Faces of the Gone

CHAPTER 6

The next morning, I at least had one small consolation prize. The paper Tina thoughtfully left on the coffee table for me had my story stripped across the top of A1 with the headline “Heroin links victims in quadruple murder.”

I don’t mind admitting that, even after a couple thousand bylines, I still enjoyed seeing my name in the newspaper. I was just settling in to read the latest one when my phone rang. It was from the 973 area code, but it was a number I hadn’t seen before.

“Carter Ross.”

“Sir, this is the Nutley Police Department calling.”

“Hi,” I said, bewildered.

“Sir, I have some bad news about your house,” he said. “There’s been an explosion.”

Before hanging up the phone, the cop told me “the incident” occurred at 7:29 A.M., when several 911 calls were received. The Nutley Fire Department arrived at “the residence” by 7:34. EMS arrived at 7:35 but there were no known injuries. I tried to stick the details in my mostly numb brain and agreed to meet the police at my house. I hung up before I had the presence of mind to ask any meaningful questions, such as, “Explosion? What the hell do you mean by explosion?”

I staggered into Tina’s kitchen, where I found a sticky note: “7:45. Went jogging. Bagels in the cabinet next to the fridge. Back by 8:30. Tina.”

I considered waiting for her to return, because it might be nice to have some company, then decided against it. She had already seen enough of me blubbering for one lifetime.

Grabbing a pen, I scribbled, “8:10. Had to leave in a hurry. Call you later. Carter.”

I swiped a bagel then went down to my Malibu, wondering if it was now the only thing I owned besides the wrinkled clothes on my back. This thought alone should have freaked me out, but I still felt detached, like this wasn’t really happening. House fires were something I wrote about, not something I experienced firsthand.

As I drove toward Nutley, I forced myself to think rationally. Had I left the stove on? Couldn’t be. My last meal at home was cold cereal. Lightning? No. It was December. Faulty wiring? Gas leak? Had to be something like that. The house is old. Was old.

I tried to become aware of my breathing and remind myself there were worse things. Sure, all my belongings were probably destroyed. But most of it could be replaced. And, sure, there was some irreplaceable stuff-the pictures, the keepsakes, the school yearbooks, every newspaper article I had ever written. .

But, hell, it could have been me in there. Most any other morning, it would have been me in there. This was clearly a rare triumph for the power of thinking with the little brain: if I hadn’t been trying to get into Tina’s pants, the Nutley fire chief would be explaining to my parents that his crew was busy picking up my remains with tweezers.

Really, as long as Deadline had managed to find a way out, the insurance would cover everything else, right? I would get a new house, a whole bunch of new stuff. I’d probably even get new golf clubs out of the deal. And how bad would that be?

As I approached my street, I began hearing this awful chorus of car alarms-there had to be fifty of them going off at once. I made the turn on my street but could only get partway down, what with the logjam of emergency vehicles.

Then I saw it, amid the usual neat row of houses along my street: this big, gaping hole, like someone had punched out a tooth. As I got closer, I saw a scrap heap where my bungalow once stood. There were pieces of siding and other various splinters on the lawn and street-even a few pieces stuck in my neighbors’ trees-but nothing that resembled a house remained.

A small clump of my neighbors, most of whom only knew me as the childless bachelor who wasn’t home very much, had formed at a safe distance on the sidewalk. As I got out of my car, my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Scalabrine, rushed up to me. Mrs. Scalabrine was a youngish widow, maybe sixty-five, and I don’t think we had talked about anything more than the weather the entire time I lived there.

But she was suddenly my best friend.

“Oh, Carter, thank goodness,” she said, giving me an awkwardly intense hug. “We thought you were inside.”

I hugged her back, even though I didn’t want to. The rest of my neighbors were just staring at me, ashen-faced, as though they were expecting something dramatic: ranting, raving, collapsing on the sidewalk, flipping out. I got the feeling they were mostly there for the theater of it and now they were expecting a show.

Speaking of which, where were the TV trucks? It was odd they weren’t here. Generally those guys religiously monitored the incident pager, a network of nuts who listen in on fire and police frequency and send out real-time messages about what’s going on. My house blowing up certainly would have been mentioned. A good house explosion usually got the TV trucks swarming from all angles.

Instead, it was just me, the broken remains of my home, a variety of people in uniforms, and my gawking neighbors.

“So what happened?” I said. They all looked at me like, What do you think happened, you halfwit? Your house blew up. Then they all started looking at Mrs. Scalabrine, who clearly had something to say.

“I saw a man in a white van,” she said nervously. “I mean, I saw him getting out of a white van. I didn’t see his face-the police asked me if I did, but I really didn’t. All I saw is he was white and he was big, like six five, and real husky, like three hundred pounds at least.”

The other neighbors, who had heard this story already, were nodding in corroboration. I thought about what Rosa Bricker had said about the size of the shooter, and how it was probably someone between six three and six five.

“I saw him run up on your lawn, right over there,” she said, gesturing in the direction of the pile of lumber where my house once stood. “And it looked like he threw something inside. And then he ran back to the van and was gone.”

Another neighbor, whose name was probably Cavanaugh-he was an actuary, I think-took the story from there.

“I heard the wheels squealing as I got out of the shower,” he said. “It was like the guy wanted to get away fast. And all of a sudden there was this huge BaaBOOOM. It was just like that: first it went baa and then it went boom.”

The other neighbors nodded, confirming that the “baa” and the “boom” had been recorded as separate incidents.

“It was like a bomb went off,” said one of my neighbors, who was either Nancy, Pat, or Angela-I could never quite remember.

