Seventy-Two Hours

Greer Halloran had a rule about the Corolla, which was that she did not talk to it when it was dying.

It was a decade-old sedan with two hundred and nine thousand miles on the clock and a sticker on the bumper that said Ask Me About My Subpoena. It had survived four winters, two parking tickets she was still disputing, and a raccoon. It was currently doing fifty-eight on the county road above Cold Spring with the radio turned up high against the dark, and she was singing along to a song she did not know the words to, loudly, with feeling, while her mind turned over a lede.

"Dennis Hale was married to a woman named Marianne, who is the sister of the man who—"

No.

"The night before he drowned in Newtown Creek, Dennis Hale ate a ham sandwich at his desk—"

No. Too cute. She thumped the wheel. Three thousand words and she had never found the first one. It was the story of her career and she couldn't find the door.

She glanced in the mirror.

The road behind her was black. The county road at night is a long tunnel of trees with no shoulders and a faint white line, and for nine miles she had seen nothing in her mirror but her own taillights reflected in the leaves. Then, round the last curve, a pair of headlights swung out of the trees, low and wide and steady.

She watched them.

It's a car, she told herself. People drive cars. It's a road.

The lights held a hundred yards back.

She sped up. She did it without thinking, the way you lift your hand from a stove. The Corolla coughed and the needle crept to sixty-five. The headlights did not close. But they did not fall behind, either. They kept their distance with the careful patient geometry of a thing that wasn't in a hurry.

Okay, said Greer. Her mouth had gone dry. Okay. Okay.

She reached into her bag with her right hand without taking her eyes off the road, and found the pepper spray, and put it in her lap.

…

It was a bridge that did it.

A little concrete culvert, single-lane, with a guardrail and a drop of twelve feet to a creek. She saw it coming and thought, with a flash of brilliant stupid hope, they'll hang back for the bridge. And they didn't. The long black sedan came up on her left bumper with a roar she felt in her teeth. She had an instant of white glare in the mirror, the shape of a grille, the smell of hot rubber.

Then the world turned over.

It was a gentle impact, almost courteous, a kiss of fenders on the left rear. She felt the Corolla swing. The wheel spun in her hands. The guardrail rushed up out of the dark with a scream of metal on metal, and her head cracked sideways against the window, and the car slewed and spun and hit the ditch nose-first in a spray of gravel and weeds and came to rest with the engine ticking and one headlight shining a pale yellow cone into the trees.

Silence.

Her ears rang. Something warm ran into her eye. She sat with her hands still locked on the wheel and her body strangely, floatingly calm, and she thought, quite clearly: I'm going to be in the paper.

A car door slammed.

Another.

Boots on gravel. Two sets of them, unhurried, approaching from behind. She could hear them crunching along the shoulder, and a cricket stopped in the grass, and then another. The passenger door was jerked open.

"Miss Halloran."

A man's face leaned in, large, pale, expressionless, lit from below by the dome light. He wore a black knit cap. He had the broken nose of a boxer and a smile like a closed drawer.

"Out of the car, please."

She hit him with the pepper spray.

She did it on pure instinct, a short ferocious spurt directly into the eyes, and the man roared and reeled back with both hands to his face. Greer threw her shoulder against the driver's door. It was jammed. She kicked it. It gave. She spilled out of the car onto her hands and knees in the weeds and scrambled up, and ran.

She got eleven steps.

…

She would remember the rest in pieces, as a reporter remembers an interview that goes on too long.

An arm round her throat from behind. The smell of cigarette smoke and leather and diesel. Her heels leaving the ground. The sky, enormous, studded with stars, and the thought they're so clear out here. A fist in her ribs, hard, flat, expert, and the breath going out of her in a ragged whoop. Her own voice, high and thin, screaming a word she didn't know she knew.

"Stop," said someone. "That's enough."

It was the second man. He had a mild, tired, reasonable voice, like a bank teller's. He crouched beside her where she lay in the gravel with her cheek in the dirt and her knees drawn up, and she saw his shoes, black, polished, absurdly clean.

"I'm sorry about this," he said. "Mr. Brannock was very clear that you should not be hurt more than necessary."

"Go to hell," Greer wheezed.

"Everybody says that." He seemed genuinely sympathetic. "I have a message. I'd like you to remember it. Can you do that?"

She spat gravel.

"You're a reporter. I understand it's what you do. You remember." He took something out of his coat and laid it on the ground in front of her face. It was her laptop. The little silver one, the one with the sticker of a cartoon crab, the one that held three thousand words of 'The Man Who Kept Two Books.' "We won't be needing the rest. It's backed up, I expect. People are careful these days."

"It's—on a—cloud—"

"Of course it is. It doesn't matter." He straightened up. "Mr. Brannock isn't interested in the story. He's interested in the book. You have a friend who's been keeping something that doesn't belong to her. He'd like it returned. Seventy-two hours, Miss Halloran. That's three days. He'll telephone the number he has for Mrs. Varga on Saturday night, at six. If she answers, there will be a place and a time. If she doesn't—"

He paused.

