Deadline

by Maher, Stephen

  When he came to, his head was in Castonguay’s lap. He could open his eyes, but he couldn’t make his limbs move. Castonguay was holding his mouth open. He dropped a handful of pills onto Jack’s tongue and then poured in some beer. He closed Jack’s mouth and pinched his nose shut. Jack was suddenly unable to breath. He tried to struggle, but all he could do was flop his arms around. He had no choice but to swallow the pills. He choked them down and then opened his mouth to gulp for air.

  “Good boy,” said Castonguay. “Sweet dreams.”

  Castonguay moved away and dialled the cell phone. “All done,” he said. “I just gave them to him now.”

  He listened for a moment and picked up Jack’s BlackBerry. “All ready,” he said.

  Jack felt very strange. He still couldn’t move his arms or legs but he didn’t feel much of a desire to do so. He closed his eyes and listened to Castonguay talk on the phone.

  “Okay,” he said. “Sophie Fortin. Got it. An email or a PIN message? Okay.”

  Castonguay typed as he repeated the instructions he was getting over the phone.

  “Subject: Too much. Okay. Done. Next? I fucked up so bad. Sorry. It’s better this way. Okay. That it? You sure? No. I think it works. Okay.”

  He’s writing my suicide note, thought Jack. He felt a deep stab of sadness at the prospect of dying. He forced his eyes open and tried to move, but only managed to twitch.

  I have to accept this, he thought.

  “What do you mean?” Castonguay said. “No. No. I hit send already.”

  He turned and glared down at Jack.

  “Fuck,” he said. “I misunderstood. I’m sorry. I thought you wanted me to hit send. No. It’s too late. I did it.”

  He paced as he listened, then stopped in front of Jack’s face. “Yes,” he said. “Okay. We’ll get out of here then. No. You’re right. It was stupid.”

  Jack could see his reflection in the shiny black polish of Castonguay’s boots. It looked funny to him the way his face was all twisted and smooshed into the hardwood floor. He smiled, and that was funny too, seeing his smooshed-up face break into a smile. And then he closed his eyes.

  Sophie was trying not to let herself worry about Jack. It wasn’t her fault that he had lost his job. She told him the story was bullshit. But when she closed her eyes the thought of his sad face in the hallway came back to her. At the time, she had been relieved when he had apologized for bothering her and left, but now it struck her as depressing. He had worn an expression of such defeat when he realized that she had someone else with her.

  Jack had lost his job in the most humiliating way possible, she thought, and when he came for help, she sent him away. He must feel like he hasn’t got a friend in the world.

  She tried to think of other things, of Ed’s first steps toward recovery, of the great sex she’d just had, of the work that she was neglecting by spending all her time at the hospital, but her mind kept turning back to the thought of Jack’s sorrowful face when she sent him away.

  Eventually she realized she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She got up, went into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of wine and sat down on the couch. She checked her BlackBerry.

  From: Jack Macdonald

  To: Sophie Fortin

  Subject: Too much

  I fucked up so bad. Sorry. It’s better this way.

  She hit reply.

  To: Jack Macdonald

  From: Sophie Fortin

  Subject: Too much

  What are you talking about? Can you call me right now???!!!

  She sent the message and then dialled Jack’s number. He didn’t answer.

  She jumped to her feet. Was it a suicide note or was she imagining things? She considered the facts and quickly decided there was a reasonable chance that Jack was trying to kill himself. If she didn’t do anything and they found his body in the morning, she would be haunted forever by the thought of how she could have saved his life and hadn’t.

  She tried him one more time, then called 911.

  She told the dispatcher her friend had sent a suicide note, bullied her into sending an ambulance to Jack’s address, pulled on her jeans and coat, rode down in the elevator and ran to Elgin Street and waved down a cab. “Please hurry,” she told the driver. “It’s an emergency.” She repeatedly tried Jack’s number again in the car but it kept going to voice mail.

  There was a police car in front of Jack’s building when she arrived and a middle-aged man standing in the lobby with a coat over his bathrobe.

