The First 48 Read online

  “Freeze!” the cop yelled.

  “I’ve got your man,” Tom said. “He was trying to rob her.”

  The girl behind the cash register, still bawling, said, “He wasn’t. He wasn’t. That’s my dad.”

  The store manager popped up from behind the counter. He put his arm around the girl and patted her back. He glared at Tom.

  “What?” Tom said.

  “Mr. Redmon,” the cop said. “What the hell did you do this time?”

  “I . . .”

  “It’s my fault,” Mike said. “I’m sorry. I told him it was a robbery. Tom is a martial arts expert.”

  “Jujitsu,” Tom said, getting up and dusting his hands. “I’m terribly sorry. It’s a martial art with roots in feudal Japan, a period lasting from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries of near-constant civil war.”

  “Jesus,” the cop said, holstering his gun and kneeling down beside the fallen man. He began to chafe the man’s wrists.

  “I’m very sorry,” Mike said. He pulled a fat wad of money from the front pocket of his pants and stripped off a hundred-dollar bill. He slapped it down on the counter. “This is all my fault. Come on, Tom. I’m sorry.”

  Mike led him out by the arm.

  “Holy shit,” Mike said.

  “Hey, my credit card,” Tom said, turning to go back.

  “Tom,” Mike said. “Later. Please.”

  “Who the hell wears an army coat in the middle of summer?” Tom asked, shaking his head.

  “Please,” Mike said, tugging at his arm, looking frantically around, his cheeks burning with color, “let’s just get out of here.”

  “Now you’re not going to cover my back?” Tom said, shaking free. “When I was a cop, a partner covered your back.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “How can I not?”

  “You . . . I . . .” Mike’s face bunched up. “Who helped you dig up that federal judge’s wife to see if she died of natural causes? Who was that?”

  “I’m not talking about that kind of stuff,” Tom said, getting into his old Ford truck. “That was a mistake. I just have discipline. I’ve trained myself to react.”

  “I’ve got discipline too,” Mike said, raising his chin. His nostrils widened.

  “In what, Mike?”

  “Fiscal discipline,” Mike said. His lips were smashed together tight.

  Tom’s face went slack. He opened his mouth, then stopped to catch his breath.

  “Is that what this is about? Money?” Tom said. He looked hard at Mike. “And I’m buying you a Fribble?”

  Mike threw his hands up in the air.

  “I knew about your doubts. Ellen said something to me . . .”

  “Ellen?” Mike said, his face losing tension. “What?”

  “She . . .” Tom clamped his mouth shut. He had slipped. How could he tell anyone that sometimes she was still there? There and gone. Sometimes whispering. Sometimes it was just her laughter. He wondered himself.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, closing the door.

  “Tom . . .”

  Tom backed out of his spot and got onto the road.

  Halfway to the marina, he pulled into the convenience store and bought a six-pack of Labatt Blue beer. Next door he picked up a small brown bottle of Knob Creek. His heart pounded in his chest just watching the deep brown liquor swish in the thick glass.

  The summer in upstate New York brought with it a rich canopy of trees. But even the sweep of broad green maple leaves and the whispering blades of the huge locust trees couldn’t entirely conceal the crumbling gray concrete, the sagging metal roofs, and the corrugated walls washed in rust.

  Like so many small upstate New York cities, Ithaca was pockmarked with structures that had long outlived their usefulness. The worst of these buildings butted right up against a lush green park that capped the south end of Cayuga Lake. Tom drove through the worst of them—grafittied brick, plywood for windows—kicking up gray dust in the heat.

  The marina lay nestled in the midst of this eyesore. Tom’s boat was a once-proud twenty-one-foot Regal with an open bow. Rockin’ Auntie. Previously owned by the spinster from L.A. who spent her summers on a lake home up in Aurora.

  The hull had been battered up one side and down the other by nearly twenty years of minor accidents. The windshield wiper had no blade. The prop was gouged and bent. Its red racing stripe had faded to a drab dirty pink. It rested between two sailboats, sleek and white with long sweeping lines. Tom didn’t know how to sail; that was for people who grew up with money.

