The Fury (2009)
Page 1
Praise for the Henry Parker novels of
THE STOLEN
“A captivating and complex protagonist, one whose pithy
observations about New York are dead-on. Pinter’s chunky
plot, rapid pacing and credible dialogue do the rest.”
— Publishers Weekly
“This thriller proves truly scary
as it explores every parent’s worst nightmare.”
— Library Journal
“[An] exciting whodunit… Fans will appreciate this
entertaining suspense thriller with the right touch of
sexual tension to augment a fine read.”
— Midwest Book Review
THE GUILTY
“[A] suspenseful and shocking tale.”
— Library Journal
“A captivating and thought-provoking read and thoroughly
enjoyable. One of the great new voices in the genre.”
— CrimeSpree magazine
“[A] fresh tale with original characters…
Pinter knows what he’s doing.”
— South Florida Sun-Sentinel
“A fabulous thriller…
will prove to be one of the best of the year.”
— Midwest Book Review
“Well-executed gritty action…”
— Lincoln Journal-Star
THE MARK
“Pinter’s a wizard at punching out page-turning action,
and the voice of his headstrong protagonist is sure to win
readers over; his wild ride should thrill any suspense junky.”
— Publishers Weekly
“From the opening sentence to the exhilarating conclusion,
Pinter’s debut thriller gets the reader’s heart racing.”
— Library Journal [starred review]
“An excellent debut.
You are going to love Henry Parker, and you’re going to hope
he survives the story, but you’re not going to bet on it.”
—Lee Child
“[Pinter] dares to take the traditional thriller
in bold new directions.”
—Tess Gerritsen
“A harrowing journey—chilling, compelling, disquieting.”
—Steve Berry
“A stunning debut by a major new talent!”
—James Rollins
“It’s ‘Front Page’ meets ‘The Sopranos’
with a little Scorsese thrown in.”
—Jeffery Deaver
“A top-notch debut… Fast-paced, gritty and often raw,
The Mark is a tale you won’t soon forget.”
—Michael Palmer
“A gripping page-turner you won’t be able to stop reading.”
—James Patterson
®
To Joe Veltre and Linda McFall
For yesterday, today and tomorrow. Thank you.
Beware the fury of a patient man.
—John Dryden
1
At nine in the morning, the offices of the New York
Gazette are quiet. Reporters read the morning papers,
prepare to call their sources and blink off hangovers
over steaming cups of coffee. Today, however, it was a
different kind of quiet. The kind of quiet where
everyone seems to be waiting for the roof to cave in, or
the floor to suddenly give way and fall out from under
you.
Every morning I would swipe my ID card, wave
hello to the security guards who’d gradually warmed to
me over the years and wait for the elevator with lots of
other people who also looked like they’d rather still be
in bed. I would exit the elevators at the twelfth floor,
passing the receptionist, always too busy to acknowl
edge staffers, and walk to my desk. The offices of the
New York Gazette towered over Rockefeller Center,
giving me a panoramic view of one of the busiest streets
in the city. Yet when I navigated the mess of chairs and
debris and entered the cubicle farm on this day, I noticed
the other journalists who shared my row were nowhere
to be seen. There were no faces hunched far too close
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Jason Pinter
to computer screens, no whispered chats about the ump
teenth death knell sounded for our industry. No report
ers haggling over verb usage and tense like it was a
matter of life or death. It seemed every day across our
industry there were more layoffs, more cutbacks, more
reasons to fear the end. And it had been drilled repeat
edly into us by our corporate overlords and the media
that if the sickle wasn’t already lancing the air above
our heads, it was in the midst of being lowered into
place.
I couldn’t worry about that. Still a few years shy of
thirty, it had been my lifelong ambition to work at a pre
stigious, thriving newspaper. And while one could
debate whether the Gazette was thriving, in my short
time here I’d had the chance to work alongside some of
the greats, including my idol, Jack O’Donnell.
I’d also been wanted for murder and targeted by a
deranged serial killer. Hey, who doesn’t complain about
their job sometimes?
Externally, you might think I looked the same. Inter
nally, though, I was a different man. A man learns who
he is when his life, innocence and freedom are chal
lenged. I was stronger than I ever knew I could be, but
deep down I wished I hadn’t needed to find that out.
When I navigated the maze of empty desks to arrive
at mine, I put my coffee and muffin on the desk, sat
down and debated whether to ignore the silence or see
what was causing the sound vacuum. I reached for the
plastic tab on my coffee, but immediately thought twice.
