Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

He stepped out of the van with a smile, his bushy mustache twitching in the streetlight, as if he were always chewing on something that didn’t actually exist. His hair had that boyish Pete Rose freshly washed gloss to it, silvery black and slightly mussed. He walked past me without shaking my hand and said, “Sorry about the time, but I was getting a whole slew of stuff for you. You’re going to thank me in a moment.”

He was carrying one of those strange metal briefcases that you always see as the last objects on airport baggage carousels, as if they exist only reluctantly and no one actually owns them. In the other hand, he was jangling a small key ring. “Follow me,” he said.

We walked past the metal garage-style grates that were pulled shut over the yawning entrances, to a narrow steel door with no sign, just a simple discolored knob. Jankle thrust a key into the hole, gazed warily up and down the street, then pulled the door quickly open. He held it for me, then yanked it shut behind us.

We stood in the dark together until he pulled a penlight from his pocket and flashed it around. I could see the hazy outlines of a beer stand against a far wall — Coors/Coors Light, $4.75, a shameless rip-off — and beside it, a snack bar with shelves for bags of popcorn and peanuts. On the concrete ground before us were piles of orange cones and pallets of boxes. The whole place was vacant and raw, permeated by a sense of defeat. We were here because the Red Sox lost. I was here because I had in some way lost.

Jesus mother of Christ, I really had to get a grip.

“Stay close,” Jankle told me. He walked slowly through the labyrinth of obstacles and said to me without turning around, “Be better if we were here to watch the first game of the playoffs, no?”

No shit. Be better if Hilary Kane were still alive. Be better if he’d never sent his thugs to get me last Monday night. Be better if a lot of things were different, but most of them probably weren’t worth bringing up there and then. So we walked in silence down a ramp toward the main concourse, then up another ramp toward a block of pale light, though light might be the wrong word. What was up ahead was just somewhat less dark. Maybe that, too, could be a metaphor.

As we ascended the ramp, I could feel the air growing cooler and a little less stale. The smell of old beer gave way to the freshness of an autumn night. And suddenly we emerged into the open air, into the stands, specifically the box seats between home plate and third base. The park was blanketed by a moon-splashed dark, eerily quiet, strangely still. The breeze was halted by the outer walls, lending an odd sense of serenity to the environs within.

“Nice night for a game,” Jankle said, giving me that typical half smile of his, as if he could find amusement in virtually any situation at any time.

I didn’t know if he was talking about baseball, or the games he was about to try playing with me. We soon would see. By way of explanation of our location, he said, “I’ve been a big fan for a long time, so the owners let me come and go.”

I didn’t respond. I wondered if that meant on game nights as well. I wondered how his superiors might regard such an, ahem, perk. Truth is, I was pissed off. This was the guy who thrust me into a situation where I cost a young woman her life, and he was sitting here acting somewhere far beyond cavalier about the whole thing, as if, perhaps, she had died in the name of some worthy cause. Maybe that’s what he believed. Maybe that’s what he fucking believed.

“Let’s sit down and relax,” he said. And we did, the former though not the latter, parking ourselves in the red field boxes with a seat in between us. He held the metal case in his lap, inserted a key and opened it. Then, while looking inside it rather than at me, he said, “So you now know there was more to the story than what I gave you.”

As he talked, he pulled out a microcassette recorder, removed a small tape from a plain manila envelope, and stuck it into the slot. He readied the tape, then put it down on the seat between us. He shut the metal case and put it on the ground beside him. Then he looked at me flush for the first time since we’d entered the park and said, “I leaked you some good information. It paid off for you. You got some paintings recovered, which I didn’t even foresee.”

“It also got Hilary Kane killed,” I said.

He looked down, nodding. “I didn’t foresee that, either,” he said.

“How could you not?”

He didn’t immediately answer. At first, I stared at him trying to gauge his mood and motivations, but he betrayed little of the former and none of the latter. I got the sense with this guy that his highs weren’t all that high and his lows never dipped all that low, that life was lived in the safety and security of a sanguine middle ground. Not a bad way to live, actually.

He took a deep breath, looked back at me, and said, “Out of some frustration, I brought you onto the periphery of the story. This is all on background, by the way. You can use it, just not attributable to me. Call me a ranking investigative official.”

Great. Last time we set ground rules like this, Hilary Kane was dead within eight hours. What poor soul was out there waiting to meet their maker because I’m a lunatic at the keyboard?

“Understood?”

I nodded.

He repeated himself: “Understood?”

“Yes.”

He chewed and twitched and did all that other stuff he does. Some might think it’s endearing, but for reasons I can’t fully articulate, his mannerisms were starting to bug me.

He said, “We’ve had Danny Harkins under court-sanctioned electronic surveillance for the last six months, based on the belief that he is complicit with his son in some of the crimes, and that he knows where his son is located now. That surveillance essentially involves wiretaps on his cellular telephone, his work lines at City Hall, and his home telephone at his Ritz-Carlton condominium.

“We’ve been frustrated, or at least I have. We know through secondary informants that he’s had elaborate contact with his son, but he’s somehow concealed it from us. Then this deal happened with Hilary Kane. She saw what we’ve been trying to see. We didn’t know if he knew what she knew.

“So I was trying to smoke him out, as the saying goes. I wanted him to realize that she saw something in his apartment, something that would make him panic, get on the telephone, make some calls that he wouldn’t have otherwise made, act in ways that aren’t characteristic.”

He paused here, looked at me, and added, “And then we’d make our case. And in the process, we might even nail the nation’s number one most wanted fugitive.”

We both sat in silence. I gazed down at the park, at the tarpaulin covering the infield glistening in the moonlight. I imagined what it would be like to sit in these seats at a game on that very night, maybe with Hilary Kane. She’d be wearing a baseball cap, cheering loudly, scarfing down popcorn, asking questions.

Actually, I don’t know where that thought came from. Just kind of popped into my addled mind.

I turned to Jankle and said, “You panicked him all right, didn’t you?”

He gave me a rueful nod. “That we did. And now we have this delicate matter of proving our case while somehow trying to continue to use him to apprehend his son. You understand, this ain’t easy.”

“Hilary would tell you just how hard it is, if she could be here to do it. Short of that, I bet her sister would let you know.”

He nodded again, looking down, as if conceding my successful jab. “It was a miscalculation,” he said. “We saw the mayor as a thief, but not a murderer.”

More silence. Then he reached down and picked up the microcassette and said, “So here’s a peace offering. You can take notes off this, but I can’t let you take the recording with you.”