The Tin Man (2 page)

As he watched her go, h
e tried to picture her perched on his lap wearing next to nothing. Under the desk, his cock made no response. Heaving a sigh, he got back to work, finishing in just under fifteen minutes.

Still f
eeling unraveled at the edges, he thought about taking another hit from his flask before deciding coffee was a better idea. He wasn’t his father and planned to keep it that way. He got up, plucked his favorite tweed sports coat off the back of the door, and slipped it on as he stepped out into the pale gray sea of cluttered cubicles.

“I’m just popping
downstairs to the cafe,” he announced to no one in particular as he made for the exit.

There was a mini-Starbucks in the lobby
—one of the reasons he’d chosen this particular building back when he was hunting around the Village for cheap office space. He also liked the building’s loft-like character and its proximity to Soho, where he sublet a one-bedroom flat from a documentary filmmaker.

As he waited
for the lift, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the polished steel doors. He was only forty, but looked older. His once dark hair was now salt and pepper and deep grooves etched the corners of his eyes and mouth. He’d aged at least five years in the past two, thanks to the fourteen-hour days he’d logged week after week, trying to make a go of the news site.

At least his
investment was starting to pay off.
The
Progressive Voice
, which he’d started on a shoestring,
now averaged twenty-five million unique visitors a month, making it one of the most popular news and commentary sites on the Internet. Ad revenues were on the rise and his staff had grown from a ragtag crew of freelancers to eight full-time employees, and he was almost in a financial position to hire more.

The elevator
opened and he got on, feeling antsy as it descended. When the doors parted on the lobby, he shambled across to Starbucks and ordered a tall dose of the daily drip. He took the coffee back upstairs and shoulder-pushed through the door of the suite. His reporter’s radar shot up straight away.

Something wasn’t right. In the wake of morning deadline, the
newsroom should be humming with activity, but it wasn’t. It was dead quiet. The only sound was a ringing telephone, which nobody was picking up.

Why?

Gut churning with a caustic blend of fear and dread, he limped toward the cubicles. A distressing odor infiltrated his nostrils. Baghdad flickered. The lump in the pit of his stomach became a shot-put. He crept toward Kelsey’s cubby. His chest tightened when he saw her slumped over the desk, her hair spilling across her computer keyboard. Cautiously, he drew closer. His breath caught when he saw the halo of blood.

He shrank back, unsure what to do.
Holding his breath, he moved in, pushed aside her hair, and pressed trembling fingers against the side of her neck. No pulse. Anguish closed around his heart like a fist.

Withdrawing, h
e hobbled from one cubicle to another. They were all the same.

Shot through the head.

One bullet each.

Quick and clean.

What the fuck? He’d been gone less than fifteen minutes. How could anybody have come and gone so quickly?

Unless
…

Panic
jolted his heart and spread outward like nerve gas, numbing his limbs. He fought to dam it off. He needed to keep a clear head, to reason this out. There was a gun in his top desk drawer—a nine millimeter Glock—but it was several yards away. If he could get to it, maybe he could defend himself. Could he make it? Should he try? He had to do something. If he stayed where he was, he was dead for sure.

Crouching, he crept to the edge of the cubicle, bad knee barking in protest
, and peered around the corner. Nothing. He started to make a break for it, but stopped short when he heard a noise. Footsteps. Panic seeped through the bulwark he’d erected in his brain. Heart pounding, throat tight, he ducked back behind the partition, senses on red alert. The phone started ringing again. Shite. Between that and the blood-thunder in his ears, he couldn’t hear a fucking thing.

He looked around for something, anything
, he could employ as a weapon. He saw an umbrella.
The Avengers
sprang to mind. John Steed always used a brolly, though not the collapsible sort, as this one was. Desperation mounting, he scanned the cubicle. Floor. Walls. Desktop. Bookcase. Filing cabinet. Nothing presented itself. Then, his gaze fell upon a metal coat rack. Maybe, just maybe, if he could swing it with all his might—the way he used to do back when he and Kenny played stick-ball in the street with the neighborhood lads—it might do the trick. He slunk toward his objective, freezing when he heard something. A shuffle, but close. He stilled, listening with every cell. Someone was breathing somewhere very nearby.

Baghdad
flickered.

The hood, the sweat, the fear
, the smell.

Blinking it away, h
e grabbed hold of the pole and spun, swinging his unwieldy stave with all his might. It connected with a sickening thud. The force of the impact knocked him backward. He stumbled, hitting the edge of the desk. Back on his feet, he looked. The gunman, clad in black from head to toe, was on the floor, but aiming his gun—a pistol affixed with a silencer—right at Buchanan. From behind the ski mask, dark eyes full of hate stared up at him.

“Filthy dissident,”
the gunman snarled through the mask.

Buchanan ducked as the gun discharged.
The bullet whizzed past his ear. He raised the coat rack and brought it down hard.
Crack.
The gunman bellowed. Seeing his chance, Buchanan bolted toward the exit, slammed through the door, and humped along the corridor as fast as he could.

Where to go? What to do?

He was halfway to the elevator when another bullet breezed by. He pushed himself harder, grimacing against the pain in his knee. The gunman was gaining, but not by much. He must have done some serious damage with that coat rack.

Behind him, he heard a click
—the trigger again. He flinched when the bullet grazed his shoulder, burning like napalm. Warm blood seeped from the wound. On the wall just ahead there was a red-metal fire alarm. He pulled it down hard as he passed. The alarm, as he’d hoped, began to clang. Overhead, the sprinklers sputtered on.

