The Deadline (22 page)

Lukewarm water trickled into the darkroom sink, the only sound in the humid blackness that engulfed Morgan.  When he turned on the red darkroom light, there was no more movie.  He finished the film and clothes-pinned the strips to a wire strung overhead in the mildewy space.

The newsroom’s fluorescent lights stung his tired eyes.  It was after nine o’clock and for the first time today, Morgan was hungry.  He’d promised Claire he’d be home thirty minutes ago, although plenty of work remained to be done tonight.  He thought about calling Claire and telling her to put a plate in the refrigerator for him, a request he’d made more times than he cared to remember.

But his stomach groused.  He decided to take a break and come back later.  He retrieved the leather briefcase he’d hidden under his desk, turned off the lights and locked the front door behind him.

The recalcitrant Escort sat forlornly on the empty street.  It wheezed and snorted and belched, but it refused to start.  Morgan slammed the driver’s door as he got out, then kicked it.  He plotted a painful, rusty death as he walked home in the dark summer night.

While Claire warmed a plate of roasted chicken and rice for him, Morgan telephoned the hospital.  A tired Dr. Snyder, at the end of a long shift, told him Gilmartin had not yet regained consciousness but his vital signs had improved slightly after he was moved to the intensive care unit.  She promised to call if the old man’s condition changed, for better or worse, but she didn’t expect any news before morning, a sentiment that encouraged Morgan.

“How is he?” Claire asked as he hung up.

“He’s better,” Morgan said, rubbing his fatigued eyes.  The pungent smell of Dektol developer lingered on his hands, reminding him that his night wasn’t finished.  “I think he’s going to make it.  He’s one tough son of a bitch, and I don’t think he survived a world war and half a century in prison to die quietly in the night.  God, I hope not.”

Claire kneaded his shoulders.  The tautness in his muscles melted away.  The buoyant T.J., swinging his bushy tail in a wide swath beneath the kitchen table, nudged his hand for an affectionate pat.  The Doors’ morose anthem, “The End,” pulsed low and endless on the stereo in the darkened den, on a fading cassette tape that had survived a thousand replays since Morgan’s college days.

“Can you put something else on?” he asked.  His mood was somber enough.  “Anything.”

Claire disappeared into the next room.  From the dark, he heard the distant, delicate harmony of Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Claire resumed her massage.

“Better?”

“Much.”

“Will you make deadline this week?” she asked, running her fingers along the taut cords of his neck into his hair.  He felt the tingle of blood spilling into the stress-pinched capillaries of his scalp as she rubbed.

“I don’t know.  There’s still a lot to do, but maybe ... right there, yeah ... I have to go back tonight.”

“I suspected you would.  I’ll make a Thermos of coffee for you.  Just the way you like it:  Extra sweet.”

“Thanks.  If they find me dead on the newsroom floor tomorrow morning, it was the saccharin.”

The oven timer buzzed.  Morgan opened the screen door to let the dog out, and stood to watch midges dancing madly around the backyard porch light while Claire served his late dinner.  She sat beside him as he ate in silence, still consumed by a difficult day that wasn’t yet over.

“What if he dies?” she asked.

Morgan tried to respond, but he couldn’t.  He had no answer.  Crickets paused in the backyard, and his iced tea glass sweated quietly into a wet ring on the table, but he couldn’t speak.

“Right now, right at this moment, do you think he did it?” she pressed him.

The hot night embraced him.  The pleated linen curtains over the sink hung limp, waiting for a refreshing wind to change the subject.

“No,” he said after a moment.  “I don’t think he killed her.”

Claire touched his hand and leaned close to him.  Her fingers were cool on his.

“Then he needs you more than ever right now,” she said, comforting him.  “I’ll pray, but you’ve got to be his angel.  You’ve done more with less, and right now, nothing else matters.  Not this freak-show militia thing, not the greedy little bean-counters at the bank, not your egotistical sheriff buddy, not even the damn newspaper.  Nothing.  If you really believe this old man is innocent, then you’ve got to prove it.”

Morgan sipped his tea and traced his finger through the perfect circle of water where his glass sat.  His own circle was broken.  He felt lost.

“Time has run out,” he said.  “I feel sorry for the guy, I really do.  If he’s innocent and he spent his life in prison ... Jesus, I don’t even want to think about it.  But there isn’t time to finish this thing his way.  He only gave me two weeks to solve a crime that was committed before I was born.  Two weeks.  It’s his own goddam fault.  He let time run out on me.”

“Don’t talk as if he’s dead.  He’s still alive.”

