The Last Story

By Richard Cheverton

In the hothouse of modern journalism, one of the biggest stories comes with a fatal price tag. An undercover assignment takes a reporter into the heart of medical madness and a powerful family's quest for nothing less than immortality. From a rogue laboratory in Central America to a fortified bolt-hole on Catalina Island, the pursuit of truth turns into a race with death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Cheverton
• Release date: Jun 30, 2010

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The Last Story

A novel by

Richard E. Cheverton

SMASHWORDS EDITION

PUBLISHED BY:

Richard E. Cheverton on Smashwords

The Last Story

Copyright © 2010 by Richard E. Cheverton

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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Chapter One

Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink.

I stare at the phosphorescent cursor hovering in the middle of the computer screen, its hypnotic wink mocking my writer’s block. A sentence appears in the mental fog, promptly evaporates. I sit very still, the slightest movement threatening to send the syllables assembling themselves in my brain skittering away like startled roaches. I feel fragile as a politician’s promise. I’m going to fall apart. I just know it.

It’s nothing new. I’ve never begun a story without the imp of doubt tap-dancing on my shoulder. But, soon, very soon, I hope, I pray, I’ll boil down everything I know (and a couple of things I don’t) in the stewpot I’ve stirred for two decades in the sculleries of daily journalism.

I’ll write this damned story.

It will be unlike any ever told before in The Orange County Record’s pages.

And it will be my last story. Ever.

I try to distill the memories colliding in my brain into nicely disciplined sentences. Instead, I hear the dull crack of a pistol; the tinkle of an ejected cartridge like a carelessly dropped coin; the thin snap of the rounds aimed at me, me!—just inches above my head. But it’s not fair… I’m a journalist!

I see flames, a world on fire. I see corpses dancing underwater. I see a brain floating in a pail of strawberry-colored preservative. How the hell will I tame these memories into cold, hard print?

My useless fingers float above the keyboard like fat, blind worms, seeking… what?

A good, clean cry might help, might clear my brain, but big boys don’t cry. Do they? The men I shot not three hours ago, he cried. Screamed for his mother, shit his pants. His fingers fussed and trembled at the little black hole I’d put in his chest, but his life leaked out anyway.

Instead of catharsis, I’ll settle for a cigarette.

Then I could think.

Alas, the Record’s newsroom is California-clean, smoking banned for three years now, the addicts banished to the margins of the property. It was a neat piece of social engineering: I gave up the habit. But what the hell have I got to loose now? Tobacco, words; they’re equally deadly, I’ve discovered.

I rummage in my desk drawer; bottom right, find a crumpled pack of Marlboros, the last cancer-stick as bent as an old man’s back. I fish the lighter out of my pants pocket: a Vietnam War-era Zippo, the enameled Marine Corps logo now nearly worn away, the chrome rubbed down to golden brass around the edges, the patina of constant, unconscious fondling.

A flame blooms, a hot, orange flower. I attach it to the end of the cigarette, take a quick, sharp drag, cough. But then the old warmth comes back, a never-forgotten memory, the nicotine rush spreading like a hill catching fire.

A hill, a fire…

A half-newsroom away, Al Dunston’s head comes up like a dinosaur at a watering hole. The old copy editor’s rheumy eyes meet mine; a wicked, conspiratorial grin creases his wrinkled face. We’re among the few people left in the vast newsroom. The Sabbath: dead time in the news business, the TV monitors above the Metro desk flashing simultaneous images of politicians fibbing on panel shows.

I thumb the Zippo again; a spark flashes, but the wick has gone bone-dry. The lighter has saved my life, as surely as if it had stopped a sniper’s bullet. The joy! The irony! I feel like dancing across the cluttered desk-tops, right up to Al’s little spot on the rim, right across his keyboard, making hash of the obituaries he’s so carefully editing. I want to warble an aria at the top of my lungs: I’m alive. Alive!

I laugh: uproariously, extravagantly, compulsively. Tears cascade down my cheeks; a gusher of joy. I pound the desktop.

Damned if it doesn’t jar the story loose.

I write; a perfect lede, alerting the reader like a zookeeper’s cart rouses a sleeping carnivore: Raw meat’s a-comin’! My fingers dance across the keyboard, this is the best it gets; it’s automatic writing now; I’m just the stenographer, a voice in my head dictating insistently. I drop in a series of bullet-points: municipal corruption, sexual frenzy, even a bid for immortality. The story promises a rollicking mis-adventure, the trail from then to now littered with corpses.