"Then I'm afraid I'd have to say that the next conversation will be about your mother."

The word went into her like a knife.

She had not told anyone. She'd said my mother twice, in two years, to two people. Her mother lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Sheepshead Bay with a very old cat and a cleaning-lady's pension. She was sixty-eight. She called every Sunday. She could not be told.

"You son of a bitch," said Greer, and began to cry.

"I know." He patted her shoulder. It was grotesque. "It's a nasty business. I do it very reluctantly."

He rose. He said something to the other man, who was still bent over with his hands to his face, swearing, and there were boots on the gravel again, retreating. A door shut. An engine turned over.

The headlights swung across her face, and she shut her eyes.

When she opened them there was only the dark and the cricket and the cold dust of the road, and above it all the long white arch of the Milky Way.

Seventy-two hours, she thought.

I have a pen, and a rib that is broken, and my mother's phone number.

Okay.

…

"Don't move."

It was a woman's voice. It was Linnea's.

She came out of the dark like a ghost. She was running, shoeless, her suit jacket flying open, with a tire iron in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and behind her, at a stagger, came Dunne, bald and bleeding and apologetic, in his shirtsleeves, with a shotgun that looked bigger than he was. A pickup stood idling on the road with its lights on, and Greer could see Anselm Varga at the wheel with his hand clenched on the horn.

Linnea knelt in the gravel.

She dropped the tire iron. She put her hands on Greer's face, very gently, either side, as one might hold a cup that might spill, and the flashlight rolled in the weeds and lit up the two of them from below in an absurd pale glow. Her eyes were enormous and wild. She was saying something, over and over, in a voice that did not sound like her.

"—sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I saw them, I saw the car, I should have followed you, I should have—"

"Linn."

"—I saw it. I stood at the gate and I watched—"

"Linn." Greer got her hand up. It hurt a lot. She laid it on the other woman's wrist. "I'm fine. I peppered a guy."

Linnea stopped.

"You what?"

"Pepper spray. In the face. It was great." She tried to laugh, and it went wrong somewhere under the ribs and came out as a cough. "I'm going to need a better lede."

"Don't talk."

"They took my laptop."

"I don't care."

"It's backed up."

"Greer."

She stopped.

Linnea was weeping, openly, soundlessly, the tears running down her face and dropping on her blouse. She looked about nineteen. She looked like a girl in a college dormitory who had gotten a phone call in the night. Greer reached up with her good hand and wiped one off her cheek with her thumb.

"Hey," she said. "Hey. Counselor. I'm fine."

"You're bleeding."

"Head wounds bleed a lot."

"You're—" Linnea swallowed. "You're my best friend."

"I'm aware."

"You're the only one I've got."

"I'm aware of that, too." Greer smiled up at her through the blood, and the stars, and the slow pulse of the ambulance lights now turning in the trees. "You're going to be unbearable about this. I can tell. You're going to put me in a witness protection program and give me a bodyguard named Gary."

A shaky laugh escaped her.

"Gary's available," said Dunne, from the edge of the road, gravely.

…

They kept her at Vassar Brothers for two nights.

It was a clean, bright, ugly hospital in Poughkeepsie, and her room had a window onto a parking structure and a television bolted to the wall. She had four broken ribs, a fractured left wrist, eleven stitches in her scalp, and a mild concussion. The nurses called her hon. A very young doctor with a nose ring told her she was lucky, and Greer said, "Define lucky," and he thought about it and said, "Alive."

She slept most of the first day.

The second, at ten in the morning, she woke to find Emmerich Stahl sitting in the visitor's chair with his gray hat on his knee, reading the Times.

"You will forgive me," he said, without looking up. "They would not let me bring flowers. Apparently there is a policy."

"You came."

"I have come every four hours since Thursday. I was told to sit quietly and to say nothing until you woke." He folded the paper. "I have been practising silence. I find I am no good at it."

She struggled up on the pillows. Her head hurt. Her ribs hurt more. On the tray table beside her stood a paper cup of water and a plastic vase with a single yellow rose in it, which she suspected had come from the lobby gift shop.

"Where's Linnea?"

"With a magistrate in Brooklyn. Arranging protective custody for your mother."

Greer went rigid.

"Do not alarm yourself. She is perfectly safe. Anselm's people moved her in the small hours. She has been told that her building has a gas leak and that she is the guest of a very grand hotel." The corner of his mouth moved. "I understand she has asked the concierge to bring up a second cat."

She laughed. It hurt abominably. She laughed anyway, and tears ran into her ears, and Stahl handed her a handkerchief, and she blew her nose into it with a noise like a goose.

"I don't deserve this," she said.

"No. Probably not." He considered. "Nor do most of us."

"I'm a reporter. I'm supposed to be the one who writes the thing. I'm not supposed to be the thing."

"That is the usual position of reporters."

"I want to run the story."

"I know."

