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Sunday, Feb. 15, 2015, Seattle
Mac Davis wasn’t sure when his house had become Shorty Guillermo’s second home, but he couldn’t remember the last Sunday evening that Shorty wasn’t there. He decided he liked it. Angie Wilson, who shared the house with him, seemed to think it was perfectly normal. And since Mac knew he had no idea what normal looked like, he took her word for it.
Mac and Angie had been living together for nearly four months. He was in the process of buying the house he’d grown up in from his aunt — a bungalow on Queen Anne. Well, the house he’d lived in as a teenager. Before that, his memory was a blur of rundown apartments and the backseats of large American-made cars with his mother, followed by a two-year stint with his uncle in Vallejo.
Actually, he gave Uncle Michael kudos for taking him in. Michael and Lindy had split up by then, and he had custody of their son, Toby, who was two years older than Mac. His uncle was Black, and Toby looked more like him than his White mother. Mac was White, at least his mother thought so — she wasn’t sure.
His mother had sent him to his uncle when he threatened one of her boyfriends with a knife. Mac had been 13 at the time.
The two teens were wild and getting deeper into gangs, so they were sent north to Seattle to live with Lindy, Toby’s mother. But they found Seattle easy pickings — right up to the day they got busted in a car they’d stolen. Toby, just 18, went to prison. Mac got probation, and the Marines.
Mac wasn’t sure what sent him down that memory lane. He looked around the house that was now technically his with its wood floors and trim. Home, he thought. Then he looked at Angie who was sprawled on the couch next to him. Family. And didn’t that thought scare him? Not as much as it had four months ago, but still. He was in a committed relationship and living with a woman for the first time — at age 30. He thought he might be in love with her. He wasn’t sure what that even looked like. He shied away from that line of thinking too.
And in some weird way, the slightly built Filipino-Mexican American man seated in an armchair across from them was family too. Shorty had run with him and his cousin back in the day. He’d been fortunate the night they got busted — he had been at some mandatory family dinner. Shorty went on to college, got a degree in math and learned that his gift for computers and data could earn him a lot of money.
Enough money that he could afford to be a teacher. He taught math in Bellevue, and often joked he was the only teacher who could actually afford to live in the district. And if you gave him the opening, he’d tell you how that was symptomatic of the flaws in American public schools.
He wasn’t wrong, Mac thought. But Mac wasn’t an education reporter. He covered cops — and wasn’t that a hoot? But the cop beat was generating all the stories he could handle and then some. He didn’t need another beat on top of it, even though he conceded that something should be done about schools. And Shorty Guillermo might be someone who could fix them — if he was willing. Right now, he looked wild-eyed at anyone who suggested that. And there were those who had, including Mac’s own boss at the Seattle Examiner.
Shorty had the television on for the evening news. Mac rarely watched it. He’d get all the news he wanted when he went to work in the morning at the Examiner. So watching the news just pissed him off. Either they got it wrong, and he fumed, or they got it first, and he was pissed. But Shorty was a news junkie.
Shorty was probably the smartest person he knew, and Mac knew some incredibly bright people. In fact most of the people he called friends were scary smart. Which made sense — Mac didn’t suffer fools.
Period.
“What the hell?” Shorty exclaimed.
Mac looked over at the television and frowned. “I hate television,” he complained. “Can’t back it up and take another look at it.”
“Shut up,” Shorty said. “I’ll find it for you later.”
Mac’s phone beeped with incoming texts:
What are you doing in Mexico?
Is that you on TV?
Mac? Where are you?
PBS was airing some documentary on the drug wars in Mexico and a small town that had stood up to them. The women of the town met secretly, then threw out the cartel, the police and the elected officials, and declared themselves an autonomous zone.
It was an interesting story, Mac conceded. But that last clip? Of a young man running through some kind of war zone? The camera caught his face. Mac’s face. Younger, Mac thought, but not by much.
“Mac?” Angie said. “If you weren’t sitting here with me, I’d think that’s you.”
Mac looked at his phone: 24 missed messages. “Apparently, you aren’t the only one, babe.”
The three of them watched the rest of the documentary in silence. The Shorty pulled his laptop out of his bag on the floor next to him — and didn’t that tell you all you needed to know about the man? Mac was amused. Who else would bring their laptop over to friends’ house on a Sunday evening?
