Jason Pinter: The Darkness

“What?” she said, blinking away the tears.

“When you’ve read it, I want you to write an article for your newspaper based on the information contained within. Your article will run this Thursday. If it does not, for any reason whatsoever…” The man took the photo and ripped off a piece. Then he dropped the tattered photo into the mud.

“I will cut off your daughter’s head and send it to you in a box.”

He walked over to Paulina, and before she could react he grabbed her by the hair and thrust the Taser into her side. Again Paulina shrieked, and again she fell into the mud, panting.

“If you don’t do what I say, before I rip your daughter apart I will burn her in places only her mother knows about.”

The man took an envelope from inside his jacket. It was sealed in plastic. He gave it to Paulina.

“This is the last you’ll hear from me if you do what I say. If you tell anyone, I will tear Abigail apart limb by limb. If you go to the police, I will know you did and I will burn her body after I kill her. I will know. I’ll burn it so thoroughly they won’t be able to identify a single piece of her flesh, and the last time you will ever see your daughter whole is in photographs. I will save her severed limbs and leave them on your doorstep.” The man paused, watched the blood drain from Paulina’s face. “If you live up to your end, your daughter will be able to live the rest of her life like a normal girl. She will be blissfully ignorant of what happened tonight. Otherwise, she will know a pain of which you’ve only felt a fraction of tonight.”

“Please,” Paulina mewled.

Chester looked at the remains of the photograph of

Abigail on the beach, her smile wide like a small child. “If not, the only bliss she’ll know is whatever happens to her soul after she dies.”

Paulina took the plastic, turned it over in her hands.

Then she looked at him, confused.

“In there is everything you need to know. And make sure you don’t lose the piece at the bottom.”

Paulina looked at the bottom of the clear folder and saw what appeared to be a small, black rock, no bigger than a pebble.

Paulina sat there, crying, sniveling and drenched. Chester stared down at her, rain dripping off the tip of his nose.

“For your sake, I hope your daughter doesn’t have to die.

Terrible thing to lose one’s family. But that’s up to you.”

By the time she looked up, the driver was back in his car. Then the engine revved, and he was gone. Paulina sat in the rain, mud staining her dress brown.

She watched him go, waiting to make sure he was gone. Her body was racked with pain, and she could barely stand. Her hands felt like they’d held a battery from both ends, and when she dialed the car service it took three tries to get the number right. When the operator asked where she was, Paulina had to walk ten minutes just to find a street sign.

“What the heck are you doing way out there?” the man asked.

“Just get here, fast,” she said before hanging up.

It was half an hour before the car service arrived.

Paulina huddled under a nearby tarp to stay dry. The driver, a short, thick man with a bushy mustache, got out.

He looked her over, his lip curled up. He was as confused as she was.

“Miss,” he said, “are you okay? Do you need me to take you to the hospital?”

“Just take me home,” she said. “And help me up.”

The driver bent down, put his arm around Paulina and helped the shuddering reporter into the backseat of his car.

As he drove away, the man said, “Don’t worry, miss.

I’m taking you home. Everything’s okay.”

Paulina looked up at him, slimy mascara stinging her eyes. And she thought, No. It’s not.

Monday

New York City exists in a perpetual headwind. If you live here or work here, you can either lean into the wind and brace yourself, moving forward a step at a time, keeping pace with the other people who are doing the same. Or you can lose your balance and be blown away like a crumpled newspaper. Some people lean into the wind and try to walk faster. They press ahead, moving at greater speeds than the rest of us. But with greater reward comes greater risk, and the more you lean the faster you can lost your balance and be blown away.

My brother fell. My idol and mentor, Jack O’Donnell, fell. I was still leaning into the wind, sometimes hard enough to lose my balance. I’d lived and worked in this gusty city for several years now, and thought I was used to it. But time and time again, the city showed me just how strong the winds could be.

I got to the office of the New York Gazette at eight o’clock sharp, half an hour before I was supposed to be there, and even fifteen minutes before I’d said I’d be there. To put it mildly, this was the most excited I’d been about the job in a long time.

The last few weeks had been a maelstrom of violence and secrets. I’d recently learned that my father had had an affair thirty years ago, and that affair resulted in the birth of a boy named Stephen Gaines. My brother.

I didn’t learn about Stephen until just a few weeks ago, when he showed up out of nowhere at the offices of the

New York Gazette, where I worked as a reporter. Gaines was stoned and scared out of his mind that night, and for that reason I didn’t give him a chance to tell his story. I didn’t see the man up close until a few hours later. After

I learned he’d been shot to death in his own apartment.

When I saw him next, he was lying on a slab in the morgue.

Not what you’d call the most enjoyable family reunion.

I’d pieced the truth together in a large part spurred on by a book written by Jack O’Donnell called Through the

Darkness. In that book, he discussed the murder of a lowly drug dealer named Butch Willingham who was possibly murdered by an elusive drug kingpin nicknamed the Fury.

Yet the truth wasn’t whole. If the Fury did exist, then something big was on the horizon. Butch Willingham’s murder was one of a spate of drug-related murders, and if history did repeat itself, that meant Stephen’s murder was merely the beginning.

Coming to grips with the life and death of the brother

I’d never known was difficult, if not impossible. It was something I was still struggling with. Eventually we tracked down the man who killed him, a low-level drug dealer who seemed to want Gaines dead to open up the door for his own upward mobility in the New York drug trade.

But something about it still didn’t sit right. It was too neat, too clean. Too many questions still lingered, an open wound that wouldn’t close.

And leave it to Jack O’Donnell to throw a crowbar into the wound.

I was wearing a suit, the same one I’d worn on my very first day in the office several years ago. I remembered the day clearly. Meeting Wallace Langston, the paper’s editor in chief, being led to my desk where I’d write the stories

I was born to write. Seeing the man, Jack O’Donnell, in person for the first time.

The man was a legend of the New York newsroom, as synonymous with this city as any one of its towering monuments. But every monument has cracks, ignored by those who prefer to see their gods as unfailing, monuments pristine in their foundations and men pure in their humanity. Yet while Jack raised the bar for journalism, his cracks had begun to show themselves not just to me, but to millions of people.

We all knew that Jack drank. But when you told people

Jack drank, you raised your eyebrows and enunciated the word drank like it was hepatitis. Jack O’Donnell drank.

Three-martini lunches might have fallen out of fashion, but Jack was trying to keep the tradition going almost singlehandedly. And who else would expose the cracks in the foundation but someone who resided as low to the ground as possible.