The Girl Next Door

CHAPTER 9

It’s surprisingly difficult to look at a gun out of the corner of your eye while driving, especially when it’s being pointed at the side of your head. But from what little I could see, McNabb’s piece was short, black, and made for the express purpose of ruining someone’s day. Gun enthusiasts go back and forth all the time about the merits of various calibers and bullets, chamber types and trigger actions. Not being a gun enthusiast, all I knew is this one would likely leave a significant portion of my brain splattered on my driver’s side window.

In my previous thirty-two years on this planet, despite brushes with some unfriendly people, I had never had a gun aimed at me from this short a distance. Or any distance, for that matter. I tried to keep walls, or at least bulletproof glass, between me and anyone inclined toward discharging a firearm in the general direction of my person.

Now here I was, with nothing but three inches of air between this gun barrel and some body parts that I preferred to keep unsplattered.

And perhaps it should have been unnerving. Or disconcerting. Or at least mildly off-putting. I certainly don’t fancy myself some kind of big tough guy impervious to bullets. I’m not especially brave in the face of danger. I have no illusions about my own fragile mortality.

Yet the only thing I felt was this strange calm. Maybe it’s just because it was all so foreign, I didn’t know how to react.

A few raindrops-big, fat, heavy ones-thwapped on the roof of the car. Then a gust of wind lashed us with another band of rain. The storm had arrived.

“Keep it nice and steady,” McNabb instructed. “Don’t try anything silly. If I feel even an ounce too much brake or accelerator, I’ll shoot.”

Up until the moment he had pulled the gun, McNabb had been his usual gregarious self. Now he seemed jumpy, on edge, neither of which were qualities I appreciated in a man with a gun.

I studied him, as best my peripheral vision would allow. His mouth had gone into the same ugly pout he had worn when I first told him that Nancy’s hit and run was no accident. At the time, I thought the reaction was because of his friendship with Nancy. Now I knew it was because he realized he had not gotten away with his crime.

He almost did. If not for one El Salvadoran woman who liked to watch sunrises, neither of us would be in this spot right now.

McNabb had turned his body toward me, his eyes staring a hole in the side of my head where a fast-moving projectile might soon follow. I could see, now that he was twisted slightly, that he had been wearing a small shoulder holster. I’m not sure how I missed it before, except of course that it had never occurred to me to look.

Had he been unbelted, I would have simply jerked the wheel and crashed into the railroad trestle we were approaching. At sixty miles an hour, I’d take my chances. But he was wearing his seat belt. Crashing the car wouldn’t necessarily improve my situation. Sure, it might make it more likely he would get caught for killing me, because the crash would attract attention, and he might be incapacitated enough he wouldn’t be able to escape. But he’d probably shoot me as soon as he figured out what I was doing. And while it might be some small consolation for my loved ones that my killer got caught, it wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good from six feet under.

So I kept it steady. Like the man with the gun said.

“Slow down. Take a right here,” he said as we passed under the railroad. “Right after the bridge.”

There was an entrance to a warehouse about a hundred feet ahead. Just short of it was a small, packed-dirt road.

“Right here?” I asked.

“That’s the one,” he said.

“I’m braking now to make the turn,” I said, because I didn’t want to get shot until it was absolutely necessary.

The Malibu, not exactly an off-road vehicle, left the pavement with a jolt.

“Keep it slow,” he said. “Nothing cute.”

“You got it, Caesar.”

I used the name to try to get a small rise out of him-to see if he would rattle a little-but he didn’t show any reaction. As I gently pressed the brake pedal, the first peal of thunder boomed from somewhere nearby. I didn’t see the lightning strike that preceded it, but the storm was definitely close. Then, just as suddenly as the thunder, the rain came, hammering the car from every direction, like I had driven into a car wash.

“Can I turn on the windshield wipers?”

“Do it slow.”

I eased my hand to the side of the steering wheel and turned the wipers on the highest setting.

In the meantime, all the mistakes I had made were raining down on my head as well. Some of them were now so obvious. Example: McNabb told me Jackman made those threats against Nancy on Thursday night. But Mrs. Alfaro said the killer started stalking Nancy on Tuesday morning, two days earlier.

“There never was any meeting at a bar with you and Jackman on Thursday night, was there?” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the rain. “There were never any threats.”

“Nope,” he admitted, without changing the position of anything but his mouth.

Of course there weren’t. That’s why McNabb would never tell me the name of the bar, why he was always so guarded about the whole thing-there was no bar. Jackman’s appointment book just said “IFIW.” It had been a negotiating session, nothing more.

“I can’t believe I thought it was Jackman,” I said, mostly to myself. “Maybe I just wanted it to be Jackman.”

That had been another massive mistake, of course. I had allowed my bias against Jackman to cloud my judgment, never stopping to think that merely being a jackass and a foppish, non-newspaper-reading hatchet man didn’t necessarily mean he was a murderer-even if he had once used a seven-iron in a way not endorsed by the United States Golf Association. Tina tried to tell me that. I hadn’t listened.

Then there was Gus Papadopolous. I still had no idea what business he and Jackman had together, but it hardly mattered anymore. I mean, sure, Papadopolous went a little short-fused when he found out a reporter was in his office. But a lot of people didn’t like reporters hanging around. Heck, maybe he sensed I had the hots for his daughter, and had kicked into overprotective daddy mode.

But there were more mistakes. I had badly misjudged McNabb, assuming that because he had one obvious agenda-positioning his union in its renegotiation with the paper-he didn’t have any other agendas that he kept hidden.

