The Darkness - Jason Pinter [5]
She watched him go, waiting to make sure he was
gone. Her body was racked with pain, and she could
barely stand. Her hands felt like they'd held a battery from
both ends, and when she dialed the car service it took
three tries to get the number right. When the operator
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asked where she was, Paulina had to walk ten minutes just
to find a street sign.
"What the heck are you doing way out there?" the
man asked.
"Just get here, fast," she said before hanging up.
It was half an hour before the car service arrived.
Paulina huddled under a nearby tarp to stay dry. The
driver, a short, thick man with a bushy mustache, got out.
He looked her over, his lip curled up. He was as confused
as she was.
"Miss," he said, "are you okay? Do you need me to
take you to the hospital?"
"Just take me home," she said. "And help me up."
The driver bent down, put his arm around Paulina and
helped the shuddering reporter into the backseat of his car.
As he drove away, the man said, "Don't worry, miss.
I'm taking you home. Everything's okay."
Paulina looked up at him, slimy mascara stinging her
eyes. And she thought, No. It's not.
2
Monday
New York City exists in a perpetual headwind. If you
live here or work here, you can either lean into the wind
and brace yourself, moving forward a step at a time,
keeping pace with the other people who are doing the
same. Or you can lose your balance and be blown away
like a crumpled newspaper. Some people lean into the
wind and try to walk faster. They press ahead, moving at
greater speeds than the rest of us. But with greater reward
comes greater risk, and the more you lean the faster you
can lost your balance and be blown away.
My brother fell. My idol and mentor, Jack O'Donnell,
fell. I was still leaning into the wind, sometimes hard
enough to lose my balance. I'd lived and worked in this
gusty city for several years now, and thought I was used
to it. But time and time again, the city showed me just
how strong the winds could be.
I got to the office of the New York Gazette at eight
o'clock sharp, half an hour before I was supposed to be
there, and even fifteen minutes before I'd said I'd be
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there. To put it mildly, this was the most excited I'd been
about the job in a long time.
The last few weeks had been a maelstrom of violence
and secrets. I'd recently learned that my father had had
an affair thirty years ago, and that affair resulted in the
birth of a boy named Stephen Gaines. My brother.
I didn't learn about Stephen until just a few weeks ago,
when he showed up out of nowhere at the offices of the
New York Gazette, where I worked as a reporter. Gaines
was stoned and scared out of his mind that night, and for
that reason I didn't give him a chance to tell his story. I
didn't see the man up close until a few hours later. After
I learned he'd been shot to death in his own apartment.
When I saw him next, he was lying on a slab in the
morgue.
Not what you'd call the most enjoyable family reunion.
I'd pieced the truth together in a large part spurred on
by a book written by Jack O'Donnell called Through the
Darkness. In that book, he discussed the murder of a lowly
drug dealer named Butch Willingham who was possibly
murdered by an elusive drug kingpin nicknamed the Fury.
Yet the truth wasn't whole. If the Fury did exist, then
something big was on the horizon. Butch Willingham's
murder was one of a spate of drug-related murders, and
if history did repeat itself, that meant Stephen's murder
was merely the beginning.
Coming to grips with the life and death of the brother
I'd never known was difficult, if not impossible. It was
something I was still struggling with. Eventually we
tracked down the man who killed him, a low-level drug
dealer who seemed to want Gaines dead to open up the door
for his own upward mobility in the New York drug trade.
But something about it still didn't sit right. It was too
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neat, too clean. Too many questions still lingered, an
open wound that