Faces of the Gone

by Brad Parks

  Before long I was back in a familiar place: on Tina’s couch, covered in a blanket, very much alone.

  The Director awoke early, a habit he picked up in the military and had been unable to shake, even fifteen years after his last salute. It pleased him to know he started his day while most of the world slept. He noticed it was a trait common among the high-powered CEOs profiled on the cover of those business magazines. They were all early risers.

  The Director considered himself their peer, even if he never got his due for it. So he set his alarm clock for 4 A.M.

  He tiptoed down to the gym he had built in the basement of his suburban New Jersey home. His wife and three children complained about the noise of iron slapping iron interrupting their sleep, so he had soundproofed it like a recording studio. Only the softest ping escaped, not nearly enough noise to wake them.

  The Director had been working out six days a week since he left the military. He once swore he would never allow himself to get soft—he would keep the same iron-hard stomach as when he had been the fittest colonel in the army.

  Alas, civilian food agreed with him too much. And as his metabolism slowed with age, he made a new vow: he would never allow himself to get weak. He took pride in still being able to bench-press over three hundred pounds. At an age, fifty-five, when some men were thinking about whether or not they would be able to pick up their grandchildren, the Director was still putting up personal bests in his basement weight room.

  He completed his workout and shower and was midway through a breakfast of bran cereal and yogurt when he heard the thudding of the newspaper against the door. The Director glanced at his watch, annoyed. It was 5:33. He liked to have his paper earlier.

  All those high-powered executives the Director read about started their days by reading two or three newspapers. The Director felt one was sufficient, and his paper of choice was the Eagle-Examiner. He retrieved it from the front porch and took it to the breakfast table, but lost his appetite when he read the first headline: “Heroin links victims in quadruple murder.”

  The Director felt sweat pop on his brow. He wanted to break something. But no. His wife would ask what had him so upset. He had to control his rage.

  How was this even possible? Had the police figured it out? It couldn’t be. He had informants inside police headquarters. They’d mentioned nothing about this.

  The Director started reading and realized this was just some reporter who had stumbled across some things and had managed to make a few lucky guesses. The Director relaxed. The situation could still be controlled if he acted quickly. He picked up the phone and called Monty, waking him from a sound sleep.

  “What is it, Director?” Monty said groggily.

  “Wake up, Monty,” the Director told him. “We have some damage control to do.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The next morning, I at least had one small consolation prize. The paper Tina thoughtfully left on the coffee table for me had my story stripped across the top of A1 with the headline “Heroin links victims in quadruple murder.”

  I don’t mind admitting that, even after a couple thousand bylines, I still enjoyed seeing my name in the newspaper. I was just settling in to read the latest one when my phone rang. It was from the 973 area code, but it was a number I hadn’t seen before.

  “Carter Ross.”

  “Sir, this is the Nutley Police Department calling.”

  “Hi,” I said, bewildered.

  “Sir, I have some bad news about your house,” he said. “There’s been an explosion.”

  Before hanging up the phone, the cop told me “the incident” occurred at 7:29 A.M., when several 911 calls were received. The Nutley Fire Department arrived at “the residence” by 7:34. EMS arrived at 7:35 but there were no known injuries. I tried to stick the details in my mostly numb brain and agreed to meet the police at my house. I hung up before I had the presence of mind to ask any meaningful questions, such as, “Explosion? What the hell do you mean by explosion?”

  I staggered into Tina’s kitchen, where I found a sticky note: “7:45. Went jogging. Bagels in the cabinet next to the fridge. Back by 8:30. Tina.”

  I considered waiting for her to return, because it might be nice to have some company, then decided against it. She had already seen enough of me blubbering for one lifetime.

  Grabbing a pen, I scribbled, “8:10. Had to leave in a hurry. Call you later. Carter.”

  I swiped a bagel then went down to my Malibu, wondering if it was now the only thing I owned besides the wrinkled clothes on my back. This thought alone should have freaked me out, but I still felt detached, like this wasn’t really happening. House fires were something I wrote about, not something I experienced firsthand.

  As I drove toward Nutley, I forced myself to think rationally. Had I left the stove on? Couldn’t be. My last meal at home was cold cereal. Lightning? No. It was December. Faulty wiring? Gas leak? Had to be something like that. The house is old. Was old.

  I tried to become aware of my breathing and remind myself there were worse things. Sure, all my belongings were probably destroyed. But most of it could be replaced. And, sure, there was some irreplaceable stuff—the pictures, the keepsakes, the school yearbooks, every newspaper article I had ever written . . .

  But, hell, it could have been me in there. Most any other morning, it would have been me in there. This was clearly a rare triumph for the power of thinking with the little brain: if I hadn’t been trying to get into Tina’s pants, the Nutley fire chief would be explaining to my parents that his crew was busy picking up my remains with tweezers.

  Really, as long as Deadline had managed to find a way out, the insurance would cover everything else, right? I would get a new house, a whole bunch of new stuff. I’d probably even get new golf clubs out of the deal. And how bad would that be?

  As I approached my street, I began hearing this awful chorus of car alarms—there had to be fifty of them going off at once. I made the turn on my street but could only get partway down, what with the logjam of emergency vehicles.

