You might call this the missing link. And who knows…you might even be onto something.

[The Police \\ Murder By Numbers]

First You Make a Stone of Your Heart

1.1

There is a rhythm to life, and to death, and yet we remain unprepared for that final reality, that the beating heart we know will never understand the infinite. But somehow, through the sharp lens of time, we have grown accustomed to the idea of that singular, defining moment. Some have accommodated their own gnawing fear through the practice of rituals that are at once very personal yet of origins beyond the arcane, while others have grown content with whatever fate or destiny or even random chance has in store. Along the way we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that about all we can hope for is a long life unfettered by pain, that we can all somehow dance in our parents’ shadows, and that, with luck, our children might dance in shadows all our own. Still, it seems that of all the creatures in this world, only humans have embraced an overarching sense of goodness as a guide to our actions, and conversely, most have repudiated evil in all its many guises. This repudiation, at times, defines the contours of this dance. As it defines our shadows.

Yet we take it for granted that for goodness to exist there simply has to be a countervailing force, this thing we call evil. Yet, indeed, is it possible that neither goodness nor evil ever truly exists outside of the human mind? But, what of this mind? Was it not this same soaring intellect, the same voice that proudly proclaimed that good and evil are the defining limits of our existence? And were these not the constructs of more primitive minds? Remnants, perhaps, of an age when humans above all else feared the night. When everything was a shadow, and we danced in fear?

But what of the voice of reason? The vox clamantis in deserto? Why do some heed this voice while others turn away and run headlong into the night, consumed by fear?

Could it be, possibly, that these proud minds are the most evil thing of all? Or could it be that the light of reason will, in the end, be our salvation?

Oh, Diogenes! Open your eyes!

1.2

She sat at the battered old Steinway, drifting along unseen currents as amber candlelight washed over the dark oaken walls of the old room. Drifting through a melange of Debussy and Gershwin, she was afloat among notes and passages that had spoken to her all her life, yet she was weaving subtle emotions with the subtle passages she chose, intonations at once as obscure as they were arcane. No one noticed. Not one head turned, and yet it seemed she had been waiting all her life for that one reaction.

She was playing in an alcove in the Grill Room, a hallowed enclave within the St. Francis Yacht Club’s main floor, and if she had bothered to look she might have seen the city lights winking on across the far reaches of San Francisco Bay. As it was, she sat erect with her eyes closed, swaying to the tapestry she wove as kelp might on a slackening tide. Her father was a member here and on Saturdays she liked to come and sit by the fireplace, and no one seemed to mind when she played the old piano in the corner. Indeed, most of the people there seemed to consciously ignore her – most of the time.

‘She’s not well, you know…’ one hushed note might imply.

‘Oh?’ a soft, contrapuntal note could be heard in reply.

‘Yes. Schizophrenia, or so I hear…’

But those knowing voices mattered not at all to her, not anymore, not after so many years of their knowing, sidelong glances. Theirs were eyes that could not see, and they spoke in hushed, shallow voices that knew only half-truths – and yet she loved most of those voices. She knew them, had known them all her life, and she had sailed with them all too many times to remember.

Her father came up after the sun settled into darkness, and he leaned into the old Steinway just as he always did before he spoke of leaving.

“I’m heading home now, Dev. You want to stay a while longer?”

She swayed to the left just a bit as she settled into Gershwin’s Love Walked In, but then she shrugged – playfully – before she finally relented with a nod and a quiet smile.

“Okay. Try not to stay out too late.”

She looked after her father as he walked out into the night, then she returned to her thoughts…and to the currents she danced on.

“Miss Devlin, we closin’ now…”

She opened her eyes, noticed the bartender leaning over to gently roust her and she nodded. “Is it midnight already?” she asked.

“Yes, Miss Devlin. You want I should go and get your coat?”

“Thanks, Ernie. Would you mind?”

“Not a bit, Ma’am. You just wait right here.”

She looked around the room, noted embers dying in the fireplace and that a dense fog had settled over the bay, then she noticed a tall stranger sitting in a corner opposite the piano, and that the man was nursing the remnants of a brandy. She thought the sight a little odd, too, if only because she knew every member of the club – and had for years. Her house, or her father’s house, was only a few hundred yards distant, not even a block inland on Baker Street, so it felt to her as if she’d spent her entire life within these walls. And in a way she had.

She looked at the stranger again and felt a sudden wave of unease wash over her, then as she watched he turned and looked her in the eye before he stood and made his way to the main entry foyer and, presumably, out to his car. Ernie the bartender returned with her coat, a heavy old US Navy pea-coat, and after the old man helped her into the jacket he walked with her to the foyer.

“You best turn up that collar, Miss Devlin. It feels right cold out there tonight.”

She saw the shadow run up one wall and then watched it turn and slide along the ceiling and then out into the night and she wanted to turn and run but she didn’t want to make another scene, didn’t want Ernie to have to call her father to come pick her up again, so she turned up her collar and followed the inky shadow out into the night. She walked through the sentinel rows of eucalyptus down to the dinghy docks, knowing that the shadows were out there somewhere just ahead, out there just waiting for her – then she saw the man, the tall stranger from the Grill Room – and he was walking away from her along the beach trail by the Green. She stood near a covey of Etchells 22s, watched the man as he walked up to the crosswalk at Marina Boulevard – but then he simply disappeared, just like all the other shadows gathering in the clinging fog.

She stood in the stillness for a moment, and she had walked all the way to the Green when she realized the tide was in – and that the black water was close to the mute stones that lined the trail here – so she stopped by an ancient streetlight and stood in the safety of the pooling light, until she realized the fog was growing colder and was now – quite suddenly – impossibly thick.

She stepped back into the fog and made her way quietly along the trail towards home – but she stopped dead in her tracks when she heard a violent commotion in the water off to her left, and when she turned to look she saw an inky black creature oozing silently out of the water and slithering up the stone steps towards her. At first she thought it must be a large harbor seal but then the quivering creature stood on human-like legs and turned to face her and she didn’t know what else to do but scream.

+++++

Kirk Dooley was the first responding officer on the scene and he took one look at the blood-soaked woman and called dispatch: “6-12, will need a Watch Commander and Homicide at my location, and I think we’re going to need the divers…”

Dooley gathered the half-dozen or so witnesses, as well as the woman’s father, in the yacht club’s parking lot, and as other responding units arrived ‘Crime Scene’ tape was strung out to cordon off the area. Paul Weyland gathered up his daughter and held onto her as she stared off into the night, and Dooley tried to figure out who had seen what and when, scribbling down notes as fast as he could…

Then a large blue step-van pulled into the lot, and two men got out and began suiting up in dive gear, then hauling all their assorted gear down to the water’s edge.

Then a baby-shit-green Plymouth Interceptor pulled into the lot and Dooley recognized Frank DiGiorgio, one of the detectives, get out from behind the wheel, but he wasn’t sure he recognized the other detective, even after he finally got out of the Plymouth and started walking over. But it didn’t matter; DiGiorgio would be in charge and he was a real straight shooter, an old-school, no-nonsense cop who could get things done, and besides all that he was clean – and Dooley knew you couldn’t say that about too many of the cops working out of Central these days.

Then a flash of memory came to Dooley. The other Dick was one of the new guys that had just been promoted. They’d worked The Tenderloin together a few years back, too. Callahan, wasn’t it?

“Hey, Kirk,” Callahan said as he walked up, “how’s it hangin’?”

“Good, Harry. You?”

“Can’t complain. Look, I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but – where’s the body?”

Dooley nodded towards the water. “That’s the thing, Harry. There ain’t one. Yet…”

DiGiorgio walked over when he heard that. “Then what are we doin’ out here at two in the a-m, numb-nuts?”

So Kirk switched on his Kel-Lite and shined the beam on a woman’s legs, and when DiGiorgio saw they were covered in blood he walked over to her, then he looked at the stones on the trail before he turned to look at the woman again.

But one look was all it took. DiGiorgio knew those faraway eyes; he’d seen them too many times to not know exactly what they meant. Kids coming back from ‘Nam these days called it the ‘Thousand Yard Stare’ – which was where the mind took refuge when reality became a little too real to deal with. But then Callahan stepped up and looked into the woman’s eyes – he saw tremors cross her field of view – so he leaned closer still – until she could see nothing beyond the contours of his face.

“What did you see?” Callahan whispered gently. “Tell me. They’re gone and they can’t hurt you now.”

“You can’t possibly know that,” she whispered in kind.

“I won’t let anyone hurt you,” he added, taking her hands in his.

She looked down, looked at his fingers and she recognized the fingers of a kindred spirit. “Debussy?” she sighed – as unseen currents passed between them.

“Gershwin.”

“Even better.” Was he the one, she wondered?

“Trust me. Tell me what happened.”

“It came out of the water.”

“What came out? Can you describe it for me?”

“Black. Slimy. At first I thought it…but then it stood and he was huge.”

“He? The man you saw…”

“He wasn’t a man.”

“But you said ‘he,’ didn’t you? And he was black and slimy? You mean like you saw a man covered in oil?”

She trembled as another memory rattled through her bones. “Skin…black…not oil…shiny, like a snake, only the eyes were different…amber, and big – like an owl’s eyes.”

An old black man walked up, and he nodded as he approached. “I seen it too, Mister. She ain’t lyin’ none.”

“You were…you saw this thing too?” DiGiorgio scoffed.

“Yessir. I was the second person out there, ran out from the parking lot behind Jimmy, and that thing took him and dragged him out into the water.”

“What?” Callahan said. “Are you saying this thing took someone out into the bay?”

“Yessir, right over there, where all that blood and stuff is.”

Which was, Callahan could now see, right about where the two rescue divers had entered the water.

And beyond the water, standing on the sidewalk above the yacht harbor, the tall stranger watched as the creature turned towards the divers, at this new presence in the water, and as the creature swam to face the new threat the tall stranger turned and walked away.

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | fiction, every word

[The Police \\ Tea in the Sahara]

This is one of those stories I can’t stop tinkering with, so I’m not sure it will ever really be ‘finished’ – but this is as far as I’m going to take it, for the time being, anyway. It seems like everyday over here another state is criminalizing abortion and imposing new restrictions, and I read another news item yesterday about a mother helping her teenage daughter find a physician willing to do the procedure – and now they’re both in jail. When I was a spud, the procedure was illegal and I remember the codeword back then sounded something like “Oh, yeah, I sent my daughter over to Stockholm for a nose job,” which was what the wealthy did back in the day until Roe v Wade (1973) changed the law nationwide. Fathers, and I feel certain that most were country club Republicans, sent their pregnant daughters to Sweden to have the procedure done. Of course, that option was simply unaffordable for most Americans (as is the case again today), which was why so many young women ended up dead after a botched back-alley abortion. I’ve seen the results of a couple of these, and it’s not something you can easily forget.

