A Scourge of Vipers (2 page)

“Can you give me some time to think it over?”

“Sure thing, Mulligan. Just don't take too goddamn long, okay? I'm havin' a helluva time holding Maggie off. She's fuckin' relentless.”

*   *   *

I never learned how Mario found out about Whoosh's offer, but two days later the threatening phone calls started. The first one went something like this:

“You Mulligan?”

“The one and only. And you are?”

“I'm the guy who's gonna be your worst nightmare if you don't stop messin' with what's mine.”

“You mean the redhead I picked up at Hopes Friday night?”

“What? No.”

“Cuz you're welcome to her,” I said. “She's a poor conversationalist, and the sex was below average. I got no plans to see her again.”

“Stop kidding around, asshole. You know what I'm talkin' about.”

“Let me think. Did my story about no-show sanitation jobs cause you some inconvenience?”

“I'm talkin' about my Uncle Whoosh's racket, you dumb fuck. You better hear what I'm saying, cuz this ain't no joke. Back off, or I'm gonna tear you a new one.”

He called me daily after that, usually right around midnight. I should have stopped provoking him, but I didn't. Sometimes I just can't help myself. So after work last Friday, I found my Ford Bronco vandalized in the parking lot across from
The Dispatch,
although with all the old dents and rust, the new damage matched the décor. And tonight, before I came home and found the snake, Mario caught me staggering out of Hopes after last call and pointed a small nickel-plated revolver at me.

“Ain't laughing now,” he said, “are you, shithead?”

“You haven't said anything funny yet.”

“My uncle's racket is supposed to go to me. I'm his blood. This is my future you're fuckin' with. I don't know what you got on Uncle Whoosh, but I'm warning you. Get lost. If you don't, I'm gonna bust one right through your heart, you fuckin' snake.”

He was pointing the gun at my belly when he said it. I wasn't sure if he was confused about human anatomy or just a lousy shot.

Confident that he'd made his point, Mario brushed past me and pimp-walked away down the sidewalk. As I turned to watch him go, he shoved the pistol into his waistband and pulled his shirttail over it. I decided not to take any more chances. The next time we met, Mario wouldn't be the only one packing heat.

*   *   *

My late grandfather's Colt, the sidearm he'd carried for decades as a member of the Providence PD, used to hang in a shadowbox on my apartment wall. I'd taken it down and learned how to shoot a few years ago after my investigation into a string of arsons in the city's Mount Hope section provoked death threats. But Grandpa's gun had a hell of a kick and was too large for easy concealment. So the day after that encounter with Mario, I splurged three hundred bucks on a Kel-Tec PF-9 at the D&L gun shop in Warwick. The chopped-down pocket pistol was five and a half inches long, had an unloaded weight of just twelve and a half ounces, and tucked comfortably into the waistband at the small of my back.

Beyond ten yards, I couldn't hit anything smaller than Narragansett Bay, but I didn't figure on doing any sharpshooting.

 

2

It was just past eight
A.M
. when I stepped into
The Dispatch
's third-floor newsroom and punched the time clock. The device was the latest employee-friendly innovation from General Communications Holdings International—GCHI to its closest friends—the bottom-feeding media conglomerate that had gobbled up the struggling newspaper last year. I'd never heard of a newsroom with a time clock, but there was no fighting progress.

“Mulligan?” the receptionist said. “The managing editor would like a word.”

I plodded over to the aquarium, a glass-walled office where
Mister
Twisdale—who did not allow the staff to call him Charles and became apoplectic when addressed as Chuck or Charlie—sprawled in the black leather throne formerly occupied by my longtime boss, Ed Lomax. Lomax's passion had been to put out the best newspaper he could every day. Twisdale's assigned task was to wring as much money as possible from
The Dispatch
before it finally went belly-up.

He was a six-foot-three-inch, broad-shouldered thirty-two-year-old with a boy's regular haircut, a white dress shirt, and a red rep tie splattered with the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity emblem. Wrists thickened by weight lifting shot out of a navy-blue blazer he'd probably bought on sale at Men's Wearhouse. The smug bastard liked the way he looked.

