Nathan’s Run

Chapter 14

Nathan licked the last of the pizza sauce off his thumb and forefinger and slumped backwards into the soft leather cushions of the sofa, thoroughly satisfied. Where a family-size frozen pizza had once resided on a cardboard tray, there were now only crumbs and a single orphaned pepperoni, which he quickly dispatched with one bite. He launched an enormous belch, and laughed aloud as the sound reverberated off the walls of the family room.

After hanging up with The Bitch, he’d listened for another hour or so in the bedroom as callers branded him either innocent and cute—Jeeze!—or guilty and vicious. There seemed to be no middle ground. He thought it was pretty cool that The Bitch was supportive. The more he listened, the more he became convinced that she was on his side.

A guy could only ignore his stomach for so long, though. He was getting bored with the radio anyway, so he switched it off with an hour still left in The Bitch’s time slot and headed downstairs, where he launched a search-and-destroy mission looking for something to eat. The pantry proved to be as empty as the refrigerator had been the night before, but a quick look in the mud room revealed a freezer full of his favorite foods. Once he realized that the pizza was too big for the microwave, he followed the directions on the back of the box and cooked it in the oven. While he waited the required twelve to sixteen minutes, he mixed a vat of orange juice from frozen concentrate. He couldn’t find a pitcher, so he used a stew pot.

Once lunch was ready, Nathan camped out on the floor of the family room, in front of a round coffee table. The remote control he found for the entertainment center looked like something invented. by NASA, with blue, green, red and yellow buttons. He pushed buttons at random until the big screen popped to life. None of the cable cartoons he liked were on, so he settled for a Star Trek rerun. Those guys were so lame. By, the time the twenty-third century came around, you’d think people would wear something more hip than high-heeled boots and skin-tight polyester. Captain Kirk was in the process of being beaten up—with his shirt off, of course, while everyone else was fully clothed. Nathan wondered with mild amusement why anyone would agree to be the guest star. Sure as hell, when you got beamed down with the regulars, you were doomed.

At the bottom-of-the-hour break, Nathan saw his face again on the screen—from a fuzzy video picture he hadn’t seen before—with a teaser voice-over for the News at Noon. Being famous was getting to be pretty cool. He wasn’t afraid anymore; at least not the same way he had been. He wasn’t sure where that shot of emotion on the telephone had come from, but he still hated himself for nearly breaking down. He still had friends, after all—somewhere. There was Jacob Protsky, his best friend and soccer teammate, and David Harrellson, who’d shared every classroom with Nathan since first grade. They’d undoubtedly be paying attention to all of this, and a guy had to be careful about his reputation.

Nathan thought about Huck Finn—not the one in the book, which was too boring for him to finish, but the one in the movies. When Huck was about his age, he outsmarted everybody, and got away from the law. Even helped people along the way. That’s what Nathan was going to do. He was going to live an adventure, moving from house to house, maybe sometimes camping out in the woods. Problem was, Huck had Jim to talk to and help him figure out his problems. Much as Nathan hated to admit it, grown-ups just knew more about certain things that he really needed help with. Like coming up with a plan. Huck and Jim had a plan. They used the cover of night to raft upstream to the free states, where Jim could find his family and Huck could start a new life.

What am I going to do?

He knew that his first priority should be putting distance between himself and the JDC, and though he had no real concept of where he was, he figured he couldn’t be more than a mile or two from where he started. That put him in the hottest part of the search area. The morning news shows had shown pictures of search parties and roadblocks, all looking for him. The reporter had even gone so far as to say that there were no leads as to his whereabouts. He figured, then, that he’d made a “clean getaway,” as they said in the movies. Now he just had to work out the next step.

Huck was little help to him here. Nathan had no raft; hell, there wasn’t even a river. And Huck didn’t have to worry about everybody in the country seeing his picture on TV and knowing what he looked like. He also didn’t have to worry about police cars and radios and faxes and radar and all the other stuff the cops had today just to make your life miserable.