McNabb said it himself, in a small bit of conversation that was now coming back to me: a powerful man facing the loss of his power will do just about anything to protect it. I thought he was talking about a different powerful man, but he was talking about himself.

More than that, I had allowed myself to rely on his information too much, without stopping to scrutinize it that extra layer. I definitely subscribe to the “one great source” theory of reporting-that all it takes is that one person on the inside to illuminate a subject for you. Of course, you still have to make a good decision about who that one great source should be. And at risk of stating the obvious, I had chosen poorly.

And shouldn’t I have known? McNabb was constantly asking me about what I had or hadn’t told the cops, always pumping me for information. I had dismissed it as an outcropping of his dirt-mongering personality, never thinking that I was keeping the murderer fully apprised of my investigation.

There was also some bad luck and lousy timing involved. If I had gotten more immediate cooperation from Anne McCaffrey-or if Anne had put Jeanne in the know earlier-I would have discovered the sexual harassment sooner. I would have had time to read the complaint a little more carefully and come to some different conclusions, ones that would have led me away from Jackman.

One example that was suddenly obvious: the complaint said Caesar touched Nancy under a table. When would Jackman ever have been sitting close enough to Nancy to do that? The only time he would have ever seen her was during a negotiating session-when he would have been on the opposite side of the table.

For that matter, Caesar was asking her out on dates. There was no way the publisher of a major newspaper, locked in a tense negotiation with its largest union, would have done anything that outrageous with one of the union’s shop stewards.

And there was Jim McNabb, calling one of his employees “candypants,” right in front of me all along. But I still couldn’t see it.

Yep, I had screwed up every way but good. And because of it, it might be the last story I ever worked.

* * *

We bounced along the dirt road, splashing through flooded ruts and potholes, going no more than fifteen miles an hour. The lightning flashes were providing more illumination than my headlights. The wipers beat furiously but still couldn’t keep up with the torrent of water gushing down from the sky.

On our left, we passed the loading warehouse and a parking lot, then a small trailer on our right. Then we were in no-man’s land. Beyond the waist-high weeds that lined the road, I had a railroad track to my right and some sort of retention pond to my left. It was a body of water that had probably been the recipient of enough heavy-metal-laced runoff and landfill leachate to make it glow in the dark.

I briefly considered yanking the steering wheel to the left and taking us for a swim in that yucky stew-I could take my chances with the elevated cancer risk two decades from now. But we were moving too slowly. McNabb might be a little surprised, but he’d have ten chances to shoot me before the water closed over the car and forced him to bail out.

No, the simple fact was, in the middle of the most densely populated metropolitan area in America, I had managed to find myself in a totally isolated spot with an armed killer. Yet another genius move on my part.

“Okay, stop here,” he said.

I pressed the brake until the car halted.

“Put it in Park,” he instructed.

I moved the shifter up from the Drive position.

“Now put your hands on the ceiling, palms up.”

I did as instructed. A thick lightning bolt lit the sky, followed quickly by an enormous thunderclap. I could briefly see a large power transfer station perhaps a hundred yards ahead, then the elevated road surface of the New Jersey Turnpike a few hundred yards beyond that. Traffic was probably crawling in a storm like this. I wondered if any of those drivers could see me, this strange little car parked along a railroad access way. But I doubted it. The visibility had been reduced to nothing. We might as well have been in an underground bunker.

“Why don’t I just drive us down to the Pine Barrens,” I said. “I know a spot that’s got to be ten miles from anywhere. You dump me off there, and by the time I get out, you could be a hundred miles away in any direction.”

“And live like some damn runaway the rest of my life? I don’t think so.”

“Jim, you’re not going to get away with this,” I said.

“Yes I am. You didn’t tell anyone about me. You told me so yourself.”

“Someone else is going to figure out who ‘J.M.’ is. That complaint makes it pretty obvious.”

“Yeah? If it was so obvious, how come you didn’t figure it out?”

Because I’m a total moron, I wanted to say.

“I didn’t, but Kevin Lungford will,” I said. “He’s a brilliant, Princeton-educated reporter, one of the smartest guys I’ve ever worked with. He’s probably already put it together.”

I put as much force behind it as I could, but McNabb wasn’t fooled.

“Yeah, that’s why you call him Lunky, huh? Because he’s so smart?”

Natch.

The rain slacked off for a few seconds, then pounded on the roof with renewed intensity, like a thousand tiny percussionists all doing a drum roll at the same time. The windshield wipers thumped from side to side, with little effectiveness. Our breath had fogged over the inside of the windows.

“Look, killing me is only going to make things worse for you. You could spin Nancy as manslaughter. They’d give you ten years, and you’d be out in five for good behavior. You kill me and it’s a double homicide. First degree. They’ll put you away for the rest of your life.”

“I’m not going to kill you,” he said, and I felt myself getting hopeful until he finished: “You’re going to commit suicide.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Because, Carter Ross, at this point, you have one choice to make in what is left of your short, miserable little life. You can die quick and painless-and I’ll make it look like a suicide. Or you can die the slowest, most agonizing death you could possibly imagine.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll take the mystery prize behind door number three.”

In one fast move, McNabb chunked me on the head with the butt of his gun. He didn’t have enough room in the car to get any momentum behind it, but it still wasn’t the most pleasant feeling in the world.

“Ow,” I said.

