by Brad Parks
It was at that moment that I understood, with a renewed sense of appreciation, how much I looked up to the man.
Tina broke the silence with: “I feel like I watched him die.”
“Is he…?” I started, but couldn’t finish the sentence.
“We don’t know,” she said. “We called an ambulance, of course. Some of the copy editors started doing chest compressions immediately. But it didn’t … I mean, I just don’t know. He’s at the hospital now. We called his wife to let her know. She was on her way.”
A sob tried to overtake her. She swallowed it, turning the whole thing into an audible gasp.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I kept it together the whole time in the newsroom because I felt like everyone needed me to stay strong. I mean, we had a paper to get out, you know? If nothing else, Brodie wouldn’t want anything to mess with that. That’s everything he stood for and I wanted to … to honor that. So I made sure we hit the mark with the first edition and that everything was fine. And then on the way here, it just hit me like crazy. I mean, I already feel like I’m out of control with these pregnancy hormones and—”
“You don’t have to keep it together for me,” I said.
“Thanks,” she whispered.
We stayed like that for a good long while, leaning against each other. Every once in a while, we’d say whatever happened to be on our minds. Thoughts about Brodie. Thoughts about the fragility of existence and the gift that it was. Thoughts about the new life stirring inside her.
But mostly we just sat. By the time we got up to go to bed several hours later, the box of tissues was spent.
CHAPTER 20
When he was a kid, playing Little League baseball in Newark, Blue Mask had been like this with his uniform.
Everything just so. Checked in the mirror. Tucked and retucked.
He would put it on at six thirty in the morning for a two o’clock game. The excitement consumed him. He couldn’t wait to get on the field. The anticipation was almost better than the game itself. Almost.
Blue Mask realized he felt the same way about jacking cars. Another sign that this was what he was meant to be doing with his life.
And maybe he looked ridiculous, walking around the house with his blue ski mask pulled down and his gun tucked in his waistband, four hours before he was going out. He didn’t care. It’s not like Birdie was going to say anything.
He enjoyed feeling like a kid again. Pacing around. Looking at himself in the mirror. Playing out things in his mind. Scripting what he’d say to the driver. Imagining the look on the driver’s face.
Maybe he’d shoot the guy. Maybe he wouldn’t. Depends if he felt like he was getting the respect he deserved.
He made himself wait until ten o’clock, then charged out into the street and then …
Well, what? Black Mask had always been the one to say where they went and when. Black Mask said which car to hit—almost like he knew the thing was coming.
Blue Mask’s only job was to wait for the whistle and then go.
For a few minutes, Blue Mask felt like an idiot. He had spent so much time thinking about the actual act, he hadn’t thought out any of the other stuff that led up to it. The planning. The strategy.
No big deal. This was just a small setback. He rolled the ski mask off his face, wearing it like a hat instead. He pulled his hoodie over his head, mostly to hide the mask. Then he left the house and started walking.
His first move was to get out of the neighborhood. He noticed Black Mask never did jobs near where he lived. That was smart. The cops in Newark did this community policing thing, which meant they all stuck with a certain area of the city. The idea was that they got to know the thugs in their own sector. If there was a crime, they always started with the known suspects. Blue Mask wanted to go to a part of town where he’d be unknown.
That meant downtown. It was where there were more likely to be expensive cars anyway. Plus, there were more traffic lights there.
He stalked around for a time, spending some time on Washington Street, then on University, then on Halsey. Nothing felt right. Either the light was green or the car was wrong or he wasn’t in position in time.
Eventually, he settled on Washington Street and set up on one corner. There was a shuttered storefront with a small vestibule that gave him both concealment and visibility: he could see the intersection but not be seen by any passing cars.
It was now after midnight. Traffic had gotten noticeably lighter over the previous hour. Most of the cars out were beaters that would probably break down before he could get Birdie’s body out of town.
Finally, he caught the gleam of a new car just as the light turned yellow. It slowed to a stop rather than risk running the light. But it was Chevy. He wasn’t here to jack no damn Chevy.
