Dead of Night

CHAPTER TEN

OFFICES OF REGIONAL SATELLITE NEWS

STEBBINS COUNTY BUREAU, PENNSYLVANIA

He answered the phone with, “Fishing for news with Billy Trout.”

His voice was dead, his body slumped into an executive desk chair that he swore once belonged to the misogynistic serial murderer Gerald Stano. He called the chair “Old Sparky” after the much different seat by which Stano exited the world in a Florida prison execution room.

“This you, Billy?” The caller was a man with a Mississippi accent.

“Mmh,” grunted Trout. He was six clues away from finishing the New York Times crossword. Thirty-eight down was a six-letter word for “parasite.” He tried “lawyer,” “ex-wife,” and “editor,” but none of them would fit.

“You still doing those weird news segments?” asked the caller.

“Hence the clever way I answer the phone,” murmured Trout with disinterest.

“Still paying for the good stuff?”

“Depends. Who’s calling?”

“It’s Barney Schlunke.”

“Ah,” said Trout and filled in the clue: “I.N.S.E.C.T.” He tossed the paper onto his desk. “You still in Rockview?”

“At Rockview. Inmates are in, staff are—”

“I know. It was a joke. We saw each other yesterday.… What do you want?”

“Yeah, I tried to talk to you yesterday at the execution, but you ducked out before I could get free.”

What a shame, thought Trout. “Talk to me about what?”

“A news tip.”

Trout snorted. “The only news around here is the storm and I’m not a weatherman.”

“Not that kind of story. Look, Billy, I wanted to know if you’re still paying the same rates for tips as you used to?”

“If it’s something good I can give you seventy-five percent.”

Schlunke snorted. “You going cheap on me?”

“No,” said Trout, “the economy blows, or don’t you read the papers?”

“Who reads the fucking papers? News is free on the Internet.”

“And you wonder why I’ve cut my rates?”

“I want the same rates as before.”

“Can’t do it. As it is seventy-five percent is my kids not eating.”

“You don’t have kids.”

“I got alimony and both of my ex-wives are immature. Works out the same.”

“Believe me,” said Schlunke, “this is worth the regular rate—”

“This is the regular rate.”

“—plus another twenty-five percent on top.”

“I can’t afford to feed a drug habit.”

“I don’t do drugs.”

“Then I can’t afford to feed your Internet porn habit, Schlunke.”

“God, I can’t tell you how much I missed being your straight man, Billy. Maybe I should be doing drugs, ’cause I must be having a psychotic episode. I mean … I think I’m talking to an actual reporter who wants an actual goddamn exclusive. But … hey, maybe that’s just the magic mushrooms talking.”

“That’s sidesplitting,” yawned Trout. It occurred to him that Schlunke was one of those rare people who looked exactly like his name. He was a big, sloppy, shambling lump of a southern boy who came to Pennsylvania because Mississippi wasn’t redneck enough. Trout grudgingly conceded to himself that Schlunke had sent three or four good stories his way over the years. “Okay, okay,” he said, “you tell me what you have and I’ll tell you if it’s worth full price.”

“Full price is one hundred and twenty-five percent of your old rate.”

“Just tell me.”

“Word of honor?”

Trout smiled as he glanced around the newsroom. It looked like a Hollywood set dresser had made sure there was every possible stereotype and sight gag appropriate to a regional paper sliding down the greasy slope to the septic tank. Stacks of bundled papers. Two-thirds of the desks empty; the other one-third buried under clutter so comprehensive that it had long ago morphed into a single eyesore rather than a collection of unique and separate pieces of junk; wall clocks that were still set to the wrong hour of daylight saving time; and one other reporter asleep with his heels on his desk and a John Grisham novel open on his chest.

It depressed him. He could remember a time — not that long ago — when coming to work filled him with excitement. Of course, back then he believed that journalists were the good guys and the voice of the people — and that the truth actually mattered. Time and the economy had beaten most of that out of him. Now it was a job, and soon it might not even be that.

Regional Satellite News was one of the hybrid services that had begun to crop up during the rise of twenty- first-century Internet news and the death spiral of print. Trout and his fellow reporters fed news stories to over forty print papers in Western Pennsylvania — none of them first rate — and they fed video stories to the Internet and, on good days, to services like the AP. The had very few “good” days here in the hinterlands of Stebbins County.

“Really,” said Trout. “You’d take my word?”

“Ha! How’s it feel to be someone else’s straight man?”

“Fucking hilarious. How’s it feel to hear me hang up?”

“You won’t. Not with what I have for you.”

Billy Trout tapped the eraser of his pencil on his desk blotter for a three count. “Okay. One twenty-five. But this had better be worth—”

“Two words for you,” said the prison guard. “Homer Gibbon.”

“I got two words for you. Yesterday’s news.”

He heard Schlunke chuckle.

“You do know he’s dead?” Trout said. “Oh, wait … as I remember you were fucking there when they gave him the lethal injection and, another news flash — so was I! Gosh, how long ago was that? Yesterday? No, I lie … It’s twenty-three hours and—”

“—and there’s more to the story if you’d shut up and listen.”

“Okay,” sighed Trout. “This is me shutting up.”

“Ever since Gibbon lost his last appeal and the execution date was set there has been a neverending media shit storm. Reporters camped out in the parking lot. I don’t know how you snagged a ticket to the show—”

“I have friends in low places.”

“—but once that asshole was dead, the party broke up. Now, new chapter. The official story was that Gibbon was going to be buried in some nondescript hole on the prison grounds.”

“Fair enough.”

“But that’s not what happened.”

Trout’s interest perked up by half a degree. Homer Gibbon was the state’s most notorious serial killer. He had been convicted on eleven counts of murder and was suspected of having actually killed more than forty women and children in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia over a seventeen-year period. Although he had never formally admitted to any of the murders, he was convicted on an evidentiary case so compelling that the jury’s deliberation had lasted only two hours. Appeal followed appeal, but during the last appeal forensic evidence from a cold-case murder in Scranton irrefutably tied Gibbon to the rape and murder of a diner waitress and her two-year-old daughter. The murder had been shockingly brutal, with elements of torture so repellent that even the most jaded reporter tended to generalize about the details. The appeal died, the new trial was quick, the death penalty given, and the governor approved execution by lethal injection for the first time since Gary Heidnik was put