FINAL DEADLINE

A NOVEL

DEREK CATRON

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

FINAL DEADLINE. Copyright © 2024 by Derek Catron. Minorca Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

FIRST EDITION

PROLOGUE 

• “I thought there would be an ashtray.”

  The small, bright room was so devoid of features Becket had needed only moments to inventory everything within it. Two metal folding chairs and a wooden table that wobbled to the right when he laid his head on it. A Styrofoam cup half filled with water. The smell of cheap aftershave and weak coffee. And a security camera, perched from a corner of the ceiling like a red-eyed bird of prey. By the time the detective entered, toting a manila folder thick with pages, Becket had moved on to cataloging what was missing.

• “Do you need a smoke?” The detective sounded irritated. He had introduced himself, but Becket immediately forgot his name. Now he sat in the facing chair. He opened the folder and flipped through the stack of papers.

   “I don’t smoke.”

  The detective looked up. “Then why do you need an ashtray?”

  “I don’t need one. I just thought you’d have one.” In cop movies, the good cop always offered the suspect a cigarette to get him to relax, let down his guard, and start talking. Becket hoped this man wasn’t the good cop.

  They looked to be about the same age, late thirties. The detective was heavier and squatter, with sour features, a full head of ink black hair, and a brush mustache lifted out of the ’70s. His gray suit looked like it hadn’t been changed in a week. He’d had a long night too.

  “Smoking is prohibited in public buildings in Florida and Palmetto County,” he said. “You should know that.”

  “I didn’t think that applied to police interrogation rooms.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  Becket let it go. He was too tired to think straight, much less debate interrogation tactics. The throbbing in his head minced his concentration. He tried reading the detective’s papers upside down but gave it up. He knew what they said anyway. He had told his story to the first officers to interview him. Now he needed sleep. He needed to forget the past twenty-four hours, not relive them. The detective wasn’t going to allow that to happen.

  Shivering, Becket wondered if the Palmetto County Sheriff’s Office kept the air conditioning blasting on purpose. A deputy had taken his watch and cell phone, and with no clock on the wall he had no way to know how long he’d been here. Ten minutes? Thirty? An hour?

  The cold had kept him from sleeping. He wore only a thin undershirt. At least the blood on it had dried. He had stripped off his dress shirt after the first shooting, using it as a compress because he didn’t know what else to do. He wanted to believe it had made a difference. Maybe saving a life made him even in the eyes of the universe.

  The detective continued reading, running a stubby finger down the typed lines of a page before turning to the next and repeating the process. The stack looked no smaller than when he had started.

  “What is it you’re looking for? Maybe I could help you find it.”

  “This will go faster if you let me ask the questions.”

  “I guess I’m used to asking questions more than answering them.”

  The detective grunted, his eyes still on the paper. He flipped to the next page. His finger advanced about halfway down before he stopped. He looked up. Gathered the pages in his hands, aligned the edges, and tapped the ends against the table. He lay the pages flat. With his index finger he stabbed the line where he had stopped.

  “Did you say all three gunmen were armed?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The detective’s fleshy brow pleated.

  “They wouldn’t be gunmen if they weren’t armed.”

  The detective watched him a moment before returning his attention to the page. “You also said one carried a cell phone.”

  “They all carried cell phones, I assume. But only one had his out. Wielding it, you might say.”

  The detective’s frown mimicked the shape of his mustache.

  Becket shifted in his seat. “He had a rifle too. It was slung over his shoulder with a strap. I guess so he could have his hands free for the phone. He was shooting video. To post on social media.”

  The detective’s head bobbed. Maybe Becket’s explanation cleared up his confusion. Maybe the statement matched what others had told him. Or perhaps the unconscious movement kept time with an earworm playing in his head.

  “The gunmen threatened you?”

  Becket closed his eyes. Summoning scenes of the previous evening should have been as simple as loading a movie on Netflix, but the memories refused to play in order. Like watching on glitchy Wi-Fi, images flicked on and off at random. Shouts and gunfire. The screams of his friends. A growing pool of blood. Laura.

  Opening his eyes shut down the playback. “Not explicitly, no.” He glanced at the detective. “I mean, nothing so straightforward.”

  “I know what explicit means. Tell me what they said.”

  Squeezing his eyes shut helped his mind maneuver amid the grief as he rewound through the playback. His eyes snapped open.

  “Only one spoke at first. He said, ‘Do everything I say and nobody dies.’”

  “And that made you fear for your life?”

  Becket blinked. “Well, that and the assault rifles and gunfire. Yeah.”

