Paperback(Original)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Then Cockburn finds himself at a bloody crime scene in downtown Omaha and uncovers a lead in what soon becomes the only story worth pursuing, one that just might pull him down and keep him there for good. From street level to small-town bureaucracy, and even the staff at the paper, a vigilante league is intent on cleaning up the ghetto for profit, even if it means killing a few people to get it done — an elaborate conspiracy too unbelievable for newsprint.
Like the detectives of all great noir, Cockburn's got a past that threatens to invade his present at any moment. Work has become a diversion from his personal life; but almost no one knew about his connection to the death of his best friend's little sister, and now he's begun receiving disconcerting blackmail threats.
Debut novelist Jonathan Segura has all the right instincts when it comes to plotting a relentless and tightly packed story. Darkly funny at times, and even wryly emotional, Occupational Hazards is a sharply observant, suspenseful read from a new and worthy writing talent.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781416562917 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 07/08/2008 |
| Edition description: | Original |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
one
Could be I'm still drunk. Or maybe this is the hangover that'll do me in. Bottom line: shouldn't be speeding to cover a hostage situation. But it's early Monday, deadline's Wednesday and it's been a slow week, so.
Began this errand at home. Got the car started on the first try despite the subzero temperature. Headed downtown, flipped on the scanner and heard the chatter. So it's north I go on 16th Street, out of our two-skyscraper downtown (the taller of which, at forty-some-odd stories, was erected a couple years ago) that hugs the Missouri River and where Union Pacific, ConAgra, Gallup and First National all have their HQs, and into the poor black neighborhood. Locals call it "North O" because four syllables are two too many. About 90 percent of the city's black population lives up here, and 100 percent of the unarmed black dudes cop-shot to death are buried up here, too. Other direction, not surprisingly called "South O," is where the growing Hispanic population lives and works in the few remaining meatpacking plants. Used to be the slaughterhouses paid decently. Now they've got union busters on retainer for the couple times a year when the immigrants get funny ideas about a living wage. Rest of the city, west of, say, 42nd Street and all the way out to 172nd or however far this burg sprawls, it's reserved for white folks. If you drove out there, you'd notice the curbs aren't crumbling and the streets are wide and lit up reliably and you'd see these tracts of minimansions — miles and miles of the fucking things — and you'd want to know where the money came from and you might wonder, momentarily, if you'd ever end up in that sorta spot and, if so, by choice or misfortune, and, in the end, how in the fuck you'd hack. It's in this town that I've been left to carve out a life.
Anyway, according to the snippets I've caught, some freakshow went on an ill-advised holiday from his antipsychotics and has convinced himself that his 13-year-old daughter is the Antichrist or some fucking thing. Stepping out of the car with the Canon strapped around my neck and my notebook and pen in hand, I find the cops have cordoned off a two-block radius around the action, and all the TV jocks and wire and daily nerds are congregating around Lieutenant Dick Savage, the cop spokesman. Savage and I don't get along, which is a story for another time. Hang loose at the rear of the posse and listen to the latest: negotiations haven't been successful and the guy's been spotted through the windows of his house alternately shoving a long-barreled pistol down his daughter's throat and rubbing his temples with it. Which is enough for me, really, so I walk down the street past a handful of rotting cracker-box houses and start hopping fences and cutting through backyards.
I finagle a decent spot behind a tiny hedgerow across the street from the house. About a half-dozen cruisers are lined up on the street and twice as many cops kneel behind them with their guns drawn. Lift the camera to my eye and use the zoom glass to scope out the action. Kinda worried the photos might turn out blurry — telephoto's maxed out and being held by these shivering mitts.
