Shoot (2 page)

I worked first at the
New York Mail
but found the competition with other reporters totally crazy. Like Ginny McElhone—who was at the
Daily Press
then—who would literally do anything for a story and is mad crazy. She also seduced me and sort of saved my life but doesn’t play well with others. When I left the
Mail
, I got my current job at the
New York Daily Press
. I write my column but I haven’t come up with any front pages on the Hacker case in weeks, which, I assume, is why my editor called me in this morning for a meeting.

My new boss, City Editor Mel Greenbaum, made me wait before summoning me into his office. He was a weird guy and a chat with him was always entertaining. The newspaper business, like my former trade, was filled with gentlemen, and ladies, who wanted to be macho. They cursed a lot. Mel was different, I had been told, because he had lost several lawsuits filed by staffers, mostly women, who said he had sexually harassed them by using filthy language. These tough guys and broads were suddenly freaked out by profanity, which, they claimed, demeaned, humiliated and degraded them. Juries agreed when they heard the recordings and it cost the paper a fortune. Some tough guys. After Mel lost the third lawsuit, he was ordered to attend charm school—sensitivity training. But he was a hard case and still couldn’t control his profanity. He was forced to undergo hypno-aversion therapy—with homonyms—or lose his job. He agreed and, technically, Mel never cursed at an underling again. It made his chats unique and no one could ever prove profanity.

I wondered if he was angry at me for being late but he pumped my hand, slapped me on the back and spent ten minutes praising me for my many exclusives on the Hacker for his enemy—the
New York Mail
. He also lauded me for switching to the good guys, beating the
Mail
and catching the Hacker on the front page of the
Press
.

“That was the best fuggin’ job I’ve ever seen, you breaking that mother-loving Hacker case,” Mel told me, beaming with pride, flashing some crooked teeth.

“So I’m getting a raise?” I asked.

Mel’s smile vanished. His watery eyes became hard and then softened.

“You just
got
a freaking raise,” he said, in a wounded voice.

“So, why am I here, Mel?”

“I just want to shoot the breeze. We should get to know one another.”

Mel never shot the breeze. Mel had to be twice my age and I doubted we had anything in common besides the newspaper. I looked around his office, the photos of the wife and kids and pets and vacations. I asked him about them and he told me. He asked about me. No wife, but Mel already knew about Jane, my hot and brilliant girlfriend, because she had also been in his newspaper and many others during the Hacker case. And Mel already knew all about Skippy, because Skippy was, if anything, more famous than me. After ten minutes of pretending to be fascinated with each other, Mel said he would buy me a drink soon. At last, a good idea. It looked like ten minutes was the limit of Mel’s social charm.

“It’s time to stop fracking around, Shepherd. You haven’t filed a cop-socking story in two weeks,” Mel said, in a fatherly, curse-free tone.

At last, the real reason for the meeting. Should I tell him I already had a dad?

“I was taking some medical leave. I was wounded in the line of duty, boss.”

“Abso-honking-lutely. Sure, you deserved some time off,” Mel replied, sounding dubious and using the past tense.

“I was knocked unconscious, shot, basically set on fire and dumped in a lake,” I pointed out.

“I’m just saying that you have to get back on the fuggin’ horse, buddy—unless you’re some kind of deuce-bag goof-off?”

“No, Mel, I’m not a deuce-bag goof-off. I like doing the column but I’m not sure this reporting gig is for me.”

He jumped out of his black leather executive chair faster than I thought possible.

“Are you freaking kidding me? You are the best bun-forking investigative reporter I’ve ever seen.”

“Thanks. I didn’t say I wasn’t good at it, Mel. It’s fun but I just don’t think I want to do it for the rest of my life. I really liked working with Izzy Negron and the cops, though. I could do that, be a homicide detective.”

“You’re too old for that, you stupid son on a beach.”

“Actually, I’m not. The NYPD cutoff is age thirty-five. I checked. I’ll be thirty in July. Besides, with my military credits, I could join up to age forty-one.”

“Bull-pit!”

“No. It’s true.”

