The water spilled down his forehead into his eyes, but the
man who called himself Chester hardly seemed to notice.
He removed something from his pocket and held it out
to Paulina. She focused her eyes, then gasped.
It was a picture of her daughter, Abby. She was at the
beach, wearing a cute pink bikini, standing in front of a
massive hole she must have dug in the sand. The photo
looked fairly recent, within the last year or so. Abigail’s
eyes were bright and cheerful, her skin a golden brown.
Abby. She looked so joyful.
Her daughter.
“Where did you get that?” Paulina yelled.
The Darkness
15
“Do you really need to ask? I had a dozen others to
choose from. You really should tell her to be careful of
what photos she posts on the Internet.”
“You’re a freak,” she spat. “What the hell do you want?”
“I want you to listen to me very carefully,” the man
said. He stepped closer, still holding out the photograph.
Water droplets landed on the photo but he didn’t seem to
care. “A long time ago, I fought in a war. I fought alongside men and women who were like my own blood. Then,
one day, we found ourselves trapped. There was one man
I fought with who was like family, closer to me than
anyone. He was like a daughter. A mother. A brother.”
Paulina shivered.
“That day, we found ourselves fighting for our lives. And
all of a sudden, out of nowhere, someone throws a grenade
at us. I was out of harm’s way, but the grenade went off right
beside this man I cared about. I remember looking at him
after the smoke cleared. He blinked his eyes, looked around
like he was just confused. The only thing I remember more
than his eyes was the splash of blood beneath him. Right
where his legs had been blown clean off.”
Then, in one fluid motion, Chester held the right side
of the photo with his thumb and forefinger, tore off a
piece and let it flutter to the ground. It landed in front of
Paulina, speckled by rain and mud.
“This is what your daughter will look like when I cut
off her legs.”
Paulina felt her stomach heave, her mouth opening, her
eyes burning as she cried. She reached out for the photo,
but was too weak to do anything.
“Blood has its own smell. It makes you want to vomit.
And imagine what happens when you see that much
blood coming from someone you love.”
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Jason Pinter
He gripped the picture, and ripped off another piece.
Again the shred fell, twisting in the rain.
“This is what your daughter will look like when I cut
off her right arm.”
“Please,” Paulina whispered, her throat so constricted
she could barely talk. She closed her eyes. “Stop. Just stop.”
The man stood there, holding the mutilated picture out
for Paulina to see. “Open your eyes,” he said. Paulina
shook her head. “Open them!”
She did.
“I have something for you,” the man said. “I want you
to take it home with you and I want you to read it.”
“What?” she said, blinking away the tears.
“When you’ve read it, I want you to write an article for
your newspaper based on the information contained
within. Your article will run this Thursday. If it does not,
for any reason whatsoever…” The man took the photo and
ripped off a piece. Then he dropped the tattered photo into
the mud.
“I will cut off your daughter’s head and send it to
you in a box.”
He walked over to Paulina, and before she could react
he grabbed her by the hair and thrust the Taser into her
side. Again Paulina shrieked, and again she fell into the
mud, panting.
“If you don’t do what I say, before I rip your daughter
apart I will burn her in places only her mother knows about.”
The man took an envelope from inside his jacket. It
was sealed in plastic. He gave it to Paulina.
“This is the last you’ll hear from me if you do what I
say. If you tell anyone, I will tear Abigail apart limb by
limb. If you go to the police, I will know you did and I
will burn her body after I kill her. I will know. I’ll burn it
The Darkness
17
so thoroughly they won’t be able to identify a single piece
of her flesh, and the last time you will ever see your
daughter whole is in photographs. I will save her severed
limbs and leave them on your doorstep.” The man paused,
watched the blood drain from Paulina’s face. “If you live
up to your end, your daughter will be able to live the rest
of her life like a normal girl. She will be blissfully ignorant of what happened tonight. Otherwise, she will know
a pain of which you’ve only felt a fraction of tonight.”
“Please,” Paulina mewled.
Chester looked at the remains of the photograph of
Abigail on the beach, her smile wide like a small child. “If
not, the only bliss she’ll know is whatever happens to her
soul after she dies.”
Paulina took the plastic, turned it over in her hands.
Then she looked at him, confused.
“In there is everything you need to know. And make
sure you don’t lose the piece at the bottom.”
Paulina looked at the bottom of the clear folder and
saw what appeared to be a small, black rock, no bigger
than a pebble.
Paulina sat there, crying, sniveling and drenched. Chester
stared down at her, rain dripping off the tip of his nose.
