Every Hidden Thing E-Book

Ted Flanagan

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 441

Beschreibung

THE MUST-READ NOIR FOR FANS OF ELMORE LEONARD, JAMES ELLROY AND MICHAEL CONNELLY 'A hard-charging, bell-ringing, mother-....... debut novel!' — James Ellroy Big city politics, nasty secrets, a dirty cop, and a deranged sociopath set the stage for a riveting journey deep into the urban jungle. The last scion of a once-powerful political family, Worcester mayor John O'Toole has his sights set on vastly higher aspirations. When night shift paramedic Thomas Archer uncovers a secret that could upend the mayor's career, O'Toole is set on silencing him, and sends Eamon Conroy, a brutal former cop, to ensure the truth remains under wraps. But O'Toole doesn't stop there. With bribes, buried secrets, and personal attacks, he wreaks havoc on Archer's life in an attempt to save himself. Archer's troubles continue to mount when domestic terrorist and militia member Gerald Knak, who blames Archer for his wife's recent death, sets in motion a deadly plan for revenge. With two forces of evil aligned against him, Archer doesn't stand a chance. But things aren't always what they seem — and he may just have a few tricks up his sleeve in a last gambit to get out alive. Reputations and lies unravel in this gripping tale of corruption, revenge and power. 'Every Hidden Thing centres the notion of power and madness as communicable diseases with media as a carrier. Flanagan's prose unspools like a particularly brutal lucid dream' — Laird Barron 'Every Hidden Thing is a subtle powerhouse of a novel that combines the best of James Ellroy's noir cityscapes with the narrative impulses of Dennis Lehane.' — Wiley Cash 'A captivating, stylish, literary/noir mashup!' — New York Journal of Books"

Leseprobe

Praise for Every Hidden Thing

‘Every Hidden Thing is a subtle powerhouse of a novel that combines the best of James Ellroy’s noir cityscapes with the narrative impulses of Dennis Lehane. The story of Thomas Archer, an EMT who’s haunted by his past and threatened by those who embody it, is like the dirty, crooked city in which this novel is set: inescapable, pervasive, atmospheric. Ted Flanagan is a powerful and undeniably gifted writer, and his debut novel proves it’ – Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author

‘This is a righteous, hard-charging, bell-ringing, mother-……. debut novel!’ – James Ellroy, New York Times bestselling author

‘A terrific, beautifully written debut that rings with authenticity. Flanagan’s intriguing, gritty tale of corrupt politicians, even worse cops, messy family relationships, and the daily cycle of hope and despair playing out on the Blue-collar streets of Worcester had me rooting for Thomas Archer until the very last page. Fans of Dennis Lehane and Michael Harvey will devour this book’ – Jane Haseldine, author of the Julia Gooden mysteries

‘Every Hidden Thing centers the notion of power and madness as communicable diseases with media as a carrier. Flanagan’s prose unspools like a particularly brutal lucid dream’ – Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase

‘A captivating, stylish, literary/noir mashup!’ – New York Journal of Books

‘A rich, reeking, ambitious study of an urban jungle that could be Everytown. More, please’ – Kirkus

To anyone punching a clock in pursuit of their place in America.

For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.

Ecclesiastes 12:14

1

The baby came on one of those January nights in the city. Warm. Everyone in shirtsleeves. A gap between inevitable blizzards. Cars crept along damp streets shrouded in snow-fog. Black-crusted drifts bounded roads warped by frost heaves, ice forming beneath the asphalt and buckling it, melted water dribbling along underground fissures to a canal dug by Irish laborers two centuries ago.

They were angry men with alien accents. In old photos they had huddled in tents and lean-tos on the muddy hills ringing Worcester while they dug the Blackstone, like an army laying siege. The canal was forever their proudest feat, but it was narrow and when the trains connected Worcester to Providence and onward to a wider world that couldn’t care less, they abandoned the canal.

The city buried the thing in the 1970s as part of urban renewal, which had no place in its heart for a waterway that reminded them of the ways progress had failed them. Below the asphalt streets and brick factories built over it, below the city that rose and fell, over and over, the canal flowed onward. Out of sight.

Thomas Archer rode in the passenger seat of the ambulance with the window down, his uniform sleeves rolled to the elbows. He enjoyed the interlude. The night had been slow. He and Julio Tavares, his partner, had done a handful of calls, nothing that required more than a smile and a taxi ride for a few of the regulars.

Even that felt like a gift.

The holidays had started almost two months ago with a cardiac arrest under a Christmas tree, the dead man’s children begging for their father’s life even as Archer and Julio knew they’d lost the battle before the first chest compression. Plenty of mayhem since. Two fatal fires. A murder-suicide up on Trenton Street on New Year’s Day, and two nights ago Archer had pulled city boxing champ Leon ‘Sunny’ Matos from a Corolla the pugilist had driven into a brick wall at eighty miles an hour.

Tonight, though. A breeze. Easy living. They’d eaten dinner slowly enough to taste it, sat at their favorite booth at the Bully, then driven down the hill and flirted with some nurses at University. The cops over at the Bean Machine on Highland were still chuckling about Mickey P, the night shift supervisor, who’d had to let a certain state rep out of a certain cemetery into which he’d – again – locked himself by accident, with a woman, though not his wife. Archer had roared with laughter, thinking there were no better storytellers in the world than Worcester cops, and around midnight began to contemplate the word. The Q word. Maybe tonight, he thought. Maybe tonight would be quiet.

Then, Kansas Street, down by the rail yard, three am and a call for the ambulance. Woman in labor.

When he listened to the dispatch recordings later, Archer heard a frantic man on the 911 line, whispering, straining not to be heard. The baby was here, he said. Months of poor planning, no planning, all coming to a head, and now here’s the baby. He said it was limp and gray and soaking the mattress. He said someone had tried delivering the baby at home.

