Читать книгу You Can't Die But Once - Penny Mickelbury - Страница 4
ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
Mimi answered the phone even though she didn’t recognize the number and choked on the mouthful of orange juice she’d just taken at what she heard:
I’m gonna whip your ass you stupid bitch!
No you ain’t. Not no more you mean bastard.
Mimi put the phone on speaker so Gianna could hear just as a gun fired. The man’s scream was as loud as the gun retort, causing Gianna to choke on the coffee she’d just sipped and to instinctively reach for the gun she didn’t have: She didn’t wear a holster at the breakfast table.
You shot me you stupid bitch! I can’t believe you shot me! I’m gonna kill you!
No you ain’t, and you ain’t gonna hit me no more either. You or that stupid preacher. You ain’t gonna do nothin’ else to me, neither one of you!
How you gonna stop me, you stupid bitch!
The gun fired again, and the man screamed louder and began crying. Gianna gave Mimi a wide-eyed, questioning look across the table, and Mimi gave back a helpless shrug. She didn’t know who was on the other end of the phone call. She hadn’t recognized the number, and she didn’t recognize either of the voices. The man stopped crying and moaning. Despite his pain, he had no remorse.
You shot my hand off you crazy bitch!
You call me bitch again and I’m gonna shoot your mouth off.
Where you get a gun from anyway? And where you learn to shoot it? Who taught you to shoot a gun?
That ain’t your business. Or that stupid preacher’s.
I’m gonna kill that Connor bitch, too! You’uns been plottin’ against me.
You think I don’t know ’bout her?
Mimi dropped the phone at those words: Beverly Connor was a target of this man’s rage! And suddenly she knew who the woman was: Jennifer somebody. She had met her in the waiting room of Bev’s office a couple of months ago while both were waiting for their therapy appointments. As was often the case, the therapists were double-booked because clients often didn’t show up. Today, however, both of Bev’s appointments were present, on time: Mimi and Jennifer. Gianna grabbed the phone up, activated the display screen, and wrote down the number displayed there.
You ain’t gonna kill nobody if you can’t walk.
They were ready for the gunshot. The louder and more bellicose the man was, the softer and quieter the woman’s voice became. And then she fired the gun. This time the man didn’t scream and curse the woman; he merely wept and mumbled. She said nothing, and Mimi and Gianna knew instinctively what was coming, and they both felt helpless because there was nothing they could do to prevent it. A final gun blast and a moment of eerie silence before the man began screaming and cursing again.
You stupid bitch! Call fuckin’ 911! You better not be dead! Call 911!
As if she were a shape-shifter, Mimi’s Gianna became the DC Police Department’s Captain Maglione. While still holding Mimi’s phone she snatched up her own, punched a button, and began calmly and precisely delivering the orders that would have the phone number traced and officers sent to that address. She hung up and looked at her watch, then at Mimi, who performed her own transformation, becoming the focused, fast-thinking newspaper reporter who had earned respect and awards in the days when truth mattered. She answered Gianna’s question before it was asked.
“The woman’s name is Jennifer, and I met her at Bev’s maybe two months ago.” Mimi now recalled the meeting with crystal clarity because it had happened during one of the worst times of her life, when she quit her job before she could be fired for refusing to apologize to a racist, sexist buffoon masquerading as a reporter. Gianna had been shot protecting Mimi from a drug-dealing lowlife wanting to stop the stories she was going to write about him. Gianna almost died and still walked with a slight limp, though both her surgeon and physical therapist assured her she’d regain full function in the leg . . . but it would take time. In the meantime, she used a cane and went to physical therapy twice a week. Mimi, who couldn’t forgive herself for being the reason Gianna almost died though nobody else—the chief of police and Mimi’s editor included—blamed her for Gianna’s injury, went to therapy once a week, but for help healing the emotional injuries, not the physical ones.
“That lowlife drug-dealing dirty cop is who’s to blame for what happened to Gianna,” Beverly Connors had told her more than once, followed by, “You’ve got enough work to do without using up our time feeling sorry for yourself, Mimi.”
