Drive Time

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  I glance into the rearview. J.T.’s still shooting. And talking. And talking. And, though it’s not his fault, he’s annoying. Every time he says network it reminds me of Kevin’s offer. And that reminds me of Josh. And that reminds me I’ve got a decision to make. An impossible decision. Unless I can clone myself.

  “Let’s make sure the audio is clean, okay?” I say, trying to come up with a reasonable reason to keep him quiet. “Tell me all that later. We need the sounds of the highway. Without anyone’s voice.”

  “You’re the boss,” J.T. says. “It’s your funeral.”

  I wish people would stop saying that.

  I see it almost in slow motion. Coming right at us. A rickety dump truck has been an annoying obstacle ever since the Neponset Road exit. Every time I try to pass the thing, some jerk driver, who for some reason needs to stay one second ahead of us, refuses to get out of the way. Other drivers, panicked by the increasing snow and squalling wind, decide creeping along at thirty miles an hour is somehow safer. Trapped, J.T. and I stay in the center lane.

  Now something big is flying out of the back of the truck. A—bat? Part of my brain struggles to name it, while the rest of me, focused, calculates the best way to avoid it. A huge piece of—paper? It’s metal. Metal. Metal. A huge scrap of metal, caught by the increasing wind, is flying toward us. We’re caught. Hemmed in. I have no place to go. Teeth gritting, I steer straight ahead, hoping it won’t slam into our windshield.

  “Holy—” J.T. leans forward, clamping both hands on the seat in front of him. “Look out, Charlie! Floor it! Or get out of the—”

  The hunk of debris misses, flying over us. Behind me, brakes squeal, horns blare, tires skid on the slickening highway. Both my hands clutch the steering wheel. Every part of me is clenching.

  “That was close,” I say. My heart is thudding, relief making my voice shaky and thin. Danger never feels real when you’re shooting a story. Fires, floods, tornadoes. You’re just doing your job. I hadn’t really thought about the stupid power steering thing. Now I do.

  “Yeah,” J.T. replies. “Should we call the police?”

  And then another flash of solid black escapes from under the fluttering green tarpaulin in front of us. Another shard, the size of a newspaper, careening across the highway, cutting through the snow. The driver—hauling scrap metal—must be oblivious. His wooden-sided panel truck picks up speed in the center lane. He thunders across a massive pothole, the truck lurching, and then the entire tarp comes loose, unleashing from its moorings, ropes flailing, plastic flapping.

  It’s a barrage of metal, piece after piece. All sizes, weird shapes, scattering in the wind, picked up by gusts and flying, like demented crows. Random. Wild. Terrifying. And inescapable.

  On either side, other drivers, each attempting the same impossible calculations, are slowing. Dodging. Speeding. Swerving. Slowing. Switching lanes. And everyone honking. I’m as frightened of getting too close to the cars around me as I am of being battered by the slicing shower of metal. Which would be worse, to plow into another car? Or to get slammed by a knifing scrap of jagged-edged—

  And then I can’t avoid it. I see it, black metal, broad and flat, twisting across the snowy pavement and sliding to a stop. Right in front of us.

  If I slam on the brakes, we’ll skid. I glance to each side. I can’t steer to avoid it. No room.

  “McNally! Watch out for the—” J.T.’s voice is tense.

  “I see it!”

  Our wheels clatter over the bent and battered fragment, jouncing us out of our seats. J.T. yells something from the backseat. Whatever he says is drowned out by my own cry of dismay.

  The truck, tarp now attached by just one corner and billowing like the cape of some comic-book supervillain, turns off the exit. I feel our right front tire make an unmistakable and stomach-churning rumble.

  The rear of the car swings wide. Cars fly by us, but my view through the windshield is no longer forward. I’m seeing the side of the highway flash by. And we’re spinning.

  “We’re skidding!” J.T. yells. “Steer in the—”

  “Shut up!” I reach down for the stick shift, then remember I’m not in my Jeep.

  “Quickly align your tires with the direction of your intended travel.” It takes me half a second to recognize the voice of Mr. Grosskopf, my grouchy but effective drivers’-ed teacher at Anthony Wayne High School. We practiced exactly this in a slippery A & P parking lot. I take my foot off the brake, and quickly turn the wheel back the way I want to go. As soon as I see “ahead,” the car starts skidding in the other direction.

