Blackbird by Tom Wright Page A

hungry either.
    Casey swallowed and said, ‘Some of the kids think it was a cult. But I heard talk like, nobody’ll ever catch whoever did it because they weren’t flesh and blood.’
    Jordan shook her head contemptuously but said nothing.
    ‘Ghosts?’ I said.
    Casey shrugged. ‘They’re saying there were no tracks and no fingerprints or anything. Somebody even said people heard horses and the sound of marching boots out there that night. Is that true?’
    ‘Who said that?’
    ‘That’s what I wanted to know, but it was kind of like, “I heard some kid’s brother told his cousin about it”.’
    ‘I just wish I knew more about cryogenic suspension,’ said Jordan without looking up.
    ‘Cry-oh-what?’ said Casey.
    ‘Why, Jordan?’ I asked.
    ‘Well, one of the kids said his uncle told him Adolf Hitler and Martin Bormann didn’t die at the end of the war. He said they had their heads cut off and frozen, and the Nazis have been keeping them in some kind of deep-freezein Argentina. Now they’ve got them hooked up to machines and the heads are telling them how to fight the mongrel races and the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.’
    ‘Gross,’ said Casey.
    Jordan stopped poking at the coleslaw and laid down her fork. ‘The thing is, people do get themselves frozen, and there could be stuff going on that we don’t know about. That boy who was talking about Hitler and Bormann said his uncle told the whole family to stay on their toes.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I guess he meant for them to watch out. Like something bad might happen to them.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because he said the government is getting totally out of control, and there’s nothing they won’t do any more. He said they burned up all those crazy people in Waco that time and – ’ She stopped and frowned down at the coleslaw.
    ‘And what, honey?’
    Her eyes came up to meet mine. ‘And this time there’s gonna be hell to pay.’

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    TEN
    Back at the office, I grabbed a few of the pink message slips that were piling up on my desk and looked at them. They were all call-back requests from reporters in Houston, London, Austin, Tel Aviv and Dallas. I picked up some more and in addition to duplications of the first handful counted three from Canada, one each from Shreveport, Bonn, Mexico City and Little Rock, and another that was hard to read but seemed to be from somebody named Ocaro at a shoppers’ weekly in the Azores. By now Dr Gold’s means of death was general knowledge, her killing touching some nerve that all the everyday murders missed, but the reporters had almost nothing to work with except the fact that Dr Gold had ‘apparently been crucified’.
    For local reporters the lack of hard information meant a lot of background coverage, opinion pieces and miscellaneous filler. Some of it was about me, one editor actually calling me a ‘tragic figure’ and a dogged nemesis of killers and rapists because of what had happened to my partner’s wife and daughter six years ago. I tried to generate a mental picture of a dogged nemesis but only got an image of Snoopy in a trench coat.
    But what happened to Bo’s family – and what Bo and Idid because of it – was no cartoon, and there was no way to deny it had changed me. I still saw flashes of their faces everywhere, in mirrors and windows, or out of the corner of my eye, as if I couldn’t completely agree with myself that they were gone for good. Jana said it had changed me, that I was less empathic and harder than the man she married.
    ‘I’ll take that at bedtime, baby,’ she said. ‘But when was the last time I got you to watch a female movie with me? You won’t even eat eggs over easy any more.’
    And it wasn’t only Jana who saw something different in me.
    ‘ That’s what I’m talkin’ about,’ Mouncey had said after watching through the two-way as I was questioning a high-school sophomore I’d brought in for shooting his stepfather