Archer found them, baby and mother, on a mattress on the floor of a third-story bedroom. Train engines and railcars colliding night after night outside the building shook dust and bits of plaster from the walls onto the floor, so the mattress floated on a sea of talcum scrapes. Lath peeked out in places from hundred-year-old patches of broken and gray horsehair plaster, polka-dotted by black blooms of mold.

The woman, cross-legged and hunched over on the mattress, blew air through pursed lips. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her mocha-colored skin glistened. Pupils pinpoint. She grimaced and chased her breath. Blood and water soaked the mattress, and the baby was still and silent. For a moment Archer saw her as on an altar, the baby a sacrifice.

A man stood to the left of the mattress with his arms clasped behind his back and his eyes wide as he stared into a back corner of the room, not at the baby, not at the woman. He seemed as black as night, and when Archer looked at the man for an extra moment, he thought part of him melted into the back wall, where the light from the bulb faded into shadow.

Julio dropped to a knee at the foot of the mattress, touched the baby’s stomach, held his fingertips over the baby’s mouth, then against the inside of a biceps.

‘Shit,’ Julio said, then placed an oxygen mask and squeezed air into its lungs. Someone had already clamped and cut the umbilical cord, Archer saw. The placenta lay in a glass baking dish on the floor. Blood trailed in a long tendril from rumpled bedsheets to the dish.

Archer felt the pulse in the woman’s wrist banging away, a weak and thready metronome.

‘Do you speak English?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘I work for the city,’ she said, her voice thick and dreamy.

She panted. The bottoms of the sweat beads on her forehead glimmered beneath the weak yellow light from the bulb above, small planets orbiting in the furrows of her brow. The man to her left unclasped his hands and stepped forward to thrust a stack of papers at Archer.

He scanned.

Hospital discharge instructions.

Yesterday morning.

Daisy Fontana, thirty-six weeks gestation, evaluated for eclampsia, gestational diabetes.

Past history included psych issues, heroin abuse, and asthma. Typical for the city.

‘You don’t need that,’ a man behind Archer said.

Archer’s stomach seized and his heart jackhammered, like a sprinter’s at the end of a hundred-yard dash. He wondered for a moment if you could imagine a voice, because the one behind him couldn’t be in the room. The voice he thought he’d heard should still be in a jail somewhere, not here, not now.

Where are the police? Archer thought.

‘The paperwork,’ the man said. ‘It’s not pertinent.’

Archer turned to the man. He was dressed in a black suit and chewing the inside of his hollow, pockmarked cheek beneath a wispy combover of almost-white blond hair. The shadows under his boxer’s nose deepened as he pressed into the ring of pale light. It was a face Archer wasn’t supposed to see for another decade. Eamon Conroy, a murderer, though sent to jail for obstruction and not the crime he’d really committed.

Archer grimaced at his own complacency. He’d forgotten the paramedic’s reflex: never go into a room you can’t get out of.

‘This is under control,’ Conroy said. He pointed to the man standing by Daisy’s bed. ‘Rigo here just panicked. There was supposed to be a midwife.’

‘Midwife?’ Archer asked.

‘Ms. Fontana here wanted to take advantage of a natural childbirth,’ Conroy said. ‘When Rigo panicked, she was understandably shaken. But everything’s fine.’

‘We’re supposed to be at Memorial,’ Rigo hissed. ‘No fucking midwife.’

Conroy held his hands up in surrender. ‘I told you we were handling this, Rigo,’ he said. ‘I thought I was clear about discretion. You know we’ll take care of this.’

To Archer, the man’s eyes were holes in the light, reflecting nothing. He knew one bedrock piece of truth about Eamon Conroy. There were two types of dangerous: the claimed and the authentic. Conroy was as authentic as they came.

‘We should have gone to the hospital,’ Rigo whispered.

‘The baby came too fast,’ Conroy said. ‘I’ve explained that to you. Maybe if she laid off that other stuff, we could have gone a few more weeks.’

Archer turned back to the woman. He didn’t want to look at Conroy. He didn’t want to think about Conroy. About the fact that Conroy was back. About what that meant.

‘When did the baby come?’ Archer asked. He spoke to Rigo.

‘The baby’s fine,’ Conroy said. ‘He’s just taking a nap.’

‘The baby’s not fine,’ Archer said. ‘You did this, didn’t you?’

‘I got here after you did,’ Conroy said. ‘That’s the story I’m sticking to, anyway. That’s the one everyone here who’s smart will tell.’

The woman pursed her lips. Her eyes shifted to Conroy. Archer looked down and to the left, saw Conroy’s shirt cuffs stained pink where they poked out from his coat.

‘The heart rate is coming up,’ Julio said. ‘He’s still not breathing well.’

‘Earlier,’ Rigo said. ‘The baby came earlier.’

Archer looked at the blood, the water, the limp baby on the bed. He saw brown dots on Conroy’s forehead.

‘What did you do?’ Archer asked.

No reply.

‘Police coming?’ Archer asked Julio.

‘I heard the sector car sign on,’ Julio said.

‘I canceled the police,’ Conroy said. He waved a cell phone and smiled at Archer. ‘The police have better things to do with their time than go on medicals. No one here but us mice.’

‘We should get moving,’ Julio said. Archer nodded. Conroy clasped Archer’s left shoulder, turned him around slowly, and held out a hand. His suit jacket parted open, and Archer saw the dark metal glint of a pistol in the light-brown leather holster under Conroy’s left arm.

‘I’ll need those papers,’ Conroy said. ‘Then I’ll be out of here.’