  The detective nodded.

  “Did you know the gunmen? Was there anything familiar about them?”

  Becket paused, forced himself to look at the detective. “No.”

  “Did their words make you angry?”

  Becket wasn’t sure why that mattered. He sipped the water, glanced at the security camera. “They made me feel like a bad day was turning into my worst nightmare.”

  “You were having a bad day?”

  “You could say that.” He thought about it a moment. “A terrible day. So I thought. I had no idea how bad things could get.”

  “We hear that a lot.”

  Becket believed him.

  The detective turned to a new page. “Do you own a gun?”

  “I’ve never even shot a gun.”

  “I asked if you owned one.”

  Becket took a breath. Wished he’d asked for coffee. He saw now there would be no sleep tonight. “No. I’ve never owned a gun.”

  The detective’s head bobbed again.

  “I told all this to the officers who took my statement.”

  “Yes. I know.” The detective tapped the pages before him.

  “Would you like me to start at the beginning?”

  The detective looked at his watch. “I don’t think that will be necessary. I just need to clear up a few things.”

  Becket sighed. He was so tired. So cold. He closed his eyes and tried to picture Laura. Before all the blood. Before all the shooting. He recalled how warm and safe he felt when she’d held him. He tried to hold the moment in his mind, but he couldn’t do it without everything else washing over him. That was why he couldn’t sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he lost control of what he saw.

  “How much longer is this going to take?”

  “As long as we need it to. We’ve got bodies in the morgue I can’t explain yet …”

  Becket swallowed as he recalled their faces. He cleared his throat. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m just tired. Maybe I could use that coffee after all. Can I have a blanket too?”

  The detective sighed heavily, but he stood and left the room. The hum of the air conditioning muffled the sound of voices on the other side of the door.

  Becket looked at his hands. A deputy had allowed him to clean up before bringing him here. He’d washed as well as he could, yet under the glare of the fluorescent light tubes he saw caked blood beneath his nails and cuticles. He smelled it whenever he brought his hands near his face. He clasped them in his lap under the table, hunched his shoulders against the cold, and waited.

  He needed patience. He needed his wits. Maybe he should have called a lawyer, like they had offered. Too late now. His fate lay in the hands of the men on the other side of this door. They were police, not judges, yet they would weigh in first on the question that would define the rest of Becket’s life.

  Was he a murderer, a coward, or a hero? At different times over the past twelve hours, Becket had identified with all three.

   

  CHAPTER 1

4:02 p.m., Friday, 14 hours earlier

The newsroom thrummed with an energy that came only from knowing happy hour at McKay’s was approaching fast. Becket Thompson breathed in the pulpy smell of old paper, stale coffee, and microwave popcorn, a whiff of which never failed to draw reporters like carp to a feeding. The week’s final deadline loomed, arriving always too fast, yet never soon enough.

He scanned the long, open room. A walkway divided it between two rows of desks, squared off within cubicles that looked lifted from a Dilbert strip.

The space was bigger than The Palmetto Press required these days. Like almost every newsroom across the country, his staff was about half its former size. Five reporters, a news clerk, and a metro editor filled the spots closest to his office. The survivors, as they thought of themselves.

The veterans claimed the choice spots against the exterior wall, where narrow windows looked out like arrow slits onto a world increasingly skeptical of whatever they published. The younger reporters, short-timers with eyes fixed on jobs at bigger newspapers, sat on the interior side. Toward the back of the room sat four empty cubicles, their blackened computer screens rising like headstones.

The vacant chairs and uncluttered desktops left the room feeling top-heavy, as if the floor sloped beneath Becket’s feet. Come Friday, he often felt the weight of the place poised to come skittering down on him, with nothing to arrest its slide.

He took a deep breath that might have been confused with a sigh and stepped into the big room before stopping when he noticed the lithe form of Laura Wilson, the newspaper’s marketing director, approaching from the stairwell that led up from the newspaper’s business offices. He knew what she wanted, and though he wasn’t prepared to talk about it, he also knew she wouldn’t be put off. Besides, he could see she had come bearing gifts. He retreated into his office.

A moment later she was there, standing partially shielded by the doorjamb, her face pinched with doubt, as if uncertain she would be welcome. It was the last thing he ever wanted her to feel, and yet he’d been avoiding her.

“I thought you could use a deadline pick-me-up,” she said, offering the shorter of two plastic cups she held in her hands. “I’m afraid it might be cold. It’s been hard to catch you this afternoon.”

“Fridays,” he said, with a half shrug he hoped would deflect her curiosity.

