Silent City

by Alex Segura

  “I’m not asking for that.”

  “Well, you kind of are, to be blunt,” Pete literally spit. “Is it really the end of the world if we don’t have a few game scores in a print edition that fewer and fewer people are reading? We had them online. People use the fucking Internet.” Pete instantly regretted his use of profanity. Now he’d emotionalized the discussion. It was lost.

  “You’re missing the point, and I’m not pleased with your tone. I don’t need to remind you that in Angel’s absence, I’m the de facto sports editor. And this is unacceptable. Whether you realize this or not, one more mistake of this level and we’re going to have to make some tough decisions. Your opinion is noted but irrelevant in this situation. Understood?”

  Pete stopped. He was done. If not now, then in the next month or so when he made another mistake. There was no win in prolonging the exchange. All he really wanted to do was get back to his desk and put his headphones on. He looked out to the newsroom, through the glass window Vance had facing the staff. He saw Mike trying to sneak a peek. Some editors were less discreet, but turned away when they met Pete’s eyes. He’d been in Vance’s office for over 20 minutes. They’d seen Vance pacing around, Pete hanging his head dejectedly. They’d heard the raised voices, surely the sign of a problem to those trying to get the day’s work done nearby.

  After a few awkward seconds of silence, Vance cleared his throat.

  Pete spoke first. “I understand. I’m aware of your role. You’re in charge. You want it done a certain way; I have to do it that way. And I will.”

  “Thank you,” Vance sat down and leaned back a bit in his chair, his hands behind his head, as he looked Pete over. “Now, that wasn’t too hard, was it? Let’s just try to work together on this. We’ll be alright.”

  “Ok,” Pete said as he stood up. “Are we done?”

  Vance stood again, ignoring Pete’s question, and extended his hand, which Pete took with some reluctance. Pete felt a shiver shoot up his arm as Vance’s cold fish handshake met his own. Vance walked Pete to the door, holding it open for him, placing his hand on Pete’s shoulder and holding him for a second too long.

  “And, well, I still have to write you up. Company policy and all that. No hard feelings?”

  “Right,” Pete said, and walked out.

  Pete felt his hands scrounging through his pockets to prevent himself from lunging for Vance. At his desk, he pulled out a wrinkled coaster from the Abbey and the useless keys to Kathy’s apartment. Pete closed his eyes for a second. He could feel his breathing and the blood pulsing through him. Everything was coming apart, he thought. Everything was coming apart. He sat down and jammed his headphones onto his head.

  Chapter Seven

  The light clicking sound of his fingertips on the computer keyboard seemed louder as the Talking Heads live album in his headphones shifted from “Psycho Killer” to “Heaven.” The quiet break between David Byrne’s beat-box-fueled solo rendition of the first track allowed the sound of the newsroom to creep into Pete’s head. He felt some calm return to him as he realized the office was humming at a normal volume. The initial drama of the day had been momentarily forgotten and people were hard at work getting the paper out. Pete felt some relief that he wasn’t in charge this evening. He was happy to just be one of the editors, churning away at story after story and able to leave when the shift was over.

  It was midnight, and close to the end of his reduced workload. Vance had left around dinner, his dirty work complete. With his departure the staff seemed to loosen up, and Pete could almost forget that his career—what little was left of it—was on the ledge.

  Feeling a tap on his shoulder, Pete took off his headphones and turned around to find Mike leaning on his desk. They’d reached the end of the line for the night—all the pages were designed and only copy tweaks were left, meaning designers like Mike had very little to do. The perfect time for some newsroom socializing.

  “How you doing?” Mike asked, keeping his voice a little lower than usual.

  “Eh, fine,” Pete said. “It is what it is. I just need to cut down on mistakes, you know?”

  Mike nodded. “Yeah, you’ll handle your shit. You just can’t let people get to you.”

  Pete sighed and typed a quick response to the slot editor about the sidebar to the main baseball game story. The reporter had misspelled a player’s name. Pete quickly typed back the correct spelling for “Renteria.”

