Contents Under Pressure Read online

  The bad guy was bundled off in the backseat of a patrol car. His weapon turned out to be a mean .30 caliber sawed-off carbine, loaded for bear.

  Residents crowded around Ted, relieved that no one was hurt. Somebody offered a beer, which he declined, though he looked like he could use one. He did accept a cigarette. He allowed the donor to light it. I was betting his own hands were shaky; mine were. I felt elated. For once, my timing had been right; everything had clicked into place. A good story. I got through the crowd to Ted.

  “Why did you handle it the way you did?” I asked him, knowing the answer but needing the quote.

  “There were women and children on three tiers of the apartment house in the courtyard behind me. If he had opened up with that weapon, a lot of them could have been hurt.”

  “How dangerous was he?”

  “He had abducted two people, Britt. He was committed to getting away. Because of that, he may have been one of the more dangerous men I’ve encountered in ten years on the department.” God bless Ted. He knew how to answer a reporter’s questions, none of that monosyllabic crap you get from some cops.

  “Last question. I saw your face when you were back in that stairwell, when it was a standoff. You were thinking about your family, your kids, right?”

  “Nope.” Ted paused, then grinned. “I was wishing I’d worn my bulletproof vest.”

  Later I sat at my desk after writing my favorite type of story for the early edition. A hero, a satisfying ending, readers happy at getting their money’s worth from a dedicated public servant, cops happy at getting good press. Lottie’s pictures helped it get prime display on the local page. What more could a reporter ask for?

  HERO COP NEVER FIRES A SHOT. RESIDENTS APPLAUD, in 60 point Bodoni. By Britt Montero, Miami Daily News Staff Writer. That’s me.

  Before going home that night, I plugged the culprit’s prior police record, which was impressive, into the story, and added a quote from the mother of the accused, who swore her boy must be the victim of mistaken identity. I was headed home, stepping into the elevator, when the city desk clerk yelled that I had a call. I sighed and turned back, determined to keep it brief.

  The caller had a tip: D. Wayne Hudson was in the hospital.

  “I’ll pass it along to the sports department,” I said breezily.

  “You don’t understand the situation,” said Rico, one of my sources, who works as an intensive care nurse.

  “How serious is it?” I asked warily.

  “As serious as you can get. His organs are about to be harvested for transplant.”

  Hudson was dead, or about to be, of unnatural causes.

  “Oh, no,” I whispered, and sank into my chair.

  Everybody in Miami knew D. Wayne Hudson. Quarterback for the University of Miami Hurricanes, all-American, first-round draft choice, led the LA Raiders to a national championship and starred for six successful seasons until knee injuries cut short his career. But he did not rest on his endorsements or break into the movies, though he had the talent and the smarts. He came home.

  Unlike so many who fight their way out of the ghetto and never look back, he reached down from the top of the ladder to those at the bottom. He tried to make a difference, coaching and working with disadvantaged youngsters to keep them in school, out of trouble, and off drugs.

  He was thirty-eight years old.

  “He came in by ambulance during the night, a few hours before dawn,” Rico continued. “Car accident, unconscious, but expected to recover. A few hours later a nurse on routine rounds called a code blue; he’d stopped breathing. The team managed to restart his heart and breathing and hooked him up to life support, but he was brain dead. They are keeping his vital functions going long enough to take his organs for transplant. He was carrying an organ donor card.”

  Phone tucked under my chin, I was scribbling notes and groping for the phone on the desk behind me. Ryan Battle, the general assignment reporter who sat there, had gone home, and I needed to call the library for D. Wayne’s clip file. I did all this while also trying, without success, to establish eye contact with the assistant city editor in the slot, forty feet away.

  “How was he injured?” I asked. “This was an accident?” I rolled my chair up to the video display terminal next to my desk, punched out the password, and slugged the story, taking notes as we talked.

  “Apparently, he was running from the cops; they were chasing him.”

  “Why would Hudson run from the cops? On foot?”

  “Nah, if it was on foot, they never would have caught D. Wayne, even with his bum knee. The cops said they were chasing his car when he wrecked it. I was in the ER when they brought him in.”