“That’s not how a therapist should talk to her patient,” Mimi would whine, to totally unsympathetic ears. Dr. Beverly Connors was more than her therapist. She was her former lover and closest friend.
“I need to call Bev and tell her about this,” Mimi said, standing up.
“What can you tell me about this Jennifer?” Gianna asked.
“Young, white—”
“Bev has white clients in the middle of a totally Black and Latino community?”
“Surprised me, too,” Mimi said, looking thoughtful as more of her conversation with Jennifer came back to her, and she told Gianna all she remembered. Jennifer lived in one of the large, new low-income City Housing Department developments on the East Side built for large low-income families, and she had told Mimi that one of her neighbors told her that talking to Bev would help her.
“Help her with what, Mimi?”
Mimi sighed. “She’s nineteen, Gianna, and she has four children. Her husband won’t let her have a cell phone or cable or go to the library. Or to the doctor. She’s to be a traditional wife, but he hangs out with his pals every night after work—”
“She’s not from DC, is she?” Gianna asked.
Mimi shook her head. “Somewhere in Pennsylvania—”
“You’uns!” Gianna exclaimed.
“What?”
“That’s what he said—the husband. That ‘you’uns’ were plotting against him. I haven’t heard that in years. It used to be common around Pittsburgh. What the hell are they doing in DC?” Gianna muttered as she limped out of the breakfast room because she was trying to walk too fast.
“Where’s your cane?” Mimi called after her.
“Leave me alone, Mimi!”
Mimi grinned, then quickly sobered. She pulled her other phone from her pocket and sat back down. She’d call Bev as soon as she had called Tyler, the editor and friend she hadn’t spoken to in more than three months. She inhaled deeply and punched a button. Tyler answered so quickly he could have been waiting for the call.
“Mimi?”
“Hi ya, Tyler. Do you have time for me to share something with you?”
“As much time as you need, Mimi,” and he listened without interruption as she told him about the phone call, then as much as she knew about Jennifer. “Where, Mimi?”
“One of the East Side housing projects for large families,” she answered, and heard him yell at somebody to monitor the police scanner. Then he asked her how she was doing and feeling.
“Can I come back to work, Tyler?”
“Is today too soon?” he asked, almost before the words were out of her mouth.
“Only if you buy me lunch. And at the French place, not the Chinese one.”
“You don’t like the French place.”
“True but think how good it’ll make you and your expense account look.”
She could picture his confused face as he said, “I don’t follow.”
“You took me to an expensive lunch and voila! I came back to work.”
“Nobody who knows you will believe that, Patterson.”
She was back! He only called her Patterson when she was the reporter and he was the editor. So . . . since she was back . . . “The children, Tyler.”
“What children?”
“Jennifer has four—”
“Had four. Just got the info: both parents are dead, and so far there’s no sign of children, but the cops haven’t completely cleared the scene yet.”
“We gotta find those children, Tyler.”
“See you at noon-thirty, Patterson. Bonjour.”
Tyler disconnected immediately so Mimi punched the button that would connect Bev and she, too, answered as if expecting the call. “Anything wrong, Mimi?”
“Yeah, but not with me,” and she relayed the call from Jennifer, adding the latest info from Tyler. “But there were no children in the home. We gotta find those children, Bev.”
Bev gave a deep sigh and because Mimi knew her even better than she knew Tyler, she could hear the sadness in her voice and picture it in her face. “Jennifer’s mother came and got the two youngest ones last weekend, and the older two probably are at school.” She sighed again and almost whispered the words: “Jennifer, Jennifer. I am so very sorry.”
“Sorry for what, Bev?”
“Sorry because sometimes, Mimi, there’s nothing we can do to help.”
“So . . . women like Jennifer have to what, help themselves? Or do without help?”
Bev didn’t say anything for a long moment, primarily because there was nothing to say. Then, “Am I gonna hear from the cops?”
“Not unless there’s something in Jennifer’s home with your name on it.”
“Her husband even checks—checked—the garbage cans, so no, she wouldn’t have left anything for him to find and question.”
“Bev! He knew about you—”
Beverly snorted. “The difference between me and his wife is that I don’t live in trembling fear of him.”