He took the proffered cup and she sat down without waiting for an invitation. Though only in her mid-thirties, Laura oversaw marketing for all the company’s Florida newspapers. At the time of her promotion last year, everyone assumed she would take up residence at the company’s largest Florida newspaper in Fort Lauderdale. Becket was perhaps the only person in the building who knew why she hadn’t made the move, yet he held his breath every time she asked to talk, bracing for the day she told him she was leaving.

“Cold or hot, you know this expensive coffee is wasted on me,” he said, ignoring the roll of her mahogany eyes.

“The swill you make in the break room doesn’t deserve to be called coffee. Besides, I know what we pay newsroom staff. Occasional charity eases my conscience.”

“At least you got me a small.”

“It’s called a Short.” Her tone was the same she would employ to explain smartphone apps to her mother.

“What do they call that?”

Laura favored iced teas. Big ones. “It’s a Trenta Cold.”

“Looks like they’d call that one a Tall.”

She smiled indulgently. “Talls are the medium-sized coffees.”

“Sounds like more marketing malarkey to me.”

“Malarkey? This is why I spend so much time in the newsroom. Everyone’s so cerebral.”

It was his turn to roll his eyes while he sipped the coffee, still warm beneath the plastic lid. “And I thought you were drawn here by my dashing looks.”

She gave him an appraising glance. “I suppose you’re not half bad—on a newsroom scale.” Her wide smile drew the venom from an old joke about how well-coiffed journalists turned to television while their rumpled peers worked where their faces wouldn’t be seen.

“Careful,” he said. “You start objectifying the minions and human resources may get involved.” This was gallows humor; the newspaper’s human resources department had been eliminated two years earlier, its responsibilities absorbed by an overstretched team in Fort Lauderdale.

 “You’re no minion, Mr. Managing Editor.” The smile slipped from her face. “You are still managing editor?”

Here it comes. The payback for her charity. Staying on top of the newspaper’s business was part of Laura’s job, and it was just her style to enliven a room until it was as jolly as a visit from Mary Poppins—until it was time to swallow the medicine.

“I still have a job—for now.” Becket’s eyes cast about the room, anywhere but where they might meet hers. “What have you heard?”

“Nothing, really. Bob knows we’re friends.”

Bob Tankersley, the newspaper’s publisher, was at this moment meeting with executive editor Walter Burns in the adjacent office, presumably to determine Becket’s fate following a meeting that morning that, if Becket were to dabble in marketing malarkey, he might say ended “suboptimally.”

“Was this about your story?” she asked, her skepticism as strong as the coffee.

“Yeah. The one you said was boring.”

“I never said it was boring.” She sipped her tea. Her eyes sparkled with mischief over the plastic lid. “I said it was unmarketable.”

Becket almost smiled, despite himself. “This isn’t helping.”

“I could try to speak with him …” she offered.

Laura would do it, too, if he asked. In her three years in Palmetto County, they had become confidants—in the office, at least. Yet he felt he would be imposing on that friendship by asking her to fight his battles. He shook his head, his eyes holding hers just long enough to show he appreciated the offer.

“Can we do this later? I’m way behind. If I don’t catch up, I’ll never get out of here tonight.”

“No worries.” Her clipped tone at his dismissal cut into him like an X-Acto knife. “You do recognize how crazy it sounds to worry about finishing when you don’t know you’ll have a job by the end of the day?”

“Blind optimism is one of my better qualities.”

Now it was her turn to meet his gaze and make the other person feel better. As usual, she did a better job of it. “Don’t think I’m letting you off this easy. Your team invited me to join them at McKay’s after work, so we will continue this conversation.”

“You want me to spill my guts in front of the newsroom?”

“Don’t be silly. That part will come later. Just stay for a bit. I’ll buy the first pitcher. You can get the next round when you show.”

“Provided I still have a paying job.”

“I’m at least as much an optimist as you are.”

The tension broken, Laura’s eyes flashed as if lit from within. Becket averted his as she crossed her legs, her dark skirt rising high on her deeply tanned thigh as she tugged at the hem to little effect.

Laura favored tall heels, form-fitting black skirts, and tailored blouses that couldn’t look baggy even if she gave up her daily yoga classes and thrice-weekly gym routine. Whenever Becket teased that her wardrobe was too good for Palmetto County, she told him people should dress for the job they want, not the one they have. As much as Becket enjoyed their exchanges, he recognized that Laura dressed for New York or someplace else where he didn’t belong.

“So you’ll come tonight?” she asked.

“You know I can’t refuse you for long.”

