Doug Perry was out of breath and promising himself he would never again eat bear claws for breakfast as he trotted across the parking garage and up to the street.
The ambulance was still there. Amy was sitting upright on a gurney in back, one paramedic taking her blood pressure, another writing something on a clipboard. She looked ghastly. One side of her face was crooked and stained by a garish bruise the color of sunset. Her glasses were askew. She was holding a cold pack to her head.
Doug was in shirtsleeves and his armpits were dark with sweat from the unaccustomed exertion. At the sight of Amy, he shouldered his way through the crowd of tourists, shoppers, and office workers who had stopped to see the spectacle. Amy’s eyes were foggy. They sharpened all at once when she saw him.
“Yag,” she said, and Doug guessed that this was supposed to be his name.
“Amy?” he said. “What the hell?”
“Yag, e ah le ma fuh efo…” It was no use. Her jaw would not properly close and gibberish was the only language she could speak. Consternation pinched her features. But Amy was not to be defeated. She snatched the pen from the paramedic with the clipboard and mimed writing until, with a grimace of exasperation, he handed her a piece of paper.
Amy wrote on it with great concentration, wincing occasionally from pain. When she was done, she handed the paper to Doug, returned the paramedic’s pen, and sagged a little as if fatigued. Doug studied the paper. In the margins of a memo on the cleaning and maintaining of emergency rigs, she had written in a spidery hand: This wasn’t random! The guy who was here before, he hit me. He took the disk back. Ask Jalil. He saw.
Jalil. She had to mean the big, black kid who worked day security. That was his name, wasn’t it? Something Arabic, at least. But what was this about a disk? And a guy from before? Doug looked the questions at her. She nodded emphatically, brushed at the air as if shooing him off.
He turned to go, thought better of it and turned back. “I’ll meet you at the hospital,” he said. “I’ll call your husband. Where’s he work?”
“E ou a houn,” she said.
It took him a moment. “Out of town?” he finally guessed.
She nodded. Then the pain winched her eyes shut.
Again, Doug turned to go. Again, he thought better of it. She had kids, didn’t she? He wasn’t sure, but he seemed to remember two little ones capering after her last year at the holiday gathering that had once, in a less politically correct era, been called a Christmas party.
“What about your kids? You want us to see to them?”
“Wih a si-ah.”
Doug whispered the strange sounds in his mind until he understood them. “With your sister. Okay, got it. I’m sure we have her number. We’ll call and let her know.”
The paramedic with the clipboard interrupted. “Okay, mister, we got to roll.”
“Where are you taking her?”
“Mercy,” said the paramedic as they pushed the gurney into the wagon. Doug heard it lock into place.
One paramedic went around to the driver’s side door. The second climbed in back with Amy. He closed one side of the rig and was reaching for the other when Amy called out.
“Ock ou Ya-il!” Doug heard her command.
Talk to Jalil.
“I will,” he called. But the door had already slammed shut.
Siren howling, the ambulance pulled away from the curb and out into Michigan Avenue traffic. Doug wheeled around to head back into the building and ran into a phalanx of Post employees pouring out through the glass doors of the elevator lobby. Like him, they had heard something was going on right at the entrance to their garage. Denis was leading the way.
“What’s this I hear about a mugging?” he said. “Is it true?”
Doug didn’t answer immediately. He lifted both hands, index fingers wagging toward the elevators. “Everybody back to work,” he ordered. “There’s nothing to see out there. Amy Landingham was jumped here in the garage, but she’s going to be fine. The paramedics have already taken her away.”
A few of them—the younger ones, mostly—stopped and went back, their questions answered. The rest paused, listened, then walked past him to see for themselves. Doug shook his head. The same thing that made some people good reporters made them absolutely lousy at following directions.
“Amy was mugged?” Lassiter was at his elbow.
Doug shook his head. “No,” he said. “She was attacked, not mugged. She—”
And then he stopped, stunned by what he saw. Lassiter stared at him, first quizzical, then impatient. “Yeah?” he said. “Go on.”
“Gun,” said Doug.
“What?”
