It's Always Darkest Read online

  It’s Always Darkest

  by

  Steve Spencer

  Copyright © 2011 by Stephen C. Spencer

  www.PaulDMallory.com

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people and actual events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by anyone who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

  The photograph of the young woman on the cover is in the public domain, and can be seen in its original state at

  http://www.public-domain-photos.com/people/girl-in-shadow

  Edited and Published by Stephen C. Spencer:

  [email protected]

  Prologue

  Sussex Youth Baseball Complex

  Tallahassee, Florida

  eleven years ago

  Between innings, the two young umpires—at twenty-four and twenty years of age, not much older than the players they were officiating—stood near the visitors’ on-deck circle and watched impassively while the rain continued to fall around them, as it had been doing for the last thirty minutes. The visiting team, up by a run and needing only three outs to make it an official game, was already on the field, eager to get on with it. The home side were ready, too: they had the middle of the order coming up, and liked their chances of tying or winning it right now.

  The field took water well, but it was near its saturation point. Puddles had begun to form on the infield dirt, and the quick-dry stuff they were using around the batters boxes and the pitcher’s mound had all it could do to keep up. A light but steady drizzle came straight down, unaccompanied by wind, thunder, or lightning.

  That was the problem.

  Added to the rain, any of those three factors would have raised enough safety issues to make calling off the game a no-brainer; but as things stood, the umpires were faced with the mother of all judgment calls. This was the last game of the season, the league championship was on the line, and, because many of the players would soon be leaving town on summer vacation or joining their American Legion teams, there was no good way to reschedule. It was now or never…and everyone seemed to be in favor of “now.”

  “What do you think?” the plate umpire asked his partner. Under the rules, he was the de facto umpire-in-chief and had sole discretion in deciding whether to call off the game, but he understandably wanted the younger man’s input: the kid had been umpiring on one level or another since he was thirteen, for Chrissake, and his old man was a fifteen-year veteran in the majors, with three World Series under his belt to boot.

  The “kid” would not have let the game continue. To him, the field was unplayable, maybe borderline unsafe. That was all that mattered. First game of the season or the last, it made no difference. What the players or the coaches or the league wanted was irrelevant. If they needed a champion so badly, they could play tiddly winks for the honor. Or flip a coin. Had he been working the plate, he’d wave the teams off the field in a second, and to hell with everybody.

  For a fleeting moment, he considered telling his partner as much. It had been a long hot muggy June night and he yearned to be back at the dorm, where it was cool and dry and where he could—if his roommate hadn’t drunk it all again—enjoy a leisurely bottle of Red Stripe beer before bed.

  Instead, though, he shook his head—a quick, short shake. Water droplets flew from the bill of his sodden black cap.

  “Your call, Tom,” he said, grinning. “Need to learn to make these decisions for yourself.”

  Tom stared at him. His mouth opened, then closed. He turned toward the home team’s dugout and extended his right arm, beckoning.

  “Let’s go,” he snapped.

  The first batter took a ball, then a strike. On the third pitch he swung late and sliced a twisting fly ball into short right field. The right fielder charged in as the second baseman, with farther to run but a better angle, hustled over. Both players were shouting that it was their play to make. Both kept coming.

  On the other hand, the field umpire, stationed behind first base with nobody on, barely had to move. He had only to turn around to be in perfect position to make two calls: first—always—whether the ball was fair or foul; and second, whether there was a catch or no catch. He watched the ball’s descent and registered, rather than saw, that the two fielders were vectoring in on the same point at high speed, neither of them hearing the other player’s cries.

  It never occurred to him to call out a warning; that wasn’t his job.

  In the last possible instant, the second baseman seemed to want to give way. He tried to dive to one side, but his foot slipped in the wet grass and the kid launched himself directly into his teammate’s right knee just as the ball touched that player’s glove, about eighteen inches inside the foul line and six inches off the ground.

  There came a sickening crack of bone meeting bone, immediately followed by a long high-pitched shriek of agony that sounded like it came from a twelve-year-old girl instead of a seventeen-year old boy. The right fielder went down, still screaming and rolling from side to side. The second baseman lay face down in the grass and made no sound or movement. Dark red blood oozed from inside his right ear. The falling rain diluted the blood, but failed to wash it completely away. The baseball—throwing up a fishtail of water in its wake—skittered into foul territory and came to a stop.

  The field umpire registered all of this, too, but he had eyes and thoughts only for the ball and its position relative to the foul line when it was first touched. That, after all, was his job. His left arm shot out, fingers extended: fair ball. Then he turned and sprinted back down the first-base line, hustling to get in position for a possible play at home plate. As he ran, his peripheral vision picked up Tom, who had moved into the middle of the diamond in order to track the runner’s progress around the bases. It was perhaps just as well that he could not see the expression on his partner’s face…

  There was no play—at home plate or anywhere else. The ball lay untouched and forgotten as teammates in the field and coaches from both dugouts sprinted toward the fallen players. The batter-runner circled the bases uncertainly, stopping at each station to peer out into right field, as though he were in some way responsible for the catastrophe. Eventually he came around and touched home plate, tying the score. On the now deathly-quiet field, the electronic click of the scoreboard as the number on the HOME side changed from 3 to 4 was audible from almost four hundred feet away.