“All of my windows on this side of the house blew out,” Mrs. Scalabrine said, pointing toward her place.

“Some of my unicorn figurines fell off my mantel,” Nancy-PatAngela said.

I nodded, as if I shared concern for NancyPatAngela’s unicorns, unable to quite grasp the absurdity that they were talking about their windows and knickknacks when I had lost my entire house and everything inside it.

“Anyone seen my cat?” I asked.

No one answered.

The neighbors eventually filtered out, wandering off to work or the gym or whatever it was they had planned for their mornings. I had a brief conversation with the Nutley police, who said they were starting an investigation based on Mrs. Scalabrine’s eyewitness account-though, as I already knew, she wasn’t giving them much to go on.

Before long, I was left alone with the realization that someone in this world wanted me dead. It was a surprisingly difficult concept to grasp, especially for a typically healthy thirty-something guy who lumped in dying with hearing aids, estate planning, and regularity in the category of Things I’ll Worry About in Forty Years.

People at cocktail parties who find out what I do for a living somehow think I must receive death threats all the time, because I so frequently find myself writing bad things about scary people. But I had only gotten one death threat in my career-and even that was from a guy who was just blowing off steam. He was a local slumlord I had exposed for keeping his tenants without heat. The day the story ran, he yelled into my cell phone that I had ruined his life and he was going to kill me. He called back later in the day to apologize. I told him he could make it up to me by filling his building’s oil tank.

Fact is, even the scary people recognize the newspaper reporter is merely the messenger. They might not like me writing about them very much. They might hope I stop doing it. They might wish I fall through an empty manhole cover and be devoured by a sewer-dwelling alligator. But ultimately the scary people are smart enough to know killing a newspaper reporter will only add to their problems. It’s an extension of the old Mark Twain saw about not picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

Think about it: how often do you hear about a newspaper reporter in this country being killed for something they wrote? It just doesn’t happen.

Except it came close to happening to me. And when I thought about how close, I started to shake. I’ve heard it said-mostly by blowhard World War II veterans-that a man doesn’t really know what he’s made of until he faces death head-on. Based on this experience, I think I was made of something resembling lime Jell-O.

I was scared out of my quivering, gelatinous mind. Whoever I was dealing with had killed four people already-perhaps more-and obviously didn’t mind adding to the body count. In this case, he had read one article, decided his world would be better off without me in it, and clearly had the means to make that happen.

And he did it in frighteningly short order. I tried to do the math: our distributors were guaranteed to get their daily supply of papers by 4 A.M. From the distributor it went to the carriers around five. So the story was pretty much everywhere in New Jersey by six, at the latest. That meant it had taken this guy a mere hour and a half to make it look like the Big Bad Wolf had visited my little straw house, huffed, puffed, and blown it down.

He knew where I lived-or used to live, anyway. He knew where I worked. It was possible he knew what I looked like, too: my head shot had been in the paper on occasion. Did he also know what car I drove? Did he have people watching me? Should I worry about rounding some corner and having a gun pointing in my face?

I didn’t know. I guess that was the most terrifying thing of all; someone was trying to kill me and I didn’t know who, what, when, or how.

All I really knew was why. That damn article. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much different it was than so many of the others I had written. This wasn’t just a case of shooting the messenger. It’s not like I was merely quoting some prosecutor or digging through documents. This was news I’d uncovered myself. And whoever was trying to kill me wanted to make damn sure I didn’t find anything else.

Having nowhere else to go, I started driving toward Newark. I was midway through my journey when my cell phone rang. It was Tina.

“Hi,” I said.

“Well, someone disappeared pretty quickly this morning,” she said, her voice full of flirtatious energy. “Were you afraid I was going to make you eat eggs or something?”

“No,” I said.

There was a pause on the end.

“Don’t play that game with me,” she said.

“Huh?” I mustered.

“The ‘I’m embarrassed I got emotional and now I’m going to shut you out’ game,” she said. “Look, I know last night took a different turn from where we thought it was going and you ended up crying on my shoulder a little bit. It doesn’t make you less of a man. I thought you were more evolved than that. It’s no big-”

“Tina, shut up,” I said. “My house blew up, okay?”

Her response was confusion, then alarm, then concern. Over the next several minutes, I took her through what I had seen and heard. “So, basically,” I concluded, “someone doesn’t like me very much.”

“Do you think it’s the same someone who killed those people on Ludlow Street?”

“I can’t think of anyone else who’d want me dead that badly.”

“Wait a second,” Tina said. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, no.”

“What?”

“The incident pager has been going nuts all morning and I didn’t figure it out until just now. Oh, my God.”

“Figure what out?”

She started reading like she was ticking off a list: “House explosion in Nutley. Fire on Eighteenth Street in Newark. Fire at Go-Go Bar in Irvington. Carter, those are all places you wrote about in your story!”

I was speechless. The man in the white van wasn’t merely going after me. He was covering his tracks. He was destroying the places where I had found evidence or might have kept evidence, making sure no one else-like, say, the police-could retrace my steps.

“Tina, I gotta go,” I said.

“Wait, why?”

“I’m heading to that fire on Eighteenth Street.”

“Carter, you’re in no shape to be chasing fire trucks. You’re out of your mind.”

“Probably, but I’m hanging up now.”

“Please don’t,” she said. “Come into the newsroom. I don’t want you out there. You’ll be safer here.”

“No,” I said. “Until I figure out who’s doing this, I won’t be safe anywhere.”