Yet, oddly enough, I’ve included one other experience of the procedure in a couple of stories I’ve written, including the 88th Key. A good friend in college got his girlfriend pregnant and asked if I would take her to a ‘doctors appointment’ – as he was ‘tied up in class’ and couldn’t take her. I was never told the appointment was for an abortion, I simply drove the girl from Palo Alto up to the City and probably read every issue of Road & Track magazine they had in the waiting room over the next couple of hours, and though I still didn’t know why she had gone to the appointment I soon understood what was going on inside the clinic.

But I was the one there with her after the procedure was finished, and I was the one on hand to pick up the pieces in the aftermath. I had no idea what deep emotional devastation looked like before that afternoon, and had never had to help someone in such a fragile state before. I do recall that the girl involved was irreparably damaged by the experience, that the termination of a human life weighed heavily on her for years. And I had never felt so utterly helpless.

Personally, I’ve always found the idea of abortion problematic at best, yet I’ve never felt anyone has any right whatsoever to tell another human being how to handle a situation like this, hence almost by default I’ve fallen into the pro-choice camp. I would assume that if history is indeed any guide at all we’ll soon find more young women in back alleys, killed by unskilled abortionists who lack the training or even the proper facilities and equipment to adequately perform the procedure, yet should the young women survive the experience, can you imagine EMS arriving at the scene and then having to call the police to come and take these devastated human beings to jail?

I simply can’t see the need for these laws, yet it’s already happening. For the life of me, these laws and policies seem grounded more in hate than in Christian love, and yet I simply can’t understand where all this hate is coming from. The awful conclusion, the one that really opens your eyes, is to finally understand that the hate has always been out there lurking in the shadows, and that this foul emotion is not really new at all, and that would certainly seem to mean that such willful hatred isn’t going anywhere. If that’s truly the case, then I’m afraid we are all in for a very rough ride. And the consequences may be far darker than we could have ever imagined.

[Kris Kristofferson \\ Me and Bobby McGee]

Between the Lines

 1.

Like most reporters on the little regional jet that afternoon, Peter Lawton had departed Ukraine by rail and then hopped on a LOT Polish Airlines Dreamliner in Rzeszów; the big Boeing was packed to the rafters with reporters and aid workers heading to London Heathrow, but even so most of the professionals leaving the region weren’t as angry as he was just then. He was tired and hadn’t eaten in days, and as he watched the Jetway retract and felt ground equipment pushing the aircraft back from the glossy new terminal building, he tried to listen to the safety announcement. Yet he was distracted and, frankly, still too mad at the world to listen to anyone at the moment.

And even up front he felt he barely had enough legroom, but at least he’d be able to grab a nap.

“Peter, right?” he heard someone say, so he turned to look at the woman in 3B.

“Yes? Have we met?” Lawton asked – though more than a little duplicitously, as he remembered the woman. 

But she smiled at his diversion, for the woman knew damn well Lawton knew exactly who she was. She’d been about half his age when they met, in her mid-thirties, and she remembered meeting him a few years after that first time. “Angela Eastman, BBC,” she said. “We met in Libya a few years ago, after all that Benghazi stuff.”

He shrugged. “Sorry,” he managed to say, “I guess I’m drawing a blank.”

“Nice to know I make such lasting impressions,” she said, smiling noncommittally at his deceit. “Too bad about your network. Did you get the axe as well?”

He shrugged. “Nothing official yet, but that seems to be the consensus of opinion right now.” After the election, everyone and anything with even the slightest patina of liberalism had been shown the door, so after almost forty years as a reporter and prime-time anchor his career seemed to be at a sudden and very public end.

“We just got word about fifteen minutes ago,” she added. “The United States has officially pulled out of NATO.”

And again he shrugged away her concerns. “I hardly think that comes as a surprise right now.”

“No, I suppose not,” Eastman said. “Still, it comes as a shock to those of us in the UK – not to mention the EU, who’ve always thought the alliance was like bedrock.”

“Why’s that? The Russians have been paying off our politicians for decades. The bill came due, that’s all. So what if someone in the Kremlin decided it was time to collect on all their outstanding balances.”

“Oh, come off it! Do you think it was really as simple as that?”

“Who knows, but Angela, really, who the fuck cares anymore.”

“But it seems so outlandish! Where’s all your American moral outrage?”

“Outrage? Really? You’re going to fall back on that line? Where were you when Turkey sided with the Russians, or where were you when Italy elected a fascist PM, and where was all your moral outrage when the Hungarians kept ‘reelecting’ the same ole fascist dictator? And now, with Macron on the ropes and French fascists on the move, France is as good as out of Nato one more time, and heaven knows Germany has been looking for an excuse to bail out. So, with the alliance in tatters and with most western economies hovering somewhere between recession and outright depression, all the Russians had to do was wait us out and then call in their markers, then wait for the politicians they’d purchased to retake power. Now the only real question is what will Germany and the UK do. Turn on their printing presses and try to build up their armed forces and hold the rest of the alliance together, or sit back and wait for the inevitable collapse of the EU and the rise of the Second Soviet Union. But really, like everyone else in a position of power, that imbecile in Number 10 waited too long to respond to Putin. But I guess in the end everyone in Europe never truly accepted the fact that the America of your dreams had fallen into the clutches of a cult grounded in wishful denialism, and so it collapsed under the weight of too many delusions, not to mention internal inconsistencies.”

“The America of our dreams?”

“Yes, of course. ‘Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,’ versus a nation fractured and splintered by disinformation, with a government polarized by information warfare and falling into political incoherence through planned irrelevance. But hey, we were just like you guys in 1939: too many disparate groups unwilling to compromise, just knowing that somehow it would all work out in the end. Only thing is that too many people were willing to drink the Kool-Aid, and I guess too few able-minded people were ready to lead.”

“It’s happening at home again right now , you know?” she sighed as she thought about the most recent collapse of the Tories.

“Of course it is. And why shouldn’t it? Humanity has never been more united than it is right now, in this moment. We are united by our Hate of The Other, and so, at last, the Second Coming is upon us.”

“Funny. I never took you for a Christian Nationalist.”

He laughed at that, then leaned back and closed his eyes with a sigh: “That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

“Oh yes. Sorry.”

“Sorry? Why should you be sorry? I think Yeats was declaring humanity is a doomed species, doomed by our collective narcissism, by our inability to see beyond the moment.”

“Indeed. To what, exactly, are you referring now?”

“We jump to conclusions. Or how did he put it? ‘The best lack all conviction.’”

“Perhaps you should stop speaking in metaphors and try plain English.”

And that made him laugh out loud again – just as their Dreamliner turned onto the runway and began yet another journey to one more lost cause, still seething that he had been pulled out of Crimea just as victory appeared to finally be at hand. He looked at the passing landscape below and wondered when the next war would consume the people lingering helplessly in those same lengthening shadows. With America out of Nato, they wouldn’t have to wait long.

“What’s the point,” he finally said to her, reaching up to turn off his overhead light.

She looked down at his hands, noted they were trembling and she too looked away.

+++++

He rode into the city on the Paddington Express and walked down to the Hilton, Angela Eastman still by his side, still talking up a nonstop storm. She wanted to know more about the White Nationalist Party currently joining forces with the last remnants of the original Republican Party, consolidating their hold on Congress now that Their Man was back in the White House.

Lawton had been doing his best to talk politely with the woman but now he felt like he’d been ambushed, and that he had somehow become her story. Here was the old school liberal journalist being summoned back to headquarters, his immediate future to be run out of town on a rail, and frankly he wanted nothing to do with the pouting lips of her hyper-manipulative bush league ambush journalism. He walked up to the reception desk and checked in, and the man behind the counter handed him a large manilla envelope that had, apparently, just been hand-delivered from the local bureau.

He opened the envelope right then and there – then shook his head as the irony of his current situation came home to roost.

“What is it?” Eastman sighed. “Bad news?”

“I guess that depends on your point of view,” Lawton replied. “A new assignment, in Jackson, Mississippi.”

“Not exactly a hotbed of international importance, I suppose.”

Lawton looked at her, at this ‘reporter’ – and he wondered why some people got into the business. This one was certainly attractive enough, well – actually, she was rather good looking, yet it wasn’t a stretch to assume she’d gotten into the business to accrue an audience – and to therefore gain a political following. That had become the new paradigm, after all. The Coalition was top heavy with former reporters who’d cut their teeth working for right wing media, and he had to admit it made a lot of sense. Who else was in a better position to understand how easy it was to manipulate public opinion than the people who did so for a living – everyday? From there, you hitched your wagon to a Party stalwart and went along for the ride, collecting your bribes while you paid your dues, your final reward working for a think-tank or doing hard time as a K Street lobbyist.

“Well,” he said, stifling a yawn, “I guess I’m off to Dulles in the morning. I’d better get some sleep, so I guess this is goodbye.”

“I don’t mean to be forward, Peter, but I know a great spot for curry a few blocks from here, and my place is nearby…”

“And I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very good company tonight,” he said as another yawn came for him. “Perhaps another time?”

She nodded uneasily, yet almost duplicitously. “Yes. Perhaps.”

He turned and made his way to the lift and rode up to the third floor in blissful silence, but after a discrete interval he put on his sport coat and made his way back down to the taxi stand. The sun was finally down and despite all the rabid uncertainty in the air, life in London seemed almost normal; it was certainly a far cry from the Russian savagery he’d witnessed in Crimea just the night before.

After a few minutes in the taxi he walked into The Grill at The Savoy and ordered his old favorites – starting off with lump crabmeat en coquille, then a Dover sole amandine with fresh asparagus Hollandaise – while he waited for an old friend from the network, and the inevitable reckoning that had to come. While he waited an aging rock star he’d interviewed more than once stopped by for a chat, but other than that he simply let all the tension and anxiety he’d experienced over the last two months fall away to other memories of better times.

“Well, better late than never,” Sara Beckman said as she sat down beside Lawton, after she’d bestowed a lingering kiss on his forehead. “Peter, you’ll excuse me for saying so, but you look simply dreadful. Have you slept at all recently?”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember. Matter of fact, I don’t recall eating anything for the last two or three days, so I hope you don’t mind but I’ve already ordered.”

“The sole, of course?”

“Yes. And one for you as well. Hope you don’t mind.”

“You look as though you’ve lost two stone. Was it as bad as it looked?”

“It was medieval, Sara. I saw hand to hand fighting in the streets and trenches – under torchlight. Sickening stuff, really, all the ways we’ve come up with to kill our fellow man. Expeditiously, I think, is the word that most comes to mind. No feeling anymore – no humanity. One minute it’s drone warfare and the next you see men going after one another with bayonets and machetes, and there’s simply no time to take it all in.”

“Your segment yesterday hit hard; there was a lot of talk about it today.”

“And obviously it did no good at all. We’re out of Nato now, I hear?”

“Yes. Did you get the envelope at the reception desk?”

Lawton nodded, but he didn’t have much to say. Yet.

“You need to be careful over there, Peter. Things are moving quite fast now, and civil order is falling apart as militias take over. You know that, right?”

He shrugged. “What are they going to do? Kill me?”

“I wouldn’t be too surprised. You really pissed off the man, or so we’re hearing?”

“I tried to. It’s not all that difficult, you know?”

“Well, the word is you really got under his skin this time.”