  He was the son of a cop who was the son of a cop. Their combined experience on the lake could be traced to a couple of fishing poles and a bag of ketchup and bologna sandwiches on board a battered aluminum skiff. In his mind, he could still hear the wheezy seven-horse Johnson outboard motor and smell the oil that bled from every seam. It had been the sole constituent of the Redmon family fleet.

  Tom popped open the first of the Labatt Blues. He dropped down in a cushioned seat and leaned back, cutting off the wax around the whiskey bottle’s neck. When he tilted his head a certain way, that first bit of whiskey heating the inside of him, he almost felt like she was there.

  Had it really been ten years?

  “You know the secret everyone wants to forget,” she said. “It’s why you are who you are.”

  He looked at her foggy shape, his cheeks feeling wet.

  “You know there’s evil in this world,” she said. “True evil. And it’s only a matter of time before it enters your life again.”

  He nodded.

  And he drank.

  CHAPTER 3

  The newsroom was a jumble of metal desks painted in primary colors. Bland white columns thick enough for a person to hide behind stood guard along the outside wall, and the few glass-fronted offices were against the windows. For the rest of them, light spilled down from a pattern of square fluorescent panels throughout the ceiling’s grid.

  “Look at this crap,” someone said.

  Jane looked up from her computer, tapped a few more keys, then got up and slipped into the small crowd clustered around the little TV on Gina’s desk.

  “TV,” someone else said in disgust.

  A man on the television screen doubled over and emitted a stream of vomit.

  “Can you believe that?”

  Jane felt slightly ill.

  “I believe it. Who in hell would go on a cruise anyway?”

  “I went on one once,” Gina said, turning from the TV to face the small group. She was sitting at her desk, and she looked up at them all. “It was like a frigging floating Motel Six. If a guy didn’t have a tattoo, his nipples were pierced.”

  Gina turned back to the TV.

  “I went on one once too. Motel Six has better food.”

  “At least it didn’t kill you, right?”

  “I mean can you believe they put that on TV?”

  “Why not?” Gina asked. “They show people practically screwing on network television at nine o’clock at night.”

  The small screen was now filled with a big white ship. In the foreground a reporter with a solemn face talked about the outbreak and the dead.

  Jane turned away. She had a deadline. As if on cue, Don Herman stood up at his own desk across the big room. Face like a mastiff. Overweight. Fifty. Bald with tufts of frizzy brown hair decorating his freckled skull above the ears. He looked at her and pointed at the clock. He held up two fingers, then three. She had twenty-three minutes.

  Jane twisted her lips and looked away from him. She sat and put her fingers to the keyboard. There was Gina. By her side.

  “Deadline?”

  “Yup,” she said, her fingers pounding out a flurry of words.

  “Big one?”

  “Big load of horse crap,” Jane said, still pounding. “Unless you think anyone runs out in their bathrobe and tears through the morning paper to find out what happened in the Senate Finance Committee’s meeting on funding for the Departme
nt of Weights and Measures.”

  “You gotta start somewhere,” Gina said. “I told you that from the start. Just because you got a Pulitzer nomination doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay your dues. This is the Washington Post, sister.”

  Jane’s maniacal patter stopped. She looked up at Gina, past the short frosted hair and the thick eyeliner.

  “I don’t have to like it, do I?”

  “I’m going out for a cigarette,” Gina said. “Meet me when you’re done and we’ll get a drink.”

  “You’re on.”

  “That’s what I like,” Gina said. “We’ll pull that hair of yours into a ponytail and they might mistake us both for college girls.”

  Gina was almost forty. Divorced. No kids. Nice figure, but a face Jane had overheard two copy editors describing as five miles of bad road. She drank too much and always regretted the men she slept with.

  “Leave my hair alone,” Jane said.

  “Just trying to help.”

  Jane swept a long dark lock out of her face and back behind her ear, then continued to type. Gina repeated her instructions and left. Jane looked up at the big white clock on the wall. The thin red second hand swept around quicker than she would have liked. She flexed her fingers, cracking their knuckles, and got back to it.