  Then I saw it, amid the usual neat row of houses along my street: this big, gaping hole, like someone had punched out a tooth. As I got closer, I saw a scrap heap where my bungalow once stood. There were pieces of siding and other various splinters on the lawn and street—even a few pieces stuck in my neighbors’ trees—but nothing that resembled a house remained.

  A small clump of my neighbors, most of whom only knew me as the childless bachelor who wasn’t home very much, had formed at a safe distance on the sidewalk. As I got out of my car, my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Scalabrine, rushed up to me. Mrs. Scalabrine was a youngish widow, maybe sixty-five, and I don’t think we had talked about anything more than the weather the entire time I lived there.

  But she was suddenly my best friend.

  “Oh, Carter, thank goodness,” she said, giving me an awkwardly intense hug. “We thought you were inside.”

  I hugged her back, even though I didn’t want to. The rest of my neighbors were just staring at me, ashen-faced, as though they were expecting something dramatic: ranting, raving, collapsing on the sidewalk, flipping out. I got the feeling they were mostly there for the theater of it and now they were expecting a show.

  Speaking of which, where were the TV trucks? It was odd they weren’t here. Generally those guys religiously monitored the incident pager, a network of nuts who listen in on fire and police frequency and send out real-time messages about what’s going on. My house blowing up certainly would have been mentioned. A good house explosion usually got the TV trucks swarming from all angles.

  Instead, it was just me, the broken remains of my home, a variety of people in uniforms, and my gawking neighbors.

  “So what happened?” I said. They all looked at me like, What do you think happened, you halfwit? Your house blew up. Then they all started looking at Mrs. Scalabrine, who clearly had something to say.

  “I saw a man in a white van,” she said nervously. “I mean, I saw
him getting out of a white van. I didn’t see his face—the police asked me if I did, but I really didn’t. All I saw is he was white and he was big, like six five, and real husky, like three hundred pounds at least.”

  The other neighbors, who had heard this story already, were nodding in corroboration. I thought about what Rosa Bricker had said about the size of the shooter, and how it was probably someone between six three and six five.

  “I saw him run up on your lawn, right over there,” she said, gesturing in the direction of the pile of lumber where my house once stood. “And it looked like he threw something inside. And then he ran back to the van and was gone.”

  Another neighbor, whose name was probably Cavanaugh—he was an actuary, I think—took the story from there.

  “I heard the wheels squealing as I got out of the shower,” he said. “It was like the guy wanted to get away fast. And all of a sudden there was this huge BaaBOOOM. It was just like that: first it went baa and then it went boom.”

  The other neighbors nodded, confirming that the “baa” and the “boom” had been recorded as separate incidents.

  “It was like a bomb went off,” said one of my neighbors, who was either Nancy, Pat, or Angela—I could never quite remember.

  “All of my windows on this side of the house blew out,” Mrs. Scalabrine said, pointing toward her place.

  “Some of my unicorn figurines fell off my mantel,” Nancy-PatAngela said.

  I nodded, as if I shared concern for NancyPatAngela’s unicorns, unable to quite grasp the absurdity that they were talking about their windows and knickknacks when I had lost my entire house and everything inside it.

  “Anyone seen my cat?” I asked.

  No one answered.

  The neighbors eventually filtered out, wandering off to work or the gym or whatever it was they had planned for their mornings. I had a brief conversation with the Nutley police, who said they were starting an investigation based on Mrs. Scalabrine’s eyewitness account—though, as I already knew, she wasn’t giving them much to go on.

  Before long, I was left alone with the realization that someone in this world wanted me dead. It was a surprisingly difficult concept to grasp, especially for a typically healthy thirty-something guy who lumped in dying with hearing aids, estate planning, and regularity in the category of Things I’ll Worry About in Forty Years.

  People at cocktail parties who find out what I do for a living somehow think I must receive death threats all the time, because I so frequently find myself writing bad things about scary people. But I had only gotten one death threat in my career—and even that was from a guy who was just blowing off steam. He was a local slumlord I had exposed for keeping his tenants without heat. The day the story ran, he yelled into my cell phone that I had ruined his life and he was going to kill me. He called back later in the day to apologize. I told him he could make it up to me by filling his building’s oil tank.

  Fact is, even the scary people recognize the newspaper reporter is merely the messenger. They might not like me writing about them very much. They might hope I stop doing it. They might wish I fall through an empty manhole cover and be devoured by a sewer-dwelling alligator. But ultimately the scary people are smart enough to know killing a newspaper reporter will only add to their problems. It’s an extension of the old Mark Twain saw about not picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

  Think about it: how often do you hear about a newspaper reporter in this country being killed for something they wrote? It just doesn’t happen.

  Except it came close to happening to me. And when I thought about how close, I started to shake. I’ve heard it said—mostly by blowhard World War II veterans—that a man doesn’t really know what he’s made of until he faces death head-on. Based on this experience, I think I was made of something resembling lime Jell-O.

  I was scared out of my quivering, gelatinous mind. Whoever I was dealing with had killed four people already—perhaps more—and obviously didn’t mind adding to the body count. In this case, he had read one article, decided his world would be better off without me in it, and clearly had the means to make that happen.