And to think, it started here, in this cloistered newsroom, with a sound, thump-thump-thump, like the dull notes of a head bouncing off a scaffold.

It was a fist, clenched like a baby’s angry face, banging on the window of managing editor Burton J. Burleigh’s office; a summons that always caused a flare of paranoia, a mad search through my mental file of recent screw-ups. As I entered Burt’s office the sound of anxious laughter greeted me like a gust of superheated air. A half-dozen of my co-editors had gathered around Burt’s desk, predatory birds jostling for position on a very thin twig.

OK, we’re all here, said Burt. He jabbed at his intercom, even though Verna, his secretary, sat right outside the door, close enough to soak up his deepest secrets, which she then passed along to a girl friend in finance, who, in turn passed them back to my pal, Jimmy Ryan, the politics editor who believed getting laid and discovering corporate confidences made a fine combo.

"Verna, tell herself she can come in." Burt shouted. Burt always shouted, probably to compensate for his height, his bowling-ball body probably topping-out at five-two. Small men, like toy dogs, are primal forces to be reckoned with.

Our eyes swiveled toward a neighboring door hidden behind a screen of potted tropical plants. Herself. About to emerge. Our editor in chief, Evangeline Sumner Poole, the hermit of the corner office, whose presence in the newsroom was usually hidden, inscrutable, malevolent.

A rare treat, Burt said with a tight smile that floated like a wisp of tear-gas over his perky, polka-dot bow-tie.

The door opened. Evangeline emerged, laughing, laughing! A first! Our heads rotated in unison. She gripped a lithe young man by the arm, the way a stablehand might lead a prancing thoroughbred past the touts at Santa Anita. The kid was magazine-cover handsome, moved with coltish energy, more like dance than ordinary locomotion.

Whoa! breathed one of my female co-editors.

He was well-tailored, almost to a fault in the wash-and-wear atmosphere of the newsroom: tasteful tie, conservative enough to get you into a private club; blinding white shirt, no pucker around the collar; shoes valet-shined to a translucent ebony glow. Nothing ostentatious; just enough to leave everyone else in the room looking wrinkled, off the rack.

Yup; a thoroughbred. I wondered how I’d bet this guy. Long-shot? Nah; creatures this polished always went off at even odds.

I’d like you to meet J. MacArthur McIntress, said Evangeline, proud as a hunter who had just bagged an elk.

Whoa, indeed.

The assembled editors, as one, glanced at a photo on Burt’s wall: the visage of the Record’s legendary publisher, Cyrus McIntress, his steely gaze fixed on some far horizon where opportunity waited for those with the guts and gumption to grasp it. Or so he wrote, with numbing frequency, in his editorials.

Cyrus had grabbed his pile the hard way: he had inherited it, in the form of the largest single land-holding this side of Texas—the fabled McIntress Ranch, thousands of acres sprawling across the county, from sea to snow-capped mountains. The Ranch had passed like a runner’s baton, from Cyrus’s great-grandfather, who had seized it from the hapless Mexicans; to his grandfather, who became the bean king, before blight nearly wiped him out; to his father, the legendary Black Jack, for the hand that had won him the near-bankrupt newspaper. His luck had run out early, two bullets that the coroner had ruled a suicide.

Now, McIntress cattle had been replaced by whole McIntress cities: mile upon mile of shopping centers, cookie-cutter master-planned communities, golf courses, a university.

Cyrus stood bestride Orange County like a colossus. King-maker. Scourge of politicians of the liberal persuasion. Slayer of high-taxes. Dispenser of timeless wisdom, some of it borderline bizarre: paeans to fiber and high colonics; to timeless pharaonic wisdom and ethereal forms of energy permeating the universe. A mystic with a billion-plus bucks.

He was a hell of a businessman, one of the last of the owner-publishers, fiercely independent in an era of press multinationals. He was said to be 80 years old and a stud, rumored to pick his consorts out of the pages of Vogue or, sometimes, Seventeen. Not that you’d read that sort of swill in The Record. After all, the best way to stay out of a newspaper is to own one.

And this was his kid.

We inspected one another with obvious interest, as well as a certain wariness. After a moment’s hesitation, J. MacArthur McIntress grasped Burt’s miniature hand.

I realize I’m an... interloper. A smile drifted across the visitor’s face like a shadow across the ocean. Burt looked startled.

Hardly, he said. But the kid had a point: publishers, much less their sons, made few appearances in the typical newsroom. It simply wasn’t part of the tradition.