I shut off my cell phone so Tina couldn’t bug me and turned in the direction of Miss B’s apartment on 18th Street. I was still two blocks away when I came to a police barricade, but I could already see her building. It was mostly untouched, except for the upper right quarter of it, where Miss B lived. That part was streaked by black scorch marks and still steaming slightly. It looked soggy. The street outside was filled with puddles and fire trucks.

I left the safety of the Malibu, and as I got closer, I had this sense that whatever had been used on Miss B’s apartment was different from what razed my bungalow. First off, the building was structurally sound. There were no pieces of it scattered hither and yon, as there had been with my place. For that matter, none of the surrounding buildings appeared to have been touched-there were no blown-out windows. I also didn’t hear any car alarms.

It looked more like any of the number of slum-building fires I had written about: the cause of the fire always turned out to be a shorted-out space heater, an oven someone had left open for warmth, a cigarette igniting a couch, or something similarly banal.

I was now directly across the street from the building. Two TV stations were already there, which may have explained why my house blowing up hadn’t attracted any coverage. The TV guys had decided an apartment fire in Newark was more interesting.

One of the cameras was busy filming a man-on-the-street reporter who was pretending to be compassionate as he interviewed the shocked and bewildered neighbors. The other camera was shooting B-roll of the smoldering building while a pissy-looking blond reporter bitched into her cell phone about how she should be somewhere else.

Still, I was a little surprised more camera crews weren’t there. Fires combined the three elements necessary for local TV news: human tragedy, an easy-to-tell story, and great visuals. Where was the rest of the horde?

Not that I was complaining. And since neither crew seemed to be concerned with what had actually happened, I was able to sidle up to the Newark Fire Department captain who was overseeing the operation. He was a former high school basketball star-good enough to get himself a D1 scholarship, not good enough to take it any further-and still thought of himself as a local hero. I did nothing to disavow him of that and put his name in the newspaper whenever I got the chance. We were pals.

“Hey, Captain,” I said.

“This can’t possibly be the most interesting thing going on in Newark today,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be off trying to figure out who the city council is stealing from?”

“I was just driving into the office, saw the smoke, and wanted to see Newark’s bravest in action,” I said, trying to keep my tone nonchalant. “So what’s this one? Crack addicts get sloppy with their lighters again?”

“Nope, someone wanted themselves a bonfire,” he said. “You’ll have to get it officially from the chief’s office, but off the record, this sucker was set intentionally.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Whoever did it was quick and sloppy about it. You could still smell the gasoline when we arrived.”

“No kidding. When did you guys get here?”

“Call came in at seven thirty-six, I think. Chief will have that, too. We were here in four minutes-I don’t want to hear any more of that crap about slow response times. We were able to contain it pretty quickly. Only the upper two floors on that one end got it. But they got it good. There was definitely an accelerant involved.”

I looked down at my feet, sorting things out. The call in Nutley had come in at 7:29, right after the man in the white van tossed his little present through my living room window. At that time of the morning, it was at least fifteen minutes from my place in Nutley to 18th Street, even if you drove like it was Indy qualifying. There was just no way Van Man could have gotten here, doused the place with gasoline, and gotten a good fire roaring so quickly. Obviously, Van Man had friends. This was a coordinated attack.

“Everyone get out okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, looks that way. Except for this one woman on the fourth floor. She wasn’t breathing too well when she got carted out of here.”

“Her name Brenda Bass, by any chance?”

“You know her?”

“I interviewed her once,” I said, skipping the details.

“Yeah, that’s her,” the captain said. “Brave lady. We’re pretty sure the fire got started in the apartment below hers-the super said it was empty. She must have smelled it pretty quickly, because she threw her four kids in the bathroom, stuffed some wet towels under the door, and got the shower going. Then she started looking for the fire to put it out. We found her in the living room with an empty fire extinguisher. The smoke got her.”

“Why didn’t she just take her kids and run out of the building like all the others?”

The captain looked over his shoulder at the TV crews then back at the building, then at me.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said. “And you didn’t get it from me. But someone barricaded her in that apartment.”

“Barricaded?”

“You didn’t get this from me, right?” he said.

“Right. Of course. We didn’t talk.”

“Good,” he said, speaking quickly in a low voice. “Some of my guys told me there was a board over her door.”

“Oh, dear God.”

“Yeah. You know how a landlord who is kicking out tenants will put plywood over the doors of the empty apartments to stop vagrants from breaking in?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s what someone did to this place, except the apartment wasn’t empty. That lady and her kids were trapped in there. Someone wanted to burn them alive.”

The captain’s radio squawked something unintelligible, but it was enough to get him moving.

“Interview over,” he said, as he walked away. “Call the chief’s office.”

As I watched water drip down from Miss B’s building, I wondered if this was how bugs who lived near the highway felt. They knew there was danger all around but they told themselves if they just kept flying, everything would be fine. And then all of a sudden, splat, there comes the one fast-moving windshield they couldn’t avoid.

I was nearly lost in that thought when I suddenly became aware of someone approaching behind me. With a surge of adrenaline, I whirled around in a crouched position, ready to be staring at a six-foot-five, white-van-driving brute.

Instead, it was just Tommy.

“Relax, I come in peace,” he said, holding his hands up.

“You scared the crap out of me,” I said, putting my hand over my fast-beating heart.

“Tina told me what happened to your place. She’s right. You are a mess.”

“I’m just a little edgy is all.”

“A little? I’ve never seen a white man jump so high.”

I could still feel the pounding in my chest.

“You shouldn’t have turned off your cell phone,” he said. “Tina is really freaked out.”