  “What cops? Miami? Metro? What kind of injuries? Did he ever say anything? Was he drinking? Any drugs? What was he wearing? Where was he coming from? Where was he going?”

  “You always do that, Britt. All I know is what I said.”

  “What cops? Come on, Rico, you saw them.”

  “The cops wore blue shirts, Miami.” Miami cops wear dark blue; Metro police and highway patrolmen wear brown.

  “Miami … on the midnight shift. How come I didn’t hear about it? I was at the station this morning.

  “Well, D. Wayne didn’t take a turn for the worse until after the cops left. That’s all I know. You got to get everything through official channels, Britt. We didn’t talk.”

  “Right.” I thanked Rico and glanced at the clock, stomach clenched like a fist. We had forty-five minutes until deadline for the final. I stepped quickly up to the city desk. Bobby Tubbs was in the night slot, responsible for the news that went into the local section in the final edition. Not a job for someone who hates change. He looked apprehensive at my approach, anticipating what was coming. When I said I had a story, his chubby face took on the look of an evil Muppet. What a newsman. Bobby was famous for becoming apoplectic when his carefully laid out pages were messed up by something as intrusive as breaking news. He was beginning to hyperventilate until I explained what I was working on. If this tip was true, his page would not be torn up after all. The story would go out front, on page one. D. Wayne Hudson was news.

  Tubbs informed the national desk, and sports, to start somebody on a sidebar with D. Wayne’s stats and playing field achievements. I hit the phones, working with a receiver to each ear. At one point, both the police department and the hospital had me on hold. Breathing deeply, I stared at the relentless hands on the big clock mounted over the city desk, then closed my eyes for a long moment. The best years of my life have been spent on hold.

  The hospital reluctantly confirmed that D. Wayne Hudson was a patient I had to go three rounds with an administrator to drag out more details. Meanwhile, the police department’s accident reports had been locked in an office until morning. I reached a public information officer at home. He promised to do some digging, then called back with a bare-bones account. A BOLO (be on the lookout) had gone out for a stolen late-model Lincoln Mark VII. The driver was described as armed, dangerous, and fleeing a felony. Officers spotted a car fitting the description and tried to pull it over, but the driver fled at high speed. During the chase he lost it on a curve, crashed into a bridge abutment, and careened into a ditch. He was arrested for fleeing the police and sent to County Hospital for treatment of his injuries. Police confirmed the identity of the driver: D. Wayne Hudson, black male, aged thirty-eight. They had no information on his present condition, dead or alive.

  “What was the felony?” I asked. “Was there a gun? Was the car stolen?”

  “We have no further information at this time,” he said obliquely. “Try again in the morning.”

  Butterfly wings beating in my chest, I called D. Wayne’s home number. The last time I had seen him, he was speaking at a fundraiser for a halfway house for youthful offenders about to be paroled back into the community. He had been an earnest and eloquent advocate. His pretty wife, Alma, gracious and elegant in white silk,
and their twin boys and baby girl were with him. How could D. Wayne have been dirty?

  A woman answered on the second ring. It was Alma’s sister. She was crying; it was true. Alma was at the hospital. A second brain scan had shown identical results, and they were about to pull the plug. All the sister knew was that there had been an accident. “Does he drive a Lincoln?” I asked gently.

  “Yes,” she answered, sounding puzzled by the question. At midnight I was able to get through to the intensive care waiting room. All Alma could tell me through her tears was that it was over. He was dead.

  We put a new top on the story minutes before the presses rolled at 1 A.M. Details of the accident were vague; why he’d tried to outrun police was unclear. Cause of death: pending an autopsy.

  The adrenaline rush of deadline was over, leaving me drained and dispirited. The high of the earlier story, the abduction at Suwannee Park Elementary, was gone. But I could go home, at last. Tubbs reminded me to come in early to follow the story. Even though I was the only passenger, the infuriatingly slow elevator still stopped on all five floors before sluggishly descending to the huge lobby where every sound echoed in the emptiness. I stepped out the back door and drank in the warm moist heat of the late summer night, the Miami Beach skyline stretching across the eastern horizon, lights reflected in dark water. Driving my five-year-old Thunderbird east across the causeway, I remembered promising to meet Lottie at the 1800 Club for a drink and some food. But that had been about eight o’clock. By now, she had surely given up on me and gone home.

