Nathan's Run

Chapter 9

Denise Carpenter, single mother of twin girls, had been "The Bitch" on NewsTalk 990 for nearly five years, a transformation that was so accidental it somehow seemed ordained that the show would become a success.

In October, four and three-quarter years before, she had been a traffic reporter, granted thirty seconds of airtime every half hour. The regular late-morning talent, Bos's Johnny, called in that morning from the D. C. jail, where he'd been offered a guest room in return for seven outstanding warrants for offenses ranging from failure to pay child support to assault with intent to murder, the latter being the result of too much Jack Daniel's and too little temper. With only twenty minutes' advance notice, Denise was told that she would get her big chance in major-market radio. The news should have thrilled her, but at the time she was not looking for work in front as a deejay. She was perfectly content to monitor the police scanners for accidents and devise alternative routes for frustrated commuters.

But she was smart enough to realize an opportunity when she saw it. At the time, her daughters, Laura and Erin, were only five, and between day care and rent, there was barely enough cash left in any given week for food. A social worker friend of hers had told her that she qualified for food stamps, but Denise refused. She wasn't about to give Bernie the satisfaction of seeing her take charity. She had wanted the divorce, and she had wanted sole custody, and she had let him off the hook for even the tiniest amount of child support, against the vehement objections of the judge. The last thing "Bernie the Bastard" said to her as they left the courthouse was, "You're gonna starve without me." Over the ensuing six years, she'd come to think of those words as her good luck charm.

With no notice, and facing a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make an impression, Denise had walked into the booth briskly and confidently. Years later, her then-engineer and current producer Enrique Zamora confided in her that he'd lost twenty dollars that day by betting that Denise would leave in tears before the end of the first commercial.

Far from tearful, Denise came out of the theme song swinging.

"I'm not the voice you were expecting to hear this morning," she'd said, her first words ever as a disc jockey. "That voice is learning to sing the song of the jailbird. It seems that Boss Johnny had more mouth than he had heart. Right now, he's in jail downtown on a number of charges, one of which is failure to pay child support. If he's innocent, I can't wait to see his smiling face back in the booth. If he's guilty, I hope he rots in a cell with Bubba the Love Muffin teaching him things he never knew about sex."

For the next four hours, Denise railed on about what was wrong with the social fabric of America, not hesitating to traipse on territory normally considered forbidden. She established her position in favor of a woman's right to choose abortion when the circumstances warranted it, but suggested that murder charges be brought against anyone and everyone who participated in an abortion-including fathers and doctors-when the procedure was used solely as a means of birth control. When she was asked how she could justify such a self-contradictory position, she answered, "I don't have to justify anything to you. I'm just telling you how I feel. If it upsets you, find that little knob on the bottom of your radio and turn it till I go away."

Through her entire first show, the telephone lines remained jammed with callers trying to assail her positions. Denise's defining moment came when Barbara from Arlington, Virginia, called in to tell her, "No offense, Denise, but you're really coming across as a bitch on the radio."

Denise responded, "Why, thank you very much Barbara, because you're right. But I'm not just a bitch; I'm the bitch of Washington, D. C." In an industry where a marketable identity means everything, Denise had stumbled upon a winner.

By the time Boss Johnny was able to scrape together bail money, two days after his arrest, his job had been given away to an upstart bitch from the news staff.

Within a week after she'd started her new career, Denise's salary had been quintupled, in return for her signature on an unheard-of three-year exclusive contract. The Bitch represented everything that is supposed to fail in radio: a black female who speaks openly and evenly about everything from racism to child-rearing. Politically, she was more conservative than liberal, but she didn't hesitate to torpedo anyone who stepped out of line.

Three weeks after her first show, NewsTalk 990 had picked up a full six percentage points in the ratings during the coveted morning slot. Denise the Bitch had been featured in both Washington, D. C. newspapers, and thoroughly dominated the trade press. According to her fans, The Bitch offered a real person's view on life. Like most Americans, Denise had no political ax to grind, and she certainly had no political ambitions, so when she said what she thought, it had the ring of truth with which her audience could identify.

One month after her first anniversary as a talk-show host, Enrique Zamora sat her down in his office, looking like a little kid who was going to burst if he didn't reveal a secret. "I overheard the station manager talking with some guy on the phone today. They're going to syndicate us!"

Even as Denise heard the words, she didn't understand his enthusiasm. "So?"

"So! Don't you get it? Syndication means we'll be on the radio in every major market in the country. A nationwide audience."

For a long moment, Denise had just stared in disbelief, her hand frozen over her gaping mouth. "Oh, my God, Rick. Are you serious?"