  Sophie ran to the door. “Are the police in there?” she asked.

  “They just went in,” said the man. “I opened the door for them. I’m supposed to let the paramedics in when they arrive. What’s going on?”

  “Please let me in,” said Sophie. “I’m a friend of Jack’s.”

  The man looked at her frightened face for a minute, hesitated, then opened the door for her.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  She ignored him and ran upstairs. A uniformed officer was standing in the doorway.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “I’m Sophie Fortin,” she said. “I called 911.” She handed him her business card. “Is Jack okay? Is he in there?”

  “Can you wait downstairs please ma’am?” said the cop. “We’re doing everything we can.”

  As the cop bent to look at the business card, Sophie tried to wedge herself through the door. The cop grabbed her and pushed her back, but not before she saw Jack sprawled on his back and a second cop rhythmically pressing on his breast bone. There was vomit on the floor.

  “Oh my God,” said Sophie and she stepped back. “Oh my God.”

  “We’re doing everything we can,” said the officer. “And you’re not helping. Please wait downstairs.”

  Sophie looked up at him and nodded, her hand covering her mouth.

  She paced the sidewalk, feeling scared and frantic, and when the ambulance arrived, she told them which the apartment to go to.

  The paramedics ran in with a stretcher and in a few minutes they came back down with Jack strapped to it and wheeled him to the ambulance. His face was blank and his skin was slack.

  “Is he okay?” she asked.

  “He’s breathing,” said one of the paramedics as he slid the stretcher into the ambulance. “We’re taking him to Ottawa General.”

  The police officer who had prevented her from entering Jack’s apartment walked up to Sophie as the ambulance drove away.

  “I think you may have saved your friend’s life,” he said.

  7 – Stay where you’re at

  JACK’S FIRST THOUGHT, before he could open his eyes, was dread of a horrible hangover. He didn’t know where he was, but he knew that being fully conscious would be unpleasant. He tried not to wake up, willing himself back into inky oblivion, but he was terribly thirsty, his head was pounding and his bladder was bursting.

  He opened his eyes a crack, to take a small peek to orient himself so that he could stagger to the bathroom, pee, drink some water, eat some aspirin and go back to bed. He moaned in distress when he realized he was in a hospital.

  He closed his eyes again and tried to pull the covers over his head, but it was no use. With considerable effort, he lifted his head to look around, dazed. He was in a room with four beds. Bright sunlight poured in through the window. The curtains were drawn around two of the beds, but a grey-haired man was sitting in the bed straight across from him, watching a little TV with headphones on. He noticed Jack’s movement and yanked out the headphones.

  “Well good morning,” he said, smiling. “Your girlfriend will be glad to see you’re awake. She’ll be back in a minute.”

  Jack stared at him, blinking. He felt terrible, totally confused and savagely hung over, with a dry mouth and a terrible pounding at the base of his skull.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” he said.

  Jack threw off the blankets and got out of bed. That’s when he noticed that he was wearing a hos
pital gown, and that he was attached to an intravenous drip. He peered down at himself in confusion.

  “I don’t know if you’re supposed to be getting up,” said the man. “Wait for the nurse. I’ll buzz her.”

  The man pressed a button attached to his bed.

  “Where’s the bathroom at?” said Jack. He spied it then, and tried to get out of bed, forgetting about the IV rack. He sagged back onto his bed and tried to remember why he was in the hospital.

  His heart sank when he remembered his story gone wrong. He flashed back to vomiting at his desk, and he felt suddenly very tired, so he closed his eyes. Then he remembered his humiliating encounter with Simms at Hy’s, knocking on Sophie’s door, his late night Big Mac, and the taxi ride home. He couldn’t remember anything after that.

  He was trying and failing to pull down the blankets to look at his limbs to see if he was injured when Sophie and a red-haired nurse appeared at the door.

  Sophie looked rumpled in jeans and a sweatshirt with no makeup and her hair in a ponytail.

  Jack felt suddenly a little better to see Sophie, and he tried to smile.

