Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

People at cocktail parties who find out what I do for a living somehow think I must receive death threats all the time, because I so frequently find myself writing bad things about scary people. But I had only gotten one death threat in my career-and even that was from a guy who was just blowing off steam. He was a local slumlord I had exposed for keeping his tenants without heat. The day the story ran, he yelled into my cell phone that I had ruined his life and he was going to kill me. He called back later in the day to apologize. I told him he could make it up to me by filling his building’s oil tank.

Fact is, even the scary people recognize the newspaper reporter is merely the messenger. They might not like me writing about them very much. They might hope I stop doing it. They might wish I fall through an empty manhole cover and be devoured by a sewer-dwelling alligator. But ultimately the scary people are smart enough to know killing a newspaper reporter will only add to their problems. It’s an extension of the old Mark Twain saw about not picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

Think about it: how often do you hear about a newspaper reporter in this country being killed for something they wrote? It just doesn’t happen.

Except it came close to happening to me. And when I thought about how close, I started to shake. I’ve heard it said-mostly by blowhard World War II veterans-that a man doesn’t really know what he’s made of until he faces death head-on. Based on this experience, I think I was made of something resembling lime Jell-O.

I was scared out of my quivering, gelatinous mind. Whoever I was dealing with had killed four people already-perhaps more-and obviously didn’t mind adding to the body count. In this case, he had read one article, decided his world would be better off without me in it, and clearly had the means to make that happen.

And he did it in frighteningly short order. I tried to do the math: our distributors were guaranteed to get their daily supply of papers by 4 A.M. From the distributor it went to the carriers around five. So the story was pretty much everywhere in New Jersey by six, at the latest. That meant it had taken this guy a mere hour and a half to make it look like the Big Bad Wolf had visited my little straw house, huffed, puffed, and blown it down.

He knew where I lived-or used to live, anyway. He knew where I worked. It was possible he knew what I looked like, too: my head shot had been in the paper on occasion. Did he also know what car I drove? Did he have people watching me? Should I worry about rounding some corner and having a gun pointing in my face?

I didn’t know. I guess that was the most terrifying thing of all; someone was trying to kill me and I didn’t know who, what, when, or how.

All I really knew was why. That damn article. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much different it was than so many of the others I had written. This wasn’t just a case of shooting the messenger. It’s not like I was merely quoting some prosecutor or digging through documents. This was news I’d uncovered myself. And whoever was trying to kill me wanted to make damn sure I didn’t find anything else.

Having nowhere else to go, I started driving toward Newark. I was midway through my journey when my cell phone rang. It was Tina.

“Hi,” I said.

“Well, someone disappeared pretty quickly this morning,” she said, her voice full of flirtatious energy. “Were you afraid I was going to make you eat eggs or something?”

“No,” I said.

There was a pause on the end.

“Don’t play that game with me,” she said.

“Huh?” I mustered.

“The ‘I’m embarrassed I got emotional and now I’m going to shut you out’ game,” she said. “Look, I know last night took a different turn from where we thought it was going and you ended up crying on my shoulder a little bit. It doesn’t make you less of a man. I thought you were more evolved than that. It’s no big-”

“Tina, shut up, ” I said. “My house blew up, okay?”

Her response was confusion, then alarm, then concern. Over the next several minutes, I took her through what I had seen and heard. “So, basically,” I concluded, “someone doesn’t like me very much.”

“Do you think it’s the same someone who killed those people on Ludlow Street?”

“I can’t think of anyone else who’d want me dead that badly.”

“Wait a second,” Tina said. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, no.”

“What?”

“The incident pager has been going nuts all morning and I didn’t figure it out until just now. Oh, my God.”

“Figure what out?”

She started reading like she was ticking off a list: “House explosion in Nutley. Fire on Eighteenth Street in Newark. Fire at Go-Go Bar in Irvington. Carter, those are all places you wrote about in your story!”

I was speechless. The man in the white van wasn’t merely going after me. He was covering his tracks. He was destroying the places where I had found evidence or might have kept evidence, making sure no one else-like, say, the police-could retrace my steps.

“Tina, I gotta go,” I said.

“Wait, why?”

“I’m heading to that fire on Eighteenth Street.”

“Carter, you’re in no shape to be chasing fire trucks. You’re out of your mind.”

“Probably, but I’m hanging up now.”

“Please don’t,” she said. “Come into the newsroom. I don’t want you out there. You’ll be safer here.”

“No,” I said. “Until I figure out who’s doing this, I won’t be safe anywhere.”

I shut off my cell phone so Tina couldn’t bug me and turned in the direction of Miss B’s apartment on 18th Street. I was still two blocks away when I came to a police barricade, but I could already see her building. It was mostly untouched, except for the upper right quarter of it, where Miss B lived. That part was streaked by black scorch marks and still steaming slightly. It looked soggy. The street outside was filled with puddles and fire trucks.

I left the safety of the Malibu, and as I got closer, I had this sense that whatever had been used on Miss B’s apartment was different from what razed my bungalow. First off, the building was structurally sound. There were no pieces of it scattered hither and yon, as there had been with my place. For that matter, none of the surrounding buildings appeared to have been touched-there were no blown-out windows. I also didn’t hear any car alarms.

It looked more like any of the number of slum-building fires I had written about: the cause of the fire always turned out to be a shorted-out space heater, an oven someone had left open for warmth, a cigarette igniting a couch, or something similarly banal.

I was now directly across the street from the building. Two TV stations were already there, which may have explained why my house blowing up hadn’t attracted any coverage. The TV guys had decided an apartment fire in Newark was more interesting.

One of the cameras was busy filming a man-on-the-street reporter who was pretending to be compassionate as he interviewed the shocked and bewildered neighbors. The other camera was shooting B-roll of the smoldering building while a pissy-looking blond reporter bitched into her cell phone about how she should be somewhere else.

Still, I was a little surprised more camera crews weren’t there. Fires combined the three elements necessary for local TV news: human tragedy, an easy-to-tell story, and great visuals. Where was the rest of the horde?

Not that I was complaining. And since neither crew seemed to be concerned with what had actually happened, I was able to sidle up to the Newark Fire Department captain who was overseeing the operation. He was a former high school basketball star-good enough to get himself a D1 scholarship, not good enough to take it any further-and still thought of himself as a local hero. I did nothing to disavow him of that and put his name in the newspaper whenever I got the chance. We were pals.