"Yes, I'm serious! Think of it. Millions of people listening to you from coast to coast. Millions of dollars in your pocket."

Enrique's last comment took Denise's breath away, making her feel light-headed. "No," she commanded, mostly to herself. "We're not going to get all excited over something you think you heard other people talking about. This kind of thing just doesn't happen to me."

"I don't think I overheard it," Enrique protested. "I know what I heard, and they were talking about you."

"And they said we were going into syndication?"

"Yes."

"You're a liar."

Enrique laughed. "I am not a liar. I'm a busybody and an eavesdropper, but I am not a liar."

Sure enough, later that day, the station manager approached Denise with the official news. Their initial syndication would be in twelve markets, from Tampa to Bloomington, Illinois. Her already comfortable salary would double once again. Within a year, there were thirty-four stations on the network, prompting another doubling of her salary.

By the time Nathan listened to her for the first time in the bedroom of a strange house, Denise was being heard on 327 stations across the country, and was earning well into seven figures.

During her monologue at the beginning of the show that morning, The Bitch had railed against the state of the youth of America, citing as an example of the decaying moral fabric the local Washington story of a twelve-year-old boy who'd escaped from prison after killing a guard.

"The prosecutor on this case says he's going to try this kid as an adult, and I think that's great. How many times do you hear stories of gang killings, and drive-by killings and robbery killings, only to find out that the killing is being done by pint-sized monsters? Twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-year-olds who have so little to live for that they take the most precious possession from others-their very lives.

"I for one am tired of hearing it. I for one am prepared to stand up and say, man or woman, underage or not, if you intentionally take the life of another human being, I don't want you as a part of my society. I want you in prison for the rest of your life, or certainly until you're old enough to be strapped down in one of those nice little electric chairs they have collecting dust across the country, where you can be zapped straight to hell, and spend all eternity considering just how cool and courageous murder really is."

The phones went nuts, every light blinking urgently by the time she was done with her tirade. Promising to talk to the listeners on hold as soon as she came back, The Bitch went into commercials.

"Half the calls want to hang the kid, and the other half want to hang you," Enrique said into Denise's headset. She smiled stunningly. To Enrique, everything that Denise did was stunning. Always well dressed and always wearing makeup, Denise was a sharp contrast to the rest of the on-air talent, whose sense of fashion focused mainly on using a napkin rather than their sleeves to wipe their mouths during lunch. Fans who knew Denise only from her voice invariably commented, when they met her, on how beautiful she was, and, privately, how surprised they were.

Denise raised her onyx eyes from her notes to stare through the glass at Enrique. "Listen, Rick," she said. "Screen out the callers who want to tell me that the kid is innocent, okay?" Enrique nodded and gave a thumbs-up. "And I don't want to talk to anyone who's going to tell me that I'm a bad mother. I just want to discuss the pros and cons of trying kids as adults, and proposed solutions to the juvenile crime problem."

"You got it, Denise," Enrique told her. "We're coming out of commercial in twenty seconds. Your first call is Robert on line four. I think he wants to agree with you."

Denise nodded with mock enthusiasm. "That sounds like a perfect place to start."

Enrique used his fingers to count down from five, and then gave Denise her cue.

"And you're back in the room with The Bitch. Not much trouble collecting phone calls this morning." She stabbed the blinking line four. "Hello, Robert, this is The Bitch. What's on your mind?"

"Hello, Bitch." Robert's voice had the gravelly sound of a smoker, maybe forty-five years old. "I'm calling to agree with you, believe it or not."

"Why wouldn't I believe that? Since I'm always right, I always expect people to agree with me."

Robert laughed, initiating a juicy cough. "But this is the first time I've ever agreed with you."

Denise laughed, too. "Well, tell me, Robert, what have I said to deserve such an honor?"

"I say the youth of America are going down the toilet. I get sick and tired of hearing that abusive families and racial strife are responsible for kids' actions. It's the kids themselves. They don't respect anybody or anything; they just look at everybody as their next potential victim:'

"You keep referring to 'they, Robert. Who exactly are 'they?'"

"The juvenile delinquents out on the street. The courts are afraid to do anything about them. If they throw them in prison, the ACLU screams that they're not being treated fairly, and the media paints this picture of an innocent who's been victimized by his surroundings. On the other hand, if the judges don't put them in jail, that means they just come back out onto the street."

Denise tried to interrupt, but Robert was on a roll.

"I read a story in the paper just a few months ago about some kid in Chicago, eleven years old, who killed a girl in a drive-by shooting. I was in Chicago at the time, and all we heard was how they were looking for this kid, who had an arrest record as long as my arm. Two days later, the kid showed up dead in some drainage ditch, shot in the head. Then the local media cried all over themselves, showing the kid's smiling face on the news and interviewing his relatives about what a wonderful kid he was!"