“Excuse me if I’m not awash in pity for her.”

“Well, she sent me out here to fetch you. She wants you to come into the office immediately. She said to tell you Szanto and Brodie said the same thing.”

“Then I’m going to ask you to pretend you didn’t see me.”

“Carter, I don’t know. This is pretty serious. I mean, this guy is a wacko. And Szanto and Brodie. .” Tommy said, looking stricken. He was a twenty-two-year-old kid. He had yet to learn the finer art of ignoring the higher-ups.

“There is no way I can figure out who is doing this while cowering in the office,” I said. “At least if I’m cowering out here, I can keep my mind off it a little.”

Tommy said nothing, turning his attention toward the sodden, blackened building.

“What a mess,” he said. “Everyone get out okay?”

I related what my fire captain had told me about the plywood on Brenda Bass’s door.

“Oh, my God, that’s terrible,” Tommy said. “This is real, isn’t it? This guy is really going after you, her, everyone.”

“Yeah, and don’t forget your name was at the bottom of that story as a contributor,” I said. “You better watch yourself, too.”

He nodded silently, looking down at a broken spot in the sidewalk, nervously shifting his weight from side to side.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” I said. “There’s no need for you to panic. There are a lot of guys named Tommy Hernandez in the world. There’s no way these psychos are going to be able to find you.”

“I guess they would have done it already,” Tommy said. “I don’t know whether to find that comforting or terrifying.”

We hadn’t really been looking at each other, but suddenly he was staring me straight in the eye.

“Carter, please come into the office,” he pleaded. “Tina is right. You shouldn’t be running around the city right now.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, trying to convince myself more than him. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll call Tina myself. That way, you’ll be off the hook.”

“It’s not about being on or off the hook. It’s about you being dead or not.”

“Tommy, I just feel like my best chance to stay alive is to keep moving and get to the bottom of all this. And I need to have you on my side. Please help me.”

Tommy held my glance for another ten or fifteen seconds, which feels like an awful long time when you’re looking straight at another human being.

“Okay,” he said, finally.

“Thank you. I promise I’ll be careful.”

“You better be,” he said. He looked down at his shoes, then added: “I’m not supposed to tell you this part, but there’s been another explosion this morning.”

“Let me guess: Booker T.”

Tommy nodded.

“Initial reports are that Building Five is a big pile of rubble,” he said.

“When did it happen?”

“It’s tough to say because we think it wasn’t called in right away-there’s no one up there with a phone. Maybe an hour after your house blew its top.”

I shook my head, thinking about Queen Mary and Red, hoping they weren’t inside. And who knows how many other vagrants might be sleeping there? How high would the body count get?

“I’m scared,” I said.

“Me, too,” he replied.

We stared at the building for a while, a couple of guys feeling the weight of the bull’s-eyes on their backs. I put my arm around Tommy. It felt nice to have a little human contact.

Actually, I was starting to feel a lot better in general, like I was coming out of the shock that had gripped me since my phone call from the Nutley police. If anything, the shock was being replaced by euphoria. I was alive. And it felt damn good.

I turned and gave Tommy a hug, patting him on the back.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem.”

“Well,” I said, breaking the embrace. “If we wait here much longer, Tina is going to come out here with handcuffs for both of us. I’m heading to the Stop-In Go-Go. You mind checking out the scene at Booker T?”

“Okay,” Tommy said.

“Do me a favor and ask around for Red Coles and Queen Mary,” I said. “And, for God’s sake, watch out for tall men in white vans.”

My trip to the Stop-In Go-Go slowed to a trudge shortly after I turned onto Springfield Avenue, which was doing its best impersonation of a mall parking lot at Christmastime. I remained calm at first, using the time to call Tina. She didn’t pick up her phone-which was perfect-so I left a message telling her that although my cell phone had been turned off, I had not been.

Once I hung up, I reminded myself I shouldn’t let something as trifling and pedestrian as a traffic jam bother me. I’d just had a near-death experience. My thoughts should be more transcendental. I should be glad for the gift that was sitting in traffic.

Instead, all I could think was, why, in the name of all that is most holy, was any road gridlocked at ten-thirty in the morning? It’s a lot harder to be grateful for one’s continued existence when those precious extra moments are being spent stuck behind a Nissan Pulsar with a noisy muffler and an I STOP FOR SALSA bumper sticker.

I finally just parked and hoofed it, and thirteen blocks later figured out the problem: the Stop-In Go-Go had become the command center for the entire metropolitan New York mass media market.

Now it was clear why such scant attention had been paid to the other two catastrophes. Everyone who was anyone in the local infotainment world had set up shop outside the charred remains of this dubiously venerable Irvington institution. The TV trucks outnumbered the fire trucks, ten to two, which was troubling: just think of the flammable potential of all the petroleum-based cosmetics concentrated in such a small area. I could only hope there weren’t any burning embers still floating on the breeze.

As I drew closer, I noticed none of the cameras were pointed at the building. Every last one of them had focused on the five women holding an impromptu press conference on the sidewalk outside-five exotic dancers in varying states of dress and undress.

Channels 6 and 12 were tag-teaming the husky, fake-blond Russian I recognized from my earlier visit to the Stop-In Go-Go. She was dressed in a leopard-print unitard that was being pushed to the theoretical limits of spandex’s tensile strength. Her interview seemed to have ended, but her attempts to spell her name-Svetlana Kachintsova-for the two Hairspray Heads in front of her was something straight out of an English as a Second Language class. And it wasn’t the Russian who was struggling.