  Twelve minutes later, a helicopter touched down and airlifted the right fielder to Capital Regional Medical Center. Shortly thereafter, two paramedics lifted the second baseman onto a gurney and slid him into the back of a waiting ambulance, which then moved slowly away—lights, no siren. In his case, there was no need for urgency: the boy had died instantly, on impact.

  For a long, long time afterward, the umpire remembered very little of what had happened. Indeed, he had in his mind reduced the play to its essentials. A fly ball was touched in fair territory, but not caught. He made the call, then ran to cover home plate, as two-man mechanics dictated in this situation, and as he’d done dozens of times before (because he preferred to “go out” on anything doubtful with nobody on base). He saw the batter-runner touch home plate. That was all he saw; it was all that really mattered.

  The memory of that evening rarely came back to him these days; but only because it had been supplanted by something far, far worse…

  At almost the exact time of the Tallahassee accident—although the local time was fourteen hours ahead of Eastern Daylight—a catastrophe of quite a different sort was taking place. The wedding of a young man i
n Vladivostok, Russia was canceled when the bride-elect decided against going through with the ceremony.

  She appeared at the church and gave her intended the news at T-minus fifteen minutes, giving him the (to her) quite reasonable explanation that she didn’t love him and was going to instead marry the man she had broken up with some six months before. Quite unreasonably, she had brought the man along with her, expressing the hope that all three of them could be very good friends.

  The jilted groom listened to this stupidity without showing the slightest emotion. When his erstwhile fiancée finished, he nodded once, but said nothing. The two lovebirds left the church hand in hand, and a few minutes later, the baffled wedding party dissolved and went their separate ways.

  Within six hours, the cancelled wedding’s parallel with the Tallahassee disaster became complete, ending with one of its participants dead and another crippled.

  In the boyfriend’s case, someone had judged things to a nicety. He had been beaten to within an inch of his life, suffering permanent disfigurement, compound fractures in all four limbs, and brain damage that would forever leave him with the mental acuity of a six-year-old child.

  An employee discovered the woman the next morning in the church where she was to have been married, bound hand and foot and hanging on a hook in the cloakroom, suspended there by a thin piece of wire around her neck. Equally great pains had apparently been taken with her. Only by standing on tiptoe and craning her neck could she relieve the strangulating pressure on her windpipe; but she couldn’t stand that way forever. The coroner later estimated that it had taken her perhaps as long as thirty minutes to die.

  Chapter One

  I merged into Thursday morning’s eastbound traffic, flipped the visor down, and set my cruise control in the wake of a black Lexus doing a reasonable six miles an hour over the limit. The sun got in under the visor, hitting me right between the eyes and instantly raising the temperature in the car another five degrees. Squinting and swearing, I reached over and turned the air conditioner up a notch. The first day of June was going to be a hot one, but the weather was clear and the track fast, for whatever that was worth.

  The way I felt, it wasn’t worth much.

  My stomach rumbled, and I couldn’t blame it. In the passenger-side seat, a crumpled and sticky cellophane wrapper was all that remained of my usual nutritious breakfast, and the coffee, when I drained the last ounce or so from its flimsy Styrofoam cup, was as cold and sour as my disposition. Even the heaven-sent voice of Karen Carpenter singing “Top Of The World” on my satellite radio failed to cheer me up—which for me was saying something.

  The track in question was I-495, better known in these parts as the Long Island Expressway. I was on my way to Southampton, a place I didn’t like, to interview for a job that I neither wanted nor needed. I’d been on the road for almost three hours and still had an hour to go. For the tenth time that morning, I considered turning around and going home; for the tenth time that morning, I kept heading east.

  Like a fool.

  I wondered why. I was under no obligation to go and see the man. I never told him I would. Hell, he hadn’t given me the chance to tell him anything. And, like I said, I didn’t want a job. I already had a job. Covering sports for the East Lambert Tribune wasn’t the absolute apex of journalistic achievement, but the work was easy and fun. It paid for beer, cigars, and the occasional trip to the race track. Every once in a while, it even paid some of the bills.

  All my considering and wondering was a load of crap. I hated myself for blowing a day off this way, but I knew damned well why I was doing it; knew, too, that I couldn’t resist it any more than a compass could resist pointing north. Quite simply, I wanted to know what this crazy deal was all about, and the answer to that lay out at the far end of Long Island, with the mysterious owner of the business card that now rested in the holder next to my empty coffee cup.

  Said owner of said card approached me Tuesday night as I left the press box at RCB Ballpark, where I’d just watched the Staten Island Yankees use a seven-run eighth inning to beat the Brooklyn Cyclones, 10-4.

