The Ways of the Dead Read Online Free Page B

credible threats to the judge, Sarah Reese’s lists of schoolmates . . . and he had dick. Sweet fuckall. He didn’t have any more time to work a source, to play an angle.
    But because of the paper’s reputation, if not his own, the story in tomorrow’s paper would be regarded as a cornerstone document in shaping the narrative of the murder of Sarah Reese in the national imagination. He was going to dictate a large chunk of that narrative while tired, not exactly sober, and knowing little more than any sad son of a bitch on the sidewalk.
    He spat. Nothing like starting in last place.

four
    “Sully, my boy. You are calling in poetry, I know it. But I got to ask you something first.”
    Tony Rubin’s cigarette-scarred voice blared down the line, followed by his smoker’s cough and the flurry of keyboard tapping in the background. Tony had the abrupt nature of a man who’d spent the past twenty-one years switching subjects on deadline and the attaboy patter of a Little League third-base coach, coaxing writers past the freezing point on deadline, the fate of the late-night man on the rewrite desk. He’d gotten divorced, for the third time, two years earlier and spent the following four months living in the newsroom, mostly without detection, as he showered in the old pressmen’s locker room and slept in the deserted warrens of the Sunday Magazine. Sully had come across him there one morning, dozing and sweaty, a jacket for a pillow, curled beneath a copy editor’s desk, dreaming of anarchy and knifing his third wife’s boyfriend.
    “Yeah?” Sully said. “What?”
    “Sunday, the Skins? Four-point line against Carolina. At home. Too much chalk? Talk to me.” The patter, nervous, finishing up a previous feed, stalling him until he was ready for the dictation.
    “I’m a Saints man. I don’t really—”
    “You’re a gambling man.”
    “Only games I know something about. But off the top of my head—look, we beat Carolina and we suck. Skins are scoring like crazy, so at home I’ll say they cover. You see the Giants game? Fifty points, I mean—”
    “Got it,” Tony said and then, finally, the flurry of typing stopped. “Okay. I’m clear. Go go go go.”
    “You got the BOLO on the three black suspects?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Not from Chris, though, am I right?”
    “Nope.”
    “Boy couldn’t find his dick with a flashlight. Okay. I got the BOLO, too, secondhand, coming out of 4-D, but from a hack I trust.”
    “Jamie has it from the feds, the FBI.”
    “Good.”
    Dictation, then: He narrated Victoria’s view of Sarah crossing the street, omitting that her perspective came from the dance studio. In this telling, she was simply a happenstance witness—accurate, not entirely forthcoming, but not exactly misleading. He said she withheld her last name for fear of possible retaliation. He knocked off the rest on the fly:
    “‘Prosecutors have said that this fear of retribution is common across high-crime areas of the city, as witnesses are loath to put themselves at risk of further violence. While the Park View neighborhood is not among the most violent, it does have problems with street crime and robberies. At least one woman on Princeton Place, Lana Escobar, has been killed in the past eighteen months. Escobar was strangled to death on the outfield grass of the Park View Recreation Center, less than one hundred yards from where Sarah Reese’s body was found. No arrest was made in that case. It is unclear tonight—’ Tony, make that ‘
was
unclear
last
night—’ Um . . . ‘was unclear whether the incident involving Reese was part of the street violence common to the area or was an unconnected tragedy.’ Wait. Make it ‘
random
street violence or whether she was a targeted victim.’ There we go.”
    He then described the scene on the street, the helicopters overhead, the crowd and its resentful energy, the television antennas, the failing light of day, the horns of stalled motorists in the