"And you don't believe he was a wonderful kid?"

"Hell, no. He was scum. Let's call it as it is. He might have been young scum, but he was scum. We've got no place for people like that on the streets."

Denise made the "okay" signal to Enrique through the window. Robert was a live one.

"So where does that leave us with this kid, Nathan Bailey? What should we do with him?"

"Honestly?"

"Of course. Nothing but the truth on my show. That's the first rule?'

"Honestly, I don't have a problem executing him. He killed a prison guard, for crying out loud. If he's tried as a juvenile, he'll be out in nine years, if not before, but that guard'll still be dead. That doesn't seem fair to me?'

Enrique's voice in Denise's headphones told her it was time to move on to Barb on line six.

"Thank you, Robert, I have to say I agree with you. Now it's on to Barb, who's live on the air with The Bitch. What's on your mind, Barb?"

The voice was timid, maybe twenty-two. "Hello?"

"Hello, Barb, you're on the air with The Bitch."

"Oh, hi. This is Barb. Thanks for taking my call, B-" Her hesitation in saying the word was not uncommon among young women.

"It's The Bitch, honey. Come on, you can say it. If I can be it, you can say it."

Barb giggled on the other end. "Anyway, thanks for taking my call

… "

Denise interrupted again. "No, you've got to say it, or I'll hang up on you. Say, Hello, Bitch."

Barb giggled nervously. "I… I don't want to."

"Sure you do. It should be easy, the way I'm treating you right now in front of millions of listeners. Just say bitch."

"I can't."

"Sure you can. I'll give you a running start at it. You just complete the sentence: Jeeze, you're a… "

"Bitch." Barb said it so softly, it was barely audible.

"Okay, Barb, that was a good start. Now, try it again with feeling. Son of a… "

"Bitch."

"Okay, that was much better. Now let's go for the gold. Say, Hello, Bitch."

"Hello, Bitch." Barb was laughing.

"Howya doin, Bitch."

"Howya doin, Bitch."

"Son of a bitch. You're a real bitch, Bitch."

Barb was laughing hard now. "Son of a bitch. You're a real bitch, Bitch."

Denise slapped the table triumphantly. "By George, we did it. Don't you feel better now?"

"Absolutely."

"And aren't you glad that my radio name isn't Vagina?" Hard laughter from the other end of the phone.

"Or better yet, maybe I'll change my name to scrotum. Think of it: 'Hello, America, don't forget to listen to your scrotum every morning." Denise started to laugh herself. "Like men need any more encouragement to do that. Anyway, Barb, you've been a good sport. What's on your mind?"

Barb composed herself more quickly than Denise would have expected. "Well, Bitch, I'm just not comfortable treating children the same way as adults. A child who's a criminal can still be turned around. It's not like an adult, where they know better and decide to commit crimes anyway."

"So you don't think that Nathan Bailey, at age twelve, knew that it was wrong to kill?"

"I think he knew it was wrong, sure. I just don't think that children can put an act like that into perspective."

"Come on, Barb, what does perspective have to do with anything? A public servant is still dead. That's the only perspective he and his family will ever have."

"I just don't think it's that simple. To try a child as a criminal requires more than just determining what the kid did. You have to look at what they thought they were doing."

"What makes you think that little Nathan thought he was doing something other than killing?"

"What makes you think he didn't?" Barb's tone had a real "gotcha" edge to it.

"That's just it, Barb. I don't care. It really doesn't matter, and that's my point. The act of killing speaks for itself, as far as I'm concerned."

The Bitch took two more calls before the first break. Neither thought that Nathan should be treated differently from any other criminal. The time had come, the callers agreed, when people had to take responsibility for their actions, whether good or bad. The courts had gone way too far in protecting the rights of the bad guys at the expense of the good guys.

Denise could not have agreed more.

Nathan sat on the edge of the big bed for twenty minutes, listening to a long string of grown-up strangers passing judgment on him.

How can they say those things? They weren't there. They didn't hear Ricky's threats, or feel his hands around their throats. They didn't know-they probably didn't even care-that if he hadn't killed Ricky, then Ricky would have killed him. They hadn't seen the crazy look in his eyes, or have their brains rattled by a punch in the eye. They didn't see the blood.

Oh, God. The blood.

The more he heard, the more he realized that the truth was becoming irrelevant. People were telling lies about him again, and he knew from experience how quickly lies can become reality in people's minds, and how once that happens, they can do anything they want to you. No one had even heard his side of the story. All they had heard was what the police and the JDC assholes were saying about him. All they had heard were lies.