But soon Shorty had his computer display linked up with the television screen, and he was replaying the clip they’d just seen. He froze the frame when it came to the man running out of a building. The three of them looked at it silently.
It had been B roll, a background for the narrating reporter who hadn’t been speaking to the scene itself. So who was he? What was he doing? Where was that? None of the basic questions any good journalist ought to include were missing.
Another reason Mac didn’t like television news. Visuals triumphed over information. He understood why — even newspaper reporters were doing short videos and photographs. But he also wrote a story with the information in it.
And he was trying to distract himself, he thought, even as he stared at the young man. Holy shit, it was like looking in a mirror.
The man on the screen was probably a couple of years younger. He had Mac’s dark hair, but it looked like he had brown eyes instead of Mac’s gray. Well, that figured — everyone said Mac got his gray eyes from his mother’s father. The man on the screen was built like Mac, maybe a little shorter, and a little slimmer. Hard to tell without someone next to him for comparison. Mac was 6-foot-2, weighed 200. He’d peg the guy at 6-foot maybe 175.
But if someone had shown him the clip without context, Mac would have glanced at it and wondered how a clip of himself from his Marine days had surfaced. A younger Mac racing out of a burning building in some war-torn country? Yup. A bit of scrutiny would have told him it wasn’t him — no camouflage, no helmet. The rifle wasn’t one he’d ever carried. The guy was older than Mac had been in his Marine days. So the details were all wrong. But overall? Yeah. It could have been him.
Mac studied the clip. Mac didn’t know who his father was. It had always bugged him. His mother had just shrugged. “So many men, so little time,” she’d joked when he asked as a kid. And who the hell thinks that’s the answer you give a 7-year-old?
But Sali Davis didn’t know who he had been. She’d been living with Lindy and Michael, who were at the University of Washington. Her parents had thrown up their hands with her. And she’d found college life to her liking. Probably none of Lindy and Michael’s friends knew she was 16.
His Aunt Lindy thought his father might be a Mexican graduate student. “Sometimes I can see him in you,” she’d told him once. “But really? You look like your grandfather — my father.”
Most people thought Mac was Black, just light-skinned. Came from those two years with Uncle Michael, followed by another few years running the streets with Toby. It was more about mannerisms and language than looks, though. In the Marines, Black men thought he was Black, and Latinos thought he was Latino — until he said something in Spanish and made them all wince.
“No Latino should speak Spanish that badly,” one man had said. “Best you continue to claim White.”
And that had been the real problem, Mac thought. Everywhere you turned, someone wanted you to fill out a form that asked what race were you? Sometimes he put White, because his mother certainly was. Sometimes other, because no one really believed him when he said he was White. Which kind of pissed him off. Couldn’t White include people like him?
And damn it, even more than wanting to know who his father had been, he wanted to know what he was. What heritage did he have? If for no other reason than to be able to check the damn boxes on the census form.
He understood why the question existed. Government was doing its best to make sure people were treated equally. But it was damned hard on people like him who didn’t know. Or the 7 percent of the people in the Northwest who claimed mixed heritage — like Shorty, for that matter, with his Filipino father and Mexican mother.
But this was the first clue that Lindy might be right. That his father had been a Mexican national who went back to Mexico and abandoned a pregnant teenager. Lindy said she didn’t think he would have known.
And Mac accepted that, although he had a hard time with the whole concept, actually. He’d never had unprotected sex. Even if the woman said she was on the pill, he wore a condom. Of course he did. He wasn’t going to leave a kid behind like his father had done. And it wasn’t safe. Too many diseases out there.
But Lindy said those years had been different. The fear AIDS had instilled didn’t exist yet, although it wasn’t far away. But birth control was available to women for the asking; abortion was legal. It had truly been a very brief period of free love, she said.
Maybe you had to be there, Mac thought, because it sounded unbelievably irresponsible to him. And God knows he had been irresponsible as a Marine. But not about that. Even during blackout drunken sex, he had taken precautions.
“Did you get the results back from ancestry.com?” Mac asked abruptly, still staring at the young man on the screen. The Michoacán? Guanajuato? He thought that was where the story had been from. To be honest he hadn’t been paying attention.