  “How you feeling?” said the nurse.

  “Not too good,” he said. “Can I have some aspirin? What am I doing here?”

  “You had a bad time last night,” said Sophie.

  “What do you mean?” said Jack. “Can I have some Aspirin please? My head hurts.”

  “You’ll have to wait to see the doctor for that,” said the nurse, checking his IV hookup. “I’ll see if she can pop in to see you.”

  Jack turned to Sophie. She wore an expression of tender concern.

  “What happened to me?” he asked.

  She wore a pained expression.

  “The doctors think you took some pills last night. They think you were trying …”

  “Pills?” said Jack. “I took pills? What kind of pills?”

  “Tranquilizers,” said Sophie. “They think you overdosed on tranquilizers.”

  Jack frowned in confusion.

  “Jack, you sent me an email at 2:30,” said Sophie. “You said that you fucked up, that you were sorry.”

  “You think I tried to kill myself?”

  Then the doctor arrived to examine Jack. She was Indian, young, businesslike, pretty and introduced herself as Doctor Shalini Singh.

  “I don’t think I tried to kill myself,” said Jack.

  She smiled. “We can talk about that later,” she said. “You are still affected by the tranquilizers and your memory is likely a bit scrambled.”

  “I’m not the type,” said Jack. “I don’t feel very good.”

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I have a terrible headache,” he said. “I feel muddled.”

  Singh flashed a light in his eyes, tested his reflexes with a rubber hammer, asked him to count to ten, asked him his name and age.

  “You seem to be doing okay,” she said as she finished.

  “I don’t feel okay. I’d like some aspirin, and I’d like to go back to sleep.”

  “I think we can give you a couple of Tylenol. And I think you need a bit more sleep. I’ll come see you later, and a counsellor will come to talk to you about how you ended up here.”

  “I didn’t try to kill myself,” said Jack.

  “Well,” said the doctor, “that’s not what the police say.”

  “The police?” said Jack. “What police?”

  The doctor smiled and patted his hand. The nurse arrived with some headache pills and a paper cup of water. Jack gulped them down greedily and laid back to wait for sleep.

  “All right,” Murphy said at the morning NTV story meeting in his office overlooking Parliament Hill. “Before we get started on the news, does anybody have any ideas about who was behind the Greg Mowat story?”

  There were five reporters and four producers in the room, and Murphy went around one by one. Timothy Duncan, a veteran who went back to Diefenbaker’s era, went first.

  “It had to be Donahoe’s people,” he said. “It reminds me of a story about Lyndon Johnston. He was facing a tough Senate battle in Texas, 1960, looked like he might lose. He told his people to spread the rumour that his opponent had been caught having carnal knowledge with a pig. They said, ‘LBJ! We can’t do that! It’s not true.’ He said, ‘I know. Just make the bastard deny it.’ And he went on to win.”

  “I don’t know,” said Luce Politi, an energetic young reporter with a shock of gelled black hair. “I think the story makes Mowat look good. People will be sympathetic to him now. Did you see his wife yesterday? That’s gold. Standing by her man. If it was Donahoe’s people, they’ve got to be kicking themselves, because Maude Mowat knocked the ball out of the park. I don’t think they’re that dumb.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” said Duncan. “Who the heck are they? A bunch of old Tory warhorses been out of the game too long.”

  Murphy looked at Tamara Johnston, a careful young reporter who kept getting elbowed out of the way by the more aggressive and glamorous Simms.

  “I think it was the Liberals,” she said. “Some Liberal rat fucker, rattling the Tory cage.”

  “Aren’t they usually too busy ratfucking other Liberals?” said Politi.

  “Or it could be Mowat did it himself,” said Johnston. “Figuring he’d end up with public sympathy, raise his profile.”

  Duncan barked a laugh. “If he’s smart and ballsy enough to do that, we’re all in trouble”

  Jasmine Bagnell, a researcher and producer, spoke up: “Do we know for sure that somebody leaked this to Jack Macdonald?” she asked. “I’m kind of assuming that he got out his own whiteout. He enjoyed the story about the drowned staffer so much that he got carried away.”

