Ian Slater - Warshot

“You be careful,” said Ida. “All this violence in New York.” To Ida, all violence happened in New York— another country. “I think you should call the sheriff’s office.”

Ovan considered it for a moment, his pride battling the pressure of his deadline. Still, the IRS gave him a turn. Rumor was, everyone gets audited sometime. “All right. Have Billy take it to the sheriff’s office first.”

Seventeen minutes later the local police car pulled up outside the Logan Examiner. When the sheriff walked in, Ovan was busy tapping the computer keys, selecting type size for the leader.

“Pete, we opened your package.”

“Then I guess it wasn’t a bomb?” Ovan replied wryly.

“Sort of.”

Ovan’s fingers stopped on the keyboard. “What you mean, ‘sort of’?”

The sheriff opened the plastic bag and showed him. It was a fish wrapped in an old copy of the Logan Examiner.

Ovan’s hands came off the keys. “You tell Ida about this?”

“No one ‘cept the deputy. I told your Billy to stay up at the station.”

“You checked the sender?” asked Ovan. “Carlisle— IRS?”

“Yep. Put a radio call through all the way to Washington. Phones there aren’t working too good.”

“Well?” said Ovan impatiently.

“No such person. Besides, Pete, IRS don’t send dead fish.”

“How ‘bout live ones?” reparteed Ovan, but he didn’t think it was funny himself. He thanked the sheriff for calling personally, asking him not to tell Billy.

Ovan’s assistant, a young, freckle-faced coed, Mary, had just finished trimming the ads as he walked over to the window and pulled out a cigarette. He always asked Mary if she minded whether he smoked, and she always said no, she didn’t, when they both knew she did. But this time he didn’t ask. He just lit up and inhaled deeply, looking out on the sunlit folds of virginal winter snow — deep and crisp and even, he thought. “Drop the leader,” he said glumly.

Mary looked up, surprised. “The story about the Stealth—”

“Do as I say,” he snapped. “We’ll run that NBA payoff scam instead.” He exhaled, bluish smoke filling the small room. “Everyone likes baseball.”

“Basketball,” Mary quietly corrected him.

But he hadn’t heard her. He was furious, and rang the CIA public relations major whose staff had been ringing the newspapers to hold back the Stealth sabotage story. The major was polite, given Ovan’s tirade about receiving the dead fish.

“Mr. Ovan — if you’ll let me speak for a moment, sir…”

“Go on, then!” grumped Ovan finally.

“We don’t operate that way, sir. I’m not going to pretend that I’m not glad you’re holding the story, but we don’t work that way, Mr. Ovan.”

“I shouldn’t damn well think so,” said Ovan, his voice now an asthmatic wheeze. “Christ, that’s just the kind of thing we’re fighting against over there, goddamn it! In Siberia!”

“Exactly,” concurred the major. “Look, we’ll have the FBI — this kind of thing is really their jurisdiction — look into it, if you like.”

“Yes I would.”

“Fine. I’ll have them contact you as soon as possible.”

“Appreciate it,” said Ovan brusquely, but grateful nevertheless.

When the major hung up, he shook his hand as if it had been on fire. “Boy, was he steamed.”

The petite second lieutenant nodded. “I could hear him from here. Did he buy it?”

“Yeah. Hook, line, and sinker. He won’t print.” The major paused. “You didn’t leave anything did you?”

“Nothing,” answered the lieutenant. “Dumped everything. Plastic gloves — everything.”

“Good!” and they went into their little Federal Express routine, laughing. “When it absolutely! positively! has to be there overnight…”

Later that day the editor of the Atlanta Journal in Georgia received an anonymous tip that in addition to a sniper attack on the road to the Savannah River plant, there had been two explosions near its three nuclear reactors. None had been perforated, but a truck carrying thirty drums of nuclear waste was blown clear off the road. At least four of the drums had ruptured, spilling their deadly poison, which, in a heavy rainfall, was now believed to have entered the water table through the porous soil.

The editor of the Journal, upon being paid a visit by the CIA after running the story, said he wouldn’t give the name of the tipster even if he knew it.

“Was it from New England?” the CIA asked. “From Logan?”

“Who’s Logan?”

“Place in New England.”

The editor shook his head. “We get all kinds of courier mail from all over the country. Especially now, the phone systems are so—”

“Yeah, yeah,” said the CIA agent, and left.

In the maze of Brooklyn’s back streets and in the vandalized cores of dozens of American inner cities that had decayed in the seventies, been rejuvenated in the eighties, only to die again the nineties, the dealers and users passed through America’s night with impunity, the police outnumbered and often outgunned — if not by the accuracy, then by the sheer number of weapons on the street. Most of all the police were consistently outmaneuvered by the high-priced lawyers who had the gunmen back out on the streets often in less time than it had taken for the police to book them.

In a Brooklyn alley not far from the bridge, there was a tinny noise of underground ventilation, gray steam bleeding into the night, many of the users already shooting up in the galleries, freebasing, the real “badasses” on crack levitating, not knowing where they were or what they were doing, TVs left on, screens flickering blue, as the president’s speech containing the phrases “arrest on reasonable suspicion” and “suspension of habeas corpus” was being broadcast. So many stations were carrying the address that some of the “dudes” uptown, the suppliers like Bobby “Bad-Ass” Duguid, were cussing and instructing their boys to turn off “that prezeedential shit, man,” Duguid demanding “video” instead — his favorite, “Wrestlin’ Witches.”

Duguid’s preppy lawyer detested wresting, especially the degrading sight of women in mud. In fact he hated everything about Bobby Duguid except the vast amounts of money he had to launder for Bobby and “muh associates— ‘Smith, Smith and Wesson.’ Ha! Ha! Ha!” The young lawyer liked something else, too — the raw power of a man like Duguid, who could daily “rip off the system,” as Bobby so accurately put it, and not even “touch the money, man.” Bobby made it a point of never carrying cash, and let it be known in the intricate, psychosis-webbed world of drugs that he never carried it. His lawyer handled that, a sight Bobby loved to see — fine striped shirts, his “whitey,” with the Cartier watches and Rockport shoes, handling the lucre with tear-off surgical gloves, terrified of catching “dis-eeze from muh clientele!”

At ten-thirty, outside one of the dozens of Harlem galleries owned and supplied by Duguid and his associates, the four men in the unmarked police car from the Sixth Precinct, the Alamo, knew that if they didn’t move within the next five minutes, even the crackheads who didn’t know what planet they were on would slip away into the garbage-tainted air. But they’d been ordered to wait. “No cart before the friggin’ horse,” as their chief had put it. “When we hit, it’s all got to happen simultaneously. I don’t want that roach in his flamingo-pink whorehouse uptown to get tipped off. Praise God for President Mayne. I’ll vote for him till I die.”

There had been a rough chorus of heartfelt amens.