The Deadline Read online

  As much as any living man, he knew it was like to die by fire. Sometime, he held his forearm tight against his nostrils, blocking some odor that only he could smell. The memory of charred flesh seared his brain, its unearthly smell haunting him still. He was frightened.

  For three nights after that first meeting with Sim Fenwick, he dreamed not just about dying, but about being cooked alive in Big Sparky, a killing contraption he imagined to be part iron maiden and part torture-fire wired directly to Hell.

  The nights were endless, the horror of his memories unrelenting. The fire ...

  On the fourth morning, he scribbled an anxious note to his lawyer, summoning him to the jail immediately.

  Gilmartin, boiling with fear, proposed a deal. Begged for it. He’d plead guilty to Aimee Little Spotted Horse’s murder if his life would be spared.

  “Are you sure about this?” Fenwick asked him.

  “Don’t fuck with me now,” he said. “They’ll pay you just the same. Just take this to the man.”

  Half relieved, Sim Fenwick trudged up two flights through empty, echoing stairwells, and knocked meekly at the prosecutor’s door. For two days, Calvin Davis let Gilmartin’s hasty note sit under his green desk blotter, allowing the prisoner’s raw nerves to stew a little longer. He felt in no particular hurry to offer a child-killer solace. Privately, he had his doubts about winning a death sentence anyway, because the evidence was weak.

  But Gilmartin couldn’t fight off the death dreams. He sat awake, his gut knotted around him like a noose, waiting for word from the prosecutor. He vomited so much, the deputies stopped bringing food.

  Barely three weeks after he’d been arrested, the county prosecutor accepted his plea. Gilmartin was hideously relieved. He’d spend the rest of his life in prison, but he wouldn’t die. Not by fire anyway.

  The sheriff made him sign some papers he couldn’t read, then left him alone in his cell. He smoked a cigarette and slept for the first time in two days. The next morning, two deputies shackled him and stuffed him in the back seat of Deuce Kerrigan’s black Buick for the five-hour drive to the Wyoming State Penitentiary.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Late July, 1996

  Time passed in Winchester, Wyoming, at more or less the same rate as any other forgotten town on the edge of the high plains, but The Bullet’s newsroom clock appeared to be running backward.

  The last time Jefferson Morgan had looked at the clock, just a few minutes before, it was almost eleven. Indeed, his wristwatch said it was eleven. Deadline.

  But the clock on the wall now read ten-fifty. And four front-page stories were still unwritten.

  Morgan thumped his watch. He had no way of knowing his two smart-ass reporters cranked the big hand back ten minutes at deadline time almost every Wednesday, stealing just a little more time to write stories that were, for the most part, already a week old.

  Morgan watched as his impatient printer, Cal Nussbaum, whose own ink-smudged backshop clock was set forward ten minutes, prowled the jumbled newsroom. Anger stretched his long face even longer.

  “Nobody gives a good goddamn about deadlines anymore,” he mumbled.

  The press was ready, if the news was not. The ink fountains filled, Cal rubbed his massive hands in a greasy black rag. He faced Morgan in the narrow space between the newsroom’s prehistoric oak desks, dragging a vapor trail of oily ink, solvent and body odor.

  Cal had worked for The Bullet since he was a kid back in the Forties, when he made fifty cents a day as a printer’s devil.

  Cal’s veins ran inky black. He hated reporters. Their only virtue, in his mind, was their egotistic ambition to do less work for more pay: Few of them stayed more than a year.

  The more Cal knew about young reporters, the more he preferred the company of pressroom rats. And for the reporters who dared trespass in his space, he displayed on his backshop wall several years worth of girlie calendars left by newsprint salesmen. It was a trifling rebellion, except that it asserted the sovereignty of Cal’s borders.

  Nonetheless, until the newsroom clock ticked past the eleven a.m. deadline, Cal restrained himself, barely.

  “Wouldn’t a happened when Old Bell was around,” he complained.

  “Old Bell” — Belleau Wood Cockins — had been the editor of The Bullet for more than fifty years. When he sold out to Jefferson Morgan a month before, he just cleaned out the deep drawers of his desk, packed up the only two reference books he ever needed — an annotated Shakespeare and a King James version of the Bible — and handed Morgan the keys. He never came back.

