Black River

by G. M. Ford

  Mikhail Ivanov stepped between the men. He used his arms to push Balagula back a step. “The car is ready,” he said. “We must go.”

  Balagula kept his gaze locked on Corso as the bailiffs stepped into the gap between the two men. “We’ll meet again, Mr. Corso. I’m sure of it.”

  “In hell,” Corso said, as Ivanov steered his boss through the hinged gate and toward the doors. No one moved until the door closed behind the pair.

  A massive sigh from Renee Rogers pulled Corso’s attention from the door. “You do have a way with people,” she said, as she snapped her briefcase shut. Against the far wall, Ray Butler leaned, chatting into the phone, oblivious to the confrontation. “After twenty-odd years of marriage and three kids, Ray and his wife Junie just bought their first house. In Bethesda. They’re like teenagers all over again.”

  “Must be nice,” Corso said without meaning it.

  She inclined her head toward the pair of bailiffs. “These gentlemen have kindly agreed to escort me out through the parking garage. I’m told we can avoid the media that way. Would you care to join me?”

  Corso stared up the aisle toward the door. “Sure,” he said, without looking her way.

  Stopping at the top of the aisle, Nicholas Balagula looked back at Corso and the prosecution team. His color was deeper than usual. Ivanov could tell that his friend’s encounter with Corso had left him feeling peevish and unfulfilled, and thus Ivanov had an inkling of what was to come next.

  “Tonight,” was all Balagula said.

  “I’ve had to make alternative arrangements,” Ivanov said.

  “Oh?”

  “Our customary provider has refused to continue.”

  “There are others, I’m sure.”

  “He objects to the condition in which the goods were returned.”

  “Surely there can be no shortage.”

  Ivanov shrugged. “Your tastes are difficult.”

  “Tonight,” Nicholas Balagula said again.

  5

  Tuesday, October 17

  4:09 p.m.

  She pulled the olive from the red plastic sword, popped it into her mouth, and chewed slowly. “So, what is it about the Nicholas Balagula saga that so captures your attention, Mr. Corso?” she asked, when she’d finished.

  “What do you mean?”

  They sat on opposite sides of a scarred oak table, four blocks west of the courthouse. Twenty years ago, Vito’s had been the favored watering hole of Seattle’s movers and shakers. These days it was just another remnant waiting for the wrecking ball. Seattle at the millennium. If it wasn’t glitzy, it was gone.

  Renee Rogers downed the final swallows of her second Bombay Sapphire martini and wiped her full lips with her cocktail napkin. “You’ve been following this case from the beginning.” She ate the other olive and gestured to the bartender for another drink. “I remember you sitting in the first row of the balcony during the San Francisco trial. I’d see you up there every day and wonder who you were.”

  “Balagula offends my sense of the natural order of things.”

  “How so?”

  Corso thought it over. “I guess there’s a part of me that believes something corny like What goes around comes around. That things are intended to be a certain way, and if you deviate too far you suffer the consequences.”

  “A moral order.”

  “Something more organic. More like a river, maybe,” Corso said. “One of those rustbelt rivers where they poured so many toxins into the water it finally caught fire. And then—you know—all they had to do was to stop the dumping, and a couple of years later it went right back to being a river again. Nothing Balagula touches is ever the same again. It’s like he spreads pestilence or something.” He made a face. “Sounds stupid when I say it out loud.”

  “I understand,” she said. “I know the type. I’ve spent the last seventeen years putting them behind bars.”

  “Not guys like him. Most people kill because they don’t see any way out, or in the heat of passion, or because they’ve got a blood lust. Balagula’s used murder as a business strategy from the beginning, even when the stakes were small.”

  “Since the day he arrived.”

  “All the way back to when he first surfaced in Brighton Beach fifteen years ago, claiming to be a wholesale jeweler. Next thing you know, the four biggest wholesale jewelers in Brooklyn go missing within the same six-month period and Balagula ends up with all their business.”