I didn't, but I gave him a toothy good-morning grin and said, “What's up, Chuck?”

“Do I really have to tell you again?” he said.

“Tell me what, Chuck?”

“How to address your superiors.”

I made a show of looking around.

“I don't see any of those here.”

“Stop being such an asshole, Mulligan. When you win a Pulitzer, you can be an asshole.”

“Really, Chuckie? When did you win yours?”

If he'd bothered to read my personnel file, he would have known that I
had
won a Pulitzer. Not that I gave a shit about that. It was a long time ago. I was more concerned about all the other things this former TV news producer from Oklahoma City didn't know about leadership, newspapers, Providence, or being human.

Over the years, I'd had my share of squabbles with Lomax, but I missed him. He'd been summarily dismissed because he possessed two qualities that our new owners could not tolerate—integrity and a hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar salary. Living on Social Security and savings now, he and his wife recently sold their big house in Cumberland and moved into a small condo in East Providence.

Twisdale glowered at me, then gave it up when he saw it wasn't working.

“You're late,” he said.

“Just by five minutes.”

“Which means you'll be docked an hour's wages. Company policy.” He sucked in a deep breath and blew it out through his nose. “Do you know why I put up with you, Mulligan?”

“Not a clue.”

“Because you're productive. You turn out twice as much copy as any of your colleagues.”

“Do you know why, Chuckie-boy?”

“I suppose you're going to tell me.”

“It's because you fired most of the paper's experienced reporters and replaced them with a skeleton crew of fresh j-school grads. Sure, they work cheap, but you get what you pay for. Most of them don't know the difference between a deadline and a chorus line.”

Another glower.

“I
know
what you're up to, Mulligan.”

“You do?”

“You're trying to bait me into firing you so you can join the rest of the moochers who live off food stamps and unemployment checks.”

Chuckie-boy was on to me. If I quit, I wouldn't qualify for unemployment. If he let me go, I could live off Uncle Sugar while I figured out what the hell to do next.

“Well,” he said, “it's not going to work.”

“Oh, darn.”

“There's a stack of press releases on your desk. Get cracking.”

I'd never worked for anyone who said “get cracking” before, and I didn't like it. It made me want to crack his head. As I turned to leave, he pulled a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer from his desk drawer and shot a dab into his palm. Funny. I didn't remember us shaking hands.

The football-field-size newsroom felt hollow as I trudged to my cubicle past the handful of reporters and editors still employed there. Twenty-two years ago, when I hired on as a cub reporter, the place bustled day and night. The news department numbered three hundred and forty then, and they were the very best at what they did, making
The Dispatch
one of the finest small-city metros in the country. But decades of declining circulation and advertising revenue had taken a toll. By the time the local owners finally gave up and sold out last year, the news staff had already been reduced to eighty. At the time, it was hard to imagine it could get any smaller. Our new corporate overlords promptly cut it in half.

They accomplished this—yes, they trumpeted it as an accomplishment—by eliminating the copy desk, firing the entire photo staff, and giving cameras to the reporters, most of whom didn't know which end of the lens to look through. Now our stories, along with those from the chain's twenty-seven other piece-of-shit dailies, were e-mailed to GCHI's “international editing center,” located in a strip mall on the outskirts of Wichita. There, junior-college dropouts with a tenuous grasp of English grammar checked them over and e-mailed them back. Because they had never laid eyes on Providence, thought Rhode Island was an island, and couldn't locate New England on a map, the chances of them catching our green reporters' mistakes were close to zero.

On today's front page, Aborn Street appeared as Auburn Street, State Senator Parker Smyth was identified as U.S. Senator Parker Smith, Burnside Park was rechristened Sideburns Park, and the Woonasquatucket River was spelled three different ways, each of them wrong.

