Stone Rain (3 page)

“I don’t believe this,” I said, getting out of my chair and heading straight for Sarah’s glass-walled office.

She was on the phone as I strode in and stood on the other side of her desk. “What’s this about Colby taking the Wickens story?”

“Can I call you back?” Sarah said. She hung up the phone. “What?”

“Cheese Dick says he’s getting the Wickens story. Why the hell would he think he was getting the Wickens story?”

“Fuck,” Sarah said. “That fucking asshole.”

“So it’s not true?”

“Noooo,” Sarah said, stretching out the word and shaking her head slowly in exasperation. “I mean, yes. It’s true.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“It wasn’t my decision.”

“Whose decision was it?”

Sarah tipped her head northward, in the direction of Bertrand Magnuson’s office.

“Magnuson pulled me off the Wickens story? I
got
the Wickens story. We played it up huge. It was my story. I’m
part
of that story.”

“I think that’s why Magnuson’s pulling you off it. Look, everyone knows you did a great job on it. Fantastic story. Award material. Pulitzer stuff. But Magnuson feels, you know, that you kind of, how do I put this…”

“Lucked into it?” I said.

Sarah screwed up her face. “Maybe.”

“I would hardly call it luck, having a run-in with that bunch.”

“You think I don’t agree? You think I’d call it lucky, what happened to you up there?” She took a breath. “But the managing editor feels that it might be more appropriate that for the follow-up stories, like whether the Wickenses were part of a larger movement, other crimes that they might have been responsible for, that that’s the kind of thing that Dick is better equipped to handle, what with his contacts in law enforcement and all.”

I stared at her. Sarah broke away, pretended to be looking for something on her desk. She was in management mode and couldn’t bring herself to look me in the eye.

“Did you make a case for me?” I asked. “When Magnuson made this decision?”

Sarah swallowed. “Sure I did.”

“How hard?”

She paused. “Pretty hard.”

“It’s the foreign editor thing, isn’t it? You don’t want to piss off Magnuson because you’re going for this new job and it’s his call.”

“That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit and you know it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Look, it’s not fair, but the fact is, Colby, for all his faults and aromas, has great contacts. He’s very experienced with this sort of thing, it’s not like his background is in—” She stopped herself.

“In what, Sarah?” My eyebrows went up, questioning. “Writing science fiction novels? His background’s a little more respectable? Is that what you were going to say?”

She deflated. “No, that’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say city hall, and photography. That’s what most of your newspaper experience has been about.”

I stood there another five seconds, then turned and walked out. “Zack,” Sarah called out. “Zack, please.”

I put my notes about the Wickens story and all relevant phone numbers into the computer and e-mailed everything to Cheese Dick. Then I grabbed my jacket, slipped it on, and started making my way out of the newsroom.

“Hey,” Dick said as I passed within shouting distance of his desk. I kept on walking. “Hey, Walker!” I stopped, looked over at him. “I need to talk to you for a sec.”

I took my time walking over to him. “I sent you the stuff,” I said.

“Yeah, I see that. Thanks. So Sarah, she explained it to you?”

I nodded.

“It’s not personal,” Colby said smugly, enjoying immensely just how personal it actually was. “I’m just more suited to this sort of assignment. When you stumble into something, like you did, it’s okay to write the first-person story, you know, what happened to you, but after that, it’s really my area, you know? I mean, you don’t see me trying to cover a
Star Trek
convention, do you?”

I found myself thinking about what constituted justifiable homicide. My definition of “justifiable” might, I feared, differ from the justice system’s, so I decided not to act on an impulse to grab Colby’s keyboard and beat him to death with it.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Actually, yeah,” Colby said, looking for a piece of paper on his cluttered desk. “Where is it…where the fuck is it?…Okay, here it is. Since I’m doing you a favor, taking this story off your hands, maybe you could do this one for me. You’d have to get moving, though. It’s in an hour.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“Good story, man, could really use your touch. And if you don’t want it, it just means I’m going to have to go over to Assignment and tell them you didn’t want it and they’ll have to pull somebody off somethin’ else to do it and then they’ll figure you’re some kind of fucking prima donna or something.”