To ignore the strange stillness of the office would have
gone against every bone in my body, and probably trig
gered some sort of spontaneous combustion. Curiosity
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not only killed the cat, but made my breakfast grow
cold. So I stood back up and took a lap around the news
floor to see what the hell was going on.
I didn’t have to go far.
A group of half a dozen reporters were huddled
around the desk of Evelyn Waterstone, the Gazette’s
Metro editor. They were talking under their breaths,
worried looks in their eyes. I wondered if there were
going to be layoffs. If some of my colleagues—perhaps
even myself—would be out of a job. That Evelyn’s desk
had seemingly replaced the watercooler as center of
office scoop was itself noteworthy. Evelyn stayed as far
away from gossip as those who gossiped stayed away
from her. Whatever happened had to be big enough to
pique her interest. I walked up casually, inserting myself
into the conversation through proximity alone.
Evelyn Waterstone was a short, squat woman whose
haircut resembled a well-manicured putting green—
only this particular green was gray with age—and
whose broad shoulders would have been a welcome
addition to most offensive lines. She wa
s a discipli
narian in the gentlest sense of the word. It took several
years for her to warm up to me, but when my work ethic
and the quality of my reporting became clear, Evelyn
began to grudgingly show me a modicum of respect.
Still, I don’t think you’d ever see the two of us tossing
back a couple of longnecks after hours. I made an effort
never to stop by her desk unless I had a specific
question, and Evelyn never stormed by mine unless I’d
made some terrible grammatical mistake that, to
Evelyn, was only slightly worse of an offense than
treason.
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“Morning, Parker,” Evelyn said. She held a black
thermos between her fleshy hands, and took a long,
drawn-out sip. “Another beautiful day at your friendly
local newspaper.” She sniffed the air. “Glad to see
you’ve begun showering regularly again.”
“Morning, Evelyn,” I said, nodded to the other re
porters, who offered the same.
“You hear about Rourke?” she said. I hadn’t, and
told her so. She raised her arms dramatically as if re
counting some heroic tale. “This paper’s most contro
versial sportswriter—who incidentally once told a
linebacker he would ‘whup his ass like a donkey’—got
mugged yesterday on his way home from the office.
Well, I shouldn’t say mugged, because the guy didn’t
take any money, but Frank ended up getting the donkey
side of the whupping.”
“Really?” I said, incredulous. “Rourke?” I had no
love lost for Frank Rourke, considering the man had
once left a bag of excrement on my desk—but the man’s
swagger seemed to come from years of always being the
one guy who was able to leave the fight on his own two
feet.
“Seems some hothead took umbrage to Frank’s
calling the Yankees ‘the most poorly run organization
since FEMA.’ Some disgruntled asshat from the Bronx.
Anyway, this guy waits outside of the office until Frank
leaves. Then he yells, ‘Yo, Rourke!’ Frank turns his
head, and gets a sockful of quarters up against the side
of his temple.”
“That’s terrible, is he okay?”
“Concussion, he’ll be fine. Police arrested the fan,
I’m just hoping he might have damaged the area of
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Frank’s brain that makes him such an asshole. Maybe
he’ll have one of those Regarding Henry kind of
epiphanies and come back a better man.”
“That’s probably too much to expect.”
“We can dream, Parker. We can dream.”
As we chatted, I noticed another group of reporters
huddled together in the hallway looking like they’d just
been told management had decided to restructure by
throwing them out the twelfth floor windows. The group
shifted nervously, whispering amongst themselves.
Never wanting to be the last one in the know, I ap
proached, said, “I thought Frank was going to be fine,
what gives?”
Jonas Levinson, the Gazette’s science editor, said,
“Frank is the least of our concerns. Though, as a matter
of fact, something has died this morning. Something to
be mourned as long as we’re employed by this godfor
saken newspaper. As of today, good taste, my friend, has
kicked the bucket.”
I stared at Jonas, waiting for some kind of an expla
nation. Levinson was a tall man, balding, who wore a
different bow tie to the office every day. He very seldom
exaggerated his feelings, so at Jonas’s remark a flock
of butterflies began to flutter around in my stomach.
“I’m not following you,” I said to Jonas. “Good
taste? Jonas, care to explain?”
“Just follow the eyes, Parker,” Jonas said. “Follow
the eyes.”
