Strange Weather by Joe Hill
“Just I did a search, and you don’t have any guns registered to you in this state.” Rickles scratched an eyebrow, didn’t look at him. “That might be a problem, you know.”
“Oh. It’s registered to Falcon Security. It’s their gun. You want me to see if I can get someone to find the paper on it? They’re based in Texas. It might be registered there, or maybe—”
But Rickles didn’t care and wasn’t listening. He swatted Kellaway’s shoulder in excitement and leaned forward. On the TV there was a shot of the Miracle Falls Mall, the entrance to its parking lot blocked by a police cruiser.
“It’s the new national normal,” intoned a deep male voice. “You know the story. A disgruntled employee walks into her workplace with a gun and a heart full of malice and begins to kill. But what happened next, at this shopping center in St. Possenti, Florida, will surprise and inspire you.”
“Here we go,” said Rickles. “I’ll tell you what, boy. I do like to see myself on TV. Hey. Did you get a call from Bill O’Reilly’s people?”
“Yeah. And 20/20.”
“We going to do them, too?”
“I guess.”
“Good,” Rickles said, and sighed. “I have days when I think about being killed in the line of duty, and you know what haunts me? The idea that I’ll miss all that sweet, heartbreaking coverage when I’m gone.”
“What if you die in your own bed at seventy-five after an early-morning screw?”
“I’d rather get blown away,” Rickles said, and took another pull on his beer. “I’d prefer to die a legend, but I doubt I’ll be that lucky.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you,” Kellaway said.
July 11, 10:00 A.M.
WHEN JAY RICKLES TOLD KELLAWAY that he had once stocked his office with black faces to put a black journalist at ease, he was guilty of exaggeration. He hadn’t really planted his window washer at a desk and told him to pretend to be a detective. The window washer was Cambodian and wasn’t even working that day.
But it was true that Shane Wolff, an IT guy from Atlantic Datastream, had been in the office on the morning Lanternglass arrived to interview Chief Rickles about the tragic death of an unarmed black youth in 1993 at the hands of the police. Shane was usually at the St. Possenti Police Department two or three times a week, to rebuild their office network, which was still improbably running Windows XP. And it was also true that Rickles had planted Shane at an empty detective’s desk, close to the front door, so Aisha Lanternglass would spot a black man in a tie as soon as she walked in.
At the time Lanternglass had nodded to Wolff, and he had mildly nodded back, and from that moment on they had studiously ignored each other. She knew him right away, of course, would’ve known him even if he didn’t also service the computers at the Digest. Wolff and Colson had gone to school together, had dated some of the same girls. But it wouldn’t have served to acknowledge him openly. As it happened, Shane Wolff’s frequent jobs for the St. Possenti police were his highest-paying gigs. First the cops paid him—and then Aisha did, if he came across anything she could use.
On Thursday, Wolff showed up at the Digest just as Aisha was finishing her morning workout. She was running steps, two flights up and then back, forty-eight steps in a complete circuit. She kept her free weights tucked in the shadows under the staircase. There was no space for them in the four-room apartment she shared with Dorothy, and Tim Chen didn’t mind.
“How many times do you go up and down?” Shane asked her, his voice echoing in the concrete stairwell.
She trotted to the bottom of the steps. “Fifty rotations. Almost done. Five left. Are you crying?”
Shane Wolff leaned into the open metal door that led to the parking lot. He didn’t look like a tech nerd. He was six foot three, maybe two hundred pounds, his neck as thick as his head. His eyes were bloodshot and streaming and tragic.
“It’s the smoke. I drove through a big cloud of it on the way here. I’ve never used my windshield wipers to brush away sparks before. They had me over to the PD yesterday to scrub the hard drives in Vice. About once a week, they go looking for online porn and find Russian malware instead. Anyway, while I was over there, I saw the ballistics report on the mall thing.”
She started running upstairs again. Her calves throbbed. “Hold that thought. I’ll be back.”
“Hey,” he said. “Is that good for your glutes? All those stairs? Must be.”
She hesitated, almost missed a step, kept going, didn’t answer him.
Tim Chen was waiting for her at the top of the steps. He had pushed open the Digest office’s fire door and sat on the landing, leaning against it, with Aisha’s battered old MacBook in his lap. He was editing her piece.
“I gotta cut these two paragraphs at the end,” he told her in a remote, distracted sort of way. “You’re five hundred words over, and this stuff isn’t important.”
“The hell I’m five hundred words over.” She slowed at the landing, put her hands on her knees, and inhaled deeply. Lanternglass craned her head to see what he was cutting. “Oh, come on, Tim. Don’t cut that. Why would you cut that?”
“You make it sound like Kellaway got kicked out of the army. He didn’t get kicked out. He served his country for a full tour in Iraq. Then he came home and stopped a mass shooting.”
“He was AdSep’d, administratively separated. That’s kicked out.”
“Don’t you have terrible things to do to your body?” Tim asked.
“Jesus,” she said, and trotted away down the steps.
Wolff watched her approach, his reddened eyes streaming. He looked like a mourner at the edge of a grave.
“Okay,” she said. “Give it to me. ‘Sources close to the investigation say . . .’”