“Give it to me,” I said. It was in Colby’s own handwriting, some notes he’d taken. I could make out “police union” and “stun gun” and a time and location. “What is this?”

“It’s a demo. Some new kind of stun gun. The cops would like to have them; the police board’s been saying no fucking way. So this guy who sells them is putting on a performance, just for some members of the police union. Some cops, they might decide to buy one, even though stun guns haven’t been approved for use. They figure it’s better to take heat for using one of those, blasting a guy with a few thousand volts and seeing him get up again, than face Internal Affairs after pulling their regular guns and killing a guy. Photo desk already knows about it.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.” I was pissed, and felt like walking out of the building and not coming back, but I didn’t want to get a reputation as an asshole, either. Or for those who already thought I was one, a bigger asshole.

“Great,” Colby said, handing me his notes. “Feel your way carefully, though. I heard about this on the Q.T. from a cop. The union may not be crazy about you being there. The board won’t like it when they hear the cops have been looking at these things.”

The demo was scheduled for 11 a.m. I was still planning to meet Trixie Snelling at 1 p.m., at a coffee shop only a few blocks from police headquarters. She was making a trip in from Oakwood to see me, and I didn’t want to have to cancel on her. I didn’t think there’d be a problem.

On my way out of the building, I passed Magnuson’s office. The door was open partway, and I could see the miserable bastard sitting at his desk, no doubt plotting ways to ruin other people’s lives as much as he seemed intent on ruining mine.

“W
hat makes this stun gun different from previous models, and what makes it the perfect tool for any properly equipped law enforcement body today, is its simplicity,” said the man who had been introduced as Mr. Merker. “Other stun gun models use two wires that are propelled from the weapon to the target. Once the gun has been fired, you must rewind the wires and replace the gas cartridge within the weapon that, basically, exploded when you pulled the trigger. So, you get one shot, then you have to reload. It’s a bit like being a Minuteman with his musket.”

There were a few chuckles among the roughly two dozen cops who’d dropped by this meeting room in the police board’s offices to see what was going on. A couple of them were clutching crudely produced flyers headlined “Stun Gun Sale, Demo.”

Lesley Carroll, the
Metropolitan
photographer who’d accompanied me to this event, and I had encountered a bit of trouble getting in. A cop at the door said it was for union members only, and I’d told him, as politely as possible, that if he didn’t let me in, my story would have to say that the police had held a secret meeting to consider whether to arm themselves with stun guns, and that might send the message that the police were acting as though they had no police board, or public, to answer to. If he let me in, I argued, readers would see that the police weren’t trying to pull any fast ones, but were hoping to open a debate on the issue of whether officers should be issued these nonlethal weapons.

The cop thought about it. “Fine.”

Once inside, Lesley, who was in her early twenties and interning with the paper, hoping to get hired on staff in a few months, said, “Nice one.”

Merker, a lean man with closely cropped black hair, pointed chin, and piercing eyes, waved what looked like a plastic toy gun in his hand as he performed for the officers in an open area at the front of the room. The floor had been covered with gym mats, which suggested to me that a demonstration of some kind was imminent.

The gun in Merker’s hand looked as though it had been drawn by a cartoonist, with fatter, exaggerated edges.

“But with the Dropper,” he said, “instead of two wires coming out, two highly concentrated streams of highly conductive liquid come out. Each stream contains a different charge, if you will, and when they connect with the target, fifty thousand volts are discharged, completely interrupting the ability of the brain to send any messages to the body.”

Someone in the audience quipped, “Maybe that’s what happened to the chief.” More chuckling. Disputes between the chief of police and the rank and file were legendary.

“Because,” Merker continued, “there are no wires to rewind, no gas cartridges to replace, it means that you can fire the gun more than once. Three times, to be exact. The unit needs no time between the first and second, and second and third shots to recharge or be rewinded, what have you. You can fire off three stun shots as quickly as you can pull the trigger. Now, this is not the first liquid stun gun, but is the first to come in a handheld, manageable size.”

There was some murmuring among the police officers, about two-thirds of them male. A woman spoke up. “What about if we drop somebody with one of these? Is there any chance they’ll die? And if they don’t, are there any lasting effects? ’Cause, like, I don’t want to get my ass sued off.”