  “Yeah. That’s tough. I don’t want to rip on the guy. I just need to do my thing and know what will set him off.”

  “You seem distracted lately, though. You were almost an hour late.”

  Pete wheeled his chair around. “I had stuff to do.”

  Mike raised his arms in mock surrender. “I’m just saying you were late. That probably didn’t help your cause.”

  “Nah, it didn’t,” Pete said. “I had to do some stuff. I only have time to run errands before work.”

  “Since when do you run errands before work? You’re usually sleeping off the night before.”

  Pete couldn’t help but laugh. A dry, empty laugh. It was true. He didn’t like it, but it was true.

  “Well, I told Chaz I’d look into this Kathy business, so I did.”

  ‘So, you’re actually doing this thing? I thought you’d sleep that off, too.”

  Pete looked up at Mike and sighed. He didn’t feel the need to respond. His fuse was short tonight, and the last person he wanted to go off on was his best—and probably only—friend.

  Mike folded his arms and looked around the newsroom. Sports was the last section to go to press, and the building was slowly emptying out.

  “I don’t like it.”

  Pete shrugged and turned back to his computer. The word was out—the slot editor had messaged everyone to alert the newsroom that sports was sent and ready to go.

  “I get you don’t like it,” Pete said. “It’s a distraction. Once I convince Chaz Kathy’s missing, he’ll take it to the police. It’s pretty clear she’s not on some kind of pleasure cruise.”

  Mike straightened up, clasped Pete on the shoulder and began to head toward his own desk to shut down his computer.

  “I hear you, man. Whatever you think works,” Mike said. “What are you up to tonight?”

  Pete thought for a second. “Nothing, but I need to get some other stuff done here first.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. You wanna grab a drink later?”

  “It is later, man,” Mike said. He was as literal as they came, Pete thought.

  “Let’s hit the Pub, in the Gables,” Pete said. “We haven’t been there in forever. I’ll meet you there in an hour or so.”

  Mike shrugged and laughed. “Sure, why not. I don’t have anything better to do. I’ll call up Emily and see if she wants to join us.”

  Emily. He hadn’t seen her in months. Not since she’d left the Miami Times and moved south to Homestead with her new husband, Rick, a well-built and well-meaning clod of a man. She’d worked a few uncomfortable months as a designer at the Times after breaking up with Pete, and before settling down with Rick. Even then, Pete had seen little of her. The wounds were too fresh, he thought, and he was too immersed in drinking his sadness away to even consider trying to build—or rebuild—any kind of relationship with Emily. After she’d left him, they made a few feeble efforts at becoming friends, but Pete didn’t have it in him. She’d left him, and in her place was a creaking emptiness. Pete suspected that she’d strayed from him toward the end, and he could never really forgive her for that. He’d never be certain. The nights out without a call. The way she’d dress up more than usual for happy hour with her friends from work. He’d never gotten the nerve to call her out, too busy spinning around in his own depression, his father recently buried and his career soon to follow. But he knew. Still, he also didn’t want to hate her. So, they’d talked from time to time—terse e-mail exchanges or drunk dials in the middle of the night that usually involved her hanging
up on him. If one’s definition of friendship was loose and based on familiarity between two people, then, sure, they were friends. But they weren’t friends by Pete’s definition, and that’s what mattered. Their relationship now had become one of resignation—Pete resigned to the fact that this was all they’d ever be to each other and Emily resigned to dealing with Pete, sneaking glances and side-stepping his random, almost unintentional advances. He loved her; she would never love him again.

  The idea of hanging out with her tonight sounded less than appealing, but he did want to talk to Mike. And he did want a drink.

  “Sure, that sounds good,” Pete said in a monotone. Mike knew as well as anyone what their history was, but he was friends with Emily and wasn’t about to choose who he hung out with based on Pete’s bruised heart. “Haven’t seen her in a while,” Pete added.