“So, I’ll go out in a blaze of glory? Is that what you’re thinking?”

“Don’t go, Peter, don’t take the assignment. Stay here. Stay with me. We can still make a nice life together, and you’d have no trouble getting on with one of the networks here.”

“I have a job to do. Something I started a long time ago; something I need to finish.”

“You can’t you do it from here?”

“And what if I did? They’d come for me here if that’s what they decide to do. There really is no place to hide.”

“Not that you would.”

He shrugged. “No, but you’ve always known that about me.”

“Hard headed. Not to mention pig headed and confrontational. Yes, I do know. So, what are you going to do?”

“My job.”

Their dinners came and they ate in silence, yet she hardly took her eyes off him. 

“Some things never change, you know?” he said when he had finished. “This place is the one constant in a constantly changing universe.”

“It is, yes.”

“So, why have you been staring at me?”

“I think I wanted to memorize your face, Peter, because once you leave I know I’ll never see you again.”

“Indeed. That doesn’t sound like you, Sara.”

“You loved me once, didn’t you? Enough to stay, I mean?”

“I still love you, Sara.”

“Just not enough to stay?”

“Odd way of putting it, don’t you think? You either love someone or you don’t. Love isn’t a matter of degrees – or have I had it wrong all this time…?”

“So, why won’t you stay? Really, that’s all I wanted to ask you?”

He looked at her and sighed. “Look, kiddo. It’s because, well, I’m not sure I know how to say this, but I feel like there’s one more war I have to cover, and I want to be there when it starts.”

“You…what? When it starts?”

He took her hand, felt her skin and the fine bones of her fingers, the warmth that still seemed so familiar, then he looked into her eyes. “I was thinking about Yeats earlier today and, well, the battle lines have been drawn, you know. Everything seems to be racing towards this one point in time…”

“What point?”

“A flash point, I think. Something horrible is going to happen over there. I know it.”

“And you think you’ll find all this in Mississippi?”

He nodded as he leaned back in his chair. “Hate comes so easily to some people, Sara. And yet some people just follow along with the crowd, not sure what’s happening but caught up in events. But… haven’t you ever thought it odd that in our business we always seem to be chasing hate?”

“You aren’t going to answer me, are you?” She looked away, perhaps because she knew her war was already over, that he’d surrendered to the inevitable a long time ago. “So, that’s it, Peter? Game over?”

“I am what I am, Sara. I go…”

“What? That you go where hate takes you? Are you really telling me that’s all there was to us?”

He closed his eyes and took her in, especially the sound of her voice. “I think I know the bones of your hands better than I know my own. That isn’t hate, Sara. That’s love. Don’t forget that about me, okay?”

“If you love someone set them free? Is that what you and Gordon were talking about before I arrived?”

“You little spy!”

“Always. Just like you.”

“We were talking about Ukraine.”

She nodded, but then she pulled her hand slowly from his and he watched the movement carefully. Was this another tactical retreat, or her final surrender?

Yet she smiled. A little. “Do you remember the beach? And that funny little house?”

“Of course,” he sighed. “Do you?”

She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “You remember everything, don’t you? Every little thing, I mean?”

“That wasn’t such a little thing, Sara.”

‘That’ was the night he’d found her in the shower, passed out and dying after swallowing a bottle of pills. After she’d taken a penknife and carved ‘Love me’ into the soft skin of her belly.

“You’ve never forgiven me for that, have you?” she whispered.

“I’ve never stopped loving you, if that makes any difference.”

And then he’d watched as she quietly stood and walked away – and he knew then that their war was finally at an end. She’d ended the thing on her terms, which he assumed was what she needed from him now, and why she’d asked him to come here tonight.

 And after a quick glass of port he’d made his way back to the Hilton on the Underground, as always listening to what was on peoples’ minds. Russia, it turned out, was the number one topic of conversation that night, and what the new leadership in the Kremlin would do now that their allies were once again in the White House and the American Congress. Even the few Americans he overheard seemed to still be in a state of shock, and more than one said there was no point returning to home anytime soon.

Which was predictable enough, Lawton thought. Home is where your heart is, he thought, still hearing Sara in his mind’s eye.

By the time he made it back to his room he was too wired to sleep so he pulled out his laptop and began writing up his observations of the evening. This was his oldest habit, and part of a routine that had kept him in top form for decades. He listened everywhere he went, but then he took the time to synthesize these ramblings in search of coherent patterns – because sometimes random mumblings became the story real – and these notes also helped him gain the perspective he needed when he interviewed people ‘on the air.’

Yet tonight something felt ‘off’ – and eerily so. First came Sara’s contrite withdrawal, then there’d been the defeated mood on the Tube. And for hours he’d felt like the norms that had guided American foreign and domestic policy for decades had finally gone off the rails, and yet the most worrisome part of this change was that it ‘appeared’ to be the Will of the People, but after all the histrionics of the past four years Lawton still had a hard time swallowing that idea. Populist movements like the one now found in America weren’t spontaneous eruptions of popular sentiment; no, they had been engineered over decades by people with opaque agendas, people willing to use the core tenets of an open society to destroy the foundations of that society. And authoritarian propaganda wasn’t exactly rocket science, was it? Both the means and the ends were taught in every political science class these days, and that had been the case because, it had been hoped, that by shining the light of reason onto such techniques it would be all the more difficult for the current dictator du jour to pull it off again.

But for that to hold true it would have been necessary for the politicians of the so-called Ruling Classes to play by the old, established rules of the game, and that had proven America’s undoing. Republicans had, by and large, supported the idea of impeaching Richard Nixon in late July 1974, but by 2020 all sense of checks and balances had been discarded by the GOP, and the only thing left now was partisan jockeying for power in the service of a working majority. And Justice didn’t mean a thing anymore, especially in the courts – because under the Coalition, the only valid verdicts would soon be issued under the auspices of Public Opinion, the very same opinion so easily manipulated by their wizards behind their green curtains. There was a certain, peculiar logic to the entire sequence of the manipulation that Lawton almost admired. It had certainly worked.

Because to that foul end media empires had long sold distorted views of government, at first to gain ratings. But then political insiders worked to undermine the very rules of basic governance by making government completely unresponsive to the needs of the people, and when government failed to deliver on these promises the very same insiders blamed government for failing the people. In a sense, the insiders had created a circular firing squad, because as this media circus further distorted and amplified the failures of government they also encouraged outrage directed at the old school insiders still working to make government deliver on it’s promises. But what made Lawton laugh loudest was the realization that none of it made sense until you realized the entire scheme was a political hit job orchestrated by none other than the Kremlin and their allies in America media, in other words, by the politicians and oligarchs that would most benefit by a rewriting of the old rules.

But when Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists formed an alliance with the main evangelical Christian political movement within the Republican Party, a new, much more powerful dynamic had been created through the new Faith and Freedom Coalition, which had proven to be not so easily managed as the Undermining Insiders had hoped, as liberals and other progressives were now called. Of course the original Coalition had splintered into more violent cadres, and members of these new splinter groups were much more likely to employ outright violence to achieve their goals, so when it appeared that Republicans might win the election, talk of a Second Civil War had suddenly taken on a new urgency. ‘But how could there even be a civil war,’ the old Undermining Insiders cried, ‘when both sides are evenly distributed throughout the country?’ 

Lawton wasn’t alone in realizing that the model for that type of civil war had played out in South Vietnam, when neighbors started killing neighbors and when no one was safe. Putting up a yard sign stating your political preferences had by last November become an act of defiance in many parts of the country, and in some states it was an act that could get you gunned down in your front yard.

So when Lawton reflected on the conversations of Americans he’d overheard on the Underground he understood the fear these people were worried about. It was, he had to admit, not all that different from the anger and frustration he’d overheard in Kyiv and Odesa, or even in Afghanistan during the last days of the American occupation. When the unifying fabric of a society began to fray around the edges it wasn’t long before the whole enterprise began to fall apart.

Lawton finally gave up on the idea of sleep and took a long shower, then he repacked his suitcase and made sure his phone and camera were fully charged before checking out of the hotel. Once on the Paddington Express he sat in silence, hardly noticing that the carriage was stone-cold empty. But when he made his way up the escalators to the check-in concourse at Heathrow’s T5 he found that the entire building looked, and felt, deserted. He walked over to the BA Business Class check-in counter and once again noted that no one else was waiting in line, and to him that was a very bad sign indeed.

“What’s going on?” he asked as he walked up to the lone agent behind the counter.

“Very few people flying to the States right now,” the girl said with a shrug. “I guess because everything still feels so unsettled over there.”

“How long has it been like this?”

“Since the election, early November I think.”

He nodded, then decided to change the subject. “What’s the equipment today?”

“Oh, I see they’ve changed it back to an A-321 again, so another narrow body today. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Oh? So no more wide bodies? No A380s or 747s?”

“Oh, no, not in weeks. I think there were only five or six passengers on yesterday’s outbound flight. Not sure about this morning, but a few of the flights coming in from the States are still almost full.”

“How long has that been going on?”

“Since the elections,” she repeated, exasperated by this dullard’s insipid questions. 

“Are any outbound flights full?”

“Malaga is running full this week, and so are flights to Athens and Barcelona, where the cruise ships embark, but no one is sure how long those will last. Some flights to South Africa and Argentina are running quite full.”

“Why are people so uneasy here? Are you hearing anything?”

“Mainly Russia and, well, you know, the political instability both there and in the States. A lot of people think the war will spill out into the Baltics any day now.”

“What would you do if war broke out?”

The girl, and she couldn’t have been more than 25-years-old, seemed unsure what she could, or should say, and then he realized she was acting as if she was under surveillance. He wasn’t surprised when she finally just shook her head: “I’m not really sure, Mr Lawton. So, just one bag to check this morning, or will you be carrying that with you onboard?”

He took the hint and moved on to security, then he wound his way through the maze of duty-free shops and found that BAs lounges were ‘Closed for Renovations’ and that there wasn’t a single restaurant open, either. Of course there were at least two Starbucks up and running, so he settled for an iced coffee and a stale pastry, then about halfway through his coffee he remembered he’d wanted to sleep on the flight.

“Well balls! So much for that,” he said to the four walls. Finishing up with his snack he took out his Leica Q3 and walked around the terminal taking pictures of the overwhelming emptiness, and then he walked over and shot a few pictures of the barren ramps, noting that several airliners had hard plastic covers over their engine inlets; he remembered that was only done when an airliner wouldn’t be flown for several days – or even weeks – and that, he knew, said it all.

When his flight was called he found he was the lone passenger lining up when Business Class was called, though he noted a few college kids boarded when coach was called, and those subdued kids walked to the very rear of the aircraft without so much as a word said between them. No one had checked his ticket at the boarding door, either, so he settled in and had just started taking pictures out the window when he felt someone sit down in the seat next to his. His first reaction was to feel aggravated at having to share a row with anyone on an otherwise empty flight, but when he turned to see who had the temerity to sit next to him he just groaned and rolled his eyes.

“Well, fancy meeting you here,” the BBCs Angela Eastman said brightly – with a Pepsodent smile that was totally inappropriate for this time of day.

