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The warning buzzer sounds that the doors are about to close. She wheels round as they begin sliding shut, jumps back on the train. One of the doors slams into her shoulder and she is caught off-balance. She grabs the handrail and steadies herself. The man in the suit is watching her.

He sighs and smiles in resignation and welcome. He smells the fear on her. Exciting, raw, unrestrained. It smells of warmth. Of woman. Of pain. Of sex.

Copyright © 2006 Margaret Murphy

The Right Call

by Brendan DuBois

A new Brendan DuBois novel, Primary Storm (St. Martin’s), an entry in the Lewis Cole series, is due out in September. A former research analyst for the Department of Defense, Cole gets involved in cases that have a touch of thriller to them. Mr. DuBois’s new story for us is about a newspaper reporter — a job he himself held for years.

* * * *

On the first Tuesday of this particular month, I was at my desk in the tiny Boston Falls bureau office of the Granite Times, writing a story on deadline on a computer that was considered old when a certain President promised us a kinder, gentler government, when a phone call came in from a self-confessed mass murderer.

Rita Cloutier looked up from her phone at the front and said, “Call for you, Jack. Sounds like the phantom, yet again.”

I kept on looking at the screen, trying to decide if I could spell Contoocook River without having to look it up, and I called out, “See if he’d be so kind as to call back after deadline. Most mass murderers have some courtesy, don’t they?”

Rita giggled, like the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl she was thirty years ago. I looked over at her and my surroundings. We were in a tiny storefront with a waist-high counter where people came in to place their classified ads or complain about missed newspapers. Rita sat right by the doorway, and between the two of us was an empty desk that belonged to Monty Hughes, the local circulation manager. My desk was up against the window, which I thought was a privilege reserved for the sole reporter in this news bureau, until the first heavy rains came and the damn thing leaked and soaked my desk. Some privilege.

I leaned back in my chair and tried to admire the view from the window, which was tough to do. The window overlooked a seldom-used rail spur for the leather mill upstream, and the rail spur was next to an overgrown, sluggish canal that spawned mosquitoes in the summer and not much else. For a moment I recalled the office I had in Manchester, at the main offices of the Granite Times. A door of my own. A parking space. A company cafeteria. I sighed. That’s what happens when you get too trusting with a news source, Jack. Exiled to the farthest reaches of the Granite Times empire.

“Jack?” Rita’s voice queried.

Still leaning back in the chair, I reached over and picked up the phone. “Hello,” I said.

“Jack Spooner?” came the familiar voice.

“The same,” I said. “What do you have for me today?”

A heavy sigh. “I killed them all, you know. All twenty-four of them. But I had to. What else could I have done?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, leaning forward so I could wrap up the news story I was working on. Three-car accident on Route 302. Minor injuries. Would probably end up as a news brief but it had been a slow news day. “You could have short-sheeted their beds when they weren’t looking. Wouldn’t that have been easier?”

A petulant tone. “You’re not taking me serious.”

There. Finished. I sent the story along the fiberoptic cables to my editor a hundred miles south, and returned to my mysterious caller. “Wrong,” I said. “You’re the one who’s not taking me seriously.”

With my free hand I opened up my cluttered center desk drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Let’s see,” I said, looking over the phone log that I had started with this character more than four months ago, “you’ve called me more than a dozen times. Each time you say something similar. That some years ago you killed twenty-four people. It happened on a Tuesday. That it wasn’t your fault. Period. The End. How am I supposed to take you seriously if you don’t give me more than that?”

The petulant tone was still there. “I thought reporters were more open-minded than this.”

“Bad reporters are, not good reporters. Look, I’ve got real work to do. Anything else you want to say before I hang up?”

“I... I did it near here. On Shay’s Meadow, by the Graham River.”

I was so eager to take this down that I dropped the pen on the floor. “Hello? Say again?”

I was talking into a dead phone. My mystery caller had hung up.

I returned the favor, then picked up my pen and quickly scribbled down what he had just said.

I’d been working for the Granite Times for almost two years, after spending some time at a weekly near Conway, by the Maine border. I started out at their Manchester headquarters, and would have gladly stayed there as I established my burgeoning newspaper career, except for an unfortunate incident on my part where I didn’t dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s while doing a silly little feature story. The mistakes associated with the story might have ended a career at any other newspaper. The Granite Times not being that kind of newspaper — and desperate to hold on to reporters during a tight labor market — I got exiled instead of fired.

I looked over the log sheet that I had started that first Tuesday, when my phantom caller had rung me up. I had taken a lot of notes, thinking that I had a key to a great story that would get me back into the good graces of my editors down south. I still remember that day, a clean and empty desk before me, a nearly empty reporter’s notebook at my elbow, when the phone rang and Rita picked it up and said, “Oh. Hold on.”

Then the caller started, as he would so many times later: “Jack? Jack Spooner?”

I had said yes and then the confession began, one that ended too soon.

I passed him off as a nut when he called the Tuesday after that, and the Tuesday after that. I asked Rita and Monty, the circulation guy, if the previous reporter, Mindy Williams — who now worked at the copy desk down in Manchester and whom I envied and hated in about equal measure for grabbing such a cushy job — had pursued a story based on anonymous phone calls and they both said no.

So. Any other reporter probably would have given up on the phantom and forgotten about it.

But not me. Like I said, I’m not like other reporters. And I still wanted that key to get out of Boston Falls. It was a perfectly nice town, but I knew I didn’t belong here. I felt like a person invited to a wedding reception where everyone else is family and friends, and you’re trying to find a way to make a graceful exit.

The rest of the morning was spent doing a feature for the Sunday edition about a woodworking business on the other side of town that had thrived by doing knockoffs — oops, excuse me, artistic interpretations — of famous Shaker furniture. That was another depressing aspect of my exile here to this little town. Back in Manchester — New Hampshire’s largest city — I’d focused on crime stories, with an occasional feature piece to relax my brain. Here, it was exactly the opposite, with most of my stories being features and small-town stories, with only the occasional crime (usually an outburst of teenage vandalism on a warm summer night) to break the monotony. After you’ve done ride-alongs with Manchester cops, breaking into crack houses right behind the TAC cops, doing a lengthy feature on a guy who makes boxes and rocking chairs is torture.