“The thing is,” I said, scanning the front page as I wandered back into the kitchen, “if no one heard those shots being fired at the mall last night, and there’s no police report, there’s no sense writing anything about it now. In fact, if I did, it would give things away to whoever those guys in the Annihilator are. Assuming, of course, that they subscribe to The Metropolitan. They’d know who, exactly, had been watching them, and then they’d never come back.”
“Wouldn’t that be a good thing?” Sarah asked.
“Now, that’s my wife talking, not my editor. Of course we want them to come back. We want this story to have some sort of ending, a resolution.”
“Here’s your coffee,” she said, handing me a mug. “I’ll talk to Magnuson. This is the sort of thing you have to let the managing editor know about. If a member of his newsroom is engaging in shootouts, even if he’s not the one actually pulling the trigger, well, he might want to have some input. I think he likes his reporters to maintain some distance.”
“Magnuson,” I said, shaking my head. Bertrand Magnuson, a fixture in the newsroom for thirty years, a veteran of every major world combat and scandal through the sixties and seventies, was a fierce, take-no-prisoners kind of editor. He had these black eyes that you could almost feel boring right through you. “So you’ll talk to him on my behalf?”
Sarah glared. “If Magnuson wants to talk to you, he won’t settle for talking to anyone else, believe me.”
I sat down at the kitchen table, leafed through the first section of The Metropolitan, and my eyes landed on a car ad. “Oh. Nearly forgot.” I told her Lawrence and I still intended to attend a government auction later in the day where it might be possible to pick up a car for a song. He was going to pick me up from the house before lunch.
“We had this discussion yesterday,” Sarah said, putting in some toast. “We don’t have money for a new car. And I don’t want us to throw money away on some old clunker. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“If we absolutely had to get one, what could we afford?”
“I don’t know. Seven, eight thousand, maybe? But there’s no point in even having this conversation.”
Paul, strolling into the kitchen, had evidently heard at least some of what we’d been talking about. “A government auction?” he said. “I’ve heard you can get cars for like nothing at those. Get a Beemer.”
Paul had his learner’s permit. I didn’t even want to think of the damage he could do to an expensive German sports car. “And get a standard. Only pussies drive automatics.”
I didn’t see any need to get dragged into a debate over transmissions for a car that I was not even going to buy. I put my nose back into the paper, my eye catching a headline next to the car ad. It was an Associated Press item, out of California, about a teenage boy who’d shot several of his classmates, supposedly his friends, at a neighborhood park.
“Color’s not important,” Paul said. “Unless it’s like some bright yellow or something, but I don’t think BMW makes cars in bright yellow. Their little convertibles, maybe, but not the 5 series or 3 series. You get something too bright, the cops are just going to pull you over all the time for speeding tickets. If they’re auctioning off cars that belonged to drug dealers, there should be lots of Beemers. Drug dealers love Beemers.”
It said in the story that this boy, who was seventeen, spent most of his time parked in front of a computer in his bedroom, hacking into places he shouldn’t be sticking his nose into, checking out websites that told you how to make your own bomb, how to kill people with nothing but a pencil, that kind of thing.
“We’re not getting a Beemer,” Sarah said. “We’re not even getting a car. We can’t afford another car.”
“What if Dad’s last book gets made into a movie?” Paul asked.
Sarah made a dismissive noise. “Your father’s book did not do well enough to get made into a movie, Paul.”
I glanced up from my paper, decided to let it go. Angie wandered into the kitchen, dressed, but her hair wrapped in a towel.
“What’s this about a car?” she asked.
Paul brought her up to speed.
“Get a Hummer,” Angie advised. In my head, I could see the headlights of the Annihilator, like eyes on a dragon, filling the Buick with cold, cold light.
“If there’s one thing I won’t be getting, ever,” I said, “it’s a Hummer, or a Suburban, or an Annihilator. They run over other people’s cars, pollute the atmosphere, get a mile to the gallon, you can’t see around the damn things, they—”
“Okay, Dad, we hear ya,” said Paul. “SUVs, bad. Little cars, good.”
According to the AP story, this boy in California was pretty reclusive. A loner. Obsessed with counterculture, not particularly good at making friends. Liked to take pictures of people without their knowing it, post them on a website. He’d had a crush on some girl, but she’d rebuffed him, and something snapped. He finds his dad’s revolver in a drawer, takes it to the park one night where he knew his classmates went to make out, drink underage, and smoke a few joints, and shoots three kids from his class.