“It’s going to hurt a lot worse when I blow off both your kneecaps. And that’s only a start. You see that trailer we just passed?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s open. And it’s abandoned. I checked it out earlier today. After I do your kneecaps, I’ll take you in there, and we can have a real good time all night long. I left some rope in there to tie you up with, and I have a hunting knife strapped to my calf. I’ll carve off a piece of you at a time until there’s nothing left. Or we can get it over with quickly. Now what’s it going to be?”

I thought about dying a messy death in that railroad trailer and about all the blood I’d leave behind. McNabb didn’t have any cleaning products with him. If someone ever did enter that trailer, they’d be sure to notice that it looked like a calf had been slaughtered there, and maybe let the police know about it. Then again, it still fell into the category of Things That Don’t Matter When You’re Already Dead.

“No one will believe a guy like me committed suicide,” I said. “I’m too happy-go-lucky.”

“Oh yeah? I don’t know about that. You just lost your job. Your girlfriend dumped you. You’re probably going to lose your house. That sounds to me like a guy who’s pretty down on his luck.”

“The detective investigating Nancy’s death is Owen Smiley, a friend of mine. We play on the softball team. He knows me too well. He’ll never believe I killed myself.”

“Oh, he’ll believe it.”

“How you figure?”

“Because,” McNabb said, pressing the barrel of the gun against my head. “You’re going to write a suicide note. In your note, you’re going to say you’ve lost everything that matters to you and decided to end it. Oh, and one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re going to admit to killing Nancy Marino.”

* * *

The condensation on the inside of the car had grown thick enough that small beads of sweat were rolling down the windows. My palms were still pressed against the roof of the car, and my shoulders were starting to ache from keeping them there.

“That’s absurd,” I said. “Why would I kill Nancy Marino? I didn’t even know her.”

“Yes you did. You live in the same town. You met her at the diner and fell in love with her. You finally summoned the nerve to ask her out. She rejected your advances. You’re a love-struck loser. If you couldn’t have her, no one could have her. Why else would you have written an obituary about her? It was your guilt coming out.”

“That’s … that’s, like, the worst episode of Law amp; Order I’ve ever heard. That doesn’t even sound like me. Besides, everyone knows I drive this crappy old car-not a pimp-daddy Cadillac Escalade. How would I have gotten my hands on a ride like that?”

McNabb eased the gun back so it was no longer directly touching my scalp, but kept it aimed at the same spot.

“Maybe you rented it, maybe you stole it,” he said. “I’m not trying to get you found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. This thing isn’t ever going to trial-you’ll be dead. I’m just throwing people off the trail. Don’t you get it yet? People are easily distracted. You give them a story that makes sense, that fills in just enough blanks, and they accept it and move on. Look at how well it worked on you. I told you one lie about Jackman that seemed plausible, and you just ran with it.”

“Not everyone is as dumb as me.”

“No, most people are much, much dumber. And a whole lot less persistent. You just kept coming at me, kept digging. So what did I do? I distracted you some more, with that e-mail from Jackman.”

“Was that real, by the way?”

“Sure was,” McNabb said, and turned his gun toward my right knee. “But, of course, you were nice enough to let your overly active imagination run wild with it. Then somehow you thought that diner owner was involved. That was great. I didn’t even have to do anything to get you spinning on that one. That was fun.”

He chuckled, then abruptly stopped.

“Now, you’ve got five seconds to decide. You want to die quick or slow? Suicide or torture?”

Some choice. Then again, I wasn’t exactly enamored of dying in that little trailer in the middle of a swamp, alone and in agony, tormented by this horrid man. He’d toss my mutilated carcass into that retention pond where my softer parts would get gnawed on by various critters. I’m not saying I needed to leave behind a corpse worthy of the V. I. Lenin treatment. But if this was the end, it would at least be nice for my parents to have something to bury.

“Okay. Suicide it is,” I said. “How are we doing this-this note thing? You got a pen and paper for me?”

“Nope, you’re going to draft an e-mail on that shiny new iPhone of yours. I want to be able to edit this thing, and I can’t do that if you handwrite.”

“Okay, e-mail. Mind if I take my arms down now?”

“Go ahead.”

My shoulders felt instant relief. Sort of like when you stop hitting yourself on the head with a hammer.

“I’m going to grab my iPhone now,” I said.

“No, let me give it to you.”

McNabb kept the gun trained on me and bent slightly to grab the phone, taking his eyes off me for a split second. Maybe this is the point where a real tough guy-like an ex-military cop or something-would exploit the one small moment of his opponent’s weakness to execute some kind of quick, devastating backhanded karate chop that severs the spinal cord between C-4 and C-5. Alas, that’s not something they teach newspaper reporters.

He hastily tossed the phone in my lap, then, before I knew what was happening, he hit the unlock button, exited the car, and reentered in the backseat. Again, the tough guy would have been alert enough to turn the situation around. But by the time I even knew what he was doing, he was behind me, with the gun still firm in his right hand.

“Hit the lock button,” he said, and I did as I was told. “Now, start writing. I’m watching everything you do, so don’t try anything.”

“Okay. To whom am I addressing this farewell missive?”

“Send it to that Lunky fellow, if you’re really that fond of him. And you better make it good. You’re a writer. I expect to see some real inner torment being expressed.”

I inhaled and let the breath out slowly. Compose Your Own Suicide Note. It had to be the worst creative writing assignment ever, even worse than Compose Your Own Obit.

I turned on that tiny little iPhone keyboard, opened up a new message, addressed it to Lunky, and began typing.

Dear Kevin,

It is most unfortunate that I find myself writing these words. As you know, being a reporter was everything to me. And now that I no longer have that, I find life isn’t worth living anymore.