  I was weary, I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and my panty hose were torn. I reminded myself to put an extra pair in my ladies’ room locker at the office, along with the change of clothes I always kept there. Billy Boots greeted me with eager mews as I unlocked my apartment door. He was hungry, too. I opened a can of chicken and liver cat food and spooned it into his dish. I wished dinner for me was as simple. The refrigerator yielded a bar of guava paste and a bowl of leftover picadillo covered with a fine, fuzzy mold. In the vegetable bin were a lone boniato and a mango, both withered and shriveled until one could not be distinguished from the other. I had forgotten to grocery shop again. The choice was either corn flakes or soup. Since I was out of milk I opted for the soup. The hour was too late and I was too tired to cook, so I ate it out of the can with a spoon as I listened to the messages on my telephone answering machine.

  Calls had come from my mother (“I know you’re always busy, Britt, but so am I. We’re having a huge sale, thirty percent off. Come take a look. Your wardrobe could certainly use it. Call me”), a Hialeah cop griping about politics in his department, a lawyer eager for publicity about a big win in court, and my mother, again. She sounded peevish this time.

  “Where are you, Britt? Why is it that I must always do all the calling?”

  Larry Zink, an insurance salesman I met on a story last month, had left the remaining message on the tape, inviting Lottie and me to meet him and a friend for drinks after work. Too late now to call any of them back.

  I am not like my mother, but I am her only child. My dad was Cuban, though I barely remember him. He died when I was three. He didn’t die, actually; he was killed, stood against a bullet-pocked wall on San Juan Hill and executed by a Castro firing squad. My mother never forgave him. She was the daughter of Miami pioneers and never understood why he let his dream of a free Cuba become a fatal obsession. His face is not precisely clear in my conscious mind, but in many ways his presence is always with me. Estamos Juntos: We are together.

  After his death, my mother was ill and depressed and found caring for me difficult. I was fanned out to various relatives on both sides of the family. Small and bewildered, I felt strange and alone, more an outsider than a part of my father’s outgoing, passionate, and sometimes volatile Cuban family who all talked at once in noisy Spanish or a part of the more reserved Episcopalians on my mother’s side who took turns speaking precise English and never, ever, interrupted one another. My father’s family laughed at my Spanish. My mother’s criticized my English.

  It didn’t help that the families were usually at odds, with me, the only link, straddling two worlds, yet not quite at home in either. My father was considered a hero, a patriot, a martyr by the Cuban community and his relatives. My mother and most of her family thought him reckless, a man who had foolishly gambled his life and lost. I did not permanently rejoin her until I was twelve. By then we didn’t know each other well, and had little to talk about. We still don’t. When I persisted in studying journalism, she encouraged me to attend Northwestern, away from the Miami influences that she considered unfavorable. The school was wonderful, but the Chicago winters were cold and long. I spent the two most miserable years of my life there.

  My clothes were never warm enough, my shoes skidded on the ice, and I hated it I yearned for the musical sound of spoken Spanish, the taste of Little Havana’s food and drink, the warmth of Florida and its vivid colors. Chicago was a gray and lonely place. I escaped and finished my last two years at the University of Miami, home at last.

  From the stories I have heard about him, and what little I remember, I think I am very much like my father. If I was not, I would believe that I am the victim of a maternity ward mix-up. My mother and I are that different.

  I was incredibly lucky to land a job on one of the best newspapers in the nation. My good fortune was more fluke than anything else. Because I was a Miamian with a Hispanic surname, the paper’s minority recruiters assumed I was bilingual and hence fluent enough to report for the paper’s Spanish language section. Not so. They discovered their mistake when, in my first story, I referred to Miami’s vice-mayor as the alcalde de vicio, the mayor of vice.