“Barely,” Morgan said, his voice rising in frustration.  “I keep thinking the phone’s going to ring and they’re going to tell me he’s gone.  I used to think that would be it.  I’d be released from this thing.  Now I’ve got this knot in my stomach, like I’m letting him down.”

“For God’s sake, Jeff,” Claire snapped at him.  “This is why you do it.  Remember that night, that first night we were together, when you told me you wanted to tell stories that changed lives?  Remember that?”

“Jesus, Claire ...”

“I know you wanted to make lives better, and you did, but now you can change a life that’s already been lived.  This old man doesn’t want to live it again.  He came to you for one thing:  Absolution.”

“I’m not God.  I’m not even sure there is a god, but it ain’t me, Claire.  I don’t perform miracles.  I can’t raise the dead.  And I can’t just wipe the dirty slate of Neeley Gilmartin’s life clean.”

It seemed an eternity before Claire spoke again.  She sat silently, her hands in her lap, not looking at him.  There were only the sounds of a summer night — children playing somewhere down the block, the random ticking of moths against the porch light, crickets in the grass — until she looked directly into his eyes and spoke. 

“You said you wanted to dip your finger in ink and touch hearts.  Something burned inside you, some passion, and the light came through your eyes.  I saw it.  I fell completely in love with you that first night.  Because you really believed you could touch people with your words, and you made me believe.  In you.”

Morgan tenderly touched his wife’s cheek.  If anything had changed since his first night with her, it wasn’t Claire.  She remained, as always, tougher than he was.

“Do you still believe?” he asked her.

“I never stopped,” she said.

He kissed her, his fingers gliding across her tummy under the loose bottom of her tee-shirt.  A soft breeze had come up, rustling the curtains over the sink.  Claire pulled him closer and he tasted the saltiness of her neck.  Then she stood up from the table and led him by the hand to the dark den, where they hid from the light and made love on the couch.

When they finished, Claire lay against her husband, the slow rhythm of old music and a warm breeze washing over their naked bodies in the dark.

“Aren’t you glad we kept the couch?” she asked.

Morgan smiled in the dark.  “Hey, you were the one who wanted to sell it,” he reminded her.  “Fifty bucks.  Remember?”

“Do you really have to go back tonight?” she asked him, brushing her hand lightly through the hair on his chest and knowing he did.

Before he could answer, the night erupted.

A thundering explosion split the air, close.  A flash of light pierced the darkness a split-second ahead of the sound.  The blast shrieked like the collected voices of Hell itself.  The windows facing the street strained and rattled against their casements, but didn’t break.

Instantly, Morgan rolled Claire off the couch onto the floor and covered her with his body, feeling the floor rumble beneath them.  A mournful keening rose as dogs began to howl throughout the neighborhood.

He could feel Claire’s nude body shaking against him.

“Are you okay?” he asked.  He felt her nod.

“What was that?” she whispered, barely able to speak.

Morgan didn’t know.  He reached across the rug for his pants, which he hurriedly pulled on.  He crawled across the floor toward the front window.

“Don’t leave me, Jeff,” Claire begged.

“Stay there,” he told her.  “Don’t move until I tell you.”

Crouching in the dark hall near the door, Morgan reached up and turned off the front porch light.  Then he opened the door slightly.  Neighbors were already gathering on the street in front of the house, but they were looking and pointing toward the downtown.

A glimmering orange light reflected on billowing smoke just a few blocks away.  Then he heard the fire department’s siren wail, desperately calling volunteers out of their homes all over town.

He hurried back to Claire, feeling for his shirt and shoes in the dark.  The hair on his neck felt like needles as he wrapped his shirt around him without buttoning it.

“Stay here, Claire,” he commanded her.  “There’s a fire downtown someplace.  Get the dog inside, lock the doors, and stay put.  I’ll call.”

Morgan grabbed a fresh notebook and sprinted out the front door toward the roaring light that glowed like a tarnished sunset just a few blocks away.  Over his pounding heart and his electrified breathing, he could hear smaller, secondary explosions in the fire.

Still two blocks away, cinders drifted to earth and smoke surged through the trees, stinging his lungs.  One block away, he felt ripples of heat on his face and shattered glass from broken windows sparkled like diamonds at his feet.

As Morgan ran across the bank parking lot, around the corner that separated the neighborhoods from Main Street, he saw flames rising high into the night sky.  Sparks curled toward heaven in blistering zephyrs.  The first firefighters were just arriving, shielding their faces against the growling inferno.

His stomach clenched and he wanted to vomit.