Another fifteen minutes passed before there was another half-decent opportunity. He thought, at first glance, that it was a Lexus. But, no, it was a Toyota that just sort of looked like a Lexus.
He was starting to think about giving up and just grabbing whatever came along. He sure didn’t want to have to sleep with Birdie’s body getting all stiff in the kitchen.
Then. Finally. Cadillac. White. The car was a few years old. Still, it was a Cadillac. There had to be some value there. He didn’t know quite who he’d sell it to. Black Mask had always taken care of that part. But Blue Mask would figure out something. He had contacts of his own.
The ski mask went down. The gun came out. The light was holding red.
Blue Mask sprinted toward the driver’s side door, the gun barrel pointing the way. The other jobs he had done with Black Mask, the drivers had played their part nicely—getting out the car, hands up, letting them just take the vehicle.
This guy wasn’t going as easily. He was a black man. A big fellow, but soft-looking. Blue Mask saw his mouth go wide, then his eyes, just like the others.
But then he stomped on the gas pedal. The others hadn’t done that.
Still, there was this small hesitation, a split second for the fuel injectors to spray fuel into the piston chambers, another split second for the spark plugs to ignite the gas, another split second for the car to transfer the energy from that small contained explosion to the drive shaft.
In that brief time lapse, Blue Mask fired two shots through the window, loosely aimed at the man’s face. The glass did not shatter. It just acquired two shallow craters where the bullets entered. Blue Mask couldn’t tell if he’d hit anything beyond it.
Then the car was gone. Some tragic fraction of a second too late, it had accelerated across the intersection. For perhaps two hundred more yards, Blue Mask watched the Cadillac careen down the street. Then it jumped the curb and hit a light stanchion, coming to a crunching stop.
Blue Mask ran after it, his gun still drawn. The driver must have blacked out and lost control of the vehicle. Or maybe the guy’s head had been blown off and that was just the car driving on its own. Blue Mask figured he’d yank whatever was left of the driver out of the vehicle, maybe put a kill shot in him, and be on his way.
Then the driver’s side door opened. Blue Mask was still a hundred yards away. He was amazed to watch the driver emerge with a hand clamped on his neck. He was a burly fellow, all right. He took one or two halting steps, leaned on the car, then cast a wary glance over his shoulder.
Then he saw Blue Mask and started staggering away, toward a nearby alley, with surprising speed for such a big guy. Maybe he knew he was running for his life.
As Blue Mask closed in, he considered going after the driver. But no. If the gunshots hadn’t attracted enough attention, the sound of the crash would. It was time to get out of there.
Blue Mask reached the wreck. The bumper had a small V in it. The driver’s side window was now mostly gone, with just a few jagged glass edges clinging to its frame.
But there was no time to worry about aesthetics. He hopped in the still-open driver’s side door, sat in a leather seat marred by glass pebbles and blood,
and closed the door behind him. He shifted into reverse to get the car away from the light stanchion, then into drive to get away.
There were no sirens approaching, no other drivers or pedestrians around to sound any alarm. After a mile or so, Blue Mask pulled over, stole the license plates of an old Saturn, and tossed the Caddy’s plates in a Dumpster.
He cursed when he surveyed the damage to the Cadillac. But maybe it wouldn’t hurt the resale value too much. The bumper could be pulled out. The window could be replaced.
It certainly was drivable. And it would get him down to the Pine Barrens and back. He could have Birdie buried by dawn. That was what mattered.
CHAPTER 21
I woke up the next morning with this feeling of dread, like the awful aftertaste of the night before had yet to leave my tongue.
Tina was still in bed when I dragged myself out of it. She had slept fitfully, like usual. It is the horrible irony of the final trimester that a woman who wants nothing more than to sleep can’t seem to do it. People like to say it’s the body’s way of preparing itself for the marathon of sleep deprivation that is to come. I think it’s just one more cruelty nature visits on pregnant women.