The woman screamed and bent over double in the bed. Rigo shook his head and stared at a point on the floor in front of him. Julio slid the bags of equipment closer to him with his foot. Archer stared at Conroy, made up his mind. He reached behind him for the heavy black flashlight hanging from the loop on his right hip. He held it over his head, a hatchet ready to strike.

‘You know we’re taking the baby,’ Archer said. ‘And mom. And the papers. Even you know we have to. You can’t keep people away from this. It’s us or someone else. Whatever you were trying to do here, it’s too late.’

Conroy smiled. He flicked the fingers of his outstretched hand.

‘I have that same flashlight,’ he said. ‘Not cheap. I didn’t think you guys made that kind of scratch. Must be good at figuring things out. You must be a genius.’

‘I’m pretty stupid,’ Archer said. His stomach clenched, and he tasted the fear that rose on a wave of acid rising in his throat.

‘Eamon, you know what happens if things go bad with the baby,’ Julio said. ‘You haven’t been off the job that long. The state will turn this place upside down. No one can stop that, once it gets going. So far, there’s wiggle room. We can be flexible. Who was here, who wasn’t here, what the hell was going on. All of it. We can be motherhumping Gumby at the moment. But we need to go to keep things that way. We’ve got to slide, man. Time to fly.’

Conroy considered what Julio said, then shrugged nd stepped back.

‘There’ll be plenty of time to sort this out later,’ he said, then pointed a finger at Rigo. ‘Remember what we talked about. Discretion. Tell the right story.’

Conroy straightened his coat, picked a piece of lint off his tie, then walked into the kitchen and out of sight. Julio exhaled. Archer bowed his head and took a deep breath.

‘You know that psycho got out of jail?’ Julio asked. ‘Seems like someone should have told us that bit of information.’

Archer shrugged. ‘I had no idea.’ He looked at the hospital paperwork, then bent down to the woman.

‘We’re going to the hospital now, Daisy,’ he said. ‘Your baby is doing better but is still very sick. Do you understand?’

Daisy nodded.

‘Can I go too?’ Rigo asked.

‘Who called 911?’ Archer asked.

‘I did,’ Rigo said.

‘That guy try to stop you?’

Rigo nodded.

‘There was no midwife, was there?’ Archer asked.

Rigo shook his head. ‘They said there would be. This whole thing is fu –’

‘Rigo, no,’ Daisy said between pants.

Rigo shook his head, a pitcher shaking off a sign.

On the way to the hospital, Archer watched as the baby’s color and breathing improved, but it was quiet, listless. A bad sign, Archer knew. A kind of surrender. The silence muted any joy Daisy might have felt, he thought, though he sensed there wasn’t much of that here in this corner of the city to begin with. He looked up front, saw Rigo absently eating his bag lunch.

They passed the Pigtown Deli on Shaw Street. The accountant in the office above the place found fat returns for the city’s cops and firefighters and medics. The deli itself was a front for a Vietnamese religious sect that recruited takeout customers while they waited with a continuous-loop video of doves floating on sun-dappled skies. The bagels and vegan soups were good enough that Archer thought it was a fair price to pay.

The baby remained quiet, even when Archer flicked the soles of its feet. Daisy only winced when Archer started the intravenous line. She stared into the baby’s face with a look Archer couldn’t interpret. Was it happiness? Was it love? Was it pain?

* * *

Archer tried to write the two charts – one for Daisy, the other for the baby. He started and stopped. His mind wandered. Seeing Conroy again had brought it all back.

Freeland Street, Archer just a couple years on the job. A single-unit efficiency on the fifth floor of a graffiti-covered box of an apartment complex, not a thing in it except a round table and a refrigerator in the kitchen. The living room had a large television, no furniture. Archer’s partner at the time, an ancient medic named Arnold Moonandowski – Moonie – recognized it for what it was.

‘Safe house,’ he said, while they waited in the kitchen.

‘Safe from who?’ Archer asked.

‘Place where the cops can talk to people without having to take them into cruisers, or for people who can’t be seen keeping appointments at the police station,’ Moonie said. He whispered. It was the first time Archer had seen his veteran partner spooked. The door to a bedroom at the end of a short hall off the kitchen was closed, but they could see a yellow strip of light below it, shadows of feet passing back and forth.

And they didn’t know much. Dispatch had given them the address, said they were going for a sick person. No other details. When they’d knocked, a plainclothes cop opened it. He was coatless, sleeves rolled up, his badge pinned to a strap on his shoulder holster.

‘You fellas mind giving us a moment?’ he said.

‘You need us to leave, Eamon?’ Moonie asked. Archer was surprised Moonie knew the cop by name. Worried because the ever-affable Moonie had gone all stiff and businesslike.

‘Nothing like that – it’s just some of the men in here need to leave, but we can’t have people seeing their faces. Secret Squirrel shit, but if you could indulge us and just turn around, that would be great.’

Archer looked at Moonie, and Moonie pointed toward the refrigerator, and a small group of people hustled out the door behind them. Archer heard male voices speaking Spanish in short bursts. He sneaked a sideways glance at the four men passing behind him. They were older. He thought he recognized two of them – one of them drove for Blue Cab; the other owned a bodega on Woodland. There was something about them, an air, a presence. The cab driver caught Archer’s eye. Archer wanted to get out of the apartment, as far from these men as possible.

‘We have a situation,’ Conroy said, once they were alone. ‘I can trust you guys here a bit, right? We got this guy in the back room, a real lowlife, scumball piece of shit. Drug dealer. Diddler. Real shitbag. So, we’re interviewing him, and he wasn’t being cooperative. Hell, what he was being was downright uncooperative.’

Moonie and Archer nodded their heads as if they knew exactly what Conroy was driving at.

