Zach and Nick, mother Jean, brother Gabe—that my content curation software spits out. Thousands and thousands of pages.
A slow sizzle begins somewhere deep in my gut, heating me from the inside out. What if Ricky Hernandez watched three bullets tear through Zach’s skull on the battlefield that day? What if he saw whoever pulled the trigger? What if he pulled that trigger himself? At first, the warmth feels like a phantom limb, vaguely familiar and not entirely real, and then I remember.
This is what a story feels like.
I toe off my sneakers, lean back in my chair and get comfortable. I’m going to be here awhile.
Early Saturday evening, I’m studying my menu in Bar Dupont’s sleek lounge when a rhythmic thump-click, thump-click pierces the chatter around me like the steady beat of a drum. I twist on my bar stool, as do half the people in the place, and find my former boss, Victoria Santillano, coming at me on crutches. She’s wearing an oversize black boot on her right foot and a dragged-down expression, heavy with equal parts crankiness and effort. All long lines and sharp edges, Victoria has always had the hardscrabble air of someone who’s forgotten to exhale, only now she looks pissed about it.
“What the hell happened to you?”
She juts her chin at the dirty martini that, just two seconds before, the bartender slid in front of me. “If that’s vodka, extra cold and extra dirty, I need it far more than you do.”
I signal to the bartender for another and push my still full glass in front of the empty seat next to me. Victoria hobbles up to the stool, flings her crutches against the bar and drinks half the glass in one giant gulp.
“Jesus, that’s good,” she says, smacking her lips.
“Please, tell me that boot isn’t just a scheme to get free cocktails.”
She snorts. “Now that you mention it, it is one of the better perks. But, alas, no. Damn ankle broke in three spots, can you believe it?”
I can’t, actually. Victoria is one of the most indestructible women I’ve ever met. She’s trekked through deserts and jungles, crawled through caves and fields of land mines, chased down thieves and dictators and drug lords, and lived to talk about all of them in front-page, top-billed feature articles. The woman survives on adrenaline and vodka and caffeine, and the only thing I’ve ever known her to break is a nail.
“Were you rappelling off an Afghani cliff? Skydiving into a war zone? Scaling the Kremlin with fish wire and Scotch tape?”
“I fell down the stairs.” Her long, unmanicured finger comes within millimeters of my nose. “And if you tell anyone that’s how I broke my ankle, I’ll have you murdered in your sleep.” She plucks an olive from her glass with two hooked fingers. “So what’s new and exciting in content management these days?”
“Not one goddamn thing.”
“Excellent,” she says, nodding sagely. “Business services, was it?”
“Health care. Health&Wealth.com is the leading health care web magazine for today’s active seniors.”
“Mmm-hmm. Sounds fascinating.”
Victoria buries her nose in her glass, and I do the same with the fresh one the bartender hands me, neither of us quite willing to rehash old arguments. She was there when I broke the Chelsea Vogel scandal three years ago, and she was there two weeks later, after Chelsea was found hanging in her Herndon shower, when I shoved my press pass to the very back of my kitchen junk drawer and handed in my resignation letter. She never questioned my decision to quit. She never, not once, tried to talk me out of it. She just told me to call her when I found my balls.
For the next six months, I sent her every type of ball I could come up with. Soccer balls, baseballs, tennis balls and footballs. A ten-pound bag of meatballs and a monogrammed bowling ball. A framed vintage poster of Lucille Ball. A custom Magic 8 Ball where every side of the triangle popped up as “Hell, yes!” Finally, when I paid a delivery service to dump a box containing a thousand ping-pong balls onto her office floor, she sent me a one-word email. “Uncle,” it said in the subject line, and nothing more. After that, we picked up where we’d left off, with regular email check-ins and cocktails every time she swings through town, which is often.
But we never broach the one subject that hangs between us in gleaming, glittering strobe lights—that by walking away from the Chelsea Vogel aftermath all those years ago, I walked away from my duty as a journalist to seek the truth and report it to the public.
Only now I’ve spent the past thirty-six hours researching an article I’m not writing, looking into a story I’m not covering, and though I’m not certain I’ve found my balls, I have, without a sliver of a shadow of a doubt, found a thirty-sixth soldier. One who was in Zach Armstrong’s convoy of vehicles rumbling down an Afghani street when small-arms fire rained down from the upper level of an abandoned building. One who fought alongside both Armstrong brothers and was returning fire when Zach took three bullets to the head. One whose interview was cataloged and then buried, whose name disappeared from every army account except one—the uncensored transcript I’m not supposed to have.
“What?” Victoria says, studying me with squinty eyes.
“What do you mean, what?”
“I mean, what’s going on here? You have that look about you, like maybe I should check between your teeth for canary feathers.”
My skin prickles, and my scalp buzzes with the thrill of new knowledge I can’t hold in another second. “Okay, so I’m not saying I’m writing anything, but say I know something that no one else knows about the Zach Armstrong story. Something new. Something earth-shattering and groundbreaking.”
“How earth-shattering and groundbreaking?”
“Enough that the DOD buried it.”
Victoria takes in my words like a seasoned journalist who’s seen and heard it all, with a pursed-lipped nod. She reaches for her martini. “I see. And what exactly did they bury?”
“A name.”
She looks up from her glass with an arched brow, the same arched brow I’ve seen her use on rapists and swindlers and serial killers, when she asked them if perhaps they shouldn’t have wiped down the door handle after leaving their prints all over it. “A soldier’s name?”
I confirm it with my own pursed-lipped nod, but I don’t reveal anything more. The thing is, as much as I like Victoria, she is completely ruthless when she smells a story. Even back when I worked for her, when she served as both my boss and my mentor, I was always careful to never reveal too much until I sent her the final copy. I didn’t trust her, not completely, to not run off with my story.
But since Ricky’s name has been wiped from every report the DOD or army has published, I’m fairly certain that no matter how hard Victoria looks, she’ll never find him.
“Where’s my Magic 8 Ball when I need it?” Victoria pounds a fist on the polished maple bar, and her next words pierce the music and bar chatter like a bomb siren. “Hell, yes! I knew it!”
Packed with corporate executives and political insiders, the Bar
