“Hitler’s dead,” I said. “And Maggie Thatcher? Not a prime minister anymore. Oh, and there was that guy? The one who walked on the moon? The moon counts as foreign, right?”
“You’ll help me?” She wanted me to be serious for a moment.
“I will help you.”
Sarah watched as I refilled our glasses. Then she asked, “When are you seeing Trixie?”
“We’re having coffee tomorrow,” I said.
“What’s her problem?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know. I called her up after I got back from Dad’s place. You know we’d had this lunch, she was about to tell me something when I got that call that something had happened to my father, so she never got into it. So when I called her after I got back, she said she was in some kind of trouble. She didn’t want to go into it over the phone.”
“What do you think it could be?”
I shrugged. “No idea.”
“I mean, what could she possibly need your help with? What kind of problem could a professional dominatrix have that would require your expertise?” She gave that a moment. “You’re no good at knots.”
“I told you, I don’t know. I must have insights in areas even we don’t know about.”
Sarah held up her wineglass and peered at me, as if she was looking at me through the rose-colored zinfandel. “Why are you friends with her?”
I pursed my lips. “I guess because she helped me out a couple of years back when we got into that trouble in Oakwood. I got to know her before I knew what she really does for a living. I don’t know. We just hit it off, I guess. Does it bother you? That we’re friends?”
“Bother me? I don’t think so. I mean, aside from the fact that she’s stunningly beautiful and knows how to fulfill every man’s deepest, darkest fantasy, I don’t see any reason to feel threatened by her.” She smiled. I started to say something, but she stopped me. “It’s okay. I know you, and I’m not worried about you. I know what we have.”
I smiled softly.
“But I think I understand what it is you like about Trixie,” Sarah said.
“What?”
“She’s dangerous.”
“Come on.”
“No, that’s it, I’m convinced. You’ve lived your whole life being safe, playing it safe, locking the doors at night, always changing the batteries in the smoke detectors, making sure the knives don’t point up in the dishwasher. You know what you’re like.”
I said nothing. My obsessions were well documented.
“But knowing Trixie, this woman with her dark side, who ties men up in her basement and spanks them for money, just knowing a person like this, even if all you do is meet her for coffee once in a while, this is your way of flirting with danger. Makes you feel that you’re not so incredibly conservative.”
“That’s what you think.”
Sarah leaned forward across the kitchen table. “That’s what I know.”
“I think you’re full of shit,” I said to her.
“Really.” She finished off another glass. “You know what I was thinking I’d like to do?”
“No, what were you thinking you’d like to do?”
“I was thinking I would like to take you upstairs and fuck your brains out, that’s what I was thinking I’d like to do.”
I felt a stirring inside me, and cleared my throat. “I think, if that’s what you want to do, you should go right ahead and do it. I would not want to stand in your way.”
“So like, can I have twenty bucks or not?”
Paul had reappeared. We both spun our heads around, and I don’t know about Sarah, but I could feel my brain moving about half a second slower than my cranium.
“Uh,” I said, wondering whether Paul had heard the last part of our conversation, “we vote no.”
Sarah slowly turned her head back to look at me. “When did we have that vote?”
“We’re going to have it right now. All those in favor of giving Paul twenty bucks, raise your hands.” Neither Sarah nor I raised our hands. “It’s settled, then. You have been turned down.”
“Aw, come on. There’s a bunch of us, we’re going to the movies.”
“Have you given any consideration,” Sarah said, speaking slowly so as not to slur her words, “to finding a part-time job someplace, instead of hitting us up for spending money all the time?”
“I second the motion,” I said.
Paul definitely looked pissed. “I thought you guys said I shouldn’t get a job because it would interfere with my homework. That’s what you said. Didn’t you say that?”
“I believe you may be correct,” I said, “but, seeing as how you don’t do any homework now, I can’t see where it would make any particular difference. It just means that instead of going to a movie or playing video games, you’d be making some money.”
“I don’t believe this,” Paul said. “Fuck, what kind of job am I going to get?”
“We look forward to finding out with great anticipation,” I said.
Paul raised his hands in frustration, then let them fall to his side. “I guess I’ll just hang out here then,” he said. “Maybe there’s a game on.”
I glanced at Sarah just as Sarah glanced at me. For Sarah’s recently announced plan to be acted upon, it would be better if we had the house to ourselves.
“Okay,” I said slowly, reaching for my wallet. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll give you twenty bucks if you promise that tomorrow you’ll start looking for some sort of part-time job.”
Paul strode across the kitchen, snatched the twenty I was holding up in my hand, and said, “Deal. I’ll be some goddamn sorry-ass burger flipper if that’s what you want.” And he was out the door again in a shot.
I waited for it to swing shut, for the dust to settle, and then said to Sarah, “I’m beginning to think we need to crack down on the kids’ language.”
Sarah shook her head sadly. “That fucking ship has sailed,” she said. “I think you have failed to set a good example.”
She got up from the table, reached out for my hand, and started leading me to the stairs.
