Free Vengeance Road by Rick Mofina Page B

of defeat.
    What happened?
    Less than twenty-four hours ago he owned the news in this town. Now his world was collapsing.
    He nearly vanished in the dust that swirled around him as the delivery trucks thundered by. A cold wind kicked up from Lake Erie and he retreated to his car and drove away, traveling back through his life.
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    Being a reporter was all he’d ever wanted to be.
    He was a blue-collar kid. His mother worked long hours as a waitress, while his father worked hard shifts in a factory on the lakeshore that made rope. Both of them were newspaper readers, a trait they’d passed on to him.
    Enthralled by life’s daily dramas, he read the Buffalo Evening News and the Buffalo Courier-Express. And when the Courier-Express folded, he read the Sentinel, which rose from its ashes.
    And he dreamed about seeing his own stories in print.
    When his parents worked late, his big sister, Cora, would take him to the library and get him books by Jack London, Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway.
    â€œThis is what a future reporter should be reading, Jackie,” she’d said.
    Cora was five years older than him and nurtured his dream. She convinced their parents to buy him a second-hand computer and encouraged him to write. They were as close as any brother and sister could be. But their age difference would have a bearing on their relationship and eventually Cora grew apart from him and her family.
    She changed.
    It hit him the night police brought her home after she’d got drunk with friends who’d stolen a car. She’d grown into a different person, one who argued constantly with Mom and Dad. So many nights were filled with screaming, slamming doors, heart-breaking silence and tears. Cora started taking drugs, which led to more arguments until the day she ran away.
    All she’d left was a note saying she could no longer stand living under “their fascist rules.”
    She was seventeen.
    Friends told his parents Cora had gone to California with an older guy who was a heroin addict. When his father got an address, he flew to San Francisco and looked for Cora.
    It was all in vain.
    They never saw her again.
    They hired private detectives, flew to cities when they had tips. It was futile. He ached for her to come home.Then his anguish turned to anger for what Cora had done. Later, there were times he’d search for her on online databases. He even asked police friends to do whatever they could.
    Not much came of it.
    Cora was out of their lives.
    Or dead.
    Accept it and leave the past in the past, he’d always told himself.
    Miles and time swept by as he searched the night for answers.
    He drove through older neighborhoods; the best and the worst of Buffalo. Here were the abandoned factories, the shut-up mills and forgotten stores, reaching from the wasteland of the rust belt like a death grasp. And here were the new bohemian communities that resurrected historic, near-dead buildings and revived the never-say-die attitude of Buffalo.
    After Cora left, he’d worked brutal summer shifts on assembly lines in Buffalo factories to put himself through college because his parents had spent nearly all they had looking for her.
    When he found time, he reported for the campus paper, and freelanced articles to the Sentinel and the News.
    All the while, he yearned to escape Buffalo for New York City and a job with a big news outlet. After he graduated from college, he worked at small weeklies then landed an internship with the Buffalo Sentinel. Impressed by his determination, the paper gave him a full-time reporting job.
    The Sentinel would be his stepping stone out of Buffalo.
    Then, while dispatched to cover a shooting in Ohio, he’d met Lisa Newsome, a reporter with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She was a sharp-witted, brilliant writer. Heremembered the way her hair curtained over her eye when she wrote the stories she’d cared about.
    She told him that she’d fallen for his edgy