On the other hand, Huck didn’t have access to those things either, did he? In one morning, Nathan had heard people change their minds about him, just because he talked on the radio. If he could change minds with a single call, what could he do with more calls? He was already the lead story on all the news shows, but television was still portraying him as the bad guy. He had to figure out a way to switch that around. He was a decent guy who’d gotten into trouble. He’d killed only to protect himself. If he could get the opportunity to tell the truth often enough, then people might start believing him. Television commercials did the same thing all the time, didn’t they? If people could accept what a make-believe psychic said, they had to believe his story, didn’t they? It was the truth, after all. All he had to do was call every radio station in the state and tell them his story.

Shit! Cops can trace phone calls!

Sure, The Bitch said they couldn’t trace the calls to her show, but what about the others?

Maybe The Bitch was wrong and the cops were outside waiting for him right now. Maybe there were rules about breaking down the doors to houses this nice. A quick and cautious check of the street from behind the small seam in the living room drapes out front revealed just a normal, empty summer street. Not even any kids running around. He figured that in a neighborhood like this everybody went away to day camp in the summer. That’s what he used to do.

So The Bitch was right after all—at least so far. And if she was wrong and cops were still on the way, well, that wasn’t something he could worry about. But he decided to cancel his planned telephone blitz. No sense taking unnecessary chances.

So now there was the matter of distance. Walking wouldn’t do. Not only was it too slow, but the news had said something about dogs trying to sniff him down. There had to be another solution.

If I could only drive.

Wait a minute! Why couldn’t he drive? Driving Uncle Mark’s pickup truck was what had gotten him into this mess in the first place. And it wasn’t so long ago that Nathan had driven Granddad’s ancient pickup truck around the fun farm in Gainesville. Purchased for a song in 1979, the eighteen-acre spread with its squalid little ranch house and collapsing barn had served as a place for Granddad to play farmer during his retirement years. Nathan loved going out there, mostly for the well-stocked ponds, but also for the old standard-shift ’68 Ford, which he was allowed to drive anywhere on the property so long as he stayed away from the water and the buildings. Granddad had even fashioned some detachable wooden blocks so he could reach the pedals.

After Granddad died, Nathan found out that the fun farm would be his one day, but that he couldn’t visit the place anymore because some lawyer in New York had rented it to somebody who turned it into a bowling alley. Nathan didn’t even like bowling.

A year ago, Nathan had made it nearly twenty-five miles in Uncle Mark’s truck before the cop pulled him over, and that was in the middle of the day when everybody noticed a kid driving a car. He smiled as he remembered dragging Uncle Mark’s prized vehicle along fifty feet of guardrail and into a maple tree before surrendering to the police. He realized that it was this final act of defiance which likely got him thrown into Juvey, but he still thought it was funny.

If he could do his traveling at night and avoid the major roads with their roadblocks, and if he could keep the car on the road, he might just be able to drive himself right out of the country!

Like everything else in this palace, the garage was huge. Closest to the door from the kitchen was a blank space, the home for the vehicle currently in use by the family. Dry stains on the concrete floor told the story of a once-leaky transmission. In the middle slot, there stood a gleaming fiberglass speedboat with twin Evinrude motors, mounted securely on a trailer.

Huck Finn’s book would have been a lot shorter if they had one of those babies, he thought as he ran his fingers wistfully over the slick, sparkle-flecked surface of the hull. Waterskiing was one of the skills his father had promised him, way back when promises were still kept.

The item he’d hoped to find was in the third and final stall, covered by a light-olive tarp. Only the very bottom radius of the wheels showed beneath the cover. Without hesitating a beat, Nathan grabbed the front corner of the tarp and pulled it off the car.

“Wa-hoa!” he exclaimed aloud, showing the purest possible admiration. Before him rested a brand-new cherry-red BMW convertible, the coolest-looking car on the street. The keys, bearing the handwritten tag, BMW, were on a hook labeled KEYS that was mounted on the wall just to the left of the driver’s door. The other keys on the peg were labeled BOAT and RANGE ROVER. He figured they took the Rover on vacation.

The driver’s door was unlocked, so he opened it and slid into the front seat. The leather was softer even than his dad’s old lounge chair, and a hell of a lot more comfortable than the torn vinyl in Uncle Mark’s 61 pickup. His jaw was slack with wonder as he stroked the seats and gripped the steering wheel, navigating the vehicle in his mind through the turns in the highways he’d soon travel. Almost as an afterthought, he put the key in the ignition and turned it just enough to arm the electrical systems. By process of elimination, he found the buttons controlling the seat position and adjusted it all the way forward, till his feet could touch the pedals. It would be a stretch, but at least they reached.