  And he did it in frighteningly short order. I tried to do the math: our distributors were guaranteed to get their daily supply of papers by 4 A.M. From the distributor it went to the carriers around five. So the story was pretty much everywhere in New Jersey by six, at the latest. That meant it had taken this guy a mere hour and a half to make it look like the Big Bad Wolf had visited my little straw house, huffed, puffed, and blown it down.

  He knew where I lived—or used to live, anyway. He knew where I worked. It was possible he knew what I looked like, too: my head shot had been in the paper on occasion. Did he also know what car I drove? Did he have people watching me? Should I worry about rounding some corner and having a gun pointing in my face?

  I didn’t know. I guess that was the most terrifying thing of all; someone was trying to kill me and I didn’t know who, what, when, or how.

  All I really knew was why. That damn article. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much different it was than so many of the others I had written. This wasn’t just a case of shooting the messenger. It’s not like I was merely quoting some prosecutor or digging through documents. This was news I’d uncovered myself. And whoever was trying to kill me wanted to make damn sure I didn’t find anything else.

  Having nowhere else to go, I started driving toward Newark. I was midway through my journey when my cell phone rang. It was Tina.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Well, someone disappeared pretty quickly this morning,” she said, her voice full of flirtatious energy. “Were you afraid I was going to make you eat eggs or something?”

  “No,” I said.

  There was a pause on the end.

  “Don’t play that game with me,” she said.

  “Huh?” I mustered.

  “The ‘I’m embarrassed I got emotional and now I’m going to shut you out’ game,” she said. “Look, I know last night took a different turn from where we thought it was going and you ended up crying on my shoulder a little bit. It doesn’t make you less of a man. I thought you were more evolved than that. It’s no big—”

  “Tina, shut up,” I said. “My house blew up, okay?”

  Her response was confusion, then alarm, then concern. Over the next several minutes, I took her through what I had seen and heard. “So, basically,” I concluded, “someone doesn’t like me very much.”

  “Do you think it’s the same someone who killed those people on Ludlow Street?”

  “I can’t think of anyone else who’d want me dead that badly.”

  “Wait a second,” Tina said. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, no.”

  “What?”

  “The incident pager has been going nuts all morning and I didn’t figure it out until just now. Oh, my God.”

  “Figure what out?”

  She started reading like she was ticking off a list: “House explosion in Nutley. Fire on Eighteenth Street in Newark. Fire at Go-Go Bar in Irvington. Carter, those are all places you wrote about in your story!”

  I was speechless. The man in the white van wasn’t merely going after me. He was covering his tracks. He was destroying the places where I had found evidence or might have kept evidence, making sure no one else—like, say, the police—could retrace my steps.

  “Tina, I gotta go,” I said.

  “Wait, why?”

  “I’m heading to that fire on Eighteenth Street.”

  “Carter, you’re in no shape to be chasing fire trucks. You’re out of your mind.”

  “Probably, but I’m hanging up now.”

  “Please don’t,” she said. “Come into the newsroom. I don’t want you out there. You’ll be safer here.”

  “No,” I said. “Until I figure out who’s doing this, I won’t be safe anywhere.”

  I shut off my cell phone so Tina couldn’t bug me and turned in the direction of Miss B’s apa
rtment on 18th Street. I was still two blocks away when I came to a police barricade, but I could already see her building. It was mostly untouched, except for the upper right quarter of it, where Miss B lived. That part was streaked by black scorch marks and still steaming slightly. It looked soggy. The street outside was filled with puddles and fire trucks.

  I left the safety of the Malibu, and as I got closer, I had this sense that whatever had been used on Miss B’s apartment was different from what razed my bungalow. First off, the building was structurally sound. There were no pieces of it scattered hither and yon, as there had been with my place. For that matter, none of the surrounding buildings appeared to have been touched—there were no blown-out windows. I also didn’t hear any car alarms.

  It looked more like any of the number of slum-building fires I had written about: the cause of the fire always turned out to be a shorted-out space heater, an oven someone had left open for warmth, a cigarette igniting a couch, or something similarly banal.

  I was now directly across the street from the building. Two TV stations were already there, which may have explained why my house blowing up hadn’t attracted any coverage. The TV guys had decided an apartment fire in Newark was more interesting.

  One of the cameras was busy filming a man-on-the-street reporter who was pretending to be compassionate as he interviewed the shocked and bewildered neighbors. The other camera was shooting B-roll of the smoldering building while a pissy-looking blond reporter bitched into her cell phone about how she should be somewhere else.

  Still, I was a little surprised more camera crews weren’t there. Fires combined the three elements necessary for local TV news: human tragedy, an easy-to-tell story, and great visuals. Where was the rest of the horde?

  Not that I was complaining. And since neither crew seemed to be concerned with what had actually happened, I was able to sidle up to the Newark Fire Department captain who was overseeing the operation. He was a former high school basketball star—good enough to get himself a D1 scholarship, not good enough to take it any further—and still thought of himself as a local hero. I did nothing to disavow him of that and put his name in the newspaper whenever I got the chance. We were pals.