Hard News

by Mark T Sullivan

  There was silence on the receiver, then: “I’ve been surrounded for a long time, Ralph. I’m used to it. I’ve got chores now. No more questions. Time to die. Time to die.”

  The police negotiator said “Go” into his radio. Over the phone Baker heard the crackle of gunfire, people screaming, and behind it all, shrill neighing.

  “Pale Rider? Pale Rider, are you there?”

  When the SWAT team opened up, Croon was ready. He caught the movement of the three officers belaying from the roof on a rope. He fired his camera as they pitched through the open door of the loading dock. Then he was running behind the sniper, squeezing off frame after frame of the tragedy as it unfolded.

  Blitzer dodged two patrol officers assigned to keep her at bay and tore at the real-life drama. Hale made the sign of the cross, then head-shot Peterson the postmaster. One of the female supervisors on the floor kicked Hale in the testicles as he crouched over her dead boss. A SWAT team member completed the pacification by shooting Hale through the right thigh. The bullet continued on and blew a hole the size of a chestnut in Teddy the Pony’s gut. Hale hugged the horse as it died, crying, “Oh, Teddy! Teddy. These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the little horse!”

  Croon and Blitzer bulled their way into the climax scene and knelt before the madman. She scribbled down his fumings. He photographed the gone prophet’s agony and Teddy’s final moments.

  When the medics carried Hale out on a stretcher into a white ambulance, Croon and Blitzer silently thanked the skies for bringing this harsh reality into their lives. It was by far the best misfortune of the year. And it had wound up an hour and a half before final deadline: A perfect package! Then they pointed and giggled: the P.C. Oracle had peeked in to view the carnage. One look at the dead pony and she had keeled sideways and was now on all fours, retching in the bushes.

  Ralph Baker watched it all on television.

  “In a tragic conclusion to today’s hostage situation, a SWAT officer shot a miniature pony to death,” Fairbanks began. “Three others lost their lives in the storming of the city’s post office, including Carl Peterson, the city’s postmaster.”

  The voice of the evening anchorwoman broke in. “You say that the SWAT team shot the pony, Paul. Will there be repercussions?”

  “Undoubtedly, Sharon,” Fairbanks replied, pressing his earphone tightly into his canal. “Already in the crowd behind us, animal activists are gathering to protest the killing. Some are questioning whether the police acted in haste, not taking the pony’s safety into account before storming the loading dock.”

  The camera shifted to show a group of people yelling obscenities at the police. Margaret Savage stood before them, writing down every word.

  Claudette X hoisted Baker out of his chair and hugged him. “Roy Orbision, you were unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable.”

  All around him the members of the newsroom cheered and clapped.

  He murmured, “It’s nothing to be happy about, Claudette. That was a real tragedy.”

  “Nonsense,” Lawlor said. “You did us proud. Ed?”

  Tower seemed as if he didn’t want to be there. He coughed. “You kept your objectivity in a tough go of it. Congratulations. Only a week left?”

  “Yes,” Baker said.

  Tower looked at Lawlor. “Hard to believe the three of us started out together more than thirty years ago. And look at us all now.”

  Baker gave Tower a strange, knowing look that seemed to unnerve the Editor for Newsroom Operations.

  Tower hemmed and hawed, then said, “Well … Ralph … a good job. I, I look forward to reading it.”

  Tower hurried back toward his office.

  Lawlor stared after him, then returned his attention to Baker. “Why don’t you take the week off, on us. Start your retirement early. You earned it.”

  He clapped Baker on the shoulder and went off. Baker plopped down at his desk, exhausted. “I didn’t prevent him from killing Peterson. Ann Landers would have.”

  Claudette X said: “No, she wouldn’t have. Ann Landers and Dear Abby sit in offices reading letters and composing responses. You did your best at something you weren’t prepared to do—negotiating with a lunatic. Now I want you to be your best at something you are prepared to do: writing a good news story.”

  Baker tugged at his impossibly black hair, then nodded: “Claudette, I’m going to need some coffee if I’m going to write this up.”

