“Yeah, I guess I was. But when you talked to Angie, was she home?”
“Yeah, she said she’d just got in. Zack, what is it? You sound almost as weird as Paul did on the phone.”
“Listen, Sarah, I’m in a bit of a situation here at the moment. Why don’t we talk in the morning?”
“Is something going on? Is everything okay?”
“Lawrence didn’t make it to the stakeout tonight. He ran into a bit of trouble. I’m at his place now.”
“What kind of trouble?”
I wanted to tell her. Sarah was my rock. When I was down or hurting or scared, she was always there for me, even when I was being the jerk of the century. But I was tired, and too weary to handle the hundred questions she’d be entitled to ask.
“Honey, I’ve really got to go,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it later.”
She could sense I was holding back. She needed to ask just one question. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m okay.”
As I slipped the phone back into my jacket, I thought, I am so not okay. And I so did not want to go down this kind of road again. A road that led me, and those around me, to danger, and violence, and heartache.
I asked the cabby to give me a lift back to the doughnut shop where I’d left my car.
“I got the word,” the cabby said as we drove through the night. “It was ‘pooch.’ ”
19
BACK AT THE DOUGHNUT PLACE, once again behind the wheel of my car, it occurred to me that, as a staffer with the biggest newspaper in the city, I had some obligation to notify the city desk about what was going on.
I got hold of Dan, working late on the city copy desk, who generally feels that I am a total fucking idiot, stemming back to an incident before I joined the paper. Because he mostly worked nights, our paths had rarely crossed since I’d started my new job.
“Hey, Dan,” I said.
“Zack. Sarah’s not here. She’s at that retreat where all the management types went.”
“I know, Dan. She’s my wife. She tells me things.”
“So, what can I do for you then? Pretend to fall down the stairs again?” Some things end up haunting you for a very long time.
“I thought you’d want to know that a Metropolitan employee, in the course of conducting his journalistic duties, found the subject of his feature nearly stabbed to death.”
I could hear Dan’s breath intake. “Which Metropolitan employee?”
“Me, Dan. Is there time to write anything for the replate?”
“It’s like, ten minutes to deadline. Best I could do would be to get a brief in or something.”
“What do you think? I’ve got a hell of a story here, about a private detective by the name of Lawrence Jones, who’s been investigating a series of robberies and ends up getting stabbed in his own apartment. I was doing a whole takeout on him.”
“You found him?”
“Yes.”
“And called the police?”
“Yes, Dan.”
“What’s the address? At the very least, we can get a photog out there so we have crime scene pics to run with a story for tomorrow.”
The thing was, there wasn’t that much we could print even if we’d had more time. Lawrence, it was clear, might already be dead on the operating table at Mercy General, and we couldn’t go naming him in the paper before the police had made their attempts to contact members of his family. Nor could we say, with any certainty, that the smash-and-grab at Brentwood’s was related to the assault on a man who lived above a hair salon. Nor would we want to say, in a two-paragraph story, that the injured man had been found by a Metropolitan reporter, thereby tipping the competition and undercutting that reporter’s exclusive for the following day’s paper.
So Dan decided the best thing to do would be to run a bare-bones item on the Metro page, tucked into the digest, that police were investigating a violent attack on an unnamed private investigator, but details were unavailable at press time.
“You’ll have to come in tomorrow and write something major,” Dan said. “I’ll leave a note for dayside to expect you.”
I slipped the phone back into my jacket, feeling chilled and exhausted. It was only now, sitting in the Virtue, that it occurred to me that there was a chance that the car was not going to start. I prepared myself to dig my auto club emergency card out of my wallet. I slid the key in, turned it, and to my astonishment, the engine came on just like that.
“You are one unpredictable piece of shit,” I said, backing the Virtue out of the doughnut shop parking lot.
On the way home I detoured by Mercy General and went to the ER to find out how Lawrence was doing. There was a cop there, just standing around, who told us Mr. Jones was still in surgery, but he was either not at liberty to say anything more or simply didn’t know.
A man who looked like the guy in the photo pinned to the bulletin board in Lawrence’s was pacing in the waiting area and, when he heard me ask the cop about Lawrence, approached.
“Are you the one who phoned the restaurant?” he said.