Past Prologue: Where are our Children (A Serial Novel) Episode 4 of 9 Read online

were probably tapping into his private affairs. It was enough to make even him nervous.

  And now he had the incident outside the library to add to his paranoia.

  Thomas had noticed a white man, who needed a new suit, trailing his footsteps and stopped to confront him on the reason why before he reached the more secluded and dark areas of the parking garage. The man was half way lit up on…something…and told Thomas that he thought it was real fucked up that he’d betray his own people for the likes of them. Thomas calmly explained that he was doing his job. He was going to gather in the facts. And let those facts decide—that’s when the man got in his face and looked to dip his hand into his coat pocket to grab something.

  Thomas punched him first. His opponent got in a couple of jabs in, but Thomas used his superior size, strength, stamina, and boxing experience to wear the culprit down. The street looked empty afterwards. Thomas was sure that he’d broken the man’s nose as he saw there was blood racing from it and his mouth as well.

  “Tommy?” Lotto had been trying to extend a cup of coffee to him for how long? “Do you want this or not?”

  “Yea,” Thomas said, trying to swim up the current back into the present. “And which of these husbands did you bet on finding out about me and his wife?”

  Lotto took another long puff off of his cigar and let the thick smoke filter out of his nose. “Telling you would spoil most of the fun. And don’t you dare look at me like that. You should know better than to take it personal, Tommy.” Lotto said. “You know that I’m all about two things: Business and winning.”

  “Business, huh, well, it’s good to know that no matter how much the Earth may spin off of its axis from time to time that some things don’t change, especially here at the Times.” Thomas sat up straight and put his shoes flat on the hard wood floor as if he were bracing himself. “What’s this about, Ernest?”

  Lotto punched the ash end of his cigar out in this ashtray which Thomas always took as a sign that the man was ready for business. “Don’t play coy with me, Tommy, You know what I want.”

  Thomas nodded. “Ok, so let’s say that I do. You know that I can’t do it even if I wanted to. I can’t discuss any of it on any official level.”

  “Of course you can’t, Tommy Boy…but you’ll do it anyway. Lotto pulled what looked to be a two page document out of his brief case and slid it over to his side of the desk. Thomas glanced over the letterhead briefly. “After I hung up with you yesterday, I cleared this with the publisher and now know that I can offer you this proposal.”

  Thomas scanned the finer points of the context including an impressive six figure compensation with his name typed at the bottom. The document only needed his signature next to his printed name for it to be complete. He slid it back to his former employer, never taking his fingers off until it until it reached him.

  “Sorry,” Thomas said. “That’s a no go, Lotto. And before you start…it’s not about the money. That’s more than a fair offer and I thank you for it. But it’s a no go. And I don’t want to hear anything else about it.”

  Ernest Lott got to his feet. “Oh, you’ll hear me out, Tommy Boy, and you’ll like what I’m telling you.”

  Thomas rose with his friend and put his hands in his pockets. “Right,” He said. “Next, you’ll have me believe that Ernest Lott, super editor, will stoop to the level of indignity of what is known as begging me.”

  “I was hoping you would save me that much trouble, but what the hell?” Lotto planted his elbows on the desk and assumed a praying pose that Thomas would have thought priceless if it were at all genuine. “Alright, Tommy, I am officially begging you.”

  “Save it, Lotto.” Thomas smiled and sat back down and waited on his friend and mentor to do the same. Thomas spread his hands wide. “I am doing an investigation for our former Mayor. A woman that this paper…and you endorsed in her campaign for that office twice; I’m going to present my findings from this investigation soon. You know that I can’t ally myself with any media outlet of any type if I’m to retain the slightest chance in hell of neutrality on this one.” Thomas stopped for breath and to measure how his friend was taking in all of this. “You are the Senior Editor in Chief of a newspaper that has been traditionally classified as a liberal publication.”

  Lotto sat up straight and put his own thick finger index finger in front of his lips. “You know using the term liberal is forbidden if not taboo terminology in this building, Tommy Boy.” He sat back then, resting his hands behind his bald head. “I thought I taught you better than that. You apparently laminated all those notes about journalistic integrity and that other bullshit, but forgot all about loyalty.”

