Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

I immediately began formulating escape strategies. Would fake appendicitis be over-the-top?

“Hey, Sal,” I said, strolling into his office and pulling up a chair as if nothing were awry.

“I know you’re Brodie’s new cuddle-buddy and all, but would you mind telling me what smoking dope with a bunch of gangbangers has to do with our bar story?”

“Why, yes, of course,” I said.

“Well?”

“Glad you asked,” I said, then started squirming as if something were gnawing on my leg.

“Hang on,” I said, fishing my cell phone out of my pocket. “I gotta take this.”

“It didn’t even ring!” Szanto protested.

“It’s on vibrate,” I said as I flipped open the phone and gave my most officious “Carter Ross!”

“Like hell it is,” Szanto said, raising his voice. “There’s no one on the other end. I’m not falling for that again!”

“Huh,” I said, taking the phone away from my ear and looking puzzled at it. “I lost him. This must be a dead reception area. Let me try it from the other side of the newsroom.”

I lifted myself from the chair, but Szanto was having none of it.

“Sit your ass down. Give me a quick update on the bar story and you can go call from Botswana for all I care.”

“I thought Tina gave you the update on the bar story,” I said.

“If you’re checking to see whether your accomplice covered for you, the answer is yes. She tells me you’re making excellent progress. But when I asked her details she faked an intense menstrual cramp and ran out of my office.”

Menstrual cramps. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

“So stop dicking around,” Szanto ordered. “Brodie is talking about this being a page one story on Sunday and he keeps asking me every eight minutes what it’s going to say. I’d like to have an answer for him.”

“Right,” I said. “The bar story. It’s this. . bar. . where everyone in the neighborhood went to, you know, drink. Except there was something, something”-what was the word Szanto had used the other day? — “something sinister going on inside.”

“Fine. I like where we’re heading on this,” Szanto said. “Who have we talked to?”

“Oh, lots of people.”

“Like who?”

“People in the, uh, neighborhood. You know. . customers.”

“Have we talked to the bar’s owner yet? What does he say? When did these people rob him? Is he a suspect?”

“I’m sure he’s a person of interest,” I said, employing that wonderfully vague bit of cop talk.

“Goddammit, are you working on this story or not?” Szanto demanded.

He didn’t wait for my answer. “You know what? I don’t care. I’m going to make this real simple for you. You got this assignment on Monday. It’s now Wednesday afternoon. I expect that bar story to be on my desk by Friday at noon or I’m sending you out to Sussex County to cover bear scat for the rest of your life.”

I grinned despite myself. Sussex County was our farthest-flung bureau, about an hour away in the northeast corner of the state. Szanto threatened to reassign me there roughly every other month.

“Right,” I said. “You’ll have a story by Friday at noon.”

And I meant it. I just didn’t know what story it was going to be.

After my retreat from Szanto’s office, I went straight to Tommy’s desk, hoping he had made some progress in the past twenty-four hours.

“You might want to consider a smaller belt,” he said as he saw me approach.

“And why is that?”

“You’re going to need something to hold your pants up with the way Szanto just chewed your ass off,” Tommy finished, pleased with himself.

“I really walked right into that one, didn’t I?”

“Chin first, yeah.”

“Then I need a soda to recover from my wounds. Come on, I’m buying.”

Tommy trailed after me to the break room vending machine, which was in a cranky mood. After surrendering the first bottle with relative ease, there was no way it was giving up the second one without a fight. I gave the machine a slight shove, which did nothing. Neither did leaning into it a little harder. I was rocking the thing violently back and forth when Tommy spoke up.

“You know, ten people a year are-”

“Oh, stuff it already,” I said, finally getting enough wobble going to dislodge a fresh Coke Zero.

Tommy sat down with his soda. I went over to another machine to do something about the rumbling in my stomach.

“So how was your return to Shareef Thomas’s neighborhood?” I asked, selecting a sleeve of strawberry Pop-Tarts. Health food.

“Not bad if you like spending a lot of time with people who wear polyester blends,” he said. “Though I did meet a drunk who claimed to be Shareef’s uncle.”

“Was he?”

“He had a Social Security card with the name Marlon Thomas on it.”

“Okay, I guess that’s legit,” I said, tearing into my first Pop-Tart.

“He told me he’d tell me anything I wanted to know if I got him something to drink. So I bought him two bottles of Boone’s Farm’s finest sparkling wine from the corner liquor store.”

“I hope you went with the 2007. Growing conditions were excellent that year.”

“But of course,” he said.

It’s strictly unethical for us to pay a source for information. Tabloids do it all the time, but no serious newspaper would ever think about it. Information that has to be paid for is considered untrustworthy.

That said, what Tommy had done was more or less fine. I’m not saying I’d write in to Columbia Journalism Review to brag about it. But it wasn’t really that much different than, say, picking up the tab when you lunched with the mayor. This was just a less conventional method of building rapport with a source-a liquid lunch, as it were.

“How do you think I expense that?” Tommy asked.

“Just put it under ‘Miscellaneous Supplies.’ ”

“Sounds good,” he said, pulling out his notebook and reading from it. “Anyway, here’s what Uncle Booze-Breath had to say about his precious nephew. His daddy-Booze-Breath’s brother-was apparently a pretty decent guy who got shot in some kind of mistaken-identity thing back in the eighties. After that, Shareef’s mom started messing around with a drug dealer, and you know how that story ends.”

“I’m guessing poorly,” I said, moving on to my second Pop-Tart.

“You got it. Once Mama Shareef had enough possession charges, she got put away for ten years and Shareef got put in foster care.”

“I’m guessing that went poorly, too.”

“Very. There was no foster home that could hold him. He hightailed it out of every one they tried to put him in and always ended up back in the neighborhood, crashing with a different relative. The relative would usually put up with him for a few months. Then Shareef would do something to make the relative turn him back over to foster care, then he’d run away again. Somewhere along the line, he started stealing cars, landed in a juvenile lockup, and has pretty much spent the rest of his life in and out of jail. When even your wino uncle describes you as ‘that boy ain’t no good,’ that ought to tell you something.”

Pop-Tart No. 2 was now gone and I peered into the empty plastic wrapper, hoping that a third had somehow miraculously materialized. Alas, it was empty.

“That was your lunch, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“No. I also had a slice of apple pie earlier.”

“I’ll remind you of this moment when you have to go to the Ugly Pants Store to buy a larger size.”

I shrugged. My secret to weight loss: get busy enough at work and you end up skipping meals without realizing it.

“So did the uncle know anything about Shareef’s most recent mode of employment?” I asked.