop the front wheel off the ground. The back wheel quickly followed, and in just a quarter-turn, she had the whole bike flying in a horizontal arc. She shifted her weight and leaned into the spin, hauling the bike through the air as she widened her stance, the lugs of her hiking shoes giving her a solid grip on the wet grass.

  He thought she was running, and kept coming.

  But June wasn’t running.

  A hundred and eighty degrees into her turn, she pulled the handlebars toward her chest, which swung the back wheel outward, where it came to an abrupt halt when the tire slammed into the side of his smiling face. She felt the satisfying thump all the way up to her shoulders. The accumulated speed and power of the blow, half the weight of the steel bike moving fast, knocked him sideways and stumbling to the ground.

  She didn’t wait to see what happened next. She landed the bike and jumped aboard and stood on the pedals to pump hard up the sidewalk against traffic.

  Leaving Edgar behind, eating her dust, hopefully with a big fucking headache.

  15

  She pushed hard down alleys and back avenues toward the reservoir until she reached the bike trail, which she took to Commerce Street and into the loose chain of parking lots that kept her off streets until the Bucks’ new arena, two blocks from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Lunch would have to wait.

  She’d swing by Dean Zedler’s desk. Dean always had good snacks.

  She’d already decided not to tell Peter about the cheerful psychopath in the white van, not until she figured out what the hell was going on. Which was the opposite of what she’d just demanded of Peter. This made her a hypocrite, she knew. But her years as a reporter had reinforced the reflex to keep information close until she knew the whole story. And Peter’s reflex was to do anything to keep her safe, which would get in the way of her learning what she needed to know.

  Relationships were hard, right?

  Feeling every ache and scrape of her fall to the pavement, she unlocked the loading dock gate with her ID, then chained her bike to the lonely yellow rack. Inside, she waved to Ernie at the security station and rode the elevator up to the fourth floor. Back when she was a beat reporter in Chicago, she’d never ridden her bike to the paper, because she never knew where the day might take her. That variability was one of the pleasures of the work. This book project, with most of her time spent on the phone and computer, was different. She supposed that meant she was moving up in the world.

  She walked into the vast, high-ceilinged newsroom, then turned left toward her borrowed cubicle, feeling the hushed energy of the place soaking into her bones as it did every morning. This was why, after years of working from home, she’d talked her way into a desk at the Journal Sentinel. The feeling of a working newsroom never got old, even in this age of shrinking staffs and declining subscriptions.

  She’d only had the cube for six months, but her desk looked like she’d been there for years. Every horizontal surface was covered with stacks of books and scholarly articles she’d used for background research, along with tall, shaggy mounds of manila folders filled with notes and outlines and drafts for each chapter.

  The only open space surrounded two framed photos, like ringed ripples around thrown stones. One was a photo of her mom, who’d been an IT professor at Stanford. The other was her dad, who’d been a tech entrepreneur and bleeding-edge researcher before his mind had gone tangled and strange. It was no mystery why June had become an investigative journalist. She’d spent most of her childhood and teens trying to decipher their odd, troubled marriage and the disastrous divorce that had followed.

  She found the morning’s print edition on the seat of her chair. The story of the market shooting was on the front page, above the fold, along with a grainy security-camera photo of the bearded gunman in his red hat and jacket and sunglasses. Dean had stuck a sticky note to the masthead. “See me if you want a piece of the follow-up—DIZ.”

  Zedler’s middle name was Ignatius, and he’d been trying to cultivate the nickname Diz, without success, since the day they’d met more than a decade ago.

  She scanned the story about yesterday’s Hampton Avenue machete murders, which was below the fold, probably because they couldn’t print photos of the mutilated bodies, then put the paper aside. Usually she scanned at least four newspapers a day, to check their coverage and to see if there were any unexpected developments in her areas of professional interest. But now she had bigger fish to fry. Forget about Vincent Holloway and Pinnacle Technologies. She was in hot pursuit of Mr. Cheerful and his white passenger van.

  First, she emailed herself the video from her phone, then threw it up on her big desk monitor where she could get a better look. She fired up some video editing software, pulled out the best stills of his face, both from the front and the side, then skipped ahead to the footage of the truck. Because the driver’s door was still open, she found a half-dozen frames she could stitch together to grab the complete VIN number from the manufacturer’s stic
ker on the outside edge. This was why she’d sprung for the fancy phone with the good camera, so she could zoom in and capture these kinds of details. She’d also gotten the plate, no-brainer, which was from Texas.