‘And the hell of it is, I think we may have hurt him, and I’m not sure what to do about it,’ Conroy said. ‘So one of the guys says, hey, let’s call an ambulance. Now, generally, I hate to bother you guys with every little ache and pain suffered by our clientele, but here’s the thing with this guy.’ Conroy leaned in, gathered Moonie and Archer in his arms, pulled them close, huddling, like they were a football team ready to make the big score. ‘The thing of it is, I’m not sure he’s still breathing.’

They found him hanging sideways from a metal chair in the middle of the room. Young. Twenties maybe. Maybe younger. Shirtless, connected to the chair by handcuffs. A puddle of water under the chair. And piss. A two-foot piece of garden hose on the ground nearby, its ends covered in dried blood. Even from across the room, Archer could see the man was motionless, his chest eerily still, the absence of rise and fall more noticeable than if he still breathed. His eyes were swollen shut. His chest a canvas of abrasions and scrapes and angry red stripes.

Moonie reacted first, ordered Conroy to undo the handcuffs. They laid the man on the floor and went to work. Archer noticed Conroy scouring the room, dumping tools and the hose and a small scale into a duffel bag, then wiping down the counter and a table with a towel before peeking over Moonie’s shoulder to check out their work, then wordlessly striding out of the apartment and into the night.

Later, they sat on the boat ramp across from the hospital and ate subs from the Portuguese takeout place. Archer tried not to think of their patient, now in the morgue at University.

‘What was that?’ Archer finally asked.

‘What that was, was stuff you’ll need to learn not to ask about,’ Moonie said.

‘That cop, you know him?’

Moonie nodded. ‘Guy named Conroy,’ he said. ‘Scary dude. I know we spend a lot of time telling the new guys how close we are to the police, and it’s true. The cops in this city, we do anything for them. They’ll always be there for you. But Conroy? He’s an exception. Other cops keep their distance. He’s psycho. I watched him once smack around a pregnant junkie at the New Star shelter because she called him dickless.’

‘Did you report him?’

Moonie finished his sandwich, rolled the wax paper into a ball and tossed it into a nearby trash can. The city darkened as the sun dropped beneath the surrounding hills. Streetlights on the river bridge winked to life.

‘That’s not how this works,’ Moonie said. ‘The cops will take care of their own. Everyone knows the score on Conroy.’

‘What was that apartment?’ Archer asked.

‘Safe house. Not everyone can be seen talking to the cops, so they’ll bring them to one of those apartments and talk to them in private.’

‘That guy was no informant,’ Archer said. ‘I mean, they electrocuted his balls. They killed him. We need to tell –’

‘You don’t need to tell anyone anything,’ Moonie said. ‘Conroy is… entrepreneurial. He runs his own crew. Off the books. They’ll get him. People know what he’s up to. But it’s not your job. Do yourself a favor, just keep your head down and stay out of it.’

* * *

Archer finished the charts, dropped copies off with Daisy’s nurse. Her baby was upstairs in the neonatal intensive care unit. He peeked in the exam room where Daisy slept, fluid going into one arm, a unit of blood into the other. Rigo nowhere to be seen.

He thought of Eamon Conroy, how he hadn’t taken Moonie’s advice back when. For Conroy’s fellow cops, the Freeland Street thing was the last straw. They had bitten their lips for years, turned a blind eye to his methods, but killing a man, torturing him beforehand? No one had signed up for that. When detectives came asking, Archer gave it up. All of it.

Later, when he’d finished testifying at the trial, Conroy winked at Archer as he left the stand. They sent Conroy off to jail, and Archer moved on, never expected to see the man again.

Now tonight – Conroy. Materializing in the middle of whatever this was, a bad dream returned and alive in the middle of a dark room coated in plaster dust.

Daisy stirred, opened her eyes, and saw Archer standing by the curtain. A thought came to him, as if hitting a trip wire. The moment before the explosion but after it was too late. Daisy slowly shook her head. I’m in the way, he realized. I’m in the way of a dangerous man.

2

Lu McCarthy got the call right after Valentine’s Day. Kittredge was chummy and warm, which the boss never was unless he wanted something. Come to my office, he said. We should talk. She’d evaded, but only for so long. She knew something was coming, didn’t like the way her boss refused to reveal the agenda.

‘There’s just some stuff we need to go over,’ Kittredge had said.

Navigating the maze of forgotten hallways in this windowless backwater section of the sprawling newspaper building, its plate metal walls sweating from the little steam heat the structure’s ancient boilers eked out against the winter cold, Lu imagined which Kittredge she’d face. Her boss had adopted many iterations over the years, a chameleon whose spots always changed in ways designed to keep Kittredge rising, ever upward – although, as it turned out, those spots could get him only to middle management at a midsize daily that had become a grape, dying on the vine.

There was backslapping Gabe Kittredge, your buddy, the guy who always bought the last round when they shut down the Dinger on election night. This was the Old Kittredge, Lu’s bureau mate back in the days when they’d shared two desks in a strip mall office in Emporia, covered dog catcher meetings and school visits by state reps who were feted and greeted like royalty. Kittredge had been looser then, still striving but a good guy, so the bottle of rye he kept in his desk seemed less like a prop than a piece of actual office equipment.

Then there was Imperial Gabriel. This version, high-minded guardian of the eternal flame of journalism, Keeper of the Fourth Estate, had arrived when Kittredge became city editor a decade ago. He ate in the private dining room. He shit in the executive bathrooms. This Kittredge spoke at City Research Bureau luncheons and received the state reps, especially in election years, as if he were a sitting Pope. Since he was the driving force behind the paper’s editorial page and the chief arbiter of the daily story budget, only the paper’s publisher, H. Robert Galloway, held more sway over public opinion in the city. Lu didn’t want to deal with this version of Kittredge today. This version, she thought, was a prick.

