He nods slowly. “You must have tapped it a few times since then. Right? College? She come up to UVA for a weekend? D.C., maybe?”
Did he put Jet through this kind of grilling? If so, what did she answer? “Paul, goddamn it. This is pointless.”
At last he breaks eye contact and looks at the floor again. “Don’t mind me. I’ll get out.”
“You don’t have to. Tell me about Kevin,” I say, hoping to steer him to more solid ground.
Sure enough, when Paul looks up, five years have fallen from his face. “He’s awesome, man. Not just an athlete. He’s smart, like Adam was. You know?”
“Yeah, I know. I bet the girls love him, too.”
Paul’s eyes shine. “Oh, yeah. He makes me remember how good we had it back then.”
“That’s how it’s supposed to be.”
“Yeah. Only . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I shouldn’t say this. But he spends so much time with my dad that I don’t see him like I used to. This goddamn traveling baseball team? Max is obsessed with it. He bought the team an RV, and he drives it everywhere. And I see all those boys looking at him like some kind of hero—which you and I know he’s not.”
“No, he’s not.”
“But they don’t know that, see?” Paul’s eyes fill with the intensity of a man incapable of expressing some deeply felt conviction. “The problem is I think Kevin senses I’m not exactly stable right now. I feel like he gravitates to Max because he’s not sure I’m solid.”
What hell has this man been living in? How did Jet ever believe we could move to D.C. and take Kevin with us? Paul wouldn’t survive that. We might not survive it, either, if he chose to vent his anger before killing himself. In fact, he would likely kill us to remove the possibility that Kevin could be taken away—
“I’m gonna go,” he says, getting to his feet. “Sorry about ambushing you like this. I just didn’t know what to think.”
“You don’t have to worry, man. Not about me.”
I can’t believe I just spoke those words knowing that Max still possesses the video of Jet and me on the patio.
“Hey,” he says. “Just promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“I’m not gonna find out a week from now that this was all bullshit, right? That you just didn’t want to tell me the truth?”
I feel as though my body has turned to lead. Somewhere deep in my mind, far behind the frozen mask of my face, a rogue impulse whispers, Tell him. Tell him the truth. The whole truth. Tell him you love Jet, but that you love him, too. Because he knows that’s true—
“Goose?” he says hesitantly.
Even as I answer, I know a moment will come in the future when we face each other again and he’ll know that I lied today, as Jet lied—that we did not grant him the respect he deserves. That moment may mean death for us all.
“I promise, man. Now get out of here and go take a pill or something. You’ve got to sleep. You’re going to drive into a bridge abutment.”
He laughs again. “If I do, tell Byron Ellis it was sleep deprivation. Get me off the hook.”
“Goddamn it, Paul—”
“Just kidding.” Without warning he takes two steps and throws his arms around me, hugs me the way he did in Ramadi, after we made it out of the city and climbed out of the Mamba. He stinks of Scotch and old sweat, and though almost thirty years have passed, his smell is as familiar to me as my own, from a hundred dressing rooms, football fields, and basketball courts across Mississippi.
“Thanks, man,” he says. “Later.”
And then he’s gone.
An enervating wave of exhaustion rolls over me. Is this how actors feel after delivering an immortal performance? Jet must be sitting with her phone clenched in her hand, waiting to hear what happened. Before heading back to Ben’s office to get my burner phone, I unlock my file cabinet and remove the hard copy of the PDF file I received this morning. Then I carry it down to Ben’s office, where I nearly bump into him on his way to the newsroom.
“What’s this?” he asks when I hand him the stack of pages.
“Your first Pulitzer. The start of it, anyway. Don’t show it to anybody else. We’ll talk after you’ve read it.”
He holds my gaze long enough to be sure I’m serious, then walks back into his office and locks the papers in his desk. Opening the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, he takes out my burner phone and the Walther.
“Is there anything else you need to tell me?” he asks.
“You’re not in danger, so long as you don’t show anybody those papers.”
He nods slowly but doesn’t speak for a few seconds. Then he says, “You weren’t kidding about the Pulitzer, were you?”
“No. But when I won mine, it was mostly for getting shot at.”
Ben smiles. “I hope there’s an easier way. Just let me know if I need to start carrying.”
Before I can ask whether he owns a gun, Ben heads for the newsroom. Since he’s left me alone, I decide to call Jet from his office, where there’s little chance that Paul could walk in on me, should he decide to come back.
“What happened?” Jet asks as I close Ben’s door.
“He bought it. I felt so damned low lying to him. Paul’s in bad shape, Jet.”
She sighs like someone who just dodged a runaway bus. “And Buckman? Did you reach him?”
“No. That deal’s off the table.”
“What? Why?”
“Arthur Pine called me. They know about Max’s video. They must have hauled him into the bank and demanded he give them anything he might have on me.”
She’s silent for several seconds. “That’s not the choice I’d have expected Buckman to make. He’s relying solely on that video to keep you from publishing the cache? I figured he’d get the cache from you, then try to welsh on whatever promises he could.”
“Jet, that video will keep me quiet. Paul is clinging to sanity by his fingernails. I just lied to his face after he begged me not to. Max and the Poker Club own us now.”
“Maybe not.”
“What?”
“They don’t have the video themselves. Max would never give it to them. He might tell them about it, but he’s too smart to give them that power. If he did, they wouldn’t need him anymore.”
She’s probably right about that. “So we’re safe for the time being? Look, I have no idea what our next move is.”
“I do.”
Ben Tate walks back into his office and motions for me to keep talking. Then he writes six words on the notepad on his desk: Arthur Pine is in your office.
“Tell him I’ll be right there,” I say.
“What?” Jet asks.
Ben disappears.
“Arthur Pine is apparently waiting in my office.”
“That can’t be good.”
“I can handle Arthur. What did you mean? What are you planning to do?”
“I’m going to get that goddamn sex video from Max. I’m not going through another spousal interrogation like that.”
“You might get his cell phone, but you won’t know if you have all copies.”
“Maybe not, but if those passwords from Sally’s necklace open his phone, I’ll be flipping the script on him. We’ll own Max for a change. How does that sound?”
“Be careful, Jet.”
“Remember who you’re talking to. P.S., I love you.”
“You, too,” I say, but the words are automatic. The desperation I felt when Paul hugged me is too fresh to feel clean about intimacy with his wife.
When I walk back through my office door, I find Arthur Pine waiting in his five-thousand-dollar suit. Unctuous on his best day, Arthur stands smirking before me with his golfer’s tan and perfectly coiffed gray hair.
“Looks pretty busy around here,” he says. “I’m surprised.”
“We’re working some big stories, if you haven’t heard. What do you want, Arthur? You here to threaten me not to run any more photos of your poker pals?”
He gives me a patronizing smile. “No, I’m here to inform you that you won’t be printing any more stories of any kind.”
“What are you talking about?”
The lawyer opens his coat and removes a sheaf of papers covered with tiny type. “I’ve come to shut down the Watchman.”
Chapter 34