  She knew somebody in the Lone Star State, right? She flipped through her mental file and came up with Christina Willis, a Chicago street cop who’d moved to Houston to escape the Midwestern winters. Now she was a detective with a talent for sifting through giant heaps of data in pursuit of organized crime.

  June fired off an email to her friend’s personal account. “I was riding my bike to work and some jerk with Texas plates almost killed me. I know you’re not supposed to do this, but can you get me a name? You know I’m good for the favor.” She attached the photos of the face, plate, and VIN.

  Then, just for grins, she ran a Google image search using his face, even though the only time she ever got a half-decent result was with mug shots or celebrities. She scrolled down through the results, but this time was no different, just a bunch of random middle-aged guys, none of them her attacker. No surprise that he didn’t have a big social media presence or website advertising his services as a freelance fuckhead. But she didn’t mind. Once she had a name, the face would help her narrow down the candidates to her guy.

  Once she found him, she could begin to figure out who sent him. And why.

  She assumed his plan had been to get her into the van, then make her disappear. A missing adult was not usually a police priority. No body meant no murder.

  Despite the warm newsroom, she shivered.

  After putting her computer to sleep, because she worked in a roomful of good reporters who were both sneaky and competitive by nature, she went to the now-defunct cafeteria for some truly terrible vending-machine coffee, taking the morning’s paper with her. She wanted to see what updates had been made to the market story since the online version she’d read the night before.

  Like most reporters, the first thing she looked at was the byline. When the story was first published, Dean’s name had been before hers. June didn’t mind. She’d done the on-scene reporting, but Dean had worked his many city contacts to dig into the police response, and he’d also written the copy. Not to mention that June wasn’t even an actual employee of the paper.

  But in the byline for the print edition, June’s name was now first. It might have seemed like generosity, but she was well aware of his other motives. He was trying to rope her into the story and, by extension, the Journal Sentinel. He’d been sending her charming and flirty recruitment emails for years.

  As she scanned the story now, however, she saw that Dean had added several new paragraphs, asking readers to contact the paper if they had any information about the good Samaritans who’d intervened in the shooting, including photographs. It meant that the police were more interested than she’d previously thought. Or else Dean himself was.

  Either way, not a good development.

  16

  Dean’s cube was in the middle of the newsroom, with a view of his editor’s office and easy access to the long file cabinets that lined the center aisle. The next pod held the cops reporters, although the squawking police scanners were long gone, made obsolete by radio encryption and the Internet.

  She found him slouched in his chair, chewing his lip and two-finger tapping into the LexisNexis search bar. Instead of the usual unofficial reporter’s uniform of a rumpled blue button-down and coffee-stained khakis, Dean wore a fine black V-neck sweater over fitted blue jeans with handsome Italian driving shoes. A cashmere blazer hung from a hanger on a file cabinet. Not a clotheshorse, not really, just someone who’d long ago learned to dress himself. Like an adult.

  She tried not to compare Dean’s outfit to Peter’s dirty work clothes. Totally unfair. Different job entirely.

  “Hey.” She plopped herself into his guest chair, the queen of casual. Not at all worried at what Dean might have uncovered. “You got something new on our market shooter?”

  He turned to look at her, smiling like a kid on a particularly good Christmas morning, as he often did when he saw her. He had a gap between his two front teeth that was just large enough to notice. She always felt badly when she found herself staring at it. She’d known him a long time.

  “Nothing on the shooter, but my source at the cop shop finally sent me security cam pics of the Samaritans this morning. It’d be a great feature if we could find these guys.” He clicked a few times and brought up a photo. “This is the guy who jumped the fence to the loading dock.”

  The face was fuzzy from the zoom, the features vague and indistinct. In person, Lewis made a major impression, but aside from the dark intensity of the eyes, this photo could have been anybody. For someone with Lewis’s past, the ability to fade out of a photograph was a kind of superpower.

  Dean clicked again. “And this is the guy who told the schoolteacher to get her kids out of the market right before the shooting started. The loading dock camera has him rushing the guy unarmed. He’s lucky he didn’t get killed.” The image showed a large blurry cowboy hat with only the lower corner of the face exposed below the brim. June recognized the angle of Peter’s cheekbone and the line of his jaw.