  When she smiled, he could see the lines in the corners of her gray eyes. He wondered if the color was natural or contact lenses.

  “Do I detect a streak of self-righteousness in the famous writer?” she asked.

  “My mama used to say I had enough moral indignation for a dozen preachers.” Corso took a sip of beer and checked his watch.

  “I understand you’re a year late with the book.”

  Corso raised an eyebrow. “A book needs an ending.”

  She leaned back in the chair, rested the base of the martini glass against her sternum, and shook her head sadly. “The end to this one’s been a long time coming.” She sighed.

  “I’m pretty sure my publisher would agree.”

  “You’ve got enough clout to make them wait.”

  “It’s not about clout,” Corso said. “It’s not about the quality of your work or the love of words. It’s about money, pure and simple. If you’re making them money, they’ll put up with you. If you’re not, you go back to your day job.”

  She winced. “I always looked at publishing as something romantic.” She waved the martini glass in the air. “Something almost mystical,” she said.

  “And I used to think truth and justice would just naturally prevail,” Corso said, with a shrug. A silence settled around them as he poured the remains of the Tsingtao into his beer glass. “Who knew?” he added.

  The bartender appeared at her elbow with another martini. She waited for him to leave and then picked up the glass. “Here’s to shattered illusions.”

  Corso raised his glass. She took a sip, reached over and clicked his glass with hers, and took another sip. “This is my last case for the AGO,” she said.

  “So I hear.”

  “I’ve got seventeen years in.”

  “Life goes on. You’re a survivor.”

  She offered a wry smile. “Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Corso laughed. “I’ve certainly had my ups and downs.”

  “About ten million of them, as I recall.”

  “The paper settled for six million and change.”

  “How’d you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m like one of those Thomas Hardy characters. I just keep on keeping on.”

  “Seriously,” she said. “I haven’t worked in the private sector since I had a job at a root-beer stand. I’m damaged goods.”

  Corso chuckled. “And now you find yourself sitting across the table from one of the most notorious pieces of damaged goods on the planet, and you figure you might as well get a little advice on plague dispersal.”

  She wrinkled her nose and laughed into her glass. “Something like that.”

  “You got any offers?”

  “A few.”

  “I had exactly one. One publisher with a failing family newspaper who decided she was so desperate to save the paper that she’d hire the Typhoid Mary of the newspaper business just for the publicity.”

  “And?”

  “And one thing led to another. We hit a couple of big stories. The paper righted itself. I wrote a book. Turned out to be a big seller. So I wrote another one.” He shrugged. “Life went on.”

  “Did you feel exonerated?”

  “You mean like, ‘You had me down and look at me now’?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “It’s too arbitrary for that.”

  “Arbitrary how?”

  Corso thought it over. “My whole life was aimed at b
eing a reporter. Not just a reporter but the best reporter. I was going to win a Pulitzer. I was going to win the Nobel Prize. As far as I was concerned , it was my destiny.” He looked down at the table and then up at Renee Rogers. “You understand what I’m saying? That was my path. The rest of this”—he waved a hand—“everything that’s happened since is just me stumbling around the woods. It’s not like I planned any of it. It just happened. It’s arbitrary.”

  “You see the Post Intelligencer yesterday?”

  “No. Why?”

  “They did a big story on you: RECLUSIVE LOCAL WRITER SURFACES. About how you were going to be the only spectator allowed in the courtroom. About you getting fired by the New York Times for fabricating a story, about the lawsuit and the settlement, how you’ve since become a bestselling author and all that.” She ate another olive and took a sip of the martini. “They said you’d never told your version of the New York Times story. They said you have a standing offer from Barbara Walters. Is that true?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’s that? Most everybody wants to tell their side of the story.”

  “Because nobody in their right mind would believe me if I did.”

  “Try me.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “No fair,” she teased. “You know my story. How I let a guy with a history of jury tampering compromise a jury of mine.”