“How awful to have to live that way,” Mimi said.
“What’s truly awful is how many women have to live that way,” Bev said, adding, “I’m really grateful to you and Gianna for keeping me out of it. I can’t afford to spend half my day listening to cops ask me questions I can’t answer.”
The two old friends declared their love for each other and ended the call, and Mimi got up and began loading the dishwasher. Starting today she’d no longer have the luxury of taking all day to clean the kitchen and breakfast nook just in time for dinner. Gianna entered in full uniform and while Mimi was admiring the sight, the eagle-eyed, leave-no-clue-unseen captain was clocking the clean kitchen. She didn’t comment verbally but raised a questioning eyebrow.
“I’m having lunch with Tyler—”
Gianna wrapped her in a tight embrace before she could complete the sentence. “Good for you, sweetheart. I’m really glad.”
“You’re this happy I’m having lunch with Tyler?”
“I’m this happy you’re going back to work.”
Mimi pulled back just far enough to make eye contact without breaking the delightful full-body contact. “I didn’t say I was going back to work.”
“You didn’t need to. Since you successfully transformed the junk heap that was the combined contents of our two homes into such a beautiful and fabulous living space while managing to conquer your entire to-read list, you have nothing to keep you occupied all day. You’d die of boredom before noon.”
Mimi had to acknowledge the truth of that statement: There had been eight weeks of almost nonstop unpacking and organizing and often reorganizing once Gianna had returned home and offered a suggestion or two—or three—. Mimi had enjoyed the entire process. Because of her leg, Gianna was unable to manage any of the lifting and moving of boxes and furniture, but she did an award-winning job of finding new restaurants to order from and new wines to try, and they surprised each other with how well and how easily they managed to agree on how to arrange and organize their new living space. Each woman had had her own home when they met and though they often talked about moving in together, work always got in the way. Now they wondered why it had taken so long. Their closest friends—Beverly and Sylvia, and Freddie and Cedric—agreed that the new space looked as if they’d lived there for years instead of just two months.
“You know me too well, Captain,” Mimi said, and kissed her appreciation before stepping out of the warm and wonderful embrace. “And unless you want that beautiful uniform wrinkled, not to mention being late for work—”
Gianna stepped away as quickly as her bad leg permitted and over to the rack at the kitchen door where her keys hung and where an elevator would take her down to the garage. She blew Mimi a kiss and opened the door. As much as she’d love to end up back in bed with Mimi, wrinkled uniform and tardy for work be damned, today was not the day for it.
“Don’t forget your cane.”
Gianna muttered something unintelligible, grabbed the cane, and left. Mimi smiled to herself and went to get ready for work for the first time in two months.
• • • •
Gianna’s boss, the DC Chief of Police, paced back and forth in front of the room full of the department’s top brass: assistant chiefs, deputy chiefs, and commanders. Gianna and her seconds in command, Lt. Eric Ashby and Det. Jim Dudley, were the lowest ranks in the room. Every eye was on the chief. He was looking at the video screen that covered most of the front wall. As he paced, he jiggled the coins in his pockets, and anybody who’d known him for longer than fifteen minutes knew to pay close and careful attention. He proved the point when he spoke: “I know you all are tired of hearing this, and I’m more tired of saying it than you are of hearing it, but I’m gonna say it anyway.” He stopped his pacing and coin-jiggling and made eye contact with the room. “I do not want a repeat of that Charlottesville horror at this demonstration on Saturday. The law says we have to let the little hatemongers have their demonstration, but you will see to it that things don’t get out of hand, and you for damn sure will keep anybody from being killed. Their lawyers have been all over social media talking about their rights. Well, here’s a right I got for ’em: They’ve got the right to obey the law as long as they’re in my town! Otherwise they’ll get their hate-spewing asses arrested. Period.”
The chief resumed pacing and jiggling; the sound absurdly loud in the deadly quiet room. Then Deputy Chief for Operations Gerhardt Schmidt cleared his throat and stood up, but before he could speak the chief waved him back down. “We’ll hear from you in a minute, Schmidt. I want to hear from Maglione first.”