  “Wow, lousy art.” Just seeing the crappy photos, June felt better. “Is this the best you’ve got?”

  “Unfortunately. But that neighborhood is full of businesses with their own cameras. I’m headed there this afternoon, to knock on doors and see if they’ll give me access. Maybe I’ll find something better.”

  Why hadn’t June thought of that? Crap. “Didn’t the cops do that already?”

  “Not according to my source downtown. Nobody died at the market, and that ugly double homicide on Hampton is where they’re putting the manpower.” He gave her a sunny smile. “But not me. I’ve got nothing but time.”

  Which wasn’t true at all. Dean had plenty to do, but he clearly smelled something, and he was too good of a reporter to let it go. He didn’t know what the story was yet, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t find out. Getting access to those private cameras could get him closer. After all, Peter and Lewis had sat outside the coffee shop as the shooter walked past.

  With June at the same table.

  Her mouth felt dry. “But the police aren’t after these two guys, are they? Didn’t they help stop the shooter?”

  “That’s what eyewitnesses say. But why did they intervene? Were they really good Samaritans, or were they somehow involved? What kind of person doesn’t step forward for his moment of glory? Maybe they know something about the shooter. Plus if they’re actual heroes, the mayor will want to honor them somehow.”

  “What about the guy the shooter tried to rob,” she said. “Any art showing his face?” Thinking of Vincent Holloway, the tech entrepreneur she thought she’d recognized. A decent picture might help her find him.

  Dean shook his head. “Guy’s a blur. The only clear shots are of the back of his head. But he’s a question mark, too. Why did he walk? Maybe he knew the shooter? Why else would someone come after him with an assault rifle?”

  Dean’s skeptical mind was always digging deeper, always looking for the hidden angle. If he was going to keep pushing on this story, it was going to be a serious problem. She needed something new and juicy to hit. Like a state rep with two wives, or a late-season tornado, or a five-alarm apartment fire. Ideally, it would be all three. Because, she silently admitted, she was a terrible person.

  Dean stared at her with his big brown eyes. His shave was still crisp, and he’d had a haircut since the last time she saw him. Not for the first time, she realized that he was a good-looking guy. A little short, but definitely handsome.

  “Hey, I have an idea.” He snapped his fingers, as if he’d just thought of it that moment. “Why don’t you come canvass the market area with me? Sweet-talk some local businesses into showing us their security footage? It’ll be like the old days. Maybe stop for a drink
or a bite when we’re done? I’ve got the bike rack on my car, I can give you a lift home afterward.”

  “Sorry, I need to get back to work on the book. I have chapters due next week.” Which was true, although that wasn’t her plan at all. She’d spend the rest of the day online, risking carpal tunnel to try to get a better read on Holloway while she waited to hear back from her friend in Houston.

  As she was leaving, she said, “Did you get any strange, ah, feedback about this story?”

  He read her face. “What kind of feedback?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” she said. “But you should be careful for a few days.”

  “June,” he said. “Talk to me.”

  She shook her head. Tired of men and their protective instincts. June was in much better shape than Dean, and she’d done far more self-defense training. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. Then stopped. “You didn’t have to put me first on the byline, you know.”

  He smiled guilelessly. “You’d do the same for me, right?”

  “No, I would not,” she said. “I’d sell my firstborn child to beat you to a story.”

  “Aw, I don’t believe that for a minute,” he said.

  Dean Zedler was, in many ways, the opposite of Peter. One of the best-dressed men in the newsroom, he was a polished professional and could have his pick of editor’s jobs at a half-dozen major papers whenever he wanted. He’d also been trying to get into her pants since the day they met.

  In the nicest way, of course.

  Ruthlessly, relentlessly nice.

  If nice could be weaponized, Dean had done it.

  Years ago, in Chicago, he’d made a major play for her. Dinners, flowers, the works. And she’d been tempted. He was smart, good-looking, and very ambitious. Like cops, reporters often ended up dating other reporters, because only another journalist could truly understand the insane demands and sublime delights of the job. But there was also something about his Weaponized Nice, which amounted to a kind of constant calculation, that had put her off. They’d never gotten past dinner, and soon afterward she’d taken the buyout from the Tribune and moved west.