Out of Range: A Novel (4 page)

Chapter Two

J
ohn Quinn felt a little naked. Normally he wore his .45-caliber bobtailed Les Baer 1911 beneath his photographer’s vest, concealed in an inside-the-waistband holster. A lot of firepower, very inconspicuous. But Disneyland had too much security and the laws in California were too draconian to take the chance of going armed here. So he contented himself with following the happy little family around the park.

It was noon and they had worked their way through Adventureland to Frontierland. Quinn watched them carefully but couldn’t help notice the dumb ass dressed in a Goofy costume standing by the gift shop, posing for pictures, making hokey effeminate gestures with his three fingered hands. You had to wonder what kind of guy would do something that pathetic and humiliating for a living. God, he hated this place. The screaming children, the overweight people, the incessant jingles and jangles. It was enough to make you sick.

He happened to catch a glimpse of himself reflected in the window behind Goofy and regarded himself objectively, assessing his disguise as much as anything. He was a fireplug of a man with the build of a collegiate wrestler, his balding head hidden under a baseball cap with a picture of Winnie-the-Pooh on the crown. He knew there was something menacing about his eyes, so he kept them covered with a pair of mirrored Oakleys.

Acting the part of a dad waiting for his kids, Quinn waved at some random family on Thunder Mountain, as though little Quinn Junior was up there having a jolly old time on the jolly old ride.

There was, of course, no little Quinn Junior. Not here, not anywhere.

He homed in on the woman again. She was watching her son shoot a toy gun at an arcade right next to Thunder Mountain. Her daughter tugged on her ridiculous Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, whining to be taken somewhere. Quinn couldn’t make out what the mother’s response was but it looked like there were gestures of reassurance and pleas for patience.

Thank God he’d never had children. What a colossal waste of time and energy.

The woman’s son blasted away his last few shots with the air gun, then she grabbed his hand and led both kids past Goofy into the gift shop. Quinn had to approach the shop’s entrance a little closer than he liked in order to make sure he didn’t lose her going through the door on the other side.

Of course, cell phones were God’s gift to surveillance operators. You could hide your entire face behind a Droid and nobody would make you—especially if you changed an occasional article of clothing. So he tossed the Winnie cap in the trash and pulled on a drab fishing hat that he kept rolled up in one of his vest pockets.

For a split second, the woman turned in his direction and he thought that perhaps she’d caught on to him. He turned his back on her casually, examining some of the overpriced souvenirs and waited a solid ten count before turning around again.

She was exiting in what looked like a hurry through the opposite door.

Afraid she might have spotted him, Quinn chose to retreat through the door he’d entered and pick them up again outside.

For a moment he thought he’d lost them in the sea of obese, ridiculously dressed tourists, but then spotted them again. She was pulling a point-and-shoot camera from her voluminous purse and setting up the kids for an all-important photo op.

“Come on guys, stay still,” she beckoned. “Say cheese!”

It was a pathetic shot: the boy was cross-eyed and sticking out his tongue while the little girl was waving her Donald Duck in front of her face.

“Oh, forget it,” the woman said, laughing and grabbing the girl’s hand. “Come on, Ollie. Meagan wants to go see ‘It’s a Small World.’ ”

As Quinn followed them, trading his olive fishing hat for an auburn golf visor, he couldn’t help but smile.

Indeed,
he thought.
It is a very small world.

Chapter Three

C
harlie threaded through the bullpen, nodding to his colleagues as he arrived for the day. There had been a time when he’d managed to convince himself that the
LA Times
would be an exciting place to work. Going to a zoning board meeting in Encino wasn’t the same as bombing around western Afghanistan in a Range Rover, but in the beginning the job still held its challenges. The first couple of years, he’d had to build up his network of contacts, learn the city, and absorb the breakneck rhythms of daily journalism. For better or for worse, those days were
long gone and Charlie could now sleepwalk through most assignments.

Today, though, he was feeling a bit more enthused. He’d been chasing down a lead on corrupt spending in the L.A. public school district and the spiky-haired young computer jockey named Mac had apparently come up with something juicy for him.

Fingering his earring and staring at the computer as Charlie approached, Mac grabbed a stack of papers and tossed them toward Charlie without missing a beat. “Got that background you were looking for,” he added with false modesty.