Channel 7 was interviewing a woman who had saved not only herself from the fire, but also managed to wrest from the peril her knee-high spike-heeled boots. She would have been five eleven barefooted, but the boots boosted her to six three. She was being interviewed by a Smurf-sized guy who was struggling to maintain eye contact, what with his face being at the same level as her massive, silicone-aided bosom.

Channels 11 and 32, the Spanish-speaking station, were sharing two apparently close friends who had escaped the conflagration in matching kimonos. They insisted on doing their interviews with their arms wrapped around each other-as if the male viewers needed their imaginations prodded any further-and you got the sense they were waiting for Girls Gone Wild to show up so they could start chewing on each other’s tongues.

But the biggest star was Tynesha, who was captivating Channels 2, 4, 9, 22, and 47 with her rendition of the morning’s harrowing events. Wearing her amber contact lenses, furry slippers, and a brief robe, she was telling her story in animated fashion, waving her arms about in a manner the robe wasn’t built to contain. She kept tugging it closed, but every once in a while, when she got too excited, it resulted in a shot that would not have been appreciated by the FCC.

In short, everyone was making great hay out of the scene at the Stop-In Go-Go, which combined the necessary local-TV elements of human tragedy, an easy-to-tell story, and great visuals-with the added bonus of involving strippers.

From a brief bit of eavesdropping on the interviews, I was amused to find the dancers’ stories contradicted each other in nearly every detail-who first became aware of the fire, who had alerted whom to the danger, who had been the most selfless heroine putting herself in harm’s way to save others, and so on.

But they seemed to agree on one basic fact: that sometime after eight that morning, when the five inhabitants of the upstairs apartments were still snoozing in their beds and dreaming of aging sugar daddies, all hell broke loose.

I sidestepped the cameras and looked for someone who resembled a spokesman for the Irvington Fire Department to get the official word, but the only firemen remaining were just as mesmerized by the dancers as everyone else.

With their attention thus occupied, I was able to slink close to the seared building and examine the damage for myself, letting my nostrils tell me the story of what happened. Gasoline. It wasn’t as fresh as if someone had just soaked the rags. It was more like a little-used Exxon station, with the faint remains of an eighty-seven-octane fill-up still lingering in the air.

Or maybe ninety-three. Whatever it was, it had done the job. The tar-paper roof was more or less gone, reduced to a few scant islands of singed material remaining atop the blackened joists. The yellow aluminum siding had gone brown in spots, warped and buckled from the heat. The signature Stop-In Go-Go sign, with its curvaceously outlined dancer, was hanging askew, half melted so the dancer appeared to be some freakish doppelganger of her former lovely self.

It was sad. That sign, that bar, had been a fixture for at least half a century in Irvington. It had seen the city through every economic and social shift, offered dancers good money and patrons a chance to blow off steam (and perhaps a little more) in a relatively safe, structured environment. I suppose you could say it had been a place of comfort for workingmen and a place of work for comfort women.

And now it was no more. I doubted it would be rebuilt. The owner, who had probably been looking for a way out, would take the insurance money and run, selling the land to someone who would open an auto parts franchise or a chain drugstore.

I know it’s a little strange to get sentimental about go-go bars. I certainly wouldn’t recommend running for city council on a progo-go platform.

But to me, go-go bars get a bad rap from outsiders who don’t understand the culture, people who want to see them as dens of vice and smut and nothing else. They are dens of vice and smut, but they’re also communities of people who, in their own bizarre way, really care about each other. They’re wholesome places, albeit in an unwholesome way, and each time one of them gets bumped out for an auto parts store, some important bit of a town’s character is lost.

The circus behind me was still playing in all four rings as I started mentally assembling a timeline of the morning’s events.

My house had been blown up at the same time Miss B’s place had been doused and lit ablaze. That seemed to be the first wave of attack, and it hit around seven-thirty. The second wave, which came during the eight o’clock hour, was the go-go bar being torched and Booker T detonating.

So, obviously, my two pyromaniacs preferred different methodologies: one knew what to do with a stick of dynamite; the other was a gas man-slosh it around, throw the match, run like hell. Each had effectively destroyed whatever evidence might have been left in their respective locations. I thought about distance between the sites and the time it might take to make the necessary arrangements. The timing fit nicely.

I had just worked it out when I heard the scuffling of Tynesha’s furry slippers behind me.

“You!” she thundered. “This is all your fault!”

Her voice had been loud enough to attract the attention of all ten cameras-not to mention the firemen, the sidewalk loiterers, and the traffic stopped on Springfield Avenue-and I suddenly found all those eyes and lenses focused on me.

“That’s right,” she hollered, even louder. “Put his picture on TV. It’s all his fault. Put his picture on TV under a thingie that says ‘bastard.’ ”

Tynesha was staring at me with her arms crossed. The cameramen quickly arranged themselves to form a wall on one side of her, standing at enough distance to be able to catch a wide-angle shot of the dancer and the recipient of her ire. They clearly didn’t have a clue what Tynesha was talking about, but they recognized potentially great footage when they saw it.

“Uh-huh!” she kept railing, her head bobbing from side to side as she spoke. “Bastard. Oh, he act like he’s a nice white boy who takes a girl to the Outback Steak house and plays all friendly. And then the next thing you know you wake up and all your stuff’s on fire.”

Tynesha glared some more, challenging me to answer. But I wasn’t saying a word, not with all those cameras rolling. I know how that stuff gets cut. If I said, “It’s not like I’m guilty as sin,” what would go on TV is me saying, “I’m guilty as sin.” Plus, making the six o’clock news for arguing with an exotic dancer in front of a go-go bar was not a career-enhancing move.

