Parker 01 - The Mark (17 page)

P
aulina threw the copy down and eyed Wallace Langston. He picked it up, scanned it quickly and handed it back.

“I’m not going to run this.”

Paulina pursed her lips, that scowl she’d perfected over the years. The one that wordlessly said
What’s the matter with you?

“Wally, forgive my insolence, but that’s bullshit. Every paper in this town is having a field day with us. Henry Parker is getting more ink than Blair and Frey combined. We’re talking
murder,
Wally. This isn’t some stupid plagiarism case we can ignore.”

“I know that.” Wallace looked and felt like hell. The last two days had been the longest of his professional life. He still couldn’t believe it, didn’t want to. Parker had such terrific potential. He was a reporter the
Gazette
could hang its hat on for decades. The talent and work ethic of a lion, the integrity of the very man he’d idolized. At least that’s what Wallace had thought. “But that editorial you wrote is pretty darn vicious. I know we need to report on the Parker search, but we don’t need to drive a stake in our own heart.”

“Our heart?” Paulina said, anger rising. “What heart? The kid is twenty-four years old. You know how many burnouts we’ve seen over the years? If Parker had never worked here, who would have known?”

“I would have,” Wallace said. “Jack would have.”

“Right…Jack.” Paulina’s voice quieted. “Funny, this whole thing started because of a story on Jack’s plate.”

“Don’t start, Paulina.”

“I’m just saying, guy’s old. Doesn’t have it all together. Who knows what his motives were for sending Henry into the field?”

“Right now I don’t know and I don’t care. But we’re going to handle this scandal like professionals. Period.”

She placed the editorial on Wallace’s desk again. “Then run my column. Be professional. Don’t avoid this. You talk about integrity? My article is the truth a lot of people are feeling. You can bury it, and admit that the
Gazette
takes shortcuts. Or you can print it. Let everyone know this paper isn’t afraid to hit hard.”

Wallace sighed. He read the piece again. Paulina had torn Henry Parker to pieces, and was now asking him to publicly scatter the ashes.

“Run it,” he said. “Tighten up the first graph. But it’ll be in the morning edition.”

Paulina smiled, thanked Wallace and left his office with an extra hop in her step.

W
hen we’d reached the bottom of our bottomless cups of coffee and licked the last toast crumbs off the plate, Amanda and I left Ken’s offee Den and headed into the morning sunlight. David Morris’s Tundra was nowhere to be seen. After four hours of “Achy Breaky Heart,” I wasn’t too sad to see him go.

Studying the cars in the rest stop parking lot, I noticed that most had Illinois license plates. A few Missouris, one or two from Wisconsin. Before we went anywhere, I went back into the diner and grabbed a road map from a kiosk. On the back cover was an advertisement for a walking tour of the state’s capitol, Springfield. Inside were coupons for an upcoming Cubs game. Somehow, we’d ended up in Illinois.

I unfolded the map, trying to pinpoint our location, then gave up. Beyond the rest stop on the southbound side of the highway was a blue sign indicating we were at the Coalfield exit on Interstate 55. Another green sign beyond that read “Springfield—10 Miles.” My legs felt rubbery just thinking about it.

Amanda appeared beside me, her shoulder brushing against my arm. The first real human contact I’d felt in hours. Her eyes were striking in the morning light. From the first moment on that street corner in New York, I knew Amanda Davies was stunning. But thinking about how much she’d done for me, how much she’d risked, she was that much more beautiful.

She must have caught me staring, because a bashful smile crept over her lips.

“What?” she said. I smiled, shook my head.

“Nothing. Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For believing me. You could have hitched a ride or called the cops, done any number of things. And I’d be lost. Completely.”

“You don’t need to thank me. I’m doing this because I want to.”

“I know you are. But thanks anyway.”

Again I thought about her notebooks, and it occurred to me that for the first time Amanda had been forced to see past the surface of her subjects. Before last night I was Carl Bernstein. Merely an entry, one of hundreds. But now I was three-dimensional. Flesh and blood. Someone to touch rather than just see.

“So what do we do now?” she asked.

“Now,” I said, “we contact our primary sources. The ‘who’ list.” I pulled the notebook from my pocket and looked over the list of names. Three in particular stood out.

Grady Larkin.

Luis and Christine Guzman.

For the first time, I found myself thinking about John Fredrickson’s family. The newspaper said he left behind a wife, two children. A family had been shattered. My heart felt weak, knowing these lives were damaged forever because of me. Despite my innocence, nothing could fill that family’s void.

Everything hit me like a punch to the gut and suddenly I felt nauseous. I bent over, hands on my knees, heaving. Amanda, ever courageous, rubbed my back.

“Henry? Henry? You okay?”

I shooed her away with a wave and resumed heaving. When my stomach’s spin cycle stopped, I stood up and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

I gathered myself, still panting, hands trembling. Amanda looked me over as I clenched and unclenched my fists. She seemed to know what I was thinking.