“You’ll have to qualify, go through the academy, be a uniform for years… You might never make detective, much less a homicide investigator. You just need to drop your cockleshell and get your back to work.” Mel settled back into his seat. “You have any ideas about the next story you want to work on?”

“You bet. Dog poop.”

It got very quiet in the office. Then Mel laughed loudly, his pink jowls wattling. When he saw I wasn’t laughing too, he stopped. I explained that there had been a study which found that dogs did their business while orienting themselves in a north–south direction. In short, Shar-Peis practiced feng shui.

“I don’t believe the study without my own scientific proof, so we’ll experiment—me and Skippy. I’ll let the chips fall where they may,” I assured him.

He glared at me and then, slowly, he smirked.

“Horse-split! This is not how to get another raise, Shepherd.”

I told him I wasn’t really angling for another bump and was ready to start work on this new column idea.

“Your pet thing is cute as a kumquat but I’m only interested in hard news and you have a father-mucking contract with us.”

“Yes, I do,” I agreed. “Have you read it?”

Mel blinked. He hadn’t. I told him. He didn’t believe that his predecessor had signed a contract letter that only required me to write one pet column a week and also to report “any breaking news I uncover.”

He called for a copy of my agreement and read it over and over, looking for a way out.

“In our business, everyone gets assigned stories and then they uncover stuff,” Mel tried. “That’s the way it works, mukluk.”

“Not if they have a contract that says what mine says,” I countered.

“C’mon, don’t be an ace-hole. I have something just up your alley right now. You’ll love it!”

“What?”

“Senator Hard-On! What else? You are going to break it wide open!” Mel declared, holding up today’s front page:

Both tabloids and every news outlet in town were hot on the story of our horny Democratic U.S. Senator, Ron Hardstein, now renamed Senator Hard-On for his online monkey business involving dozens of women, his smart phone and his penis. My colleagues were at that moment stalking the honorable gentleman, trying to uncover the names of all the women he had had sex with. Everyone in the country was on the story and it all seemed very predictable. The only thing more boring to me than someone else’s sex life was politics.

“You’ve got to be kidding, Mel.”

“Why is the biggest story in town not good enough for you?”

“Because I don’t care what Hardstein does with his equipment. His sex life is between him, his wife and the women. It’s no one else’s business because it had nothing to do with his job. It’s not a story.”

Mel chuckled. “You’re a beginner in this business, Shepherd. I’m the judge of what is and what isn’t a story.”

To me, his reasoning seemed circular, a self-licking ice-cream cone. If he was the guy who decided what stories went in the newspaper, then all of his choices became news—proving his news judgment was one hundred per cent correct. When I continued to disagree, he threatened me with legal action.

“Okay,” I responded.

We sat looking at each other for a while, until Mel thought better of his threat and took a different tack. “Would you at least be open to fugging suggestions?”

“Fine. But I don’t have to follow them.”

“You’ve only been working for newspapers for a month or two. You don’t know how the news biz works.” He started listing ideas for stories, topics for me to dig up scoops on, mostly involving sex and celebrities.

“The next big story will find me,” I told him.

“You’re really kissing me off. What are you freaking talking about?”

“News happens,” I explained, already walking through the door. “You can’t go out and create it.”

Mel was still laughing uproariously when I left his office, his belly bouncing like a beach ball of Jell-O against his desk.

As soon as I hit the street, I took out my phone.

“Is Mel an asshole?” I asked Siri.

“There’s no need for profanity, Shepherd,” Siri chided me.

Siri is a lady. I apologized. I asked her to FaceTime Jane. As I waited for the call to connect, I got that feeling again, the one that had kept me alive this far. Someone’s eyes were on me.

Once the call connected I didn’t bother with preamble.

“Mel Greenbaum called me in for a chat.”

“What did he want?” Jane asked, her face concerned. She was wearing her pink Dr. Jane lab coat, her stethoscope around her neck, and looked like a blonde movie actress playing a veterinarian. I could see her kitchen in the background.

“Well, he shook my hand, patted me on the back, told me about his family, asked about you and Skippy, and then told me to get back to work.”