The Smurf from Channel 7, undaunted by his ignorance, pointed his microphone at me.

“This woman seems to be saying you set this fire,” he said. “Do you have a response?”

I sighed and shook my head but kept my lips clamped.

“Aw, hell, he might as well have set it,” Tynesha proclaimed, walking over to the Smurf and snatching his microphone, then using it like it was hooked up to a loudspeaker system. She wanted to be heard. All the cameras instantly readjusted so their shot wasn’t screwed up.

“He didn’t strike the match but he put it in the hands of the guy who did,” Tynesha declared, emphasizing every couple of words like a Sunday-morning preacher who has gotten on a roll.

The Smurf just stood there. His journalistic wits were apparently at their end-plus, he was impotent without his microphone-but the guy from Channel 12, the one who couldn’t spell, was determined to apply his hard-nosed-reporter’s instincts to get to the bottom of this important story.

“Are you an accomplice?” he asked me, with all due drama. “Are you a coconspirator in some way?”

I slapped my hand to my forehead and finally just couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “No,” I said. “No, no, no-”

“That’s right!” Tynesha crowed. “That’s exactly what he is. He’s a Coke conspirator and a Pepsi conspirator and everything else!”

The hairdos stayed straight-faced, but I could see the cameramen smirking. Nothing like a little malapropism to make everyone’s day.

“Look, guys, I’m a reporter for the Eagle-Examiner,” I said. “I didn’t set any fires. I wrote a story, that’s all I did. You can turn your cameras off. There’s no news here.”

I thought it sounded like a reasonable request but, of course, I wasn’t thinking like a TV person. Of course there wasn’t any news. But there was controversy-which is far better than actual news.

“You keep those cameras rolling!” Tynesha commanded, still gripping the Smurf’s microphone. “He put my friend Wanda’s business out there. And now all my stuff’s burnt.”

“Tynesha, can we please have this conversation somewhere else?” I asked.

“No way. We’re having it right here. All my stuff’s burnt and you don’t want to talk about it with all the cameras? Why, because it don’t make you look good?”

“It has nothing to do with looking good,” I countered. “There are some things I need to tell you. In private.”

The hairdos had not yet put A (that Tynesha was talking about the story I had written in that day’s Eagle-Examiner) together with B (that the places I had written about were under attack), so I could only assume they thought they were watching some kind of bizarre lover’s quarrel. The cameras had started swiveling back and forth between me and Tynesha, as if they were covering a tennis match.

“No, I’m through with your crap,” Tynesha bellowed. “Why didn’t y’all just put a map in the damn newspaper, maybe some directions, too. I’m going to get me a lawyer and sue the damn hell out of you and your newspaper.”

I finally lost my patience.

“Tynesha, look, I’ve lost everything, too, okay?” I said. “Whoever did this threw a bundle of dynamite through my living room window this morning. He blew up my house. He blew up everything I own. He even blew up my cat.”

I hated to play the cat card, but I needed to invoke a little bit of sympathy-if not for me then at least for Deadline.

It didn’t work.

“Serves you right!” she snapped. “You just wait until I tell Miss B what happened. She ain’t gonna give you no pie. She ain’t gonna talk to you no more. She ain’t going to answer the door when you knock.”

“Tynesha,” I said as quietly as I could, turning my back to the cameras in the hopes they couldn’t hear me. “Miss B’s place got burned, too. She’s not. . she’s not looking too good.”

Tynesha came at me with fresh rage, fists flying.

“You bastard!” she screamed, veins bulging. “You bastard! You killed her, you killed her!”

She was flailing at me more than she was punching me. I was able to hold her off easily enough-long arms are nice sometimes-though midway through the attack, the belt on her robe slipped loose. With her breasts flopping everywhere, I had to be a little more delicate about the manner in which I restrained her.

Tynesha either didn’t know or didn’t care that her goods were being aired for public consumption-perhaps mass public consumption. She just kept screaming obscenities at me until the big blond Russian grabbed her. Eventually, Tynesha allowed herself to be corralled away. She had been choking back sobs so she would still have breath to berate me, but she couldn’t hold them forever.

“You bastard!” she shrieked one more time, then collapsed into the Russian, who offered her a protective, motherly embrace and shot me a Siberia-cold glower.

The cameras had, naturally, caught the whole ugly thing and they stayed trained on Tynesha and her grief. That left me alone with my thoughts. If I had felt like rationalizing, I could have told myself I was only doing my job, that I hadn’t set anything on fire or blown anything up, that I was just as much of a victim as anyone else.

But knowing the ruin my article was causing-even if the ruin wasn’t my fault-I couldn’t help but think Tynesha right. I was a bastard.

With Tynesha having captured every bit of available attention, I slipped away unnoticed and began walking toward my car. About five blocks later, it occurred to me I should go back and offer the TV morons some kind of explanation for the bizarre thing they had just witnessed. After all, that’s the first rule of public relations: if you’ve got a side of the story to tell, get it out quickly and in an attractive manner.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized a psychopathic, pyromaniac drug kingpin was on the loose, and it was at least partly my fault. For as awful as the TV news was going to make me look, I should leave bad enough alone. After all, there’s also the second rule of public relations: if you’re in the wrong, shut the hell up, take your beating like a man, and hope everyone forgets about it by the next news cycle.

So I completed my walk down Springfield Avenue to my trusty Malibu, which soon delivered me to the relative safety (I hoped) of the Eagle-Examiner offices. By the time I arrived, the morning editor’s meeting was already under way, so I was able to settle into my desk without worrying about immediate ambush from Tina or Szanto.

