Fiction: A Simple Exchange

By Charlie Kondek

 

Ed Gontarski and most of his crew were at Ed’s little house in Westland engaged in pre-job chatter when Mack Renner showed up with his brother, Bert. “Ed, can we talk to you privately?” 

Pete Sharka, the man who would climb the fence and cut the barbed wire, was saying, “I just hope I don’t rip my balls open. I can’t wait ‘til there’s a drone big enough to just…” He mimed. “Pick me up and carry me over.”

Ollie Stanek, one of the truck men, said, “You’re just looking for an excuse to fly that thing.”

“What he really wants,” offered Tom Cooms, “is a jet pack. Which James Bond movie had the jet pack, was it Thunderballs?”

“Thunderballs? You’re thinking of a dirty movie you saw once. It’s thunder ball, you idiot.” 

Laughter from Pete, Ollie and Tom, and the other two men, Jimmy Khoury and Ike Schmidt, as they accepted cards from Ollie, who was dealing 5-card draw. They weren’t really playing, though, just going through the motions while they chewed time and a couple pizzas. Ed followed Mack and Bert into the front room.  

“Panic attacks?” Ed said when it had been explained to him. “How long has this been happening?”

“A couple months now, but they’re getting worse,” Mack said. “Honest to God, Ed, the first time it happened I thought I was having a heart attack. Jeanine even took me to the hospital. I’m sorry, man. I’m just coming apart. I feel one happening right now. I feel like my chest is closing in on me.”

“He wants to go through with it,” Bert said. “But you can see he can’t. We were hoping, that’s why he asked if I could take his place.”

Ed, like Mack and Bert, was somewhere north of 40 but not quite 60. What was left of his dark hair climbed down from a widow’s peak to stab at a pair of serious, scrutinizing eyes. He affixed Mack and Bert with these now, unsmiling, a small constellation of pock marks in the shadow of one swarthy cheek. Bert said, “You know me, Ed.”

“That’s not the point. The point is something in the plan has changed.”

“Ed, what are you saying?” Mack pleaded. “He’s my brother. Working with Bert is just like working with me.”

“It’s not the same. I didn’t make the arrangements with Bert. I made them with you.”

“So? Slight change of plans. Slight.”

“I don’t like having my plans changed.”

“You’re being, like, superstitious.”

“No. I’m being cautious. It’s what I’ve always been, cautious.”

Bert said, “Well, what do you think, Ed? Like we told somebody? We didn’t tell anybody. It’s a simple exchange.”

But Ed was no longer listening. Hands on hips, he seemed to be thinking. When he said, “I’m calling it off,” the faces of the brothers fell, and they followed him into the kitchen imploring, “Don’t be that way, Ed. Ed, don’t be that way.”

“We’re calling it off,” Ed announced to the men around the table. Reactions were mixed. Jimmy looked scared. Pete threw his cards on the table and went, “What? Why?” Ollie waited. “Because there’s been an unplanned development,” Ed answered, gesturing to the Renner brothers. “I gotta get this checked out. If it’s okay, a few weeks, we try again.”

“Checked out?” Mack protested. “What is there to check out?”

For a moment Ed glared at Mack like he was going to hit him. Everybody must have felt it, because nobody said anything. Then Ed said, “Ollie, take the gear back to the storage unit, leave it there. Make sure you’re not followed. If you even think you’re being followed, don’t go to the storage unit. Pete, take the point car back. Ike, find Jake and let him know we won’t be using the trucks tonight. He’s probably at home. Don’t tell him on the phone. You can call him, but don’t tell him about the trucks except in person. Somebody take the leftover pizza. Let’s go, let’s move.”

Chairs slid back and they started to disperse. In the midst of this, Mack looked like he wanted to say something more, but the angry cloud in the pock marks on Ed’s cheek told him he’d better hold his tongue. He concentrated instead on just trying to breathe, one hand on his anxious chest. 

