"He doesn't have to lose anything, it's being taken from him, bottle by bottle. He's worked for you for what, thirty years? And you repay him by turning a blind eye?"
"Watch it, Parker," Wallace snapped. "You haven't been here long enough and you haven't known Jack long enough to judge either of us. We'll get O'Donnell the help he needs. Right now your only job is as an employee of this newspaper. Assuming you still want to be."
"Of course I do," I said. "More than ever."
"Good. Then show it."
Wallace hung up. I felt a great anger surge through me.
Both at the runaround I was getting on the Linwood/Oliveira kidnappings, and now this. I'd looked up to Jack for so many years, spent so much of my childhood idolizing this pillar of a man, to see him reduced to a lump under a hospital throw rug was like seeing a baseball bat taken to fine crystal. That's one thing I'd learned in my years as a reporter. Every person, no matter the pubic perception, had demons. And the higher regard in which you held them in, the greater the disappointment when you realized their demons were as common as anyone else's. I refused to believe that Jack O'Donnell was a common alcoholic. The kind of guy who scrounged around his cabinets for that one drop of Knob Creek he knew was left. Jack had a gift that defied all of it. And once he got help, he could polish that crystal back to a shine.
I took a cab back to my apartment. Last night I couldn't wait to get to the office. Today I couldn't bear to spend another minute there. I needed a respite, if only brief.
I threw my stuff on the couch, went into the kitchen and found a Corona nestled behind a jar of pickles. The beer tasted flat, but I didn't care. It had alcohol and that's all I wanted right now. I needed a moment to feel oblivious, blissfully ignorant, to have that feeling all alcoholics must have when they pop the first top of the day and know that, pretty soon, the world outside wouldn't bother them for much longer.
Before I could get to the second sip, my phone rang.
The caller ID read "Amanda." I picked it up.
"Hello?"
"Henry, everything all right? I've been trying to reach you all day."
"Not really. Jack was admitted to the hospital this morning. Alcohol poisoning. I walked in on him sitting in a pile of his own vileness."
"Oh, God. I remember a while ago you thought he was drinking too much."
"Yeah, I just never thought it would get this bad."
"I'm so sorry to hear that. I called you at the office, and got worried when I couldn't find you. After the past few days my mind's been all out of whack."
"I'm at home now. Having a beer. Feel the same way as you."
There was a pregnant pause, and then Amanda said,
"Mind if I come over?"
Without waiting, I said, "No. That'd be nice."
"Be there in half an hour."
After we hung up, I got up and poured the rest of the beer into the sink. Then I sat on the couch and waited.
I wondered: Would Dmitri Petrovsky still be alive if we hadn't followed him? Possibly. But what the hell was he mixed up in?
I still didn't know exactly what his link was to Danny and Michelle. He was their pediatrician, but somehow he was connected to my friend the Chesterfield-chainsmoking sociopath. One more trail to follow. I needed to know who that man was, who lived in that house, and what
Dmitri Petrovsky knew that made necessary his permanent silence. One thing was for certain, my digging had opened a can of worms someone very badly wanted kept closed.
I looked around my apartment. Humble even by humble's standards. I knew when I moved to New York that it was one of the most expensive cities in the world, but nothing prepared me for three-dollar cups of coffee or twelve-dollar movie tickets. I was paying about sixty percent of my income to a landlord I never met, who took longer to fix my air-conditioning than it would have taken me to install a hot tub into a Buick Skylark. I had no idea how long it took Jack to make a decent living, but I hoped it wasn't too long in the waiting.
Twenty-five minutes later my buzzer rang. I peeked out the window, saw Amanda standing on the street. She looked up at me, waved. I let her in.
She came upstairs and sat down across the couch from me. Hands folded under her chin. Her hair fell over her shoulders, worry lines at her eyes. Though she was still beautiful, the past few years had aged her slightly. We'd been through so much together, yet strangely I'd known this girl for less than two years. I still saw that brown hair and remembered that on the day we met, despite the circumstances, she had made everything stand still, if only for a moment. Women like Amanda, who were beautiful almost in spite of their lack of effort, beautiful without trying at all, they didn't come along too often.
We sat there in silence. It was the kind of quiet I hadn't experienced with many other women. I longed for that sense of confidence. Of comfort.
After a few minutes had passed, Amanda said, "What do you think the cops will do now?"
"You mean the dedicated men and women of the Hobbs
County PD? Probably nothing. I'd bet my life savings that the same guy that mistook me for a barbecue started that fire, but I can't imagine the cops will work very hard to prove it. They want to wipe this whole mess under the bed and be done with it."
"What about Petrovsky?"
"I don't know. They claim they never found a body, either in the driveway or inside the bonfire. All they did was file a missing persons report when his secretary said he didn't show up at work. Petrovsky isn't married, no children, no real family in the States, so until enough time has gone by they won't have anything breathing down their necks. And the press won't be putting pressure on them if there are no weeping widows or no orphaned children to plaster on the front page to stir sympathies."
She looked sad. "It's like a crime was never even committed."
"It wasn't," I said. "Until a body turns up. Or we catch these assholes."
"If someone is willing to kidnap two children, kill a doctor, torture you and set a house on fire, I have a feeling they wouldn't think twice about disposing of a body."
"Tomorrow," I said. "We start from the other end. We've been looking for what happened to Michelle Oliveira and
Daniel Linwood, who kidnapped them and why. And we haven't made a lot of headway on that end. So now we follow this." I took a crumpled piece of paper from my pocket. Tossed it at Amanda. She uncrumpled it, read it.
"The receipt," she said. I nodded.
"Toyz 4 Fun," I replied. "Let's see who was buying a young girl some early Christmas presents. And I'll bet whoever it is has another child. Someone who hasn't been reported missing yet. Someone who in a few years is meant to be another Danny Linwood."
James Keach walked down the off-white hallway, still shaking after nearly tripping over an old man and his walker, just thankful he didn't rip the old guy's IV from his arm. James's jacket was unzipped, one hand in his pocket while the other one hung loose. Just like Paulina had taught him.
Be cool, she said. If anyone asks, you're visiting a relative. It's okay to be nervous-nobody likes being in a hospital-but nurses and orderlies are trained to sniff out anyone who doesn't belong. You belong, right, James?
Just tell yourself you belong and you'll act like it. Just don't be a pussy, James, and you'll be fine.
He still couldn't get over that word. His friends used it in casual conversation all the time, usually out at bars or while watching lumberjack competitions on Spike TV.
He'd never been called one. And to be called that name by a woman, his boss, on a regular basis, was something
James still hadn't come to grips with.
Once this task was complete, he was going home, getting under the covers and sleeping. Tomorrow he'd be joining his father on a golf outing with Ted Allen, and he'd need to be up for that. James knew his father had cashed in a favor in getting Ted Allen to hire him at the Dispatch.