For a man who craved power so baldly as Kittredge, she couldn’t fathom how he’d ended up in a windowless office hidden in a warren of empty conference rooms filled with mismatched office furniture, old fax machines, listing credenzas missing a leg here and there, and glass-topped coffee tables once coveted by long-dead executives, all of it layered with an inch of old, gray dust.

It was out of the way, far from the newsroom and even farther from the palatial sprawl of Galloway and his executive minions. It was cheap, dirty, old. Lu figured it had to do with power and the application of power. Kittredge liked to move in unseen circles, a perpetual cycle of need-to-know with ultimately only one person in need of knowing it all. Lu also knew it was the only office in the entire building with its own private exit, this one leading to a back alley adjacent to city hall.

In the newspaper’s heyday, Kittredge’s office had been the studio for a low-watt news radio station the paper owned. It was soundproofed so well you could hear your own heartbeat, or the blood coursing through vessels and arteries. She thought that having Kittredge’s job, having to come to this dungeon, so far from people, so far from the world and the bright sun outside, locked in here like a declawed tiger, would have driven her nuts.

It was all too quiet in this part of the building. The presses that once ruled the now-empty basement caverns, the newspaper’s former heart and soul, their rolling thrum vibrating every corner of the building – they were gone now. The beating heart had been replaced by fiber-optic cables and keyboard clicks and soft shoes on carpets and, the worst of it all, silence. Soulless, Lu thought. As good as dead.

The radio station went under in the early 1990s, the studio converted into storage, and then last year, when half the Courier’s Telegraph Street home had been sold to a health insurance company looking for a bigger downtown footprint, the defunct studio was converted into an office and Kittredge moved in. Lu avoided it as much as she could.

She rapped on the doorframe, and Kittredge, a phone tucked into his shoulder, swiveled his office chair around, held up one finger, then pointed to an empty chair in front of the desk.

‘There are other factors at play here that maybe you don’t appreciate, different metrics altogether,’ Kittredge was saying. ‘You’ve got to understand that, from thirty thousand feet up, at the end of the day, we’re missing out on the lowhanging fruit here. And you’re comparing apples to hubcaps.’

Lu cringed. When, she wondered, had people in this business stopped speaking like human beings? We used to make fun of people who talked like that, she thought. Now we’re assimilated.

Kittredge chewed his bottom lip like bubblegum and ratcheted his head up and down as he listened. Lu knew the look. It was when Kittredge had arrived at the point where he knew what you were going to say, no longer wanted to wait, had conjured a reply, and now boiled inside with the desire to be done with your opinions and move on to his.

‘Write whatever you want, Phil,’ Kittredge said, ‘but the official Courier position is that we are realigning our resources to be tighter, leaner, and more agile, and going digital first is one way to do that.’

Kittredge put a pretend finger gun to his head and feigned pulling the trigger.

‘We saw this with the collapse of ad revenue, but that was, what, a decade ago?’ he said. ‘Might as well have been last fucking century. We’re talking disruption, now. Technology outpacing tradition. Totally different. We’re not collapsing. We’re growing. Things are just revenue-neutral at the moment.’

Lu settled into the red fabric desk chair and waited for Kittredge to finish the lesson. She could hear the blood rumbling through the veins and capillaries in her head, a background pulse, like water clanging through an old steam radiator. Each breath whooshed like a bellows, her heartbeats pounding a swishing drumbeat. She couldn’t fathom how Kittredge survived coming here every day.

‘I’m hanging up now,’ Kittredge said. A pause. ‘Because you’re being pedantic, Phil. It’s clear to me that you’ve got an agenda. Bottom line, this paper will be here a lot longer than your fucking website!’

Kittredge slammed the phone into the cradle, ran his hands through the gray hair on the temples of an aquiline head, long and narrow with large orbits around his eyes and black circles that gave him the perpetual look of a prizefighter who’d just finished sparring without headgear.

‘That sounded like fun,’ she said.

‘Phil fucking Bracken.’

‘Of course. “Dienewspaperdie.com.” I’m more a fan of “newspaperdeathwatch.com.”’

Kittredge laid an arm across his desk, sank his forehead into the crook of his elbow, and nodded. ‘At least those guys seem a little bit sad about the whole mess. Bracken is downright priapic about it.’

‘Getting fired publicly will make a man bitter,’ she said.

Kittredge looked up, a pained expression on his face.

‘We didn’t fire him,’ he said. ‘The goddamn Herald fired him. You can’t file stories from war zones while hiding in your mother’s basement.’

‘That was not a stand-up move.’

‘That was not.’

‘So,’ she said. ‘You rang, sir?’

Kittredge picked up a plastic cup filled with paper clips. A handful hung on the magnetic lip of the cup. Kittredge bit his lip and pulled a clip from the magnet and unraveled it, straightening the thing into a narrow-gauge piece of wire.

‘The paper is facing significant challenges, as you know,’ Kittredge began. He looked down at his hands. They rebent the paper clip into a new form, an approximation of its former self, only in opposite curves. ‘We’ve attempted to stem the tide. We’ve beefed up our coverage of the outer boroughs, erected a paywall on our website, started the printing operation for inserts, that kind of stuff.’

‘Not to mention getting rid of the pension, firing most of the bureau staffs in those boroughs, eliminating matches to the 401(k) that was supposed to replace the pension, a week off each quarter without pay,’ Lu said.

Kittredge nodded. ‘True enough,’ he said. ‘We’ve done all that, plus a lot of things you haven’t seen. Ugly things. Believe me, the knife has cut deep in advertising and circulation and the executive suite. Editorial hasn’t borne the entire brunt. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been enough.’