Someone I can't see because of the glare opens up the dormered window on the second floor of the house and throws something small and black into the street. Can't quite make out what it is. A guy who I assume is the negotiator steps out of an unmarked cruiser, rubs his chin and says a few words to the sergeant next to him, then makes a phone gesture with his hand and shrugs. So negotiations have failed. Lick my lips because they're chapped as hell, and the fuckers must be bleeding, because I taste copper. Suddenly there's a torrent of screaming. I scan the house with the camera and see the front door's open. The girl, still wearing blue plaid pajama bottoms and a Huskers sweatshirt, is thrown out onto the porch. She's screaming and crying. Her face is red and swollen and there's blood dripping from beneath her right eye. Snap a few shots of her as she stands up. Two tripping, running, horror-movie-esque steps toward the street, and — shit — that familiar crack meets the shutter click as a chunky pink mist erupts from her head. Soon as her body falls, the cops open up, the trigger-happy juveniles, and I'm clicking away, the speed winder buzzing, egging me on, till I see a bearded and bloodied face drop just across the threshold of the front door. Black and crimson holes — two in the forehead and one in the cheek. Shoot till the film's expired.
Follow my footprints through the snow back to the media corral, where Lieutenant Dick is talking into a tangled nest of boom mics. His face looks plastic under the sun guns blazing down on him, the prick. I consider stopping for a quick quote, but this will get covered all to hell and back, so I can snake whatever I need from what's going to be printed on it in the morning. Besides, by the time we hit the street with it on Thursday, it'll be stale. But it's hot — and mine — for the moment.
En route to the office, my cell phone rings. Caller ID shows it's from my apartment, so I don't answer. Check my voice mail after plugging the meter, and Allison's going to be working late, so go ahead and get dinner without her. Can do.
The only way into the office is down a steep flight of fire hazard stairs illuminated by two bare bulbs. At the bottom, I step into a puddle of melted snow deep enough that it splashes my socks. Door's a heavy sumbitch, solid wood with a plate of frosted glass dominating the top half. Omaha Weekly News-Telegraph written in Magic Marker.
A dim, miserable place, the office. Used to call it the orifice, but gave that up because it's such a gimme. The walls here started out white, but years of cigarette smoke have turned them yellow in some places and brown in others. There's only one window, and it's a good twelve, thirteen feet up and no bigger than a broadsheet.
Swagger like the cowboy I'm not across the sales area. Our five reps call it the killing floor. A noisy bunch, these guys. Yammering loud and fast and dinging that goddamned sales bell whenever one of them closes a deal. You'd think they were trying to impress someone with the show they put on. Wink.
My home is in the back, next to the pisser and below the sign that reads: Enchant. Deceive. Secondhand metal desk and a '70s-era orange IBM Selectric typewriter. Used to have a computer, but I got hooked on the rhythmic clatter one afternoon at a vintage store waiting on an ex to finish perusing the junk.
"Morning, boy." It's Manny, the implausibly titled Chief of News and Marketing. I know, how can a newspaper maintain its integrity with that power structure? Answer is: at least we're not pretending. Manny's called me "boy" as long as I've been working for him. He thinks it's funny, for a middle-aged black guy to call a college-educated, just-past-30 honky his boy. "Tell me you got something on that shooting this morning."
I spin around in the chair and hold up the can of film. Manny's shirt's already halfway untucked from his triple-pleated Dockers and his tie's loosened. Horrible damned tie, too: puppies square-dancing and drinking moonshine from little brown jugs. He can say what he wants about my appearance, I've got two things going for me: my shoes are always polished and my ties, when I wear them, don't fucking suck. "Have it written up by Wednesday." Spin back around to confront the pile of press releases. One on top's from Savage's office, says the police locked up a local Catholic schoolteacher this weekend after a dozen kids accused the guy of paying them each 25 bucks to jerk off and shoot their loads into salt shakers as part of a study he's doing for the university. Attached to the release is an itemized list of everything taken from the guy's apartment after a search: 22 containers of suspected semen, a Jumping Jolly Pussy, Anal-Ease, a Realistic Vibrating Pleasure Face with Sucking Action (Dishwasher Safe), Cum-Filled Sorority Bitches, Part 7 and a Nikon Coolpix 885 digital camera.
"Got a minute, boy? We need to chat."
I fold up the press release and slide it into my pocket. "Let me get a coffee real quicklike."