Naturally, Tina’s struggles meant I had slept poorly, too. Though I was just smart enough not to complain. I like my face unslapped.
The encouraging news, which Tina received via an early-morning e-mail that she drowsily checked while in bed, was that Brodie had made it through the night. He was far from out of the woods—they were just starting to assess the damage—but he had survived those crucial first twelve hours. Apparently, it took a lot more than just a heart attack to take down our executive editor.
I was stepping out of the shower as Tina entered the bathroom.
“Can I pee?” she asked.
We were not at the point of our cohabitation that we were comfortable urinating in front of each other. And, come to think of it, that was a point I hoped we would not reach for a while—like, a hundred and fifty years or so. I realize not all couples in this great, urinating nation of ours feel the same way. I say: keep some of the mystery intact, America.
I vacated the bathroom for a moment. When I heard the toilet flush and the shower turn on, I thought it safe to reenter.
“I can’t believe I’m going to have to put the same underwear back on when I get out of here,” she said.
I decided this was not the moment to badger her about her failure to have moved any of her stuff into my house. (See previous reference to: face, unslapped.)
“I’d offer you some of mine, but somehow I don’t think they’d fit.”
“No, the sad thing is, they probably would,” she said. “The only problem is this will end up being the day I go into labor, and the nurses will ask me if my wife is planning to attend the delivery.”
“You could always go commando.”
“No, you could go commando. Trust me when I say a woman in my condition cannot. You don’t want to even know what’s oozing out of—”
“You know, why don’t I just let you enjoy your shower?” I said.
She laughed and let the water run for a while. As I shaved, my thoughts meandered back to Earl Karlinsky. I knew I needed to catch him in the act, whatever that act happened to be.
A friend of mine tells a great, perhaps apocryphal, story about Jimmy Breslin, the famed New York Daily News and Newsday columnist. This dates back to the early eighties. Breslin was already a legend—his piece about the ditchdigger at John F. Kennedy’s funeral is perhaps the most venerated newspaper column of all time—but he was not the type to rest on his Pulitzer.
As the story goes, there was a rumor about a school superintendent in the Bronx who had misappropriated a baby grand piano from a school and given it to a pastor-community activist. This caused quite an uproar, and there was considerable speculation as to whether this had occurred. Breslin wasn’t one for rumors. He marched up to the Bronx, knocked on the pastor’s door, and said, “Show me the piano.”
It speaks to Breslin’s ability to get to the heart of the matter. But it also makes the point that there is no substitute for seeing something with your own eyes. If I wanted to know whether Earl Karlinsky was cruising the parking lot, slapping tracking devices on cars, I’d have to find a way to set up there and check it out.
I couldn’t very well use my car. My Malibu was too conspicuous.
The water in the shower shut off. That’s when an idea came to me.
“Hey, can I borrow your car today?” I asked.
“That depends,” Tina said. “Can I borrow a towel?”
“That can be arranged,” I said, exiting the bathroom for a moment to fish a towel out of my linen closet.
I returned as she slid the shower curtain back. I took a few seconds to leer at Tina’s naked body.
“You know you’re gorgeous, right?” I asked.
“Towel,” she said.
I handed it to her.
“What do you need my car for?” she asked as she went through a drying routine made more complicated by her baby bump.
“I just wanted to do a little snooping on a source and I need a change of vehicular appearance.”
“Okay, just try not to get any bullet holes in it,” she said. This, sadly, had happened to my Malibu. If you looked carefully enough, you could still see where the holes had been patched up.
I returned to my bedroom to give my wardrobe its usual 1.3 nanoseconds of consideration. I came away with pleated slacks, a button-down shirt, and a patterned tie—an ensemble that was a completely different fashion paradigm from the day before, because the shirt was pale blue, not white, and the slacks were slightly darker.
If I ever write an erotic novel, its title will be inspired by my closet. I’ll call it Fifty Shades of Khaki.