“Yeah, I just…” My voice trailed off. I looked into her eyes, warm and sorrowful, as if sharing my misery would help lighten the load. “It just doesn’t seem real.”

She nodded. “I know.”

“I mean, I have a home and a family I haven’t even spoken to since everything happened. My mother, she’d be devastated.”

“What about your father?”

I shook my head.

“He won’t care. This would just confirm his assumption that I was born to fail.”

“Well, then it’s up to you to prove him wrong.” I nodded. Years ago I’d made the choice to distance myself from my parents. Accomplishing that goal brought a sense of both pride and regret. And now I couldn’t turn to them even if I wanted to.

“Now come on,” Amanda said. “We have work to do.”

She took my arm and we headed toward the highway. I’d walked ten miles before, but never with a definite purpose or destination. Cold nights, breath streaming in front of me, nowhere to go but to be lost in the woods of my own thoughts. Back home, when I couldn’t take things anymore, when the rotten stench of beer and sweat literally forced me out of the house, walking was a cure from my father’s passive aggressive anger. I waited years for him to explode, to release all his hatred in a viscous torrent, but instead it wafted out like a leaky gas main, making me woozy and sick for years, poisoning me slowly.

One of my favorite analogies is the frog and the pot of water. I used it on sources that were reluctant to speak. It helped them understand the severity of their situation.

If you put a frog in a boiling pot of water, he’ll sense the heat and immediately jump out of the scalding liquid. But if you put a frog in a cold pot of water then slowly raise the temperature, the frog will boil alive. He becomes accustomed to the gradual temperature change, right until it kills him.

The lesson is that people stay in terrible situations simply because they’ve gotten used to them. The water around them is so scalding and hurtful but they don’t know any better because it’s happened in such small increments. Thankfully I was able to leave my own pot before it was too late.

We started off down the interstate, walking side by side, halfway between the surge of speeding vehicles and the protection of the tree line. I didn’t realize it until the third or fourth mile, but my leg was really starting to hurt. Not the kind of ache from a cramped muscle or even a deep bruise. No, this was beneath the skin. Nausea swept through me, but I fought it off.

Soon buildings began to appear on the horizon, rising above the endless span of highway. The humidity dried up, the sweat once pouring from my body now drying, causing my shirt to stick to my skin. Peeling it off caused an icky sensation, like hearing the wet sound of a bandage ripped from a fresh cut. Amanda seemed to notice this, and leered at me whenever I pried the sleeves loose from my biceps.

“This is the first time I’ve ever said this,” I said, “but I could really go for a good shopping spree right about now.”

Amanda laughed, but there was weariness in it. Still, I had to admire her being able to keep a sense of humor under the circumstances.

“If we get out of this, I’ll take you to Barneys. You’ll fall in love with their suits.” She playfully tugged at the waist-band of my pants.

“Forget suits, I’d drop twenty on a crappy Fruit of the Loom right about now.”

“I bet Mr. Fruit of the Loom would be flattered to hear that.”

As we walked, time seemed to go into a strange sort of wind tunnel, everyone speeding past us. We were running on fumes, the colors all blurring together, like life was a record going at 33
^1/3
. Amanda was beginning to walk sluggishly, dragging her heels, her shoulders slouching.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Just a little tired,” she said. “Haven’t slept in like thirty-six hours.”

Same as me,
I thought. But I had reasons to keep going.

Amanda wasn’t fighting for her survival, she was fighting for a man she’d met a day and a half ago. We needed a place to rest, even if it was just for a little while.

One hour and three more miles later, according to my body’s—likely faulty—pedometer, we saw a sign for gas, food and lodging, and an arrow veering off the freeway. I looked at Amanda, who shrugged, as if to leave the decision to stop entirely up to me.

“We should rest,” I said. She slowed down, seemingly mulling over this idea.

“If you insist.”

We followed exit 42 until we reached an intersection. Half a dozen fast-food joints populated either side of the highway, competing for layover dollars from families on the go. A Motel 3 lay about a half mile down the road, the roof a muddy red. A large neon light proclaimed that, yes, they did have vacancies and at least the
V
in TV. If the laws of division were correct, a Motel 3 would be half as good as Motel 6. And right they were. It resembled a two-story slab of pancake-colored timeshares, the paint looking like it hadn’t received a second coat since before Sherwin married Williams.

We entered the motel, where an elderly man with a crescent moon of gray hair was resting his eyes at the reception desk. I rang the bell. The man stirred, picked his head up and wiped the drool from his mouth.

“What?” he said, his voice irritated, like a cranky teenager woken from a nap.

“Hi, uh, we’d like a room.”

He grimaced, then reached beneath the counter for a water bottle with an inch of viscous black liquid at the bottom. He raised it to his mouth and spit chewing tobacco into the lip. Whatever missed the bottle dripped down the side like an insect’s number two.