Laura laughed, an irresistible sound. “That’s my favorite of your qualities.” He had no response to that, and Laura smiled more widely at his submission. “I’ll need a ride afterwards. I’m having some work done on my car.”

His pulse skipped a beat as he mentally marked the hole in that sentence. He couldn’t think of a garage that could service Laura’s sleek BMW and still be open on a Friday night, and Laura hadn’t specified where she wanted to be taken. She lived in a condo in Sabal Beach, and he’d never been there. He tried not to let his mind ponder whether that was the setting she had in mind for continuing their conversation.

“If I’m late, you’ll know I still have a job.”

“Meet up at six-thirty?”

“Six-forty-five is a better bet,” he said, resigning himself to returning to the office on Saturday to finish reading stories for Sunday and Monday’s editions.

Laura stuck out her lower lip and tucked in her chin. “Happy hour ends at seven.”

“I’m best with a deadline.”

Quick as a wink, the pout flashed into a crooked grin and she was up and out the door. A part of him was sorry to see her go, but he didn’t mind watching.

Before Becket looked away, Jim Doyle leaned in his doorway, careful not to block the view. The sports editor was Becket’s best friend on the staff, a one-man show in his department following the layoff the previous year of the only other sports writer. He also knew nothing of the drama playing out in the editor’s office, and Becket’s shoulders loosened to know the subject wouldn’t come up.

“I can tell your day’s looking good.” Doyle dropped into the chair Laura had vacated. “Still warm. Nice.”

Becket tried to look peeved, but Doyle was irrepressible. His blue eyes glimmered with impish humor. He wore baggy khakis and a collared golf shirt bearing the name of an Orlando course that held a professional tournament each spring. Tall and broad-shouldered, his build still suggested the high school athlete he’d been thirty years ago, though his rounded belly spoke to how much he enjoyed life now. The world was Doyle’s playground, and if he ever had a bad day, Becket never saw it.

“I suppose you have a reason for intruding?”

Doyle shivered. “I guess I’d get a warmer reception if I’d brought coffee. Or wore a skirt.”

He lowered his voice when he delivered the last line, and Becket pretended not to hear. While Doyle technically worked under Becket, his hands-off approach to sports permitted a level of friendship that was difficult with the rest of the people he managed.

Looking a little chagrined that Becket didn’t rise to the bait, Doyle got down to business. He needed a photographer Saturday night at a high school baseball tournament. The Press had the luxury of still employing two staff photographers, Marco Gonzalez and Ellen Adkins. Ellen was on rotation for Saturday work, and Becket sent a quick text to alert her to the assignment.

“That’s why you’re the boss. You keep all the plates spinning.” Doyle twirled an index finger beside his ear, the same gesture he would have used to call Becket crazy.

“Glad I can be of service.” Before he could remind Doyle no one else in the newsroom finished for the day before five o’clock on a Friday, his friend pivoted to weekend plans.

“Karen’s making lasagna on Sunday. If you come over, it means I can watch basketball while ‘entertaining our guest.’”

“And if I can’t make it?”

“She’ll put me to work making salad or something.”

“There’s always an angle with you.”

“It’s not like I’d invite you for your charm.”

If he still had a job come Sunday, Becket might welcome the distraction from work. And if he was jobless, Doyle would understand if he canceled. “Tell Karen I’ll bring a salad and a pinot noir—and thank her for me.”

Doyle rose and headed for the door with a haughty wave before pausing and looking back. “She’s not going to wait for you forever,” he said, his voice lowered so he wouldn’t be overheard.

“What are you talking about?”

Doyle’s look said Please. “You should ask her out.”

“We work together. It’s never a good idea to mix business with pleasure.”

“Seems to me you could both use less business and more pleasure in your lives.”

“How would you know what she needs?”

“If she looked at me the way she looks at you …” He rubbed his palms together as if anticipating a meal.

“And what would Mrs. Doyle think of that?”

The glimmer flashed again, more mischief than humor this time. “Mrs. Doyle would be laughing her ass off to watch me chase a high-class act like that.”

“So you’d rather watch me make a fool of myself?”

“Entertainment’s hard to come by around here.”

Becket held up his hands in surrender. Doyle would always have to have the last word. After he left, Becket rose and followed him into the newsroom to check the status of the weekend stories. He had a job to do—for the moment—and now he had incentive to ensure he wasn’t kept late.