Please tell Tina not to blame herself for what happened. She begged me to marry her many times, and perhaps if I had said yes, none of this would have happened.

But the fact is, I couldn’t marry Tina when I was in love with someone else. Her name was Nancy Marino. I never let on to anyone about my true love, but my heart burned for her every day. She wouldn’t have me, and I honored that choice. But

I put down the iPhone for a second and said, “Wait, what was that line you wanted me to use?”

“Something like, ‘If I can’t have you, no one could,’” McNabb said.

“Right, right, of course,” I said, then continued:

if I couldn’t have her, no one could. I can’t wait to join her where the angels soar.

And now it is time for me to go to a place that is deeply meaningful to me. Where Philip Roth began is where I will end. The man who gave the world Sabbath’s Theater will help set the stage for my final act.

Sincerely,

Carter

P.S. Please find my cat Deadline a good home, perhaps a farm in the country where he can continue to lead his active lifestyle.

I reviewed my effort, deciding that fertilizing day at the organic farm couldn’t have stunk worse. But, of course, that was the point. If nothing else, I hoped the fans of my writing would recognize I would never allow my last words to be so painfully trite. But even if they didn’t pick up on all the cliches, the purely comical line about Tina, or the nonsense about Nancy, the part about Deadline would throw it over the top. Deadline’s slothfulness is that legendary.

“You should be a little more direct about the Nancy thing,” said McNabb, who had been hovering over my shoulder the whole time. “You need to come out and say ‘I killed her.’”

“Nah, come on, think about it: the love-struck loser on Law amp; Order is never that straightforward,” I said. “If I really was that loony, I’d probably be too nuts to even realize what I had done.”

He grunted and continued to study my note, breathing hot exhaust in my ear-which wasn’t quite as painful as torture but had to be at least as annoying.

“What’s this Philip Roth thing?” he asked.

“It’s where you’re going to kill me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re going to kill me-excuse me, I’m going to commit suicide-outside the house where Philip Roth grew up. That’s why I wrote ‘Where Philip Roth started is where I will end.’ It’s a bit obscure, I know. But it’ll make sense when that’s where my body is found. Everyone who knows me knows I’m the biggest Roth fan there is. You want this to be believable? There’s got to be a Roth connection.”

“Roth, huh?” he said, and I could tell he was rolling it around in his head.

“You can scroll through my sent messages if you don’t believe me. Earlier today I was trying to convince Lunky that Portnoy’s Complaint was Roth’s greatest work.”

“That’s the one where that sick bastard whacks off with coleslaw or something like that?”

“Raw liver,” I corrected him, as if I were the most learned of Roth scholars.

McNabb breathed some more, mulling over whether to permit me my literary license. I took advantage of his indecision.

“You said you wanted this to be convincing, right? And you said you wanted it to distract people. Think about it: a frustrated writer commits suicide outside a famous writer’s childhood home? That’s nice, easy symbolism.”

“Okay,” he said. “Philip Roth’s house it is.”

I quickly hit the Send button on the message.

“Hey, I didn’t say to do that!” he said sharply.

“Sorry, I thought you-”

“You want to go in that trailer?” he shouted, grinding the gun into my head hard enough that it bent my neck forward and plowed my chin into my chest. “Is that what you want?”

“Just take it easy. Lunky goes home at six. Most of our reporters work ten to six. You know that. He won’t get this until tomorrow morning.”

“Never mind. Just give me the damn phone,” he barked.

I passed it back to McNabb, who promptly rolled down the window and tossed it outside. Even through my hazed windshield, I could see it sail over the weeds in the direction of the retention pond, where it would spend eternity stewing in toxicity.

“You won’t be needing that,” he said before I could offer comment. “Now let’s get moving.”

* * *

I reached forward with my arm and swiped a clean spot in my thoroughly fogged-over windshield, then started blasting the defroster so it would stay clear.

“How am I getting out of here?” I asked. “I’m not sure backing up is the best idea.”

“Drive down to the power transfer station and turn around,” he said. “Now, here are the rules: two hands on the steering wheel at all times, and keep them nice and high-ten o’clock and two o’clock. Nothing too crazy with the gas or the brake. If I don’t like what I see, I’m putting a slug in your kneecap, and I’m going to shoot first and ask questions later. So let’s not get cute.”

I eased the car back into Drive and began splashing my way forward. The road was waterlogged, and even at twenty miles per hour, we were tossing up spray like a powerboat under full throttle. The rain had slackened-it was now just a gentle drizzle-but the sky was still bruise blue, like it hadn’t yet released all its fury.

“You’re going to die tonight, Carter Ross,” he added. “You stick to the script, you die easy. You make it hard on me, I make it hard on you. That’s how it works.”

I didn’t know how this lunatic thought he’d get away with this. Except, of course, he had nearly pulled it off with Nancy.

“You know where you’re going?” he asked, when we made it back to the paved roadway.

“I told you, I’m a huge Roth fan,” I said.

Keeping my hands at the mandated position, observing all posted speed limits, and generally acting like I was taking my driver’s test all over again, I pointed us toward the turnpike-which was, as I suspected, trudging along well below the speed limit. The rain had all but stopped, though another line of storms was bearing down on us, putting on an impressive fireworks show in the distance.