“Yeah,” Shorty said slowly. “Wasn’t sure you were really interested.”
About two weeks ago, Shorty had shown up with test kits for ancestry.com. Take a swab, send it in, and they would match your DNA. You could see your heritage. See if anyone in the database was related to you. Shorty had said he was tired of Mac’s grouchy response of “Not even my mother knows for sure.”
Mac had always thought that line was pretty funny. Of course, Shorty had heard it more than once.
“And?” Mac said impatiently. Because Shorty was right. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be a part of the ancestry.com database. Wasn’t sure he wanted matches with relatives he didn’t know.
“And I had to do some research on what the results meant, because, well,” Shorty said. He took a breath and started over. “Your ancestry is about 50 percent British Isles — your mom, right? The other is 30 percent Iberian Spain, and 20 percent Native American — typical of someone from Mexico, apparently. My Mom has a similar mix, although she’s from Oaxaca and you’re apparently from the Michoacán.”
“Where this clip probably came from,” Mac said flatly.
Shorty nodded.
“So I probably have a half-brother there.”
Shorty shrugged. “Ancestry.com will tell you if you have matches in the system, and you do — we all do.”
Mac looked at him for a moment. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Shorty chewed on his lip. “There was a blocked relation on yours,” he said slowly. “Someone who took the test and won’t let it be shared. I asked around. That’s unusual. I mean that’s the whole point right? To find relatives, figure out your family tree, that sort of thing.”
Mac considered that.
“And Mac?” Shorty said, and he was anxious about whatever he was about to say. Mac focused on him. “You were already in the system, and so was your mother. You must have been pretty young... sometime around 1990. You would have been what? Six? Ancestry.com started in the mid-‘80s.”
Mac frowned as he thought that over. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Mom wanted to prove my paternity.”
Shorty nodded. “I’d guess so. And whoever she thought your father was took the test, and then blocked the results. So he knows about you — and your mother must have known who he was if he didn’t block it right away.”
Mac could feel his muscles hunch as if to ward off a physical blow. Too bad his hindbrain couldn’t tell the difference between physical blows and emotional ones.
Angie rubbed his shoulders, and he forced himself to relax those muscles. He smiled at her, a bit twisted, but a smile. “Time to track my mother down and get some answers?”
She shrugged. “If you really want them.”
Good point. He rotated his shoulders, releasing the tension in them. He looked back at the film clip still frozen on the TV screen. A brother? And what the hell was he into? Did he really want to know?
He wouldn’t be a reporter if he wasn’t curious. And if that clip didn’t provoke his curiosity, he needed to find a new line of work.
“You’re right,” he said, smiling at her. “I need to think this through. It’s a bit like Pandora’s Box. And once I open it, there’s no going back.”
She nodded. She gestured with her head to the film clip. “Because I don’t think he’s supposed to be representative of the good guys, Mac. I think he’s one of the bad guys.”
He looked at her, then back to the screen. He looked at Shorty. “Better send me the results,” he said. “I assume I have an ancestry.com account now?” Mac relied on Shorty for all of his computing and online needs.
Shorty nodded. He was watching Mac carefully, and Mac wasn’t sure why.
“And the link to that documentary,” Mac added.
“You’re going to investigate?” Shorty asked.
“I’m not sure,” Mac said. “I always thought I wanted to know. But that?” and he gestured toward the TV, “I wasn’t expecting that. A man with another family? And I show up unannounced? And if he’s drug cartel? No, maybe I don’t want to know. Or at least, I don’t want to know more than I do right now.”
“I’ll do a bit more research,” Shorty said, vaguely.
Mac nodded. Shorty had done research for him in the past. He was one of the best in the business.
Shorty got up and packed up his computer. “I’ll send you the ancestry stuff,” he promised as he left.
Mac sat on the couch, holding Angie. Shit, he thought. My mother is schizophrenic and my dad is in a drug cartel? Well, that’s a family to write home about.
Angie hugged him. “You aren’t your parents, Mac,” she said. “Your aunt and uncle have as much to do with raising you as your mother did. You are who you are, Mac Davis.”
He kissed her, and then tugged her upstairs to their bedroom.
I am who I am, he thought. Whoever the hell that is.