A light came on. Not on – more like a dimmer went from low to high. Or like the moment before a car wreck, Lu thought, that pause when the collision is inevitable but you still hold on to the wheel, stand on the brakes. Futility, but it’s just what you do; you’re keenly aware of how perfect everything is, your life, and how it’s all about to go to shit, has already gone to shit but for the playing out of the physics. The whoosh in her ears became a torrent. Kittredge snapped the tortured paper clip in half.

‘We need to make more cuts,’ Kittredge said, ‘deep cuts. Cuts to muscle and bone.’

He met Lu’s gaze. She braced for the haymaker.

‘We have to let you go, Lu. I’m sorry. You’re our highest-paid reporter, and you work the cops beat. No one your age works cops.’

She dried her palms on the knees of her pants. She rocked a little back and forth. Cleared her throat.

‘I can’t say it’s a complete surprise,’ Lu said. ‘Jesus. Thirty years.’

Kittredge reached into a desk drawer, pulled out a box of tissues, slid it over the desk toward her. Lu pointed at the box. Sneered.

‘You expecting me to cry?’ she asked. ‘When did you ever see me cry? What did I ever do to give you the impression that I’m a crier?’

‘Sorry, reflex move,’ Kittredge said. ‘I’ve been doing this a lot lately. A lot of crying in here.’

He dropped the tissue box into the drawer.

‘It was a great run,’ Kittredge said. ‘You’re a pro. But we’ve got to stare down the bottom line here. People like us, Lu, we’re becoming obsolete – hell, we’re already obsolete. It’s all about data mining and computer-assisted reporting and getting kids out of Worcester State willing to do twice the work for half the money, shooting their own video, taking their own art. We used to make crusaders, but now it’s – it’s not that the facts aren’t important. It’s just that they need to be in service of more than just the truth. The news is a product. Widgets built in a widget factory that exists on a computer screen instead of newsprint. Content drives everything, right or wrong. Being first is the new priority. No one has time to be right too. Gnosticism runs amok.’

‘Gnosticism?’

‘Hidden agendas and secret orders, and everyone hates an expert, which is ironic since everyone is an expert in their own crackpot theories, about life and power, and the press. Especially the press. There’s an awakening, Lu, a vile, veiled thing, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We live in a time when every hidden thing is both truth and lie. Fact and fiction are the same, as long as you yell your truth loudly enough. I think Mussolini said that.’

‘I don’t think he did.’

‘Well, maybe not. Doesn’t matter, as long as I say he did with enough conviction it becomes true. Not totally true, but true enough, and that’s all that matters these days.’

As he talked, Lu followed Kittredge in a rotation of connectedness. He spoke while thumb-scrolling through emails on his phone. Sidled over to the laptop on his desk, tapped down through messages or a feed or some other kind of deluge of information and opinion, the ever-progressing obliteration of fact, of objectivity, of anyone having an opinion they kept to themselves anymore. Even as he took Lu out at the knees, Kittredge kept up with the feed. That was the job now. Feeding the feed.

‘The last kid that applied here?’ Kittredge said. ‘Didn’t mention a single word about his student newspaper work. Told me all about his “platform.” Platform, Lu. That’s what they’re teaching in J-school these days. The news is no longer as important as the package. No one cares about the message as long as you get it to them first and in a hundred different ways. You can be wrong, you just can’t be slow. When the mode of the messenger became more important than the message, that was the moment. We were out of a job fifteen years ago, the last nail in this whole fucking enterprise hammered in by some coder in a cubicle somewhere. Death by HTML.’

Lu couldn’t hear the rushing blood anymore. The office became just another empty, quiet space in a building daily breeding such spaces.

‘How long do I have?’

Kittredge winced. ‘End of summer. Best I could do. You work night cops through July fourth, maybe Labor Day, if I can stretch things a bit; then we can give you a six-week severance, but that’s about it.’

‘The last round of buyouts, they gave people like six months’ pay.’

‘And I got you six months’ worth of work,’ Kittredge said. ‘Listen, Galloway wanted me to get you out of here with two weeks and a handshake. This is a good deal.’

‘My ex is years behind in child support, Danny Junior’s at BC, I already make crap here. I mean, where’s the money going to come from?’

‘Dan Senior won’t help?’

Lu laughed.

‘Maybe if I could find him. But no. He won’t help. I’ve tried.’

‘I feel bad for you, Lu, you know that, but who encouraged you to take the last buyout? I did. Remember? But you wouldn’t fucking listen. The job too important to you. Shit, we could have said sayonara with nothing, but I fought for you, Lu, I did. I told Galloway that you were a legend, that you deserved something. July fourth. Maybe Labor Day. That’s the best I could do, and you should be happy for it.’

‘Please, no preaching.’

‘All I’m saying is that you should have listened to me,’ Kittredge said.

Lu thought she might vomit. The room pitched and yawed. She was desperate to go to the Ding Wa, bungeejump her way through a series of Manhattans and kibitz with Mae, her favorite bartender, who knew how to use just enough Southern Comfort to keep the warmth in her chest glowing long after last call.

‘You should have listened to me then,’ Kittredge said, ‘and maybe now.’

Kittredge stood and walked to his office door, peered up and down the hallway, then closed the door and sat on the corner of his desk. He leaned toward Lu, spoke in hushed tones.

‘I may have something for you,’ Kittredge said. ‘But it’s… it’s unconventional.’

‘I’m not in a position to insist on convention.’

‘I mean, way out there. And it may be a little touchy for you, distasteful even. But there are some serious rewards to it too. Life-altering things. Let me make my pitch, see what you think. You don’t like it? Vaya con Dios, no harm, no foul.’

‘Where am I going?’ Lu said. ‘I just got canned.’

Kittredge unlocked a bottom desk drawer and retrieved a manila folder.

‘John O’Toole’s main guy, this former cop you might remember, Eamon Conroy –’

Lu raised her hands.