“Then what?”

“I told him the reporter gig may not be for me. He freaked. He tried to convince me I was wrong. Then he threatened to sue me but backed off when I said let the games begin.”

“So?”

“So, we’re still friends, I’m working on my dog-poop scoop and keeping an eye out for the Next Big Thing.”

“Which is what?” she asked.

“I have no clue. I think he’ll pester me with suggestions. Listen, I think I’ll stop by and pick up Skippy for a walk.”

I heard a familiar bark. Skippy had heard my voice.

“What’s up?” Jane asked.

“Nothing,” I lied.

“You’re lying,” Jane observed.

I should not have done this on FaceTime.

“Only a little,” I admitted.

“We agreed about this,” Jane pointed out. “No bull.”

“Sorry. Someone is following me.”

“Ginny Mac again?”

“Not her. Someone else, I think.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then how do you know they’re following you?”

“I’m good at that.”

“Maybe Ginny Mac has someone else following you?”

“That’s possible. I’ll see you soon.”

I hit the phone camera app and reversed the angle. I held it up above my shoulder so I could see behind me. No Yankees cap, no red sneakers, no visible face. I put the phone away but I still had the warning itch between my shoulder blades, the urgent urge to seek cover, turn, aim and fire. I fought to resist my fight-or-flight instinct. On the other hand, I was on a sunny street in America. What could happen?

* * *

Jane’s five-story Upper East Side brownstone townhouse in the fancy Carnegie Hill neighborhood near Central Park is worth major money. When I asked her if she got the cash from her practice, her dead husband, or was she rich, she looked at me like I was a complete jerk.

“All three, if it matters,” Jane told me.

I was very new in New York then and didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to ask people openly about money. Instead, after asking your name—to see if they had ever seen it in bold type in a gossip column—sophisticated Manhattanites just asked where you lived. Their New Yorker Real Estate Radar instantly told them if you were rich, poor or pathetic. If they were still interested in a conversation with you after that, they asked what you did for a living, which was just another disguised money question. I had become used to women asking me the three questions at parties and watching them retreat to the bar after I answered “Shepherd,” “Broome Street” and “newspaper reporter.” I have my own small apartment downtown, a tiny walk-up sub-let. I couldn’t afford to buy it because Manhattan was quickly becoming a millionaires-only spot. Lately, Skippy and I had been spending most of our time with Jane in her fancy townhouse, even though neither one of us had made any actual decision to live together.

I let myself in with my key. The alarm was off, blinking green. I called her and she answered from the kitchen. So did Skippy. I heard his distinctive yip and his trimmed toenails galloping across the expensive hardwood floors toward me, big as a wolf. I went on one knee to avoid being bowled over by the huge blue-eyed husky, who skidded into me and began licking.

“Hey, buddy, I was only gone a couple hours,” I told him, scratching his large head where black fur made a symmetrical black cap on his mostly white fur, with two parallel lines descending toward the intelligent bright eyes, the mark of a thoroughbred. I laughed and he leaned into my petting with delight, his tail slamming the floor.

I met Skippy in a bloody kitchen, a murder scene where one of his masters had been butchered, the first victim of the Hacker. It was like we had always been friends, even before we met. We rescued each other. Skippy had helped me investigate that case and protected me. I was sure he liked it when the game was afoot. One of Skippy’s fuzzy ears twitched. He turned toward the front door and cocked his head.

Jane was also glad to see me. She gave me a kiss and a hug, her stethoscope and her plastic
DOCTOR JANE
nameplate scrunched between us.

“I’m beginning to wonder if you like his kisses better than mine,” she smirked.

“I would never say that… to your face,” I smiled.

“Skippy and I just got back from a second walk,” Jane told me. “Don’t let him con you.”

“That’s okay. I need him for something.”

“Really?” Jane asked, brushing some blonde hair behind one ear. “What?”

I changed the subject and asked her about her day. She sighed, as if she was going to tell me about the death of someone’s pet, then burst into laughter.

“What?” I asked, smiling.

“Today, I saved a dachshund who was choking to death,” Jane said, still laughing.