“What did they used to call Myanmar?” I asked her.
“ Burma,” Sarah replied.
“I think that’s right,” I said.
Sarah, not even waiting until we’d reached the second floor, was unbuttoning her blouse as she scaled the stairs.
“Dangerous,” I said, following her. “You’re the one who’s dangerous.”
3
I was settling back in at my desk at the Metropolitan, having just returned from the cafeteria with a coffee, when I caught a whiff of something unpleasant behind me. That could mean only one of two things. Either one of the photogs had just returned from covering a drowning in the sewers, or our top police reporter was in the vicinity.
Without turning around, I said, “What is it, Dick?” Slowly, I spun my computer chair around to look at him.
“How did you know it was me?” he asked. Dick Colby is not only the paper’s best crime reporter, he’s also its most odiferous. His fellow staffers are unsure whether it’s that he fails to bathe, or to do his laundry, or possibly a combination of the two. He lives alone. I don’t know whether he’s ever been married, but I couldn’t imagine a wife sending him out into the world this way. He’s a gruff, slightly overweight, prematurely graying creature in his late forties, and I didn’t know whether he was aware that most everyone referred to him, behind his back at any rate, as “Cheese Dick.”
“Sixth sense,” I said. I’d taken a deep breath before turning around and was slowly exhaling as I spoke. “You want something?”
“Your notes on the Wickens thing. Phone numbers, stuff like that. I need them.”
This request so took me by surprise that I breathed in suddenly, then coughed. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I said.
“I’m taking over the story,” Colby said. Just like that. As Paul might say, Hold on, Captain Butter-Me-Up.
&
nbsp; “Oh, you just decided, ‘Hey, I think I’d like that story,’ and thought you’d come over here and I’d hand it to you?”
Colby offered me a pitying smile. “Shit, you haven’t been told, have you?”
“Told what?”
“Maybe you should talk to your wifey,” Colby said. “After you’ve done that, you can give me your notes.”
The blood was rushing to my head. I wanted to grab Colby by the neck and strangle him, but I also knew that if I got that close to him I might pass out. My stories on the Wickenses, a family of Timothy McVeigh-worshipping crazies whose plan to kill dozens, if not hundreds, of people had blown up in their faces, if you will, had run in the paper over the last couple of days. They had rented a farmhouse on my father’s property, and I’d gotten to know them, in the last week, somewhat more intimately than I could have ever wanted.
“I don’t believe this,” I said, getting out of my chair and heading straight for Sarah’s glass-walled office.
She was on the phone as I strode in and stood on the other side of her desk. “What’s this about Colby taking the Wickens story?”
“Can I call you back?” Sarah said. She hung up the phone. “What?”
“Cheese Dick says he’s getting the Wickens story. Why the hell would he think he was getting the Wickens story?”
“Fuck,” Sarah said. “That fucking asshole.”
“So it’s not true?”
“Noooo,” Sarah said, stretching out the word and shaking her head slowly in exasperation. “I mean, yes. It’s true.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“It wasn’t my decision.”
“Whose decision was it?”
Sarah tipped her head northward, in the direction of Bertrand Magnuson’s office.
“Magnuson pulled me off the Wickens story? I got the Wickens story. We played it up huge. It was my story. I’m part of that story.”
“I think that’s why Magnuson’s pulling you off it. Look, everyone knows you did a great job on it. Fantastic story. Award material. Pulitzer stuff. But Magnuson feels, you know, that you kind of, how do I put this…”
“Lucked into it?” I said.
Sarah screwed up her face. “Maybe.”
“I would hardly call it luck, having a run-in with that bunch.”
“You think I don’t agree? You think I’d call it lucky, what happened to you up there?” She took a breath. “But the managing editor feels that it might be more appropriate that for the follow-up stories, like whether the Wickenses were part of a larger movement, other crimes that they might have been responsible for, that that’s the kind of thing that Dick is better equipped to handle, what with his contacts in law enforcement and all.”
I stared at her. Sarah broke away, pretended to be looking for something on her desk. She was in management mode and couldn’t bring herself to look me in the eye.
“Did you make a case for me?” I asked. “When Magnuson made this decision?”
Sarah swallowed. “Sure I did.”
“How hard?”
She paused. “Pretty hard.”
“It’s the foreign editor thing, isn’t it? You don’t want to piss off Magnuson because you’re going for this new job and it’s his call.”
“That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit and you know it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Look, it’s not fair, but the fact is, Colby, for all his faults and aromas, has great contacts. He’s very experienced with this sort of thing, it’s not like his background is in-” She stopped herself.
“In what, Sarah?” My eyebrows went up, questioning. “Writing science fiction novels? His background’s a little more respectable? Is that what you were going to say?”
She deflated. “No, that’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say city hall, and photography. That’s what most of your newspaper experience has been about.”
I stood there another five seconds, then turned and walked out. “Zack,” Sarah called out. “Zack, please.”