“But I’m Chief of Operations,” Schmidt said, barely stopping short of whining.
“Since I gave you the job, I think I know that. Now have a seat,” the chief said, looking at Gianna.
Without looking at Eric, she gave an imperceptible nod of her head and the newly minted lieutenant walked to the front of the room. He saluted his chief and started talking: “We will deploy our people on both sides of the demonstration. I’ll lead one team and Det. Dudley will lead the other. Our people will wear mics and cameras, and they will be mobile—able to move about the crowd as necessary, especially in the event of a disturbance—relaying an audio and visual record of everything. They will be in constant contact with our Command Center, which will be in constant contact with Command Central—”
“I haven’t issued that order,” Schmidt said loudly.
“I’m issuing it,” the chief snapped. “I want everybody in constant communication with everybody else. Is that clear? This is not the damn federal government! No unit of this police department operates in secret. Keep talking, Ashby.”
“Yes, sir. If Chief Schmidt—or anyone—needs one or several of our people to change position, the order goes from Central to our Command—”
“And who’s in charge there?” Schmidt demanded to know.
“I am,” Gianna said quietly and without turning around, so she didn’t take her eyes off the chief. “All orders from Central go through me to my people.”
Gianna had been a cop long enough that everyone in the room knew her. All of them respected her and most of them liked her. A couple, however, like Gerhardt Schmidt, were envious of her close relationship with the chief, but even they knew she’d earned his trust, even if they didn’t know all the pertinent details. But that didn’t prevent more than a few of them from wanting to see her up and moving, wanting to see some hint of vulnerability, to see her limping or, even better, using the cane, which was tucked under her arm when she entered the room. Wasn’t gonna happen.
“All right, Schmidt. You can talk now, then ATTF. I see Andy Page but where’s your boss, son?”
Page closed his eyes and inhaled. Then he squeezed his eyes tightly shut. “He’s on his way back from a Homeland Security briefing—”
Everybody already knew what their chief thought about the federal law enforcement agencies of Washington, and most had worked with him long enough to have heard, if not felt, his displeasure. Still it was a revelation, and some insisted that he regularly invented new cuss words and especially creative new ways to express his feelings about the feds. Lt. Andy Page’s eyes still were squeezed shut, but a tiny grin lifted his lips. He was glad not to be his boss.
• • • •
“What are you grinning at, Patterson?”
“You, Tyler.”
“Why?”
“’Cause you’re funny, getting all worked up because I won’t give into your whining and do the story on Jennifer when I told you before we ordered this pretentious . . . whatever it is . . . that I wouldn’t do the story. You do have other reporters, you know.”
Indignant replaced whining. “Do you know what this lunch is costing me?”
Grinning even wider. “Nothing,” Mimi replied, “and I don’t care what it cost the paper. Now, can we talk about Saturday’s demonstration? That interests me.”
Tyler’s attitude did a graceful pirouette on the proverbial dime, and now he was the grinning Cheshire. Mimi groaned inwardly. She’d just been had. “Carolyn will be delighted to hear that, Mimi,” he said, grin widening as he saw that she knew she’d been played. Yes, he was her boss, but he also was her friend. They’d worked together for years and knew each other well. Knew where all the buttons were and when to push them. She’d only been gone a few months. Had her gears rusted so quickly?
“I see your promotion has improved your skills, Tyler.” Formerly the city editor, Tyler Carson now was the managing editor, and Mimi’s abrupt and angry resignation three months earlier had a lot to do with that. “I’m gonna have to up my game.”
He shook his head. “Your game is fine. Just don’t leave me to my own devices again, please.”
“Does that mean you missed me?”
He began a snarky riposte—their usual form of communication—but bit it back. “More than you’ll ever know, Patterson,” he said quietly.
“Hmmm. Maybe I should’ve gotten mad and quit sooner. I don’t know how to handle all this love from you, Tyler. But then maybe you have so much more to give since you finally wised up and dumped the straight boyfriend. I don’t know how or why you put up with his sorry ass for so long.”