  Yes. I turn the wheel back the other way, straightening us out again. Back and forth, smaller and smaller turns. And finally it’s clear road in front of us. And we’re going—more like klunking—in the right direction.

  I check the rearview. Nothing.

  “I’m pulling over into the breakdown lane,” I say, barely recognizing my own voice. “You okay, J.T.? We have a flat.”

  Once we stop the car and get out, J.T. starts unsnapping straps from the floor of the trunk. He’s searching for a jack and spare tire that had better be there. Being stranded on the interstate was not in our plan. “What if the power steering had—”

  “It didn’t,” I say. My heart rate is back to normal. My voice is, too. My knees, not quite yet. “I must admit, though, the words defective rotary valve did cross my mind.”

  The narrow, rutted breakdown lane of I-93 is never the safest place. Now, huddled behind our rental car, Saturday at noon, in freezing, bleak January with snow swirling and cars streaming by and a slashed-to-rubber-ribbons flat tire lying dead at my feet, I wonder, briefly, about my years-ago flirtation with law school. Choices then, choices now. I pull my wide plaid shawl up over my head, wrap it tighter and try to keep the glass half-full. “What they don’t teach you in journalism school, right?”

  J.T.’s hair is frosted with the falling snow, his sandy curls damp, cheeks ruddy. With one quick motion, he hoists the spare tire from deep within the trunk. Thankfully, it bounces on the pavement. At least the spare tires haven’t been recalled.

  He balances the tire with one gloved hand, pushes his sunglasses up onto his head with the other. He looks at me. Up and down.

  “All in a day’s work,” he says. “But you know, McNally, you pretty much rocked back there. That was some smart driving. Most women would have—”

  ‘Most women?’ Ignoring his scrutiny, which is almost unacceptably unprofessional, I open my mouth to inquire what “most women” is supposed to mean. J.T. holds up a hand, stopping me.

  “Hey, I take it back. I just meant you did a great job. Driving. And this is a hell of a story, too. You’re all business, McNally. I can see why you’ve lasted this long in TV. Most women your age are—”

  “Most women my age?” I try, again, to come up with some sort of retort, even though the ground he’s treading here is actually a bit more solid. Fortysomething women in television are as rare as shoulder pads and leg warmers. I know my own style is destined to go out of style. You’re only as good as your last story—or the whim of a new boss.

  J.T. gives me an anchorman-worthy smile, all teeth and cheekbones. Crackling blue eyes. Major-league shoulders. He could easily be on camera, maybe in someplace like Santa Fe, or Cheyenne, where those supertight jeans, leather jacket and kick-ass boots would wow the female eighteen-to-forty-nine demos. Which, of course, I’m still in.

  “It’s what they call a compliment, McNally,” he says. “You’ve still got it goin’on, as they say.” Tipping the tire against the car, he cranks the black metal jack one notch higher. With a few quick motions, he lifts the tire into place and slams on a wrench to tighten the lug nuts.

  “You ever think of going network? Maybe some all-news operation? Can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be after you. Emmys, all that. You’re too big for Boston, I’d say.”

  Keeping both hands on the wrench, he stops midmotion. He looks up at me, suddenly serious. “I m
ean it. They ever call you?”

  A wave of suspicion flares, disturbingly, through my mind. Can he possibly know about Kevin’s job offer? He can’t. Kevin told me no one knows. What’s more, that “still got it goin’ on” remark is, again, uncomfortably close to the line. Or maybe I’m too sensitive. I mean, I was thinking about his jeans, right? But the observation was just clinical. I would never consider saying it out loud.

  I wave a leather glove in his direction, trying to diffuse the moment. We just had a pretty narrow escape. It’s cold. We have work to do. Franklin’s waiting. The mechanic is waiting. And there must be a glass of wine and Josh’s fireplace in my future.

  “Hey, Boston’s market five,” I say. “How’s that tire coming?”

  “Changing the subject. Got it.” With a nod and an overbroad wink, J.T. returns to work.

  He’s not even attempting to hide his smile.