The Bullet
was fully engulfed.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

B
y morning’s first light, only the charred bones of the printing press stood above the smoldering remains of
The Bullet
.  The old newspaper’s skin had been cremated and ripped away, exposing the steel spine that had always given it strength.  Pools of ash-choked water from the fire engines’ hoses seeped like black blood from the mordant debris.

The bomb had exploded inside the building, probably in the pressroom.  A firefighter had already found a shallow crater, filled with black water, in the concrete floor beneath the back window.  The blast had blown out the entire back wall of the building, igniting the stock of paper and ink in the pressroom.  The damage wasn’t confined to the newspaper office:  Buildings on both sides of
The Bullet
suffered the shock of the blast, their walls disfigured, their broken windows gaping like black wounds.

Rod Dombeck, a lantern-jawed sheriff’s investigator who’d sped away from his teen-age son’s American Legion baseball game in extra innings when he heard the explosion the night before, had already blocked the alley with yellow crime-scene tape and he was scouring the brick-strewn parking area for evidence.

A little after five a.m., as soon as they could see in the dim light, firefighters fanned out from the hulk of the press, probing in the mess with pikes and pry bars.  Half-ton rolls of tightly rolled newsprint, once stacked four high, were reduced to feathery embers.  Ink barrels had burst in the intense heat, feeding the fire with their flammable contents.

Morgan coughed up gray-flecked phlegm as he wandered through the incinerated newsroom.  The fire chief wouldn’t let him go any farther into the wreckage, which was now a crime scene.  He saw nothing familiar, except a few orphaned pieces of common office hardware that hadn’t been vaporized in the intense heat:  Blackened steel parts from chairs, desks and light fixtures, crushed filing cabinets, and the small safe where Crystal kept petty cash and receipts.  The rest — phones, computers, desks, wooden chairs, books, even the old newspaper pages and the clock on the wall — were burned beyond recognition.

Morgan was numb.  The lingering smoke nauseated him.  The smudged light of morning stung his eyes as the soul of his newspaper, his dream, rose in smoky tendrils to the sky and drifted slowly to the east in a sinuous cloud.

The Bullet
was gone.

Somewhere in the ashes, or somewhere in the clouds above, was the last edition.  Morgan tasted it in the air, a mordant bitterness that cloyed his tongue and churned in his belly.  The week’s paper was certainly lost, and he didn’t know how or where he could make next week’s.

“Over here!” a young volunteer firefighter yelled from the pile of rubble near the press.

The boy sagged to his knees, pinching his blackened mouth and nose with his left hand.  Morgan recognized him from the Conoco station, where he pumped gas after school.  He’d helped Morgan push the Escort across Main Street the night before, safely away from the fire.  Now, he looked ill as a half dozen other firefighters and deputies scrambled across the wreckage to his side.  Morgan followed them and nobody stopped him.

The corpse had been hidden under a collapsed wall.  The boy had uncovered it when he yanked on a deformed piece of sheet-metal, and was immediately enveloped by the caustic stench of charred human flesh.

In the half light of the new morning, the body lay on its back, its empty eye sockets staring up at the smoky sky.  In the intense heat, the eyeballs had split open and shriveled like grapes on a griddle.  The soft tissues of the face had been stripped off by the fire, revealing grayish white bone beneath.  Pieces of its skull had peeled away in thin, flat layers.  Its jaw was frozen in a savage, silent scream at the sky.

The corpse had no hands, but the stumps of its forearms were thrust out in front of its body like a fistless boxer protecting his seared viscera, which were exposed to the air.  Skin and fat were broiled away, laying bare a hash of scorched muscles that had ruptured.

Morgan had seen and smelled burned bodies before, but nobody he’d known in life.  He tried to envision Cal Nussbaum’s long, rumpled face on the skeletal countenance in the hole.  Vomit rose in his esophagus and he choked it down.

“Get him outta here,” Dombeck barked, pointing at Morgan.  “We got a murder scene now.  Call the sheriff and tell him we got a ten-seventy-nine, well done.  And for god’s sake, watch where you step.  We might have more crispy critters under all this shit.”

A uniformed deputy escorted Morgan away from the corpse’s shadowy hole, back to the front sidewalk where they ducked beneath the freshly strung yellow police line.  Shattered glass was everywhere.  A small crowd of gawkers had gathered across the street.  All night, he’d seen them, standing on distant corners, parked along side streets, feeling the heat on their empty faces, watching his life collapse in flame.  Now, Morgan stood with his back to them, feeling embarrassed and angry.  He wanted to take them, one by one, to stare into what remained of Cal Nussbaum’s face.  If they were still curious, they could trace the cracks in his bare skull where Cal’s boiling brain had seeped out.