  Since that day four weeks before, Morgan hadn’t met a single deadline, and it pissed him off. The damned paper wouldn’t even have been delivered on time if Cal Nussbaum hadn’t bribed the boys at the Post Office with a twelve-pack of Coors every week.

  In almost eighteen years at the Chicago Tribune, where the massive machinery of journalism churned every minute of every day in a near-perfect synchronicity, Morgan had never known anyone to challenge the consecrated institution of The Deadline. It existed as a kind of covenant between newspapermen and their deluded gods, and punishment would be swift and painful if it were ever violated. It was somehow sacrilegious that here, in the very newsroom where Old Bell Cockins gave him his first byline, the sin of missing a deadline could be atoned with twelve beers.

  Morgan hovered over his two reporters, a pair of $250-a-week community college grads who’d been at The Bullet for less than a year. They bent their heads toward their ancient Macintoshes, pecking away at their late stories, always keeping the editor in the periphery of their sight.

  The tiny brass bell above the front door jingled.

  Morgan glanced up. Crystal Sandoval, the counter girl who took classified ads, renewed subscriptions, answered the phone and calmed all but the angriest readers with her friendly smile, was away from her chair.

  The frail old man who shuffled through The Bullet’s door looked lost. He slouched across the foyer’s checkered tile, as if gravity itself threatened to drag him under. His sharp face was hollow, almost cadaverous. A ragged thatch of white hair tangled at the sides of his bald head like dead weeds flattened under a weathered fence. The long sleeves of a stiff blue shirt hung past his wrists, its collar buttoned at his skinny throat, and his canvas belt was cinched so tight around his thin hips that the waistband of his brown trousers folded in a thick pleat at the front.

  The old man looked around. His dark, sunken eyes were as sharp and serious as a worn sawtooth.

  “Sorry. The paper’s not out yet,” Morgan apologized. Readers often visited The Bullet before noon on Wednesdays to snatch one of the first papers off the press. Over tuna melts and iced tea down at The Griddle, every word — from the police blotter to the Little League results to the editor’s weekly column — would be cussed and discussed.

  “Ain’t here for no paper. You the editor?” the old man asked Morgan. His voice was a coarse scrape.

  “That’s me. What can I do for you?” Morgan asked, circling around the reporters’ desks to the waist-high, swinging wooden gate that separated the tiny waiting area from the newsroom. He held a piece of copy paper with some scribbled notes in his left hand, as he extended his right courteously across the gate.

  The old man’s hand was knobby and dry, his wan grip as cold and blue as the paper-thin skin stretched across his arthritic knuckles. The inside of his knotted index and middle finger were stained brown, and his fingernails were cracked and yellow. Shaking his hand, Morgan smelled stale cigarettes and aging flesh.

  “You don’t know me,” the old man said, lowering his voice to almost a whisper. “My name’s Gilmartin. Neeley Gilmartin.”

  He waited for some recognition from Morgan, but Gilmartin wasn’t a name he knew.

  “Glad to meet you, Mr. Gilmartin. I’m Jeff Morgan. I’ve only got a minute. We’re just finishing up the paper and I was just ...”

  An impatient glower settled on Gilmartin’s brow.

  “I ai
n’t got no time for fuckin’ around here either,” he rasped, suddenly less brittle than he’d first appeared.

  “Mr. Gilmartin, I understand, but this is a bad time for me. Can you come back in an hour or two, after we put out the paper? Then we can talk.”

  The old man waved him off, as if he were brushing away a fly. The cracked corners of his mouth turned down in disgust.

  “I’ll wait right here. No place else I gotta be. Go sell your goddam papers,” Gilmartin said, shuffling toward the three spindle-backed Windsor chairs lining one wall of the cramped foyer. He eased his bony hips into the farthest from the window.

  “And don’t make me wait all fuckin’ day,” Gilmartin sniped. His face twinged in discomfort as he fished a crumpled pack of Camels from his shirt pocket. He knocked one out of the squarish package and wedged it between his thin, crooked lips. Then he took it out again, stiffening momentarily, his eyes closed so tight his face seemed to fold at the middle.

  There was pain in this old man.

  The stories were an hour late.