Not much real journalism was getting done either. Gone were the days of aggressive political and criminal justice reporting, sophisticated science and religion writing, blanket coverage of all thirty-nine Rhode Island cities and towns, and blockbuster investigations that had sent scores of politicians, mobsters, and crooked businessmen to the gray-bar hotel. Now the news pages were filled with rewritten press releases, crime news cribbed from police reports, fawning features about our few remaining advertisers, and columns of clumsily cut wire copy. Meetings and press conferences were often covered by monitoring the local-access cable TV channel. Our reporters were seldom allowed out of the office, dispatched only when a three-alarm fire broke out or a grisly murder was committed—this thanks to our former TV producer's “if it bleeds it leads” news philosophy. On most days, the longest story in the paper was the list of corrections on page two. I used to be proud to work at
The Dispatch.
Now it was a freaking embarrassment.

Late that afternoon, I was rewriting a press release touting the Providence Place Mall's fabulous upcoming St. Patrick's Day celebration (“Fun for the whole family!”) when Chuckie-boy summoned me again.

“Channel 10 is saying the cops have fished a body out of the Seekonk River just above the falls in Pawtucket.”

“It's the Blackstone River,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“It becomes the Seekonk River
below
the falls. Above the falls, it's called the Blackstone.”

“Whatever. It's close to here, right?”

“Less than ten miles.”

“I need you to get out there ASAP.”

“Soon as I find my sunglasses. I've been stuck behind a desk so long that my eyes are unaccustomed to daylight.”

 

3

The Blackstone rises at the confluence of Mill Brook and Middle River in the old industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts, tumbles southeast through a string of suburbs and rural villages, and enters Rhode Island at the decaying mill city of Woonsocket. Then it scoots south through the bedroom communities of Cumberland and Lincoln, mopes past the triple-decker slums of Central Falls, and finally rolls into the city of Pawtucket, where Samuel Slater erected the first water-powered cotton mill in America in 1790. There, forty-eight miles from its source, it spills over a low dam into the tidal Seekonk River.

In colonial times, the Blackstone was alive with Atlantic salmon and the lamprey that preyed upon them; but by the mid-1800s it had become an open sewer, running thick with effluent from textile mills, solvents and heavy metals from jewelry and woodworking shops, and human waste from the cities and towns along its course. In 1990, the Environmental Protection Agency branded it the most toxic river in America, and recent attempts to clean it up have been only marginally successful. Today it is designated a class C river, unsafe for swimming but suitable for boating and fishing if you don't mind the odor and have the good sense not to eat what you catch. That doesn't deter immigrant anglers who pull carp, one of the few critters hardy enough to survive in it, out of the murk and bring them home to poison their hungry children.

I cruised down Roosevelt Avenue past Pawtucket City Hall, a grotesque pile of masonry that gives Art Deco a bad name, and pulled Secretariat, my pet name for the Bronco, into the nearly empty Slater Mill Historic Site parking lot. There, a uniformed cop was waving away two Mystic, Connecticut, school buses crammed with middle-school kids who were too preoccupied with their iPhones to look out the windows. No field trip today, boys and girls. Take a rain check. The docents at the Slater Mill museum will bore the hell out of you with their looms and shuttles at a later date.

I grabbed my Nikon, climbed out of Secretariat, and flashed my press pass at the uniform.

“You're gonna have to wait over there,” he said, pointing toward two TV vans and a clutch of reporters and photographers who didn't seem to be doing anything.

“
No inglés,
” I said. I brushed past him and hustled toward a medical examiner's wagon and six Pawtucket police cars clustered beside a band of bare young maples that skirted the riverbank.

“Hey, bud! You hard of hearing?”

“
No comprendo,
” I shouted and kept moving.

Before I got there, I was intercepted by a bespectacled young man wearing a cheap suit and tie under an unbuttoned cloth topcoat. He was carrying a clipboard.

“Excuse me, sir. Are you with the press?”

“¿Por qué?”
I said.

And he said,
“¿Cómo te llamas?”

The game was up. I didn't know any more Spanish.