"Meet you upstairs," he says while pretending to read whatever it is he's holding. Since we don't have a conference room, whenever something needs to be aired somewhat selectively or covertly, we talk upstairs, which is a euphemism for on the sidewalk.
I don't think I'm in trouble, because I can't remember having fucked up anything recently, so maybe I'm getting a raise. Which would be the first one since I signed on fresh out of school eight years ago.
Coffee shop on the corner gives us coffee because we give them a free ad every week. I take two houses with milk, tip a buck because I'm a nice guy, have a quick hey-how-are-you with a guy who calls me Tommy and I'm out the door.
After crossing the street, I set one of the coffees on the sidewalk and kick the window to let Manny know I'm waiting on him. He's grumbling something about heart disease when he gets to the top of the stairs.
"You should cut back on the pork rinds." I give him the coffee from the ground.
"Got a burner?"
I pull out my pack and hand him one, then light us both with my Zippo, that white trash standard-bearer.
"Where you at with the expressway piece?" Manny asks.
Fuck. Caught. A big deal public works boondoggle story he threw at me a week or more ago that I've recently deposited in the doomed-to-never-be-finished drawer in my file cabinet. It's got plenty of company in there: an exposé on the broken juvenile justice system, the obligatory gang violence tearjerker, an interesting-as-wet-carpet piece on how the county's funding formula for its elected officials screws over the public defender's office in favor of the county attorney. Name it, I've half-written a story on it. So I throw out one of my standards. "I'm playing phone tag with the engineering firm. Guys are hard as hell to get on the phone, you know." It's not that I'm lazy, but trite, systemic shit fails to start me up.
"Keep on 'em. This one's going to be big."
I nod and shrug simultaneously. It could be a big story, but it won't: nobody reads our fucking newspaper, and I get paid the same whether our circulation is four or 400,000. The fantasy world in which Manny lives, though, is disturbing. Maybe it's easy for him because he hails from the sales world. Ten, fifteen years ago, he sold computer hardware and networking equipment. Made a killing on routers and servers when the whole dot-com thing blew up. The technology boom exploded at about the same time as his old man's heart. And because his pop was a newsman from the old school, Manny thought he'd do the right thing by him and start up a brick-and-mortar business selling tangible information. That he hasn't given up and sold out, you could or couldn't call that admirable, especially now, when small papers are shuttering every day and the big boys are steeped in revenue shortfalls. He still thinks he can make a difference the old-fashioned way. He can change things, create community dialogues, reverse the century-old traditions of racism and hatred and separation and distrust that are Omaha's hallmarks. He's older than me. He's been to more places and seen more and met more people than I have. So why is he the blindly idealistic one? What's he seen that I haven't?
"But," he says, trying to tuck in his shirt while holding his coffee, "I've got an idea for something else that you might actually write. Remember that Park-Leavenworth story you never did anything with?"
It was supposed to be a big goddamned deal. Profiling a once-golden neighborhood that'd fallen to shit and was back on the proverbial upswing. I invested about two weeks into that story and let it die. Back when the neighborhood was at its worst, I lived there, so writing about it shortly after vacating made me feel like an opportunist asshole, rubbing everyone's noses in my steaming pile of movin'-on-upitude. Besides, neighborhood makeovers make for tedious reading. And yes, I'm fully aware the Baltimore City Paper won some bigshit alterna-rag award for a similar story. The News-Telegraph, however, is not the City Paper.
"Think it's time we revived it. Got a peg now with all the apartment renovation going on downtown."
"That's a trend, not a peg."
"What I said, ain't it? You've got that, the new elementary school on 19th and whatever, the prostitution cleanup" — he taps his index finger on his coffee cup with each alleged point — " the new shops and stuff opening up. That's a story."
"Blowjob."
"Not if you do it right."
"Mouth's a mouth, Manny."
No reply.
