Jonathon King - Eye of Vengeance

Ms. Cotton nodded again. "You can keep them, Mr. Mullins," she said and clasped her fingers as if to show that she would not pick up the box again.

"I, uh-no, ma'am," Nick stammered, not understanding, or perhaps not wanting to. "I'll get them back to you."

"No, sir. I am finished with them, Mr. Mullins," she said, rising to her feet again.

"OK, well. Can I ask you, Ms. Cotton," Nick said, treading carefully, "why did you tell the detective that you didn't have these?"

The tiny woman looked down at him with a quizzical expression on her face, like she was surprised he didn't understand.

"Because they aren't for him, Mr. Mullins. He didn't lose his child. They're for you," she said as though the meaning were obvious. Again, Nick looked into this strange woman's eyes that were prying into the corners of his heart like she knew what lay there better than he himself did.

"I'm not sure what you mean, Ms. Cotton. What my daughter has to do with this," Nick said, stumbling into something personal, a major professional misstep.

"This is really just research, to see if we recognize any names or, you know, recognize any threats of retribution," he said, trying to recover, but seeing that odd, almost unnatural light in Ms. Cotton's eyes as if she knew something he needed to grasp.

"What's in them isn't for retribution," she said quietly. "It's for your forgiveness."

She was staring down now at her hands, almost as if in prayer. Nick was at a loss, the word forgiveness rolling in his mouth like a new taste that was so foreign to him he had to decide whether to savor it or spit it out.

"I don't know what you mean, Ms. Cotton," he finally said.

The woman looked up and held his eyes.

"You've got another daughter, Mr. Mullins," she said, "who's going to need that." Nick put the box of letters in the passenger seat of his car and started back to the newsroom, trying to sort out what the woman had said and then giving it up as the ramblings of someone who'd been knocked off her orbit of logic by her tragedies. But each time he was stopped by a traffic light he found himself glancing over at the lid of the box, the simply tied bow of string holding it together, and a nervous energy built in his veins. Was she warning him? Was she cursing him? What kind of forgiveness could be held in a box full of letters not even meant for him to read? A horn blew behind him and he accelerated through a newly greened light and then snapped open his cell phone: Things to do, not to dwell on.

He dialed in to the newspaper library using Lori's direct line.

"Daily News research," she announced when she picked up.

"Lori, Nick. Hey, can you run a name for me, please? I'm coming in from a shooting from this morning. The vic's name is Trace Michaels, common spelling."

"Got it. Another single gunshot wound to the head?"

"Yeah, but I gotta tell you, Lori, I'm not sure I like the fact that you're always ahead of me," Nick said with a smile at the corners of his mouth. He knew she kept an ear on what was happening in the newsroom during the day and that she also would have been required to be at the morning news editors' meeting where they discussed what might make the next day's paper.

"You have no idea how far ahead of you I am, Nick."

But before he could ask what she meant by that, she changed the subject.

"Did you do a piece on this guy in the past too?" she asked and he could tell from the slight lilt in her voice that there was more in the question so he didn't answer right away, waiting for the punch line.

"I did that comparative list for you," she continued. "Man, you ought to buy some lottery tickets quick, Nicky. If you did a piece on this morning's guy too, you're gonna be five for five. They're going to start calling you the Grim Reaper Writer."

"Five?" Nick said, and then tripped off the names to her from memory. "Chambliss. Crossly. Ferris. And now Michaels."

"Pretty good, Nick, for a reporter," Lori said. "But you forgot Kerner."

Nick did not respond. The name had slapped him, hard.

"Charles Kerner," Lori said into the silence. "Kerner was the boyfriend of Margaret Abbott, who helped him suffocate her own father while they were robbing him at his little mom-and-pop store for cash to go buy more crack," she said, obviously reading from some document on the screen of her computer.

"From the clips it looks like some overzealous prosecutor took Abbott's twelve-year-old daughter to trial first to get leverage on the adults and the kid got sentenced to life on a felony murder charge. You wrote a piece about how the daughter was just a tag-along in the robbery and that the justice system sacrificed her to get convictions on the other two."

Nick remembered the case too well. He had worked the story night and day. The daughter had been raised mostly at home by Abbott, who kept her near her side for company, like a doll or a confidante or maybe just some maternal reason to live. When the girl was ten she'd been sent out to the selling streets to buy cocaine, the adults knowing that even if she did get arrested she'd be a minor and wouldn't get too busted. It started out as a court story, but Nick couldn't let the thing go. He'd spent hours with the kid's older siblings, who had escaped the home. He'd interviewed teachers about the potential the child had and the corner drug sellers about the fear in her eyes when she had to approach them. The resulting stories detailing her upbringing-details which had not been allowed in court-had been pipelined to the appeals court in Atlanta where her conviction was being reconsidered. Her mother and the boyfriend, Kerner, had been sentenced to life.

"Nick? You still there? "

"Sorry, Lori," Nick said into the cell phone. "Yeah, I remember."

"Well, I included a short piece from the Birmingham paper about Kerner being shot in a possible drive-by while he and some other Alabama road gang prisoners were out picking trash along the highway. He'd been transferred up there by DOC in a state swap to put some other convict closer to family in Florida. I'll print all this stuff out and put it on your desk and get as much as I can on this Michaels guy, alright?" Lori said.

"Thanks. Yeah, I'm on my way in now."

Five, Nick was thinking. Or seven if you include my own wife and daughter. Maybe I am the reaper. When he got back into the newsroom, Nick cleared a pile off his desk. Included was a manila office-to-office envelope with Lori's name written on the most recent line.

He pulled out the list of sniper-style shootings that she had culled from archives throughout the United States along with the five names that had matched with stories he'd written for the Daily News. From his reporter's notebook, he took out the Secret Service list of deaths that Hargrave had somehow gotten from agent Fitzgerald. Then he untied the box from Ms. Cotton and tucked everything inside. When he used his fingers to open a space between the letters, he noticed that each letter and card had been stuffed back into its original envelope with the original postal cancellation mark printed over the stamp.

He was tempted to start pulling them, but what would he be searching for? More names? Some religious poem? Some envelope marked: REDEMPTION? His fingers had pinched a single letter from the box when a voice made him jump.

"Hey, Nick. How was it out there? Do we have a story or not?"

Deirdre had left her office bunker and was roaming the newsroom, her nervous energy and aura of supervision making everyone around duck and start clicking at their keyboards. Live by the day's lineup of stories, die by the lack of same.

"Yeah, sure," Nick said, clamping the top back onto the box and shoving it down in the knee space under his desk and then flipping open his notebook for effect. "Let's see. We got a forty-three-year-old male, supposedly coming in to the parole office up on McNab to check in with his parole officer for their weekly meet, and bam! Gets one in the head just as he's opening the door."