Vengeance Road

And now Styebeck pays Fowler a late-night visit.

Piece by piece a picture was emerging. Something large was percolating beneath the surface, but he didn’t know what it was.

Was a cop suspected of murder being protected?

All right, better let things simmer, he told himself as he got to Cheektowaga, one of Buffalo’s first suburbs. He lived in Cleveland Hill, a working-and middle-class neighborhood of proud, flag-on-the-porch homes built after the Second World War.

Mostly Polish-American families lived here, going back two and three generations. But he hadn’t gone very far either. He’d grown up on the fringes of Cleveland Hill, near the Heights, a rougher district.

Buffalo was his home. A place he loved.

It was also his prison, he thought as he pulled into a parking space at the building where he lived, a tired-looking apartment complex built in the 1960s. He grabbed his bag, got his mail and took the elevator to the sixteenth floor.

His building had more good tenants than bad. There were a few noisy neighbors and a few creeps. And sometimes the halls were heavy with the smells of exotic cooking. But generally people left him alone.

He liked that.

His apartment had a large, sweeping view. The wind often charged off Lake Erie and rattled his windows, but it was warm in the winter.

He sat on his couch and sorted through his mail. There were mostly bills, then a letter from Ron Cook, an old reporter friend, who’d quit his job at the Detroit Free Press to teach English in Addis Ababa.

“Buddy, here’s an application if you’re looking for a career change and an escape from the snow!”

Gannon pondered the idea for a moment, but he had too much going on here to give it serious consideration.

No, thanks, Ron.

Then he came to a letter from the lawyer handling his parents’ estate, reminding him that the anniversary was coming up for payment on the unit where he’d stored their belongings. Did he want to pay for another year, or did he have other plans for his family’s property?

He’d deal with that later.

He tossed the letters on his coffee table, opened his bag, and had started reading the file Mary Peller had given him on her missing daughter when his cell phone rang.

“Gannon.”

“It’s Fowler. We’ve got a substantial retraction going in tomorrow’s edition. In thirty minutes we start rolling it off the presses.”

“You didn’t call to tell me that.”

“Give me your source and I’ll kill the retraction.”

Gannon said nothing. Now more than ever he didn’t trust his managing editor.

“Jack, give me your source and we can all have our lives back.”

“Does Bernice Hogan get her life back? Why does Styebeck get a free ride?”

“The police have publicly pissed on your story and the Sentinel today. You were wrong. We have to swallow that and move on.”

“I was not wrong. And I can’t give up my source.”

“Think about what you’re risking. Your job is hanging by a thread, Gannon. You’ve got about twenty-nine minutes to think it over.”

Gannon didn’t call.

He took a hot shower, dressed and got into his car.

Freeway traffic was light as he glided along Interstate 90.

He left the interstate and got on Genesee. As he headed into the heart of the city, Buffalo’s skyline rose before him: the HSBC Center, the Rand Building and City Hall.

He found himself at the Sentinel’s loading docks, an area bordered by a chain-link fence that trapped stray papers and flyers. The air smelled of newsprint and exhaust as trucks and vans performed a marshaling ballet in and out of the ten bays, laden with damp copies of the first edition.

He was watching an act in the swan song of the newspaper industry, an industry in which he’d invested everything.

But he was not giving up.

He parked and went to the gate. Holding up a dollar bill, he flagged down a van departing for its route.

“Sell me a copy?”

The driver had a scar on his cheek. He snatched Gannon’s buck then reached to his passenger seat, grunted and handed him a fresh copy of the Buffalo Sentinel.

The retraction was there on the front page, framed in a shaded box with a different font. He scanned, “Sentinel offers its apology …”

“Uncorroborated information …”

“Erroneous reporting …”

“Taken action …”

“Suspended …” The words landed like punches until he heard a clank down the street at a row of newspaper boxes.

A carrier was loading a box for the Buffalo News. Gannon went over and bought a paper. The News had clobbered him with their front-page coverage, giving him his comeuppance in a column under the headline:

The Pulitzer Finalist Who Got It Wrong

The item pontificated about the journalistic failing of rushing to be first at the expense of getting it right. Gannon lowered the papers, like flags of defeat.

What happened?

Less than twenty-four hours ago he owned the news in this town. Now his world was collapsing.

He nearly vanished in the dust that swirled around him as the delivery trucks thundered by. A cold wind kicked up from Lake Erie and he retreated to his car and drove away, traveling back through his life.

Being a reporter was all he’d ever wanted to be.

He was a blue-collar kid. His mother worked long hours as a waitress, while his father worked hard shifts in a factory on the lakeshore that made rope. Both of them were newspaper readers, a trait they’d passed on to him.