Reassuringly, my e-mail in-box had the usual mix of worthless press releases and urgent reminders from Human Resources, one of which was about making sure the batteries in my home’s carbon monoxide detector were working properly. Oh, irony.

There were also some messages from colleagues who’d heard about the kindling box my house had become. And over the next half hour, as I called my insurance company and began filing my claim, a number of them stopped by and offered condolences and iftheresanythingicandos. Even Buster Hays dropped his usual persona and offered some kind words.

You wouldn’t necessarily think of newsrooms as dens of altruism, but in times of personal crises, the Eagle-Examiner staff was known for going above and beyond to help its own. I had a half-dozen offers for free lodging by the time Szanto and Tina appeared from the morning meeting.

Tina didn’t bother with words. She came straight for me and hugged me before I could even get out of my chair. It was a bit awkward, having my face mashed into her chest. And I’m sure it was noted by the newsroom gossips, who undoubtedly knew why I hadn’t been at home to be blown up along with the rest of my belongings. But it felt so nice I didn’t care.

“When you’re done molesting him, send him into my office,” Szanto said as he walked by.

Unembarrassed, Tina kept clinging to me. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” she said, kissing the top of my head fiercely. “Now stop scaring the crap out of me.”

I offered my best winsome smile. “Don’t worry,” I said. “If what Billy Joel says is true and only the good die young, I got a long way to go before I check out.”

“You’re staying with me until this is over,” she said. “No arguments. We’re locking the doors and putting on the security system.”

“Okay, but no eggs for breakfast.”

“Deal,” she said, releasing me and exhaling sharply. “Okay. I’m done.”

“Thanks,” I said, and went into Szanto’s office before anyone could get a full look at just how much I was blushing.

“I hope you don’t expect me to hug you like that,” he said. It was as close as Szanto came to a joke.

“Probably for the best,” I said. “I have a pet peeve about hairy backs anyway.”

He almost grinned, but I knew what was coming: the Sal Szanto I’m-a-gruff-bastard-but-I-care-about-my-people speech.

“Hell of a thing this morning,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“No, really. How are you doing?”

“I’m fine, boss,” I said. “Honest. I had my happy-to-be-alive epiphany. I’ve talked with my insurance company. The only thing I can’t replace is my own wonderfully unique DNA sequence, and that managed to come out unscathed.”

Szanto bent forward for a moment to grab his coffee, then returned to a recline, sipping thoughtfully.

“Sometimes these things take a little bit of time to sink in, you know,” he said. “I want you to take some time off. Get away somewhere until this cools down. I talked to Brodie about it and he agreed the paper will handle the tab, so pick yourself a nice island and get lost for a couple of weeks. Drink some fruity drinks. Meet some local girls. Whatever works for you. Hays and Hernandez can pick up the story from here.”

“Like hell they will,” I said.

“Carter, I’m offering you a free vacation.”

“And I’m telling you thanks but no thanks. This is my story and I couldn’t live with myself if I quit on it. At least one woman-and who knows how many Booker T vagrants-may die because of something I put in the damn newspaper. You think a few banana daiquiris will make me feel better about that?”

Szanto moved forward in his chair and placed his coffee back on the desk.

“Yeah, I thought you were going to say that,” he said. “If you wake up tomorrow and change your mind, no one here will think less of you.”

“I’ll think less of me.”

That seemed to settle matters. Szanto asked about my morning and I gave him the full narrative. Then he caught me up on the latest from inside the nest of Mother Eagle. Apparently, the county prosecutor had called up and asked us to be a little more careful about what we put in the paper. Brodie, God bless him, had politely told the prosecutor to shove it up his ass.

Such bravado aside, we all knew that as long as we had a homicidal maniac receiving home delivery, the rules about what we did and did not print needed to change. We had to hold our cards closer to the chest.

“. . and the Newark police want a statement from you,” Szanto finished.

“Can’t you just tell them to buy the newspaper like everyone else?”

“Don’t know if that’s going to work this time,” Szanto said. “We’ve had some success stalling them in the past when these sorts of things came up. But, ultimately, you’re going to have to cooperate. You might as well get it out of the way.”

That was how, in short order, I ended up taking a walk down the hill, across Broad Street, and onto Green Street for a visit with my good friends at the Newark Police Department. Tina had insisted on accompanying me, which gave me some small comfort: at least if the man in the white van suddenly appeared and decided my brain would look better decorating the sidewalk, there would be a witness.

Otherwise, I doubted Tina’s yoga classes, for as shapely as they made her arms, were going to do much to help in the event of an attack. Fact was, if the guy still wanted me dead, I was going to be dead one way or another.

“Whatchya thinking about, Mr. Stare Off in the Distance Man?” Tina asked.

I looked at her and thought about telling the truth: death, Tina. I’m thinking about death. I’m wondering whether I’ll be reunited with my harp-strumming grandparents atop cotton-candy clouds or whether I’ll have all the afterlife of a junked television. I’m wondering if this lunatic is done for the moment or if he’s merely having a Rooty Tooty Fresh N’ Fruity at a local IHOP and will be back to finish me after he’s done with the funnel cake he ordered for dessert. I’m wondering how my blood would look as it poured out of me and spread in a nice circle on the pavement, which is probably the last thing I’d ever see.

Which means I’m also wondering whether I should really just save my own ass and hop on a plane for St. Thomas, taking Tina with me so we can spend the next two weeks finding creative and entertaining ways to start a family.

