Subject
by Via Meyerson
Your story is about a freelance writer in an office emailing your mom.
Subject: Murder on 5th and Elm.
No. That’s not right. Backspace.
Subject: Obituary.
That’s still just not right. Backspace.
Subject: Jackson.
That’s the one.
I have no idea how I’m going to get through the rest of this email if I can’t even formulate the proper title for it. I’m not supposed to have to do this. This is not what I envisioned myself doing when we started this whole thing four months ago. All we could see was a big, fat pay out in the end and our names living on as the people who finally brought down the famous Ceyzar. Plus, we’d both land jobs with any paper in the country. Our story would drop and he’d be caught. Jackson had the perfect background to infiltrate: he was a good mix of Cuban and Mexican, but American born. He spoke perfect Spanish and fit right in with the cartel from the get go.
It took barely any time at all for him to infiltrate. He spent maybe a little over two weeks proving himself—making connections, meeting to procure shipments. We had talked about the backlash and the danger involved in our “research” and had both agreed to immediately pull out if he was asked to murder anyone or anything. He never was which, at the time, seemed great to us. It was no secret that these guys were dangerous and had at least a dozen bodies on their hands; at least, those were the ones the authorities knew of.
Turns out, he never fully made it in.
I knew something was wrong last night. Jackson and I had taken every precaution to keep ourselves safe and still be in contact with one another. We drew up fake documents, such as birth certificates with fake names for both of us and a marriage certificate. Much of what we did was probably illegal, but it was worth the risk for the pay off. We were in this together, though, for better or worse. During our previous three years of marriage we had worked on big stories like this together, but none had made it to a collective finish. Mostly we published small stories that we worked on individually—we knew, though, that this was it. But it wasn’t worth our lives and, somewhere along the way, we forgot about that.
Ceyzar himself called Jackson yesterday around four or five. Jackson was already planning on meeting with transport vehicle for a shipment that night—something he had become accustomed to doing a couple times a week over the last month. We had enough information to do an amazing storing on the transport vehicles and the minor players in the cartel, but we were shooting for the heavy hitters. We wanted Ceyzar himself and the main transporter, neither of which Jackson had been introduced to yet.
We thought this was our big break in the story when Ceyzar called to ask Jackson to meet the main transporter. And, bonus, Ceyzar was going to be there too. He spit off some nonsense about wanted to test the quality of the shipments to dispute some complaints they had received lately, but he needed Jackson to do the initial transport from the main location to the next vehicle. The cartel did a great job moving locations as to not keep too much product in one spot for too long—it would become too easy to spot. Jackson, of course, agreed and was given an address for the meet.
Something made me uneasy about the situation, though. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the whole thing just seemed…off. Ceyzar didn’t mention why he needed Jackson to run the shipment this time when he hadn’t needed him in the past, he didn’t give any information about the location besides the address, and the shipment was set to hit in just a couple hours. Jackson convinced me that it was fine—that was the way their system worked: the less information the better.
He left our apartment at 7:45. He never came back.
The police found his body by the docks and called me around three this morning. Of course, they knew him as Chris Newman and me as Julia Newman. Jackson never carried his real information with him—that would have been a death sentence. But, he always made sure to have my contact information just in case this was to happen. I went down to the police station and identified his body, corrected them on his real name, and explained our situation. They agreed to print the story as the homicide victim being that of Chris Newman—they said if Jackson had been pinned as a fraud, then putting his real name anywhere in the paper would be a death sentence for our entire family.
I’ve been at the office for about an hour now, still staring at the computer screen with nothing but a subject line. Jackson’s mother was always the biggest supporter of our work, but when we told her about our plan to bring down the biggest drug cartel in New York she begged us not to.
“You’ll be killed all for nothing.” She said. We told her we would be careful, and assured her we would make it out fine. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her she was right and her worst fear had come true.
I put the email aside for the moment. I had an important story to write and I need to go pick up the baby. If she never gets to know her daddy, at least she’ll know that he didn’t die in vain.