He stared at the woman but said not a word.

“I hear the weather in Mississippi is perfectly dreadful this time of year,” she added with a polite smile. “Of course, I had no idea what to pack.”

Again, he simply stared at her – wishing she would vanish or, failing that, simply just go away, like any other bad dream.

“What? No pithy denials? Not up for some more idle chit-chat?” she said, her lips puckering into an infantile pout that still somehow managed to look perfectly cute on her professionally made-up face.

And maybe it was her face that finally got to him. He smiled – a little – but then stood and went to the forward WC to wash the beading sweat from his forehead, and he stared at his reflection in the mirror for a while as he tried to come to terms with the same two emotions that had controlled his life right up to the end of his last marriage – which had been his third. He always felt unbridled lust when he looked at a face like Eastman’s, yet that lust had always been tempered by unreconciled self-loathing which, not surprisingly, grew out of his inability to control his lust. And so he’d proceeded through life guided by his hyperactive penis, chasing after every good looking woman he laid eyes on, and often despite the inherent dangers such pursuits entailed. ‘Hell,’ he’d thought more than once, ‘maybe it was because of the danger.’ Like fucking the head of the network’s wife at the annual Christmas party – three years in a row. She was arm candy and always came on to him, so who the hell was he to say no?

Because when he was in his twenties he’d figured out that to a certain kind of woman he was like catnip, and yet he provoked outrageous, often outright flirtatious behavior from married women, and more often than not women who were married to some of the most powerful men in network television. He was, after all, Peter Lawton, and he’d been reading the six o’clock news five nights a week to half the households in the country, and his broadcasts had been number one with married women in the powerful 24-45 demographic. The age group that the networks fought over year after year. And men detested him, too – and for just that reason.

He’d married his college sweetheart right after graduation, but after their second child she’d grown angry and depressed and he’d started hunting off the reservation soon after one of her depressive bouts. That marriage soon ended in divorce number one. Two marriages to actresses followed, each lasting a year or so, but after the last one he’d given up on the idea of marriage and had simply decided to have fun with women – until that approach had proven legally problematic. After that revelation it was like he kept his penis on a leash and didn’t dare let it run free for fear of a million unanticipated consequences. Until he’d been assigned to London and met Sara.

Smart, sexy, provocative – and full of despair – that was Sara. How hard had she worked to conceal her depression? Yet he had loved her even so. But that love had run up against his earlier self and all those other unanticipated consequences. He was, he kept telling himself, old enough to know better, but he’d fallen for her. Until that trip to the Bahamas, when he’d found her bleeding and overdosed in the shower, with knife in hand. Love Me, indeed.

And now here was Angela Eastman, and she represented nothing more or less than a roomful of unanticipated consequences. Probably a bedroom, too, knowing that look in her eyes.

When he went back to his seat he found she’d moved across the aisle – and now she was banging away on a MacBook, sending messages at a furious clip and she didn’t even look up when he took his seat again. The aircraft doors shut a few moments later, then the Jetway retracted and the Airbus was pushed back from the terminal. The lone flight attendant came by as the jet taxied out to the runway and said she’d serve them breakfast once they reached their cruising altitude, and that she had sandwiches for a pre-landing snack – but that was the last he saw of her. They took off to the east and he looked down through low scudding clouds at Parliament and Big Ben, and then the little jet turned south, then west, and as they began chasing the sun across the Atlantic Lawton dropped the window shades and reclined his seat, almost immediately dropping off into a deep, dreamless sleep…

2.

After the empty concourses he’d seen at London’s Heathrow, Washington Dulles seemed almost normal, yet Lawton thought the degree of normalcy on display was in itself perversely remarkable. Europe was a schizoid shambles, with Eastern Europe caught up in pre-war jitters while Western Europe flitted about in abysmally irrational denial, but there was not even the slightest hint that anyone walking around Dulles was concerned about anything happening in Europe – or anywhere else, for that matter. The usual suspects were, as usual, queuing up at Cinnabon and ready to graze through the various burger franchises, but of course the first Starbucks he saw had a line out the door. Lawton ignored them all and stopped at a news stand and picked up copies of the Washington Post and New York Times to read on his final two legs to Jackson, Mississippi, for he would, of course, have to change planes in Atlanta, and as he always did when he returned home, he sighed at the nonsensical waste of time the hub and spoke arrangement imposed on air travelers in the States.

And though Angela Eastman had remained blissfully across the aisle while he slept his way across the Atlantic, when he boarded the Delta A-220 he was more than annoyed when she sat next to him on the overcrowded flight. Not knowing what else to do, as soon as she started talking he took out his Leica and started taking pictures of people and machines moving around on the ramp below his window, as it seemed that nothing was going to stop her nonstop chattering now.

“So, have you learned why they’re sending you to Jackson?” she asked as the last shuttle pulled away from their Airbus.

“No, not a peep.”

“Isn’t that a little unusual? I mean, why send a foreign correspondent to Mississippi?”

He shrugged. “I haven’t a clue. What about you? Know why they sent you?”

“No, not really. There was the story that broke a few days ago about the abortion doctor. Did you pick up on that one?”

He shrugged again. “Sorry, I must’ve missed it.”

“Really? Well, an Ob-Gyn performed an abortion on a girl that was carrying a non-viable fetus – I mean the baby apparently had less than half a brain and wouldn’t have survived five minutes outside of the mother’s womb – but late last week the District Attorney down there decided to file homicide charges against both the mother and the physician, and they were both arrested a yesterday. And guess what? Representatives of the Coalition are demanding the death penalty for the physician.”

That caught Lawton’s attention. “What? You’re joking?”

“No, not at all. There was the usual ineffectual knee-jerk response from the few remaining progressives on the Hill, but so far the media all seem to be on board with the Coalition.”

“I just looked over the front pages of both the Times and the Post – and I didn’t see a thing about the arrests in either paper.”

“See what I mean? The last liberal news organization reporting on events in your country is based in the UK; how’s that for plain ole down home irony?”

“You mean there’s been nothing further about it on the cable news channels?”

“Silence is golden, Peter. Or should we just roll over and say ‘democracies die in silence?’”

“That’s what the bumper sticker says,” he sighed, still reeling.

“Ooh, cynicism. The autocrat’s best friend.”

He shook his head and groaned. “Do you happen to know any dates? Arraignments or such?”

“I heard the trial is set for this Friday, but that couldn’t be right.”

“Friday…? But you said they’d just been arrested? No one could possibly prepare briefs in a capital case in two days, let alone the opening arguments in a case like this. Where’s the ACLU on this?”

“Not in Mississippi, apparently. In fact, most state offices of the ACLU were forced to shut down over the last month. Threats against staff, I think, was the issue cited. And you’ll love this, Peter. Both the mother and the physician are Black.”

He sighed and shook his head, then put his face in his hands. “Of course they are. And the NAACP? Are you telling me they’re silent on the matter? Jackson Mississippi was like ground zero of the civil rights movement, I seem to remember? It’s hallowed ground!”

“Times are different now, Peter. You ever been to the SPLC?”

“In Montgomery? Sure, several times. Why?”

“Firebombed two days ago, nine dead, and my guess is you didn’t read about that in the Post or the Times, either.”

“Dear God,” he whispered, “what’s happening? Where’s the FBI?”

“Compromised, apparently, by internal dissension.”

“Internal dissension?”

“I seem to have heard that means penetrated by White supremacists.”

And at that point one of the flight attendants stopped by and leaned over to speak to them. “Uh, listen you two, I don’t mean to intrude but people have complained about you.”

“Complained? Really?” Angela asked. “About what?”

“You shouldn’t be talking about this stuff in a public place, ya know?” the woman said nervously.

Lawton looked at the woman, and she appeared scared. “Are you saying that some people here are offended by talk of this situation?”

The flight attendant nodded. “Yup, you got it, and if you keep it up I’ll have to call law enforcement, and they’ll have you removed from the aircraft for creating a disturbance.”

Lawton leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, tried to control his breathing and get his blood pressure back under control, while Angela simply smiled and nodded her tacit agreement, and a moment later the Airbus pushed back from the gate.

And at that point Angela leaned close and whispered in his ear: “Welcome home, y’all.”

By the time their second regional jet flight landed in Jackson, Lawton was so angry he could hardly breathe. The first four years had been bad enough, then the pandemic hit and sure, life tumbled out of control for a while, but after four relatively sane years things now appeared to be spiraling completely out of control. Arresting a post-terminated-pregnancy patient – who’d just been confronted with one of the most emotionally wrenching decisions of her life – was heinous enough, but charging the physician with a capital offense was like something straight out of the dark ages. Ten years ago people would have laughed in his face if he’d told them that something like this was happening in America, and maybe the same would have been true four years ago – but not now. Now we were in a race to the bottom, yet no one seemed to appreciate what had really happened.

But he had been thinking as they flew along, thinking that there was some little place in his memory of America that he had missed, something important he’d lost sight of, and yet he wasn’t sure exactly what that was, but he knew that the heart of his story lay in an examination of this one thing, of this memory he’d misplaced.

Representatives from the network’s local affiliate met him at the baggage claim area, and when they met Miss Eastman they were only too glad to help out a reporter from the BBC, so Angela hopped in the van and off they all went, driving the six miles into downtown.

“Mr. Lawton, we put you up at The Old Capitol Inn,” Cheryl Templeton, one of the local producers said after introductions were made. “Miss Eastman, do you have a reservation anywhere?”

“No, nothing yet.”

“Would you like me to call the Inn and see if they have a room for you?”

“Yes, please. That would be so nice.”

Lawton cleared his throat, looked at Templeton. “Do you have the backstory yet? And just what kind of piece is New York looking for? Anything, by chance, resembling the truth?”

Templeton turned and looked at Lawton and he could see the pleading look in her eyes, then the sidelong glance in the direction of their driver – and he realized she was telling him that he couldn’t talk freely in the van, at least not when her cameraman, Brad McNaughton, was around. “I have both standard bios in your background information folders,” the producer said as she passed over several large manilla envelopes, “as well as copies of the DAs charging documents and the press release the Coalition put out.”

“Anything scheduled yet?”

“Interview with the DA tomorrow morning at eleven. They’ve been stonewalling us about an interview with Washburn, and so far we haven’t been able to contact the Polk family. No word on a bail hearing yet.”

“And they are?”

“Fay Polk is the woman whose pregnancy was terminated. Doctor Elise Washburn is her Ob-Gyn, or was, anyway. Uh, I hate to ask, but do you have a suit with you?”

Lawton looked up from Polk’s bio and shook his head. “Sorry. I lost most of my clothes in a missile attack two days ago. I think I’m wearing most everything I have with me right now.”

“Oh well, okay. Well, we’ll see if we can do something about that in the morning.”