  Thomas’ gaze turned serious. “I haven’t forgotten what you and this paper did for my career.”

  Lotto snorted. “You could have fooled me. It wasn’t easy for a lowly junior editor working in Chicago to convince his bosses to give a snotty nose kid fresh out of a small, irrelevant, area state college a shot at the big time. You began writing for one of the largest distributed daily papers in the country.”

  Thomas smiled at the memory of days long gone by. “I’ve told you time and time again, Lotto, that wasn’t snot in my nose. I was living on chicken soup back in those days.”

  “Maybe, but I wasn’t finished yet,” Lotto snapped his finger, remembering another detail. “And then many years later, I also gave the first rousing review for an unauthorized biography of Cathy Hooks that most papers called slightly bloated, if now well overwritten.”

  “And may I remind you that the bloated and overwritten biography won a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction that year.” Thomas straightened his tie for emphasis. “And its author gave his first interview to the paper you were editing when the book hit number one of the New York Times Bestseller List.”

  Lotto looked wounded. “I thought our relationship had grown well beyond reciting what we’ve done for one another, Tommy Boy.” And then a grin formed on his face. “You continue to disappoint me, Thomas. I guess I have no one else to blame but myself. I had such high hopes for you.”

  “Join the crowd. But then good judgment never has been my strong suit has it?”

  “That interview Beverly Hooks, Cathy’s daughter was one of the few. How is the old girl?”

  She wasn’t well and Thomas told his friend with a degree of sadness. Beverly’s oldest son had put his mother into a nursing home after a year of complications from Alzheimer’s made it impossible for him and his wife to care for her any longer. Thomas thought it was remarkable that a woman who had such a remarkably sharp memory could lose it all in such a short span of time. She was Thomas main source for the biography about her mother Cathy—a survivor of the Atlanta riots of 1906. Cathy had disobeyed her father’s instructions to stay in the house when an assembly of white men took her father away when they came looking for some Black Man…any Black man to lynch for the rape and murder of a couple of white women in the alley behind an after-hours establishment. Cathy had tracked them down as they readied her father for his lynching and hanging. Beverly had told Thomas that the leader of the mob was a White man that she’d seen hanging around with her dad on numerous occasions as they drink and whored together.

  The old White man had told Cathy’s father that she had one—and only one chance to leave there before she risked being raped and murdered herself. Tearfully, Cathy’s father kissed his devoted daughter on her forehead and pleaded with her to run away. He told her to run away and not look back. Cathy looked into her father’s eyes for a few seconds more with a waterfall of tears in her eyes and did as her father beckoned.

  She did not look back.

  “Thomas,” Lotto had said when the old tale had told itself out. It was time to get on with the here and the now “Look, what happened down at your townhouse…and then at the FBI field office, seriously. Are you alright?”

  Thomas felt a warmness flow through his shoulder blades. He was reminded why he appreciated this man’s friendship. “Yea, thanks. I�
��m going to get through this someway or the other. If Cathy Hooks can stare down a racist mob and live to see another day then I can see this through to its end without looking back as well.”

  “I know that you will.”

  “Well, in case I don’t, you can help me help you.”

  “You’re not making any sense, Tommy Boy.”

  Thomas Pepper gave the Senior Editor’s office a hard once over and then lowered his voice. “I told you that I won’t share what I know with you in any official capacity. But I will tell you what I know unofficially. These are serious people that I’m dealing with across the aisle…across all these aisles.”

  “Tommy Boy, you sound a little scared.”

  “I am scared, Lotto. If I wasn’t…then being questioned by the FBI before and after Serena’s escape and seeing on television what Xavier Prince and a House in Chains did at Carver instilled a little fear in me.”

  “Alright, Thomas, if you need me to be confidential, then I will be. What do you have?”

  Thomas reached into his jacket and slid his own two page document at the other man. “I’m sorry, Lotto. Even your word is not good enough considering what I know and the ramifications of it being leaked before I’m ready to talk.”

  Ernest Lott yanked an expensive fountain pen from his shirt pocket, scanned the papers