Free Oregon Hill by Howard Owen Page B

Pikarski.
    I went down. At first, I didn’t recognize Leonard’s father. He seemed older than he had at the trial.
    Mr. Pikarski walked up to me. He had a box with him. Without saying a word, he opened it and threw the ashes on me.
    “You people,” he said, his voice quiet and calm, “you’re always so sure. You wanted Leonard. You got him.”
    He turned without another word, and left.
    I brushed Leonard Pikarski’s ashes off me as best I could and went back upstairs, past the stares of the receptionists and the security guard.
    I was never quite so sure again.

    I look Sally in the eye.
    “Sorry,” she said, “I had to ask.”
    “It was a long time ago,” I tell her. “One doesn’t have anything to do with the other.”
    So she called Wheelie, and I could tell from her end of the conversation that our managing editor wasn’t buying into any last-minute changes in the preordained story line. Mostly, I figured, he just didn’t want to get his lazy, already half-drunk ass into the newsroom on a Saturday. Wheelie, like a lot of suits of my acquaintance, thought newspapering was a nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday job.
    Sally kept after him, though. Finally, just to get some peace and quiet and to avoid the hassle of coming all the way back into the office from the West End, he allowed me to put some of my caveats into the main story. He wouldn’t let me use anything with unnamed sources, which knocked out anything Peachy had told me; but we were able to tell our breathless readers that the boy and his mother both claimed Martin had been down in Chase City when Isabel Ducharme was being butchered.
    I think it irked Baer that I was pissing a little bit on his A1 parade, but at least he got to have the whole byline. Sarah Good-night and I “contributed,” it said at the end of the story.
    By the time I got back from covering the latest drug deal gone bad over by Gilpin Court, the first edition was rolling off the presses. We used to be able to hear and feel the presses, and some guy in a hat made from a newspaper would slam a bunch of them down on the copydesk. Now, the presses are fifteen miles away, and we get to look at page proofs. If we’re lucky, they’ll remember to send some actual papers to us from the printing plant, although they like to keep those to a minimum, so as to save paper. The way circulation and advertising are going, we’re saving a lot of paper these days.
    The headline said, “How did this happen?” just like we told people it would in the Saturday paper.
    “Tell me,” I muttered.

CHAPTER SIX

    Sunday
    G rowing up in Oregon Hill, this was my favorite time of the week. It was as quiet as it ever was, for one thing. It was a day you could ease into like an old pair of slippers. Whoever Peggy was with got up late and slow. Sunday was comics and cinnamon toast. At least, that’s the way I remember it.
    There’s the GTO, sitting right where it might have been in the fall of 1977, our senior year. Goat is standing next to it, a Blue Ribbon in his hand. McGonnigal is there, too, walking around this ghost from our past, touching it gently like it might bolt away. Goat sees us and waves. The glass from the bottle reflects the morning sun. It seems, for a second or two, like old times.
    “How do you like this shit?” he says, maybe a little too loud. “Is this the spitting image, or what?”
    Yeah, I say, it is. It is a dead ringer for the 1967 GTO that Goat and his dad were able to somehow buy off one of the older guys whose wife was tired of a work of art that wouldn’t start half the time. Same powder blue, same interior.
    “Found it sitting in somebody’s backyard, outside Canton. I’ve been working on it for a year. Three hundred and thirty-five horsepower, just like the old one. It runs like a scalded cat now, most of the time.”
    He recites all the rest of the specifics, losing me fast in the argot of Hurst shifters and Quadrajets. Apparently, he’s driven it all the way