“Just what is it I’ve done, Avery?” Pace interrupted, slipping his hands inside his coat and pushing them deep into the pockets of his trousers. He meant there to be an edge of challenge in his voice, but as he listened to himself, he wasn’t sure he heard it.
“What have you done? Are you that insensitive?” Pace knew then why Schaeffer had wanted this meeting in the conference room. The place was soundproofed, and Schaeffer was testing the outer limits of the envelope of that technology.
“I’m not insensitive at all,” Pace replied. “I assume this is about my visit to Ken Sachs last night. I don’t apologize for it. Sachs was the last one outside this newsroom and the restaurant to see Mike McGill and me together. He had to be the one who issued the order to kill Mike.”
“Oh, really? Let’s assume for the moment the shooting was, as you suggest, an effort to make McGill’s death look like an accident. I’m not convinced of it, but we’ll assume for the moment it’s true. Did it ever occur to you someone simply followed McGill all day, looking for an opportunity? Did it ever occur to you when your pilot friend left us at the restaurant, the goons saw their opportunity, formulated their plan, followed him into the drugstore and carried it out?”
“No. Mike would have noticed if someone followed him all day. I would have, too.”
“Why should he? Why should you? Were you trained by the FBI?”
Pace felt a twinge of doubt creep to the edge of his self-confidence. He defied it.
“Even if everything you believe is true,” Schaeffer continued, still wound tight in anger, “your visit to Sachs last night destroyed all the subtlety we agreed on. The idea was to let your story do the talking. Now you’ve blown that. You’ve blown it all. If Sachs is guilty, he’s going to send everyone else to ground. If he isn’t guilty, you’ve lost one of the most valuable inside sources you could have.” He paused and peered at Pace. “Does any of this make sense to you?”
“I believe what I believe, Avery,” the reporter said, but he could feel the doubt returning, gobbling up his self-confidence like an old Pac-Man game, and there wasn’t enough defiance left for a counterattack.
“I’ll tell you this: If you don’t straighten up—and that includes drying out—you’re history on this story, and maybe history on this newspaper,” Schaeffer warned savagely. He was so worked up that when he pronounced “newspaper,” drops of spittle sprayed the carpet. “Too many people spent too many years making the Chronicle into one of the most respected newspapers in the country. This paper is our identity, our greatest achievement, our lives. And your Pulitzer notwithstanding, I’ll see you gone and disgraced before I’ll let you bring this paper down.”
Schaeffer’s reference to drying out hit Pace like a slap in the face. He was drinking a lot. He had a clear mental image of a nearly empty Jack Daniel’s bottle in his kitchen.
“How did you find out?” Pace asked curiously.
“What? About your outing last night?”
Pace nodded.
“Ken Sachs was waiting for me when I got in this morning. If you think I’m angry, you should see him. He feels horribly violated, and I don’t blame him.”
“I thought he was supposed to leave at dawn on a political trip for the President.”
“He was. He said he canceled it on the pretext of an emergency. That’s pretty impressive, don’t you think? Would a guilty man come in here to confront me in front of most of my staff?”
“Maybe, if he thought he could get the kind of response from you I’m hearing.”
Schaeffer shook his head slowly, frustrated. “I’ve given you my ultimatum, Steve,” he said flatly. “You heed it and get your head straight, or you start looking for another job.”
Pace felt dazed. He’d walked into the Chronicle building confident in what he believed, but like it or not, Schaeffer had shaken his confidence. And there were, Pace had to admit, blurs in his brain, blank spots in his memory, chinks of doubt in his personal wall of fury, all of which, maybe, were signs that Schaeffer’s reference to booze was on target.
He was disappointed to find no messages in his mailbox or on his desk. Calls would have given him something to do, somewhere to make progress out of the mess he created.
“Hey, aren’t you going to welcome me home?” The question came from the desk next to his. Jack Tarshis was back at his post.
“Sorry, I didn’t see you, Jack. My mind was somewhere else.” Pace shrugged out of his coat. “Where have you been, anyway? You’ve been gone a month.”
“Only ten days,” Tarshis replied. “I was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. A seminar on preserving the wilderness environment. Good stuff.”
Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The memories flooded back. A place where time doesn’t count, only the size of the trout at the end of your line. The little stream, the one winding like a snake through the National Elk Refuge—Flat Creek. No trees to hide me from the fish. Had to crawl through the high grass up to the bank on my knees, with the sun in my face so my shadow wouldn’t fall over the water and spook the devils. They can smell a fly rod at a hundred yards. Two great days on the Snake River on the prowl for cutthroat trout. Smartest fish ever created. Bastards can spit out an artificial lure faster than the hand of man can set the hook. Yellowstone National Park. So much to do; so little time. Stalking the rare grayling in the Firehole River, and when hunger calls, going for the big trout in Yellowstone Lake.
And then another memory. LeHardy Rapids. Five A.M., on an early June morning. The tourists weren’t even thinking about getting up yet. Parked the car off the side of the road and walked down a grassy hillside to the Yellowstone River, then waded a hundred feet upstream and nearly froze my legs off. Found a flat rock where I sat and listened to the birds exalt in the new day. A muskrat was swimming easily, half-submerged in the fast-moving water, the beginning of the end of spring runoff. It was chilly. Got down below freezing overnight, but as soon as the sun hit, felt like midsummer. The air’s so thin; the sun so intense.
I saw movement on the other bank. A grizzly sow, thin after a winter’s hibernation, but huge. Unmistakable hump above the shoulder blades. Tremendous muscle mass. And two cubs, cubs of the year, for sure. Born in the den while the mother slept. Born no bigger than kittens. Had to work their way up the sow’s body to find the nursing stations. She couldn’t help. If they missed, they died. But they lived. They grew. They were playing, wrestling on the opposite bank while the sow drank and kept an eye on a shallow backwater, alert for an unwary trout that would make breakfast. I shifted my legs. The sow’s head came up. She knew I was there. She saw me, or smelled me, or sensed me, I don’t know which, but she knew. She watched. I whispered, “I’m not going to hurt your babies.” And she lowered her head to the water again. The Yellowstone River, wide at LeHardy Rapids, separated us. I was no threat to her or to her cubs. She was no threat to me. Her decision to stay at the river bank was a gift to me, and I will be forever in her debt. When she and her cubs disappeared into the forest, I looked at my watch. It was 7:43. I had shared more than two hours with one of the rarest and most magnificent of creatures.