Jason Pinter - The Darkness

“You like your job, don’t you?” I nodded. “Then live with it. You do your job the best you can, don’t worry about everyone else.”

“But don’t you think, you know, that the Gazette should have a higher standard? You’ve been here, what, thirty years?”

“What do you think the Gazette is?” Jack said with a laugh. “Our job is to report the news for the paper. It’s not the news’s job to get to us. This company is the sum of what we make of it. Now, if you want to work for a company that only reports what you want, go start a blog.”

“I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t have to like it.”

“Like it, hate it. It ain’t changing,” Jack said. “Now here’s the deal. I want you to call Brett Kaiser.”

“Why me?”

“I’ve heard of his firm before. They handle civil litigation, among other things, including libel. Which means they know a lot about newspapers, which means, no offense, kiddo, he’ll be a little less threatened by a-how should I put this?-wet-behind-the-ears guy like you.”

“I’m not that wet behind the ears,” I replied.

“Come on, Henry. What was it, a year ago that you could finally rent a car without paying extra fees?”

Rather than argue (and lose), I just nodded. We went to my desk, Jack perching on the corner while I picked up the phone. I dialed the number for Kaiser, Hirschtritt and Certilman from the paper Talcott gave us. A woman picked up on the first ring.

“Kaiser, Hirschtritt and Certilman, how may I direct your call?”

“Hi, I’d like to speak with Brett Kaiser.”

“And who may I ask is calling?”

I looked at Jack, knowing where this was about to go.

“My name is Henry Parker. I’m with the New York

Gazette. ”

“Hold on,” she said, wariness in her voice. “I’ll put you through.”

The next thing I heard was a dial tone. I placed the receiver down.

“You got hung up on,” Jack correctly surmised. I nodded. “Go home.”

“What?”

“It’s been a long day. Get some rest. We’re going to be working like dogs over the next few days, and I don’t need you conking out on me.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve got almost fifty years on you.”

“True, but while you were smoking from atomic bongs and doing keg stands in college, I was chasing leads. Get some rest, Parker. I’ll see you here tomorrow. Nine o’clock.”

“I’ll see you at eight,” I said.

A smell greeted me in the apartment that I did not immediately recognize. It resembled some sort of meat, maybe chicken or fish, something sweet and citrusy-all mixed with the tangy smell of something burning.

Making my way through the pungent stench to the kitchen, I found the oven on and some sort of concoction roiling and baking inside that, from the look of the sauce coating the insides of the appliance, didn’t seem to be enjoying it. As I got closer, a small bit of smoke escaped the oven, so I quickly shut the device off.

“Amanda?” I yelled. “Are you here?”

There was no answer, so I tried again.

“Amanda?”

I heard a squeak as the bathroom door opened. The shower was still running, and I could see Amanda’s wet head poking from behind the curtain. Her hair was filled with shampoo and her eyes looked at me through a haze of steam.

“Henry?”

“Amanda, what the hell are you doing?”

“Bowling. What does it look like I’m doing?”

“You’re aware that this apartment was about thirty seconds from being on the eleven o’clock news.”

“What?” she said, wiping suds from her face.

“I saved your mystery meat dish just in time before it burned down the neighborhood.”

“No way. The timer was supposed to go off after half an hour. I didn’t hear anything.”

“You are in the shower, you know.”

“No way. I have a keen sense of hearing.”

“When you pressed half an hour,” I said, “what exact buttons did you press?”

“I held the button until it read three zero minutes and zero seconds.”

“Really,” I said. “You’re sure about that?”

“Sure. Why?”

“There’s no seconds on the oven. It’s just minutes and hours. You set the timer for three hours and zero minutes.”

“Oh. Crap. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Just…never cook again. And apologize to the fish in there.”

“It was supposed to be orange chicken,” she said.

“Well it’s probably got the texture of volcanic rock right now. You feel like pizza?”

She offered a sheepish grin, and said, “Let me finish up in here and we’ll order.”

“Sure you don’t want me to join you?”

“No, the toaster is on, too. Would you mind checking on it?”

“The toaster? Are you ser…”

“Just kidding. Give me five minutes.”

She closed the door and I collapsed on the couch. I turned on the television and clicked through a hundred and fourteen channels before deciding that there was nothing worth watching. It was just as entertaining to sit there and go through the events of the day, and prepare for the next.

Hopefully Brett Kaiser could fill in much of the information that was missing. Somebody had to be paying

Kaiser’s firm’s share of the lease money, and with any luck that person would have intimate knowledge of just who my brother was working for and why he was killed. I still didn’t buy that it was totally a power play.

Stephen came to me because he was scared of something. If you work in a company and have problems with underlings, there are ways to circumvent any actions. Now when somebody above you wants you gone, that’s when you have a problem. If you feel that your termination-pardon the term-is inevitable, you begin planning an exit strategy. In the workplace, maybe you look for another job, prepare a lawsuit, something so that you’re not thrown from an airplane without a parachute. When Stephen came to me that night, scared out of his mind (a mind already addled), he was looking for his exit strategy. Granted the actions you take are a little different when you led a life of crime as opposed to life in a cubicle, but the principle still stood.

What I needed to know was who set Stephen on the path to his eventual exit. Even though he didn’t make it, he had something to say. A story to tell.

Amanda came out of the shower. She was wrapped in a towel, and over the towel she wore a pink bathrobe.

Above this contraption she was tousling her hair with another towel. The combination of towels and thick bathrobe made Amanda look about twice as thick as she normally did, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

“This is my routine,” she said. “You should be used to it by now.”

“I am,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean you don’t look a little silly.”

She took a seat on the couch, wrapping the towel into a turban where it sat perched a whole foot above her head.

I’d bought the couch at an apartment sale for about a third of what it would cost at a department store. It was brown leather, with big cushions that I constantly rotated to change up the stains. Made me feel like it was a little less worn.

“How was your day?” she asked, absently flipping through the stack of the day’s newspapers I kept on the coffee table.

“Still working on this story with Jack,” I said. “It’s interesting, working with him for the first time.”

“In what way?”

“Jack was in pretty bad shape my first few years at the

Gazette. I hate to admit it, but there was a moment or two when I wondered if this was really the same guy I grew up wanting to be. Not many kids dress up like a journal-88

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