The Informers (The Stringers Book 2)

by TJ Martinell

“Casey Novak?”

  “Yeah.”

  I felt a small bit of hope.

  “Is he there?” I asked.

  Cybil cleared his throat. “He ain’t nowhere, boss. He’s dead.

  Outside the office Hernandez cried out in happiness and hugged Carlos, thanking him again and again and again. Their voices filled the air with the joy of a man who had obtained something he had long sought.

  Cybil coughed. “Boss? You hear me?”

  “Yeah. What happened?”

  “Got a tip from one of my pals in the local five-oh station. The Record hasn’t got the story up yet, but word inside the ISA is that Novak was killed in the line of duty, succumbed to a wound in the femoral artery caused by a newspaper gangster.”

  “What really happened?”

  “Not sure. Some friends of mine there think it was a suicide. They’re not sure. But the ISA is already putting the spin on it. It doesn’t look good to have their youngest deputy director dead unless you make him a martyr, right?”

  Silence. Except for Hernandez’s cheers outside the office.

  The phone fell out of my hand and hung off the hook, swaying in the air like a pendulum. My hands were limp as I sat down. Cybil kept calling out for me. I stared at the wall thinking of Casey. I pictured him somewhere thinking his life wasn’t worth living. I thought of his final seconds of life, how he somehow managed to convince himself he would be memorialized after his death.

  The same “death” his father had died.

  There was another possibility. Among those documents Casey had found a truth so terrible he couldn’t let it go.

  Maybe, just maybe, he went out the same way as his father.

  Like father, like son.

  Hernandez burst into the office, a smile consuming his entire face. Oblivious, he laughed and clapped me on both shoulders and exclaimed that they had found a replacement car of a similar model and year from a dealer who was willing to sell it. He offered me his hand. I looked at it and then at him. I took out my bag of money and poured it onto the table. I hadn’t counted it in a while but knew the value of the coins were enough to purchase the car even if it were in pristine condition.

  Hernandez gaped at the sum and thanked me.

  “I will make sure you get to drive it!” he said. “I doubt you will ever have something like that happen again!”

  “No. It won’t.”

  Carlos came in and greeted me. He noticed Cybil’s voice on the dangling phone and asked if it was for me. I hung the phone up on the wall and walked past him, out of the garage and onto the street surface.

  I went passed a tiny bar where three men were warming themselves in front of burning oil drums. They took off their hats and addressed me as “Kill” Roy Farrington. I ignored them save for a slight tip of my hat and kept walking in the rain until it drenched my fedora and my clothes until I had been fully baptized in the water. I found an empty alleyway and turned into it and stood against the wall.

  Lifting my hand against the chipped brick surface, I started hitting it like a boxing opponent in the final round before the end of a match. I struck the surface until my hands were as red as the bricks. When I finally pulled back I examined my raw knuckles and fell to my knees. I cried out to God demanding to know why. I didn’t know precisely what I meant.

  If an answer ever came, I never heard it.

  ***

  It just took a glance at Griggs inside his office to know he had received the same call from Cybil. He was empathetic but offered no condolences. The time for that had long passed.

  “Got an assignment for me?” I asked as I entered.

  “Find whatever you want.”

  He came over to me and shook my hand.

  “What’s that for?” I asked.

  “Now you know.”

  We both smiled. Finally, we understood one another.

  “Yes,” I said. “Now I do.”

  Jean reacted reservedly when I got back. I stood outside the train car sipping on a glass of whiskey. The comforting feel of a cigarette in my hand. There would be no library that night.

  She came out and stood by me. Some time passed before she asked why I was sad. I didn’t know what to say. Who did I mourn? The man I had known? Or the man I knew he could have been?

  “I used to wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t been arrested as a child,” she said. “What would it have been like if I had been with my father? I might have pursued music like I am now.”

  “Oh.’

  “But I stopped thinking about it when I realized how much my father suffered.”

  When I failed to understand her, she touched my arm.