  Mike slid into his backpack and shook Pete’s hand. “Alright, I’ll see you there, then,” he said, walking toward the elevators. “Don’t stay too late, whatever the fuck you’re doing.”

  Chapter Eight

  Pete waited a few minutes after hearing the elevator doors close to be certain Mike was gone; then he began logging back into his computer. He had been desperate to do this earlier, but after his war of words with Vance kicked off the shift, Pete couldn’t risk being caught doing something other than work. He looked around and saw only the web editors and a few custodians.

  He logged into the Miami Times’ employee network and hit the “home” button on his Internet browser, which took him to the company Intranet, which housed a number of basic reporting and editing tools and databases, including an electronic newspaper archive, access to the Associated Press archives, and a variety of personal search engines that were meant to be used by enterprising young journalists looking to find sources or connect the dots on their next story. Pete wasn’t sure how closely his movements when using these programs were tracked, but he knew he was leaving some footprints. He only hoped they weren’t big enough to be noticed. The thought struck Pete as odd. He was now officially violating his job, arguably threatening it, and clearly going against his ethics as a journalist. Still, he wasn’t moved to stop. Something was tugging at him, the same spark of excitement and energy he had felt years before in New Jersey when he was chasing a story or looking for the perfect turn of a phrase to close out a profile piece on a new player or coach. He was hungry for information. He didn’t know Kathy enough to really care about her well being. But he did feel like something was happening, and he wanted to be doing something for once, instead of just sitting around feeling bad for himself. He typed Kathy’s name in the search field.

  A quick scan of the Times’ database only pulled up Kathy’s actual work for the paper: cop beat pieces, crime stories and the occasional police profile. He noticed that, of late, Kathy’d been spending a lot of time writing about Miami’s criminal history—specifically, about the Cuban gangs and their ties to the drug trade. One headline jumped out at Pete: “Who is the ‘Silent Death’ of Miami?” He clicked on it and got a rather lengthy, speculative piece about the killer who’d haunted the dark side of the Miami streets for years, working as an enforcer for the Cuban mobs. Kathy’s story suggested that the Silent Death was responsible for a string of murders involving the Cuban cartels and that it was one man, a previously unheard-of hypothesis. Understandably, she had little concrete information to go on. Pete found himself engrossed in the reading, reeled in by Kathy’s staccato writing style. The story ended on a hypothetical note, wondering when the Silent Death would strike again. Pete checked the date on the story—it was from a few weeks before. He sent it to print, hoping there’d be something of use in it, and went back to scanning Kathy’s clips. She was a prolific writer, and she was good. She covered the cops beat with aplomb and seemed to generate a wide range of pieces, not limited to the usual police report rehashing and publicity-seeking pieces. He found the historical pieces—which had increased in frequency lately—the most interesting. She knew about the criminal history of the city, the drug lords, the gangs, and corrupt cops, and could weave a compelling narrative. Could this be what got her in trouble? He wasn’t sure. She had never been the story herself. Pete did a quick background check on Kathy and also found nothing out of order—she paid her taxes on time, and, at worst, had two unpaid parking tickets from earlier in the year. Otherwise, she was a model citizen. Why hadn’t Chaz mentioned anything about the stories Kathy had written? Why hadn’t he done a basic search any Times employee could do if he was so worried about his daughter? The thought troubled Pete.

  Kathy’s boyfriend was another story, Pete realized. Not only did Javier Reyes’ name pop up a handful of times in the electronic archives—small news briefs reporting on petty robbery or arrests—but his actual arrest record was spotty at best. Pete scanned Javier’s rap sheet quickly, starting at age 18—a few misdemeanor arrests, a DWI about five years prior, and one charge for possession with intent to distribute. He’d been nabbed on the last charge a few years back and was currently on work release and serving probation, meaning he worked at a sanctioned job for five days a week and then served the remainder of his sentence under house arrest.