  “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine?”

  Her eyes held a wicked gleam. “Something like that,” she said.

  Corso heaved a sigh. “I got hustled,” he said. “I got overconfident and started reading my own press clippings about how I was destined for a Pulitzer. Next thing I knew, I was hot on the trail of a guy a lot like Balagula, and everything was going my way. Witnesses were coming out of the woodwork to sign depositions. Everything was falling into place for what was going to be the exposé of the century. The biggest story since Watergate.”

  “And that didn’t ring any bells with you?”

  “I was so full of myself, it seemed like it was my destiny.”

  She nodded. “I remember the feeling,” she said sadly. “I was absolutely certain that nobody could get to my jury.” She sat and watched as he rolled his glass between the palms of his hands. Finally she asked, “Why is it newspapers have trouble printing your name without the word reclusive as part of the package?”

  “I’ve had my fifteen minutes. It’s somebody else’s turn.”

  Corso downed the rest of his beer. The cold liquid did nothing to stem the dryness of his throat.

  “I gotta go,” he said. “Time and deadlines wait for no man.” He reached into his pocket, but she waved him off. “I’ve got it covered,” she said, with a smile. “Look at it as your tax dollars at work.”

  “Thanks,” Corso offered. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He got to his feet and retrieved his coat from the rack by the door. He could feel her eyes moving over him like ants as he shrugged his way into the coat and stepped out through the stained-glass doors.

  Outside, the promise of rain had been kept. Huge silver raindrops exploded on impact with the asphalt. Cars sloshed down Fifth Avenue, swept along inside silver canopies of mist. Corso pulled the coat tight around his neck and began walking uphill.

  6

  Tuesday, October 17

  4:13 p.m.

  Half his index finger was missing. Water dripped from the squared-off tip as he pointed toward the far end of the lot at a pair of buildings, barely visible through the rain.

  Fifty-something with a narrow face that hadn’t seen a razor in a week, he wore rubber boots and a sewer suit, the ensemble topped off by a drooping army camouflage hat.

  “Building on the right!” he shouted above the din. “Name’s Ball, Joe Ball. He’s the foreman. If anybody can help you, he’s the guy.”

  “Thanks!” Meg Dougherty yelled out the car window.

  When he nodded you’re-welcome a river ran from the brim of his floppy hat, splashing down onto the ground at his feet. He shook his head.

  “Been around here twenty years!” he shouted. “Don’t ever remember it raining any more than lately.”

  “Me neither.” Shattered raindrops wet Dougherty’s left cheek. She had her finger on the window handle but hesitated.

  “Not this hard, this long!”

  “It’s almost biblical,” she agreed.

  He smiled, revealing a set of tombstone teeth, tilted and oddly spaced along his gums.

  “That’s what my old woman says,” he said. “Says the Day of Judgment is at hand. Says we’re all gonna pay for our sins this time around.”

  “I sure hope not,” was all she could come up with.

  He showed his teeth again. “You and me both, lady,” he said. He turned and walked to a battered Chevy pickup, where he offered a final wave and climbed in.

  Dougherty rolled up the window, pulled the shift into drive, and started bouncing down the gravel track toward the buildings in the distance.

  The raindrops were huge, pounding the little car’s sheet metal as she drove the quarter mile. The flailing wipers barely broke even. From fifty yards, she could finally make out the buildings. A pair of old-fashioned Quonset huts, EVERGREEN EQUIPMENT painted on the front of each. A black sign on the door of the right-hand building read OFFICE. NO ADMITTANCE.

  Dougherty parked the Toyota parallel to the front of the building, as close to the office door as possible. She shut off the engine, pulled the hood of her cape over her head, and then sat for a moment, working up the courage to step out into the torrent. With a sigh, she elbowed the door open, stepped out, and made a dash for the office.