“Becki Kolbert shot Roger Lewis three times with a .357 Mag. The first one nailed him in the chest while he was facing her. He turned to run, and she tagged him in the back and the left buttock. At that point Becki Kolbert probably tried to leave the office and was surprised by Mrs. Haswar. The way it looks, she slew the baby and Yasmin both with just one shot, right to the center mass.”
“‘Slew’? That’s a very Old Testament way of putting it,” she said. “Maybe you should be a writer.”
“Shortly after Kolbert killed the Haswars, Mr. Kellaway entered Devotion Diamonds. She retreated into the office, they exchanged words, boom, boom, he fires two shots. One missed, the other caught her in the left lung. She went down, and he turned away to attend to Mrs. Haswar. Bob Lutz walked in and approached the shooter to see if she was still alive. Unfortunately for him, she was. Becki Kolbert shot him right between the eyes, military precision. At that point Kellaway disarmed her, but it’s pretty much over anyhow. She bled out shortly after Emergency Services arrived on the scene.”
Lanternglass was running up the stairs by then and was too out of breath to reply. She climbed twenty-four steps to where her editor sat on the concrete landing.
“You almost done?” Tim Chen asked. “You’re making me tired, and I’m only watching.”
“Why are you cutting the stuff about his military service?” she gasped.
He read her own article back to her: “‘Kellaway may have missed his chance at heroic distinction in the Gulf—his tour of duty was troubled, and he did not receive an honorable discharge—but following the events at the Miracle Falls he’ll be celebrated for his service at last.’ Why would you write that? His army record a decade ago isn’t relevant. You’re taking a perfectly satisfying feel-good story and stapling on this strange catty ending.”
“Catty?”
“I was going to say bitchy, but it isn’t politically correct.”
“He was dismissed from the army for excessive use of force as an MP. He routinely drew his firearm in nonthreatening situations and once punched a handcuffed prisoner. Look at the record. This guy is not a war hero, no matter how they made it sound on Telling Stories the other night.”
“Out of curiosity,” Tim Chen said. ??
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said, and ran back down the stairs to Wolff.
Wolff dabbed at the corners of his eyes with a white handkerchief. “I can show you some good stretches.”
“For what?” she said.
“For your glutes. You want to stretch them out before you abuse them like that.”
She slowed again as she approached the bottom of the steps. “You said something funny a minute ago. You said, ‘The way it looks,’ she slew the baby and Yasmin Haswar with one shot.”
“Yeah, and you made fun of me.”
“No, hang on. What do you mean, ‘The way it looks’?”
He wiped under his eyes. “That’s the only theory that fits the facts. They’re still digging around for the bullet. It went through a mirror and the drywall behind and disappeared into the bowels of the Miracle Falls Mall.”
“Slew. Bowels. Glutes. You’re full of interesting words, Shane. Can I make a suggestion?”
She started back up the stairs.
“What?”
“Verbally admiring a woman’s glutes isn’t the right way to lean into asking her out. Say something about her laugh.”
She was twenty steps up when he shouted after her, “You’d have to laugh for me to say something nice about it. I work with what I have.”
Chen was still sitting there at the top of the steps.
“Yeah. All right,” Lanternglass said. “When he was with the military police, Kellaway handcuffed a black private in front of his girlfriend and then punched him. And last year he pulled a gun on a black teenager who he thought was stealing from the mall. Turned out the kid was an out-of-uniform employee moving stock from one store to another. And what matters here isn’t that they were both black. What matters is that Kellaway has a history of going Rambo, acting violently without thought.”
“There’s nothing in the article about him harassing employees.”
She jogged in place in front of him. “No. My source asked me not to print that story. Point is, I don’t think it would be the worst thing for this paper to at least hint at the possibility that Randall Kellaway is predisposed to using excessive force. Just in case the cops recover the security footage on the conveniently destroyed iMac and we find out he shot Becki Kolbert when she was trying to surrender.”
“Like the way Colson got shot?”
She quit jogging and gripped her knees and lowered her head. When she inhaled, it felt like there was a cactus in her chest where her heart belonged, needles bristling against her lungs.
“Jesus,” she said. “That’s a low fucking blow, Tim.”
“Is it?” he said calmly. “You hear this story about Randall Kellaway harassing a black kid. You hear about him assaulting a black soldier in the army. Now he’s a hero and he’s got Jay Rickles hugging him on TV and calling him the good guy with a gun. If Kellaway’s story came apart, you could humiliate the both of them. You could take out two with one shot.”
“No, Tim. Words aren’t bullets. When Yasmin Haswar and her baby hit the floor, that was two taken out with one shot.”
Tim Chen firmly and forcefully tapped two keys. One of them was Delete. “Give me a reason to trash his military record and we’ll put it in the very next story. But your personal issues don’t count as a reason.”
She was surprised at the sudden deep stab of hurt in her stomach. It was on her lips to say, Fuck you, but she didn’t say it. It was on her lips to say, That’s so fucking unfair, Tim, but she didn’t say that either. She turned and ran away, ran back down the steps, because the thought was in her mind that it wasn’t unfair at all, and maybe if she moved quickly enough, she could leave her shame behind, up on the top landing with her friend and editor.