A grin crossed Nathan’s face. This could work. It had to work. As he played the scenario in his mind, he felt his confidence grow geometrically by the second. All the ifs and maybes were of no consequence to him. He’d beaten the odds to this point, and he’d beat them the rest of the way. Whether it would work or not was irrelevant. What mattered was that he had a plan.

Denise felt like dancing. In the hours since she’d signed off the air, she’d received countless phone calls and faxes from people expressing interest one way or another in the day’s show. Each of the three network morning talk shows had asked for live interviews the next day, but only Good Morning America offered to bring her to their Washington studios via limousine, so that was the one she accepted. The rest wanted to interview her from her home, and as someone who obsessed about cleaning up for relatives, she wasn’t equipped to entertain 40 million Americans before dawn.

If Denise looked ecstatic, Enrique looked like he’d taken a beating. The show had been over for hours, yet calls kept pouring in. Denise had only spoken to the people who got past Enrique, and he had personally spoken with over three hundred people. Even his hair was disheveled, and his hair was never anything short of perfect. Per the secret pact he had made with himself at the conclusion of the show, at exactly four o’clock, he laid the receiver on its cradle, with a caller still running her mouth, and turned off his telephone, routing all calls electronically to The Bitch Phone, a glorified answering machine that was billed as a way for people to sound off during hours when the usual lines were jammed.

Relieved at last to be in a quiet room, Enrique rocked lazily back into his leather chair and crossed his feet atop the corner of his desk. He knew about Denise’s agreement to go on the tube tomorrow morning, which meant that she wouldn’t sleep the entire night. Instead, she’d spend the night preparing for her two and a half minutes in the spotlight. As her producer, sounding board and designated hand-holder, he knew that, like it or not, sleep was not in the cards for him, either.

If any rest lay in his immediate future, it would be during the next couple of hours, while Denise was basking in her recent glory. It wouldn’t be till 2:00 A. M. that her serious self-doubt would materialize, and that’s when his real work would begin. He’d never understand why she kept doing this to herself. Before drifting off for his power nap, he checked his watch. It was 5:03.

Enrique nearly fell backwards when his sleep was shattered by a ringing phone. His watch now read 5:08, and he prayed that it had stopped working.

“I thought I turned you off,” he grumped at the phone, but by the second ring, he realized that it wasn’t the 800 line. It was Denise’s private line. By the third ring, it was clear that she wasn’t going to answer it herself, so he snatched it to his ear. “Bitch,” he answered. It was the usual one-word salutation to callers, but this time it seemed to ring with emotion.

The female voice on the other end of the line was at once cordial and efficient. “Mr. Dorfman calling for Ms. Carpenter.”

Enrique’s feet shot to the floor, and he was instantly wide awake. “One moment, please,” he said. Ronald Dorfman was president of Omega Broadcasting. Headquartered in New York, Omega was the company that syndicated Denise’s show and wrote their paychecks. In all the five years that The Bitch had been on the air, Mr. Dorfman had never called the show personally. Whether his presence on the phone was good news or bad, he had no way of telling. But one thing was certain: he needed to find his boss right now.

As he’d expected, Enrique found Denise at the coffee pot, accepting kudos from a group that rarely showed interest in the work she did—the news staff.

A card-carrying pessimist at heart, Denise naturally assumed that she was in trouble. Unlike Enrique, Denise had, in fact, spoken with Mr. Dorfman twice: once on the day she signed her syndication contract, and a second time when a caller pushed her a little too hard and her language exceeded FCC standards by a significant margin. That latest occasion was three years ago, and since then she’d been perfectly content to limit her contact with the Big Guy to the sterile holiday greetings he sent to all on-air personalities at Christmas.

Three minutes after Enrique had pushed the hold button, Denise was on the line. “Hello, this is Denise Carpenter,” she said, her voice full of business, and totally devoid of the talk host jive. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”

“Not at all, Ms. Carpenter,” the secretary said. “Please hold for Mr. Dorfman?’

