Birth of a Monster (16 page)

“The only question left is whether the
police will arrest Mayor Roverdile before he carries out even more
heinous acts of bloodshed in a maniacal attempt to cover his
tracks.

“May Kasani help us all.”

Righty had to pinch himself to avoid
bursting out laughing. With any luck, the tone in the other
newspapers would change soon. After all, which story was more
titillating? And everyone knew that, when it came to the news, The
Sivingdel Times set the beat that the other papers marched
to.

Righty went back to the park, found
Harold in the forest, and took off towards Ringsetter. He told the
konulans to search far and wide for a ranch anywhere within one to
three hours from Ringsetter by horse . . . and with a white picket
fence. Righty had a promise to fulfill.

But the rest of the day was going to be
for him, Janie, and Heather.

Well, almost. He had another article to
write for The Sivingdel Times. While he hoped Harry Felden was wise
enough to realize the mayor’s demise needed to be reported in a
manner consistent with today’s article, Righty felt the situation
was a bit too delicate to allow Harry back at the helm just
yet.

Tomorrow’s top story was going to
require just the right wording.

Chapter 29

“How in the hell did we miss this?!” a
red-faced man bellowed at a trembling audience of six. He was
Michael Felthammer, owner and executive editor of The Sivingdel
Gazette, second only in size and prestige to The Sivingdel Times.
They were his top assistant editors, and while their interns and
secretaries may have trembled at their frown, they currently
quivered before the tongue-lashing from their boss.

“This is the story of the century if
not of the millennium!!” Felthammer roared, his eyes darting around
at the hapless faces before him, searching for the slightest
inkling that his toadies failed to appreciate the enormity of their
screw-up.

Mournful faces, bowed heads, sighs, and
lip-chewing informed him that they understood.

“Okay, okay,” he said, calming from the
level of raging bull to cranky, in a one-man version of good
cop/bad cop.

“Let’s think solutions. Andrea, Phil,
Steve, Roger, Sam, Charles—lift your sources up and shake them
until something falls out. If we don’t have something in tomorrow’s
paper that we can provide the public unique from whatever juicy
steak The Sivingdel Times serves tomorrow, we may as well pack all
our bags and go home. Heck! I’ll go ask Harry Felden right now if
he’d be interested in buying our paper out!”

Steve, who had been there the longest
and often dared ask openly what the others scarcely dared ask
within the safe confines of their own mind, suddenly said, “Sir,
with all due respect, is there any chance Felden got fed a line of
bull and ran with it? Maybe he thought it was too great a headline
to pass up?”

“Gee, thanks, Genius Steve! That
thought never even entered my mind, but let me summarize the facts
here for you. We’re not talking about The Sivingdel Inquirer—we’re
talking The Sivingdel Times, for Kasani’s sake! As much as I
dislike that smug Harry, he wouldn’t run with a story like this
unless it was ROCK solid! You print a story like this and it turns
out to be bogus, and you’re not just looking at being made a
laughingstock . . . you’re looking at defamation damages that could
break the national bank! You’re looking at CRIMINAL charges!” His
angry eyes scanned the room.

“Don’t go yelling ‘Liar! Liar!’ just
because The Sivingdel Times has reporters that know how to get
their hands dirty. As you have probably heard, the mayor was found
dead last night—killed gangland style along with some other victims
whose names my police contacts are keeping hush-hush, and the mayor
had a note attached to his back about debts. You know what you’ve
gotta do. Now get out of here, and GET to work!!”

The six assistant editors
slinked out of the office like a group of naughty children that
have just had their ears boxed. More than one of them had a thought
that could be roughly summarized as follows:
If the boss wants dirt written about the mayor, we’ll give it
to him . . . even if the source is our own imagination!

Chapter 30

The next day Righty felt almost as
anxious as the prior. He could imagine several
headlines:

SHAME ON
YOU,
SIVINGDEL
TIMES!

A NEW LOW IN JOURNALISM?!

HARRY FELDEN MOONLIGHTS FOR

THE SIVINGDEL INQUIRER, CONFUSES
ARTICLES . . .

OOPS!!!

If he saw anything like that, it would
probably mean a group of stern-faced detectives would be marching
over to The Sivingdel Times at this very moment, or perhaps were
already there, maybe holding Harry Felden upside down from a window
asking him when he began writing stories at the behest of kingpins.
From there, a whole five minutes would elapse before he would show
them the mysterious note threatening his family.

Everyone would calm down,
and Harry Felden would write a retraction article along with a
verbatim copy of the savage threats he and his family had been
subjected to. The riotous call for Mr. Brass’s head would quickly
resume in all the newspapers, and he would need to take Janie and
the baby and hightail it out of the country like one of those
desperate outlaws he had been reading about recently in the late
Chief Benson’s copy of
Brutality During the
Prohibition Wars.

He took a deep breath and approached
the stand for The Sivingdel Gazette. Practically flinching, he
picked up a copy:

WE THOUGHT WE KNEW YOU, MR.
MAYOR!

Righty quickly paid for a copy, then
purchased a copy from the adjacent The Sivingdel Times stand, and
headed off for a place he could sit and relax. He found a nearby
bench and turned back to the article from the Gazette:

“To call it ‘a double life’ would
perhaps not do the situation justice. While we mourn the violent
way in which Mayor Roverdile deceased last night, there can be
little doubt that such a fate awaits all who lie in bed with
organized crime. Rumors of Roverdile’s ties to the underworld had
long persisted, but only recently have law enforcement sources
begun to talk.