  Cal Nussbaum was so angry he wouldn’t even speak as he sliced long slicks of type into precise blocks, carving off wasted margins of white paper like a butcher cuts fat off a good steak. The pages fell together under Cal’s knife, and he finished his work long past the time he’d normally go to lunch. The old four-unit Goss Community press waited, its hungry black belly rumbling.

  Morgan was angry, too. He jammed a pica pole in his back pocket and felt his jaw tighten as he left the backshop, preparing to reprimand his reporters for their insouciance about deadlines. He composed his come-to-Jesus sermon in his head as he threaded his way down the narrow hallway, past the pungent bathroom that doubled as a darkroom, toward the newsroom.

  But the reporters were gone. They’d sneaked out to lunch like scared, hungry fugitives. The newsroom was quiet except for the metallic ticking of the ceiling fan that droned incessantly all summer, occasionally sailing a stray sheet of paper off the litter-strewn archipelago of desks.

  But Gilmartin hadn’t left.

  For two hours, he’d squirmed his aching hips in the hard-pan wooden chair, chain-smoking and watching townfolk pass The Bullet’s gold-lettered front window. If a passerby looked in, Gilmartin turned away.

  From time to time, he’d get up and read the yellowing front-pages Old Bell had hung on the foyer wall. Five decades worth of the town’s biggest stories, banner headlines tall and thick, lined up across the wall in earnest black frames. “SLURRY BOMBER DOUSES THEATER FIRE,” said one. “BASEBALL PARK NAMED FOR BIG-LEAGUER,” said another.

  The old man lingered in front of one in particular: “GIRL’S KILLER CONFESSES.”

  The swinging gate into the front foyer squealed as Morgan stepped through. The checkered floor around the old man’s shoes was dusted with cigarette ashes.

  “Mr. Gilmartin, I’m very sorry it took me so long. I guess we’re going to have to get better at this newspaper stuff,” he said. He smiled but wasn’t in the mood to make excuses for his indolent reporters. “Anyway, can I get you anything? Coffee? Water?”

  The old man turned around and glared at him. If his body was slowly decaying, the fire in his eyes was not. He ignored Morgan’s offer.

  “Where’s the old guy who used to be here?” Gilmartin asked.

  “Bell Cockins? He retired about a month ago. You know him?”

  “Yeah, a long time ago. I been away.”

  “Things change pretty quick, even here, I guess,” Morgan said.

  Gilmartin pointed at the newspaper on the wall.

  “You read this shit?”

  “Some of it,” Morgan said. “There’s a lot of local history up there.”

  “Fuck that,” Gilmartin scoffed. “Some of it is bullshit.”

  Morgan was a little surprised.

  “How’s that?”

  Gilmartin put his finger on one of the front-page photos, the one he’d studied so long. In it, a young man, an accused killer, glared banefully at the camera over his tattooed shoulder. The look was malignant and cold.

  “That’s me,” Gilmartin said.

  Morgan didn’t believe it, or couldn’t. This old man, a killer?

  He studied the photo and looked at the old man. The body had wasted away, but the eyes were the same. The old man wasn’t lying.

  Gilmartin patted down a pack of Camels, searching for one more. It was empty.

  “You got a smoke?” he asked. Morgan shook his head. Exasperated, Gilmartin tossed the crumpled pack on the pile of unfiltered butts in the ashtray beside him.

  “I need a smoke bad,” the old man said, scowling. He sidled stiffly past Morgan to the front door. Hot air boiled off the sidewalk as he held it open.

  “I gotta get outta here. The place stinks,” he said impatiently. “You comin’ or just breathin’ hard?”

  Morgan looked around the empty newsroom. Cal Nussbaum leaned against a doorway, watching them. When Morgan caught his eye, Cal shook his head in disgust and disappeared into the back.

  They walked a block down Main Street to the Conoco, the nearest cigarette machine. It was midday in late July, hot enough to curdle the asphalt were the street met the gutter. Gilmartin shuffled along, sweating. Morgan could hear him breathing hard before they’d taken a dozen steps, but he persisted.

  “I ain’t got no silver,” the old man said, patting his pockets. Morgan had just enough change for two packs. Gilmartin hastily stripped off the cellophane, peeled back the top of one pack and whacked it against the heel of his palm. He clamped his lips around the cigarette that stuck out farthest, then lit up.