‘You can stop right there. Anything involving that warped psycho, count me out. I covered that thing when he went to jail, followed the trail of bodies dropped by that private gang he hired, all those School of the Americas alumni. Guy should still be in jail, you ask me. And by the way, there are a few questions about how he engineered his release. Some weird timing there, what with the riot and all.’

‘I thought I said to hear me out.’

‘I’m just saying.’

‘I’m trying to help you out here, Lu.’

Kittredge waited. She lowered her hands.

‘Me and Conroy, we keep in touch. It’s good to have connections so close to a guy like O’Toole. So we’re having drinks at the Dinger the other night, and he asked me my thoughts on doing a little work for them on the QT, very quiet-like, for a project they’ve got going in advance of O’Toole’s likely run for governor.’

‘Of course he’ll run for governor,’ Lu said. ‘Shit, I heard he even rented a warehouse on St. James to store all the signs he’s already made.’

‘We’re talking about this thing they need done, and immediately your name came up,’ Kittredge said.

‘I don’t do pay for play,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my integrity; at least give me that.’

‘It sounds like, you do a good job on this, bring home what they want, there may be a city job in it for you, long term. Short term, Conroy said they’ll pay. Fifty thousand, under the table.’

Kittredge let the number hang in the air.

Lu played poker face, but inside she was stunned. Almost a year’s salary. For what? No way, she thought. Working for a murderous psycho? But how can I say no? Do I really want to? Who’s going to tell Danny Junior not to pack for school in the fall?

‘I know it’s not your kind of thing, Lu, but it’s never bad to have the future governor owe you a favor. And the money. A pension. A life after the Courier.’

Lu shifted in her seat, scratched the back of her head. Three decades and she’d never written a story she couldn’t stand by. And what had it gotten her? Nothing but thrown out on her ass with a month and a half of pay to show for it. And how was she going to pay the mortgage?

Lu stepped on her thoughts. She could hear the blood rushing through her ears again.

‘What’s the story?’ she asked.

Kittredge pulled a sheaf of papers from the folder. She could see from across the desk that it was a police report, although it lacked the usual department letterhead. Must be one of the private files she’d seen a few times in her career, the ones not meant for eyes outside the Citadel, aka police HQ. Lu had had such files leaked from police sources in the past. These private reports were usually full of undistilled truth, or at least a close approximation of the truth. Not lies, not exactly, but the grinding wheel of facts against which a kind of truth could be milled. They were private. The victor always writes the history, she thought, and this was their source material.

‘There’s this baby, delivered in the projects, those slums on Kansas Street,’ Kittredge said. ‘This kid has an, um, complicated lineage. Very complicated. So anyway, the kid was delivered by city medics in the apartment, and things went poorly. The baby was deprived of oxygen, some shit, doctors say brain damage. Permanent disabilities. Lifetime care needed. Expensive stuff. This could be bad news for John O’Toole’s political ambitions for three reasons. One, the mother, this Daisy Fontana, works in city hall, clerk’s office, bit of a heroin problem. Links to some tough hombres in the Posse. Two, John O’Toole has been fucking Ms Fontana’s brains out for a couple years, until recently, and the baby is almost certainly his.’

‘And the third?’

‘The third is the kicker. The medics didn’t deliver the baby. Eamon Conroy did. He had this half-baked idea that having Daisy Fontana deliver at Memorial Hospital or Saint B’s would attract unwanted attention, get wags asking too many questions. So he promised Daisy a home birth with a midwife, all costs covered, plied her with all kinds of stuff – appliances, furniture, promises of more than that. But the baby came early, the midwife they’d planned to use was instead down at this place on the Cape, drying out from an affection for Wild Turkey, and that left Conroy playing catcher, so to speak.’

‘Holy shit.’

Kittredge nodded.

‘Shit is right,’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing holy about it. Conroy screwed things up, damn near killed the baby and Ms Fontana. Her boyfriend, Rigo Mejia – you might remember him from some Posse court cases – couldn’t take it, finally called 911. The resultant mess has simmered ever since. One of the medics on the call, Thomas Archer, has made some noise. Filed a few complaints. Conroy wants it gone. He thinks the best way to achieve that is to make this medic go away.’

‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’

‘We covered that already.’

‘Not that,’ Lu said. ‘Everyone knows O’Toole can’t keep it in his pants. This medic they want me to go after, this guy Thomas Archer. Any chance he was drunk the night this happened?’

Kittredge shrugged.

‘If you know him, and he’s got a problem with the bottle, that would be a great angle to pursue,’ he said.

‘I’m surprised Conroy hasn’t taken care of this himself.’

‘It’s a big year for those guys,’ Kittredge said. ‘They’re trying to be discreet.’

‘Me and this Archer,’ Lu said. ‘We have a history.’

‘I know you’ve written about him before,’ Kittredge said. ‘Back when he and his partner testified at Conroy’s trial, that other civil case he was in. So what? This will just be more of the same.’

She shook her head.

‘It’s more than that. It’s a little painful. We grew up in the same neighborhood. His mother and my father had a, um, brief relationship. Didn’t end well for either family.’

Kittredge smiled, held his arms out wide.

‘Then this will be perfect,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s time to settle some old scores of your own. I feel your pain. I’m part of this, too. I’m going to edit these pieces personally, to make sure they get through the desk intact the way we want them.’

Lu had trouble thinking. The sound of the blood rushing in her own ears deafened her.

‘What makes you trust me with this?’ she said. ‘I could go to Galloway’s office right now and tell him what you’re planning. Maybe I’d end up with your job.’

‘Because I know you, Lu. You’re pragmatic. You’re no crusader. How many years you spend in those courtrooms, or talking to cops, or breaking bread with gangbangers and wiseguys? This isn’t something I’d take to an idealist. But you. You live in the real world. So do I.’