Rolling along just above stall speed gave me time to start placing recent events in their proper order and to make sense of everything for the first time. As a newspaper reporter, I am trained to think in narratives. And narratives are best understood when you start at the beginning. So how had this started? Mrs. Alfaro said a man-who I now knew to be McNabb-began stalking Nancy on her paper route the Tuesday before she was killed. What event precipitated that? Peter Davidson of NLRB stopping by the diner on Monday.

But, of course, the diner probably hadn’t been his only stop that day. Davidson said he tried to investigate all aspects of an employee’s history. So the diner would have been a side stop, but if the complaint was primarily lodged against McNabb and the IFIW, that would have been Davidson’s main destination.

“It was the NLRB, wasn’t it?” I said. “The NLRB visited the State Street Grill on Monday. They came to you the same day, didn’t they?”

“Are we on the record, Mr. Eagle-Examiner reporter?” he taunted.

“Hell yes. The least thing you can do is grant a reporter his last interview.”

“Okay, I guess there’s no harm now,” he said. “On the record: yeah, that pencil-pushing prick from the NLRB came to my office on Monday, asking me questions about allegations made by Nancy Marino.”

“And what happened?”

“I stalled him. It was all crap anyway.”

We were picking up speed as traffic diverged into the enormous mixing bowl of roadways at Newark Liberty International Airport. I followed the signs for Route 78.

“Oh, come on, you’re not really going to deny sexually harassing her, are you?” I said. “Your union probably represents a couple hundred employees a year in sexual harassment cases. You know the rules.”

“Damn straight I do,” he said. “There’s two kinds of sexual harassment. One is quid pro quo, where your boss asks for sexual favors in return for a raise or a promotion. The other is creating a hostile work environment. Well, guess what? I’m not her boss-I’m just an employee of the union to which she belongs. Hell, if anything, she’s my boss, because she votes for the board that hires or fires me. So there could be no quid pro quo. And I couldn’t have created a hostile work environment for her when she doesn’t work for the union.”

There were at least a hundred holes in his argument, not the least of which was that union negotiations easily fit under the umbrella of a “work environment” as the courts had defined it. Besides which, you’re not allowed to grope a woman’s thigh without her permission outside the work environment, either. But I wasn’t arguing legal technicalities with a man so obviously deranged. Or so armed.

“So why did Nancy take all that to the NLRB anyway? Shouldn’t she have gone to the EEOC?”

“Because her complaint to the NLRB didn’t have to do with the harassment,” he said. “She was saying her harassment complaint had not been properly heard by the union.”

“Was it?”

He chuckled, like he was enjoying this. “Hey, it’s not my fault our human resources people didn’t see things her way,” he said. “She got a thorough exercising of due process.”

More likely, she got the runaround when McNabb cajoled and threatened his horsewhipped employees into ignoring her complaint. This was all becoming clear to me.

“So, if you were so much in the right,” I said, “why kill her?”

He actually laughed. “You ask good questions, you know that? In some ways, it’s a shame I have to kill you, too. You were one of the best reporters in my Rolodex.”

“Yeah, and I’m a good enough reporter to know when someone is dodging my question. So, again, why kill her?”

“Because I was tired of dealing with her,” he said. “She had gotten to be too much of a headache, and I realized she was never going to shut up. I just tried to give the bitch a few compliments and she went and made some big thing out of it.”

* * *

The line of storms I had been watching in the distance hit Newark just as we got off Route 78, while I was on the ramp for Exit 56. It reduced visibility to the few feet in front of my windshield, but that bothered me less now that we were back in Newark. I may be the whitest man alive, but Newark is still my hood. I could find my way to 81 Summit Avenue in a blizzard if need be.

So I hydroplaned my way into the Weequahic neighborhood that Philip Roth once called home. The Jewish population that dominated this area fled in the fifties and early sixties, not long after Roth himself left for college and never came back. The street names and some of the old houses might still look familiar to Roth or any of the other aging Jews who still had a memory of the place. But it had changed in just about every other way. The Weequahic they knew was long gone.

We kept hitting red lights all along Elizabeth Avenue and on Chancellor Avenue. It occurred to me the storm had significantly improved my chances of being able to make a break for it at a stoplight. I just couldn’t figure a way to get out of the car. The Malibu kept the doors locked as long as it was in Drive, so I couldn’t just roll out. There was too much my hands had to do: unclick the seat belt, unlock the door, pull the handle. It was impossible to even attempt such a move while white-knuckling the steering wheel at ten and two. Not even Houdini could have pulled that sleight of hand.

We passed Weequahic High School and I glanced at the Malibu’s clock. What should have been a fifteen-minute drive had taken us closer to thirty. I just hoped it was enough time for Lunky to do something other than prepare a lengthy reply message about how Roth really intended for suicide to be used as an allegory.

But as I turned onto Summit Avenue, I didn’t see any kind of welcome party, just a long, wet, empty street teeming with raindrops. Up until that moment, my faith in Lunky had been total, perhaps inexplicably so. I thought for sure he’d still be hanging around the newsroom, like he was every other night, see my message, get the reference to Roth’s home and call in the reinforcements.

Instead, my life was going to end because Lunky either wasn’t reading his e-mail or didn’t understand it. He was a kid who couldn’t find his way out to South Orange Avenue without me holding his hand and who thought he could wait until the next morning to write a story for a daily newspaper. Just because he was well read and knew how to translate a Caesar cipher didn’t mean he had been handed enough street smarts to be of any real use.

I slowed as I approached the former Roth family home, which was on the right side. It was a three-family house with brick front steps and little in the way of a yard. Someone had added stone facing to the first floor at some point after the Roths departed. There was also a plaque marking the house’s significance.

