Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-10 (44) (177 page)

“The time,” the man repeated. “Do you have the time?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

Damn if she didn’t do it again. She started to step around him, trying to make up for the weakness of her words with a steely bridge-like determination in her body language.

“Yes, I believe you,” he said.

Believe whatever the hell you want,
she thought but said nothing.

Suddenly, in a flash, he had his hands around her waist. After the initial shock she began to kick and scream. But he was too strong and there was no one else around to hear.

She felt herself spinning.

“I’m sorry,” the man said.

“Why?” she yelled. “Why are you doing this?”

“You know why.”

Her face formed a question mark.

No!
her mind screamed.
No, I don’t.

A second later she felt the man’s powerful arms swing her back and then up and forward. And then her world went upside down and began to fall away.

A few moments later there was a lonely and terrible splash down in the river below.

And then nothing.

Two Weeks Earlier…

I poured myself another sloppy shot of Maker’s Mark and stood in front of the window watching the rain streak the glass, wishing for things that once had been, wishing I could have found a way to hold on to them.

Ben was dead. Almost seven months now. But that didn’t stop him from coming back every single night, didn’t stop him from crawling out of his grave and into my living room.

He never said anything. He just sat there looking sad. Sometimes the drinking helped. Sometimes it made it worse.

I had gotten used to it, but on this night I didn’t feel like dealing with him. I held the glass to my cheek and stared outside, refusing to turn around. After the third drink the lights of the city lost their focus as my mind loosened from my skull. I could see his blurry reflection in the window pane.

Benjamin Mortimer was just a memory, like the scent of his aftershave that still lingered in my closet or his voice on old phone messages I refused to delete. I knew he wasn’t real. I didn’t see ghosts. It was the whiskey and the loneliness and the anger and the grief that brought him back each night.

I finally turned around.

He looked the same. Black hair, pale face, hollow and haunted eyes. I held his gaze, searching for an answer, looking for the missing piece. But as always, I came up empty.

“Why, Ben?” I whispered. “Why did you throw us away?”

He didn’t answer. He never did.

I poured another drink and watched him disappear.

And then I got to work.

For some reason my editor at the
Portland Free Press
wanted a story on education finance. It was the kind of thing that had always tested my sanity, sitting through a dull-as-pencil-lead budget meeting and coming away with a thick binder full of numbers and a pain behind the eyes.

I had three other stories I was working on at the moment, all of them more interesting, but I wouldn’t be able to get to them until this one was out of the way. I knew what I had to do. I just had to plow through the material and get it done.

I read through my notes and highlighted some possible quotes, then leafed through the binder, slapping Post-its on the pages that I would need to analyze better by the light of day. I made a short list of district personnel to follow up with and wrote down a few questions. Maybe I would talk to some art teachers and librarians, the ones scheduled for the slaughterhouse if the proposed budget was approved.

School cuts and lost jobs were commonplace, but I still needed to find a way to humanize the story. It wasn’t going to be anything original, but at least talking to the victims would put a face on the numbers.

An hour later I closed my laptop, stacked the binder and my notes on top of the table by the door, and set the alarm on my phone. I still had four hours before I had to get up. Maybe I could get some sleep.

Before getting to bed I wandered back over to the window. It was raining harder. Through the downpour I stared at the rusty metal table with the one matching chair on the small porch across the street. I had never seen anyone sit out there. I wondered what it said about a person with a table and one chair. Did it say they had given up any and all hope that there would ever be a need for a second chair?

Maybe I should get rid of some of my own chairs.

The dog had run up to him and he stroked its head, savoring the moment, a mix of anticipation and tightness in his chest.

Spring was on its way, but not yet. It had rained all day and now the chill of twilight closed in all around as more dark clouds rolled in from the west.

“Bailey, come back here,” the owner said. “Bad dog. I’m sorry.”

He saw her holding the leash, the leash that should have been hooked onto Bailey’s collar.

He wondered how many times a day she called to it and how often it actually listened. He knew it wasn’t the dog’s fault.

He thought about those words: I’m sorry.

