Brad Parks - The Girl Next Door

“I’m braking now to make the turn,” I said, because I didn’t want to get shot until it was absolutely necessary.

The Malibu, not exactly an off-road vehicle, left the pavement with a jolt.

“Keep it slow,” he said. “Nothing cute.”

“You got it, Caesar.”

I used the name to try to get a small rise out of him-to see if he would rattle a little-but he didn’t show any reaction. As I gently pressed the brake pedal, the first peal of thunder boomed from somewhere nearby. I didn’t see the lightning strike that preceded it, but the storm was definitely close. Then, just as suddenly as the thunder, the rain came, hammering the car from every direction, like I had driven into a car wash.

“Can I turn on the windshield wipers?”

“Do it slow.”

I eased my hand to the side of the steering wheel and turned the wipers on the highest setting.

In the meantime, all the mistakes I had made were raining down on my head as well. Some of them were now so obvious. Example: McNabb told me Jackman made those threats against Nancy on Thursday night. But Mrs. Alfaro said the killer started stalking Nancy on Tuesday morning, two days earlier.

“There never was any meeting at a bar with you and Jackman on Thursday night, was there?” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the rain. “There were never any threats.”

“Nope,” he admitted, without changing the position of anything but his mouth.

Of course there weren’t. That’s why McNabb would never tell me the name of the bar, why he was always so guarded about the whole thing-there was no bar. Jackman’s appointment book just said “IFIW.” It had been a negotiating session, nothing more.

“I can’t believe I thought it was Jackman,” I said, mostly to myself. “Maybe I just wanted it to be Jackman.”

That had been another massive mistake, of course. I had allowed my bias against Jackman to cloud my judgment, never stopping to think that merely being a jackass and a foppish, non-newspaper-reading hatchet man didn’t necessarily mean he was a murderer-even if he had once used a seven-iron in a way not endorsed by the United States Golf Association. Tina tried to tell me that. I hadn’t listened.

Then there was Gus Papadopolous. I still had no idea what business he and Jackman had together, but it hardly mattered anymore. I mean, sure, Papadopolous went a little short-fused when he found out a reporter was in his office. But a lot of people didn’t like reporters hanging around. Heck, maybe he sensed I had the hots for his daughter, and had kicked into overprotective daddy mode.

But there were more mistakes. I had badly misjudged McNabb, assuming that because he had one obvious agenda-positioning his union in its renegotiation with the paper-he didn’t have any other agendas that he kept hidden.

McNabb said it himself, in a small bit of conversation that was now coming back to me: a powerful man facing the loss of his power will do just about anything to protect it. I thought he was talking about a different powerful man, but he was talking about himself.

More than that, I had allowed myself to rely on his information too much, without stopping to scrutinize it that extra layer. I definitely subscribe to the “one great source” theory of reporting-that all it takes is that one person on the inside to illuminate a subject for you. Of course, you still have to make a good decision about who that one great source should be. And at risk of stating the obvious, I had chosen poorly.

And shouldn’t I have known? McNabb was constantly asking me about what I had or hadn’t told the cops, always pumping me for information. I had dismissed it as an outcropping of his dirt-mongering personality, never thinking that I was keeping the murderer fully apprised of my investigation.

There was also some bad luck and lousy timing involved. If I had gotten more immediate cooperation from Anne McCaffrey-or if Anne had put Jeanne in the know earlier-I would have discovered the sexual harassment sooner. I would have had time to read the complaint a little more carefully and come to some different conclusions, ones that would have led me away from Jackman.

One example that was suddenly obvious: the complaint said Caesar touched Nancy under a table. When would Jackman ever have been sitting close enough to Nancy to do that? The only time he would have ever seen her was during a negotiating session-when he would have been on the opposite side of the table.

For that matter, Caesar was asking her out on dates. There was no way the publisher of a major newspaper, locked in a tense negotiation with its largest union, would have done anything that outrageous with one of the union’s shop stewards.

And there was Jim McNabb, calling one of his employees “candypants,” right in front of me all along. But I still couldn’t see it.

Yep, I had screwed up every way but good. And because of it, it might be the last story I ever worked.

* * *

We bounced along the dirt road, splashing through flooded ruts and potholes, going no more than fifteen miles an hour. The lightning flashes were providing more illumination than my headlights. The wipers beat furiously but still couldn’t keep up with the torrent of water gushing down from the sky.

On our left, we passed the loading warehouse and a parking lot, then a small trailer on our right. Then we were in no-man’s land. Beyond the waist-high weeds that lined the road, I had a railroad track to my right and some sort of retention pond to my left. It was a body of water that had probably been the recipient of enough heavy-metal-laced runoff and landfill leachate to make it glow in the dark.

I briefly considered yanking the steering wheel to the left and taking us for a swim in that yucky stew-I could take my chances with the elevated cancer risk two decades from now. But we were moving too slowly. McNabb might be a little surprised, but he’d have ten chances to shoot me before the water closed over the car and forced him to bail out.

No, the simple fact was, in the middle of the most densely populated metropolitan area in America, I had managed to find myself in a totally isolated spot with an armed killer. Yet another genius move on my part.

“Okay, stop here,” he said.

I pressed the brake until the car halted.

“Put it in Park,” he instructed.

I moved the shifter up from the Drive position.

“Now put your hands on the ceiling, palms up.”

I did as instructed. A thick lightning bolt lit the sky, followed quickly by an enormous thunderclap. I could briefly see a large power transfer station perhaps a hundred yards ahead, then the elevated road surface of the New Jersey Turnpike a few hundred yards beyond that. Traffic was probably crawling in a storm like this. I wondered if any of those drivers could see me, this strange little car parked along a railroad access way. But I doubted it. The visibility had been reduced to nothing. We might as well have been in an underground bunker.

“Why don’t I just drive us down to the Pine Barrens,” I said. “I know a spot that’s got to be ten miles from anywhere. You dump me off there, and by the time I get out, you could be a hundred miles away in any direction.”

“And live like some damn runaway the rest of my life? I don’t think so.”

“Jim, you’re not going to get away with this,” I said.

“Yes I am. You didn’t tell anyone about me. You told me so yourself.”

“Someone else is going to figure out who ‘J.M.’ is. That complaint makes it pretty obvious.”

“Yeah? If it was so obvious, how come you didn’t figure it out?”

Because I’m a total moron, I wanted to say.

“I didn’t, but Kevin Lungford will,” I said. “He’s a brilliant, Princeton-educated reporter, one of the smartest guys I’ve ever worked with. He’s probably already put it together.”