Doug pointed to where a black Luger lay on the concrete next to the right, rear tire of somebody’s car. “Gun,” he said again.
Lassiter looked where Denis was pointing. He started when he saw it. “Holy shit,” he said. “You figure the guy who attacked Amy dropped it?”
Doug found himself wondering—and not for the first time—how it was that this guy was his boss instead of the other way around. “That’d be my guess,” he said. “Yeah.
A low whistle. “Holy hell. What should we do?”
“Call Mendoza. Have him seal the garage and put a couple of his guys down here to make sure nobody touches the gun. Get a photographer down to get pictures. Call the cops.”
It struck Doug how bizarre it was that he was giving orders to Lassiter this way. But Lassiter didn’t seem to notice. His nod was thoughtful. “Yeah,” he said, “those sound like good ideas. I’ll call Mendoza.”
“Good,” said Doug, moving away. “You’ll want to keep an eye on things til his men get here to make sure nobody messes with that thing. This is a crime scene now.” Several of the reporters were now staring at the gun and taking pictures with their smartphones.
“Where are you going?” asked Lassiter.
“Going to talk to the kid in the lobby.”
“What for?”
Doug stopped. “Amy said it wasn’t just a random mugging. She knew the guy—or at least she’d seen him before. He came through here earlier today. She told me the kid in the lobby saw him, too.”
Lassiter stared at him for a beat, taking all this in. Then he said, “First Malcolm disappears, now this. What the hell is going on here?”
“That’s what I want to know.” Doug strode off through a second, late-arriving group of reporters, reached the elevator, and punched the button for the main lobby. Behind him, he heard Lassiter telling people to step back.
Doug couldn’t make sense of it. Someone coming after Malcolm at least made some kind of sense. He wrote an opinion column, after all. Opinions piss people off. But Amy? She was a good-natured young reporter who, as far as he knew, didn’t have an enemy in the world—unless you counted that married alderman who used campaign funds to take his boyfriend on a ski trip to Aspen. When he wouldn’t give her an interview, Amy had ambushed him in a public meeting and questioned him so relentlessly he broke down crying at the podium.
Other than that, who would wish ill on Amy Landingham? Heck, who, beyond the most assiduous newspaper junkies, even knew her name?
Could it be a coincidence, her getting attacked the same day Malcolm went missing?
It could be, he supposed, but the idea just didn’t feel right. No, somehow, all of this was connected. He just didn’t know how. Doug felt as if he were trying to solve some bizarre puzzle to which he held a few random pieces, but had no idea what the finished product was supposed to be.
The elevator opened on the lobby. The security guy was just sending off an angry subscriber with a replacement copy of that day’s paper. He saw Doug coming. “What’s going on?” he asked. “I heard them say somebody got mugged down in the garage?”
Instead of answering, Doug nodded toward the retreating customer. “Been like that all day?” he asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “All day. So what’s happening in the garage?”
“You’re Jalil, right?”
“Yeah.”
Doug had folded and creased the memo from the paramedics. Now he unfolded it and placed it beneath the big man’s eyes. “A few minutes ago, some guy coldcocked Amy Landingham down in the garage.”
Jalil looked up from the paper, eyes rounded by distress. “Amy? But she ain’t big as a minute. Was she hurt?”
“They’re taking her to the hospital,” said Doug, “but I think she’ll be all right. She looked all right, at least, more or less.”
“So what’s this I’m lookin’ at? Some kind of paramedics memo?”
“No. Amy wrote that note out for me, the one right there in the margins. She said you would know what it means.”
Jalil read. Then the line of his jaw stiffened and something pulsed in his temple. “I’ll be damned,” he said.
“Yeah?”
Jalil looked up. “Yeah,” he said. “I know who she’s talking about. Came here asking to see Malcolm Toussaint’s editor. Said he had something important for him. Some computer disk. I knew there was something hinky about that guy. I knew it.”
“He was angry about Toussaint’s column?”