CHAPTER 4

5:01 p.m., Friday

Ray Miller and his brothers approached the Palmetto Press offices from the back entrance. There were two buildings, linked in an L shape. One was a long, two-story brick office with small, narrow windows. The other looked like a warehouse with metal siding. His older brother Dalton explained it housed the presses, where the newspaper was printed every night. A squat guard shack sat where the buildings met. It was barely big enough for a single desk and a television that linked with video cameras around the property.

Late on a Friday afternoon, about a dozen cars remained in the parking lot, and it appeared everyone in the business offices downstairs had cleared out, just as Dalton promised.

The only person who saw them coming was the lone security guard, an unarmed contractor who had been working the four-to-midnight shift for a year. He unspooled the hours on his smartphone, streaming Netflix over the newspaper’s Wi-Fi and stalking old crushes on Facebook. Ray never bothered to ask how Dalton knew all this.

The guard rose from his desk chair when he saw them approach. He was fat and smiling, trying to look eager to help rather than annoyed at the interruption. Ray thought of an overfed puppy. He and Colton carried the long canvas duffel bag between them, and it was heavy as shit so Dalton had to deal with the guard. That made Ray uneasy, but Dalton walked straight up to the guard, pulled the handgun from behind his waist and put it right in the guy’s face, walking him backwards into the shack so quickly no one could have seen.

A glance passed between Colton and Ray. This was a good start. They had never seen this side of Dalton, and Ray had wondered if he still had it in him. They dropped the bag and Colton pulled out his phone and pointed its camera toward the action.

“Do as I say and you won’t be hurt,” Dalton said.

The guard stammered, half begging for his life, half insisting he had no money. He had a pink face that his crying turned florid, and his eyes disappeared between the folds of his fleshy face. Ray moved to help, but Dalton was quicker. He knocked the guard back into his chair with a shove to the chest. A ball cap with the name of the security firm printed across the front flew from his head.

“Shut up and listen,” Dalton said.

The man whimpered so pathetically Ray wanted to knock him upside the head. Dalton seemed to know it was unnecessary. The man was his to command.

“Give me your cell phone and keys,” Dalton ordered. The back entrance to the office had one of those card-scanning locks, so Dalton got the man’s card key as well. When the guard handed over his wallet, Dalton tossed it back to him. “We don’t want your money.”

The dipshit’s face slackened enough to reveal blue eyes clouded with dawning comprehension. His forehead glistened with sweat despite a cool March breeze stirred by the descending sun.

Ray stood aside to allow Colton to get a close-up. Then he pulled the guard to his feet, pushed him out of the shack and into the parking lot. Beyond the field of black asphalt was a grassy right of way lining the road. A convenience store with dingy windows covered in outdated advertisements stood about two hundred yards off on the opposite side.

“Run to that store and call nine-one-one,” Dalton said.

The man’s eyes disappeared again in a face screwed up with confusion. He started stammering again about not wanting to die.

“Shut up, you fat fuck.” Ray slapped him on the back of his head with the palm of his hand. “We’re letting you go.”

Dalton ignored Ray. “Calling the police if something happens is your job, right?”

Ray had never heard the steel in his brother’s voice that was there now. It was beginning to seep through the sludge of fear silting up the man’s mind.

“What they pay me? No job is worth this.”

“Okay then. How about this: You do your job and call the police—or we shoot you?”

The steel fully penetrated doughboy’s brain that time. He nodded so eagerly Ray wondered if his head might snap off his neck. He shoved the man to get him started.

“Be quick about it,” Ray said. “Run.”

The guard nearly tumbled face first into the asphalt before catching himself and staggering ahead. His stumpy legs began pumping, and he looked over his shoulder every few stumbling strides. Just to fuck with him, Ray pulled his handgun from his waistband and aimed it at the dude.

“Don’t stop,” he yelled.

The guard made some kind of squealing noise and didn’t look back again. If he meant to run faster after seeing a gun, Ray couldn’t tell.

“Let’s go,” Dalton said. “We don’t have much time.”

“The way he runs? He might pass out before he makes it across the street.”

Enjoying the rush, Ray watched another moment before nudging Colton, who still had his phone directed at the fleeing man. His little brother slipped the phone into his pocket, and they hoisted the canvas duffel. Dalton already had the doors open.

They were double steel fire exit doors, each with a panic bar across the width that people pushed down to exit. Reaching above the doorframe, Dalton pulled down an Allen key he knew would be there and used it to lock the bars in place.

Ray removed the first set of chains from the bag and wound them around the bars, securing the chain with a padlock. No one was getting out that way without a key.

Once finished, they stepped inside and went to the service elevator. Dalton said it would carry them to the second floor. And the newsroom.

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