Lawton looked over Templeton then turned and gazed out the window – though he shook his head just a little. Pale pink button-down oxford cloth shirt, complete with polo player over the left breast, khakis and penny-loafers – standard issue Ivy League wannabe journalism major in her second job as a line producer, and she’d probably wound up in this armpit of a city after crapping out in a major secondary market like Nashville, or maybe St Louis. He’d seen at least a dozen just like her and her type’s clinging ambitions were tiresome – but often quite useful, too. And this one was seriously on the cute side of the blond-hair blue-eyed equation, so her ego would probably be borderline toxic – but then again, he knew his was just as toxic so maybe they would balance each other out. “Anyplace nearby for dinner?” he asked politely, trying to hide his jet lag by stifling a yawn.

“The food at the Inn is actually pretty good,” Templeton said. “If you want a steak, LaCour is still open and they’re the best in town.”

Lawton yawned for real and then rubbed his burning eyes, then tried to shake himself awake. “My eyes feel like fire-pits. The Inn will have to do tonight.”

“I’ll be by at seven in the morning,” Templeton added, “and they start serving breakfast at six,” she said as they pulled up to the front of a nondescript red-brick building. “You’re already checked-in, Mr Lawton, and oh, by the way, there’s a nice rooftop bar in case you two need a nightcap.”

“Swell,” Lawton said, not able to stifle the next long, deep yawn. “If I’m not waiting for you in the lobby tomorrow morning, come poke me with a stick and see if I’m still breathing. Ya know, on second thought I think I’m too tired for dinner,” he said as he slid out of the van. He waited for Angela and then made his way into the Inn’s lobby, and once he had the key to his room he high-tailed it right to the shower and turned on the hot water. After he dumped his dirty underclothes in the provided hamper he found the little black dopp kit he’d tucked away in a corner of his carry-on and couldn’t wait to stand under the water – when he heard a delicately feminine knock on the door.

So after a long sigh he opened the door an inch or so and there was the BBC’s Miss Angela Eastman, a bottle of scotch in one hand and two glasses in the other, now smiling from ear to ear and looking like she wanted to talk, among other things.

“You are kidding, right?” he sighed as he grinned.

“I’ve been told I give a mean back rub, in case you’re interested?”

All things considered, it turned out he was. More than once, as it happened.

+++++

Benton Baxter, the local district attorney, was of course late for their appointment – but Lawton had expected no less from a mid-level pawn with his eyes now firmly on the prize, at least considering current circumstances. When Baxter finally did show up, twenty minutes later than promised, he told Lawton he could only spare a few minutes – which, once again, Lawton had gleefully anticipated. And that’s when he introduced “Miss Angela Eastman of the BBC, who’d like to sit in on our interview this morning…”

So, Baxter had, as predicted, called his secretary on the intercom and pushed back a couple of appointments. Templeton and her cameraman had already set up their equipment in a nearby conference room, and a few minutes later everything was good to go.

“So,” Baxter said, preening when he saw the red light atop the camera wink on, “welcome back to the States, Mr Lawton. We sure have enjoyed your reporting from the front lines. Were things as dangerous as they looked on TV?”

Lawton smiled. “Yes, well, it is a challenge to maintain your journalistic objectivity when you see entire neighborhoods that have been hit by repeated missile strikes, but then I drove through a couple of your low income neighborhoods this morning and what I found there was strikingly similar in appearance to what I’d seen in Kherson and Kyiv recently.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Well, let’s look at this home,” he said as he pulled up a picture on his iPhone. “One story wood frame construction, half of the roof caved-in and the floors under two of the four bedrooms have rotted away. I’d assumed the people who live in that house might fix those floors but there are simply too many copperheads in the crawl space to make that happen anytime soon. And as a matter of record, I bring this up because this is the home where Miss Fay Polk was raised, where she tried to carry a baby to term, and do you know what, Mr Baxter? Because of longstanding problems with the water being distributed to the poorer neighborhoods in Jackson, when I tried to get a glass of water in their kitchen this morning, the Polks were actually ashamed when raw feces came out the tap, so yes, I found conditions in Kherson frightenly similar to what I found here this morning.”

“I see. Well, as I’m sure you’re aware, the political situation here in Jackson is very complex.”

“Yes, so I understand. But it has been, or so I hear, that way since 1865, has it not? But tell me, Mr Baxter. When you turn on the faucet in your home, does raw sewage pour out of your taps?”

Baxter looked as if he could murder Lawson, quite literally kill him with his bare hands, but he also knew he’d lost the moral high ground. “I doubt that it does, Mr Lawton.”

“I see. So, could you tell me how many people in the State of Mississippi believe in a woman’s right to choose?”

“I have no idea, sir. I enforce the laws, not public opinion.”

“I understand. But still, considering that in recent polling of voting age people in your state, including young people Miss Polk’s age, almost seventy percent of respondents believe in a woman’s right to choose her own reproductive destiny, so I’m curious how this law came to be.”

“I’m not sure what you’re implying, Mr Lawton.”

“Really? Well then, I guess it seems, to an outsider like myself anyway, that a narrow political agenda is being enforced – at the expense of a truer, more representative and certainly a more democratic expression of the will of the people.” 

“As you say, you are an outsider here, aren’t you?” Baxter’s eyes were now cold and hard.

“Well, of course, but do tell: do you really feel that imposing the death penalty on a physician performing a medically justified procedure is truly warranted?”

“Again, Mr Lawton, I’m just a civil servant doing the job I was elected to do.”

“Ah. That sounds suspiciously like the justification employed time and time again by Nazi concentration camp guards at the Nuremberg Trials.”

Baxter shrugged. “Concentration camps? What on earth are you talking about?”

“Mr Baxter,” Angela Eastman said, sensing this part of the interview was now at an end, “do you think it would be possible for me to interview either Miss Polk or Dr Washburn while I’m here?”

“I might be able to get you in, Miss Eastman,” the DA said, though by that time he was pointedly ignoring Peter Lawton’s presence in the conference room, “providing you don’t use any material from either Mr Lawton or his network.”

“Certainly, sir,” she smiled coquettishly. “I’d never do such a thing without your explicit approval and authorization.”

“Do you have a camera crew with you?”

“No, I’m afraid not. I just wanted to speak with either of the two you have in custody.”

Baxter smiled. “Well then, won’t you please come with me?”

Angela stood and followed the DA from his conference room, leaving Lawton and Templeton to pack up their gear, while her cameraman, Brad McNaughton, broke down his kit and put the expensive camera in a bright yellow Pelican case – yet McNaughton glowered and grumbled while he worked.

“What’s with the attitude?” Templeton asked McNaughton as they loaded their gear in the van a few minutes later.

“What a prick!” the cameraman snarled.

“Oh?” Lawton said.

“Don’t tell me you weren’t picking up on that vibe, man. He was spitting in your face, Mr Lawton. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was never a big fan of your politics but he’s a public servant, not…”

“He is what he is, Brad,” Lawton said, cutting him off, “but he’s also not the story.” He turned to Templeton and nodded. “Are we getting a clear signal out here?”

“Loud and clear,” Templeton said, “and it looks like we have a solid feed on the recorder.”

The three stepped inside and moved to the editing and transmission console in the middle of the van, and after Templeton plugged the feed into the main data recorder a grainy video appeared on one of the module’s screens, and then, finally, there was Dr. Elise Washburn onscreen. And while the image was less than perfect, the audio was crystal clear. 

Washburn had, they heard her say, grown up in Jackson in the good graces of the Catholic Church, which was in itself unusual, and then she had moved away to college, first to Loyola in New Orleans, then on to the medical school at Tulane. She’d gone on to Johns Hopkins for her internship and residency, yet she’d always known she would come home to practice medicine. She’d taken, and passed, her Boards in Obstetrics and Gynecology before taking a staff position at UMMC, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, in Jackson – and as soon as Roe v Wade was struck down the State of Mississippi had immediately declared an outright ban on most abortions, and then as more restrictions were put in place the legislature had also made it illegal to even teach the procedure. 

As a staff physician at a teaching university medical center, Washburn needed to be able to teach the procedure if only to insure that physicians trained at UMMC could pass all of the core procedures and exams related to the safe practice of Obstetrics, yet now there was simply no way she could do that. Legally, that is.

The fact that Washburn was a practicing Catholic made no difference in the events that followed, which was not as ironic as it first seemed as the most radical evangelical Christian groups also happen to be Catholic, and these groups had all been pushing for a complete ban on the procedure for decades. The fact that Roe was finally struck down as a result of litigation between the Jackson Women’s Health Organization and Thomas E. Dobbs, the lead state health officer with the Mississippi State Department of Health, was a small irony not lost on Washburn, nor any of the other Ob-Gyns practicing in the state.

But when Eastman asked Washburn about Fay Polk, you could see the change come over the physician as she recounted her first encounters with the girl. Fay had just turned eighteen years old and told Washburn that she had been repeatedly raped at home, and after questioning it turned out to have been by a family member. As she had been receiving basic obstetrical care through Medicaid, the federal government’s medical insurance program for the impoverished, the baby’s underlying medical condition had soon been discovered. The fetus would develop along somewhat normal lines, Washburn told Polk, yet it’s brain would not, and once born the child might conceivably live as long as five minutes – but that once the umbilical cord was cut the child would simply suffocate and die. 

Yet Fay herself was not in good health. Chronically undernourished, Washburn discovered the girl was diabetic and had a complex endocrine-metabolism disorder and had recently experienced difficulty digesting food, so carrying the fetus to term was itself ill-advised on those grounds alone. Her GFR indices were also perilously low, which meant her kidneys were suddenly failing too.

Yet the latest law passed by the State Legislature was clear. No abortions would be allowed in the state, period. Not in cases where the life of the mother was in jeopardy and not in cases of rape or incest. Further, the latest law stated that the procedure could not even be conceptually taught or discussed in any facility owned by the state, which of course included the University’s Medical School, but also in any clinic that accepted Medicaid.

It was one thing, Peter Lawton felt, to listen to these things discussed in the abstract, yet quite another to see the empathy and compassion of an Elise Washburn run headfirst into the steamroller of evangelical political radicalism that was now coming to take her life, and he simply couldn’t process what he was seeing. He was an Episcopalian and had been all his life, yet he had been on one overseas assignment after another for the last ten years, so what he was seeing now was the result of a withering meanness at work. And this, he thought, wasn’t just the usual Southern mentality at work, either. This was national in scope, and quite suddenly he was beginning to feel as if he stepped into some kind of bizarre, off-the-wall medieval drama, or perhaps a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale – as told by William Faulkner.

Yet one thing was clear. Quite clear. Elise Washburn was a kind soul full of compassion who had done nothing more or less than the Right Thing, and now the state wanted to kill her. Lawton, Templeton, and McNaughton sat in silence listening to the physician’s story, and by the time Angela Eastman wrapped up her interview even McNaughton was blind with red-faced fury. “Is it just me,” he said, “or is there something really weird about Christians wanting to kill a physician and a rape victim – who was probably going to die without the procedure?”

Yet when Eastman came out of the County Jail about a half hour later, and just as she crossed Tombigbee Street on her way to the van, a marked patrol car cruised by ever-so-slowly, the patrolman inside eyeing the reporter carefully as she passed.

3.