  The office was old and hot and empty. In the right front corner of the space, a gas-fired stove poured too much heat into the room. Behind the scarred counter, an orange NO SMOKING sign loomed over a pair of gray metal desks, whose tops were awash in a rainbow of paperwork. The walls were covered with yellowed posters. Several had come partially loose and curled at the edges: CATERPILLAR, PETERBILT, BRUNSWICK BEAR-INGS. An Arcadia Machine Shop calendar featuring a spectacularly endowed blonde wearing little more than a surprised expression and a red polka-dot thong. At the back of the room, another door stood ajar.

  “Hello!” she called. She waited and then called again, louder this time. Nothing. The spring-loaded gate squealed as Dougherty pushed through. “Hello,” she called a third time. Still nothing. And then, from somewhere in the bowels of the building, she heard a noise. Not words, more like a squeal. A dog, maybe.

  She walked behind the desks and pulled the rear door open. Big as an airplane hanger, the building smelled of old grease and cheap cigars. The walls were lined with workbenches and tool cribs. The floor was littered with machinery in various stages of repair. Along the far wall sat a road grader, its blade removed and lying next to the huge tires. A pair of dump trucks were parked bumper to bumper in the center of the space. Across the way, a rusted bulldozer lay in pieces, its parts scattered about the floor like the skeleton of some ancient beast.

  The noise reached her ears again, high-pitched and unintelligible. She waited a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom and then began to pick her way forward, moving toward the sound, stepping carefully around the debris on the floor. Skirting the dump trucks, she opened her mouth to call, then heard the word and swallowed it.

  “Please,” someone blubbered. “Please.”

  She stood still. The fear and desperation were palpable. She could feel the tension on her skin, as she steadied herself on a filthy fender and took another step forward. She was close now. She heard a hiccup and then a sniffle.

  She peeked around a pile of oil drums. He was in his mid-forties. Bald. Kneeling in the middle of the floor, twenty yards away, his hands clasped in silent prayer. His lips quivered as he mouthed some silent litany. And the tears. His cheeks were wet with tears. “For God’s sake, man, I got three kids,” he whined.

  “Shoulda thoughta that before,” another voice said.<
br />
  “Before you fucked up your end,” yet another voice added.

  The kneeling man waved his folded hands in front of his body like he was ringing a bell. “How was I supposed—”

  “You take money to bury a truck, the truck better stay buried.”

  “You fuck up, you become a loose end,” the second voice said.

  “We leave loose ends, we become loose ends,” said the third.

  “Please,” the guy chanted. “Please.”

  “Shut up.”

  “No way I coulda—”

  Dougherty heard a single flat report. Saw the kneeling man rock backward. Watched as his clasped hands came undone and his arms spread like wings. She gasped as the small red flower bloomed in his right eye and a single rivulet of blood ran down across his face. She stood transfixed as he fell over onto his side, his lips silent now, his single lifeless eye staring down at the floor.

  She clamped a hand over her mouth and began to backpedal.

  “Strike him out,” the second voice said.

  She heard a grunt and two more silenced shots. As she spun on her toes and began to run, her arm hit something and sent it spinning off into space. She didn’t wait for it to land.

  7

  Tuesday, October 17

  4:16 p.m.

  Ramón Javier stepped forward, placed the silencer against the back of the victim’s head, and pulled the trigger twice. The head rocked back and forth as if saying no to the floor. Satisfied, Ramón pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and began to wipe the weapon clean when he heard the sounds. The sound of metal hitting the floor and then the unmistakable scrape of a shoe.

  They moved in unison. Ramón held the automatic up by his right ear and started moving toward the noise. Gerardo required no prompting. He ran for the car.

  Ramón eased along the oil drums, keeping himself covered in case the intruder was armed. He squatted and peeked around the corner. Got just enough of a look to see it was a woman, before the shadow disappeared behind the truck.

  He abandoned his caution now and broke into a full sprint; his long legs propelling him forward into the gloom. By the time he reached the center of the room, he realized he’d been too careful; she was halfway to the office door.