  Gilmartin took a long drag and exhaled slowly, letting the smoke seep out of him in devilish blue curls. He stuffed both packs safely in his breast pocket, which now bulged against his cratered chest.

  “I been smokin’ all my life and it ain’t killed me yet. Ain’t gonna get a chance to kill me neither,” Gilmartin said, then paused while he took another long draw at his cigarette. “You ever come close to dyin’?”

  “Maybe once,” Morgan answered. He shoved his hands deep in the empty pockets of his khaki slacks and studied Gilmartin’s face. He was reluctant to share personal information with the old man, but it sounded to him as if a door might be opened.

  “I was just a kid, maybe seven or eight. I was playing alone on an inflatable raft out at Rochelle Lake. The wind came up and blew me out farther and farther into the deep water. Nobody heard me screaming. I was afraid the raft would spring a leak or tip over and I’d drown. I held on for dear life until a fisherman came by and pulled me out.”

  Gilmartin looked even paler and more pinched in the harsh sunlight. He avoided looking at Morgan as he spoke, just peered down into the gutter, where a thin drool of muddy water trickled almost imperceptibly toward the storm drain. He flipped an ash into the tiny stream, where it floated a few feet then dissolved.

  “You make any deals when you was out there? You promise your god that you’d be a good little boy if he’d just blow your scared little ass back to shore? Did you lie to Him just to save yourself?”

  The sun was hot and the smell of gasoline overpowering as they stood there on the corner by the gas station. Morgan scuffed the sole of his worn leather Oxford across the sidewalk as if he were trying to scrape something off, but he was trying to remember what it felt like to encounter death. The skin on his back prickled in the heat as he imagined, all over again, cold water spilling into his lungs, weighing him down, clamping his throat closed.

  “Not any I remember. I was just scared. I didn’t want to die.”

  “You do dumb shit when you think you might die,” the old man said, smoking and watching the empty street in front of them.

  The air was dead calm. Smoke hovered around Gilmartin. He tilted his head back and breathed deeply through the cigarette, his cheeks sucking slowly inward. His hand trembled. Then from nowhere, a cough wracked his whole body, distorting his face as it erupted from deep inside.

 
“Let’s find someplace cool to sit, Mr. Gilmartin,” Morgan suggested, touching the old man’s elbow.

  “Yeah, sure, paper boy.”

  Across the street and up past a few storefronts was Winchester Park, a patch of sprinkled green near the center of town. They sat on a concrete bench in the cool shade beneath the towering cottonwoods. Birds bickered unseen in the branches above them. The playground thirty yards away was crawling with children on summer vacation.

  “I’m not sure what you need from me, Mr. Gilmartin,” Morgan said, his leg bent across the park bench as he faced the old man.

  “I need your help to do something I can’t do for myself. I’m seventy-three fuckin’ years old and I can hardly wipe my ass without help. If I could do this thing on my own, I would,” Gilmartin said. He fumbled in his lumpy shirt pocket for another cigarette. “I hate reporters, but I ain’t got no other choice. I need you.”

  Morgan learned one good lesson on the cop beat: Don’t waste time being indignant. Only the amateurs stay mad, his city editor once told him.

  “Okay, fair enough. But let’s cut to the chase here. Why me and what for?” Morgan asked coolly.

  Gilmartin scratched his skeletal fingers through the thin mat of his white hair and stared between his knees at the thick grass. His trousers draped across his emaciated thighs and the muscles at the back of his bent neck bowed out like the slack cords on a marionette. He sat unmoving for a while, elbows on his knees, cupping a lighted cigarette in his palm.

  “I ain’t proud of what I am, but I ain’t no killer,” Gilmartin said. “I been almost fifty years in prison for a crime I never done. That’s the fuckin’ truth. When I was your age, I already done thirteen years of hard time and I was lookin’ at a lifetime still to go. It was like dyin’ real slow. Back then, I made some choices to save my life, and maybe they was the wrong choices. Now I’m seventy-three and I’m dyin’ fast. Got cancer all through me. Hurts like a motherfucker and I’d just as soon be six feet under where it don’t hurt no more. But I don’t wanna go without clearin’ up my name.”