Sitting in the station’s editing suite an hour later, Cheryl Templeton and Brad McNaughton were piecing together Eastman’s surreptitiously acquired quotes in painstaking order, while an audio engineer – Carol Hoffman was her name – tried to clean up some annoying background noise in the hastily stitched-together digital audio file. Lawton and Eastman had been at the Inn for at least an hour, grabbing lunch and changing into casual clothes before coming back to the station to add commentary to the audio track. 

“Man,” McNaughton sighed, “this sounds like a hit piece.”

“What do you mean?” Cheryl asked.

“It sounds very biased to me,” he added, “almost like it’s conspicuously trying to present just one side of the story.”

“Well, it is one person’s version of events. It’s Elise Washburn’s version, right? What else should we include?”

“What about Baxter’s point of view?” Carol said.

Brad was incensed: “What? Are you serious? Mister I’m Just Enforcing The Law…”

“It doesn’t seem responsible not to include his position,” Carol added. “And I’ll tell you what else is missing. Fay Polk’s part of this story is missing. That very basic human element is missing from this story.”

“And guess what?” Cheryl barked. “Baxter won’t let us near her.”

Hoffman looked up from her DAT recorder and smiled. “Well then, there’s your story. Or at least half of it. Why do you think he’s doing that?”

“Half?” Cheryl asked.

“Sure,” Carol said. “Why won’t he? Does it look like he’s hiding something? But anyway, look at it this way, if Baxter isn’t going to give you access to Polk you’ll just have to get the next best thing, you’ll have to interview Fay’s friends and family. The other thing I’m not hearing here is structured questions. Who provided background to Lawton?”

“I did,” Cheryl pouted, instantly growing defensive. Hoffman had gone to Duke and she was the real deal, and management knew it. Cheryl, on the other hand, had gone to Ole Miss and had only been interviewed here at the station after her father intervened – and even then she hadn’t landed a job. She did eventually land a gig at a small station in Gulfport, but it had taken her four long years to get back up here to Jackson; now Peter Lawton was here on a National Story and Cheryl had to know this was her ‘one big chance,’ maybe her last chance at the big time. “I pulled everything I could off Google,” she added.

“Google, huh,” Hoffman said flatly. “Imagine that.” She looked at Brad and saw him grimace, then shake his head in apparent disgust. She looked over at Cheryl and saw the pastel colored polo shirt and the penny loafers and she knew Cheryl was still going out to dinner with her parents several times a week, but the only thing she think of was Google? No thought of trying to run down an interview, no attempt to do a little detective work, just be content to use other people’s unverified work to fill out a bio for a national reporter coming to town to cover a big story. “Well, okay, I’ve got the file cleaned up. What’s next?”

“Well I…” Cheryl had just started to speak when Peter Lawton walked in, and when she could see he didn’t look happy she stopped talking.

“How much do you have,” Lawton asked Cheryl.

“I don’t…I’m not sure…maybe a minute?”

“Play it, now.”

McNaughton hit play and the segment began rolling, and the longer it played the angrier Lawton grew.

“Well, congratulations Miss Templeton. You’ve succeeded in making me look like an idiot. An uninformed idiot. Thanks for driving me by their house this morning, but have you actually spoken to anyone in Fay’s family?”

“No, sir. Her sister wasn’t home,” Templeton said.

“Who are you?” Lawton asked the girl behind the editing console.

“Carol Hoffman. Working audio today, Mr Lawton.”

He looked her over and nodded. “Uh-huh. Cheryl, would you go get me a coffee?”

“Black?”

He shook his head, exasperated. “Cream and Splenda, same as this morning.”

“Right away, sir.”

After the door closed behind Templeton he turned to Carol. “School?”

“Duke.”

“Jewish?”

“That’s right.”

“And Cheryl’s keeping you down, right?”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Brad said, grinning.

Lawton looked at the kid, then back at Carol. “Know your way around town?”

“Well enough.”

“Brad, grab a camera, preferably something small, and let’s get out of here.”

By the time Templeton returned to the editing suite the rest of her crew was long gone.

+++++

“2400 block of Brown Street, right?” Brad asked.

“Yup. Turn right on Yates, should be the next street,” Hoffman replied.

Lawton and Eastman were in the back seat of Carol’s little SUV, a teal green Subaru of some kind, and both were shellshocked as they looked out their windows at the homes in these neighborhoods. Most of the houses had been built in the 1920s, and even by those shabby standards it appeared as if these houses had been quickly slapped together using the cheapest materials their unscrupulous builders could lay their hands on.

“They’re all the same,” Angela said. “Every one of them. Little shacks made of tarpaper.”

“But the asbestos shingles were a thoughtful touch,” Carol sighed. “Keep some of the rats out, I imagine, at least when they’re not causing lung cancer.”

“So, keeping the cancer in?” Eastman asked. “Well, look at that. A swimming pool.”

“No water in it the last five or so years. Last time they tried raw sewage came out of the water pipes,” Brad said as he turned on Yates Street. “So, this is her sister’s place?” he said as Carol read off the address again.

“Yup.”

“Her name is Keisha, right?” Brad asked as he pulled onto the barren front yard in front of the dilapidated old house.

Carol and Lawton exited the Subaru and walked up to the front door and knocked, and a few moments passed before the door cracked open a few inches.

“Keisha?” Peter asked. “My name is…”

“I know who you are.”

Peter nodded. “How are you doing?”

The woman shook her head and shrugged, and as Angela walked up to the door she guessed Keisha weighed maybe ninety pounds.

“Could we speak to you?” Peter asked. “About your sister?”

“What’s there to talk about, Mr Bad Newsman?”

“We’re trying to understand what’s happening down here, why this happened to your sister…?”

“Really? Don’t know much about Mississippi, do you?”

“Only what they don’t teach in the history books,” he said, trying his best to project some measure of empathy.

“Funny,” Keisha said. “Ha-ha…”

“Do you know what was wrong with Fay’s baby?”

She nodded, looked away. “Called it Edwards Syndrome, or trisomy something.”

“Trisomy-18?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Anything else they tell you about your sister or her baby?”

She nodded. “Yeah, some kinda cyst growing in it head so his head couldn’t grow right, then it heart was growing all wrong and doctors know it ain’t gonna live, and all that time Fay gettin’ sicker and sicker. Throwin’ up all the time and couldn’t eat nothin’ and her kidneys was gettin’ sick too. They talkin’ like she have to go on dialysis to have that baby because it against the law to not have the baby but it gonna be dead as soon as he come out, ya know? Didn’t make no sense, I guess, but nothin’ much ever do ’round here.”

“So, did Dr Washburn tell you that getting an abortion was necessary?”

“Oh yeah, but that the funny thing. She say no more doctors do it here because of the law, and it even against the law to teach other doctors how to do it. She almost last doctor left here that can, but everyone know they just waitin’ to get her.”

“You think they were trying to set up Dr Washburn?”

“Naw, no need for that. It gonna happen sooner or later so they just wait for her then they snatch her up.”

“I tried to speak with your parents this morning, but…”

“They gots the Alzheimer’s, Mister Bad Newsman, but that ain’t the funny part.”

“Funny part?”

“Yeah. They sendin’ they bills to them but they give ‘em to me. Wanna see?”

“Yes, if you don’t mind.”

Peter looked at Angela and the BBC reporter simply shook her head, then quietly turned away.

“Here they is,” Keisha said, handing over a stack of letters from the hospital. “All that stuff be illegal so Medicaid ain’t gonna cover none of it.”

He flipped through the stack, noting that the latest bill – received a few days ago – was for almost a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. “Mind if I take pictures of these?” he asked.

Keisha shrugged. “Ain’t gonna matter much one way or another, is it. That what they do. Send bills then come the collections people, and they buy the bills from the hospital and then the lawyers come and pretty soon the real estate lady come by and put up a For Sale sign in your front yard. Drive around and look at the signs. Same real estate lady, too. Her husband work for the hospital, her brother work at the courthouse, so yeah, Mister Bad Newsman, you got lots to learn about the way things is down here, but that the way it always been and that the way it always gonna be.”

She slammed the door shut then, but she left the stack of bills in his hand.

“And that’s the way it is,” Lawton sighed, thinking of the way Walter Cronkite signed off at the conclusion of each broadcast, then remembering Cronkite announcing Kennedy’s assassination. “And here we are, right back where we started from. It’s like the Civil Rights Movement never happened.”

He turned and started for Carol’s Subaru but a sudden reflection caught his eye and he squinted a bit – and he could just make out a Ford SUV with two men up front, and one of them was pointing a large white camera lens their way.

“Carol,” he said gently, “you better drive, and don’t go even one mile an hour over the posted limit.”

“We pick up some company?” Angela asked. “Like maybe the KGB?”

“Wrong country,” Peter sighed, “same tactics.”

Brad had seen the flash, too, and now he was more than a little scared. So scared, in fact, that he took out his iPhone and did the one thing he’d sworn to never do again.

He called the meanest human being he knew; a man who, once upon a time, had been his father.

4.

“What did he say?” Peter Lawton asked McNaughton.

“That he would make a few calls,” the cameraman said. His hands were now shaking so visibly that even Angela Eastman had asked if he was okay. 

“What does he do?” Lawton then asked the kid.

“I’m not real sure.”

“What? He’s your dad, right? Not like a step-father?”

McNaughton nodded his head slowly as Carol Hoffman pulled out into traffic. 

“The cops in a dark gray Explorer?” she asked – no one in particular.

“Yeah,” Lawton said, turning his head just enough to see the ‘photographers’ pull in behind her Subaru – but still a few hundred yards back, “that’s them.”

“Okay, we should go straight to your hotel,” Carol said, “then you guys need to stay out of sight for a while.”

“Assuming, you mean,” Eastman added, “they let us get there.”

“They’re staying back,” Carol said hopefully. “We’ll be okay.”

“Standard protocol,” Lawton sighed, “will be for them to call in a marked squad car if they want to do a traffic stop.”

“So as soon as I see one of those,” Carol moaned, “we’re toast, right?”

“Pretty much,” Lawton nodded. “Brad, did your father say what we should do?”

The cameraman just shook his head. “Just that he’d make a few calls.”

“Do you at least know where he is?”

“He lives in Florida, I think. He works somewhere in Miami, I think.”

“You guys don’t talk much, huh?”

Brad shrugged.

“But you think he can help?” 

“If anyone can – he’s the one I’d call. That’s his job, I think.”

‘So,’ Lawton thought, ‘the guy lives in Miami and he gets things done that no one else can do, and his son is covering for him. But the kid is too straight-laced to come from a mob family…and McNaughton…is that Scotch, or Irish? Irrelevant. The kid’s dad is in law enforcement…but in Miami? No way he’s a local yokel, which means he’s a Fed. Which means the kid’s dad is either Bureau or…Miami…? DEA? Could he be DEA? Or is he an intel weenie working the Cubanos…?”

When Carol pulled up to the Inn unmolested everyone felt relieved, and after Angela climbed out of the back seat Lawton slid across and got out too, but Carol and the kid remained up front.

“Should we go back to the station?” Carol asked.

