Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

“Ah, c’mon, Earl!” I shouted. “I was there. I heard the gunshots, for cryin’ out-”

“But you didn’t see anyone actually get hit, did you?” He stared back at me. “Oh, I believe you, all right … and, yeah, I think you were actually there, not just holed up here drinking yourself stupid.”

He walked over to the bed, picked up the pair of mud-caked boots I had struggled out of last night, and dropped them back on the floor. At least I had some tangible proof that I hadn’t blown off the assignment. “But unless you can find me a corpse with an ERA bullet lodged in its chest, you know what the stadium will say.”

I nodded my head. Yeah, I knew what the official spokesmen for the Emergency Relief Agency would say, if and when questioned about gunshots heard during last night’s raid. The troopers had been fired upon by armed squatters and had been forced to protect themselves. That, or complete denial, were the usual responses.

This wasn’t the first time ERA grunts had opened fire at unarmed civilians in St. Louis, yet no one, from the press to the ACLU, had yet to make a successful case against ERA on charges of unnecessary use of deadly force. Life in my hometown was becoming reminiscent of a third-world banana republic; allegations were often made, but material evidence had a habit of disappearing. So did material witnesses …

The local press was treading a thin line. Especially the Big Muddy, which was in the habit of intensively covering stories the Post-Dispatch only mentioned. The feds couldn’t cancel the First Amendment, but they could make life difficult for Pearl. Tax audits, libel suits … Bailey knew the risks of being a public nuisance, and he was being careful these days.

No proof, no story. Unproven allegations didn’t mean shit to him. I should have known better. “Aw, man, I’m sorry, Pearl. I didn’t-”

“Don’t call me Pearl,” he said. He hated his nickname, even though everyone used it. He glanced at his watch. “You were supposed to be at the staff meeting.”

“Oh … yeah. Staff meeting.” I sat down at my desk and rubbed my eyes. “When it’s supposed to start?”

“A half-hour ago. You missed it. That’s why I’m up here.” He started to walk toward the bathroom, then caught a whiff through the door and thought better of it. He cocked his thumb toward the john. “Is there anything alive in there?”

“Nothing you haven’t seen before.” I stood up from the desk. “Okay, I’m sorry for missing the meeting. I’ll come down right now-”

“Naw, man. If you came downstairs now, you’d only make everyone sick.” He shook his head in disgust, then favored me with a little smile. “You worked hard last night. Get a shower and put on some clean clothes.”

“Thanks. I’ll be down in a half-hour-”

“You’ve got fifteen minutes, and tell the president I think he’s a dickhead and I don’t believe in world peace.” His smile faded. “If I don’t see you in fifteen, you can begin updating your resume. Got it?”

“Got it.” I didn’t like the sound of that.

“See you downstairs.” He turned around and tromped back through the door. “And clean this shit up. It’s embarrassing … to me, at any rate.”

He slammed the door on the way out.

The offices of the Big Muddy Inquirer were spread across a large room occupying the second floor of the building, its various departments separated from each other only by cheap plastic partitions. The place resembled a lab maze for down-on-their-luck mice: computer terminals on battered gray metal desks, fluorescent lights hung from pipes and ductwork along the cobwebbed ceiling, checkerwork brick walls plastered with old posters for rock concerts. Near the stairwell leading to the front door was the personals desk, where a steady parade of lonely people visited to place their ads for other lonely people; at the opposite end of the room was the layout department, where a handful of bohemian graphic artists pasted up the pages within a perpetual haze of marijuana fumes, vented only by a half-open window. Radical chic long after it was chic to be radical and Tom Wolfe had gone to the great word processor in the sky.

Somewhere in the middle of the room was the editorial department: four desks shoved together in a small cubicle, with Horace-the paper’s unofficial mascot, a trophy-mounted moose head decked out in oversized sunglasses and a Cardinals baseball cap-standing watch over the proceedings. The two other staff writers were out on assignment, allowing John Tiernan and me a chance to have our own little staff meeting regarding the events of the previous night.

John was the oddest person working for the Big Muddy in that he was the only staffer who closely resembled a normal human being. At a paper where everyone drank or smoked dope or experimented with various bathtub hallucinogens, John’s only apparent vice was chewing gum. While most people reported to work in jeans, T-shirts, and football jerseys, and our arts editor frequently sported an opera cape and a pince-nez, John came in wearing a business suit, a button-down Oxford shirt, and a plain tie. Sometimes he wore sneakers, but that was as informal as he got. He wore his hair neither too short nor too long, shaved every day, and probably couldn’t say “shit” even if his mouth was full of it. He had a wife and a kid and two cats, lived in a small house in the western ’burbs, attended Catholic mass every Sunday morning, and probably gave the most boring confessions a priest had ever heard.

No one at the Big Muddy ever gave him flak about his straitlaced ways. John was not only tolerant of all the bent personalities around him, he was also the best investigative reporter in the city. Earl would have sold his own son into slavery before giving up John Tiernan to another paper.

“Did you get her name?” he asked once I had given him the rundown of the Muny raid.

“Uh-uh,” I replied. “I didn’t even get that good of a look at her, beyond what I just told you. But she didn’t belong there, man. She was no squatter.”

“Yeah. Okay.” John’s face was pensive. He had his feet up on his desktop next to his computer terminal; he opened his top desk drawer and pulled out a pack of gum. “But you say she knew me-”

“She knew your name, but not your face. How else could she have mistaken me for you?” John offered me a stick of Dentyne; I shook my head and he unwrapped the stick for himself. “Does she sound familiar?”

“I dunno. Could be anyone, I guess.” He shrugged as he wadded up the stick and popped it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully as he used the computer’s trackball to save the story he had been working on. “And she said she wants me to meet her at Clancy’s tonight at eight?”

“Right, and not to believe any other messages you happen to receive from Dingbat …”

John grinned from one corner of his mouth. “Yeah, right. I suppose I’m not to believe anything I hear on the phone, either. Weird.” He shook his head, then dropped his feet from the desk and swiveled around in his chair to face the screen. “Well, I gotta finish this thing, then I’ve got a press conference to cover at noon …”

I snapped my fingers as another thought suddenly occurred to me. Chalk it up to my hangover that I buried the lead. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “one more thing. When I asked her what this was all about, she told me two words … um, ‘ruby fulcrum.’”

John’s hands froze above the keyboard. He didn’t look away from the screen, but I could see from the change in his expression that he was no longer concentrating on the minor news item he had been writing.

“Come again?” he said quietly.

“Ruby fulcrum,” I repeated. “I checked it out with Joker, but it couldn’t tell me anything. Why, does that ring a bell?”