"I want to run it now. This week. Front page of the Dispatch. Dennis Hale, and Hollis Brannock, and Wick, and the camel coat, and the Gate Three lashing, and the whole fucking—" She caught herself. "Sorry."

"Please. I have heard worse from a magistrate."

"Mr. Stahl." She leaned forward, gripping the blanket. "They hurt my mother's address. They said it out loud. If I run this story, I make a liar of every threat they made, and if I don't, I make a liar of me."

He was silent for a moment.

Then he put the paper on the tray table, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked, in the bright flat light, very old and very tired.

"I held two ledgers for four years," he said. "I could not decide which to publish. It was the worst decision of my life and I made it by not making it. I let two men die while I tended my theory." He lifted his head. "I will not advise you. But I will tell you what I believe a reporter is for."

"What?"

"To be the person who writes it down when the person who should have is afraid."

The room was very quiet.

Out in the corridor a trolley rattled past. The window showed a gray sky over a gray structure of ramps. And Greer lay back on the pillows, with her broken wrist on the blanket and a yellow rose in a plastic vase, and felt a thing she had not felt since the morning she'd first walked into the Dispatch with a résumé and a borrowed blazer. It was not courage. It was something older and plainer. It was the plain animal obstinacy of a woman who has been told to stop.

"Give me a pen," she said.

…

She wrote it by hand.

On a yellow pad, left-handed, in a scrawl like a dying spider's, with the pad propped on a pillow and the pen jammed between her second and third fingers. It took her nine hours. She wrote the lede forty-one times. She wrote it in a voice she'd never used, quiet and plain and without a single clever word, and when she had it, she knew it was the one.

Dennis Hale ate a ham sandwich at his desk on the last night of his life. His wife, Marianne, packed it. She put in an extra pickle because he liked them.

That is the first thing you should know about the man whom the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey would later describe, in an internal memorandum, as 'an administrative loss.'

She read it once. She put the pen down.

Then she picked up the hospital phone, and dialed a number she knew by heart, and waited through four rings.

"Aldrich."

"Judith," said Greer. "It's Halloran."

A pause. A rustle of paper. "Miss Halloran. I'm told you've been in an altercation."

"I was run off a bridge by a hired thug. I'm fine." She cleared her throat. "I need to send you something. By courier. Tonight. I'd like you to keep it in the firm safe."

"Is it dangerous?"

"It's a story. It's the best thing I've ever written." She looked at the yellow pages. "It's about the man who killed Dennis Hale. And I'd like you to hold it, sealed, until the day I tell you to publish. Or until the day I can't."

The line was silent.

"A dead man's switch," said Judith Aldrich. Her voice was dry, and very precise, and not unkind. "My dear girl. I haven't been asked to hold one of those since before you were born."

"Will you?"

"I will." A pause. "Does Linnea know?"

"Not yet."

"Don't tell her. She'll try to talk you out of it."

"I know."

"She'd be right." The old woman sighed. "And you would do it anyway. You are very like her. It's why I hired you both."

The line clicked.

…

On Saturday morning, at a quarter to six, Greer sat up in bed with a cup of cold tea and a rib-belt and the sunrise lighting up the parking structure in long gold bars, and counted the hours.

Seventy-two. It was Saturday. Brannock would call tonight.

She had a plan, of a sort. Not a good one. The kind a woman in a hospital gown comes up with at five in the morning, which is to say it was mostly stubbornness, with a layer of spite. She would sit here. She would be a very good patient. She would wait for Linnea to come and tell her what the rest of the world had decided. And then she would write it down.

There was a knock at the door.

It was a soft knock, polite, three taps. "Miss Halloran?"

She knew the voice. She did not know where from, and then she did, all at once, the way you know a face in a crowd. The floor dropped.

"Come in," she said.

The door opened. He had to stoop to get through. He was very big, gray at the temples, in a dark coat that did not belong in July. He carried a bouquet of white lilies in his enormous hands, and he wore a look of solemn, shy, bashful concern, and his eyes were red.

"I'm sorry to intrude," said Cormac Ruddick. "Mr. Varga asked me to see how you were."

Greer did not move.

She was aware of the pen in her fingers. She was aware of a long black car, and a boy on a motorbike, and a photograph of a café window. She was aware of a man in a library saying, quietly, we leave him exactly where he is.

She thought of her mother in a hotel suite, feeding a cat.

Smile, she told herself. You're a journalist. You've smiled at worse.

"Mr. Ruddick," said Greer Halloran, and held out her good hand. "How very kind."

He crossed the floor. He laid the lilies on the tray table, next to the plastic rose. He took her hand in his, carefully, in the great soft dry paw of a man who has held a great many doors. His fingers were trembling.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "It's a terrible thing. A terrible, terrible thing."

"Yes," said Greer.

She looked into his face. It was a broad, heavy, decent face, with the creased eyes of a man who has not slept in some time, and what she saw there was not villainy. It was something much worse. It was grief.

He means it, she thought. Stahl was right.

God help us all.

"Please," she said gently, "sit down."