Lawton looked around, saw the gray Explorer parked two blocks away under a barren tree with both men still inside, and the older man in the passenger seat was not even attempting to conceal what he was doing – which in Lawton’s experience meant this was an exercise in intimidation – but by who? Or – for whom? “Park in the lot, over there,” Lawton said without taking his eyes off the Explorer, “and we’ll wait for you here.”

A minute later they walked into the Inn and went straight up to the rooftop bar, and despite it being January the weather was quite nice out, more like late summer afternoons in New England used to be. Brad’s phone chirped and he saw it was Cheryl calling – for the tenth time in the last two hours – but he picked it up this time, so Lawton walked over to the edge of the roof and looked at the Explorer.

And yes, the older man was still there, and still looking right at him – only now he was using binoculars.

‘Well, time to force their hand,’ he thought, but first he walked around the perimeter of the roof looking for other surveillance units – but nothing out of the ordinary stood out. Not yet, anyway.

Brad seemed agitated so he walked back to their table and tried to pick out the key points in the conversation the kid was having on the phone, but just then a waitress came over and handed out menus.

“What do you recommend up here this time of day?” Lawton asked, still keeping an eye on Brad.

“The shrimp remoulade is really popular,” the young girl said absent-mindedly – until she looked up and saw she was addressing Mr Peter Lawton, the big-shot news anchor – at which point she seemed to go weak in the knees, “and we have a special today, a fresh red snapper with a lump crabmeat stuffing.”

Lawton was hungry and he knew Angela had skipped over most of her breakfast, so he ordered four shrimp appetizers and four snappers and a chilled Pinot Grigio. He waited until the waitress walked off then sat next to Angela and let slip a long, drawn out sigh. “You know, you kind of get to a point where you expect this kind of shit to happen – when you’re walking around Moscow or maybe Tirana. But not in Jackson fuckin’ Mississippi.”

“Ya know, you’re right,” Angela said. “But this just doesn’t make any sense anymore. None of it, none at all…”

Brad rang off and put away his phone, and Lawton noted the kid looked a little upset.

“What’s happened, Brad?”

“Polk and Washburn just had their bail hearings. Both were denied bail, and, well, we missed it, didn’t we?”

“The hearing? Yeah? So what? That was pretty much a foregone conclusion.”

“Cheryl got it, but the station manager wants to fire me and Carol,” Brad said, his head now hanging low.

Carol nodded. “That figures. Kolb has been gunning for me all year,” she sighed – then she looked at Peter. “Think they’ll come after you too?”

“Nothing would surprise me right about now.”

Angela looked at his face carefully then. “I guess the question is, Peter, do you still give a damn?”

“You know, that’s a funny thing…but I’m not actually sure I ever really ‘gave a damn’ about this job. To me, it was always the story, the truth of things. Whatever I was working on – the truth of things had to matter or the story was just a fluff piece – and I guess that’s why I gave up the anchor desk. I was reading the news that other reporters had worked their asses off to get to my desk, but I can’t tell you how many times I was left to ask the important questions myself. The hard questions. Like the reporters we had out there often didn’t know their jobs, and there were some big stories brewing that they were simply not covering the way they should have been.”

“I always wondered what happened,” Angela said. “People work their whole careers to get where you were, but you just turned away from it all and walked away.”

Lawton nodded. “Times change. Hard news used to sell; now opinion sells. The thing is, my opinion isn’t any more or less informed than the next guys – unless I’ve gone out and really looked for the facts. Then the job is to report those facts, or at least that’s what it used to be, because opinions don’t mean a damn thing. Now you turn on your favorite channel and you know exactly what you’re going to get, even before you sit down to watch. Maybe, Carol, the real question is what exactly does a reporter do in a situation like the one we’re in right now?”

Carol smiled and began: “Cassius was right; the fault dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves…”

“Goodnight and Good Luck,” Carol and Peter both quoted in unison.

“They have nothing left to sell now, do they?” Angela added. “No policies, just hate.”

“…Nothing to fear but fear itself,” Peter added. 

“What are you guys talking about?” Brad said.

“Edward R Murrow and how Joseph McCarthy used fear of communism to divide people in the 50s. Seems like the Republicans are going back to their old playbook one more time.”

“But didn’t they do it once before, like back in the 30s?” Angela asked.

And Lawton nodded. “Oh yeah, with the Tucker Carlson of his day, Father Charles Coughlin, the Catholic radio priest, who also just happened to be a rabid anti-Semite. In the years leading up to the Second World War, he preached the idea that the US should team up with Nazi Germany to purify the world of Jews. Funny how times have changed, too, because Roosevelt actually shut his radio program down. He couldn’t get away with that now.”

“Wasn’t that the problem with Germany in the 20s?” Carol asked. “That their government got too liberal and Hitler took advantage of it?”

Lawton shrugged. “Yeah, I think it was Article 50 of the Weimar Constitution that did them in, but it’s an age old problem, Carol. If you allow free speech, when does some speech ‘cross the line’ – and who gets to decide if it does? We’ve allowed Neo-Nazis to march for their cause – in the name of protecting everyone’s right to free speech, but should a government allow speech that aims to destroy the foundations of that government? Hitler and Mussolini both used such permissive legal landscapes to sow division and cause the ultimate collapse of their own national governments, and now it looks like that’s exactly where we’ve found ourselves.”

“So,” Angela sighed, “the question then becomes one of degrees, doesn’t it? Do you maintain an absolute right to free speech in all instances, or do you place limits on that right?”

“Well, we already do,” Lawton said. “Common sense stuff, like it’s against the law to run into a crowded theatre and yell ‘Fire!’ But once you cross the line into curtailing political speech our constitution is really very clear: You can’t do it. You must not curtail such speech, no matter how detrimental it is to the country, as long as such talk doesn’t openly incite insurrection or sedition.”

“Yeah,” Brad growled, “and we’ve already seen how well that turned out. Seems like certain people with enough money can buy all the justice they need.” And as Brad finished talking his phone chirped again. “Oh boy, here we go.”

“Your dad?” Lawton asked, his voice a low whisper.

Brad nodded, then he listened to his father – but he soon started to grow pale, and then his left eye started twitching. “Are you serious?” he whispered at one point, but then he listened for several more minutes, at one point asking someone for a pen and paper.

Their shrimp appetizers came and Lawton was too hungry to wait so he piled in, and so then Angela did as well; Brad rang off a minute later and nodded slowly then grabbed his cocktail fork and ate in silence. Carol gave up and joined them, but she noticed Brad was waiting until everyone else was out of earshot before speaking.

And without looking up from his plate he mumbled: “Something big is brewing.”

“Big?” Lawton asked. “What do you mean…big?”

“Big. Apparently some Black cops and sheriff’s deputies are pissed off about this shit and it’s spread to the National Guard. Dad’s heard that they’re going to try and get both of ‘em out of jail…”

“What does that mean?” Lawton said, now wide-eyed.

“Sorry. They’re planning on breaking them out.”

“And who the hell else knows about this?”

Brad nodded. “The governor does, the commanding general of the state guard does too…”

“And if they know,” Lawton sighed, “that means everyone knows. From the local Chief of Police on up to the White House.”

“So what?” Brad snorted. “Eighty percent of the people in this city are Black, so you can reckon on about a hundred and fifty thousand really pissed off people getting involved. But have you thought about what might happen if all those folks get riled up and start carrying torches towards City Hall?”

“Or AR-15s,” Carol mumbled, starting to frown.

“It would make Kent State look mild,” Lawton sighed, “but that would also be playing right into the Coalitions hands. The National Guard was formed in large measure to put down this kind of domestic unrest.”

“Funny how they didn’t show up at the capital on January Sixth,” Angela smiled.

“Lots of funny things about that day,” Carol added, “starting with Michael Flynn…”

Lawton held up his hands. “Stop it, would you? There’s no need to run down that rabbit hole right now, is there? Brad, what does your father think we need to do?”

“Get ready to get the fuck out of Dodge, Mr Lawton. He hasn’t heard anything about you in particular, but he thinks they’d like to discredit you somehow. Kind of like take out two birds with one stone…that kind of thing. The one thing that seems to be bothering my old man has to do with the National Guard. He’s checking now, but it sounds like the Guard wants violence. He called it a flash point.”

“How nice,” Lawton sighed – just as their waitress arrived with plates of fish. His phone chirped then and he smiled at the waitress as he pulled his phone from an inside pocket, and he saw the Caller ID displayed ‘unknown name, number blocked’ – but for some reason he decided to take the call.

‘Hello?’ he said.

‘Lawton?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Be in the station’s van on Congress Street by the jailhouse steps. Tomorrow, 2100 hours.’

Then the line went dead.

Lawton looked up and sighed.

“Who was that?” Brad asked.

Lawton shrugged. “I’m not sure, but my guess is it may have been the military. They want us in the station’s mobile transmitter van tomorrow night, parked by the jail at 2100 hours.”

“2100 hours?” Angela muttered. “That’s military time over here, isn’t it?”

“Yup.”

“But…wait…?” Angela cried. “You can’t be…but Peter, why…it’s such an obvious trap?”

He nodded. “Yeah, sure it is, but this is the first move on the board, isn’t it? Which means this is the story they want to get out, that a couple of liberal reporters broke two Black prisoners out of jail. But wait, because obviously this isn’t the real story. No, now they want this part of the story, the story about a trial no one wants, to go away. But we can’t let that happen, even if that’s not the real story…” 

“What’s the real story?” Carol said, looking unsure of herself now that she was potentially unemployed.

Lawton leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands behind his head, then he looked up at the sky…and there it was. A small drone, watching everything they did.

He quickly looked down, then spread his hands wide. “The real story? Well they got these laws passed but they’re not real popular. Still they worked for decades to repeal Roe and they’re not going to give it up without a fight…” He closed his eyes, then shook his head slowly. “Without a fight,” he muttered slowly, carefully. “And Brad’s dad says they want a fight. The fight, a big fight. They want all the Blacks to come out tomorrow night, they want them to come down here. That’s the real trap. Gather a mob, get them angry, then supply the spark to set them off. The flash point, I guess.”

“Okay, a spark…but like what?”

“My guess is they know those girls are going to be in the van with us, so then they force us to make a run for it. Then they stop us and take us out, preferably right in front of an angry crowd and, of course, probably carried live.”

“But…why?”

“You turn the tables. Riots start, but instead of two martyrs going to trial you now have two escaped convicts on the run – but neatly done away with, and in the process you reestablish violent control over a large swath of population you want out of the way.”

“You mean ‘put them back in their place,’ don’t you?” Carol said.

Lawton nodded. “Boxed up, cut off, and politically isolated, as in Jim Crow version 2. Nothing will turn the ‘undecided’ voters quicker than having their most repressed fears legitimized, as in thousands of armed Black rioters torching cars and businesses over a couple of escaped cons, but then again the same thing happened after the Rodney King riots in LA. I guess the thinking goes the moderates will want all those rioters either shot and killed or picked up and shipped off to prison camps. It’ll be media’s job to present images of burning cities and pissed off Blacks – then all that chaos and disorder will be neatly juxtaposed with more images of troops and order restored.”