“We’re here,” I announced as we approached. “I don’t suppose we could just call this quits, could we? You know, I’ll let you skate on Nancy if you let me walk away? I don’t need to tell the police anything. And I can forget I ever met a guy with the initials J.M. What do you say?”

But McNabb either wasn’t listening or didn’t feel like answering. I turned slowly to face him and saw that his eyes were scanning the street.

“This is good. This is perfect,” he said. “Now do exactly as I say. Park the car.”

“Okay. There’s no parking on this side.”

“Fine. Turn it around. Just pull a U-eey in this intersection.”

I followed his instructions. There were several parking spots available opposite the Roth house, and I stopped in one of them. Just then, a shock of thunder rattled the car with a sound wave so powerful it seemed to alter the air pressure as it passed.

Something about it jolted me out of the numbing sense of calm that had gripped me ever since McNabb pulled the gun on me. It finally occurred to me, This is it. I’m really going to die.

More than anything, I felt pissed. Joan of Arc was, what, sixteen when she died? Half my age, and she led armies. Jesus? He was thirty-three-only a year older than me-and look at all he managed to get accomplished in that time. I’m not saying I had delusions of grandeur, like anyone ought to be basing an entire religion-or a television miniseries-on my life. But dammit, here I was thirty-two and all I had to show for it was a few decent newspaper clips scattered across the course of a not-even-half-finished career. Now here I was, working my last story, and I’d never even get to write it.

At the very least, I was through with being obsequious. If he was going to kill me, it would be on my terms.

“Come on, let’s get this over with,” I said, ripping my hands from the steering wheel, hitting the button on my seat belt, shoving open the door, and swinging my legs onto the street.

“Hey, what are…” McNabb began to protest, but I was out of the car before he could finish.

I heard the back driver’s side door opening up behind me, and McNabb was already in midroar: “… ass back here. Stop right there.”

But I marched across the narrow street to the sidewalk in front of 81 Summit Avenue, and just as I was about to turn around and face my end, it suddenly occurred to me:

What do I mean, die on my terms? Why am I waiting around for this guy to kill me? Run, you dumbass. Run for all you’re worth.

“Stop. I haven’t cleaned my prints off the gun yet,” McNabb yelled, as if this was somehow my concern.

No, my concern-my only concern-was putting more distance between myself and McNabb. I felt my right thigh muscle flexing, then my left. Strides one and two were a bit of a misadventure, as my dress shoes slipped on the wet pavement. Strides three and four went better, with my feet gaining traction, enough that the sides of my vision began blurring. I was starting to move. Fast. Hey, if I could outrun a bear, I could certainly outrun a fat lump like McNabb.

I looked for something resembling cover, but there was none. Summit Avenue was just this long, straight street with nowhere to hide. So I concentrated on making it to Chancellor Avenue, my best chance to find a cop, a hiding spot, something. My arms were pumping. My legs were churning. I was going to make it.

I heard another thunderclap, only it was even closer than the last one. Then something tripped me and I went sprawling.

Only it wasn’t thunder. And I hadn’t tripped. It was McNabb’s gun firing. And he had shot me in the back of the leg.

For a moment, I saw nothing but wet, time-worn asphalt in front of my face. I was down. I tried to scramble up but couldn’t seem to get my left leg underneath me. It didn’t hurt or anything. I just couldn’t make it move.

All I could do was roll over. The rain was pounding me so hard I was losing track of where it was coming from. Now that I was faceup, there was so much water gushing on me it was almost like I was trying to open my eyes under a running showerhead. I propped myself on my right elbow and used my left hand as a shield, just so I could see McNabb marching toward me, scowling and red-faced. My mad dash had gotten me all of three doors down from the Roth residence.

“You want to do this the hard way? You want to do this the hard way?” McNabb screamed, keeping the gun aimed at me.

I had no answer for him. I just lay back down and started to feel an otherworldly pain emanating from my left hamstring, like a bad cramp, only fifty times worse.

At least I had tried, I told myself, no matter how lame the attempt was.

“I told you to follow the script,” he bellowed, now standing over me. “How are you supposed to commit suicide with a gunshot wound to your leg? How is that in the script?”

He steadied himself with his legs spread wide, gripped the gun in both hands, and pointed it down in the direction of my head. I didn’t want to watch anymore. So I looked up at the sky and tried to concentrate on something other than the growing agony coming from my lower half. I found myself tracking individual raindrops as they fell into my eyeball from a seemingly impossible height, watching as they cascaded down through space that seemed curved. And I waited for the lights to go out.

* * *

I’ve heard it said the moments before death are slow ones, stretching out far longer for the soon-to-be-deceased than they do for anyone else. This, at least, is what those who have experienced near-death come back to report-life flashing before their eyes, tunnels appearing, that sort of thing.

But I wasn’t experiencing any of that. I just suddenly became aware the lights hadn’t gone out and the guy who was trying to kill me suddenly wasn’t upright anymore.

A large, fast-moving shape had barreled into the small of his back, sending his chest thrusting forward in a parabolic shape, his arms flying out at his side and his head tilting back. An explosion of air escaped from his lungs in a barely formed grunt. And then he disappeared.

I propped myself up on both elbows to look for him. But he was gone. All I could see was Lunky-Lunky! — and he had apparently executed an absolutely textbook tackle: head down, arms wrapped, body low for maximum leverage. He finished by landing squarely on top of McNabb, momentarily obscuring the smaller man. It was a quarterback sack that would have made any NFL Films highlight reel. McNabb had been thoroughly blindsided.