Tina was still waiting for my answer.

“Oh, nothing,” I said instead. “I was just realizing that I’ve spent my entire career interviewing cops and never once had the tables turned on me. Funny, isn’t it?”

“You’re lying,” she said. “That wasn’t what you were thinking about at all.”

“I wasn’t?”

“I know when you’re lying. I hope you don’t play poker. Your tells are as obvious as turnpike billboards.”

The implication-that I couldn’t tell a lie to a woman I might end up sleeping with-was too immense for my head to process at a time like this. So we walked in silence the rest of the way to police headquarters. I went up to the desk sergeant on duty, announced myself, then was asked to take a seat in a lounge area that reminded me of a hospital waiting room except that it had Wanted posters for wall hangings.

A battered television was bolted into the ceiling in the corner, and we arrived just in time for the News at Noon update. The TV was muted-as all TV news should be-and I was going to keep it that way until I saw they were leading their broadcast with the Stop-In Go-Go fire. I walked over and pumped up the volume in time to catch the words “Let’s go live to Irvington.”

The scene cut directly to the Channel 7 Smurf, who no longer looked so small now that he was appearing alone on camera with nothing to set his diminutiveness in perspective. The word “LIVE” appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and the blackened remains of the Stop-In Go-Go were framed perfectly in the background.

“Thanks, Tom,” the Smurf said. “A bizarre story here, where police say an unknown arsonist has torched this and several other buildings, apparently in revenge for something written in a newspaper article.”

The next scene was a quick scan of the top of that day’s Eagle-Examiner, then footage of Miss B’s place, then of the heap of rubble that remained of Booker T. The Smurf was talking over it the entire time and I was mostly ignoring him until he said, “. . and we have this footage of a dramatic confrontation between one of the dancers and the man who wrote the article, Eagle-Examiner reporter Carter Ross.”

I cringed. Other than Van Man, this was the last thing in the world I wanted to see: Tynesha raving at me, and me pleading in return.

Even having participated in the original event, it was hard to follow the clip they had chosen. They used a special effect to strategically blur her wardrobe malfunctions. They used a bleeping sound every time she swore. The net effect was that most of the clip was either blurred or bleeped.

“That was entertaining,” Tina said when it was over. “Did you really just try to engender sympathy with a source by telling her about your dead cat?”

“Yes, I’m afraid I played the cat card.”

“Interesting,” she said. “At least we don’t have to worry about losing you to network news.”

“Be honest,” I said. “How bad was it?”

“Remember that movie with Winona Ryder and Richard Gere?”

“Ouch.”

Just then, Hakeem Rogers, the Newark Police Department’s spokesman, appeared. Actually, calling Hakeem Rogers a spokesman was a bit of a stretch, since most of the time he was paid to say nothing. We had a relationship based on sarcasm and mutual irritation.

“Hi, Carter,” he said, pretending he was happy to see me.

“Hello, Officer Rogers,” I said.

“Gee, it really breaks my heart you wasted your time coming down here. We don’t need you.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not our case anymore.”

“So whose case is it?”

“We turned it over to the feds,” Rogers said, like I should have somehow known this already.

“Which feds?”

“The Newark Field Office of the National Drug Bureau,” he said. “They told us they had reason to believe the crime involved international drug smuggling and they claimed jurisdiction over it.”

“Huh,” was all I could say.

“Yeah, so you can go bother them now,” Rogers said. “I’m glad we’re rid of it. We got enough murders we can’t solve. If you ask me, they’re not going to do any better with it than we did.”

The Director wasted little time pondering his morning’s work. There was another job to do, and he knew it was going to take several hours: he had a lot of pictures to print out, and ink-jet printers were simply not built for speed. The Director didn’t like using his own printer-in addition to the printer being slow, it meant fussing with those annoying ink cartridges-but he had no choice in the matter. These were not the kind of pictures he could take to the local Fotomat.

They were the snapshots the Director had ordered Monty to take of Wanda Bass, Tyrone Scott, Shareef Thomas, and Devin Whitehead in the moments after their deaths. They were postmortem portraits. Faces of the gone.

And now that the news of the four dealers’ deaths was in every newspaper and on every television-and had no doubt captured his employees’ attention-the time was right to deliver the high-impact message the Director wanted to impart.

He made forty-two packets, one for each of his remaining dealers, to be delivered along with their weekly shipment. Each packet included a set of the photos and a memo:

TO: All Employees

FROM: The Director

RE: Reminder about cutting

It has recently come to my attention that four of our employees were cutting The Stuff as a way of stretching out supply. The pictures enclosed can be considered the consequences of that decision. A similar penalty will await any other employees who make a similar mistake. We have put strict quality control measures in place and we will continue to perform spot checks in the field to ensure compliance on the part of all employees. Only with 100 percent purity can we achieve our goals.

It is my hope this is the last such directive I will have to issue on this subject.

The Director read the memo over three times to make sure it struck the right tone. Then, because he liked how it looked, he found “The Stuff” stamp on his desk and imprinted its logo at the top of each memo-one last sign of authenticity.

In a rare display of initiative, Monty tried to convince the Director it was madness to send out the packets. Mathematically, weren’t there good odds one of them could slip into the wrong hands? Couldn’t this be used as evidence against them?

But the Director only laughed at Monty’s anxiousness. Even if one of his dealers took the package directly to the chief of police and spilled everything, it would have no impact on the Director’s operation. The Director had the local police under control. Besides, each level of his organization was essentially blind to the level above it.

The Stuff could never be traced back to him.