River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (6 page)

“Inside,” he said, suddenly serious. He met her questioning gaze, but his eyes revealed nothing. Still holding her mug, she squeezed past him. He came in behind her, closing the door.

In addition to Frank’s cluttered desk, a couple of filing cabinets, a bookcase and a long wooden credenza, the office held a ratty old couch and two visitor chairs. Oscar Reyes,
The
Voice
’s owner, sat on the couch with his hands folded over his soccer ball of a stomach and a dour look on his face. His hair, pure silver, was combed away from that face, which was creased and lined enough to suggest a lifetime of hard labor in the sun.

“Oh, hi, Oscar,” Molly said. “I didn’t realize you were in here. How are you?”

Oscar had an office of his own. Some days he didn’t come in at all, but lately he’d been around a lot, closed up in his office, sometimes calling Frank in for private meetings. None of it boded well, she had thought. Neither did this. Were they firing her?

Oscar smiled, a sincere grin that radiated warmth. “Tired as hell,” he said. “And sore. I spent all weekend working on the lawn and the garden. Edging, trimming, weeding, all that stuff. I told my wife it’s almost winter, why bother, and I thought she was going to tear me a new one.”

“You should get yourself a Mexican for that kind of thing,” Frank said, settling behind his desk. The curtains were drawn across his window, as they usually were since it just looked out on a little paved parking area in back. On his walls he had hung framed front pages of
The
Voice
. The very first issue occupied the place of honor behind his desk.

“I
got
a Mexican for that,” Oscar replied, chuckling. “You’re looking at him.”

The two men were old friends, and they teased each other mercilessly. Sometimes Oscar retaliated for the racist jibes with attacks on Frank’s homosexuality. Both took the barbs as good-natured harassment. Molly suspected they found it hilarious that a Latino and a gay African American ran the only real alternative newspaper in El Paso.
The
Voice
stuck it to what they called “the lily white
El Paso Times
”—even though its editor was also Hispanic—as often as they could.

“Sit, Molly,” Frank urged.

Molly sat in one of the visitor’s chairs, angling it so she could see Frank and Oscar. She let the mug heat the palms of her hands. “What’s up?”

“Your brother is about to have a visitor,” Frank said.

“A very famous visitor,” Oscar added.

“Byrd is?”

“You got any other brothers?” Frank asked.

“Just the one.” Byrd had been in the oncology ward at Providence Memorial Hospital for several weeks. His leukemia had spread to the point that he needed constant supervision and full-time medical care. He was convinced that he wouldn’t be coming out again, and his doctors were beginning to agree. “What visitor?”

“Wade Scheiner’s on his way to El Paso,” Frank said. “He said he wants to spend time with Byrd while he still can. He’s been in Germany, getting checked out in a military hospital there and being debriefed. A friend at CNN tipped me that he’s headed here.”

“That’s great! Byrd will be thrilled.” So was she, really. She hadn’t been in touch with Wade much these last few years, but he had been a huge part of her life, as well as Byrd’s, for decades. She had always believed that his example had set her on course for a career in journalism.

“CNN hasn’t announced where he’s going, just that he’s taking a leave of absence,” Frank went on. “They don’t want him swamped with well-wishers or job offers or any of the fruitcakes who come out of the woodwork after a story like his. So it’s kind of hush-hush. I thought you’d want to know.”

“Thanks, Frank.” She took a sip of the coffee, waiting for the rest of the story. There was another shoe floating somewhere over her head, and she wasn’t going anywhere until it dropped.

“One more thing,” Oscar said.
And here it comes.
She wondered if she should duck. “Scheiner hasn’t told anyone what happened to him in Baghdad. Nothing on the record, anyway. The whole story of his kidnapping, how he escaped, all that. It’s a huge story, and he’s keeping it to himself.”

“Maybe he’ll do a special report for CNN,” Molly speculated. “Or write a book.”

“Maybe so,” Oscar said. “And then again, maybe he just needs some time to process everything he went through before he talks about it.”

“Could be.”

“The thing is, getting an exclusive on a story like that would be good for
The
Voice
,” Oscar said. The corners of his lips turned up in a kind of dreamy smile that he was probably unaware of. “Really good. The kind of good that boosts circulation, which makes advertisers happy, which allows us to increase ad rates. That kind of good.”

Things became clear to Molly. “So you want me to work him.”

“Everyone in America wants to know what happened to him and how he got away. He’s your friend,” Frank said. “And your brother’s, right?”

“Yes.”

“So presumably you’ll be seeing him, spending time together, anyway. We’re not asking you to do anything underhanded. Just try to make sure that if he wants to talk about it, you—and by extension, the readers of
The Voice
—are the
who
that he wants to talk to.”

“You are a newspaper editor, right?” Molly asked. “Because that was one hell of a terrible sentence.”

Frank nodded, his gaze downcast. “You’re right, it was. I even offended myself with that one. But I think you get my point.”

“I think so. You want me to prey on an old friend’s misfortunes to hike our ad rates.”

“That’s a cynical view of it, Molly,” Oscar said.

“I’m a girl reporter for a big city newspaper. Cynical is in the first line of my job description.”

“And we wouldn’t want you any other way, Molly.”

“I can guarantee you one thing,” she said, knowing it would be important to both men. “He won’t give his story to
The
Times
.”

“Why not?”

“He hates that paper. To begin with, he thinks their editorial page is somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun.”

“Was Attila conservative?” Oscar asked, his right eyebrow arching up his forehead.