Evangeline cleared her throat. Mr. McIntress…

"Mac," he corrected her.

Mac, here, will be with us for a while. He’ll be experiencing the newsroom, getting its flavor, so to speak.

"You mean, work here?" Burt blurted. Evangeline shot him a glance.

Yes. Work, learn, she said.

"Learn what?" Burt looked alarmed.

Your deepest secrets, Mac laughed.

They aren’t very romantic, said Burt, a beat too quickly.

I’m not into romance, said Mac. "Are you?"

"Not our Burt, interrupted Ryan. We haven’t been introduced, he said pointedly, grasping the young man’s hand. Jimmy Ryan. Assistant managing editor for politics, and other nefarious stuff."

Mac McIntress. Amateur. But well-intentioned.

It broke the ice. The editors lined up to shake his hand, a little too eagerly, including (my first confession—many to follow) me, Joe Dunn, grand pooh-bah of crime and courts, the dull daily grind of misdeeds and justice.

These are our very best editors, Mr. McIntress, said Evangeline.

"Our only editors," stage-whispered Jimmy.

We’re very proud of them, said Evangeline frostily.

"That’s so good to know," said Mac. The almost-smile flirted at his lips, as though he had just heard a punch line in a comedy club in his cranium.

Well, I suppose we need to find you a berth, said Burt. Tough, basic, eh?

Mac nodded. "I do have an interest in crime."

Jimmy Ryan glared at me.

We’ll move him around the newsroom, said Burt. How long will you..?

Six months or so, said Mac.

Hmmmmm, said Burt. He didn’t look terribly pleased.

Maybe a year, said Mac with that flickering smile. Spooky kid, I thought. I’d like to start right now. If you approve, of course.

Then off you go, said Burt, motioning to me with his tiny paw.

And so, just like that, I was given the care and feeding of young J. MacArthur McIntress.

I gave the heir a quick tour of the newsroom, pointing out the invisible boundaries between departments, each as edgy and murderous as a Renaissance city-state. We passed a bank of Bloomberg terminals in the Business section, financial quotes crawling across their screens like an army of ants heading toward a picnic. His fingers flickered across the keyboard.

Checking your portfolio? I asked.

Buy low, sell high, he said. My broker never seems to get it right. He stared at a listing and sighed. Oh, well. It’s only a paper loss.

How many zeros?

He shot me a glance. Too bloody many. His vowels had an odd curl, something mid-Atlantic, from places where trees lost their leaves in the fall.

Our imperial progress moved through the crowded newsroom. Word of the heir’s arrival had already spread: heads swiveled as we passed, reporters and copy editors straining for a glimpse; eyes burning with the hunger of small animals in the jungle undergrowth.

We arrived at my cozy little territory, a warren of battered desks and a shelf full of police radios babbling incessantly. Trudy Williams, a beginner but talented, barely two years away from the sausage-grinder of a weekly in the San Gabriel Valley, murmured into her headset. "Blood? How much blood?"

I installed McIntress at a desk next to Trudy, warned him not to keep anything valuable in any of the drawers, the newsroom’s full of kleptos. Then I handed him a dog-eared list of police dispatchers’ phone numbers. "Start dialing. Make the rotation every couple hours. Cops won’t tell you shit. You’ve gotta dig it out. Nicely, of course. But dig."

I strolled back to my little cubicle, not quite an office, no door, but half-height walls and a couple of extra square-feet of room to hector reporters. I turned to my computer, the message pending light blinking frantically.

Ryan had already dispatched a quick comment: I DON’T THINK HE DOES WINDOWS.

COLLAR BUTTON UNDONE AND HE’S CALLING, I replied. Sure enough, J. MacArthur McIntress was busily working his way through the county’s two-dozen police agencies, all of them staffed by mean-assed watch-commanders, all of them surly, uncooperative. He caught my eye and winked, happy as a kid at summer camp.

Damned if I didn’t wink back. Careful, I told myself. He’s not in the club.

Six-thirty. Seven. He made his calls. Seven-thirty, he hit his first pay dirt.

One dead, shooting, First and Ross.

That neighborhood? Gotta be a drive-by, I said. Happens all the time. Gimme four inches.

"A brief?" he asked, crestfallen.

"Gang-bang—it’s normal. Two-hundred kids popped each other last year in Santa Ana alone. They’re not good murders. Dig?"

Dig, he said.

