Mirror Image

“Yeah, but I don’t like it, Van. Maybe we ought to call the FBI and not tell Avery.”

“She’d never forgive you.”

“But she’d be alive.”

The two men were quiet for a moment, lost in their private thoughts, considering possible options, and coming up with zip. “Tomorrow, you stick around here. No need to go with Rutledge.”

“I figured that,” Van said of his assignment when Irish finally broke the silence. “I’ll be at the airport tomorrow night when he gets back. The press release said he’d be arriving at seven-thirty.”

“Good. Try and make contact with Avery then. She said it’s hard to phone from the hotel.”

“Right.”

“Election morning, come to the TV station first. Then I’m posting you at the Palacio Del Rio. I want you to stick to Avery like glue all day. If you see anything suspicious, anything, to hell with her arguments, you call the cops.”

“I’m not stupid, Irish.”

“And just because you have a free day tomorrow,” Irish said in a threatening tone, “don’t go out and get blitzed on something.”

“I won’t. I got a lot to do around here.”

“Yeah, what?”

“I’m still looking at tapes.”

“You mentioned that before. What are you looking for?”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I find it.”

They said their good-byes. Van got up long enough to relieve himself in the bathroom, then returned to the console, where he had spent nearly every free hour for the last several days. The number of tapes left to view was dwindling, but not fast enough. He had hours of them still to look at.

The wild goose he was chasing didn’t even have an identity. As he had told Irish, he wouldn’t know what it was till he saw it. This was probably a colossal waste of time.

He’d been dumb enough to start this harebrained project; he might just as well be dumb enough to finish it. He took a drag on his joint, chased it with a swallow of booze, and inserted another tape into his machine.

* * *

Irish made a face into the bottom of the glass of antacid he had forced himself to drink. He shivered at the wretched aftertaste. He should be used to it by now since he guzzled the stuff by the gallon. Avery didn’t know. Nobody did. He didn’t want anyone to know about his chronic heartburn because he didn’t want to be replaced by a younger man before he could retire on a full salary.

He’d been in the business long enough to know that management-level guys were bastards. Heartlessness was a requirement for the job. They wore expensive shoes, three-piece suits, and invisible armor against humanism. They didn’t give a damn about an old news horse’s valuable contacts at city hall or his years of experience beating the bushes for a story or anything else except the bottom line.

They expected dramatic video at six and ten so they could sell commercial time to sponsors, but they’d never stood by and watched a house burn with people screaming inside, or sat through a stakeout while some nut wielding a .357 Magnum held people hostage in a 7-Eleven, or witnessed the unspeakable atrocities that one human being could inflict on another.

They operated in the sterile side of the business. Irish’s side was the down-and-dirty one. That was fine. He wouldn’t have it any other way. He just wanted to be respected for what he did.

As long as the news ratings kept KTEX number one in the market, he’d be fine. But if the ratings slipped, those bastards in the worsted wool would start sifting out the undesirables. An old man with a sour stomach and a disposition to match might be considered deadwood and be the first thing lopped off.

So he covered his belches and hid his bottles of antacid.

He switched out the light in his bathroom and shuffled into the bedroom. He sat on the edge of his double bed and set his alarm clock. That was routine. So was reaching into the nightstand drawer and taking out his rosary.

The threat of physical torture couldn’t make him admit to anyone that this was a nightly ritual. He never went to confession or mass. Churches were buildings where funerals, weddings, or baptisms were solemnized.

But Irish prayed ritualistically. Tonight he prayed fervently for Tate Rutledge and his young daughter. He prayed for Avery’s protection, begging God to spare her life, whatever calamity befell anyone else.

Last, as he did every night, he prayed for Rosemary Daniels’s precious soul and beseeched God’s forgiveness for loving her, another man’s wife.

Forty-Four