Stone Rain

part-time job someplace, instead of hitting us up for spending money all the time?”

“I second the motion,” I said.

Paul definitely looked pissed. “I thought you guys said I shouldn’t get a job because it would interfere with my homework. That’s what you said. Didn’t you say that?”

“I believe you may be correct,” I said, “but, seeing as how you don’t do any homework now, I can’t see where it would make any particular difference. It just means that instead of going to a movie or playing video games, you’d be making some money.”

“I don’t believe this,” Paul said. “Fuck, what kind of job am I going to get?”

“We look forward to finding out with great anticipation,” I said.

Paul raised his hands in frustration, then let them fall to his side. “I guess I’ll just hang out here then,” he said. “Maybe there’s a game on.”

I glanced at Sarah just as Sarah glanced at me. For Sarah’s recently announced plan to be acted upon, it would be better if we had the house to ourselves.

“Okay,” I said slowly, reaching for my wallet. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll give you twenty bucks if you promise that tomorrow you’ll start looking for some sort of part-time job.”

Paul strode across the kitchen, snatched the twenty I was holding up in my hand, and said, “Deal. I’ll be some goddamn sorry-ass burger flipper if that’s what you want.” And he was out the door again in a shot.

I waited for it to swing shut, for the dust to settle, and then said to Sarah, “I’m beginning to think we need to crack down on the kids’ language.”

Sarah shook her head sadly. “That fucking ship has sailed,” she said. “I think you have failed to set a good example.”

She got up from the table, reached out for my hand, and started leading me to the stairs.

“What did they used to call Myanmar?” I asked her.

“ Burma,” Sarah replied.

“I think that’s right,” I said.

Sarah, not even waiting until we’d reached the second floor, was unbuttoning her blouse as she scaled the stairs.

“Dangerous,” I said, following her. “You’re the one who’s dangerous.”

3

I WAS SETTLING BACK in at my desk at the Metropolitan, having just returned from the cafeteria with a coffee, when I caught a whiff of something unpleasant behind me. That could mean only one of two things. Either one of the photogs had just returned from covering a drowning in the sewers, or our top police reporter was in the vicinity.

Without turning around, I said, “What is it, Dick?” Slowly, I spun my computer chair around to look at him.

“How did you know it was me?” he asked. Dick Colby is not only the paper’s best crime reporter, he’s also its most odiferous. His fellow staffers are unsure whether it’s that he fails to bathe, or to do his laundry, or possibly a combination of the two. He lives alone. I don’t know whether he’s ever been married, but I couldn’t imagine a wife sending him out into the world this way. He’s a gruff, slightly overweight, prematurely graying creature in his late forties, and I didn’t know whether he was aware that most everyone referred to him, behind his back at any rate, as “Cheese Dick.”

“Sixth sense,” I said. I’d taken a deep breath before turning around and was slowly exhaling as I spoke. “You want something?”

“Your notes on the Wickens thing. Phone numbers, stuff like that. I need them.”

This request so took me by surprise that I breathed in suddenly, then coughed. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I said.

“I’m taking over the story,” Colby said. Just like that. As Paul might say, Hold on, Captain Butter-Me-Up.

“Oh, you just decided, ‘Hey, I think I’d like that story,’ and thought you’d come over here and I’d hand it to you?”

Colby offered me a pitying smile. “Shit, you haven’t been told, have you?”

“Told what?”

“Maybe you should talk to your wifey,” Colby said. “After you’ve done that, you can give me your notes.”

The blood was rushing to my head. I wanted to grab Colby by the neck and strangle him, but I also knew that if I got that close to him I might pass out. My stories on the Wickenses, a family of Timothy McVeigh-worshipping crazies whose plan to kill dozens, if not hundreds, of people had blown up in their faces, if you will, had run in the paper over the last couple of days. They had rented a farmhouse on my father’s property, and I’d gotten to know them, in the last week, somewhat more intimately than I could have ever wanted.

“I don’t believe this,” I said, getting out of my chair and heading straight for Sarah’s glass-walled office.

She was on the phone as I strode in and stood on the other side of her desk. “What’s this about Colby taking the Wickens story?”

“Can I call you back?” Sarah said. She hung up the phone. “What?”

“Cheese Dick says he’s getting the Wickens story. Why the hell would he think he was getting the Wickens story?”

“Fuck,” Sarah said. “That fucking asshole.”

“So it’s not true?”

“Noooo,” Sarah said, stretching out the word and shaking her head slowly in exasperation. “I mean, yes. It’s true.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“It wasn’t my decision.”

“Whose decision was it?”

Sarah tipped her head northward, in the direction of Bertrand Magnuson’s office.

“Magnuson pulled me off the Wickens story? I got the Wickens story. We played it up huge. It was my story. I’m part of that story.”

“I think that’s why Magnuson’s pulling you off it. Look, everyone knows you did a great job on it. Fantastic story. Award material. Pulitzer stuff. But Magnuson feels, you know, that you kind of, how do I put this…”

“Lucked into it?” I said.

Sarah screwed up her face. “Maybe.”

“I would hardly call it luck, having a run-in with that bunch.”

“You think I don’t agree? You think I’d call it lucky, what happened to you up there?” She took a breath. “But the managing editor feels that it might be more appropriate that for the follow-up stories, like whether the Wickenses were part of a larger movement, other crimes that they might have been responsible for, that that’s the kind of thing that Dick is better equipped to handle, what with his contacts in law enforcement and all.”

I stared at her. Sarah broke away, pretended to be looking for something on her desk. She was in management mode and couldn’t bring herself to look me in the eye.

“Did you make a case for me?” I asked. “When Magnuson made this decision?”

Sarah swallowed. “Sure I did.”

“How hard?”

She paused. “Pretty hard.”

“It’s the foreign editor thing, isn’t it? You don’t want to piss off Magnuson because you’re going for this new job and it’s his call.”

“That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit and you know it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Look, it’s not fair, but the fact is, Colby, for all his faults and aromas, has great contacts. He’s very experienced with this sort of thing, it’s not like his background is in-” She stopped herself.

“In what, Sarah?” My eyebrows went up, questioning. “Writing science fiction novels? His background’s a little