  “Could be,” said Murphy. “Personally, I suspect that Mowat was banging some Mountie’s wife and the guy decided to screw up his week. Anyway, we’ve all got theories. If you hear anything that is more than a theory, I want to know about it. This is a weird story, and I won’t be satisfied until I know what started it. Whether we can put it on the air or not, I want to know. What do your sources say, Ellen?”

  Simms didn’t know what to think. She had had drinks with Balusi and Bouchard the night before and they seemed honestly confused by the whole thing. She wasn’t prepared to say much without more information. “My sources are as confused as we are,” she said. “I like your theory, boss.”

  After the meeting, she went to her desk and took up where she’d left off the day before when the Mowat story broke. She opened both sound files and looked at their wave forms carefully. The second one had been edited, and was about two seconds shorter. She thought about going to a sound technician, who would likely be able to spot the edit in two minutes, but decided she didn’t want to share whatever she had.

  She sighed, put on the headphones and started to listen.

  When Jack awoke, there was an attractive blonde woman sitting in the chair next to his bed.

  He lay still for a moment, taking her in. Mid-thirties, with a womanly figure, a wedge of frizzy blond hair and a wide, beautiful face with a strong, sensual mouth. Dressed in a black blazer, white cotton blouse and jeans, she was fiddling with her BlackBerry.

  “Good morning, Jack,” she said. “How you feeling?”

  “Not bad.” He tried and failed to sit up. “I’m thirsty.”

  She filled a plastic cup with ice water from a pitcher by the door and gave it to him, then helped him adjust the bed so he could sit up.

  “You must be the counsellor,” he said.

  She smiled. “I’m Mallorie.”

  “I don’t know if there’s much point to us talking,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” she said as she sat back down. “Aren’t you feeling well enough?”

  Jack looked around the room, clearing his head.

  “No,” he said. “I feel pretty good now. It’s just that I don’t think I need to talk to you. I didn’t try to kill myself, I don’t think. I’m not suicidal.
It was an accidental overdose.”

  The woman looked at him and didn’t say anything for a moment. She put her fingertips together in front of her face and looked up in the air.

  “Well, good,” she said. “That’s good news. Um, but, why did you take so many pills?”

  Jack stared at her and scratched his head. “What time is it?”

  “Eleven fifteen.”

  “You don’t know how long I slept, do you?”

  “Not exactly. About two hours, I think. So why did you take so many pills?”

  “Well,” he said. “I’ll be honest. I don’t remember.”

  Jack was telling the truth. His last memory was a hazy recollection of wolfing down a Big Mac.

  “I was totally hammered,” he said. “What I think likely happened is that I took some pills, to help me sleep off the hangover that I knew was coming. Then I was so drunk that I forgot that I already took some. I usually have a high tolerance to drugs, and I was upset and really wanted to zonk out for a while. So maybe I took too many.”

  He stopped and neither of them said anything for a moment. She was looking at him with a small smile and nodding.

  “I feel like an idiot,” he said. “It’s embarrassing. I’m lucky that I didn’t kill myself by mistake. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll never make that mistake again. Now, I want to get out of here. I have things to do. I feel like an idiot for causing all this trouble, but there must be actual suicidal people in the hospital you could be helping. I bet some poor bugger in another ward is this minute plotting to do away with himself. He’s probably perched on the window sill as we speak, working up the nerve to jump.”

  She laughed a little. “You’re funny,” she said. “That’s great. But, I have to ask you, if it was an accidental overdose, why did you send that note?”

  Her clear blue eyes were on him. She had a way of watching that he found disconcerting, a cool intelligence in her gaze that made him feel that if he lied she would catch him.

  “Right,” he said. “I sent an email, did I? Shit. What did it say? I have no memory of that.”

  She looked at her BlackBerry and read aloud. “Subject: ‘Too much.’ Message: ‘I fucked up so bad. Sorry. It’s better this way.’”