Angela crossed her arms over her chest and sighed. “Aren’t you forgetting something, Peter?”

“No, I don’t think so. And I think I know what you’re going to say, too. It’s not our job to make the news, it’s our job to report it. I hear you, and I get that. But Angela, we didn’t start this, did we? They get to make the first move. The question is, how do we counter that move?”

Carol looked at Lawton again: “We get the word out to the Black community that they’re being set up again…”

“They’re not going to care,” Brad sighed. “If those two girls are killed – and it won’t matter by who – then this city is going to go up in flames.”

“It won’t stop here,” Angela said. “Hitler did the same thing, you know. Staged events like this, had film crews on hand…”

“Social media will do the job this time. They won’t need us anymore,” Carol countered. “Images and videos will go viral within minutes, then the rioting will spread to other cities…”

Lawton nodded. “And that’s exactly why the Right hasn’t wanted to restrict social media. Political violence, uncut and unedited, plays right into their hands.”

“So, what do we do?” Brad asked.

“Sorry kid, but you’re going to have to tell me a little more about your dad.”

Brad nodded, but then he looked away. “Where do you want me to start?”

“Why don’t you begin by telling us why you’re so afraid of him…”

5.

The station’s transmitter vans were, like most iterations of the current design, based on a modified C-Class RV chassis, and the Jackson network affiliate had six Mercedes Sprinter-class vans in service that afternoon. With their large, rotating two-way satellite antennas folded flush to the van’s roof, there was no mistaking what they were or what their purpose was, and when people saw these vans pull up to the scene of a crime they assumed that they were there to cover a big story.

And so it was that day. In fact, the three major legacy networks had multiple vans parked outside of the County Jail, and so did CNN and Fox, and all the networks were on hand because because bail had been denied two days before and racial tensions were simmering once again in Jackson, Mississippi. Civil rights leaders had arrived on jets from Atlanta and local pastors had summoned their flocks to meet down by the courthouse that evening, and now the air was electric – even if it was filled with malignant expectation.

The network’s vans were fairly conventional, too. The rear doors opened onto banks of power generators needed to send AV transmissions to satellites in low earth orbit, but those same generators also powered the bulky video cameras the networks still relied on for ultra-high quality video, as well as the banks of floodlights needed to illuminate both the reporters and the scenes they reported from. The middle of these vans were filled floor to ceiling with powerful mobile editing suites, and an editor worked with the producer to shape the contours of any given story from the seats there. Up front the cameraman acted as driver, while the Face, otherwise known as the Onscreen Talent, sat in the passenger seat, for the most part reading the storyline developed by the producer in order to be able to ask questions that fit the narrative arc of the story they were reporting on.

The Hinds County Courthouse is one of these monstrous gray concrete affairs put up in the 50s and that always seem to exude a certain brooding sense of steady purpose, for the people within such buildings are in the business of processing criminals and prepared to pronounce their innocence or guilt, and if so found, the convicted can begin their journey into and through the vast, brutal penal system.

Immediately next to the courthouse is the Hinds County Jail, a modern tan brick structure designed by an architect who seemed to have fallen in love with drawing 45 degree angles, and between the courthouse and the jailhouse – on the ground level – was a sally-port, a covered garage area where prisoners could be unloaded well away from the prying eyes of reporters and the idly curious.

A still employed Brad McNaughton drove van number C-124 east along Pascagoula Street, then made a right onto Congress and he parked in the space indicated by the mysterious voice, but within a half hour every transmitter van in the region arrived, and for some strange reason they too parked on Congress Street, and this was like leaving a piece of chocolate to melt on a hot sidewalk. Soon, many of the people called upon by civil rights leaders and local pastors to gather downtown saw all the network vans parked on Congress Street so everyone in these huge, jostling crowds decided to head up Congress Street and see what was up, and within a half hour more than ten thousand very angry people were milling about the streets surrounding the Hinds County Courthouse. 

Judges about to leave for the day looked out their windows and instead of seeing lawyers and paralegals heading home now saw huge crowds of very angry Black people, most carrying signs decrying the unjust situation unfolding in the jail. These judges became upset by the sight and so they called the police. And the police were more than ready for the call, so their response was sudden, and massive.

Yet there was one other element missing. An angry crowd of White people who had rallied to the cause of Law and Order.

And at that point three Black Sheriff’s Deputies came down the steps leading out of the jail, and they were leading two Black women to the network news van driven by McNaughton. They stopped and opened the van’s side doors and then disappeared into the crowd, and many people now seemed confused. Not coincidentally, several hundred very angry White people appeared on Congress Street; that was when the shouting began, and within seconds the tear gas canisters began flying.

Washburn and Polk had no idea what was happening to them, only that now they were in a van surrounded by technical equipment they had never seen and could scarcely understand. Yet before the doors were slammed shut, and before McNaughton could drive, a dense crowd surrounded the van and a man appeared in the open doorway. He helped the two women out of the van and McNaughton drove away from his parking place, but crucially, so too did five other network transmitter vans. A large street fight was just getting underway too, and the mood on the street had suddenly turned dark and ugly when the tear gas hit, yet in the confusion the vans drove away from the scene.

Polk and Washburn recognized Peter Lawton, the man standing there smiling at them. “Ladies, if you’ll come with me, I do believe it’s time to leave.” Still surrounded by a small, dense knot of people, Lawton led the two women to a small yellow school bus. “Get in,” he said, “and keep your faces down.”

As Brad resumed driving from the area no one noticed that all six vans driving away appeared to be owned by the same network, or that the number on the side of each van was C-124, and neither did the two police officers in the marked patrol car that pulled in behind the group of vans. Soon the vans started changing positions and breaking away from the formation, but by that point the police officers knew that something was up. They immediately radioed for back up and within minutes all six vans had been located and were being tailed.

McNaughton’s was the first to be pulled over, and the two officers roughly removed him from the van before they searched it – yet they found no escaped prisoners inside. In fact, they found nothing but a bunch of equipment inside, and no people at all.

And within a few minutes the remaining vans had all been pulled over and searched – and still no escaped prisoners were found…

…because Fay Polk and Elise Washburn were now inside a school bus surrounded by dozens of other Black women – and two White reporters – and this bus, along with several more just like it, were all headed out Medgar Evers Boulevard to the Medgar Ever’s House National Monument, where a giant rally was scheduled to start at nine that evening.

But one school bus broke off from this convoy and doubled back to Woodrow Wilson Avenue and that bus then drove out to Hawkins Field Municipal Airport, and the two Black women and the two White reporters exited the bus and walked directly out to a waiting Beech King Air 360ER that was registered out of the Bahamas. A few minutes later a sedan appeared and drove up to the King Air, and both Brad and Carol dashed out of the car and into the aircraft, and within minutes the aircraft was airborne and turning to the east-southeast, flying directly over downtown Jackson…

And one of the pilot’s names was Buck McNaughton.

And down on the streets of downtown Jackson the Back people suddenly turned away from the violence and began marching out to the Evers house, where word was spreading that the girls had escaped and were now on the loose somewhere in the city. And all the civil rights leaders, many friends of Peter Lawton, and all the local pastors called for a peaceful candlelight vigil out at the Evers house…

…while just then the police started searching neighborhoods and homes where Fay and Keisha were known to have lived, and even after professional trackers were called in with their Bloodhounds, the girls still could not be found. 

And as the King Air flew over the Gulf of Mexico, and then over Florida, Brad told Peter and Angela and Carol about his father, about growing up without a real father because his Old Man was always off somewhere flying, and not for an airline but for a strange, almost non-existent company that flew spies to Central America one week and then humanitarian relief supplies to Somalia the next. People had tried to have his father killed more than once, too, and ever since a veil of secrecy had shrouded his father’s comings and goings. And these days his Old Man lived in the Bahamas, alone most of the time – because his mother simply hadn’t been able to compete with his father’s tumultuous life.

And a few hours later the King Air landed at a small, unlighted airstrip on a barren, windswept island barely a hundred miles off the Florida coast, and yet days turned to weeks, and weeks to a month, and still no one knew of the two girls whereabouts…

Until one February evening, when Angela Eastman came on live, apparently from the studios of BBC4 in London. And with her were Fay Polk and Elise Washburn, and it seemed the broadcast was coming live from an undisclosed location because attempts had been made on their lives. The women didn’t know a whole lot about their escape from America, only that they had been on a bus for a while, then on an airliner bound for somewhere, where they had in due course been granted asylum. Fay was awkward and shy and remained silent during most of the interview, and she seemed terribly self-conscious that all this had happened because of her poor baby, while Elise had a few choice words to say about some people’s political choices, but she graciously told the world that she was okay now and practicing medicine as she’d always wanted – without Big Brother peering over her shoulder and telling her what to do, or how to do it. The broadcast ended, for the time being, the long political nightmare endured by many of the politicians who had crafted the laws used to tear apart their country, but as that had always been their intent none were upset for very long that the two women had “escaped justice.” They had bigger fish to fry, for their country had not yet been completely torn apart, so there was still work for them to do.

Coda

It said they be a house out on da point, not a big house but even so they say it be nice inside. After da hurricane it be not so good and it empty for long time, but then we hear that a pilot-man bought it up. These pilot-men be strange creatures, they usually Americans that drinks too much, but they fly them crazy machines anyplace they be money.

But da man who move into da house on da point ain’t no pilot-man. No one know da man, not even his name, and da police has told everyone that da man not to be disturbed.

Though somedays, and for a while now, da man slip out of dis house and walks down to da beach in front of his house – and on most days he just sit there, usually he just stare at da dark clouds over Florida, but even so da man be pulling off his shirt and swimming out to da reef from time to time. Then one day da pilot-man come by da house, and several people got out of da car and went inside da man’s house – but wasn’t long ’til da pilot-man left all those people and they don’t come outside much. At least not during the day.

Of course they still lots of tourists on da island, but few being from America anymore, because America be closed off now, in a kind of war with itself. But tourists still walk the beaches, especially to see da sunset, and then everyone gather by da fire pits and sing da songs that make them happy and then they eat conch fritters and drink rum drinks and then go do the things people always do late at night. Now we hear there be nights when the stranger come and walk among the tourists, but I hear people say he always be lookin’ to the west – where his home used to be.

There be a new lady-doctor at da clinic in Cooper’s Town and it be da strangest thing because she be American too, and most doctors around da islands be British, but she a good doctor and people say she fine.

And a funny thing. A few weeks ago a famous lady from London come to da island, and there be a new rumor that she move in with the strange man in his house on the point, and I know ‘cause sometimes we be seein’ them walk on da beach da way some people do, holding hands and all that. Another story I hear say he a teacher, another say he a writer, but ya know that soon enough no one care. He just da man who live out on the point and who look at da tall clouds to the west before he walk out into the deep blue blue and be swimmin’ out to da reef. Sometime the woman be with da man out there, but I ain’t gonna talk about that stuff.

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, every last word of it…

[Hendrix \\ The Wind Cries Mary]