But he could change that, couldn't he? All he had to do was pick up the telephone and call. He had the number memorized already; God knows they said it enough on the air. He could just pick up the phone and tell his side of the story, and set the record straight. Except it wouldn't be that simple. They wouldn't believe him. She'd make fun of him, and say terrible things to him, and he'd get upset, and the thoughts would come back to him and he'd get caught doing something stupid. He couldn't afford to get caught.

But he couldn't afford to let people think those things about him, either. There was no harm in just a phone call, was there? If things got bad, he could always just hang up.

The phone was a cordless one, resting on the nightstand next to the radio. Nathan picked it up, pushed the ON button, and just sat there silently for a long while, staring at the handset. Finally, the dial tone changed to a horrid screeching sound that caused Nathan to hang up quickly. Taking a deep breath, he pushed the button again, and dialed The Bitch's 800 number. He noted the odd sound of the touch tones, which were all the same pitch. At home, he used to be able to play tunes with the tones. When he was done dialing, he brought the phone to his ear to hear an immediate busy signal.

Nathan felt relieved; the pressure was off. He had tried. Even though he had failed, trying was enough, wasn't it?

He listened to two minutes more of the radio and decided that no, it wasn't enough at all.

He dialed the number again. And again. And again. Each time, he got a fresh busy signal. On his ninth try, he heard some odd sounds in the handset, and had to stop himself from automatically pushing the flash and redial buttons. He had a rhythm going. Finally, the phone on the other end began to ring.

After what seemed to be a hundred rings, someone picked up on the other end. "You've reached the Bitch Line:' the voice said. "What do you want to talk about?"

"I want to talk about this Nathan Bailey thing."

"Are you a kid? The Bitch doesn't talk to kids."

"I think she'll want to talk to me. I'm Nathan Bailey."

Denise was ready to shift gears again. They had been on the Nathan Bailey topic for the better part of forty-five minutes, and they had stopped receiving original input. Once the callers currently on lines one and four were taken care of, there would be a commercial break, and then they'd move on to some tidbits on the way the president was handling foreign affairs.

Gordon, a psychiatrist from Stockdale, Arizona, was on the line, babbling psychological double-talk about how children under fifteen don't have a strong enough system of values to make adult-level decisions regarding right and wrong. Denise smiled contentedly. When the good doctor paused to take a breath, she was going to eat him alive.

She had just opened her mouth to begin her meal when Enrique's excited voice popped in her earphones. "You've got to take the caller on line six," he said.

The look Denise fired to her producer should have melted the glass that separated them. One of the most basic, cardinal rules of talk radio was, never interrupt the host when she is talking-or about to talk.

Recognizing the look for what it was-a threat to his career-Enrique explained, "It's a kid claiming to be Nathan Bailey. The Nathan Bailey. I think he's telling the truth."

Denise completely lost her train of thought for a moment. If it were true, they could be on the verge of some terrific radio. After a pause that was long enough to make some of the audience wonder if their radios were broken, Denise regained her composure and dumped the doctor from the phone line. "Thanks, Doc, but that's about as much of that as I can handle. My kids are a hell of a lot younger than fifteen, and they have an excellent feel for what is right and what is wrong.

"Well, now, it would appear that we have a celebrity on the line, assuming that my producer is telling the truth." She made quite a show of pushing the button numbered six. "Nathan Bailey, are you there?"

"Yes, ma'am," said a small but strong voice from the other end. There was determination in the boy's husky voice. For years, Denise had prided herself in her ability to recognize personality traits just from listening to people's voices. This was the voice of a Boy Scout and Little League baseball player; the voice of someone who was honest. Denise instantly began to second-guess her conclusions about Nathan.

Michaels was already feeling the result of too little sleep, and the coffee he had consumed to compensate had formed an acid bath in his stomach that could etch glass. Without consciously realizing that it had made any noise, he picked up his phone after the first ring.

"Lieutenant Michaels."

"Michaels, this is Petrelli," the other voice said.

Oh, shit. That's what I fucking need. "Good morning, J. Daniel. I see you were up early for the cameras."

Clearly agitated, Petrelli ignored the barb, which was uncharacteristic of him. "Turn on The Bitch," Petrelli barked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The radio, goddammit. Turn on The Bitch. The Bailey kid is on there talking to her right now!"

"No shit?" Michaels was in no hurry. He knew he'd be able to catch whatever he missed by listening to one of the many tapes of the program that were being made by any number of police officers who would soon march them into their supervisors, making a show of how conscientious they'd been.

"Yeah, no shit," Petrelli growled. "Turn it on and listen. I'll call you when they're done."