  By chance, a city desk post for a police reporter, a job no one else wanted, was open. The editors doubted a woman could endure the work. They expected dead bodies and shoot-outs to quickly gross me right out of the job. That only steeled my resolve to master the beat and make it my own. I was determined to be successful at it.

  The job is exciting and enjoyable most of the time. It is almost always a comfort. The newspaper is something I can count on, a constant in a world full of uncertainty. It publishes every day, rain or shine, in peace or war. The newspaper will outlive all of us and record our history, our beginnings and endings. No matter what happens, the newspaper will come out tomorrow, like the sun. People will wake up in the morning and find it on their lawns. One of the few sure things in life, it is something to hold on to.

  I had finished the soup. It was vegetable; not bad, actually. Nutritious, I told myself. Before dropping the can into the recycling bin I read the label. “Stir in one can of water and heat.” I wondered if I should drink a can of water. I had a glass of wine instead and went to bed.

  Two

  I awoke in the dark at 5:30 A.M., wondering if some chronically ill recipient was lucky enough to be waking up with D. Wayne Hudson’s donated championship heart. Still weary and let down, I needed to work out the kinks, mental and physical. There was no time for an aerobics class at the Spa, so I pulled on shorts and my favorite T-shirt, sent by a friend in the Salvadoran press corps: ¡Soy Periodista! ¡No Dispare! (I am a Journalist! Don’t Shoot!) I clipped my beeper to my waistband and walked two blocks east. From a half-block away I heard the ocean, and, as always, it made my pulse beat faster. A shrouded moon and two morning stars hung high above the stairs to the boardwalk. The eastern sky had paled to lavender above the rim of the sea. Dark purple clouds stacked above it in deranged shapes, like the shadowy skyline of some wild and alien city that exists only in troubled dreams.

  The lights of half a dozen ships at sea still dotted the vast horizon. I broke into a slow jog, heading north on the boardwalk, reveling in the refreshing sea breeze, as the lavender brightened to pink and then to orange neon with charcoal smears. A scrawny gray striped cat sat alone on the sandy beach, eyes fixed on the same heavenly spectacle that took my breath away.

  I
thought of Billy Boots, fat and glossy, and regretted not having a pocket full of cat nibbles. The black sky to the west faded to navy, and then cobalt blue. Two joggers passed briskly on the beach below, running on hard-packed sand, as the steps of others thudded on the boardwalk behind me.

  Images of D. Wayne Hudson, his wife and children, and the eager faces of youngsters at the project, where Ted Ferrell and the gunman had played out their taut drama, intermingled in my mind as yellow replaced the orange neon to the east, and the ships’ lights began to fade from the horizon. Violence and bad news always seem more shocking when they take place in paradise, I thought. One swimmer was already bobbing out beyond the breakers. Pale blue and pink streaks stretched north and south, a giant finger painting framed by soft billowy clouds. The palms made whispery sounds in the breeze, and crickets still chirped in the sea oats and oleander bushes as I passed the still-sleeping beachfront condos and hotels. Sea gulls soared and swooped over the shoreline, and a pelican skimmed hard-edged surf the color of gunmetal. We were all waiting for the same moment. The playful breeze suddenly ceased, as if in a dramatic pause. The radiance behind the clouds burst into a great blaze of fire as the sun emerged. First a dazzling sliver slid into view, then a quarter, then half and then the brilliant ball of flame broke free, sailing into the morning sky. The ocean instantly changed to a sea foam green fringed by silver.

  The gulls cried out a greeting. I wanted to, too. Another South Florida day had been born.

  I picked up a quart of milk at the Mini-Market on the way home, and carefully scrutinized my stories in the final edition, over cereal and coffee. Ted Ferrell looked good, surrounded by a sea of admirers, young and old. He sounded even better in print on the local page. He might even make Officer of the Month for this, I mused. Lottie’s telephoto lens had caught the suspect in the doorway brandishing his wicked-looking gun before he gave it up, pretty much shooting holes in his mother’s mistaken identity theory. The morning’s radio news had picked up both my stories, leading with D. Wayne’s death, reading them almost verbatim. It was 7:30 A.M.