I opened my mouth to ask another question, but then
I realized what he was saying. The eyes of every
member of our group were focused on two individuals
making their way across the Gazette’s floor. They were
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stopping at every desk, popping into each office for a
few moments. It looks like some sort of introduction
ritual was taking place.
Immediately this struck me as odd. I’d never met
another employee during a walkaround, and had not
received one myself. The fact that this one person was
being given the grand tour made it clear he was
someone the brass wanted to coddle.
One of the two men I recognized immediately as
Wallace Langston, editor in chief. Wallace was in his
midfifties, lean with a neatly trimmed beard. His brown
hair was flecked with gray, and he had the slightly bent
posture of a man who’d spent the majority of his years
hunched over a keyboard. Wallace had been a staunch
supporter of mine in the years I’d been employed by the
paper, and even though now more than ever he was
feeling the crunch of his corporate masters insisting on
higher profit margins, he knew what it took to print
good news. If not my idol, he was a good, loyal mentor.
“Is he,” I said, “introducing someone around the
office?”
“That is precisely what it looks like,” Jonas replied.
Evelyn walked up and said, “I never met a damn
person until my first staff meeting. I got as much of an
introduction as my stove has to a cooking pot.”
“Me, neither,” I said. When I started at the Gazette,
I didn’t know anybody other than Jack O’Donnell. Jack
was my boyhood idol, the man most aspiring reporters
dreamt of becoming. He and I had grown close over the
last few years, but recently he’d lost his battle with the
bottle and left the Gazette. I hadn’t spoken to him in a
few months. I’d tried his home, his cell phone, even
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13
walked by his Clinton apartment a few times, but never
got a hold of the man. It was clear Jack needed some
time alone with his demons.
Ironically the first reporter I’d met was a woman
named Paulina Cole. We worked next to each other
when I first started at the Gazette. Soon she left for a
job at the rival Dispatch, where through a combination
of balls, brass and more balls she’d become one of the
most talked-about writers in the city. Paulina was cold,
calculating, ruthless and, worst of all, damn smart. She
knew what people wanted to read—namely, anything
where if you squeezed a page, dirt or juice came out—
and gave it to them. She was part of the reason Jack had
left the Gazette. She’d managed to pay off numerous
people in order to discover the extent of Jack’s drinking
habits, and then ran a front-page article (with unflatter
ing pictures) depicting Jack as the second coming of
Tara Reid. Saying there was no love lost between us was
like saying there was no love lost between east an
d
west coast rappers.
Wallace was still too far away for us to make out just
who he was introducing around the office, but I got the
feeling he would prefer if he didn’t have to do it en
masse.
“I’m going back to my desk,” I said. “Jonas, if you
see good taste anywhere, I’ll get the paddles and we’ll
resuscitate the bastard.”
“Thank you for the offer, Henry, but I do believe
it’s too late.”
I walked back to my desk, trying not to think about
what this could mean. Since Jack left, the Gazette had
been on a hiring freeze. We were in a war with the
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Jason Pinter
Dispatch over circulation rates, advertising dollars and
stories, and our expenses were taking a toll. If Harvey
Hillerman, the president and owner of the Gazette, had
hired a new reporter, he or she had to be important
enough to cause a stir. Not to mention someone who
would be approved of by the other reporters whose pay
raises had been nixed last holiday season.
I sat down and continued working on a story I’d been
following up on for several weeks, about the homeless
population of New York. According to the New York
City Department of Homeless Services, there were over
thirty-five thousand homeless individuals living within
the city’s borders. Including over nine thousand
families. That number had increased by fifteen percent
in the last five years.
I was about to pick up the phone, when I heard the
sound of footsteps approach and then stop by my desk.
I looked up to Wallace Langston. And his mystery hire.
“Henry Parker,” Wallace said, hand outstretched,
“meet Tony Valentine.”
Tony Valentine was six foot three, looked to be a
hundred and eighty svelte pounds and had the smile of
a cruise-ship director. His hair was bleached blond, and
his teeth glistened. His tan was clearly sprayed on, as I
noticed when he extended his hand to shake mine that
his palms were a much paler shade. He wore a designer
suit, and wore it well. A red pocket square was neatly
tucked into his suit jacket. The initials T.V. were em
broidered in white script on the cloth.
As he offered his hand, I noticed his sleeves were
held together by two gold cuff links. Also mono
grammed with T.V.
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Clearly this man did not want his name to be for
gotten.
“Henry Parker,” Valentine said, gushing insincere