“For your sake, I hope your daughter doesn’t have to die.
Terrible thing to lose one’s family. But that’s up to you.”
By the time she looked up, the driver was back in his
car. Then the engine revved, and he was gone. Paulina sat
in the rain, mud staining her dress brown.
She watched him go, waiting to make sure he was
gone. Her body was racked with pain, and she could
barely stand. Her hands felt like they’d held a battery from
both ends, and when she dialed the car service it took
three tries to get the number right. When the operator
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Jason Pinter
asked where she was, Paulina had to walk ten minutes just
to find a street sign.
“What the heck are you doing way out there?” the
man asked.
“Just get here, fast,” she said before hanging up.
It was half an hour before the car service arrived.
Paulina huddled under a nearby tarp to stay dry. The
driver, a short, thick man with a bushy mustache, got out.
He looked her over, his lip curled up. He was as confused
as she was.
“Miss,” he said, “are you okay? Do you need me to
take you to the hospital?”
“Just take me home,” she said. “And help me up.”
The driver bent down, put his arm around Paulina and
helped the shuddering reporter into the backseat of his car.
As he drove away, the man said, “Don’t worr
y, miss.
I’m taking you home. Everything’s okay.”
Paulina looked up at him, slimy mascara stinging her
eyes. And she thought, No. It’s not.
2
Monday
New York City exists in a perpetual headwind. If you
live here or work here, you can either lean into the wind
and brace yourself, moving forward a step at a time,
keeping pace with the other people who are doing the
same. Or you can lose your balance and be blown away
like a crumpled newspaper. Some people lean into the
wind and try to walk faster. They press ahead, moving at
greater speeds than the rest of us. But with greater reward
comes greater risk, and the more you lean the faster you
can lost your balance and be blown away.
My brother fell. My idol and mentor, Jack O’Donnell,
fell. I was still leaning into the wind, sometimes hard
enough to lose my balance. I’d lived and worked in this
gusty city for several years now, and thought I was used
to it. But time and time again, the city showed me just
how strong the winds could be.
I got to the office of the New York Gazette at eight
o’clock sharp, half an hour before I was supposed to be
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Jason Pinter
there. To put it mildly, this was the most excited I’d been
about the job in a long time.
The last few weeks had been a maelstrom of violence
and secrets. I’d recently learned that my father had had
an affair thirty years ago, and that affair resulted in the
birth of a boy named Stephen Gaines. My brother.
I didn’t learn about Stephen until just a few weeks ago,
when he showed up out of nowhere at the offices of the
New York Gazette, where I worked as a reporter. Gaines
was stoned and scared out of his mind that night, and for
that reason I didn’t give him a chance to tell his story. I
didn’t see the man up close until a few hours later. After
I learned he’d been shot to death in his own apartment.
When I saw him next, he was lying on a slab in the
morgue.
Not what you’d call the most enjoyable family reunion.
I’d pieced the truth together in a large part spurred on
by a book written by Jack O’Donnell called Through the
Darkness. In that book, he discussed the murder of a lowly
drug dealer named Butch Willingham who was possibly
murdered by an elusive drug kingpin nicknamed the Fury.
Yet the truth wasn’t whole. If the Fury did exist, then
something big was on the horizon. Butch Willingham’s
murder was one of a spate of drug-related murders, and
if history did repeat itself, that meant Stephen’s murder
was merely the beginning.
Coming to grips with the life and death of the brother
I’d never known was difficult, if not impossible. It was
something I was still struggling with. Eventually we
tracked down the man who killed him, a low-level drug
dealer who seemed to want Gaines dead to open up the door
for his own upward mobility in the New York drug trade.
But something about it still didn’t sit right. It was too
The Darkness
21
neat, too clean. Too many questions still lingered, an
open wound that wouldn’t close.
And leave it to Jack O’Donnell to throw a crowbar
into the wound.
I was wearing a suit, the same one I’d worn on my very
first day in the office several years ago. I remembered the
day clearly. Meeting Wallace Langston, the paper’s editor
in chief, being led to my desk where I’d write the stories
I was born to write. Seeing the man, Jack O’Donnell, in
person for the first time.
The man was a legend of the New York newsroom, as
synonymous with this city as any one of its towering
monuments. But every monument has cracks, ignored
by those who prefer to see their gods as unfailing, monuments pristine in their foundations and men pure in their
humanity. Yet while Jack raised the bar for journalism,
his cracks had begun to show themselves not just to me,
but to millions of people.