  Or maybe “approached” is the wrong word, suggesting as it does a gradual drawing near, because I never saw him coming. For all I knew, he could have materialized out of thin air, but there was nothing thin about this guy. Dressed in a dark blue suit with a discreet red pinstripe, he was large enough and round enough to join the solar system with no questions asked. The cigar protruding from the right side of his mouth would have been a full day’s work for the best torcedor in Havana, and if he was worried about the stadium being smoke-free, he gave no sign of it. Gave no sign, in fact, of ever being worried about much of anything.

  We stood there looking at each other. I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t get past him without moving him physically, and to move him physically, I’d have needed to rent a derrick.

  The apparition removed the cigar and spoke. His voice, though friendly enough, was deep and authoritative—the voice of a man who was used to getting what he wanted.

  “Mr. Mallory, isn’t it? Mr. Paul Mallory?”

  I nodded. “That’s me. What can I—”

  With a bit of legerdemain even Houdini would have envied, he produced a card and thrust it into my hand. Cramer Press Syndicate, it read, followed by a Southampton address. There was no phone number, no name. I flipped it over. The other side was blank. I looked up, feeling my eyebrows rise as I did so.

  “What—”

  “I’d like to talk to you about coming to work for me, Mr. Mallory,” the man boomed, his words echoing throughout the now-empty stadium. “When is your next free day?”

  “Day after tomorrow,” I answered automatically. “Thursday. But what kind of—”

  “Excellent. Nine-thirty suit you? Good. See you then. Don’t bother with a résumé.”

  He spun on his heel and vanished around a corner so quickly that I wondered whether I’d imagined the whole encounter. I couldn’t hear his footsteps; and when I looked around that same corner a few seconds later, there was nothing there to see. But I had his business card (such as it was) in my hand, and the smoke from his cigar still hung in the air over me. It smelled wonderful.

  I had never heard of the Cramer Press Syndicate, so when I got home that night, I did some quick and dirty research. Based in New York City, the outfit seemed to consist of a wire service and twenty-four dailies scattered across the country in cities that looked like they’d been chosen by a drunk throwing darts at a map: Medford (Oregon), Yuma (Arizona), Pompano Beach (Florida), and Lewiston (Maine) formed the boundaries of a large and curious quadrilateral.

  I didn’t learn very much. Each of the papers was described only as a “daily newspaper…covering local news, sports, business, jobs, and community events.” Each was published seven days a week. None had a website. Newspapers were a dying breed, and Cramer’s bunch seemed to be no exception: their circulation numbers were modest at best, running from twelve to sixteen thousand in each location. With few exceptions, each was the second newspaper in a two-paper town. They couldn’t be making the man any money; why was he bothering with them?

  And about his wire service, I learned even less. It did at least have a website, but that consisted of no more a single sentence on a white screen, stating that membership in the Cramer Press Syndicate had to be applied for in person. Yet there were no points of contact: no links to click, no forms to fill out, no email addresses, no phone numbers, no nothing. Damned annoying. Whoever this clown was, he wasn’t much of a salesman.

  Maybe he didn’t have to be.

  I flicked on my turn signal and took the exit for 27-East. The clock on the dash read 9:02, and the fuel gauge stood at just under seven-sixteenths. It had been almost full when I left the apartment.

  That was damned annoying, too. What a waste of time and gas money. And to what end? I didn’t want Cramer’s crummy job, whatever it was. Even if he could significantly improve on my present salary (which wouldn’t be
difficult), I wasn’t about to pack up and go to work on a paper in Yuma or Medford or Pompano Beach. Or anywhere in between. I hate travel of any kind and, like the objects at rest in Newton’s First Law, much prefer to remain at rest. All I wanted to do today was find some facts.

  Starting now.

  The Cramer Press Syndicate looked more like a prison compound than it did a news organization. Two sets of high fences, razor-wired top, middle, and bottom, delineated thirty yards of barren no-man’s land. Inside the inner fence lay a small parking lot and an acre of perfectly groomed perennial ryegrass; in the middle of this sat a plain one-story red brick building with high windows and a flat roof. At the gate, one large armed guard in camouflage gear checked my driver’s license, while another spoke quietly into a field radio. After about a minute, they let me in without looking too happy about it, and the man with the radio pointed toward where I was supposed to park.

  Except for my car, the parking lot was empty. I pulled into my designated space and disembarked. Then I took my suit jacket from the back seat, put it on, and adjusted my tie in the driver’s side window. Walking up the blue and white canopied walkway, I was stopped for both a full-body X-ray scanner and a magnetometer, after which yet another guard ran my license through a computer check before admitting me. I’d been through less intrusive cavity searches. The guard handed my license back and, with something less than a welcoming smile, opened the door for me. I took a deep breath and went inside.

  The outer office was a spotless model of efficiency, an antiseptically clean and well-lighted place that would have made the one in Hemingway’s story look like a Bowery flophouse. The walls, devoid of any type of decoration, were oyster white; the short-pile carpet, navy blue. What little furniture there was consisted almost exclusively of glass and stainless steel. Deep in the background, so deep and quiet as to be almost subliminal, a piped-in music channel played the Stan Getz/Astrud Gilberto version of their 1964 top five hit, “The Girl From Ipanema.”