“Predicated?”
Kit eased back in his bucket seat, his Nutshell Library shifting against his thigh. Stay cool, believer.
“Predicated. Pre-di-cated.” The guard made a show of checking his gauges, his heat vents. He switched off the Album-Oriented garbage.
“You get out to the woods much yourself, Viddich?”
Kit took a moment, in the quiet. “I used to,” he said. “Where I came from, Garrison, it was hard core. We had an Indian guide.”
“You’re shitting me. An Indian guide?”
Kit shrugged. “Men like that, in the woods all the time, they’re usually the outcasts. The kind that never fit in. They’re happy to find steady work.”
“Your own private Tonto. Hard core in Minnesota. Your guide have a name, Viddich?”
Actually the old man had had a whole array of names, though Kit wasn’t about to share any of them with Garrison. A tiny Ojibwa, a man who said the AA prayer every night, he was Claude at the highway turnoff. By first camp, however, he’d revert to his tribal name, Poyi Buss. Then sometimes he’d translate that as Bone Place, sometimes as Death Challenge. The range wasn’t uncommon, among Western natives. “Let me tell you something, Garrison. When I got my first buck, he put his fingers in the blood and painted stripes on my face.”
“Whoa. Hard core.”
“He made me do it too. He made me put a stripe on his face. And then he made me drink the blood.”
Kit’s driver went on making a fuss.
“Give me a break, Garrison. It was another world.”
The guard chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know. Seen what they go in for at them punk-rock clubs?”
Kit eyed the Charles River, outside. The truck had pulled onto Storrow Drive now, poking along between tie-ups. The river was stormy, spiked waves tearing up an oily surface. Or maybe it was Garrison who was oily. In Kit’s window the man’s reflection rode like scum on the water, while at last he brought up the Grand Jury.
“In there, Viddich, you got no idea what you’re going to have to deal with. You think Monsod was rough?”
The guard wasn’t even pretending to keep up with traffic, his eyes off the road. “In there you’re going to go through Monsod all over again. Every last dirty thing you did, Viddich. Inch by fucking inch.”
At least the roomy curtained cab allowed Kit to turn around smoothly, unruffled.
“You know anything about a Grand Jury, Viddich? You ever do any research like—”
“I know about a Grand Jury.”
“Meat grinder, man. Meat grinder. Don’t go by no rules like a court of law.”
“I know about a Grand Jury.”
“Oh yeah?” Garrison glanced out over Storrow again, easing ahead a car length or two. “Way I heard it, you’ve been acting kind of nutty lately.”
And here came the real heat, a closeness as if the guard had punched the controls into the red. Kit raised a hand to his window, taking in cold through his fingertips. Wearily he told Garrison to make his pitch.
“You been hiding out a lot lately, Viddich. Hiding out, no phone. Mixing booze and painkillers too.”
Kit flexed his back; the Naugahyde squeaked. Secrets, he reminded himself — secrets hurt.
“And now there’s some shit where, you’re closing the paper but you’re not? You ask me, Viddich, that’s nutty.”
“Garrison.” He frowned, putting a clamp on his surprise, his sore spots. “Aren’t you going to tell me that you have friends on the Grand Jury?”
“Whoa, tough guy.”
“Isn’t that what this is about? You’ve got friends who can do me a favor?”
“Yeah, I got friends. People like me and Leo, we got lots of friends. Sometimes, our friends are your friends.”
Now the heat was even in Kit’s fingers.
“Friends we got on that Grand Jury, they’re the tough guys. They’re men, Viddich. You ever work with men?”
“Hmm. You mean like, men who lock a convict in a closet and feed him drugs to keep him quiet?”
The guard seemed to age, his face growing longer. “Wiseass.”
“You mean like men who run a so-called public inspection and never even look at the real problem? We never even looked at those overhead pipes, Garrison.”
“Oughta kick your ass for being such a wiseass.”
Heat in his fingers, heat in his bruises. For a moment Kit could see it happen: the two of them shoving and punching in the gadget-filled space, the high cab rocking amid stalled traffic. Deliberately he exhaled.
“That’s what I’m telling the Grand Jury,” he said.
Didn’t sound too bad. After a moment, after his jaw relaxed, Kit added that once he got his paper away from Leo he was going to put the Monsod story in there as well.
“In your paper?” Garrison’s looks were turning pudgy again. “Man, nutty. Really. You think you’re ever going to put out a paper again in this town?”
Kit swiveled back to the window — and got his worst shock of the morning at the nudge of his tucked-away gun. A shock erupting through the otherwise silly image of him and Garrison in a scuffle. He spread a palm against the Plexiglass. Carefully he explained that it didn’t matter just how the story got before the public. “It won’t be news anymore,” he said, “but this isn’t about news. I’m the only witness.”
“Only surviving witness.”
Kit rolled his eyes. He distracted himself with math, trying to figure the sticker price of the truck, the cost of a gofer like Garrison.
“Whoa,” the guard was saying, “I really jabbed you there, didn’t I? Really jabbed and twisted. I’m sorry, man.”
“The story belongs before the public,” Kit said.
“I’m sorry, really. No call for that. I think it’s this traffic, you know, the old stall-n-crawl.”
Back to the diplomat?
“Gets everybody hot, you know? Traffic.” Back to the pout, the Irish Elvis. “I mean, Viddich, you yourself. Don’t you think like, you’re taking this story awfully personal?”
“Personal?”
Garrison had his eyes on the road, his rig out of first gear. He said he knew enough about the news business to know reporters weren’t supposed to get emotionally involved in their work. “It’s unprofessional. Right? What goes in the paper, that’s strictly business.”
“Journalistic distance.” Just like that, Kit found himself grinning. Looking forward to this round.
“Distance. That’s right. You’re with the media, you keep your distance. Otherwise you can’t work.”
“Sea Level isn’t a forum for me and my whining.”
“That’s right. Just look at the name, hey? Sea Level. That right there, that says everything’s like, balanced. Everything’s in its place.”
“Aw, Garrison.” Kit couldn’t hide his grinning. “Garrison, man, you’re out of date. You’re history.”
The guard, at last nosing off Storrow, could only glance away from the ramp traffic for a moment.
“What I do, it’s the future.” Kit gestured at the truck’s digital clock. “I’m alternative press.”
“What? Viddich, are you being a wiseass again?”
“Not really.” In fact he wasn’t, for all that he enjoyed this round. Or he wasn’t a wiseass any more than Tom Wolfe. “Alternative press, think about it. We started in the ‘60s and we’re headed straight for the future.”
“The future,” Garrison said, “is that Grand Jury.”
“Come on, listen. Learn something. Do you know what happened to the media in the ’60s?”
The guard heaved an incredible sigh, a varsity man after a long day at practice.