“Minimum’s one night. None of that ‘we need fifteen minutes for a quickie’ bullcrap. You want that you best go a mile down the road to the Sleep ’N’ Snuggle Inn, fifteen bucks an hour at that slop house.”

“Then we’ll take a room for one night,” I said.

“Don’t you be bull crappin’ me,” he spat. “If you plan on stayin’ more than three nights I need a down payment. Too many peoples coming in here staying and don’t paying.”

“Just one night,” I repeated. “Honest. And we’ll even pay that up front.”

“Well, all right then.”

He reached under the counter and pulled up a gigantic logbook, its yellowed pages more like remnants of Talmudic scripture than loose-leaf. He turned it around to face us, and motioned to a pen attached to a chain. Not a dinky chain of metal balls like they have at banks, but a full damn chain. If this is how he protected writing implements, I wondered how he tethered his pets.

“Need your name—both of ’em—and John Hancocks.”

“No problem. Can we pay in cash?”

“This is still America, right? Haven’t gone all to plastic yet.”

“Far as I know,” Amanda said.

I took the pen and logbook and began to scrawl.
B-O-B W-O-O-D.

Before I could finish, Amanda jabbed me in the ribs.

S-O-N,
I wrote. Bob Woodson. Stupid name.

Amanda took the pen. With delicate penmanship, she wrote in
Marion Crane.
When I looked at her, she was blushing.

Marion Crane. Janet Leigh’s character in
Psycho.
The woman who ran from her lover and the police with $40,000 of embezzled cash, before becoming Norman Bates’s carving block.

Marion Crane. The girl who just wanted a better life.

He said, “Now I’ve blocked the rooms from dialing those 900 numbers. You want me to unblock it, I’ll need a credit card imprint. Seen some people run up ungodly charges on those things.”

“No thanks, that won’t be necessary,” I said.

He gave me a creepy smile, smiled at Amanda. “I’m sure it won’t.”

He handed us a small key attached to a palm-sized block of wood. “So you don’t be stealin’ it,” he reprimanded us. The key was stamped
4.
He pointed us down the hall and told us to hook a right. All the doors were a faded red, the paint cracked and dirty. We passed by a soda machine. I was thirsty, but the machine was sold out except for the Diet Shasta Orange. Yum.

After we turned the key, room 4 took several hard kicks to open. Just like home.

The bed was concave, as if it had recently been vacated by a particularly obese buffalo and hadn’t yet taken back its normal shape. Thankfully the bathroom was clean. The shower stall was cramped, but at least the water ran.

Amanda collapsed onto the bed. Her legs hung off the end as she took long breaths. I sat down at a small desk in the corner and pulled up my pant leg, pain shooting again as the fabric grazed my wound. Dried blood the color of charred wood had congealed around the yellowed gash. I gently pressed my finger against it, winced.

I stood up and went over to the scratched oak dresser, throwing open the drawers one by one. All I found was a Gideon’s bible and a wadded-up tissue. Ew.

“What’re you looking for?” Amanda asked, her voice sluggish.

“Just checking to see if anyone might have left some spare clothes, socks maybe.”

“Sure, I bet the Salvation Army figured they didn’t need little Johnny’s socks anymore and tossed ’em in the drawer.”

“Whatever,” I said, easing back into the chair. “I need to get out of these clothes, take a shower.”

“Be my guest.”

I removed my socks and shoes and lay them neatly by the radiator. Stepping into the bathroom, I hung my shirt and pants on the shower stall, hoping the steam might rinse away some of the sweat and dirt.

Steam wrapped my body like a glove and I closed my eyes, the world seeming ever so far away. Just a few minutes, and I forgot all about John Fredrickson. The last two days never happened. The weight of the world disappearing down the drain.

I was back in the Guzmans’ apartment. Luis was reciting lines from
The Glass Menagerie
while Christine showed off booties for their unborn child.

I was back at the
Gazette,
writing obituaries while Wallace and Jack observed from across the newsroom. Everything was right with the world.

Then it all came rushing back like a busted dam. The gunshots. John Fredrickson’s body prone on the ground, blood everywhere. The pistol pointed at Amanda’s head. The cold glare from the man in black. The cops who wanted me dead. Hours cramped in the back of a truck, knowing every breath might be my last. Death and destruction, all following me like my own shadow.

Suddenly I was awake. I looked at my watch. Half an hour had gone by in a blink.

I shut the water off and grabbed a crinkled towel. My clothes were still damp, so I wrapped the towel around my waist and rejoined Amanda. Modesty damned to hell, I wasn’t going to put those nasty clothes back on until they’d been boiled and disinfected.

To my surprise not only was Amanda awake, but she was wearing a different shirt. A large plastic bag lay at her feet.

“Is that new?” I asked, incredulous. When we arrived, Amanda was still wearing her fleece. Now she had on a blue T-shirt with the letters CPD embroidered on it. Chicago Police Department. What a sense of humor. “What’s in the bag?”