Tyler mumbled something that sounded a lot like “fuck you, Patterson.” Mimi sighed. She was back and, truth be told, she was both happy and relieved. While quitting had been the right thing to do under the circumstances, and her unemployed status meant she was on hand to help Gianna heal and orchestrate their move into their wonderful new condo, at this point she was bored and antsy. She loved her job and she was good at it. She needed to be busy. She didn’t know what exactly Tyler had in mind for her but working the White Power demonstration story with Carolyn Warshawski as her editor was a good start.
• • • •
It took but a moment for silence to descend on the normally noisy newsroom when they walked in. All eyes were on Mimi. The silent disbelief turned into beehive buzzing and then into a raucous cheer. “Fuck you Patterson!” Someone yelled the good-natured welcome from the back of the room, and Mimi yelled back a good-natured obscenity that involved the heckler’s mother. She was home. And like the professionals they were, everybody returned to their work, and the cacophony of ringing phones and clacking keyboards and voices at all levels of conversation that made up the normal noise of the newsroom was as welcoming as a royal trumpet salute. Not to mention louder and less melodic.
“About time you brought your sorry ass back to work,” Mimi heard from behind her, and she didn’t need to turn around to know that Joe Zemekis would be there, trying to convert the joy in his face into a scowl. His anger at her resignation had almost caused her to walk back the words “I quit”. Almost but not quite. She turned around to face him, and the scowl lost.
“Hi ya, Joe. Tyler’s been keeping you busy, I see.” Naturally she still read the paper every day, the print edition as well as the many digital ones. “You’ve been doing really good work.”
“I’m really glad to see you, Mimi. Still pissed at you for quitting but glad to see you.”
“I’m glad to see you, too, Joe. And if I hadn’t quit, you’d have been fired, so I did you a favor. You should thank me instead of bustin’ my chops.”
“How do you figure you did me a favor?”
Mimi remembered the day more clearly than she wished to, and she saw that Joe did, too:
“Well if it isn’t JJZ! Where’s the Queen B? Somewhere making beautiful music with the lieutenant who can do no wrong, leaving you to do all the work?” Ian had spoken loudly enough that everyone within a ten-food radius heard him, which was his intention. To call the man clueless was to grossly understate. “I just wish Patterson heard what he said, the little fuck. She’d have cleaned his clock and left the pieces on the floor.” Joe had said. Carolyn made a sound and Henry looked up as Mimi headed toward them. “Patterson! A little afternoon delight with the lovely lieutenant? Give me an hour with her and I’ll make her forget all about that wanna-be plastic dick you dykes use. Or is it rubber? I’ll slide nine inches of the real thing into her—” Mimi’s fist met his jaw with such speed and power that witnesses weren’t sure he’d been hit until he was spiraling backward, yelling at the top of his voice.
“If I hadn’t hit him you would have, and then you’d have been fired instead of me.”
“You weren’t fired, Patterson; you quit.”
“And now I’ve un-quit and if you don’t mind, I could do with no further talk of the Weasel and his disastrous effect on the operation of this newsroom.” Mimi looked around. Everything was the same and yet everything was different. How one person could so totally and negatively affect an entire operation—the thought sickened her. For about the one-millionth time.
“Our ship has been righted,” Joe said, and as proof that he was right their editor, Carolyn Warshawski, approached.
“I’m so glad you’re back, Mimi,” she said, offering a brief hug.
“Me, too, Carolyn. And I’m so glad that you’re finally in the chair that should have been yours a long time ago.”
“I couldn’t be in this chair as long as Tyler was in it,” Carolyn said with a smile. “But as soon as he moved his butt, I moved mine!” When the Weasel finally got shit-canned, Tyler was promoted to that job and he quickly promoted Carolyn to his. Back for just a few minutes and Mimi already could see that the newsroom was functioning better than it had in years. As if to prove the point Tyler joined their group— something the Weasel never would have done.
“Patterson will brief you and Joe on this morning’s events. Then you and I can put our heads together and decide how we want to cover the clusterfuck they’re calling a demonstration.
“You really think it’ll devolve into a clusterfuck?” Joe asked.
“I live to be pleasantly surprised,” Tyler said, his tone dry as desert dust, as he turned and headed toward his lair. Carolyn made for her own cubicle, beckoning for Mimi and Joe to join her.