Jalil shook his head. “Actually, he didn’t even mention it. I mean, we’ve had a lot of folks through these doors today so pissed off they could spit. But that didn’t seem to be where he was comin’ from. He just kept demanding to see Toussaint’s boss, and when I explained to him that Mr. Toussaint didn’t work here anymore and his boss didn’t, either, that seemed to throw him.”
“When was this?”
“Couple hours ago, I guess.”
“Can you show me?”
He nodded and beckoned Doug to join him behind the security desk. There he had a console with five screens, one showing the parking elevator downstairs, one showing the front of the building, one showing the newsroom upstairs, two watching the lobby from different angles. None, Doug noted, with a view of the garage where Amy was assaulted. “We need more cameras,” he told Jalil.
Jalil nodded. “Yeah,” he said, tapping the keyboard. “I told Mendoza the same thing. He said no way that happens. Budget cutbacks.”
There was weariness in Doug’s sigh. “Yeah,” he said. “Lot of that in this business lately. You want my advice, kid?”
When Jalil glanced up, Doug told him, “Keep your eyes open for another job opportunity. Grab it if it comes.”
The younger man grinned. “All due respect, sir, I ain’t dependin’ on this place to take care of me forever. I’m in school. Got one more semester til I get my degree in video game design.”
“Video game design? That’s a thing now? You can get a degree in that?”
“Oh, hell yeah,” said Jalil, still grinning. “That’s what I’m doing. I’m looking to start the next Rockstar Games.”
Doug did not know what that was. He felt old.
As he spoke, Jalil was fast-forwarding through images from a little more than two hours ago, a procession of people who darted up to the desk, spoke rapidly, gestured broadly, darted away. All at once, Jalil slowed the playback. “There he is,” he said.
Doug fumbled for the glasses he kept in his shirt pocket and leaned forward. He saw a thin man in his forties with nervous eyes and a bizarre hairstyle, buzz-cut on one side, thick on the other, chopped off just above the ear “He ought to stab his barber with his own scissors,” muttered Doug.
On the screen, he saw Jalil in the foreground, talking with some older lady, while the man waited his turn, reading headlines of old newspapers. There was something odd about it, almost as if he were making a show of being calm. But all you had to do was look at those jittery eyes and you knew it was only a show.
“He give a name?” asked Doug.
“No,” said Jalil.
On screen the old lady moved away from the desk and the man approached Jalil. “Okay,” said Jalil, poking one stubby finger toward the screen, “this is where he’s asking me about Mr. Toussaint’s editor and I’m telling him he doesn’t work here anymore, yadda yadda, he comes out of pocket with this DVD, says he has to get it to Mr. Carson, yadda yadda yadda, and then, boom.” Again, he pointed to the screen. Amy had entered the frame, pushing a cart full of Bob Carson’s belongings. “She tells him she’s going over that way and she’d be happy to give Bob the DVD. And he says yeah, but you can kind of tell he doesn’t really want to do it.”
Doug peered at the screen. You really could tell. The jittery eyes were dancing a buck and wing, the lips pursed in resignation, as the man handed the DVD to Amy.
“Can you burn copies of that?” Doug asked.
Jalil nodded. “Sure.”
“Make three. Cops are going to want one. Give one to Lassiter. And make one for me.”
“Machine’s slow,” Jalil warned him. “And it can only make one at a time.”
“Fine,” said Doug, pulling a cellphone out of his front pocket. “Make mine first.”
“I’ll tell you one thing about this guy,” said Jalil. He was placing a DVD in the open bay of a dubbing machine.
“What’s that?” Doug was scrolling through the contacts list on his phone, looing for his own office number.
“He didn’t like me very much.”
Doug looked up. “How do you mean?”
“I mean he didn’t like me.”
“Did the two of you have words?”
“No,” said Jalil, “it wasn’t a personal thing. It was a race thing. He didn’t like having to deal with a black man.”
Doug looked down into the young man’s eyes. They were straightforward and clear. “How did you know this? Was there something he said? Something he did?”
Jalil gave him a little smile and to Doug’s surprise, he read pity in it. “No, sir,” said the security man. “But you can just tell.”
Doug did not bother to mask his skepticism. “You can tell.”
Still those straightforward eyes. “Yes, sir. Usually, you can.”