Kittredge picked up the folder, waved it in front of her.

‘I’m not worried that you’ll go to Galloway, try to get me fired,’ Kittredge said. ‘I’m worried you’ll turn me down and you’ll be nowhere, bureau mate. You want to try and make money as a freelancer, go ahead. Have fun bagging groceries to put gas in your car, or telling Dan Junior he’s done at BC, time to come home, night classes at the adult-ed center, maybe begin his long career in landscaping.’

Lu tried to connect dots she couldn’t see, like they were painted in invisible ink on a path that led to the mayor’s right-hand man. The connection was thin. Hair thin. Until it hit her with a bright white clarity.

‘What’s your cut?’ she asked. By the shrug and the way Kittredge dropped into his chair, Lu knew it was good, probably bigger than hers.

‘I’m being taken care of from a separate account. Plus, you won’t be the only one with a job when this is said and done, although mine will likely be in Boston, under the gold dome. Just because it’s good for me doesn’t mean it isn’t also good for you.’

She thought of Archer, her de facto stepbrother, although she’d moved out as soon as her father let Archer’s mother move in during the divorce. Close but not close. Teammates in mutually assured family destruction. Archer, the screw-up. Unstable like his old man, who remained famous on the East Side for what he’d done to the McCarthy Thunderbird all those years ago.

But how surprised could she really be? Archer’s mother – Lu would never think of her as her stepmother, even after her father married her – didn’t go off the rails until Lu came home from college, even before she got her first daily newspaper job at the Courier. She spent days on the living room couch, drinking cheap wine, sleeping and crying and talking to herself. Lu kept her distance from this woman she barely knew, didn’t want to know. She saw Archer at holidays when she couldn’t avoid it, the silence between them so loud her ears rang.

She knew that Archer, still in high school, fed and clothed himself, lived for weeks off a few hundred bucks tossed on the kitchen table each month by her father, who himself would disappear for days at a time.

But Archer was an adult now, and he’d made his mistakes. Lu figured he was old enough to know how to handle himself. She’d even heard about Archer’s son and the brain tumors from her father, wondered if that had set Archer off.

‘I’ll need to meet with Conroy,’ she said, ‘before I promise anything.’

Kittredge smiled. ‘That’s exactly what Eamon thought you’d say.’

3

Thin clouds stretched themselves across the blue sky above city hall, and the flags in the arc of poles beneath the front portico snapped in a hot July cross breeze that smelled of heat and damp concrete and diesel exhaust. A grand half-moon of marble steps led from Main Street into the grand entrance of the aging building, palace to municipal graces. It was a big day in this hill-straddled central Massachusetts city. Even the food trucks out back had closed for the morning.

Mayor John O’Toole looked out on the scene from his fifth-floor office and tried to enjoy the view. They were here for him, after all. But the text that had appeared on his phone an hour ago spoiled the view.

He read the message from Daisy again:

Money too tight. Miguel too sick. You won’t return my calls. What am I supposed to do?

O’Toole asked himself again, what would his father have done?

In a city as small as Worcester, it was hard to be related to a legend like the first Mayor O’Toole – the late, great Eddie O’Toole. John O’Toole had wanted to make his own path here, but it had proven difficult. That was the dual nature of shadows, the young mayor thought. Great places to hide, not great places in which to live.

Eddie O’Toole had loved this city, learned to love it digging ditches for Commonwealth Gas when his own father, Orion O’Toole, was its president. Eddie O’Toole liked to tell his son he’d seen the city from the inside out. He used the money he earned rummaging below its streets to pay for his education at Salve Mater College, whose redbrick buildings glowed orange today on the sides facing the morning sun, in the ring of hills that rose high above downtown, the hills upon which the city was built. John O’Toole had gone there too, his being one of the last classes where the Franciscan brothers taught nearly every course.

John had learned important lessons from his father, from the way they sat in a middle pew at Mount Carmel’s Sunday Mass, so as not to put on airs, to the basket they donated to the Orphan Mission on Mattson Street every Thanksgiving and Easter. Young John O’Toole thought he must be part of the world’s largest family the way people on the street, at the butcher’s, at the Riverside, everywhere greeted Eddie O’Toole as long-lost kin, some of them hailing and waving hats from passing streetcars. Those were long gone now too. And his father’s agile memory – John O’Toole had always marveled at that, the way Eddie O’Toole knew everyone’s name, asked about sick mothers and little sisters and fathers and brothers, like all he did all day was memorize the names and personal histories of every city resident.

Some lessons John O’Toole had learned were ones his father never realized he was teaching. Power was a great thing, an important thing, but only if you knew enough to use it. The elder O’Toole wielded it inefficiently, John believed. He was all velvet gloves and sweet talk. When Eddie O’Toole had a chance to finish off his opponent, he always stopped short.

Once, when John O’Toole was eleven, a city councilor called his father out publicly for closing a city pool in Morningdale. The neighborhood had once been a haven for French Canadian workers from Montreal who’d kept the optics plant on Southside Street humming through the Depression and two world wars and well into the sixties. With the death of the plant, the workers left, the vast complex of apartment buildings where they lived turning into public housing for the city’s recent arrivals from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

The pool at Morningdale was decrepit. Eddie O’Toole wanted to close it as a way to extract federal money to replace it on the same plot of city land. Eddie had maneuvered unseen for months to get the money, knew that the surest way to kill the largess of the urban-renewal folks was to talk about their work openly, expose how the money flowed into the city in brackish streams. Their reticence was an opportunity for O’Toole’s opponents, who caught wind of the plans to close the pool and chastised the mayor in the Courier as a racist. The city councilor who called Eddie O’Toole out knew all this, but he also planned to run for mayor in the next election.