He wasn’t done fighting, of course. No, he was struggling against Lunky, wriggling and cursing and wriggling some more, trying to at least get himself turned over to face his assailant. But he couldn’t get any momentum. Lunky was so much bigger and stronger, he easily kept McNabb pinned, long past a ten-count. McNabb would have stood a better chance against a mountain gorilla. Lunky actually seemed to be taking it easy on the guy, like he pitied him.

I began opening my mouth to warn Lunky not to be too blase, that McNabb was armed. Then I saw the gun had come to rest a good ten yards away. McNabb had no more chance of reaching it than I did of standing up and winning Dancing with the Stars on one leg.

Lunky maneuvered into a sitting position atop his quarry, with his powerful legs keeping McNabb’s arms pinned. With one giant paw, Lunky smothered the side and back of McNabb’s head, keeping it pressed down into the street. Lunky could have kept McNabb there all night if need be, and McNabb seemed to resign himself to it. Either that or he had run out of energy for his struggle, because he was finally still.

The pain was starting to make it hard to think, so I lay back down and stared up at the rain some more. Soon, a head of curly brown hair was poking into my frame of vision and a very concerned-looking Tina Thompson was gazing down at me.

“Are you okay, honey?” she asked,

I wish I could report my reply had been something valiant, funny, touching, or memorable. But it was, in fact, a little more candid: “It hurts.”

“You’ve been shot,” she informed me, like I didn’t already know. “It’s okay. Tommy is here. He’s calling an ambulance.”

“Just hang in there,” Tommy said from somewhere in the neighborhood of my feet. “I’m on the line with 911 right now. They’re coming. The other good news is the EMTs will probably cut those ugly pleated pants off you.”

I may have attempted a smile, but I was aware it came out as a grimace. Tina was still looming above me, tucking a piece of hair behind her ears in a way that, even in my agony, I couldn’t help but find adorable. I wanted to be mad at her, really mad, for not believing in me, for bailing out on me in my time of need, for siding with the publisher over her own reporter-even if, as it turned out, she was sort of right about the whole thing.

But I just felt so grateful to be alive. There was not the least scrap of anger in me. Only relief. I let my lungs fill with air, then released it, then repeated the process a few more times. The air was wet but, I swear, it had a flavor to it. And it tasted delicious.

There was a moan-it was probably coming from me-and I tried to concentrate on breathing some more. And I also heard a voice that sounded like it belonged to Detective Owen Smiley. But I couldn’t be certain.

The rain was finally tapering off into a light sprinkle. After having been hammered by globules the size and weight of quarters, the smaller, needlelike drops actually were pleasant by comparison. Besides, it gave me something to think about other than my leg.

Tina had repositioned herself and was now kneeling at my side.

“Don’t die on me,” she said. “You’ve got a story to write.”

“I don’t work for you anymore, remember?” I said.

“Sure you do.”

“Don’t mess with a soon-to-be-dead man. You fired me.”

“No, you quit,” she corrected me. “And I never accepted your resignation. As far as the Eagle-Examiner is concerned, you were on suspension, but it has been revoked.”

“All I had to do was get shot, huh?”

“No. Actually, your part-time translator and full-time coconspirator returned to the office this afternoon, telling us you were on the trail of a pretty amazing story and that we’d be idiots not to bring you back in the fold and let you work it. I took it to Brodie, who backed you immediately. You should have told us about the eyewitness.”

“I didn’t think you’d believe me.”

“Sorry,” she said, stroking my hand. “I’m so sorry, Carter.”

“I’m cold,” I said.

“I don’t have a blanket. Just hang on a little longer. Is there anything else I can do?”

I heard a siren approaching from somewhere. I was getting a little disoriented. Tina’s curly head was starting to spin.

“Tell that bastard,” I said, then got hit by a surge of pain and had to stop.

“That bastard over there,” I said. “Remind him.”

“Remind him what?”

“That we made our last interview on the record.”

Then I’m fairly certain I passed out.

* * *

If I had to choose one city in the world in which to get shot, I would pick Newark, New Jersey, above all others. No matter where you are, from Weequahic to downtown all the way up to the North Ward or out to the Ironbound, you are no more than a short drive away from one of several trauma centers that rank among the country’s finest. There, you will find a team of doctors more experienced with gunshot wounds-and more skilled at treating them-than you will in any of the world’s standing armies.

I ended up at Newark Beth Israel, just a few blocks away. When I came to, my parents were there, as was a rather unimpressed doctor. He informed me the bullet had passed clean through my leg, coming close to nicking both a bone and an artery-either of which injury could have been disastrous for various reasons-but missing both, rendering my wound neither very dangerous nor, to his mind, very interesting.

The night was a blur of bothersome nurses and rounding doctors, buzzing in and out through the evening and into the small hours of the morning. They made it damn difficult for a guy to get a decent night’s sleep, which is what I needed most. I may have grumbled about this, perhaps even created a few profane word combinations in expressing my displeasure. Eventually, my father took over, posted guard at the door, and made it clear to any and all-including my mother-that I was not to be disturbed. Dads are good that way sometimes.

By the next morning I was feeling pretty good. Though, admittedly, my mood may have been aided by the wonders of Percocet. Around ten o’clock, I assured my father I was sufficiently well rested, and he relented, allowing a stream of flower- and balloon-bearing visitors to begin entering my room and paying homage to the wounded hero. Dad only let them in one at a time, so I had to hear the story in bits and pieces-and all out of order, since my visitors were not thoughtful enough to arrange themselves chronologically-but I eventually assembled a fairly thorough account of the evening.

