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he big announcement, hell, since the day Maggie Sterling died. The credibility I built up over the years, the reader following. I was the first to call the big recession, the first to see that Washington Mutual would go down. It didn’t matter. Why am I in a near state of shock now?
He says, “I’m really sorry, man.”
I muster enough saliva in my mouth to speak again and ask about the story.
“That’s not going anywhere,” the M.E. says.
I just sit staring at my tie. After half a minute of silence, he goes on, “James Sterling personally said, ‘no more Olympic stories.’ I had to fight like hell to get your second column in.”
“Why?” The exclamation covers a world of questions in my life that moment.
“I’ve got to go,” he says. “Come by my office on Monday. We’ll talk about what comes next. I know readers will want to have a goodbye column. The severance will be decent, not terrible. Look, I’m trying to save the newspaper, get the newsroom down to a staffing level where the consultants say it might attract a buyer. But it probably won’t happen in this environment, so I’ll be joining you in the unemployment li…”
I hang up. Before me is the nook where I write from home. Above the desk is my ego wall, with awards and photos from a quarter century of newspapering. I look impossibly young in some of the photos. The awards include some for stories I barely remember—I only remember the hard work, the all-nighters, the sense of justification when they appeared on the front page. All gone. So many good people have lost their jobs in the past few years, and more than a few have never been able to get back to their old earnings power. Why should I have been special? But my eye goes to a photo of four men in suits, smiling and clinking glasses. It was taken years ago. One of the four is me. The other three went on to lead major newspapers. I became a columnist. I never knew how to go along to get along.
I still don’t. I stand and grab my notebook. Then I’m not sure I want the information inside to go with me to this interview—you never know. So I stash it in a file drawer with a hundred other identical reporter’s notebooks, and pick up a new one to make notes from Pete Montgomery. I also take my small tape recorder. Heidi will be recording, so I don’t want any arguments over the accuracy of quotes. I don’t have anywhere close to the whole story put together, but there’s a start—and Olympic is scared enough to grant a weekend interview.
***
George is sitting in front of the building when I step out of the elevator into the lobby. He sees me through the glass entrance and casually but unmistakably crooks his arm at a ninety-degree angle and makes a fist.
“Freeze,” it says. Infantry hand signals. The old first sergeant then drops his arm and wraps his left forefinger over his right forearm: “Enemy.” He signals two fingers—two of them—and points to the south.
I immediately turn and walk quickly to the back door, toward the recycling bins. I step into the alley and Stu is fifteen steps away, maybe closer. His face is set in hatred. Suddenly I feel so goddamned tired and beaten, but something inside makes my body run at him. He’s surprised to see me coming toward him and starts reaching inside his coat. But by that time I’ve hit him head-on with a body block that would be a technical foul in any contact sport. He hits the ground hard and I run toward the street, expecting any second to feel a bullet in my back.
Instead I see a yellow play gun. It’s attached to Bill’s hand and pointed at me.
The darts are very fast and hit me in the gut, cutting into the shirt. The worst cramp I’ve ever imagined convulses my abdomen and spreads from there. My arms are uselessly out at my sides and my legs are frozen, the muscles twirling backwards. My mind is somewhere else, where everything hurts a lot, so I can barely see it as the old cobblestones come up hard and fast.
I do a face plant in the middle of the alley.
“Roll his ass over…get his coat off…”
I hear them talking above me but I can’t move. My middle still feels like it’s been folded in on itself.
“Get his sleeve up.” Fabric comes up on my skin.
“Can you hit a vein?”
“Yeah.”
One of them has a syringe in his hand. So this is how it will end for me.
Not very creative when you think about their previous work.
But, the end.
I try to fight back but my arms and legs don’t work. They are abstractions, divorced from the commands of my brain. I try to pray but I just see the faces of the people I have failed, Jill, Pam, Rachel, now Amber…so many. I never doubted that I’d go to hell.
Chapter Thirty
Hell, as it turns out, is a cold place.
At first, the cold is all I am conscious of. And the dark—impossibly black. The black of perdition. It would terrify me except that my body is shaking uncontrollably, my legs and arms, even my belly. Arms won’t move beyond the trembling. My skin is nothing but a scrimshaw of goosebumps so large they hurt. My jaw aches from a constant, cold-induced tremor; I hear my teeth chatter like a child’s toy dentures. When I force myself to stop, the silence is as frightening as the dark. The cold has seeped deep inside my bones, which ache with a fathomless intensity. It’s a chill so pervasive I can’t remember my past or my name. My head has a large weight attached to it, causing my neck to throb in pain. I try to lift my head and it falls backwards again, sending a freezing ache into the tendons of my neck and shoulders.
Then I fall back down the well of unconsciousness.
Chapter Thirty-one