We all knew that Jack drank. But when you told people
Jack drank, you raised your eyebrows and enunciated the
word drank like it was hepatitis. Jack O’Donnell drank.
Three-martini lunches might have fallen out of fashion, but Jack was trying to keep the tradition going almost
singlehandedly. And who else would expose the cracks
in the foundation but someone who resided as low to the
ground as possible.
Paulina Cole used to work with Jack at the Gazette. A
few months ago, she penned a hatchet job to end all hatchet
jobs, exposing Jack’s drinking problem on the front page in
our rival paper, the NewYork Dispatch. It was a colossal embarrassment to his reputation, personally and professionally.
Then Jack disappeared.
Whether he was in rehab or lying in the gutter some-22
Jason Pinter
where, I figured the man needed time to figure out if he
was going to be swallowed whole by his demons, or if he
still had the strength to fight them off. My answer came,
surprisingly, when I needed him the most.
After I learned the truth about Stephen’s killer, Jack
found me at my home just as my girlfriend, Amanda, and
I were packing up. He told me he’d needed a “dialysis of
the soul.” He looked good. Healthy. And raring to go to
answer the questions that Stephen’s murder just touched
Anyway, that’s what I was doing here early in the
morning. I wanted to get here before him. Though we’d
worked in the same offices for several years, I’d never had
the chance to work side by side with Jack. I was eager to
prove what I’d learned, eager to prove that there was
someone waiting in the wings to carry on the traditions
he’d started. And what better way to show I was ready
than by beating the man to his desk on his first day back
in the office?
So when I got off on the ninth floor, pushed through
the glass doors to the newsroom, rounded the corner to
the sea of news desks, I was shocked to see Jack O’Donnell surrounded by our colleagues, looking like a kid at
his own birthday party.
He was sitting on his desk, feet on his desk chair,
speaking loudly and buoyantly while the other reporters
and editors laughed and slapped him on the back. I hadn’t
seen Jack with this much energy since, well, ever. And
any frustration I felt in getting here late disappeared when
I saw the smile on the old man’s face.
It was like a returning war hero being embraced by his
countrymen. While Jack was gone, one of the things I
wished I understood better was the newsroom’s opinion
The Darkness
23
of him. While I always held his professional career in the
highest regard, there were no doubt others who looked at
his departure as something of an embarrassment
. Any
time a paper’s reporter ends up in the headlines instead
of below them, it was considered an affront to the integrity of the establishment. The New York Times went
through it with Jayson Blair, and the Gazette had gone
through it twice in the last several years: the exposure of
Jack’s alcoholism by Paulina Cole at the Dispatch, and
when I was accused of murder. And while the truth about
my situation eventually came to light, the harsh reality
was that every word in Paulina’s story was true. Granted
she handled it with the class and dignity of a five-dollar
hooker, but her words touched a nerve because they cut
deep.
The stain on my reputation had begun to disappear
over time. I didn’t know if Jack’s ever would.
“Henry!” Jack’s voice boomed over the newsroom.
He was waving me over, the reporters around his desk
looking in my direction expectantly. I smiled, big and
wide, and walked over.
“Jack,” I said, “how’s the first day back?”
“Coffee still sucks, elevator’s still slow, and the receptionist still doesn’t know my name. Just another day at
the office, and I’m loving it.”
He was wearing a suit and tie that both looked new.
His beard, usually shaggy, was neat, the gray more
evenly spread. The bags beneath his eyes looked to have
dissolved, and his movements were sharper, livelier. It
was great to see him like this, and though my smile was
wide on the outside, it was nothing compared to how I
felt inside.
Jonas Levinson, the paper’s science editor, said, “We
24
Jason Pinter
didn’t know when we’d see you again, old boy. No note,
no forwarding address. Who are you, my ex-wife?”
“I guess when you have enough of them,” Jack said,
“you start to inherit their best qualities.” The group laughed.
“Coffee tastes a whole lot better with a sprinkle of
Beam in there,” Frank Rourke said. “I got a bottle at my
desk, Jack. Stop by if you need a taste.”
The smile disappeared from Jack’s face. “Hey, Frank?”
“Hey, Jack-O?”
“Why don’t you go back to your desk and slam a
drawer on your head a few times.”
Rourke seemed taken aback. “Christ, it was just a joke,
O’Donnell.”
“Just leave. Amazingly you’ve got less tact than brains,
and that’s not an easy feat. Go on, git. ”
Rourke walked away, fuming. Jack’s face warmed
again, then he turned to me. Speaking to the rest of the crew,