“Per one anonymous detective, ‘I
thought for a long time I could just look the other way. I felt the
mayor was untouchable and would put me away forever if I talked.
But once I saw what he did to my brothers at the police station, I
knew it was time to speak out.’”

Righty smiled inwardly but kept a stony
exterior. He flipped over to The Sivingdel Times:

SLAIN—THE MAYOR

VICTIM—THE GALLOWS!

“While death at the hands of our city’s
gangsters may have been poetic justice for the now infamous Mayor
Roverdile, we at The Sivingdel Times believe that a public trial
and execution would have had a more powerful deterrent effect on
future politicians who believe themselves above the law.

“Detectives close to the case say the
gambling debt may have merely been the proverbial straw that broke
the camel’s back, with the primary motive being a fear amongst the
underworld hierarchy that the mayor was going to make them take the
fall while he posed as the restorer of law and order. Some sources
say the gangsters had even come to fear extrajudicial acts of
violence from the mayor because these gangsters epitomized ‘knowing
too much.’”

Righty felt the deepest sense of relief
he had experienced in a long time. He wasn’t out of the woods yet,
but he could see the clearing. It was so very beautiful.

But he had some papers to look over in
his cabin, and he flinched inwardly at the thought of what he might
find there.

Chapter 31

While Righty Rick enjoyed a sublime
respite from the bloody forty-eight hours that were now behind him,
journalist Stephen Randalls was at the apogee of distress. He and
Righty had shared something special together, though Righty was
utterly oblivious to the fact, and to Mr. Randalls it was just a
hunch.

Approximately forty-eight hours ago,
Mr. Randalls had been inside the processing area of the Sivingdel
Police Station, tucked away in the shadows while an interesting
prisoner had sat under a bright light like an artifact on
display.

Mr. Randalls had sketched enough
mugshots for The Republic’s Gazette for the task to become rather
mundane, but he knew from the moment arrestee Sam Higler walked in
to be sketched that this was no ordinary arrest and no ordinary
criminal.

The man looked like he was carved out
of solid granite—chest, arm, and shoulder muscles bulging out
ferociously, yet aesthetically, like the well-designed exterior of
a deadly trebuchet, capable of hurling missiles mercilessly at its
enemies.

And the man was seething. Though the
casual observed might have thought him calm or even broken, Mr.
Randalls was no ordinary observer. He had always had a keen eye for
a man’s state of mind, and inside Sam Higler fateful clouds were
slowly churning, bearing all the hallmarks of a nasty hurricane in
formation.

Mr. Randalls had inquired after Sam
Higler’s departure from the processing area what his offense was
and why he was in his underwear rather his normal clothes. The
processing officer feigned ignorance until handed a small bribe, at
which point he recalled that Sam Higler appeared to be a first-time
guest at the jail and that he had showed up asking to speak to Tats
and then to the chief. A search of his clothing quickly discovered
so much money in so many hidden pockets that they decided to remove
his clothing as evidence of attempted bribery.

Mr. Randalls couldn’t help but wonder
at that very moment if this could be the elusive Mr. Brass—the man
who had maintained secret and sacrosanct his real name, whatever it
was, and who had seemingly appeared out of nowhere to acquire city
kingpin status as if it were as simple as picking up a glass of
water and drinking it.

Having been busy in Sivingdel for the
last several weeks, lurking around the jail processing area for a
SISA-related arrest to happen so that he could sketch the hapless
miscreants, he had accumulated a couple dozen sketches of suspects,
and had been planning on heading back to the capital city the next
morning, but a strange hunch had told him to stick
around.

He had left the jail for lunch and had
been heading back there when he saw a scuffle near the doors to the
police station entrance. It looked like a group of men had chained
the doors shut, but he was too far away to be sure. Although he
could see the men in question were very well dressed, he couldn’t
make out their faces.

His attention was quickly diverted by
shouts of “FIRE!” And it seemed out of nowhere flames quickly began
devouring the top of the building. He had whipped out his sketch
pad and begun drawing as quickly as he could, but the deafening
sound of explosions and the chaos that quickly unraveled in the
streets prompted him to turn tail and run for dear life.

Not knowing what other acts of violence
might be in store for the city that day, he dashed back to his
hotel, packed his items so quickly he practically broke his ankle
in the process when he tripped over a piece of luggage, and
skedaddled, feeling as if at any moment one of the surrounding
buildings he was passing on his galloping horse might erupt into
flames and consume him like dry kindling.

He breathed a sigh of relief once he
had Sivingdel far behind him, but it seemed that no sooner had he
achieved something truly approaching tranquility when he found the
bashed-in remains of a corpse, both of whose hands had been
severed. While he couldn’t be sure, he believed he had seen that
man visit the police station a time or two with a partner looking
really official and putting all the local cops on edge.

He almost got out his sketch pad, but a
combination of disgust and a strong desire for self-preservation
told him he needed to keep moving. He had ridden through the night
and arrived in Selgen at around 4 a.m.

He went straight to his humble office,
where he had a small room in the back, and went to sleep
immediately.

That night his dreams—if nightmares can
thus be called—made sleep a torment rather than a relief. He saw
the body count in Sivingdel growing higher and higher. And he awoke
after a mere five hours of sleep, energized by terror.

He then spent the rest of the day going
around in circles in his mind as to what he would do with his most
recent sketches. At Senator Hutherton’s behest, which involved a
fee, he had been putting them front and center on the first page of
The Republic’s Gazette each time he came back from Sivingdel so
that he could bring as much attention to the drug peddlers as
possible.