“I wouldn’t want anybody hurting that ass of yours,” a male cop said, and everyone laughed, including the female cop.

Merker shook his head confidently. “The subject is instantly incapacitated, for several seconds, as his central nervous system collapses, but within about fifteen or twenty seconds, he starts recovering. Allow me to demonstrate.”

This caused even more murmuring, this time a bit on the agitated side, as if the police officers in the room were worried that they might be volunteered for a demonstration. But then, to everyone’s collective relief, a tall, lumbering, round-shouldered man in the first row got to his feet and approached Merker.

“I’d like you to meet my associate, Mr. Edgars. He is, as you can see, a big, strapping individual, 240 pounds, six foot four. It would take a lot to stop someone like him. Even an officer armed with a conventional weapon would feel unnerved if someone like Mr. Edgars was charging him.”

Edgars grinned. Somewhat stupidly, I thought. He had a kind of “gentle giant” quality about him.

“But not only will the Dropper drop Mr. Edgars, it will leave him unharmed. Leo,” he said, addressing Edgars by what was evidently his first name, “you’ve been shot with the Dropper, in demonstrations such as this, how many times now?”

Leo Edgars said, “Uh, I guess, I think…I don’t remember exactly, Gary.”

Before any nervous laughter could erupt, Gary Merker said, in the tone of a carnival barker, “Twenty-seven times! That’s how many! Leo has been shot twenty-seven times and yet remains undamaged in any way whatsoever.”

Leo grinned again. “Actually, Gary, I believe it’s twenty-seven times.”

There were some nervous chuckles. There was the sense among all of us, I think, that Merker’s assistant was a bit of a dim bulb who could benefit from a few more volts.

Merker smiled along with everyone else and then did something funny with his nose. He twitched it, pulled on it a couple of times between thumb and index finger. He turned away from the audience for a second to conduct some bit of nasal maintenance, then faced front again and said, “The Dropper is an ideal tool for dealing with, for example, mental patients. A hardened criminal, a rapist, a bank robber, you don’t lose too much sleep shooting one of those types even if they never get up again. But a, you know, nutcase who can’t help being the way he is, that doesn’t deserve a death sentence.”

Some cops exchanged awkward glances.

“Now, Leo, you pretend to be a mental patient coming at me, with a knife, perhaps.”

Lesley had slipped away a few moments earlier and was off to the side, ready with her camera.

“Sure.” Leo took a few steps back, paused, put his fingers to his temples for a second, as if getting himself in the moment, and then he charged.

“Ahhh!” he shouted. “I’m crazy!”

Lesley was taking pictures as Gary Merker raised his Dropper stun gun and fired.

The streams of water were so small, and came out so quickly, that I almost didn’t see them. But the results were immediately apparent. There was a brief crackling noise as they hit Leo, and his body went into an immediate spasm, dropping instantly. Lesley moved in for a better shot. Given Leo’s size, there was quite a “fwump!” when he hit the mat. Everyone recoiled, wondering whether Gary had just murdered his associate and we would all be called upon as witnesses.

“You see!” said Merker. “Instant capitulation! And if I wanted to, I’d be able to shoot again immediately!”

Leo just lay there. Lesley got off a couple more shots.

“Uh,” said the woman cop who’d asked a question earlier, “is he okay?”

Leo was still not moving.

“Leo!” Merker shouted.

His face still pressed into the mat, Leo said, “Errr.”

“He just needs another minute,” Merker said. Slowly, Leo moved one of his arms, then another, and then he was slowly moving up onto his knees as most of his audience held their breath. With care, he got back onto his feet and dusted himself off.

Everyone, myself included, applauded. We were just relieved, I think, that he wasn’t dead.

“Of course,” Merker said, continuing his sales pitch, “during the period when he was down, law officers would have been able to cuff Leo, to subdue him. All you need is a few seconds to bring a suspect under control.” Merker walked over to Leo, put a hand on his shoulder while Lesley got an “after” shot. Merker gave her an annoyed look. “So, that’s twenty-eight times now. How are you feeling?”