  She finished and sent the document to Don Herman. It wasn’t what she would call good, but it wasn’t bad, either. She got up, looked in her satchel, shut it, and slipped it over her shoulder. That’s when the phone rang.

  “Houston’s at eight,” the thin voice grated at her. “Manhattans and big Greek salads.”

  “It’s seven-thirty, Frank,” she said. “Why didn’t you wait a little longer?”

  “God, the market was crazy today,” he said. He was a financial consultant for Dean Witter. “But we made a freakin’ ton.”

  “I’ve got plans with Gina,” she said. “Sorry.”

  In truth, she was sick of having the bill arrive and the two of them sitting there, looking at it, waiting for some magic trick that would make it disappear. She believed in chivalry. He regularly forgot his wallet.

  “And do me a favor,” she said, “don’t come knocking on the door at midnight. I’ve got an early morning tomorrow.”

  “Sometimes I just need you,” he said.

  “I know what you need.”

  She hung up and was already on the other side of her desk when it rang again. She tried to walk away, but for the same reason she couldn’t shit-can him altogether she picked up the phone.

  “What, Frank?”

  “I’ve got something for you,” the voice said.

  It wasn’t Frank.

  All the noise around her, all the typing, all the talk was reduced to a low hum.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Have you checked out everything else?”

  “Yes,” she said. She picked up a pen. She squeezed it. She twisted it. “It’s good, but I still need more if I’m going to get it in. I have editors and they have editors. Something like this will have to go all the way up the line. You can’t just attack a United States senator with some loose allegations. We don’t print rumor.”

  “This will get it in. Meet me at L’Enfante Plaza at nine. 3-F.”

  “Can’t we—”

  She was going to say “meet someplace normal,” someplace where she could see his face, know who he was. But he’d already hung up the phone. The thought of section 3-F in the damp bowels of the Plaza’s parking garage made her skin crawl. But this could be it. He’d teased her with enough information that she knew he had it. It was just a question of when he was going to give it up.

  This could be more than just a Pulitzer nomination. This could be the prize.

  CHAPTER 4

  One always had to be certain about leads. Jane was a young reporter, and still she got at least two dozen voice mails a week from people she didn’t know. Crackpots with goofy ideas. Incredible stories. Wild stories.

  Mrs. Kibble—she called once a week—had it straight from Jesus that the senator from Kansas was being guided by Satan to vote against the tax bill. A secretary in the office of a congressman from Rhode Island who wanted Jane to do a story on what a bad guy he was for not sending flowers on Secretary’s Day, not even a card. This Mark Allen guy was extreme, though. He had left three messages a day for almost a week until he finally caught her answering the phone. Tidbits and leads that only an insider would know.

  She told him to send an E-mail or fax but to stop calling. She’d check it out. But in the end, it took only one sentence to really grab her.

  “Don’t you want to know about the senator’s connection to your father? He’s Tom Redmon, right?” he asked.

  Then the information began to pour out. Still he wouldn’t answer questions about her father.

  The air was still quite warm, even in the deep shadows of the buildings, when she exited the Post—the sun unseen, but glowing yellow in the west. Gina leaned against a concrete planter full of geraniums. Legs crossed. Pall Mall between her index and middle fingers and held up beside her ear. Lipstick stain on the white filter.

  “I can’t do drinks,” Jane said.

  “What?”

  “I’m not even going to tell you. I was only nominated for a Pulitzer. Remember?”

  Gina twisted her face sideways. She covered crime for the Metro Section. Two heads in a Dumpster wasn’t a big deal to her.

  “It’s about Senator Gleason,” Jane said.

  Now Gina actually rolled her eyes.

  “Not again.”

  It was a short walk to Jane’s apartment. Out of her skirt and blouse and into jeans and sneakers with a sleeveless top. She didn’t like to dress this way on the job. Casual made her look too young. She checked her face in the mirror. Some of the many freckles there were showing through so she dusted on some fresh makeup, then added a touch of lipstick.