I went downstairs to the kitchen and fed Deadline, who was nervously pacing in front of his bowl, anxious to get on with another busy day of eating and sleeping. I then poured myself a man-sized bowl of a children’s cereal and checked my e-mail.
The one from Buster Hays was the first to catch my eye. Buster still struggles with e-mail etiquette and has yet to master where the salutation belongs. Hence I clicked on an e-mail with “Dear Ivy,” in the subject line.
The good news is he has recently overcome his affinity for Caps Lock, so I could at least peruse the body of the e-mail without feeling like he was screaming at me. It read:
According to task force, another carjacking last night, approx. 12:30 A.M. in the 100 block of Washington Street. Vehicle was white Cadillac CTS, three years old. Driver was shot in neck but managed to walk to hospital. Assailant ID’d as a young black male wearing blue ski mask.
Buster
P.S. Don’t thank me. Just send scotch.
I absorbed that news for a moment. The man in the blue ski mask—who may or may not have been following me the day before, and who may or may not be working in a crew with Earl Karlinsky—had a busy night. I wondered if the Cadillac belonged to a Fanwood Country Club member. Cops would not usually share the name of a victim who had survived an assault, but if anyone could coax it out of them, it would be Buster. I replied to his message, asking him to do just that, promising a second bottle of scotch as a thank-you.
The other e-mail of interest came from Doc Fierro. It was a list of every member of Fanwood Country Club, along with a pointed suggestion I not misuse the information or say where I had gotten it.
I replied with a quick thank-you, along with an acknowledgment that I owed him a debt of more than just gratitude. Then I redacted his name from the e-mail and forwarded it to Buster Hays with a request that he ask his guy on the carjacking task force to check it against their database of recent victims.
About the time I was done with this, Tina appeared, with damp ringlets of hair brushing against yesterday’s blouse.
“I’m starving,” she said. “Do you have anything resembling berries or citrus in this house?”
“That depends, do Froot Loops c
ount?”
“You realize you’re going to have diabetes by the time you hit forty,” she said.
I grinned. “Yeah, but if you go by my maturity level, that’s still at least twenty-eight years away.”
She just shook her head. We swapped car keys. She leaned in, kissed me on the cheek, then left Deadline and I to our usual breakfast silence.
* * *
For as much as I was eager to get on with the business of investigating Earl Karlinsky, I had two promises to keep: one, that I’d visit Sweet Thang in her do-gooder headquarters at ten o’clock; and two, that I’d turn that visit into a readable puff piece by 5:00 P.M.
I knew I could put off the whole thing, being as Brodie wasn’t going to be in much shape to know or care that I hadn’t turned the story in. But that hardly seemed like the honorable thing to do under the circumstances. If the true measure of a person is what he does when no one is watching, I didn’t want to come up short.
Giving Deadline one final pet, I locked up, hopped in Tina’s Volvo, and started toward Newark. There is a certain theory of journalism that says in order for a story to be considered real news, there has to be at least one person who would rather not see it in the paper. And, sadly, the person forced to write it doesn’t count.
By that standard, the story I was about to slap together was not real news. But the crossword puzzle isn’t real news, either, and people would get mighty pissed if we didn’t run that. Besides, a newspaper owes it to its readers to be a reflection of the community it covers. So I resolved to just get this over with, quickly and quietly.
The address Sweet Thang gave me led to a featureless box of a one-story brick building that made it clear to me the Greater Newark Children’s Council was not wasting donor money on posh digs. Or signage. Next to the front door, there was a small plastic plaque with black-and-white lettering. It couldn’t have cost more than ten dollars. It was a grim marker to what was promising to be a grim place.
Then I walked inside and it was like entering a cheer factory. There was framed children’s artwork covering every available wall space: gleeful stick figures with explosions of hair, dots for eyes, and overlarge smiles; bright, bold suns with rays of light that reached practically to the ground; rainbows that took up the whole sky; houses fronted with purple flowers, pink bushes, and lollipop trees.