Mac was a smart kid with good instincts but more than that he was something like a genius when it came to digging up information in cyberspace. Charlie was reluctant to use the word in front of anyone at the paper, but Mac was essentially a hacker. A hacker who should have been working for the NSA or Wikileaks, but somehow didn’t realize how much his talents were being wasted here.

Charlie flipped through the dense pages and marveled, “This is the actual public schools budget?”

“Every line item in the entire county. You want to know what Beverly Hills High spent on toilet paper, it’s in there.”

“How’d you—” Charlie shook his head and smiled. “Never mind, I don’t even want to know. Just be discreet, huh?”

“That’s why they call me Deep Throat.”

Charlie managed a chuckle and headed for his own cubicle.

“Oh, hey,” Mac called after him. “Sal was looking for you.”

Charlie felt a catch in his chest. The recession and a declining readership had been slowly strangling the paper for years now. Only last summer, twenty-six people had been laid off and for several months Sal had been hinting that Charlie might need to show some “flexibility” if he was going to avoid the next round of cuts. He knew that Sal had been angling at those cuts for the early spring, and lo and behold, April had now passed into May.

Was today the day the shit hit the fan?

Charlie dropped his bag off at his cubicle and headed for Sal’s office. When he got there, Sal held up a finger, indicating that Charlie should wait for him while he wrapped up his phone call.

Charlie sat down on Sal’s beat-up leather sofa and found himself gazing at the framed photos on the wall. One in particular caught his eye:
Charlie and Sal in Tibet
, fresh out of journalism school. They had been there as freelancers to cover the Workers’ Hunger Strike and had somehow found a way to grab the first and only interview with Zhou Yong, its organizer. It was a major coup for two twenty-four-year-old guys and only confirmed for Charlie that they were on the path to greatness. Together they had planned to be the last of the gonzo journalists, searching out the toughest stories in the most out-of-the-way places, righting society’s wrongs, shining the light of truth on falsehood and abusive power. But when they’d returned from Tibet, Sal had shocked Charlie by taking a staff writer’s job at the
Chicago Sun-Times
. Within a few years, he’d worked his way up the managerial ladder inside the Tribune papers—a fact which Charlie had ribbed him about on every possible occasion. Of course, after Uzbekistan, Charlie had to admit he was grateful to have such a close ally in such a conventional place. And even though he was now Charlie’s editor and boss, Sal had gone out of his way never to treat Charlie
like an underling. They were friends and friendship meant everything.

Sal hung up the phone, looked up from his paper-strewn desk, and sighed. He was a big bear of a man with a thick shock of close-cropped black hair and a gut that was one size larger than his waistband. “Close the door, would you?”

Charlie knew what was coming. “You spoke to the board?”

Sal nodded. “They’re digging in their heels on this one. Unless you start taking on long lead assignments internationally, there’s no way to justify your salary.”

“So they want to fire me.”

“You know the kind of cutbacks we’ve been making. I can hire three smart kids straight out of J school for the money we’re paying you.”

“You think some kids out of J school can do what I do here?”

Sal’s face took on an evasive expression. “Look, Wallace was supposed to be covering the economic summit in Shanghai, but he’s getting bogged down on this Libya thing. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for you to get out there again. It’s an analysis piece. Two weeks, maybe three, you’re home again.”

When Charlie didn’t respond, Sal spread his hands impatiently and warned, “Charlie, you need to get out in the field again. You’re overqualified for what you’re doing.”

“We agreed when I came here—”

“That was six years ago—”

“We
agreed
that I could stay in town and work domestic. That was the deal.”

Sal leaned forward, rested his chin on his hand and gave Charlie a long, skeptical look. “What does Julie say about all this?”

Charlie picked up a stray paper clip off Sal’s desk and flicked it toward the trash can.

Sal kept after him: “Two months this has been brewing and you haven’t mentioned it to her?”

“I didn’t think it was real until today,” Charlie replied. Even before he spoke the words, he knew how lame that was going to sound.

Sal leaned back in his chair, his body retreating. “Look,” he said, “I know what you all went through, but don’t you think it’s time you put it behind you and got back out into the world? I really don’t think Julie would have a problem with it.”

“She said something to you?” Charlie read Sal’s hesitation—clearly he didn’t want to sell her out. “What did she say, Sal?”