  Claudette X beamed. “Now you’re talking! I’ll get it myself, Ralph. Cream?”

  “And sugar.” He paused. “And maybe just a splash of vodka … to still the clanging, you know?”

  Claudette X fished in the pockets of her jumpsuit and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “Split of vodka, cream, and sugar it is.”

  Twenty feet away, LaFontaine smiled at the tangy taste he got in his mouth watching the meanest woman he knew hugging the second most burned-out reporter he knew. He opened GOSDI on his computer and took notes for future oral renditions of the day when Roy Orbison rose from the deathbed of his career to sing strange harmony with an end time crackpot and a pony named Ted.

  Dusk Falls …

  MCCARTHY HEARD MUCH OF the action on an all-news radio station. His forehead pounded cold as if he’d been force-fed a gallon of ice cream. Part of the story belonged to him and he hadn’t showed. He slouched in the front seat, asking himself what he’d do if he lost the job. Few alternatives suggested themselves: teaching, he supposed, advertising, or public relations. He shuddered at the latter course, then quelled these thoughts by following radio developments in the Hale shooting until eight o’clock, when a reporter cornered eight-year-old Tess Knight as she left a ballet class. She was the pony’s owner. Her parents hadn’t told her that Teddy was missing. Tess’s sobs made McCarthy think of Miriam and the way she slept with Malice curled at the foot of her bed. He’d told her that her father was going to visit. She just smiled and said, “That’s nice. Will he bring me a present?”

  Depressed, McCarthy switched the broadcast off. There used to be among news outlets an unwritten limit on how deep a reporter would intrude into ordinary people’s lives caught up in extraordinary events. Only tabloid slimeballs ignored the restriction.

  In the past ten years, however, the demarcation of legitimacy had been obliterated between grocery store weeklies and great gray ladies. They all ignored the line that said don’t talk to a little girl who thinks her pony is safe in the barn, not assassinated by a religious lunatic. He didn’t know exactly what started the rampage. Economics, competition, an expanding number of news outlets without a corresponding expansion in real news. Ego. All had played a part though the latter force seemed paramount.

  The sad thing was that he knew the role well. He could see the radio reporter gleefully telling comrades over a beer about how she “broke the Tess Knight angle.” Grief is as hard a currency in the news business as sex and scandal.

  By nine o’clock his butt hurt. He was ravenous and thirsty. He fished in his glove compartment and came up with two stale peanut butter cups. He used Laura Milk’s outdoor faucet for a drink. He fell asleep around eleven.

  At two in the morning he awoke, got out and urinated, then fell asleep again. He was startled awake at three-thirty by the sound of a car door shutting. He shivered. A fog had rolled in off the ocean. Footsteps on the sidewalk now. Two people appeared out of the mist, then evaporated through the back gate at 3345. McCarthy’s breath turned shallow and rapid. At times like these—when a reporter knows he’s on the verge of breaking something really big—the danger lies in allowing preconceptions to obstruct the flow of possibilities. He rapidly raised his arms up and down. He jogged in place to bring blood to his tired brain. He slipped to the rear of the house, waiting just inside the gate for ten minutes, then knocked softly at the back door.

  “Bill?” came a deep gravelly voice from the other side. A male’s voice.

  “My nam
e’s McCarthy. I write for The Post. I think you and Dusk are in trouble and you need to tell someone what you’ve heard. I spoke with Delta Porter and Tabor.”

  There was a shuffling noise and then murmurs and then nothing for several minutes. McCarthy rapped again. A hurtling form in his peripheral vision shot out of the night, clouted him high in the shoulders, and blew him sideways through a trellis and into pricker bushes. Warm liquid the taste of copper trickled from his lip. Something quick and small moved in the mist to his right. He groaned, “Hey, I’m a reporter, I’m not here to …”

  A wildly flung boot grazed McCarthy’s ribs, swung back, and prepared to kick again. McCarthy rolled to his left, dodging the next blow, frantically trying to remember some of the self-defense moves he’d learned in a class several years before.