How many times did people use that phrase? And how many times did they mean it? Most of the time what they really meant was that they were sorry you showed up and got in the way. They weren’t sorry for anything they had done. Not really.

But that was all right. That was about to change.

“No need to be sorry,” he said, squeezing the needle into the dog’s neck. “Good dog.”

Bailey never felt a thing, running off down the wooded path before stumbling and then slumping down to the ground next to a tree.

He smiled at the woman and reached inside his pocket, feeling the latex gloves. She was rather attractive for someone her age.

But this wasn’t about that.

I stared down at my mug of Earl Grey, the steam billowing up like a nuclear reactor, and made the call.

“Hello, this is Kate Craig,” I said.

“Kate
who
?”

“Craig. Kate Craig. I’m a reporter at the
Portland Free Press
. Is Mr. Dumars in?”

“Wait, let me see,” the woman at the other end of the line said. I waited. “No, I’m afraid he stepped out. Would you like to leave a message?”

I left my name and number and hung up.

“Nice work on that budget story, Jackson,” Dan Porter said.

The city editor at the
Free Press
had gotten into the habit of calling me Jackson after watching a documentary on the history of the Eagles a few months earlier.

“When they were just starting out, Jackson Browne lived in a basement below Glenn Frey,” Dan had told me one day. “Frey said that he would hear the whistle from Browne’s tea pot every morning and listen to him sing and play the piano, working on the same verse over and over and over until he felt he had it just right. And then he would have some more tea. And then he would work on the next verse twenty times. And so on.

“When I heard that story I immediately thought of you, Kate. Tea by your side, always trying to write the perfect story.”

I appreciated that he noticed how hard I worked and I didn’t mind the nickname. I was into jazz, but Jackson Browne was all right. You could be called a lot worse. What I didn’t like was the idea that I might become Dan’s go-to writer when it came to finance and budgets. That’s not why I had gotten into journalism, but this was the fourth money story I had written so far this month.

“Thanks,” I said, trying not to sound overly enthused.

“Hey, how’s that hero piece coming along, Heather?” Dan asked.

I wondered why he didn’t have a nickname for Heather Roberts. She was blond like me. He could have easily called her Blondie or Britney or Underwood.
Phew.
Dodged a bullet on that one. Yeah, you could be called a lot worse than Jackson.

“I should have it for you in an hour,” Heather said.

She had gotten an exclusive interview with a high school teacher who had prevented a school shooting two days earlier by wrestling the gun away from a student. According to a journal found in the gunman’s backpack, he had planned to shoot as many of his classmates as possible before taking his own life. At first the reluctant hero refused to talk to the press but Heather had gotten him to open up.

I tried not to feel jealous. At the moment the closest thing I had to something like that was an idea for a human interest story on Eric Dumars, the chief administrative officer for the city of Portland, who on his days and nights off skydived and deejayed at dance clubs around town. But he wasn’t returning my calls.

Detective Clay Moore studied the body in the back seat for another long moment.

The man’s eyes bulged hideously from his head as if they had been trying to run away. His legs were splayed apart unnaturally, as if they had been trying to run away, too. The victim’s tongue hung limply from his mouth. A dog snored in the driver’s seat.

“What’s with the dog?” Moore asked.

“Drugged,” Detective Elmer Reyes said.

Moore ran his fingers through his hair. It felt oily. His ex, back in the good days, would have bought him one of those shampoos designed for his greasy condition. But those days were long gone.

He looked over at the small group that had begun to gather behind the yellow tape. At least it was still early. In another hour this place would be a zoo.

“I’ve got our people canvasing the park,” Reyes said, pointing his chin across the street.

“Okay, but better tell them to focus on the homeless because that’s who’ll still be here,” Moore said to his partner. “According to Wick, the vic’s been dead for at least six hours. Everyone else is long gone. We need to re-canvas tonight.”

“Gotcha.”

Reyes put two fingers between his shirt collar and his thick neck and pulled down. Then he got on his radio and relayed the message regarding the homeless to the uniforms working the park.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and get a print off the leash,” he said, turning back to Moore.

“I wouldn’t hold my breath. That didn’t work out too well for our man here. What do we know about him?”