  Pete felt a sharp jab in his stomach. This is what Javier’s life had become. Pete knew he himself was fucked up—desperately in love with a woman who had cheated on him and left him, on the brink of being fired and drinking away his sorrows and hopes nightly. But Javier was inching toward becoming a career criminal, if he was not one already. Where would Javier be, Pete thought, if he’d had a father like Pete’s? He remembered the new world order after the 7-Eleven incident. His father drove him everywhere. No outings after school. Monitored homework sessions after class. On days Pete didn’t have school, he’d go to work with his father, to the station house at the Miami Dade PD. Pete was resentful and angry for years—it took even longer for him to forgive his father. But his father had made the right decision. What little of a life Pete had, he owed to his dad’s firm hand. Javier had gone down another path, though.

  Could he have done more to help him? He was his friend. He’d failed him. Pete sighed. His eyes drifted back to the work-release information. Interesting, Pete thought. Pete didn’t immediately think of Javier’s neighborhood as a place for ex-cons. And from what the report was telling him, Javier was working 30 hours a week as a busboy at a restaurant in Westchester—a suburb of Miami where both Pete and Javier grew up and where they met and became friends.

  Pete jotted down the restaurant’s name—Casa Pepe’s—and began to close down his computer when, on a whim, he did a quick search for the restaurant in the Times’ article archive. A few classified listings and ads popped up, as expected, but Pete was surprised to find an actual story appear as a result, a puff piece community news story, but a story nonetheless. Susan Frey, a reporter close to Pete’s age, wrote it. She’d moved to Orlando a few months back to take a business editor gig. He scanned the story, which profiled the restaurant’s owner, Jose Contreras—a Cuban refugee who, after coming to Miami during the Mariel boatlift of 1980 and spending a year in a Miami jail for assaulting a fellow refugee, toiled in the kitchens of various restaurants before finally cobbling together enough money to open his own.

  It made him laugh. Did Miami really need another Cuban restaurant? The story went on to paint Contreras as not only a capable businessman, but also a good citizen, noting he had set up part of the Casa Pepe’s workforce as an approved work-release program for convicted felons in an effort to help them get back on their feet. Probably got a healthy tax cut, too, Pete thought as he finished the story. He printed out a copy of the story and jotted down the restaurant’s address after collecting his pages from the printer. This was something, Pete thought. He wasn’t sure what. He stuffed the folded paper in his back pocket and hooked his bag over his shoulder. Something to do tomorrow, he thought. Talking to Javier, if that happened, would shed a different light on the situation. But now it was time to cut loose a bit. As Pete walked
toward the elevators, his screen flickered off, asleep.

  Chapter Nine

  The Gables Pub was a shitty dive off Le Jeune Road, on the edges of Coral Gables, one of Miami’s swankier neighborhoods. The Pub reminded Pete of college and the dozens of nights spent drinking in the bar’s patio area, closing the place down, being politely—and sometimes not so politely—asked to head home by the patient waitstaff. His memories of the drives home were a little blurry, and Pete was grateful to still be in one piece. It had been a destination not because of a particularly great ambiance, but because they were notoriously lax about carding students and the bartenders mixed the drinks strong—an attractive combination for Pete and his friends at the time. Back when drinking a Long Island Ice Tea was a good idea because it fucked you up quickly, the Pub was where Pete and his buddies hung out. Pete, Mike, Emily, and a few others willing to risk missing class the next morning made the bar their salon, where they’d talk about their lives, the news of the day, or argue about whether Radiohead’s “OK Computer” was historic or hype, and when Weezer was going to come out with a new record as good as “Pinkerton.” Pete didn’t care about either band anymore.

  Before he’d moved to New Jersey to take the Bergen Light job, before he’d fallen for Emily and decided to go from friend to lover, he’d lived in a tiny apartment less than three blocks away from the Pub, making it all the more obvious a destination for him. It also made driving between the lines less of a worry when he was trying to decide between going home and having one more. It may have even been one of the reasons he moved downtown when he returned to Miami, as opposed to settling into Coral Gables. Not much had changed. In his new neighborhood, he had just found another bar down the street.