“Okay,” said Doug, returning to his cellphone directory. “Thanks.”
He was dubious. In his experience, black people—Malcolm included—often cited race to explain stuff race had nothing to do with. It was a default position for some of them. Even an excuse.
He called his office, got his secretary, and gave her terse instructions. Get his suit coat and his laptop computer and bring them both to the lobby. Call Amy Landingham’s sister and tell her what had happened and where she was.
As he spoke, Hector Mendoza and two of his men—one was a woman, actually—came through the turnstiles without a word and strode to the parking garage elevators. Jalil was directing a customer to the classified advertising desk. Doug glanced at the progress bar on the CD burner. Only 65 percent. Jalil was right. The thing really was slow.
On a whim, Doug opened his phone again. He touched Bob’s name on the screen. Granted, Bob no longer worked here—Doug still couldn’t believe it, even though he had known it would happen—but he still ought to know what was going on. Especially since the guy who slugged Amy had been looking for him. What if he was still after him? Besides, thought Doug, he wouldn’t mind hearing the guy’s voice, just to make sure he was okay.
“Hello?” said Bob.
“Bob, hey, it’s Doug Perry. Listen, I thought you ought—”
“I can’t talk right now.”
“No, listen, I just need to tell you…Hello? Hello?”
Doug stared at the phone as if it had done him wrong. Surely the call had just been dropped. Surely, the sonofabitch didn’t just hang up on him.
Doug touched Bob’s name on the screen again. The call went straight to voicemail. Doug swore softly in disbelief. The sonofabitch had, indeed, hung up on him.
As he pocketed his phone, his secretary came through the turnstiles with the items he had requested. Peggy Toyama was a thin woman of Japanese heritage with half-moon reading glasses and a matronly dignity. Doug thought she must have been a knockout in her day.
She held his coat for him as he shrugged into it. “You tell Amy to feel better soon,” she said. Amy and Peggy were great friends.
“I will,” Doug said. She handed him his briefcase.
“I can’t believe somebody hurt that sweet little girl,” she said.
“It’s been a crazy day,” he said, “and it’s not even 1:00 yet. Don’t forget to call her family.”
The elevator from the garage opened. Lassiter came through. “Police just arrived. Mendoza’s got it covered,” he said. Then he noticed the suit coat and briefcase.
“You’re leaving?”
“Going to the hospital.”
“I understand you want to check in on her and that’s fine. But we’ve still got a paper to put out. Heck, we’ve got to get an opinion page together—without an opinion page editor.”
Doug spoke more sharply than he’d intended. “Yeah, well maybe you and Lydia should have thought of that before you sacked the opinion page editor we had.”
Lassiter’s eyes widened and Doug knew he’d gone too far, snapping at the executive editor in front of two of his subordinates. He had a moment to calculate the job prospects for a 61-year-old manager in a dying industry. They were not good. After a moment, he said, “I’m sorry, Denis. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just been a hard day. I’m worried about Amy and Malcolm. Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon.” Doug added this last, even though he wasn’t at all sure it was true.
Still, it had the desired effect. Lassiter gave a short, sharp nod, mollified for the moment. But Doug knew this wasn’t over. He was conscious of all their eyes on him—Doug’s, Peggy’s, even Jalil’s—as he moved to the elevator and stabbed the button, reminding himself again of his uncertain employability. And yes, this did concern him.
But damn it, something was going on here and he needed to know what it was. For all any of them knew, some lunatic was out there targeting Post employees. At the very least, it might well be news. And, budget cuts aside, that was still the name of this business, wasn’t it?
The elevator door opened. Doug got on and rode it down to the parking garage. A police detective was using a pencil to lift the Luger by its trigger guard. Doug walked to his car, a little canary-yellow coupe. He threw the briefcase on the front seat, cranked the engine, and drove out into the weak late autumn sunshine.
About a mile south on Michigan, he saw police barricades going up. It reminded him of what he had almost managed to forget. It was Election Day. They were sealing off streets, rerouting traffic. Tonight, Barack Obama was coming to Grant Park.