  The Power House Garage in Boston’s South End reeks of oil and gas and rubber. Drills and power tools whine. Engines rev, ignitions churn. I’m sure the whole place is full of carbon monoxide. Which reminds me, for a melancholy moment, of Dorothy Wirt. A twist of concern, unwelcome and unpleasant, begins an uncomfortable spiral. How am I going to make all of this work?

  Reining myself back into the moment, I put my other life on hold. Behind the massive glass doors of the garage, we’re warm and finally dry. I’ll think about the rest of it later.

  Our rented black hatchback is high on a mechanical lift, its spare tire a glaringly obvious mismatch. Franklin, J.T. and mechanic Frick Jones, all wearing thick plastic safety goggles held on by orange plastic straps, are conferring underneath the chassis, heads tilted back, looking up at something. I know my limitations. I wouldn’t recognize a broken rotary valve if I saw one, but I’ll learn about it soon enough. We didn’t tell Frick about the recall. We want to see what, if anything, he finds on his own.

  I take a sip of the first chamomile tea I’ve ever had in a garage and wait for the verdict on our rental car. As so often happens in journalism, bad news would be good news.

  “Here’s your problem, Charlie.” Frick Jones, who looks more like my ninth-grade chemistry teacher than an auto mechanic, selects a pencil-thin flashlight from a wide tool belt and shines it at the car’s undercarriage. “You can see it right here. The torsion bar on the rotary valve is cracked. Actually, it’s almost cracked through.”

  Score one for us. With Frick’s pronouncement, we have our story confirmed.

  I glance at Franklin, who’s giving me a low-key thumbs-up at the good-bad news. He says something to J.T., pointing. The photographer takes off his goggles and picks up his camera from a sleek black Formica counter, adjusting the viewfinder. Franklin clicks open the tripod, a not-so-subtle suggestion to J.T. that he expects rock-steady shots of the broken rotary valve.

  Frick’s still talking, playing the light beam back and forth between the two front tires. “Good thing you brought it to us when you did, in fact. Couple more yanks on the steering wheel and you might have lost your control. You say you had a flat tire on the way here? In the snow?”

  He emerges from under the car, slowly shaking his head. He points the flashlight at my chest. “Lucky you.”

  My knees, almost recovered, suffer a brief relapse. I know my smile is weak. “You can fix it, right?”

  “One more thing,” Frick says, pushing a red button on a gizmo hanging from the ceiling. The lift begins to lower. With a puff of hydraulics, then a soft clank, the car hits bottom. Frick clicks open the hood and points to what even I know is the battery.

  “Look here. This black wire. One battery lead is loose. Look.”

  He reaches forward, and with two fingers, wiggles a thin black cable. Then he tightens the nut that’s attaching the cable to a stubby metal post on the battery.

  “Sometimes the cable works itself loose. Especially on newer cars. Easy enough to fix. But if that had come off while you were driving, you’d have lost power. Car wouldn’t have started again.”

  Through his goggles, I can read Frick’s troubled expression.

  “You don’t want the battery lead to come off.” He gives me the flashlight in the chest again. “Like I said. Lucky you.”

  “I’m set to roll, McNally.” J.T.’s voice interrupts the cataloging of our near disaster. “Whenever you say, I’ll—”

  “Can you put the lift up again, Frick? First we’ll need you showing the problem to Charlotte,” Franklin interrupts J.T., yanking back the alpha-dog position. He’s put his goggles on top of his head and now looks like a prepped-out biker. “She’ll need goggles. And then we’ll need to show you repairing it.”

  J.T. is ignoring the tripod and ignoring Franklin. “I’ll shoot off the shoulder. So it matches the other stuff we have. You know. The accident.”

  The accident. Gabe and Sophie. Declan Ross. Car smashed into the guardrail. A rented car. As I watch J.T. roll off a few shots of Frick puttering with the engine, I realize what’s haunting me.

  “Frick, can you check one more thing?” I put down my paper cup of tea and point to the black car. A dark hunch is percolating. “We didn’t tell you about this initially, but can you check to see if this car has air bags?”

  “See if it has air bags?” Frick looks puzzled. He hands me a pair of goofy-looking clear plastic goggles. “Of course it does.”