Morgan walked across Main Street to examine his car.  Some plastic piping had melted off the front bumper and the paint on the hood had blistered before he and the young firefighter had pushed it out of harm’s way.  He sagged against the front fender and peeled off some of the scorched blue paint, letting it flutter down the street.

Sheriff Trey Kerrigan parked his white Blazer in the middle of Main Street, behind a fire truck.  He wore his election-year Stetson and a short-sleeved brown uniform blouse, with his silver sheriff’s star on the breast and razor-sharp creases.  His father’s gun was on his hip in a polished black leather holster.  Trey’s face was drawn and serious.

The sheriff spoke briefly to one of his deputies before climbing up to view Cal’s body in the smoky debris.  A few minutes later, he clambered down, the cuffs of his brown uniform trousers black with soot.

“I’m sorry about all this, Jeff,” he said, wiping the smell of death away from his nose.  “Looks like a bomb.  We got the state arson team and the ATF on the way from Cheyenne.  I’m fair certain they’re gonna want to ask you some questions.”

Morgan nodded but said nothing.  He was eager to tell them about Pierce’s threats, and to begin rebuilding his newspaper, starting with the next edition.

Trey Kerrigan swept his boot through the glass that covered the sidewalk.

“You don’t happen to know who the body is up there, do you?”

“I think it’s Cal Nussbaum.  The place was empty when I left for dinner, but Cal was going to come back to the office last night to finish some pages,” Morgan said.  Then he realized the dark task before him.  “I have to tell his wife.”

“Don’t worry,” the sheriff said, “I’ll send somebody over to his place as soon as we get the coroner up here.  Shouldn’t be long.”

“No,” Morgan insisted.  “It should be me.  I owe him that.  They have a place up on Nightcap Creek, ten miles out.  They don’t have a phone.  She won’t know about the fire.”

“I’m sorry, Jeff.  I can’t let you go.”

“What?”

“I can’t let you go.”

Morgan’s heart convulsed.

“What, am I a suspect now?”

Kerrigan looked away, down the street.

“Maybe.”

Morgan was stunned.

“You must be shitting me.  You think I’d blow up my own newspaper?  Give me a fuckin’ break, Trey.”

The sheriff glared at his old friend.

“No, you give
me
a break.  Don’t play me for some dumb-ass tinhorn cop.  I ain’t sayin’ you done it, but everybody knows you’re havin’ major-league financial problems.  It raises questions.  Big-city cop reporter, you been around these investigations.  You know the routine.”

“You think I torched the paper for the insurance money?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to, Trey.  I know the routine, remember?  Well, goddammit, I didn’t do it.  We’d just turned the corner and I always had other options for money.  But not this.  No way.  You know me.”

“That was once upon a time.  You went away and I don’t know who you are now, Jeff.”

Anger welled in Morgan.

“I didn’t change.  You did.  You’re too goddamned worried about keeping your job.  That badge is weighing you down, my friend.”

Morgan nearly spit the last word.  He saw Trey Kerrigan’s right hand curl into a fist at his side and he stepped back to give himself plenty of time to fend off the blow.  It never came.

Instead, Kerrigan leaned toward his old friend and spoke in an angry whisper:  “Fuck you, Jeff.  I’ll take you down in a minute and don’t think I won’t.” 

A nervous sweat was trickling down Morgan’s side.  For the first time in his conscious memory, he faced Trey Kerrigan as an enemy.  He felt as if he were fighting for his life.  Even if he understood his suspicions, it frightened him to be a suspect.  He fought through it.

“Trey, if you’re arresting me, then take me back to the jail so I can call my lawyer.  If you aren’t, get out of my face.  I have to go home and tell my wife what happened here,” he said, trying to hold himself together.  “Then I need to go out and see Betty Nussbaum.  She needs to know.  What’s it going to be?”

Momentarily outmaneuvered, Kerrigan scowled.

“The feds and the state fire boys will be here by lunchtime.”  The sheriff thumped Morgan in the chest with his thick index finger.  “You’d better be where I can find you or I’ll hunt down your ass myself.  I swear to God I will.”

Morgan said nothing and walked away.  Kerrigan watched him get into the wounded Escort and attempt to start it.  By the third gasping try, the sheriff was shaking his head, a mocking smile on his lips.

Just as Morgan was about to abandon the heap and walk, the engine turned over.  Kerrigan himself pointed the way through the emergency vehicles still parked in the street, across several unfurled fire hoses toward home.