So now it was Denise’s turn to wait. Enrique sat anxiously on the worn sofa across the tiny office from her desk. There were many perks in radio, and countless ways to stroke the substantial egos of on-air talent, but among these was not plush office space. Hers was little more than a cubicle, ten by ten feet, if you cheated a little with the yardstick. The walls were adorned with pictures, mostly of or painted by her children. There was no degree to post, no brag wall in the traditional sense of lawyers and doctors. Her bragging rights belonged to her single-handed rise through the ranks to command a top-rated show. As she waited for Mr. Dorfman to pick up her line, she sent up a private prayer that she hadn’t inadvertently done something to risk all of this.

“Good afternoon, Denise, this is Ron Dorfman.” His tone was quite friendly, causing Denise’s shoulders to slump a little, a visible sign of relief that made Enrique relax as well. “It’s been a very long time since we talked. How have you been?”

“Really quite well, Ron, thanks for asking. The show seems to be doing rather well.”

The smile stayed in her boss’s boss’s boss’s voice. “Indeed it has,” Dorfman agreed. “In fact, I had the opportunity to listen to you today. Please don’t take offense, but with my job, I really don’t get that opportunity very often:’ She could tell that he was talking around his ever-present stogie.

“Oh, I certainly understand?’ Her shoulders tensed again, bringing Enrique to the edge of his cushion. This was going somewhere.

“This business with the boy who killed the prison guard. Tell me what you think about it.”

“I think it’s great radio,” she said without hesitating. It was the answer she thought he wanted to hear.

“No, that’s not what I mean. What do you think about the situation?”

Denise’s instincts told her to fall into a defensive mode, justifying her decision to talk with Nathan on the air. But she opted to hold back instead; to feel out Dorfman’s purpose for calling. “If you’re asking me if I think he’s telling the truth, the answer is, yes, I do.”

“And why do you think that? There’s an awful lot of people out there who don’t agree with you.”

“With all due respect, Ron, those people haven’t been calling our station.”

“Trust me on this, Denise. There are people, and then there are people. The ones who wear badges don’t agree with you, and they’re making their positions to that effect very well known here in New York.” There was nothing at all adversarial in his voice. “Now, please, tell me why you believe the young man’s story.”

Denise looked to Enrique, who, of course, had no idea what was being said. How do you answer a question like why? How do you sum up a feeling, an intuition, in a way that would make sense to the head of a seven-hundred-million-dollar corporation? Put in the same situation, a child would respond with the most honest answer of all: “Because.” But that wasn’t the kind of answer Ron was looking for, was it? She shrugged and stammered a bit as she tried to find the words.

“That’s a tough question to answer, Ron,” she tried, hoping for a reprieve.

“I understand. Take your time.”

He was not going to let her off the hook. “Pardon me for being so unscientific,” she said at last, “but the main reason I believe him is because I have kids around the same age, and I just know when they’re lying. His telling of the story was just too… real.”

Dorfman was quiet for a moment as he considered the answer. “And if we accept that he is, in fact, telling the truth, what does that mean in the grand scheme of things?”

Denise was ready for this. “It means that there are a whole lot of policemen wandering around northern Virginia scouring the countryside for an ‘escapee’ who never had any choice but to run away. I’m not sure what the grand scheme of things is, but I know where my sympathies lay. Nobody—not even Nathan—disputes the basic events, that he killed the supervisor and ran away. What’s in play here is who really is the murderer and who is the victim. Sometimes you can’t tell that merely by counting who’s standing and who’s laying down.”

There was a deep sigh on the other end of the phone, perhaps a drag on the cigar. “Very eloquently put,” Ron Dorfman said at length. “And I agree with you. I had the same feeling, but it’s been so long since I’ve been around twelve-year-olds that I needed some affirmation from a second source. It was a sensational interview.”

Denise would have thanked him, but she sensed there was another shoe to drop. She didn’t have to wait long.

“A New York State Trooper was in my office just a half hour ago to present me with a summons to appear at the Braddock County Courthouse (wherever that is) tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock to argue against an emergency petition filed by one J. Daniel Petrelli, Commonwealth’s Attorney for Northern Virginia. Seems they want to have access to our telephone records. What do you think about that?”

