Linwood Barclay: Stone Rain

I waited for it to swing shut, for the dust to settle, and then said to Sarah, “I’m beginning to think we need to crack down on the kids’ language.”

Sarah shook her head sadly. “That fucking ship has sailed,” she said. “I think you have failed to set a good example.”

She got up from the table, reached out for my hand, and started leading me to the stairs.

“What did they used to call Myanmar?” I asked her.

“ Burma,” Sarah replied.

“I think that’s right,” I said.

Sarah, not even waiting until we’d reached the second floor, was unbuttoning her blouse as she scaled the stairs.

“Dangerous,” I said, following her. “You’re the one who’s dangerous.”

I was settling back in at my desk at the Metropolitan, having just returned from the cafeteria with a coffee, when I caught a whiff of something unpleasant behind me. That could mean only one of two things. Either one of the photogs had just returned from covering a drowning in the sewers, or our top police reporter was in the vicinity.

Without turning around, I said, “What is it, Dick?” Slowly, I spun my computer chair around to look at him.

“How did you know it was me?” he asked. Dick Colby is not only the paper’s best crime reporter, he’s also its most odiferous. His fellow staffers are unsure whether it’s that he fails to bathe, or to do his laundry, or possibly a combination of the two. He lives alone. I don’t know whether he’s ever been married, but I couldn’t imagine a wife sending him out into the world this way. He’s a gruff, slightly overweight, prematurely graying creature in his late forties, and I didn’t know whether he was aware that most everyone referred to him, behind his back at any rate, as “Cheese Dick.”

“Sixth sense,” I said. I’d taken a deep breath before turning around and was slowly exhaling as I spoke. “You want something?”

“Your notes on the Wickens thing. Phone numbers, stuff like that. I need them.”

This request so took me by surprise that I breathed in suddenly, then coughed. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I said.

“I’m taking over the story,” Colby said. Just like that. As Paul might say, Hold on, Captain Butter-Me-Up.

“Oh, you just decided, ‘Hey, I think I’d like that story,’ and thought you’d come over here and I’d hand it to you?”

Colby offered me a pitying smile. “Shit, you haven’t been told, have you?”

“Told what?”

“Maybe you should talk to your wifey,” Colby said. “After you’ve done that, you can give me your notes.”

The blood was rushing to my head. I wanted to grab Colby by the neck and strangle him, but I also knew that if I got that close to him I might pass out. My stories on the Wickenses, a family of Timothy McVeigh-worshipping crazies whose plan to kill dozens, if not hundreds, of people had blown up in their faces, if you will, had run in the paper over the last couple of days. They had rented a farmhouse on my father’s property, and I’d gotten to know them, in the last week, somewhat more intimately than I could have ever wanted.

“I don’t believe this,” I said, getting out of my chair and heading straight for Sarah’s glass-walled office.

She was on the phone as I strode in and stood on the other side of her desk. “What’s this about Colby taking the Wickens story?”

“Can I call you back?” Sarah said. She hung up the phone. “What?”

“Cheese Dick says he’s getting the Wickens story. Why the hell would he think he was getting the Wickens story?”

“Fuck,” Sarah said. “That fucking asshole.”

“So it’s not true?”

“Noooo,” Sarah said, stretching out the word and shaking her head slowly in exasperation. “I mean, yes. It’s true.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“It wasn’t my decision.”

“Whose decision was it?”

Sarah tipped her head northward, in the direction of Bertrand Magnuson’s office.

“Magnuson pulled me off the Wickens story? I got the Wickens story. We played it up huge. It was my story. I’m part of that story.”

“I think that’s why Magnuson’s pulling you off it. Look, everyone knows you did a great job on it. Fantastic story. Award material. Pulitzer stuff. But Magnuson feels, you know, that you kind of, how do I put this…”

“Lucked into it?” I said.

Sarah screwed up her face. “Maybe.”

“I would hardly call it luck, having a run-in with that bunch.”

“You think I don’t agree? You think I’d call it lucky, what happened to you up there?” She took a breath. “But the managing editor feels that it might be more appropriate that for the follow-up stories, like whether the Wickenses were part of a larger movement, other crimes that they might have been responsible for, that that’s the kind of thing that Dick is better equipped to handle, what with his contacts in law enforcement and all.”

I stared at her. Sarah broke away, pretended to be looking for something on her desk. She was in management mode and couldn’t bring herself to look me in the eye.

“Did you make a case for me?” I asked. “When Magnuson made this decision?”

Sarah swallowed. “Sure I did.”

“How hard?”

She paused. “Pretty hard.”

“It’s the foreign editor thing, isn’t it? You don’t want to piss off Magnuson because you’re going for this new job and it’s his call.”

“That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit and you know it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Look, it’s not fair, but the fact is, Colby, for all his faults and aromas, has great contacts. He’s very experienced with this sort of thing, it’s not like his background is in-” She stopped herself.

“In what, Sarah?” My eyebrows went up, questioning. “Writing science fiction novels? His background’s a little more respectable? Is that what you were going to say?”

She deflated. “No, that’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say city hall, and photography. That’s what most of your newspaper experience has been about.”

I stood there another five seconds, then turned and walked out. “Zack,” Sarah called out. “Zack, please.”

I put my notes about the Wickens story and all relevant phone numbers into the computer and e-mailed everything to Cheese Dick. Then I grabbed my jacket, slipped it on, and started making my way out of the newsroom.

“Hey,” Dick said as I passed within shouting distance of his desk. I kept on walking. “Hey, Walker!” I stopped, looked over at him. “I need to talk to you for a sec.”

I took my time walking over to him. “I sent you the stuff,” I said.

“Yeah, I see that. Thanks. So Sarah, she explained it to you?”

I nodded.

“It’s not personal,” Colby said smugly, enjoying immensely just how personal it actually was. “I’m just more suited to this sort of assignment. When you stumble into something, like you did, it’s okay to write the first-person story, you know, what happened to you, but after that, it’s really my area, you know? I mean, you don’t see me trying to cover a Star Trek convention, do you?”

I found myself thinking about what constituted justifiable homicide. My definition of “justifiable” might, I feared, differ from the justice system’s, so I decided not to act on an impulse to grab Colby’s keyboard and beat him to death with it.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Actually, yeah,” Colby said, looking for a piece of paper on his cluttered desk. “Where is it…where the fuck is it?…Okay, here it is. Since I’m doing you a favor, taking this story off your hands, maybe you could do this one for me. You’d have to get moving, though. It’s in an hour.”