As he passed, the sheriff cocked his thumb and forefinger like a pistol and, from his hip, aimed it at Morgan.  Through the windshield, Morgan watched the hammer fall.

Claire was waiting for him.  Already dressed in her baggy painting pants and a gray Northwestern University tee-shirt, she rocked nervously on the top step of the front porch.  When she saw his car, she ran out to the end of the driveway to meet him.  Before he spoke, she lost it, her shoulders heaving as she wept in his arms.

“It was the paper, Claire,” he told her as she held him tight.  He clung to her as if she were the last thing in his world.  “It’s gone.”

“They killed him,” she sobbed, unable to catch her breath.  “They were here and they killed him.  I went out to make room in the shed for my painting stuff and I found ... him that way.  Oh, god.”

Claire’s face was buried in his chest, but she swept her arm toward the house.

She couldn’t have known about Cal.  Not so soon.  Morgan wrapped his arms more tightly around her and guided her across the lawn toward the front door.  Safely inside, he sat her on the sofa and searched her tear-streaked face.  Her eyes were frightened and red.

“Killed who?  Tell me,” he said, wiping tears from her cheeks.  “Please tell me.”

Claire just pointed toward the back door.  “Out there,” she said.

Morgan touched her cold hands and went into the kitchen alone.  Last night’s dinner dishes were still on the table, but nothing looked awry.  The back door was open.  Outside, the porch light still glowed as morning blossomed.

He walked across the backyard.  The thick lawn was dewy and he felt the cool wetness seep through the soles of his shoes.  It was still before six and the neighborhood was quiet.  No children playing, no dogs barking.

No dogs
.

He called for T.J.

Nothing.

Morgan called again, but the dog didn’t answer.

As he turned toward the house, he found T.J.  The pup had been skinned and hanged by a chain from the porch eave, dangling from a railroad spike driven through his neatly sliced neck.  His belly had been slit and blood dripped onto a small, sad pile of guts that cooled in the morning air beneath the carcass.

Morgan ran inside to Claire.  She had composed herself, but was still trembling and cold.  He wrapped a hand-knitted afghan across her shoulders.

“He called,” she murmured as her husband held her close, trying to share his body heat.  “He called after ...  I was afraid to answer the phone, so I let the machine pick it up.  I heard him.”

She pointed toward the answering machine on a curio table in the hallway.  It blinked ominously. 

Morgan left her on the couch and pushed the button.  The machine beeped once and rewound.  The message was brief and chilling, the voice unfamiliar.

“You make it too easy, Jew-lover.  We got your paper and your fuckin’ dog, easy.  We’re comin’ for your pretty Jew wife next if you keep askin’ questions.  We don’t need your kind here.  You ain’t gonna do to us what you done to P.D. Comeaux.  You know us and you know we don’t care nuthin’ about killin’ prairie niggers or Jews, which ain’t even good as dogs.  That Indian-trash kid wasn’t worth comin’ home and findin’ your wife gutted like a dog, was she?  So don’t go pokin’ your fuckin’ nose where it ain’t supposed to be.”

The message ended abruptly.  Morgan removed the tape from the machine and dropped it in his pocket.  His hand was shaking and his head throbbed.  He was exhausted and afraid.

But now he knew.

He couldn’t know exactly who called, but he knew in his heart who’d sent the message.

He knew who’d bombed
The Bullet
, killing Cal Nussbaum.

He knew who slaughtered Claire’s puppy.

And, for the first time since Neeley Gilmartin had come to him, he knew who’d probably killed Aimee Little Spotted Horse and thrown her tiny body into the Black Thunder River gorge.  Even if he didn’t know why or how, he knew there was a connection.

Malachi Pierce.

Morgan didn’t want to leave Claire alone at the house, even though she had progressed from shock to seething anger.  Now she was mad.  But he wasn’t sure she was safe by herself, so he took her with him to deliver the answering-machine tape to Sheriff Trey Kerrigan.  Not only would it exonerate him, it offered a new lead in the arson-murder at
The Bullet
.

Downtown at the fire scene, Morgan found Trey Kerrigan in a grim conversation between the sheriff and the county coroner about the dead man, whose remains lay heaped in a black plastic body bag on a gurney between them, part of the discussion but past caring.  He hung back, watching and listening.

The verbose Carter McWayne had followed his father and his grandfather in the funeral business and the distasteful corollary job of Perry County coroner.  In his mid-forties, his fleshy face and enormous belly might have belonged to any devotee of The Griddle’s fatback-gravy specials, but his bulging eyes marked him as a McWayne.