  “We would have never met had neither one of us suffered,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Often the reasons for why we suffer are not always known right away.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sometimes it is never known.”

  “Yes.”

  “But now I know.”

  ***

  The next day I took my Royal Enfield into Bellevue in search of my father’s grave. The Record had not named the graveyard and the ISA was tight lipped about where they buried “gangsters.” But, I had a good idea.

  I traveled north into my old neighborhood where an unknown courage spurred me to enter a diner my father and I used to frequent with my mother. The people inside were kind, particularly the old waitress who had worked there since I was a kid. She recognized me the moment I arrived and avoided eye contact with me until I inquired about Carl Farrington. In a distant voice, she replied I could find him with his wife.

  I drove south to an old cemetery. The lawn had been freshly mowed. The tips of the glass blades glistened with the morning dew. I walked out onto the field and headed to the northeast end of the plots where my mother’s grave was located underneath a large maple tree. As I approached it I saw the gravestone next to it with my father’s name.

  Kneeling in front of the graves, I apologized to my father for not believing him. I told him I understood him as well as I could. I reached into my pocket and took out one of my father’s books of poetry I had managed to recover from an antique store after it had been sold to them by the ISA following their raid on our house. From it I recited The Second Coming by Yeats. In it he had written of mere anarchy being loosed upon the world. The line came to mind as I placed the book at the foot of the gravestone.

  When I turned to leave Cybil stood a few feet away. His cynical grin betrayed his attempts at anonymity in his mundane attire.

  “Thought I’d find you here,” he said.

  “How?”

  “Called your gal. She said you left early, spent all night talking about your father. Figured you’d be here.”

  He opened his coat, bringing out a frayed package wrapped in brown paper that had the words TO BE DELIVERED UPON MY DEATH written in spotted ink.

  “What’s this?” I asked as he handed it to me.

  “A guy dropped it off at the safe house this morning. Didn’t say nothing, wouldn’t talk. Just handed it over and said it was no longer his problem.”

  He then tipped his hat and headed to his car parked near the fence. He hopped the fence and drove off as it started to rain. I sat underneath the maple tree for cover and thumbed the package, tearing off the wrapping paper to find a leather-bound notebook with fading on the corners. I opened it carefully and came to the first page.

  THE PRIVATE DIARY OF CASEY EDWARD NOVAK.

  There was a folded paper inside. I opened it and read the single sentence.

  The time is free.

  Flipping through the pages, I found within the oiled, stained pages an account of every single day of his entire career in the ISA chronicled and recorded. No self-censoring.

  Here he had written the truth.

  One page caught my attention. It was the same day Jean and I had been mysteriously saved from the Examiner stringer and his co
mpanion.

  Our savior had been Casey.

  He had personally ordered a non-authorized drone attack against two unconfirmed targets. It had been Casey’s only official reprimand. They had later removed it as a reward when Casey had discovered Cutman.

  Then the entry on the day of my father’s death. Casey hadn’t made the shot. The deed had been done by an officer they were looking to get rid of. The credit had gone to Casey as a PR stunt, while the officers had been paid off in exchange for their silence.

  The last journal entry was from only days ago.

  Whatever they say the truth is I am still alive. I gave Ronnie what little I could and then let him go. One can only hope he makes it.

  It wasn’t hard for my superiors to find out. I also didn’t try to hide it or lie about it. My father’s legacy wasn’t enough to forgive me for it. At least I had time to prepare myself. Thankfully, the sentencing didn’t drag out. They wanted this handled as discreetly as possible.

  By the time you’re reading this, I will have gone to join my brothers who languish for doing what I should have done long ago. I go in the belief I will never return. But perhaps it will only be a purgatory, not a hell. Perhaps someday I will be released after I have suffered enough. God only knows how long it will be until that day.

  My friend, please forgive me for not having the courage to do this before. I hope someday we will see each other again. On that day, we can finally meet in true friendship without the shadows of our fathers’ legacies looming over us. It’s the only hope I can cling to.