I put my notes about the Wickens story and all relevant phone numbers into the computer and e-mailed everything to Cheese Dick. Then I grabbed my jacket, slipped it on, and started making my way out of the newsroom.
“Hey,” Dick said as I passed within shouting distance of his desk. I kept on walking. “Hey, Walker!” I stopped, looked over at him. “I need to talk to you for a sec.”
I took my time walking over to him. “I sent you the stuff,” I said.
“Yeah, I see that. Thanks. So Sarah, she explained it to you?”
I nodded.
“It’s not personal,” Colby said smugly, enjoying immensely just how personal it actually was. “I’m just more suited to this sort of assignment. When you stumble into something, like you did, it’s okay to write the first-person story, you know, what happened to you, but after that, it’s really my area, you know? I mean, you don’t see me trying to cover a Star Trek convention, do you?”
I found myself thinking about what constituted justifiable homicide. My definition of “justifiable” might, I feared, differ from the justice system’s, so I decided not to act on an impulse to grab Colby’s keyboard and beat him to death with it.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Actually, yeah,” Colby said, looking for a piece of paper on his cluttered desk. “Where is it…where the fuck is it?…Okay, here it is. Since I’m doing you a favor, taking this story off your hands, maybe you could do this one for me. You’d have to get moving, though. It’s in an hour.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Good story, man, could really use your touch. And if you don’t want it, it just means I’m going to have to go over to Assignment and tell them you didn’t want it and they’ll have to pull somebody off somethin’ else to do it and then they’ll figure you’re some kind of fucking prima donna or something.”
“Give it to me,” I said. It was in Colby’s own handwriting, some notes he’d taken. I could make out “police union” and “stun gun” and a time and location. “What is this?”
“It’s a demo. Some new kind of stun gun. The cops would like to have them; the police board’s been saying no fucking way. So this guy who sells them is putting on a performance, just for some members of the police union. Some cops, they might decide to buy one, even though stun guns haven’t been approved for use. They figure it’s better to take heat for using one of those, blasting a guy with a few thousand volts and seeing him get up again, than face Internal Affairs after pulling their regular guns and killing a guy. Photo desk already knows about it.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.” I was pissed, and felt like walking out of the building and not coming back, but I didn’t want to get a reputation as an asshole, either. Or for those who already thought I was one, a bigger asshole.
“Great,” Colby said, handing me his notes. “Feel your way carefully, though. I heard about this on the Q.T. from a cop. The union may not be crazy about you being there. The board won’t like it when they hear the cops have been looking at these things.”
The demo was scheduled for 11 a.m. I was still planning to meet Trixie Snelling at 1 p.m., at a coffee shop only a few blocks from police headquarters. She was making a trip in from Oakwood to see me, and I didn’t want to have to cancel on her. I didn’t think there’d be a problem.
On my way out of the building, I passed Magnuson’s office. The door was open partway, and I could see the miserable bastard sitting at his desk, no doubt plotting ways to ruin other people’s lives as much as he seemed intent on ruining mine.
“What makes this stun gun different from previous models, and what makes it the perfect tool for any properly equipped law enforcement body today, is its simplicity,” said the man who had been introduced as Mr. Merker. “Other stun gun models use two wires that are propelled from the weapon to the target. Once the gun has been fired, you must rewind the wires and replace the gas cartridge within the weapon th
at, basically, exploded when you pulled the trigger. So, you get one shot, then you have to reload. It’s a bit like being a Minuteman with his musket.”
There were a few chuckles among the roughly two dozen cops who’d dropped by this meeting room in the police board’s offices to see what was going on. A couple of them were clutching crudely produced flyers headlined “Stun Gun Sale, Demo.”
Lesley Carroll, the Metropolitan photographer who’d accompanied me to this event, and I had encountered a bit of trouble getting in. A cop at the door said it was for union members only, and I’d told him, as politely as possible, that if he didn’t let me in, my story would have to say that the police had held a secret meeting to consider whether to arm themselves with stun guns, and that might send the message that the police were acting as though they had no police board, or public, to answer to. If he let me in, I argued, readers would see that the police weren’t trying to pull any fast ones, but were hoping to open a debate on the issue of whether officers should be issued these nonlethal weapons.
The cop thought about it. “Fine.”
Once inside, Lesley, who was in her early twenties and interning with the paper, hoping to get hired on staff in a few months, said, “Nice one.”
Merker, a lean man with closely cropped black hair, pointed chin, and piercing eyes, waved what looked like a plastic toy gun in his hand as he performed for the officers in an open area at the front of the room. The floor had been covered with gym mats, which suggested to me that a demonstration of some kind was imminent.
The gun in Merker’s hand looked as though it had been drawn by a cartoonist, with fatter, exaggerated edges.
“But with the Dropper,” he said, “instead of two wires coming out, two highly concentrated streams of highly conductive liquid come out. Each stream contains a different charge, if you will, and when they connect with the target, fifty thousand volts are discharged, completely interrupting the ability of the brain to send any messages to the body.”
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