“Please talk us through it, Mimi. How did she come to have your number? Did you know her? Was she a source?”
The waiting room of East Side Families First was packed, as always. No matter that Dr. Beverly Connors and the original partners of the Midtown Psychiatric Associates had moved across town, bought a small abandoned warehouse, and added half a dozen new therapists and social workers; the demand for services in one of the poorest parts of Washington, DC, would guarantee a permanently full waiting room. Appointment times were rarely kept because, as everyone knew, emergencies took precedence, and in a community where the women and children were as traumatized as those living in war zones, emergencies were the norm. Which is why Mimi always brought along a book.
“You’re not poor,” Mimi heard almost directly in her ear. She lifted her eyes from the book and turned to her right. She controlled her surprise.
“No, I’m not.”
“So how come you’re here? This place is supposed to be for poor people.”
“I’m here because Dr. Connors is the best therapist in the city. Why are you here?”
Mimi’s words had the desired effect: The young white woman, struck speechless for a moment, finally replied. “I’m damn near crazy and I’m for damn sure poor.”
“And you’re probably the only white person in this entire neighborhood.”
The young woman gave a snaggle-toothed grin showing all the places where teeth were missing. “Which is why my mean bastard of a husband won’t look for me here! I don’t hate Colored people like he does!”
“But he’ll live in a neighborhood with people he hates?”
The young woman shrugged. “If he can get free stuff.”
“But he doesn’t know you come here?”
“Gawd no! He’d kill me! I cain’t go anywhere or see anything or read anything or hear anything that his dumbass church don’t okay first. We ain’t got no TV and no cell phone. He won’t even let me take the children to the library ’cause there’s computers there and computers got the internet.”
“How many children do you have?” Mimi asked.
“Four and he wants me to have some more, but I ain’t. I’m puttin’ a stop to that shit. He’d kill me if knew. That dumbass preacher got him believin’ we have to be old fashin. But if he wants more babies he can damn well have ’em hisself.”
“Where is this church?”
The girl shook her head. “It ain’t got a place. We meet in different places but mostly in the community room of the place where we live.”
Mimi took a card from her pocket and offered it to the girl who reluctantly took it. She squinted at it, reminding Mimi of her friend Baby Doll—Marlene Jefferson—who couldn’t read when Mimi met her. “I’d like to talk to you some more if that’s okay—”
“What do this say?”
“That I’m a newspaper reporter—”
“Like that fake news?”
“Only if you believe that telling the truth about that shit for brains in the White House is fake news,” Mimi snapped, standing up when the receptionist called her name.
“Do you see Dr. Connors for free?”
Mimi shook her head. “I pay full price.”
“Do you remember when this was?” Joe asked.
Mimi shook her head. “But two things: On the call we overheard the husband say ‘you’ens’ and Gianna recognized that as being an Eastern Pennsylvania speech pattern—”
“Kinda like ‘y’all’ or ‘youse’,” Joe said, nodding.
“And she called the church ‘maga.’ I thought she was saying ‘mega,’ like it was one of those huge places with thousands of members, but she was saying—”
“Oh shit!” Joe exclaimed. “MAGA church!”
“Do not say those words in my presence, Zemekis,” Mimi growled at him.
“There could be more of them. Lots more of them!”
“Lots more of what, Joe?” Carolyn asked.
“People like this Jennifer—lots more of them living here in DC.”
“Happy hunting, Z,” Mimi said.
“”Will Dr. Connors talk to me?”
“Nope,” Mimi said.
“Will you ask her?”
“Nope. You’re on your own.”
“How old was this woman? How old are her children?” Joe Zemekis was thrumming like a tuning fork.
“The cops have had access to that place for a few hours now, Z. They’ll have all the answers you have questions for.”
“Thanks, Patterson. Later, Carolyn,” and he was off and running—literally.
“He’s a good reporter,” Mimi said.
“One of the best,” Carolyn agreed. “As are you, Mimi, and this could be a very good story. Why don’t you—” The ringing phone saved Mimi from having to formulate a polite answer. “Tyler wants to see you. Then there’s a meeting in the Exec’s office to discuss how to cover the demo on Saturday.”