When she got to the bottom of the stairs, Shane Wolff said, “Smoke is bothering you, too, huh?”
“What?”
“Your eyes,” he said, and pointed. “You’re crying, too. Want my hankie?”
She snatched it away from him and wiped her face. “Thank you.”
“I know a pretty good rooftop bar,” he said. “It’s up five stories. I could take the elevator and you could run, and we could meet at the top for a beer. It’d be great exercise.”
“It’s hard to go out when you have an eight-year-old,” she said. “I can afford to pay you for the ballistics report or I can pay for a sitter, but I can’t pay for both.”
“So? The report’s on me, then. The beers, too.”
She very gently punched him in the chest. And turned. And started back up the stairs. “That’s sweet, Shane, but I don’t want to take advantage. And stop staring at my glutes.”
Lanternglass was a dozen steps up when she paused and looked back. Shane Wolff stood in the open door to the parking lot, covering his eyes to shield them from the sight of her glutes.
“So . . . wait,” she called down to him. She stopped running, stood there with her fists balled on her hips. “Four shots when she killed Lewis and the Haswars. A pause. Then two more when Kellaway enters the store and shoots her. Another pause. Then one more, when Becki Kolbert executes Bob Lutz. Seven shots in . . . what? Five minutes?”
“That’s about it,” he said.
“Huh,” she said, turning to climb on.
When she got to the top of the stairs, Tim Chen was still sitting there, back to the open fire door, holding her laptop.
“I want to apologize,” he said. “For what I said a minute ago.”
“Don’t apologize,” she said. “Just stick it back in.”
He sighed heavily. “I can’t think of one good reason to even play footsie with defaming the guy.”
“How about this?” she said. “The cops say Kolbert fired four times, three into Rog Lewis, one into Yasmin and her baby. A minute later Kellaway enters the store and fires twice, hits her once, misses once. Finally, about a minute after that, there’s the last shot, the one that kills Bob Lutz. That’s what the forensics report tells us.”
“Okay.”
“But there’s an eyewitness—really an earwitness—who heard the whole thing. And he said it was three shots, a pause, then two, a pause, then two more.”
“So? Your earwitness was scared to death and got it wrong. Happens all the time.”
“He was texting his girlfriend. He texted her after each burst of gunfire. He was sure: three, two, two. Not four, two, one.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means there was another shot after the one that killed Bob Lutz. Explain that.”
Tim Chen couldn’t. He sat there tapping one finger against the edge of the laptop. “Did your earwitness show you the text messages, proving he heard what he says he heard, when he heard it? Did you see the time stamps?”
“No,” she admitted. “I had to pick Dorothy up from tennis camp. I didn’t get a chance to look at the texts. But I’m sure he’d share them if I asked.”
Tim nodded and said, “Okay. Well. That might be interesting. But I don’t see what it has to do with Randall Kellaway’s piss-poor military record.”
“Nothing.”
“So why denigrate his service at all? Even casually?”
“To fuck with him and see what happens. You can find out a lot about someone by fucking with them.”
“Yeah? You learn that in journalism school, Aisha?”
“That ain’t J-school, brother,” she said. “That’s old-school.”
July 12, 6:13 P.M.
THEY TAPED FOR THE O’REILLY FACTOR at the same local TV studio where they’d recorded their bits for Telling Stories and 20/20. When Rickles and Kellaway came out into the warm, smoky evening, Aisha Lanternglass was waiting for them. She cut them off before they could get to Rickles’s pickup.
“Hey, guys,” she said. “What do you say about giving your local paper ten minutes? Or do I gotta have a TV show for you to talk to me?”
She grinned to
Jay Rickles beamed, creases deepening in his seamed face. He hitched his belt up. “Aisha! I got your voice mail. Getting back to you has been on the top of my list of things to do for about three days now. You want my secretary to give you a ring, see if we can pencil something in?”
“That’s great,” she said. “If you could give me ten minutes right now, and then if we could follow up in a couple of days with a longer sit-down, that would be perfect.”
Rickles glanced at Kellaway. “We better give her her ten minutes. I’m afraid if I try to climb into the truck, she’ll tackle me.”
Kellaway found it difficult to look her directly in the face. His insides were hot, sick and inflamed. He had heard all about her article, trashing his military service first thing in the morning. They’d hashed it out on the morning news shows.
“New details have emerged about Rand Kellaway, the hero of last week’s Miracle Falls Shooting,” said the newsboy, a kid who looked like he ought to be bagging groceries, not blabbing on TV. “The St. Possenti Digest is reporting today that Mr. Kellaway was released from the U.S. military in 2003 after repeated allegations that he was guilty of using excessive force in his time as an MP. Gun-control activists have already seized on the piece to argue that Kellaway escalated the situation by entering with a loaded . . .”
Later Kellaway found a wrinkled copy of the Digest in the green room at the TV studio and read the article for himself. There was nothing new in the whole story until the last couple of paragraphs, where they made him sound like a Third World torturer instead of a soldier. A postage-stamp-size photograph of Aisha Lanternglass ran alongside the piece, grinning just the way she was grinning now.