Stone Rain Read Free Page B

think you have failed to set a good example.”
    She got up from the table, reached out for my hand, and started leading me to the stairs.
    “What did they used to call Myanmar?” I asked her.
    “Burma,” Sarah replied.
    “I think that’s right,” I said.
    Sarah, not even waiting until we’d reached the second floor, was unbuttoning her blouse as she scaled the stairs.
    “Dangerous,” I said, following her. “You’re the one who’s dangerous.”
     
3
     
    I WAS SETTLING BACK in at my desk at the
Metropolitan
, having just returned from the cafeteria with a coffee, when I caught a whiff of something unpleasant behind me. That could mean only one of two things. Either one of the photogs had just returned from covering a drowning in the sewers, or our top police reporter was in the vicinity.
    Without turning around, I said, “What is it, Dick?” Slowly, I spun my computer chair around to look at him.
    “How did you know it was me?” he asked. Dick Colby is not only the paper’s best crime reporter, he’s also its most odiferous. His fellow staffers are unsure whether it’s that he fails to bathe, or to do his laundry, or possibly a combination of the two. He lives alone. I don’t know whether he’s ever been married, but I couldn’t imagine a wife sending him out into the world this way. He’s a gruff, slightly overweight, prematurely graying creature in his late forties, and I didn’t know whether he was aware that most everyone referred to him, behind his back at any rate, as “Cheese Dick.”
    “Sixth sense,” I said. I’d taken a deep breath before turning around and was slowly exhaling as I spoke. “You want something?”
    “Your notes on the Wickens thing. Phone numbers, stuff like that. I need them.”
    This request so took me by surprise that I breathed in suddenly, then coughed. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I said.
    “I’m taking over the story,” Colby said. Just like that. As Paul might say,
Hold on, Captain Butter-Me-Up
.
    “Oh, you just decided, ‘Hey, I think I’d like that story,’ and thought you’d come over here and I’d hand it to you?”
    Colby offered me a pitying smile. “Shit, you haven’t been told, have you?”
    “Told what?”
    “Maybe you should talk to your wifey,” Colby said. “After you’ve done that, you can give me your notes.”
    The blood was rushing to my head. I wanted to grab Colby by the neck and strangle him, but I also knew that if I got that close to him I might pass out. My stories on the Wickenses, a family of Timothy McVeigh–worshipping crazies whose plan to kill dozens, if not hundreds, of people had blown up in their faces, if you will, had run in the paper over the last couple of days. They had rented a farmhouse on my father’s property, and I’d gotten to know them, in the last week, somewhat more intimately than I could have ever wanted.
    “I don’t believe this,” I said, getting out of my chair and heading straight for Sarah’s glass-walled office.
    She was on the phone as I strode in and stood on the other side of her desk. “What’s this about Colby taking the Wickens story?”
    “Can I call you back?” Sarah said. She hung up the phone. “What?”
    “Cheese Dick says he’s getting the Wickens story. Why the hell would he think he was getting the Wickens story?”
    “Fuck,” Sarah said. “That fucking asshole.”
    “So it’s not true?”
    “Noooo,” Sarah said, stretching out the word and shaking her head slowly in exasperation. “I mean, yes. It’s true.”
    “Are you kidding me?”
    “It wasn’t my decision.”
    “Whose decision was it?”
    Sarah tipped her head northward, in the direction of Bertrand Magnuson’s office.
    “Magnuson pulled me off the Wickens story? I
got
the Wickens story. We played it up huge. It was my story. I’m
part
of that story.”
    “I think that’s why Magnuson’s pulling you off it. Look, everyone knows you did a great job on it. Fantastic story. Award