Once again, Denise was at a loss as to the right answer, so once again, she opted for honesty. It had been working pretty well so far.

“I think it stinks, Ron.” Hearing those words out of context, Enrique nearly fell off the sofa, certain that Denise had finally lost her mind. “You said you listened to the show today. Did you hear my conversation with the policeman?”

Dorfman chuckled. “Yes, I did. And I’d be real careful not to be caught speeding any time in the next couple of years.”

“Well, I think I stated my position pretty clearly then.”

“And so you did. But Denise, I want you to understand what the stakes are here. First of all, our attorneys tell me that your First Amendment argument is viable only if the government is put in a position to compel us to hand over the records. If we simply agree to do so, then that whole argument is moot. Follow me so far?”

“Yes, I suppose. But Ron—”

“Hear me out.” He sounded like a CEO now, his words delivering a direct order. “The attorneys also tell me that if we refuse to allow access to the records, and we prevail in the court proceedings, we open ourselves up to enormous civil liabilities if the kid turns out truly to be a murderer and he goes forth to do it again. All of this before we even try to calculate the public relations disaster that would result from that turn of events:’ He paused a long moment to let his words settle in Denise’s brain.

“So here’s where we stand,” Dorfman summarized. “On the one hand, we have an obligation to the greater good, to assist the police in their efforts to protect society, and to bring an admitted killer to justice. On the other hand, we have an ethical obligation to ourselves and to our industry to protect that which is ours, if only on principle. You can probably guess what the legal department wants me to do, but you’re the one who talked to the boy. You’re the one who got us into this. I want to hear what you think we should do:’

This wasn’t fair! Denise wasn’t an executive, never wanted to be.

She was a talk show host, nothing more and nothing less. She wasn’t paid to carry this _ sort of burden. Where did Dorfman get off unloading this on her shoulders?

As quickly as the protests flashed through her brain, they were followed by the answers. She had forced him into a crack. She had taken such pleasure defending the high ground against attacks from that cop, Thompkins, that she’d left Dorfman with no “wiggle room,” no face-saving route of escape or compromise. And she’d done it in front of millions of people. Suddenly she was filled with admiration for her great-grand boss. He wasn’t even angry at her for pushing him into a very public corner. He was, however, waiting for her answer.

“Ron, I think you might have missed one important issue here,” she said carefully. “I know what the legal department says, and everything you said makes sense, but this is bigger than just our rights versus the rights of the community. There’s a scared little kid in the mix here. Maybe my emotions have been sucked deeper into this than they should have, but my heart really goes out to that boy. I want to hold his hand and help him out of this. But I can’t do that. I can’t do anything to help him at all. I guess… Dammit, Ron, the odds are stacked too high against him. He’s just one little boy trying to fight a losing battle, and it just doesn’t seem fair to give them access to computer records when they already hold all the cards.” There, she said it. And she sounded just like an irrational, overly emotional woman.

Ron chuckled. “You’ll forgive me if we don’t present that argument in court,” he said. While the words were patronizing, the message was not. Another deep draw on the cigar, followed by a long, measured exhalation. “Well, Denise, here’s what we’re going to do tomorrow. I’m going to bet my job, and yours, and a substantial chunk of this company’s assets, on the assumption that this boy is telling the truth, and that he will not, in fact, embark on a multistate crime spree. We’ll argue to the court that our telephone records are private, and that we won’t share them with anyone.”

Denise was stunned. It was not what she’d anticipated. Able to think of nothing more profound, she simply said, “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. This might be the stupidest decision I’ve ever made.”

“It’s certainly one of the most courageous?’ The words came directly from her heart.

This time, it was Dorfman who was caught off guard. “Why, thank you, Denise,” he said. “We chief executives don’t get to hear things like that very often.” He cleared his throat. “Listen, you did a good job today. I appreciate it. Hope you sleep better tonight than I will:’ He hung up, leaving Denise staring at her phone.

Enrique couldn’t stand it anymore. “Well?” he insisted.

A huge smile blossomed on Denise’s face. “He said we did a good job.”