It started with Lunky, who had received my e-mail shortly after I sent it. He said I caught him at a good moment-he had finished Emerson and was just about to plunge back into Thoreau when my e-mail came-and he realized fairly quickly that something was amiss. The tip-off for him was that, apparently, Sabbath’s Theater has nothing to do with the stage.

“I was sure you knew Mickey Sabbath is a puppeteer, not an actor,” Lunky informed me gravely. “I considered it a cry for help.”

So while the part about suicide didn’t grab him, the bungling of Roth did. And he was thus inspired to take my note to “Missus Thompson,” perhaps not fully realizing she was one and the same as the “Tina” who was referenced in the note. Tina recognized the entire e-mail as gibberish and acted accordingly.

“I decided you had either lost it completely or you were in real trouble,” Tina told me during her first visit of the day. “Either way, I needed to intervene.”

Tina didn’t have my new number, so she couldn’t call me. And, in any event, my phone was already sitting at the bottom of a Hudson County retention pond, next to some radioactive fiddler crabs. So she asked Lunky for a translation of the Roth stuff, and he remembered our first conversation, where he had mentioned Roth’s childhood home at good ol’ 81 Summit Avenue.

Tina summoned Tommy, and the three of them decided fairly quickly to hightail it down to Weequahic and figure out what was going on.

On the way, Tommy had put in a call to Owen Smiley. Unfortunately, while Tommy remembered Smiley’s name, he didn’t have the detective’s cell number. So he had to go through the Bloomfield Police Department switchboard. And Smiley, whose gun just might have come in handy, didn’t get the message for a little while-which is why I only heard him on scene after the shooting had already happened.

But it didn’t matter, because Lunky was my secret weapon. The lady who lived at 81 Summit Avenue remembered him fondly and invited him and his friends in from the rain. They were huddled in her house, trying to figure out what to do, when they saw my car pull up.

I guess everything happened pretty fast from there. But Lunky said as soon as he heard the gunshot, he knew I needed help-he’s a quick study, that Lunky-and he bolted out the door and bounded down the steps. He saw McNabb walking toward me, ready to shoot, and went in for the tackle. The noise of Lunky’s rapid approach was drowned out by all the rain and thunder.

From there, all ended happily for those not named McNabb.

None of my visitors were allowed to bring in the Friday paper, which was deemed “too stressful” for me in such an early and tender phase of my recovery, but I managed to get the details of what we had printed. The Newark Eagle-Examiner reported that Jim McNabb, IFIW-Local 117 executive director, had been arrested for the murder of Nancy Marino and was being held without bail. A spokesman from the prosecutor’s office said McNabb could also expect to be charged with two counts of attempted murder, and a variety of weapons charges for both his use of an illegal handgun and his use of a Cadillac Escalade, which, it turned out, he happened to own and have registered in his name. A reference was made to an “outstanding local citizen” who would be receiving a $10,000 reward for her cooperation with the Bloomfield police.

They had put my byline-and mine alone-on the story. It was accompanied by an editor’s note, explaining to readers that the story had been primarily the work of staff writer Carter Ross, who had been injured during the course of doing his reporting. Tommy Hernandez and Buster Hays had completed the reporting and written the piece.

Since Hernandez and Hays were only beginning to untangle the mess with “Caesar 710” and the sexual harassment angle-and didn’t want to put guesses in the newspaper-they had left the matter of motive fairly vague. It was only in the morning, when Tommy got Peter Davidson of the NLRB on the phone, that things started becoming a little more clear to them. Now that Davidson knew Nancy Marino was dead-and therefore he didn’t have to worry about spoiling an EEOC complaint-he relented on the FOIA request. By lunchtime, Tommy had a small handful of documents, all of which named Jim McNabb as the target of Nancy’s complaint.

Gus Papadopolous’s “involvement”-if you could call it that-turned out to be minor. Nancy had listed the State Street Grill as one of her places of employment, so Davidson had paid a visit there, just to get a sense for what kind of worker she was. Davidson said that Gus had been a little leery, repeatedly saying he “didn’t want no trouble.” But Davidson was ultimately just looking for a character witness of sorts. And the affidavit Gus supplied extolled Nancy’s long history as a loyal, reliable worker.

As for the Jackman-Papadopolous conspiracy I had created, it turns out that the Bloomfield Chamber of Commerce, of which Papadopolous was the president, was one of several chambers partnering with the paper on a new initiative aimed at driving consumers back to downtown shopping areas.

Which is what Tina had just finished explaining to me during her second visit of the day, during the midafternoon.

“So there’s another daily story going in tomorrow’s paper, I assume,” I said.

“Yeah, with a sidebar about McNabb’s long tenure atop IFIW-Local 117 coming to a close. The union board convened a hasty meeting this morning and voted to terminate him.”

“Who’s writing all this?”

“Hernandez is doing the main. Hays is doing the union stuff.”

“Uh-huh. And who is doing the big, beautiful Sunday story that makes sense of it all?”

“I didn’t think you would be up for-”

“Get me a laptop,” I said, before she could finish.

Over the next four hours, I let it pour out of me, indulging my penchant for overwriting, knowing the desk wouldn’t dare take it out. Reporters who have been shot in the line of duty get special dispensation. And since I hoped this would be the only time in my career I could claim that exemption, I enjoyed it thoroughly.

It was definitely better than writing my own obit.