Deadline Man

I didn’t know if that is true, but if so it is the only good thing I ever inherited from my old man. The thing I do know is how good her hand feels.

“Let’s go to my place,” I say.

She laughs. “Right here. Right now.”

Her skirt has already ridden over her hips, revealing that her sheer black stockings are thigh-highs. She pulls aside a black thong—she is a natural redhead—and guides me inside. I try to go slow. She pushes against me and gasps. We move at an easy rhythm.

“You’re fuckin’ me.” Her face carries an angelic smile.

My breath comes faster as we buck against each other. From the mirror, I can see myself impaling her. I have my own smile. I lean forward to kiss her and stroke her soft hair. When I raise up she starts rocking faster, pulling me into her with her lovely legs. Her face is turned to the side and her eyes are shut tight as her moans coalesce into a sharp, percussive scream. I’m…right…there…too.

Chapter Thirteen

Monday, October 25th

The first sign of my personal train wreck is not when my kinky, even-tempered Pamela pours cold water on our relationship. After all, I lose Pam but gain this luminous young Amber. I am back to three lovers; economists might consider that a manageable equilibrium. The first sign is not when I break one of my cardinal rules of romance: I shalt not bed co-workers. I even turn aside from one of my inclinations. I tend to avoid women in their twenties; they have rarely been attracted to me, even when I was that age, and now I find most of them boring and unformed. She might be young enough to be my daughter. But a night with Amber has washed away these reservations and I am feeling way too proud of myself. Later I may begin the cycle of regret over losing Pam. What if Pam had been The One? I don’t even believe in The One. Maybe Amber is The One, instead.

“You are a monster.”

Later I may wonder why I broke the rules that had served me so well. Was it that I was deeply attracted to this young woman, that I loved her sudden, impulsive seduction in a public place, that I was insane with worry on many fronts and needed the mysterious escape of chemistry and flesh? All that, and who the hell knows. “All men are dogs,” Jill used to say, with some fondness. “There’s no logic when they’re thinking with their little head.”

Nor does the sign of impending ruin even manifest itself in the warning from Rachel, delivered by her father using what can only be described as tradecraft. Somehow the intensity of my night with Amber lets me set that aside for the week ahead. It’s too big, too unknown, like living under a nuclear showdown. You get used to it. You lie alone Sunday morning on sheets that still smell of Amber and read the newspaper. You read your column and it has no typos. You’ve told the world things it didn’t know about Olympic Defense Systems. The ashes of the note are down the drain. Only as the day goes on does it come back to me. I can recite it from memory.

“You’re in trouble, even if you don’t realize it…”

No, the first sign of my personal train wreck is forgetting the breakfast speech I am scheduled to give this morning to the Lake Union Kiwanis Club. It is the first time in my many years on the rubber-chicken circuit that I have forgotten a commitment. I tell a lie, feeling guiltier than if I had fibbed about my schedule with one girlfriend in order to spend the weekend with another. There is no excuse. My calendar was neatly laid out on my computer just as my loft reflects a Sunday night spent obsessively ordering and reordering my files.

Now it’s Monday morning and a new column is due in less than four hours. I have done no research on anything this weekend. I am way too thrilled at having bedded Amber and that the Sunday column was the second most read article and top emailed one on the newspaper’s Web site. And yet the goddamned machine must be fed. I will have to pull out an evergreen—how is port traffic doing? What’s the latest report out of Brookings? When you write three times a week, forty-eight weeks a year, not every column will be a Pulitzer contender. I bargain with myself, in an odd paralyzed change-the-subject daydream, even as the train is tumbling off the tracks, the delicate physics of moving wheels on steel rails fatally violated, motion and gravity becoming destiny, only I don’t know it yet.

A column is due in less than four hours but I sit on the sofa and recite Rachel’s note again from memory. Stay away from 11/11? I wanted nothing to do with it. It keeps trailing me like a bad reputation. Twenty years of journalism have taught me to be skeptical of everything. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. So could the situation really be as dire as Rachel writes? I don’t even know what the situation is. Is she trying to get me to chase a foolish non-story, maybe get payback by seeing me humiliate myself in print with a “what’s 11/11?” column? But there’s nothing vengeful in Rachel. Is it a warning that matters cosmically—a calamity on the way—or just personally, maybe an embarrassing financial imbroglio that involves her father? No, it is written with coiled violence in the background. I recite, “He’s a good man, but he knows bad ones. Long story short: you’re in trouble, even if you don’t realize it.”

I don’t know what to do. Now even my determination to talk to the M.E. and explain the 11/11 weirdness evaporates. Doing so might endanger Rachel. Look what happened to Troy Hardesty and Ryan Meyers. Both had an 11/11 connection, whatever that means. They may have been murdered. The police have sealed their death records. So why not go to the police? And tell them what? Eleven/eleven makes me sound like a paranoid, like a lunatic. Like my sister. No wonder I told Amber nothing about it in our time together. I need to call Rachel, and yet I don’t dare. It puts me into a neat loop of paralysis. I think about Amber as I knot my tie.

I walk back into the living room as the front door flies open, pieces of doorknob and lock skittering across the floor. The sound is like a bomb has just gone off in front of my face.

I stand there feeling nothing but terror and timelessness as figures move quickly toward me. Two men aim guns into my face, the barrels looking impossibly large. They are the feds from the anonymous office. Before my brain can react they turn me and one drives a foot behind my right knee, dropping me hard on the floor. A bundle of nerves in my kneecap sends an urgent message to my scrambled brain. The pain shoves me suddenly, excruciatingly, into the moment.

“You can’t…” It’s the first words I can manage.

“Shut the fuck up, asshole.” The barrel of the long silver handgun sits cold against my ear. Stu holsters his gun and pats me down, digging his hands into my pockets. He spends long minutes looking through my wallet. He tosses it on the floor.

“Get up.”

With no similar help from them in rising, I pull myself up. I’m afraid to even touch my aching knee. They push me into a chair at the dining table. Stu is wearing a suit today. The guy who looks like a kindly preacher—I still don’t know his name.

“Fathers and sons, they never stray too far apart.” He pulls out a chair and sits opposite me. He leans close. His face is pleasant, self-satisfied. He speaks softly, like a high-school counselor talking to the kid who can hope for nothing more than to drive a delivery truck. “You can’t outrun your DNA. Your father was a criminal. You’re headed that way, too. All your compartments.”

“He was a nutty tax protester. Fuck you! Why couldn’t you knock?” I feel my temples throb with useless anger.

“You’re potentially dangerous. You were Army Intelligence,” Stu says, leaning against a counter.

“Are you nuts? I was an Army journalist.”

His lips go pale

in a small smile. “Right.”

“You can’t just break into my home!”