Sal leaned forward, trying to calm the tenor of this. “Come on, kid, when you met Julie, you were both tearing up the world. She’s not a soccer mom . . .” He waved his hand around the cramped, paper-strewn office. “And you’re not
this
.”

“What did she say?” Charlie demanded.

“She’s suffocating, Charlie.”

“She told you this?”

“She told Laura. Laura told me.”

Laura was Sal’s wife and had become a good friend to Julie, so this hearsay evidence, as galling as it was, had an air of credibility. And Sal was anything but a shit-stirrer.

Searching for confirmation, Charlie’s mind drifted back to that morning . . .

Julie’s defensiveness, the way she’d acted with him at the car. The cursory “Love you, too,” her tearing out of the driveway like she couldn’t wait to get out of there.

Suffocating. I’m suffocating my wife.

Sal wasn’t through. He apparently had a lot to say, and one way or another, he was going to get it off his chest.

“You can tell me to go jump off a bridge if you want, but I’m gonna give you some of my pearls of wisdom about marriage. I’m on my second go-round here and I can tell you what screwed it up the first time. It wasn’t that we were fighting. We should have been fighting. Instead we were so damn polite with each other we ended up strangers. Strangers with secrets. I don’t want to see you go down that road.”

Charlie sat silently for a moment. He knew if he stayed in Sal’s office, he would say something to fracture their friendship or cost him his job. Without a word, he rose and jerked the door open.

He strode through the bullpen, averting his eyes from his colleagues, and made his way to the elevators. He hit the call button and waited, but he had no idea where he was going.

Chapter Four

J
ulie sat in the boat with Meagan and Ollie, bobbing slowly through “It’s a Small World.” The trippy 1950s-style animatronics, the almost hypnotically repetitious song and the slow, rocking motion of the ride seemed uniquely suited to the turbulent state of her mind.

One hates what one wrongs,
she thought. It was her favorite line from her favorite film. Richard Burton explaining to Peter O’Toole in
Becket
that O’Toole’s King Henry “hated” the commoners precisely because he treated them so badly.

The phrase had caught her fancy as a teenager the first time she’d seen the film and had always stuck with her because she felt it explained so much of human nature. And it helped her understand now why she had treated Charlie so shabbily this morning. She had
wronged
him—and rather than admit it, she had been edgy, intolerant, and passive-aggressive, preying on his weaknesses while refusing to show any of her own.

It made her sick that it had come to this. Particularly because she still loved him deeply and still respected so much of who he was, even if the man she’d fallen in love with had in some ways retreated from the world. But how could she possibly explain her lies to him now? Part of her wished he
had
seen the baggage claim ticket on her suitcase, or that she’d had the audacity to leave it there for him to find. At least that would be a way to begin the conversation.

“Mommy, look!” Meagan cried, tugging on Julie’s sleeve and snapping her out of her introspection. She was pointing at the kaffiyehed Arabic dolls. “Why do they wear those scarves on their faces?”

“It’s part of their religion,” Julie tried to explain. “Like some Jewish people wear black hats and coats. It’s almost like a uniform.”

“Like Santa Claus?”

Julie couldn’t help but smile. “Sort of, yeah.”

The answer seemed to satisfy Meagan and she resumed watching in wonder at the spectacle around her.

For a moment, Julie was able to see the ride through Meagan’s innocent eyes, appreciating the fantasy that all peoples and cultures could somehow exist side by side.

Her work for World Vision had taught her, sadly, that people were essentially tribal, that by nature they almost always needed some kind of Boogeyman to align themselves against and that choosing one’s particular Boogeyman inevitably became a central and inescapable part of one’s identity.

It occurred to her that in some ways she had unconsciously made Charlie her Boogeyman. The source of her unhappiness, the person she blamed for whatever was lacking in her life. It wasn’t fair and she knew it couldn’t go on this way.

She gripped the safety bar at the front of the boat. It had to be tonight. She would come clean with him and let the chips fall where they may. For the first time in a long time, she breathed a full, deep breath. Though she was buzzing with anticipation and fear, she felt as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

The boat emerged from the dark tunnel, shimmying along the rail, delivering them into the afternoon sun. As it came to a stop, she took the hands of both her children and led them up the ramp into Fantasyland.

She felt free.