Carla Neggers - Cut and Run

Matthew sat very still. He’d stopped breathing. His headache had vanished. His thinking was clear and ice-cold. Otis Raymond never exaggerated the danger he was in. Never. Vietnam had taught him that. If Weaze said over his CVC that there were a half-dozen NVA regulars firing up at him, then there were a half-dozen NVA regulars firing up at him. Not three. Not ten. Six.

Stark felt something clamp down in his gut. “Get out,” he said, his voice like stone. “Don’t get yourself killed over Ryder. Wherever you are, Weaze, get the fuck out. Come to Washington. I’ll put you up.”

“I don’t know if I can get out.”

“Do it.”

“Man, if I can…”

“Do it, goddamn you.”

“Jeez, Stark, I-” Weasel stopped, and the nervousness turned to panic as he went on rapidly, “Shit, oh shit, I got a guy bird-dogging me!”

Matthew jumped to his feet, but he didn’t lose control. He couldn’t. It was a self-indulgence that wasn’t going to do Otis Raymond a damn bit of good. “Weasel, where are you? I’ll come for you myself.”

The line went dead, and Stark lost his control because now nothing that he did mattered.

“Goddamnit, Weaze!”

The only answer was the patient hum of the dial tone.

Stark’s teeth were ground together so tightly his jaw ached, but he took a breath, sucking in his emotions with the stale air of the overheated newsroom. Weasel was going to let himself go down because of Sam Ryder, and there wasn’t a damn thing Stark could do about it-except keep plugging away at all the fucking crazy leads. The Minstrel’s Rough, more damned Peperkamps. I told you, I don’t know anything about diamonds…

Bullshit, toots.

Slowly he became aware of Alice Feldon at his side. He had no idea how long she’d been standing there. “Are you all right?” she asked, more curious than worried. He understood-no one had better rein on himself than Matthew Stark.

He nodded and cradled the receiver.

“This buddy of yours is in trouble,” she said.

“Nothing he thinks he can’t handle.”

“What do you think?”

He looked at her without expression, but the despair was eating away at him. “Life expectancy zero.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s what the grunts used to say about door gunners.”

“Weasel?”

“Yeah. He was a door gunner, and he lived. He was twenty-one years old when he left Vietnam. You might say the rest of his life has been anticlimactic.” Matthew pulled his leather jacket off the back of his chair. His arms and legs were rigid; he moved without grace. “If the Weaze calls again, find out where he is. Don’t let him hang up until you do.”

“I’ll try.”

He looked at her, the black eyes remote. “Don’t try, Feldie. Do it.”

Anybody else would have nodded her head and kept her damn mouth shut, but that wasn’t the kind of smart Feldie was. She put out a hand and touched Stark’s elbow. “Hey, there, slow down.”

He took a breath. “I’m sorry.”

His voice was tight and sandpapery, and none of the tension went out of him, but Feldie nodded, satisfied. “At least now you don’t look like you’re going to go off and kill somebody.”

He tried to smile. “Who me?”

“Yeah, now what aren’t you telling me?”

“Feldie, Weasel’s got to get out of there. Make him understand that.”

“I’ll try, okay? But what-”

“When I’ve got anything that makes sense, we’ll talk.”

“All right, fine. Look, I’ve got a guy on hold. The call came through on my line. You want to take it?”

“Who is it?” He was thinking of Juliana.

“Some guy. Wouldn’t give his name.”

Ryder? Stark headed over to Feldie’s desk and picked up the phone; she hung in there right beside him, glasses on the end of her nose. He scowled at her. “You mind?”

“Hell, yes,” she said, and remained rooted to her spot.

He ignored her and punched the button on the phone. “Yeah?”

“You always did have a winning way with people, sir. ”

The voice on the other end was deep and precise, the sarcasm just hinted at, all of it disturbingly familiar. Matthew sat down, tense and alert.

“Lucky your competence made up for your personality.”

“Who is this?”

“You don’t remember?”

There was a short, spasmodic laugh, and then Stark did remember. He didn’t move; he didn’t breathe. He sat very still and listened, hoping he was wrong, knowing he wasn’t.

“And here I’ve been thinking I was the basis for the villain in that book of yours,” the voice went on. “I read it, you know. I forget what cesspool I was sitting in at the time but sure did get some chuckles out of that one. At least you didn’t whine. Christ, I get sick of all the whining.”

Matthew reached for a pencil and a scrap of paper, just to have something to grip, to keep him anchored in the present. His mind-his very soul-had begun to drift back.

In heavy black letters, oblivious to Alice Feldon, he wrote: Bloch.

Sergeant Phillip Bloch. He’d been a platoon sergeant in Vietnam, a hard-bitten, ritualistic man on nobody’s side but his own. He’d saved people, and he’d killed people. It didn’t matter to him which or who.

“I’d heard you were dead, Sergeant.”

“Did you have a party?’

“No. I didn’t do a damn thing.”

The laugh came again, a laugh of nightmares and ghosts. “You’re a cold bastard, sir, but that’s okay. Wouldn’t have made it out of ’Nam two times as a chopper pilot if you weren’t. I kinda was counting on you not making it out, you know, but you and me-we’re a lot alike. We know how to survive.”

Matthew made no comment. There was no need. Bloch knew what Stark thought of him.

“How’s the newspaper business?” Bloch asked, his tone deceptively jovial.

“I do my job.”

He glanced at Feldie, who didn’t even roll her eyes.

“Working on a big story?”

“You didn’t call to chitchat.”

“That’s right, buddy.” The jovial tone disappeared. “I’m calling to warn your ass off a story. Whatever you got, drop it. You hear? That way, nobody gets hurt. Our paths just ain’t meant to cross, you know? Shit happens every time. So you just bow out now, and we’ll go our separate ways.”

Stark pressed the pencil hard into the paper. The point snapped. He kept pressing. So Bloch was in it. From the moment Matthew had first seen Otis Raymond’s thin, yellowing, bug-bitten body in the Gazette newsroom, he’d guessed, deep down in a place inside him he didn’t like to go, that Phil Bloch’s name would come into it, sooner or later.

Bloch went on smoothly, “You know what story I’m talking about.”

“No,” Stark said, although he knew lying would be pointless. Yet he had to try. For Weasel’s sake, maybe even for Ryder’s-and maybe even for his own, although he didn’t care to think so. He preferred to think he could handle Phillip Bloch. If necessary, beat him.

“Then let me refresh your memory-Otis Raymond.”

The pencil snapped in half, the sharpened end skidding across the desk onto the floor. Behind him, Feldie jumped, startled. But Matthew remained very still. He had no room in which to maneuver. Right now Bloch was in control. He knew what was going on; Matthew didn’t.

He had to listen. Play the sergeant’s game. Buy time.

“Ya’ll used to call him Weasel,” Bloch said. “That help?”

Matthew set the eraser end of the pencil down on the pad; his hands were rock steady. “I haven’t seen the Weaze in ages. He checks in every so often and lets me know he’s alive.”

“He check in last week? He drop in, Stark?”