"Well, shit." I chew on my lip and look over Manny's shoulder. It's what I do when I pretend to be thinking about whatever it is he asked me. The problem here, or at least the main problem, is that Manny's idea, as usual, is nebulous as fuck. It's like trout fishing using a whole leg of lamb as bait; there's so much shit to chew through you'll never get to the hook. "How about," I say, "we narrow the scope a little. You know, laserlike focus."
"Go on."
"Instead of hitting all the bases, why don't we hit one of them. But hit it really fucking hard."
"Developer profiles."
He loses points for not putting that in the form of a question. He loses more points for letting his sales flag fly.
"What's say we do something about that neighborhood watch group that's turning the area into a war zone by way of making it safer for the crackers? Couple guys got arrested little bit ago for beating up a kid. Thought he was a dealer or something. Turned out he was a Mormon doing that thing Mormons do. Daily did a tiny brief on it?"
"That's got nothing to do with redevelopment."
"Thing is — your story's boring. Mine isn't."
"Look," he says, "I know you'd be perfectly happy skulking around crime scenes forever, but I need something on this redevelopment push."
I make a fart noise with my mouth.
"I want you to do this story. I know you don't, but for me, okay?"
This for-the-Gipper shit's always trouble. "Why?"
"Because it's a story is why. When's the last time a neighborhood in this town got gentrified?"
"Never."
"See? Story."
"I don't buy it. What's the deal, seriously?"
"Boy, not everything everyone does has an ulterior motive."
"Not true, my proud brother. Not true."
"Think whatever you want, so long as you write me a fat centerpiece story for next week."
"Gimme two weeks, and you, sir, have a deal." That's generally the amount of time it takes for him to forget the specifics about what he's assigned me. He'll ask about how that one thing I'm writing is doing. And I'll say it's slow but steady; give me another week. And by then, he'll forget about it, and I can go on doing what I do best: writing the seedy shit he wishes I wouldn't.
"I need it next issue. We have a huge hole."
"Yank something from AlterNet."
"AlterNet ain't exactly our friend right now."
Someone neglected to cut a check. Again. We're not really fly-by-night. More navigated-by-the-blind.
"Can't you get Donna to do it? Features, you know, that's what she do."
"This story has Cockburn written all over it."
"Maybe the one I have in mind. The one you want has advertorial written all over it."
"Shit, boy, it's the end of the year. Everything's slowing down. Wouldn't it be nice to do something light? Take a break? Get some extra cash in the door so I can maybe float you a Christmas bonus?"
Okay, so one of the few things I still have that I give a shit about is my integrity. And for all my I'm-so-jaded shit, this still matters: I am what I do. Gimme a scent, let me loose and I'll come back at the end of the day with a story hanging limply from my clenched chompers. Or, rather, there was a time. And I'd be remiss if I didn't say I think I've still got it in me. I'd be further remiss if I didn't say I'd like to find out whence that part of me's hidden itself. Why? Moments like those I witnessed this morning — that spark. It's been faint as of late. I'd communicate this to him, but I'm not one for disquisition. I already have a pretty good idea of what he's up to: he's got an ad package set up with whoever the fuck owns a bunch of real estate around there, and the deal's contingent on him delivering up some slobbery complimentary-with-an-e copy. We've had these debates countless times, but it matters fucking not; he refuses to see that what he's doing is plain fucked. "This why you brought me up here? To give me a bullshit assignment?"
"Didn't want you to throw a fit in the office."
"Maybe if you'd change my diaper more often — "
"Just get this done."
"Big mistake, to count on me."
"You'd like me to think so."
With nothing left to say, we stand and smoke in silence like a pouting baby and his fill-in father.
When Manny's smoke is down to the butt, he grinds it between his thumb and index and middle fingers until the cherry falls to the cement. He takes the butt inside with him when he goes to throw it away. Mine dies beneath my heel on the cement.
I could follow Manny back in but opt instead to check in on the pervo teacher. Since he was picked up this weekend, his bond hearing will be this afternoon. Figure by the time I'm done with that, business should be picking up down on Leavenworth Street enough that I shouldn't have a problem finding a nefarious character or twelve to chat up. Copyright © 2008 by Jonathan Segura