Mac’s shift as a cop reporter started early. He walked into the newsroom precisely at 6 a.m.
“So not in Mexico, I see,” his boss, Janet Andrews, said, barely looking away from her screen.
It was 2 hours to deadline.
Mac grunted. “You and three dozen other people seem to think that’s funny,” he said sourly.
Janet grinned. “It is, kind of,” she said. “But you must have a lot of news junkies in your circle if they even saw that clip. Let’s face it, a story about a village in Mexico throwing out the cops and the drug cartel isn’t exactly headlines — they played it more for human interest. What do those crazy Mexican ladies think they’re doing? Taking on a drug cartel?”
Mac thought some of his oldest friends probably had more interest in drugs than Mexican politics, but he didn’t say that. Janet knew about his past, but there were people present in the newsroom who didn’t.
Probably, they didn’t. Angie said that he was the center of more gossip than he realized.
He sat down at his desk and called up the queue of police press releases to see what had happened over the weekend — to see what the police wanted to tell the media about anyway. He then pulled out the list of telephone numbers for the dispatchers, public information officers, and other sources that he called each day. All the stories he collected, most of them no longer than a couple of paragraphs, would be written up for the police blotter, a page 2 column of all those actions.
Of course, the truly interesting stories weren’t there. Many stories weren’t there, really, and it was bugging Mac more and more. The accountant who embezzled $1 million from his employer? It wasn’t there. But the guy who held up a 7-Eleven for $50 and some change? That was.
But deadline wasn’t the time to think about that. He wrote quickly and accurately, then shipped the copy over to Janet for editing. Libel-suit hour, she called it. Stories that could impact someone’s reputation, written on deadline, with little time for fact checking? A libel suit waiting to happen.
But then guys who held up 7-Eleven’s didn’t have attorneys to file libel suits. Not like the accountant would.
Mac’s focus on deadline was legendary. He didn’t hear any of the talk going on around him. He didn’t hear the phones ringing. He did hear his own cell phone beep that he had an incoming text, but he ignored that too. He was on deadline, God damn it, and everyone and everything else would have to wait.
Mac had his desk phone tucked under his left ear and was typing the stories directly into his computer. A bit of clean up, and on to the next call. The next bit of human misery. A man who was firing shots in a well-to-do neighborhood. Someone who was drunk and disorderly. A break-in at a gun shop in Marysville.
Mac stopped at that one. “What’s the address?” he asked and jotted it down. Craig Anderson's address. He frowned. Why would someone break into there? Craig had put the shop up for sale, and left town. He’d made too many enemies last fall when the cops had come after Mac and his friends. Craig had been trapped on the cops’ side and tried to work both sides just to stay alive. And as Craig and Mac both knew, that was a fast way to end up with a whole lot of people mad at you.
Still, Craig’s attempt to do that had saved Mac’s life. He owed the man. He liked him, even, and there weren’t many on that list. They’d met on the story in the North Cascades, and Mac thought Craig was a good man to have at your back. He scowled at the address. Maybe he’d run up and take a look after work.
When 8 a.m. hit, it was over. There were still more calls that could be made. And maybe he or his counterpart on the evening shift would get to them. If not, there was tomorrow’s deadline time, and he’d grab them then.
“Let’s meet,” Janet said. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman in her early 40s, with messy brown hair and blue eyes. You could tell how harried deadline was by how messy her hair got. Today hadn’t been too bad. Her hair was still in a braid. Mostly.
Mac nodded and grabbed his backpack. Meeting usually involved coffee across the street rather than the conference room. And these days it often involved others on the safety team — a mix of reporters who had come together last fall on that big story and found that working together to cover crime from arrest through the courts actually made sense. And now, four months later, Mac felt good about it. Fewer stories fell through the cracks. They knew when criminal charges went to court — and when they didn’t. They had better data analysis thanks to a reporter named Mike Brewster.
Mac and Janet had gotten in the habit of going for coffee after deadline a long time ago. It just seemed natural to include the rest of the team in those meetings. Not that Mac actually drank coffee. He preferred Mountain Dew, although of late he’d gotten attached to iced tea. The coffee shop seemed to think that was a more acceptable drink; they did stock his Mountain Dew rather than lose Janet as a customer. Mac was under no illusion about who they cared about. They all but sniffed when they had to serve him his Mountain Dew. It made him snicker.