Mimi looked around the newsroom and smiled. “Feels good in here. Again.”
Carolyn Warshawski smiled and nodded her agreement. “Glad you’re back.”
Mimi exchanged welcome back greetings with several colleagues en route to Tyler, and she had to admit that she enjoyed the feel-good feeling. Under the Weasel’s tenure the toxic level in the place had been dangerously high. The Weasel had fired some good people to make room for his hires—at best lazy reporters, at worst raging incompetents. He’d tried to fire Joe Zemekis who was stationed at the Central American Bureau, but Joe played his seniority card and forced his return to the States. Then Tyler blew away all of the Weasel’s hires, all white men, and replaced them with a variety of women and men of a variety of colors and sexual preferences.
Mimi shook the ugly thoughts out of her brain and approached the cubicle Tyler maintained on the main newsroom floor, the place he was happiest and the most comfortable. He saw her coming, stood up, and entered his office, where he stood in the door waiting for her, then closed the door. “I just got back, Tyler, for crying out loud. I haven’t had time to do anything that warrants a closed-door meeting.”
“I don’t want people to hear you scream when I tell you that part of your new assignment is to be one of the digital content editors—”
“I don’t want to be a fuckin’ editor, Tyler.”
“Two days a week, Patterson. Two days a week for Zemekis. I do the other three. And it’s just until we hire two permanent editors. And you know we have to do it. The world is a digital place.”
She knew. She’d become a frequent reader of the paper’s digital edition and had to admit that it was a quality operation. “Who’s been doing it?”
“Carolyn, Zemekis, Henry and me. Now Henry and Carolyn can concentrate on their regular jobs. I’ll give you a tutorial after the Exec’s meeting.”
Mimi hadn’t screamed, but she was feeling as if she’d been slipped a mind-altering substance. A ninety-minute lunch with Tyler and back in the building less than an hour, and her reality was so different from the one she awoke to that perhaps screaming wasn’t a bad idea. She startled the Exec when she knocked on his door, and he frowned when he checked his watch. “It’s not time for the meeting, sir. I just wanted to check in with you.”
He stood up. “Welcome back, Ms. Patterson.”
“Thank you for having me back, sir.”
“I’m not the one who wanted you gone,” he snapped, “and nothing like that will ever happen again at this newspaper, I promise you that!”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Now go to the personnel department and see how they’re handling your absence.”
Personnel had been human resources for at least ten years . . . but who was counting? And she had quit. How many ways could that be handled? She posed that question to him as delicately as she knew how but he waved her away, muttering something that sounded like “nothing in writing.” Then he called her back. “You gave that young woman your card. The one who killed her husband and herself. That means you were working for us at the time. Had been all along, for my money.”
• • • •
“So, you were on sick leave for a few weeks, and the rest of the time . . . what?” Gianna was as mystified by the outcome of Mimi’s visit to human resources as was Mimi herself.
“Not sure I know, my love. At least about anything but the four weeks,” Mimi said with an elaborate shrug and a crooked grin.
“But you understand the four weeks of sick leave?”
Mimi nodded. “According to the head of the personnel department, a.k.a. human resources, I have oodles—her word, not mine—of sick leave, but I seem to be one who believes in using her vacation time as soon as it accrues. Unlike someone I know,” she said, shooting Gianna a dark look, one studiously ignored by the captain. “So, since she had to take time from me, she took it in the form of sick leave. And the rest of the time . . .” Mimi shrugged. “Tyler’ll figure it out.”
“No doubt.”
“Can we eat now?”
“After you tell me about the digital editing job.”
Mimi told her, and they both agreed that it certainly could prove to be interesting, if not enjoyable. While Gianna opened wine and fixed their plates Mimi read the latest update of the digital edition of the paper and felt a sliver of excitement creeping in. However, it was mitigated by a sliver of unease. She looked up from the laptop screen and caught Gianna’s eye.
“And sweetheart? Don’t turn your back on that Schmidt character. His long knives are out and sharpened.”
