“Not tonight, you can’t.”
Twenty minutes later, we were through and she eyed the notes. “Your output hasn’t changed much.”
“I know.”
“But that’s not good news, is it.”
“Hardly,” I said. “The fluid output should be below eight ounces, and then I get the tubes out and I stop looking like a costume contestant at a science-fiction convention.”
She gently slapped me on the butt. “Especially one with smell-o-gram pajamas.”
Later I was on the couch, trying to stretch out my dining with some homemade peanut butter and crackers—my never-fail recipe of Jif peanut butter and saltine crackers—when Paula called from Boston. “Last full night of the conference, and I’m ready to come home after tomorrow’s sessions.”
“I’m ready, too,” I said.
“Because you miss me or because you miss my nursing talents?”
“All of the above,” I said. “How’s the state of journalism today?”
“More like a disease-ridden province than a state,” Paula said. “But you know what? Being here is a lot of fun, hanging out with your peers and guys and gals who’ve been through the same shit you have. Being a reporter or editor, you see the same damn faces all the time, the same town officials, the same ‘concerned citizens’ who come up to you every week with their particular tales of woe. Which reminds me, never trust a man who wears sandals and socks.”
“Where did you get that little bit of info?”
Paula giggled. “At lunch earlier. A bunch of us were talking about the ‘concerned citizen’ approach to life, and how they all had their particular cranks to turn, from alleged corruption to fluoride in the water. But there was one thing in common. The male part of the species always wore leather sandals with socks. So always watch out for them, and never trust them.”
“Duly noted.”
“Okay, time to head out and—oh, forgot to tell you. Mystery solved.”
“You mean Pluto really is a planet?”
“No, silly boy, the mystery of the missing silver sludge at the Tyler Chronicle.”
I had been pretty close to drifting off to sleep with Paula’s pleasant voice in my ear, but now I was wide awake. “Go on,” I said. “Who’s been arrested?”
“Nobody,” she said. “But the mystery is no longer a mystery.”
“What happened, then?”
“What happened is that Rollie Grandmaison, our increasingly forgetful editor at the Chronicle, suddenly remembered what happened to the sludge. It hadn’t disappeared a few days back, when I heard the break-in the night I was working late. It went out the door a couple of years back, when our sole photographer departed the scene.”
“Did he leave on his own?”
“Yeah, if you call a layoff notice stuck in your pay envelope leaving on one’s own,” she said. “Anyway, he was the last of the old-fashioned characters, the guys who could go into a darkroom with a piece of crap film, work some magic, and come out with a stunning page-one shot. That was when our corporate masters decided that with the arrival of digital cameras, anyone could be a photographer.” A little snort. “Like anyone with a portable PC could be a journalist.”
“So he stole the sludge?”
“Not really,” Paula said. “When he was leaving, he asked Rollie if he could take some of the old supplies, chemicals, papers, stuff the newspaper wouldn’t be needing anymore. Poor Rollie—probably half in the tank from a Rotary Club lunch—he said sure, not realizing later that the silver sludge was included in the deal.”
“Did Rollie try to get it back?”
“Hell no. That would have been too embarrassing. He didn’t want to let corporate know what happened, so he left it at that. Whatever the sludge was worth made up for a lack of severance pay. The end.”
“So what were the people doing in the basement of the Chronicle if there wasn’t anything valuable down there?”
“Not my job, dear one. Talk to my rival, Diane Woods.”
“She’s not your rival.”
“Glad to know that. Gotta go.”
She hung up and I disconnected the phone. I ate one more peanut butter cracker, trying to make sense of what I had just heard.
And instead, I dozed off.
I woke up gradually, wondering why I had spent the night on the couch when a perfectly good bedroom was just upstairs. I checked the time and saw it wasn’t even midnight yet, so I got up, washed my hands, and switched off the lights in the kitchen and the living room. In the semidarkness I stood there, tired but refreshed, thinking of the two very different women in my life, one my lover and the other a long-term friend, reporter and cop, practically opposites in so many ways. Some women.
Then the gunfire broke out.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
At first I thought the television was still on. But I saw the flashes of gunfire through my windows and dropped to the floor as best as I could. The shooting went on and on. I crawled across the room, keeping low, until I made it to the counter. I reached up and grabbed the phone. On my back, in the darkness, it was easy enough to see the glow-in-the-dark numerals, and I dialed nine-one-one.
It was picked up instantly. “Tyler police, what’s your emergency?”
“There’s gunfire in the parking lot of the Lafayette House, Atlantic Avenue.”
“Do you know who’s doing the shooting?”
“No.”
“When did it start?”
“About ninety seconds ago.”
“Is anybody injured?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who is this, please?”
“Lewis Cole.”
The dispatcher must have recognized my name from my constant visits to the police station to see Diane Woods. “You all right?”
“I’m on the floor.”
“Good,” he said. “Stay there.”
I clicked the phone off and rolled over. The gunfire had slowed down but was still going on. Party A and Party B, it seemed like. There had been a sudden outburst—somebody made a move, somebody made an insult or stepped on a shiny pair of shoes?—but now it was only a couple of rounds here and there. It seemed like Party A and Party B had retreated to their respective corners.
I started crawling to the door, reached up and gave the doorknob a twist, and then propped the door open
