The Deadline Read Online Free Page A

floated a few feet then dissolved. 
    “You make any deals when you was out there?  You promise your god that you’d be a good little boy if he’d just blow your scared little ass back to shore?  Did you lie to Him just to save yourself?”
    The sun was hot and the smell of gasoline overpowering as they stood there on the corner by the gas station.  Morgan scuffed the sole of his worn leather Oxford across the sidewalk as if he were trying to scrape something off, but he was trying to remember what it felt like to encounter death.  The skin on his back prickled in the heat as he imagined, all over again, cold water spilling into his lungs, weighing him down, clamping his throat closed.
    “Not any I remember.  I was just scared.  I didn’t want to die.”
    “You do dumb shit when you think you might die,” the old man said, smoking and watching the empty street in front of them.
    The air was dead calm.  Smoke hovered around Gilmartin.  He tilted his head back and breathed deeply through the cigarette, his cheeks sucking slowly inward.  His hand trembled.  Then from nowhere, a cough wracked his whole body, distorting his face as it erupted from deep inside.
    “Let’s find someplace cool to sit, Mr. Gilmartin,” Morgan suggested, touching the old man’s elbow.
    “Yeah, sure, paper boy.”
    Across the street and up past a few storefronts was Winchester Park, a patch of sprinkled green near the center of town.  They sat on a concrete bench in the cool shade beneath the towering cottonwoods.  Birds bickered unseen in the branches above them.  The playground thirty yards away was crawling with children on summer vacation.
    “I’m not sure what you need from me, Mr. Gilmartin,” Morgan said, his leg bent across the park bench as he faced the old man.
    “I need your help to do something I can’t do for myself.  I’m seventy-three fuckin’ years old and I can hardly wipe my ass without help.  If I could do this thing on my own, I would,” Gilmartin said.  He fumbled in his lumpy shirt pocket for another cigarette.  “I hate reporters, but I ain’t got no other choice.  I need you .”
    Morgan learned one good lesson on the cop beat:  Don’t waste time being indignant.  Only the amateurs stay mad, his city editor once told him.
    “Okay, fair enough.  But let’s cut to the chase here.  Why me and what for?” Morgan asked coolly. 
    Gilmartin scratched his skeletal fingers through the thin mat of his white hair and stared between his knees at the thick grass.  His trousers draped across his emaciated thighs and the muscles at the back of his bent neck bowed out like the slack cords on a marionette.  He sat unmoving for a while, elbows on his knees, cupping a lighted cigarette in his palm.
    “I ain’t proud of what I am, but I ain’t no killer,” Gilmartin said.  “I been almost fifty years in prison for a crime I never done.  That’s the fuckin’ truth.  When I was your age, I already done thirteen years of hard time and I was lookin’ at a lifetime still to go.  It was like dyin’ real slow.  Back then, I made some choices to save my life, and maybe they was the wrong choices.  Now I’m seventy-three and I’m dyin’ fast.  Got cancer all through me.  Hurts like a motherfucker and I’d just as soon be six feet under where it don’t hurt no more.  But I don’t wanna go without clearin’ up my name.”
    Morgan’s lips thinned.  It was all just a con.  He’d heard crooks deny their crimes since his first day on the beat at the Chicago Tribune .  After a while, he stopped believing prisoners altogether.  Reporters were easy marks for sociopathic inmates who were always screwing with the system, exploiting every soft spot.  Young reporters, hungry for a big story or in a hurry to change the world, yearned to believe they could ferret out injustice, tip the scales back into equilibrium, and clear an innocent man’s name.  Even Jefferson Morgan had that crusading