He remembered then his phone going off, and he pulled it out to take a look. The number wasn’t one he recognized. He clicked on the text.
Toby? What was his cousin doing sending him a text? From a burner phone? He grimaced. This wasn’t going to be good news.
He talked to Toby maybe once or twice a year — which was more than Toby talked to his mother. He didn’t approve of his mother coming out as a lesbian, and Lindy disapproved of her son ‘the drug lord’ as she called him. So Mac dutifully passed information back and forth. Mac thought they both should get over it. Toby had a wife and two daughters who Lindy had never met, and that was sad. They had too little family as it was to be ignoring parts of it.
The text read: In trouble. My fault, I trusted a cop.
Mac snorted.
I can take care of it, but I need you to take care of Keisha and the girls. They’re vulnerable. Too many players in this game, and they’d make good hostages. Can you come? I’m calling in all the favors on this one, cuz.
Mac frowned and exhaled. He owed Toby. Owed him for a lot of things, really. But the night they got busted in a stolen car, Toby took the blame. He’d been over 18, and he’d gone to prison for it — two years. He claimed Mac didn’t know it was stolen. No one actually believed that, but Mac had been just shy of 17, and it gave the judge the opportunity to put him on probation instead of sending him to juvie. Finish high school, enlist, and his record would be expunged, the judge said. And so four months later, Mac had become a Marine.
Mac always assumed that it had more to do with Mac appearing to be a White kid, and Toby a Black man, than it had to do with Mac’s status as a youthful offender. And the more he’d learned over this last year about all the players in that bust, the more he was sure of it.
But two years in prison had changed Toby from a wild kid who was running hot cars from Seattle to Oakland more for the exhilaration of it than for the money to a calculating man with the connections to set himself up as a drug dealer in Vallejo, California, when he got out.
Mac, on the other hand, had been doing it for the money. Growing up as poor as he had, having a cash stash mattered. He was never going to drink powdered milk again. And he’d been as involved in the car theft ring as Toby, no matter what Toby told the judge.
Toby wasn’t some drug dealer like you saw in movies, selling drugs on the street corner. No, he looked like a businessman. Hell, he was a businessman, Mac conceded. A very successful one. He lived in a gorgeous house in a posh neighborhood with a view of the harbor, an outdoor swimming pool, and an indoor gym to die for. Toby had gotten married while Mac was in the Marines — so maybe nine years ago? Keisha was a pretty woman, who loved Toby, and was a good mother to the two girls, Belinda and Sarah. Mac liked her — what was there not to like? And the two kids were cute — the oldest was named after Lindy, whose real name was Belinda, and the younger one after Keisha’s mother, Sarah. Belinda was 8 now, he thought, and Sarah was 5? Sarah had been just a baby when he’d last been down there, so he thought that was about right.
No, Toby was a broker. He had connections in Mexico — and Mac thought briefly of the documentary last night — and he had connections in the City. Most of his clients were white-collar workers in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. After all, as Toby often joked, they had money. Why try to sell product to the poor on a street corner, when you could sell to a banker with money to spare?
Back in Mac’s college days, Toby had occasionally hired him for a job — guard jobs for the most part. He didn’t like to think about the jobs that had gone beyond that, but there had been a few. The money had been good, and college wasn’t cheap. He’d seen more of Toby back then. But he knew if he kept taking those jobs one day he’d move down there and become Toby’s number two man.
And he would never get back out of it.
Toby hadn’t, had he? All that money, and at the end of the day, he was still a drug dealer.
Mac didn’t want that. Being in the Marines had taught him a few things — mostly the hard way. So, he got his degree, told Toby no more jobs, and came to work for the Examiner. Toby hadn’t been happy about it. And things had gotten strained during the last few years.
Mac grimaced and re-read the text.
He glanced over at Janet’s desk; she was already gone. He shouldered his backpack and headed out the door to the parking garage, and down to the street. He had to talk to Janet about needing some time off.
He’d never taken a vacation since he started working here. It would be three years come June. He had to have some paid leave accumulated, right?
He sent back a text to Toby: On my way.
There was no response. Not even a thumbs up.