“Oh yeah,” Frank said. “One of the first neocons. He was sure the Romans would greet him as a liberator.”

“Right, I almost forgot. And he hated the gays, too. Or was that the Gauls?”

“So that’s something, right?” She started to raise her mug to her lips.

“Don’t do that,” Frank said sharply.

She paused with the cup at chin level. “Do what?”

“You know the swill we buy for the kitchen isn’t real coffee. Let’s go out for a while. You can hold down the fort, right, Oscar?”

Oscar gave his workingman’s smile. His left canine was gold. “Consider it held, Frank.”

* * *

Although it pained her to admit it, when she had heard about Wade’s kidnapping, her first thought had been of herself and Byrd. Especially Byrd. Her big brother had saved her life, emotionally and in actuality. He had done the same for Wade. For years, Byrd and Wade had been inseparable, joined at whatever bone or nerve ending made people want to risk their lives in tiny boats on roaring rivers. She had been part of the group in their earlier days, before the boys started leaving Palo Duro to live their adventures on a bigger canvas.

Molly had been a gangly kid in those days, when Wade had first moved into their little ranching town on the Rio Grande. Since then she had blossomed into a woman. Now, in her early thirties, she had continued blossoming, to the point that she was glad that J-Lo had popularized a little extra mass in the ass. Her phrase—the more common vernacular was “junk in the trunk,” but Molly was precise when it came to words, and to her a person’s trunk was her torso, not her behind. Molly had dark brown hair that she kept shoulder-length, and bright green eyes and perfect lips, she thought, just full enough and heart-shaped, not much of a chest but on the bright side, not much of a gut either. She was five-seven, no model, but not ashamed to catch her own reflection in a shop window. Not at all the little girl she had been when they had met Wade.

Now that Byrd was in need, it tore at her heart that she couldn’t save his life in return. Neither could Wade. But she had been afraid, in those first moments and through the days since then, that Byrd would die without ever seeing Wade again, or worse, that news of Wade’s death would trigger Byrd’s final spiral. As it was, only a miracle would keep him alive long enough to see the dawn of 2007.

Her joy at Frank and Oscar’s information was tempered by a gut reaction to their full-court press on her. She wanted Wade to spend time with Byrd. She didn’t want that time to be soured by her squeezing him for a story. She especially didn’t want to piss him off, make him sorry he had ever come to town.

Frank and Oscar were both reasonable men, and they’d understand if she refused to exploit her connection. They would understand, but they would be disappointed. They might begin to doubt her reporter’s instincts, her willingness to chase a story. Maybe a refusal here would put the brakes on her advancement prospects.

She had studied journalism at the University of Texas, El Paso, encouraged by Wade’s early success. She had worked hard as a freelancer, selling articles to the
Times
and
Texas Monthly
and other markets. Then a staff job had opened up at the alternative weekly, and she had pushed and cajoled, managing to win the position. She would hate to see that job impaired by an attack of conscience, not to mention the chances of moving up to more interesting and meaningful stories. An editorship one day, even publisher. Molly was ambitious, and she had an abiding respect for the journalistic predecessors that she hoped to emulate. The names of H. L. Mencken and Nellie Bly, Edward R. Murrow, Woodward and Bernstein, even more recent stars like Keith Olbermann and Christiane Amanpour, were a personal pantheon to her. Since Thomas Paine, the dream of America had been tied to the written word. The more powerful the government became, the more good journalists were required to keep it honest. In her wildest fantasies, she leveraged a significant career at
The
Voice
to one of more nationwide prominence, where she could have an impact on the nation similar to that of her heroes.

If it happened, it happened, and she would keep working toward that goal. She just hoped her job wouldn’t threaten her relationship with her brother’s best friend.

When she had learned of Wade’s escape (coincidentally from Byrd, who, stuck in the hospital and in a world of pain, couldn’t do much except watch TV), once again her first thought had been of her brother.
Thank God he won’t die knowing that Wade went first,
she had thought. Concern for Byrd’s emotional health outweighed her worry about their friend’s life.

She would have thought this made her a shitheel, except that if she did think this, then a voice inside her head—a voice that, when it came from outside her head, belonged to Byrd—would tell her to
knock it off, swearing’s not ladylike, and besides you don’t fucking do it well enough
. To which she would respond, as if talking to the real Byrd,
Yeah? Up yours, bro.

Thereby proving his point.

The Byrd in her head couldn’t be effectively silenced, so she tried to keep the reins on her own language, on his behalf.

The day was coming when that would be the only Byrd left.

She could hardly bear to imagine it.

FIVE

Frank drove his Volvo station wagon, which he’d had for decades and which had come in handy in the newspaper’s earliest days, according to the legends that had grown up around
The
Voice
, when he’d stuffed the back full of papers at the printers and delivered them to street boxes and markets around town. As soon as he had the engine started he turned up the radio, letting the blaring Eagle 99.1 make it clear that he didn’t want to talk until they got where they were going.

That was okay. He had stirred up the old memory river (a swimming spot Molly didn’t dip her feet into when she could help it), and the sediment hadn’t all settled yet. Molly folded her hands in her lap and listened to Bad Company and thought about her tenth summer.

* * *

I saw him first.

That was the thing about Wade that always stood between Molly and Byrd, although it had gone unspoken since the very beginning. If she had given voice to it, Byrd would have pooh-poohed it anyway.
What about it?
he would have asked.
What does that matter? Okay, you saw him first, big deal? I saw Mom and Dad first. I saw you before you saw me. So what?