  Not bad. That was how the copy editors described her when they didn’t know she was listening.

  She caught a cab to the L’Enfante Plaza Hotel, got out, and circled around to the back of the building until she found a brown metal door. The opening led out onto a concrete pad just to the other side of a loading dock. She scanned the area to see if anyone had seen her. She went back around front, into the hotel lobby, and took the elevator down to the garage. The thick concrete columns bore the black scuff marks of a hundred bumpers. Above that were thick-painted bands, orange, green, and red, with numbers and letters stencil-painted in black.

  Section 3-F was at the bottom, in the far corner, away from the light of the elevator bank. Right near the red door of an emergency exit stairwell. Jane cleared her throat and looked around. The lonely sound of her footsteps echoed off the concrete with just the hint of a twang. She glanced from the dark interior of one car to the next, then made herself stop. The hair on the back of her neck was beginning to rise.

  “Mark,” she said, peering into the dark corner.

  She jumped. A rat scrabbled across the floor and between two small cars and disappeared beneath a box with a series of quick scratching sounds. Jane sniffed the dank air, then swallowed.

  “Mark,” she said, softly now.

  “I’m here,” he said. The dark shape of a man materialized in the shadows behind one of the thick columns.

  Jane hurried over.

  “That’s close enough,” he said.

  She reached out and felt the smooth curve along the trunk of the Audi coupe resting beside her.

  “I’m going to have to know who you are, you know,” she said. “If you want me to keep spending time on this.”

  “I told you my name,” he said.

  “There are about a million Mark Allens,” she said. “And you still haven’t told me anything about my father. You said you would.”

  “I said when the time was right.”

  “I think the time is right, right now,” she said.

  “I know everything there is to know about him,” he said. “I’ve spe
nt two months. Watching. Listening. Everything. I’ve read everything there was to read about him. I tracked down every rumor. Some were. Some weren’t.

  “The whole time, your name kept popping up. Twenty-seven hundred dollars in unpaid parking fines. Another on campaign finance problems. One on . . . one on—”

  “A seven-hundred-and-eighty-six-dollar credit card payment to a mob-operated strip club in Atlanta—which I forgot to mention, by the way, has since been shut down by the feds,” she said. “We’ve been through this.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I don’t like dirty rich egomaniacal politicians. They kind of suck.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “I don’t have time for this. Give me what you have or leave me alone.”

  He bent down and slid a manila envelope down the length of the Audi.

  She reached down and felt for it, keeping her eyes on him. Straining for a glimpse. The voice was young. Strong. His frame looked that way too. Just over six feet. Wiry. The shadows were too dark for anything else.

  She straightened up and opened the envelope.

  “It’s all you’ll need,” he said. “Credit card records. From his foundation. Look at them. More strip clubs. Charter planes. Cases of French champagne. Escort services in Las Vegas. Those are hookers.”

  “No shit,” she said, angling the first sheet into the dull light coming from the other side of the garage. “Hookers. Man, this guy is a professional politician. Almost quaint.”

  “This will get it in, right?” he asked.

  “I’ll check it out,” she said, still reading. “It’s a start. What about my father?”

  She read on.

  When she looked up, he was gone.

  Jane heard the creak of the fire door. Instead of following the sound, as she’d done two other times, she turned and began to run. She sprinted up the ramp, full speed. Up and around. Up and around. Up and around. Her head swimming now. Her lungs burning.

  She streaked past the cashier’s booth. A thin dark man in a powder blue uniform. Thick glasses. He looked up and she raised her hand briefly on her way past. Like she knew him.

  Outside. Clean air. She tore around the corner and froze. A man was walking swiftly away from the metal door. It was already closed, but it had to be Mark Allen. She watched him walk to the guardrail. Dark pleated slacks and a black knit shirt with a collar. Thick dark hair. Thick eyebrows. A tan chiseled face. A lean build. He looked around. She ducked behind a utility box, then popped her head out the other side. He disappeared over the edge.