  Until then, you know what to do.

  Don’t be sad for me, Roy. I have finally become a man. And what’s more, the man my father never was.

  Closing the book with a newly found sense of gratitude I shoved it into my coat pocket. Wiping my eyes, I went back with Cybil to the safe house. From there I returned to the newspaper.

  In the newsroom, I felt the blast of two dozen voices yelling simultaneously and men bumping into me as they ran out into the corridor with messages in their hands. I breathed in the intoxicating aroma of cheap whiskey and gin as I eased into my chair and plopped the diary onto my desk.

  Griggs was out of his office with his tie loosened and his hair a mop, a crumbling cigar in his hand. He smiled worriedly until I held up the diary and grinned. With a brief nod, he tacitly agreed to save room for me on the front page.

  Opening the diary, I typed the proposed headline for the story. When I came to the byline, I wrote my name, paused, and then rewrote it to read “By Casey Novak and Roy Farrington.”

  I was typing up a description of the diary when the young errand boy strolled up to me, studying me with his big eager eyes.

  “Whatcha working on, Mr. Farrington?”

  “Whadya think, kid?”

  He stood on his tiptoes as he peered at the diary. “What’s the story about?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Clarence, but everyone calls me Chad.”

  “Does your father call you that?”

  “No. I live with my mom in an old shack over by the docks. She works the market, but needs the extra money.”

  I put my hands down and in my lap as I regarded the boy sympathetically.

  “Still want to be like me?” I asked.

  He bobbed his head up and down.

  “Then come here and learn how.”

  I took a spare chair from the back of the newsroom and placed it next to my desk. The other writers watched amusingly as Chad hopped up into it and started to peck at the keys as I dictated to him. His fingers found their mark with incredible accuracy. Not a single mistake.

  “Where did you learn to type like that?” I asked.

  “Watching you.”

  “Really?”

  “I said I wanna be like you. I said this one time and this lady comes over to me and says if I wanna learn how, I should watch how you do it.”

  I grinned. “Was this lady short?”

  “Yeah. People call her Bonnie. They said she’s a killer, but my mother said she didn’t look like it.” He shrugged. “My mother says she’s very good judge of character, whatever that means.”

  I chuckled and resumed my dictation. When I was finished and was ready to read from the diary I picked it up and scanned the page, hearing Casey’s voice reciting it to me as though he were observing me and the young boy with approval.

  Amid typing, I stopped abruptly and turned to Chad.

  “What did your mother say about me?” I asked.

  “I think she wants me to be just like you. That’s why I came here.”

  I studied him silently.

  “You know what, Chad?” I said.

  “What, Mr. Farrington?”

  “What I was, you are. What I am, you will be.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t worry. One day, you you’ll understand.”

  I smiled as he shrugged. He was mystified. But curious.

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  The Stringers

  TJ Martinell

  Decades in the future, America is in the midst of a new Prohibition Era. This time, the contraband is information. Free press has been replaced with journalism licenses and a formidable federal censorship agency. Reading newspapers is now a crime.

  Aspiring journalist Roy Farrington thinks nothing of it all, until his father is mysteriously arrested in a late-night home raid. His search for answers leads him to the ruins of a post-earthquake Seattle dominated by ruthless newspaper gangs. Forced to adapt to their technologically regressive ways, Roy learns to survive in a world where a story’s value is measured in blood spilled and there’s always more than one way to meet a deadline.

  Brimming with political intrigue, “The Stringers” exposes the danger and futility of state censorship in the same dystopian vein as "Fahrenheit 451."

  About the Author

  TJ Martinell is an author, writer, and reporter from the Pacific Northwest. His reporting for various community newspapers in the Seattle area has been recognized by the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also a researcher and blogger for the Tenth Amendment Center and published several ebooks on gun rights and constitutional history.

  See his other work at:

  www.tjmartinell.com

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