A few feet
beyond, the fire doors swung out from the walls. He heard the click just as he dove. The bullet missed, but not by much. He hit the carpet, skidded along on his stomach, and squeaked between the closing doors just in time. They slammed behind him with a reverberating boom.

Clambering to his feet,
Buchanan lumbered toward the stairwell. The elevator would go to the recall floor—the lobby, in this case—leaving the assassin with only the fire escape.

Doors opened onto the hall. Curious
, anxious faces peered out.

“Get back inside,” he
bellowed at one and all. “There’s a bloody gunman in the building.”

“Oh my God,” a woman cried. “Should I call
nine-one-one?”

“
Do,” he replied, straining to get the words out.

“Should
I ask for an ambulance?”

“
No,” he said. “The cops. Homicide. And the coroner.”

Nirvana’s
Come as You Are
crashed into Thea Hamilton’s dream, shattering a scene in which she was backstage after a concert, desperately trying to talk Kurt Cobain out of killing himself. She was a huge fan, she was telling him, had even written him a couple of letters over the years—something she’d never done with any other celebrity in her life.

“Did you happen to read any of them?
” She was sure he would remember. She had a way with words. Everybody said so. “As a rule, I’m not all that impressed by fame, you know, but there’s just something about your music that touches me. Touches lots of people, actually. Touches—how do they put it?—‘the soul.’”

She didn’t know if it was her soul, exactly, but
his music definitely touched something deep—in that way that made her throat tight and her eyes all misty.

“
To be able to do that is a gift.” Gazing into his vacant blue eyes, she put a hand on the sleeve of his ratty cardigan. “And, well, if nothing else, isn’t that worth living for?”

The dream was a recurring one. She’d
had it off and on since Cobain was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound back in 1994—only a week after her older brother, a grunge guitarist who, like Cobain, struggled with heroin addiction, died from an overdose. It was ruled an accident, but she’d always suspected it was deliberate. Robby had never been a happy person, even before the drugs. She’d done everything she could think of to be there for him, but nothing helped.

Sometimes,
in the dream, it was Robby instead of Cobain or it would start out being Cobain and somewhere along the way, he would morph into Robby or vice versa. Either way, she only had the dream on the nights she volunteered for the suicide prevention hotline, which were few and far between, given the demands of being an investigative reporter for New York City’s leading daily.

Blinking hard,
Thea rolled toward the end table and flicked on the lamp. Still disoriented, she took a quick inventory of her furnishings: red micro-suede club chair in the corner, the foldout futon she slept on, retro coffee table, jam-packed bookshelves, dusty mini-blinds, and stacks of newspapers, magazines, and books filling every spare inch.

Home sweet home.

Yeah, right.

She squinted toward the
kitchen, straining to make out the microwave’s red digital display. It took a minute before she figured out it was eleven thirty. Wow, had she really slept that late? Then again, she’d been on the phone with that suicidal girl in Queens until nearly two in the morning.

Oddly,
Come as You Are
was still playing, though it sounded tinny and far away. It hit her then like a slap to the forehead: it was the ring-tone on her iPhone. Snatching it off the table, she pressed the device to her ear.

“Yeah?”

“Thea?”

The
woman’s voice did not immediately register. “Yeah?”

“Did I wake you?”

Embarrassed about still being in bed, she plucked a lie out of the air. “Of course not. I was up.”

The
woman chuckled. “Doing what? Sleepwalking?”

Thea
coughed. She’d always been a terrible liar and now she knew the voice. It belonged to Glenda Northam, her editor on the investigative desk. A picture popped into her head of a sharp, no-nonsense Helen Mirren type with wise blue eyes and a blunt silver pageboy.

“What can I say? I was up late
…” Thea’s voice trailed off as umbrage hijacked her excuse. “And so what if I wasn’t? It’s my day off—in case you’ve forgotten.”

“I haven’t forgotten,”
Glenda assured her, “and I’m sorry to bug you, but I thought that, under the circumstances, you’d want to know.”

Thea’s
journalistic instincts surfaced like a piranha scenting blood. “Know what?”

“
There’s been another media-related shooting.”

Thea
sat bolt upright and pinched the ridge between her eyes to clear the residual fog. That made two media-related murders in the past three weeks. The first was Malcolm Connolly, the CEO of Atlas, Inc., a medium-sized British corporation whose flagship was Newswire, an international news agency. Someone gunned him down in a car rental parking lot at Ronald Reagan National Airport. Oddly, nobody could say what he was doing there.

The killer left
a calling card: a Z carved into Connolly’s forehead. In the wake of the murder, Atlas stock plummeted, leaving the company vulnerable to takeover.

“
Who was it this time?”

“That liberal news site,”
Glenda told her. “
The Progressive Voice
.”

Thea
’s heart skipped a beat before lodging in her throat. Was he dead? She swallowed hard, steeling herself. She didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to hear the answer, but she had to know.

“W
as the owner the target? Please tell me he isn’t…?”

She couldn’t bring herself to
finish the sentence, couldn’t bear the thought that Alex Buchanan might be—gulp—gone. Buchanan was a rare breed of journalist (and man)—intelligent, principled, passionate about doing what he believed was right. Back when he worked for
World View
, a top news magazine, he won a well-deserved Pulitzer for a hard-hitting series on the government encroachments on individual freedoms after 9/11. She deeply admired him for doing that particular series. It was a subject that, for lots of reasons, mattered deeply to her.

“
Apparently,” Glenda was saying, “he’s the one who found the bodies.”