The Stolen Read Free Page B

New York streets. It didn’t take long to learn that Augusts in New York could be brutal. My first summer in the city, I made the mistake one day of wearing a T-shirt and sweater to the office. Jack told me between my clothes and the Gazette ’s sporadic air-conditioning, I’d lose ten pounds before the day was up. While I doubted the New York summer could get any hotter than my childhood years in Bend, Oregon, when later that night I peeled off my sweater and squeezed out the moisture, I realized East Coast summers were just as brutal as their West Coast counterparts.
    I took another sip of my beer—my third of the night, and third in slightly under an hour—and casually glanced up at the baseball game. Out of the dozen or so patrons, only two or three seemed to care about the outcome. The others were nursing a drink, chatting up the bartender or, like the six people my age playing darts, far too busy reveling in their own bliss.
    I’d gotten to know the bartender, Seamus. Things like that happen when you become a regular. Some nights I had trouble sleeping. This necessitated finding somewhere to go to kill time. Somewhere I could be lost in my own thoughts. That’s how I stumbled upon Finnerty’s. Quiet enough to lose yourself. Loud enough to drown everything out.
    Most nights I was happy to imbibe among young Irish gents and apple-cheeked female bartenders. U2 and Morrissey seemed to emanate from the jukebox on an endless loop. Though I enjoyed the Irish pub, sitting in Finnerty’s made me feel that much closer to the elder drinkers, sitting with bottomless glasses of whiskey, talking to the bartender because he was cheaper than a psychiatrist. All of this, by proxy, made me feel more and more like I was becoming Jack O’Donnell. In many ways being compared to Jack would be a compliment. Just not this one.
    Jack O’Donnell, to put it bluntly, was my idol. He’d worked the city beat for going on forty years, and any conversation about New York journalism was incomplete without mention of the old man. Growing up, I’d gone out of my way to read every story O’Donnell wrote, not an easy task for a kid who lived three thousand miles away from New York. I had our library special-order the Gazette on microfiche. I would take on an extra newspaper route just so I could afford the next O’Donnell book in hardcover when it hit stores. I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, wait for the paperback.
    A few years ago I’d arrived at the New York Gazette a fresh-faced newbie reporter who deigned only to shine O’Donnell’s shoes. He was a journalistic institution, writing some of the most important stories of the past half century. Despite his age, Jack seemed to grow younger with every word he typed. Even though Jack’s first assignment for me led to disaster—namely me being accused of murder—he was the first person at the newspaper to give me an honest shot at showing what I was worth. Both Jack and Wallace Langston, the Gazette ’s editor-in-chief, had taken me under their wings, given me stories that I grabbed on to tenaciously and reported the hell out of. Without Jack I probably wouldn’t have come to New York. Because of him I found my calling.
    Like any idol, though, once you got closer you could see that some of the gold paint covered a chipped bronze interior. For all his brilliance with a pen, Jack’s personal life was a disaster. Several times married and divorced. On the highway to alcoholism while seeming to hit every speed bump at sixty miles an hour. Yet, despite Jack’s faults, he was the tent pole to which I aspired to in this business. As long as I could stop there.
    Nights like tonight, I was content to sit on the aged bar stool and ignore everything. It was easier that way.
    Then I felt a cold splash on my back, whipped around to see a tall, lithe redhead standing over my shoulder, her hand over her mouth as if she’d just seen a bad car accident.
    “Oh, my gosh!” she said, grabbing a pile of