  He got to his feet and crouched in a triangular stance. The man rushed straight at him. McCarthy stepped off the line of his attack and threw his forearm at what he figured was the man’s head. He missed the head, but caught the neck flush. The man crumpled with a soft grunt. A knife clattered at McCarthy’s feet. He grabbed it, more terrified now than during the fight. The man choked and clawed at his throat. He rolled over onto his knees. McCarthy knelt next to him and held the knife to his neck.

  “I got your knife here, right where you don’t want it,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll tell you again, I’m not here to hurt you.”

  “Fuck you, this is deadly,” the man said, sounding like cellophane being torn.

  “I told you …”

  A woman behind McCarthy and to his left said, “There’s a baseball bat in my hand. I won’t miss. Put the knife down.”

  On instinct, the reporter said, “You may hit me, but I’ll fall forward onto his neck. I don’t put it down until you agree to talk.”

  McCarthy pressed the knife into the man’s skin. He brayed hoarsely, “Chrissy, for fuck’s sake hit him!”

  “Carol Gentry’s dead,” McCarthy blurted. “People who knew her have been hurt. If you don’t tell someone outside the system, you could be next. Homicide is watching the place on Farnsworth. You’re just lucky I figured out Larry’s mother lived here first.”

  The next thirty seconds were the longest of McCarthy’s life. In the chill darkness he focused on the faint glint of the knife. It was as if everything he’d done in the last few months could be absolved by that glimmer.

  The bat thunked on the cement pool deck. “Okay, we talk,” she said.

  “No,” the man complained. “We don’t know who he is.”

  “I don’t care. People got to know. And I’m sick of being all hopped up like this.”

  A door opened. Light flooded out onto the patio. McCarthy squinted at the retreating figure of a woman in a brown bathrobe then down at the scrawny little man in dirty Levi’s, a tan tank top, and a black leather motorcycle vest. The Milkman hadn’t shaved or showered in several days. His brown hair clung oily to his scalp. A falcon tattoo graced his left forearm. Milk winced in the glare and said, “The blade, man.”

  McCarthy relaxed the pressure. Milk slowly got up, rubbing his neck. McCarthy motioned with the knife toward the door and followed the biker inside past a six-foot stack of tabloid papers into a bedroom lit by two naked light bulbs. A cage occupied the center of a three-legged card table jammed against the wall. The white rat inside wiggled its nose at McCarthy. The competing odors of rodent and Laura Milk hung in the air.

  McCarthy tossed the knife out into the darkness, then shut the door. Dusk gave McCarthy a short appraisal, then disappeared behind an army blanket clothespinned to a rope slung across a doorway. Milk straddled a chair with two broken slats and considered the floor as if it were his enemy. Dusk returned with a washcloth.

  “You’re bleeding,” she said to McCarthy. “Wipe yourself off.”

  Dusk dwarfed her boyfriend. She was close to six feet, with heavy bones and generous weight. Her dark hair framed an oblong face dominated by wide brown eyes, pretty by themselves. The dour set of her lips and cheeks stunted the overall effect. She sat, uneasy, on the other chair at the card table. Her fingers trembled as she drew out a cigarette and lit it. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  McCarthy lowered himself gingerly onto the burst springs of a green sofa and pulled out his notebook. “Just what you heard.”

  “Hold on,” Milk said. “I know how this reporting stuff goes down. Right now, you know you can hear it all. But no names.”

  McCarthy grimaced. “Without names I can’t attribute. Without attribution to what I think you know, I can’t publish.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Milk said. “You want to hear it, you play by our rules.”

  McCarthy asked Dusk, “That how you want it?”

  “Got to cover our own, you know?”

  McCarthy thought about it a second, then said, “Deal.”

  Dusk told him that Gentry was not a regular on the Boulevard. She had an attitude and talked about attending sex parties for big money. Gentry even offered the phone number of her outcall service to Dusk and some of the other street whores. Only one, a girl named Shirley Barfield, ever called.

  “You have the phone number?”

  Dusk said, “Yeah, maybe. Hold on a second.”

  She disappeared through a door. Somewhere down the hallway, Laura Milk stirred. She cried out “MARY MAGDALENE REINCARNATES AS FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE!”