  “It’s a 2006,” Franklin puts in. “It’s the law. They all have air bags.”

  “They’re supposed to,” I say.

  “No air bags in our car,” I say, shaking my head. “Can you believe it? And what if there were no air bags in the Ross car? And that’s why they didn’t inflate?” Frick’s confirmation of my hunch haunts me as we leave the garage. I click open the passenger door of our news car, waving Franklin into the driver’s seat. “You drive, okay? I’ve had enough for one day.”

  J.T. is returning the now-repaired hatchback to RCK. We got all the video we need. The defective torsion bar—now wrapped in tissue paper in my briefcase—we kept for evidence. Franklin and I are heading back to the station to drop off our tapes. We have a potentially blockbuster story. And a potentially blockbuster dilemma.

  “What made you think of the air bags?” Franklin says, steering us out of our parking space and toward Huntington Street. “I’ll never understand how your brain works, Charlotte. It’s a beautiful thing. Strange, but beautiful.”

  “Yeah, well. Declan’s didn’t go off, remember? And that’s been bugging me. It didn’t make sense. They should have. And I read someplace, air bags are the hot new item to steal. Bad guys rip them out, replace the covers, then resell the air bags on the black market. Who’d know? Until there’s an accident, of course.”

  I shudder. Most people are so trusting. And others are so cynically money hungry. That’s a dangerous combination. I pause, considering.

  “If other RCK cars have no air bags, does Randall Kindell know about it? Is he supplying stolen air bags for the black market? If so, we should get the story on TV right now. Soon as we can. Maybe even before the ratings start. The next crash could be fatal, you know. Lives are at stake.”

  “Charlotte, the February book is only three weeks away.” He’s shaking his head. “I think we can wait. And then put together two stories. We’ll do unrepaired recalls first, then hit them with the big air-bag scoop. Even better, here’s what I’m thinking. What if Kindell’s doing it across the country? In all the RCK franchises?”

  Franklin pantomimes basketball. “Slam dunk. A national story.”

  We stop at a red light. I reach over and touch Franklin’s arm. I need him to look at me for a moment.

  “But, Franko? What if Kindell doesn’t know? What if someone is renting cars and then ripping out air bags? Then it’s not just about RCK, but could be happening at every rental-car place. Don’t you feel some obligation to tell the police? Warn Kindell? Warn the public? Right now?”

  “Are you losing it, girlfriend? Where’s the ratings-hungry Charlotte I signe
d up to work with? You know it’s all about big results. And big numbers.”

  The light turns green. Franklin shifts gears into Drive, puffing incredulously as he turns left onto Charles Street.

  “You can’t win the sweeps if your story’s on too early. And we’re in it to win it.”

  Franklin and I are partners. But, more and more, it seems like we’re not on the same team.

  I’ve always thought my job as an investigative reporter meant helping people, warning them of danger, keeping them from harm. And exposing the bad guys. It always worked. I treasure every Emmy, but the need to consider schedule before substance seems so cynical. Am I still a good guy if I keep a secret just to boost the ratings?

  Why haven’t I thought of this before? Who’s suddenly out of balance? Franklin? Or me?

  “Franko? J.T. and I could have been killed this afternoon. We were driving a dangerous car. Unrepaired recall, no air bags. Yes, we got the video. Yes, it all worked out in the end. But Frick said it—we were lucky. I say we talk to Kevin. Monday, first thing. Tell him what we know. And I bet he’ll want to get this on the air. Sooner rather than later.”

  Franklin waves me off, shrugging. “Bet he won’t. I bet he’ll grab the fifth-floor graphics gang and whip up some hot ‘Charlie McNally Investigates’ promo spots. For February. Bet you ten thousand dollars.”

  “You’re on,” I say. But I’m not exactly sure who’s going to win that imaginary bet. On the other hand, truth be told, we don’t really have a story. Just suspicions. We certainly don’t have enough nailed down to go on the air. What if we sent viewers into a panic over missing air bags and it turned out to be a coincidence? Or a one-time-only event? Putting that on television would do far more harm than good. I struggle to regain my news equilibrium. Maybe I’m suffering PTSD from this afternoon.