In an hour he was back, eager for his first edit. I popped it up on my screen. Strictly amateur hour, of course: the lede a mess of dependent clauses, as jammed and chaotic as a suitcase stuffed by a fleeing crook. And ten inches.

I started moving things around, snipping, trimming, like a gardener creating a topiary sculpture out of an unruly hedge. Mac watched over my shoulder. He didn’t groan as I made my amputations, nothing to indicate I had a prima donna on my hands, in which case I’d have to run him through some of my more ruthless editing ploys.

See? All better, I said, punching the button that sent the story off to the Metro rim, where the copyeditors would have their own nit-picking way with it.

Well, ‘night then, Mac said.

See ya, I tossed over my shoulder.

He paused again. I seem to be the first one out the door.

I checked my watch. Here’s the newsroom’s dirty little secret. Most of us don’t have any place better to go. We’ve lost our wives or husbands, burned-out our friends...

Have you?

Mac studied me silently. Dead air. The reporter’s secret weapon. Maybe the kid’s got some instincts.

Divorced. Occupational hazard.

Sorry. I sensed his mental pencil scratching notes.

That makes one of us, I said.

Instead of leaving, he turned and stripped off his suit coat, tossed it over his chair, plugged-in his headset, started punching the speed-dialer. Eager kid. Driven. Not bad, for a dilettante.

The next day he was like a kid with his first toy: I caught him more than once gazing at his byline, even though the story was tucked into an inside page of the Metro section, 18-point headline, no big deal.

In the following days he toned-down his wardrobe: lost the tie—the Armani duds replaced by custom-tailored chinos and woodsy shirts by Ralph Lauren—and started learning how to become a halfway decent journeyman journalist. He gave good phone, which was the only way we related to the far-flung cop-shops in our coverage area. Mac, somehow, charmed the dyspeptic watch commanders, got tips that led to some half-way interesting murders and a jewel heist that a big shopping center wanted to keep quiet. Stock in trade for the Nuts ‘n’ Guns Club.

We happened to be leaving the newsroom together a few nights later, so I invited him to tag along to my post-work tipple at the nearby Pen & Pencil Club. I was mildly surprised when he accepted.

The place was a nondescript cinderblock box on 17th street, a dank little dive that gave itself away with a hand-printed sign beside the door: PRESSMEN WILL KINDLY WIPE THEIR FEET BEFORE ENTERING THE ESTABLISHMENT. An indelible trail of work boot prints ran past it, headed straight toward the red leatherette bar.

My usual booth was far in the back, a cozy grotto of fly-specked mirrors and plastic plants. Jimmy Ryan, my professional pal and political tutor, was already there; along with TaResa Thompkins, the entertainment editor. We sandwiched Mac between us, talked around and through him. Jimmy had heard that the minority-leader of the state Assembly, a dim-witted hack from Orange who owed his office to the religious right, was pronging one of his biggest supporters, oftentimes on the minority-leader’s ornate Victorian oak desk. The supporter, In more ways than one, Jimmy smirked, was the bottle-blonde wife of a certain prominent televangelist, who was also having a little problem keeping it zipped, despite his ringing oratory about family values, the sanctity of holy matrimony, that sort of rot. It was low-grade smut, runnable only if someone got jilted and sued.

You guys heard about Tim DuMaine? Mac interjected, but Ryan bulldozed past him, until TaResa muttered, DuMaine? Her interruption was a serious breach of the table’s protocol.

He asked me for a donation. Some kind of defense fund, said Mac guilelessly.

Defense? Against someone disclosing his IQ? Ryan sneered, turned to pick up the thread of his previous story.

The indictment’s in the district attorney’s desk drawer, I believe, said Mac. The word indictment snapped Ryan’s head back, like an iron filing seeking a lodestone.

The so-called Democrat who ran against Timmy in the general, he recruited her, financed her campaign, said Mac, with a smile that indicated he thought DuMaine had been borderline clever.

"That’s a story," TaResa and I said, more or less simultaneously. Interesting moment, I thought. Now we’ll find out if this guy is a newsman.

Bullshit, Jimmy stammered. DuMaine was a slam-dunk in that race. The Democrats barely exist in the fuckin’ twenty-ninth.

Mac shrugged. If you’ve got an opponent, the party coughs up extra cash. Timmy’s saving it up, for bigger things.

Such as? Jimmy asked skeptically.

Congress, said Mac.

"There’s the small matter of the incumbent. Jerry Tubbs loves appearing on