  Dusk shushed her.

  Milk jutted his chin toward the door. “She’s the only one can keep my mama in line. Otherwise, they’d have her down to county mental health in some lockup.”

  “You know she can’t stay here much longer.”

  “We’ll care for her here long as we can. It’s her home.”

  Dusk entered the room and handed McCarthy a slip of paper with a phone number and a name on it.

  “Tiger?” McCarthy asked.

  “Probably the brains behind the outcall,” Dusk said. “I never wanted to be under anyone’s thumb like that.”

  McCarthy folded the slip and put it in his pocket.

  Dusk went on, telling McCarthy that Gentry claimed to have screwed an old rich guy to death at one of the parties. She had the money that went with that kind of scene, so Dusk believed her. When McCarthy asked why an outcall hooker making big money would work the streets, Dusk said that Gentry was a freak who liked the danger of the Boulevard, who liked to taunt the police, letting them know she wasn’t afraid.

  McCarthy decided to press Dusk. “This is all interesting, but Delta Porter says you heard some cops talking about killing Gentry.”

  Dusk twisted a length of her hair between her thumb and forefinger.

  McCarthy said, “I have to hear it if I’m going to protect you.”

  Dusk nodded, fumbling for another cigarette. “It was probably like eight weeks ago, about a month after she first testified. A Friday night and I’m out early, six, seven o’clock, and they roll through with the wagon.”

  McCarthy looked at her confused.

  “You know, a wagon. When they do sweeps on the Boulevard, they bring in a rolling cage to put us all in so they don’t have to make twenty trips to the jail. It’s standard. Anyway, I’m the first one to get popped and thrown in the cage. It’s parked in an empty lot up there at Seventy-seventh.”

  Dusk swam in the flow of her story now. “I’m sitting in there alone wanting a smoke, and I hear these two cops start talking and pretty soon I know who they’re talking about. They’re saying shit about ‘this bitch Gentry making trouble for them.’ ”

  “How come they’re talking in front of you?”

  “Not in front of me. They’re out by a patrol car. But what they’re saying is echoing off the wall of the furniture store. I could hear it almost as clear as you and me right now.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “A short fat cop with reddish hair and a tall Mex, he was in charge. After they found Carol, I went to the library to look up the stories about Gentry testifying. The li
ttle guy was the one they call Click. The other one was Blanca, the lieutenant she testified about.”

  McCarthy closed his eyes for a second. I’ll be a son of a bitch, he thought. I got it. “You’re positive?”

  “You don’t forget faces when they say stuff about killing someone. Click, he was pacing back and forth. He says maybe she could disappear and the whole thing would be dropped. Blanca kind of nods, but says they can’t be involved. But maybe there’s someone who can do it for them. And Click says he knows someone who owes him, who’d do it as a favor. Blanca just stands there stone-faced, saying he wished he’d never met her.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “That’s all of it, man,” Milk said. “Then a bunch of other girls was brought in and they stopped talking.”

  McCarthy’s lungs suddenly collapsed inward. Four-thirty. He hadn’t slept well in weeks. He’d crossed a desert and wanted nothing more than to press his face into cool water. And then the need to sleep was washed away by the understanding of what was required before publication. He breathed deep again, reaching for his second wind. He had Dusk repeat the story.

  Satisfied he had it all, he said, “Couple more questions. How come you haven’t gone to the cops with this?”

  Dusk pursed her lips in disgust. “Jesus, who are they going to protect, me or one of their own?”

  “If I write this, Fisk, the homicide lieutenant, will want to talk. I mean, it’s obvious he already does.”

  Milk screwed up his face. “I guess that’s okay, then. Cause the fuckers can’t just ignore it once it hits the papers, can they?”

  “No, they can’t,” McCarthy said. He looked at both of them with a critical eye. They were lowlifes, but even lowlifes can tell the truth. “I believe you heard what you said you heard and I’m going to try to write it.”

  “No names,” Milk reminded him.

  “They’re going to come out eventually if you’re called as witnesses.”