 

* * *

 

Kurt Unsley, one of the two security guards on duty that night at the All-Tek distribution center, got off work at seven in the morning. After putting his uniform shirt on a hanger in the back seat of his car and his sidearm in its lockbox under the front, he drove to Gracie’s Bar & Grill in Wayne, a 24-hour joint that catered to all shifts working the Ford plant, the medical center, or anyone else wanting a drink or a cheeseburger at any hour of the day. He was washing down the last of a pulled-pork sandwich with a beer and screwing around on his mobile phone when Ed Gontarski walked in. The gal behind the bar said, “I thought you were on vacation,” to which Gontarski replied, “I am. I left one of my books in the break room.” He emerged a moment later with a paperback in his hand and, noticing Unsley, said, “Hello, Kurt. Just getting off?”

They shot the breeze for a while. Then Gontarski slapped the Donald Westlake novel on his knee and said, “Welp, I guess I better get this vacation started.”

“I’ll walk out with you.” 

Alone in the parking lot, Unsley said, “When you guys didn’t show up I figured something happened. Everything all right?”

“One of my guys backed out at the last minute,” Gontarski said. “Said he was sick. I don’t like any changes in my plans so I called it off for tonight.”

“You don’t trust this guy.”

“Actually, he’s one of my closest friends.” Sheepishly, he added, “So’s his brother—he tried to get me to take his brother instead. But I’m, just… any change in a plan is a chance for something to go wrong, so I shut it down. For tonight. You cut the south camera I take it.”

“Just like we planned. Made it look like the wire had worn away. The company will come around and replace it today and, hopefully, not get too suspicious about how it happened.”

“That means when we try this again we’ll have to find another way to take out a camera to get you outside. That is, if the plan stays the same.”

“So we are going to try this again.”

Thinking of Overbaugh, Gontarski answered quickly, “Absolutely. I just gotta check some things out first. Make sure it’s okay to go ahead. Make any changes to the plan I need to make.”

“How long?”

“A few weeks, I think. Not long.” He jerked his head toward Gracie’s. “I’ll be in touch.”

Ed watched Unsley’s Impala pull away through the cracked parking lot before turning toward his own older model Ford Escape, a pile of camping gear visible through its rear window. Wearily, he piloted it towards 275 and injected it into the traffic going toward Toledo, a little thicker than expected. Who had business in Toledo on the Friday going into Memorial Day weekend, or any day? On that note, what was a syndicate man like Overbaugh doing there, instead of living a glamorous gangster’s life in Chicago, or Indianapolis, or anywhere else? He got that the business of this particular outfit was in highways and back roads, truck stops and cornfields, dirt lots and concrete blocks, all across these green and dusty states. But that a man like Overbaugh would deliberately choose to headquarter in Toledo… well, it impressed Ed, honestly. It spoke to Overbaugh’s seriousness, a seriousness that touched Ed nervously now as the highway rolled underneath him. 

Though there was nothing to do last night with the job called off, no reason to stay awake, Ed hadn’t slept much. He lay on the couch in the front room, something he did more and more these days, somehow more comfortable there, maybe avoiding the wife-sized cavity in the bed, turning over in his mind what to do about this Mack Renner business and, more importantly, how to communicate it to Overbaugh. He decided, sometime in the sleepless night and now again on the hypnotic highway, that he could count on that seriousness to justify what he’d done and buy him the time he needed. But how much time, and for what?

Gontarski didn’t go to Toledo, but turned off for Sterling State Park. Thirty minutes later he was snapping the fiberglass poles of his tent into place while a compressor inflated his air mattress. He set a pile of wood and a folding chair by the fire pit, cracked the cap on a fresh bottle of J&B, and fiddled with his fishing poles and lures while the sun vaulted Lake Erie. 

On Saturday, Overbaugh came. He found Gontarski fishing from the shore, and Ed offered him one of the poles. “Nice work if you can get it,” said Overbaugh, casting a line. “So what happened?”

Gontarski didn’t mince words or make excuses. He would have preferred to keep Mack and Bert’s identities out of what he reported, but Overbaugh had insisted on knowing the names of his crew, and as the syndicate was footing the up-front expenses and had recommended Jimmy Khoury, Gontarski didn’t feel he could withhold. “The thing is,” he opined, “I’m 80-90% sure what Mack is telling me is legit. But I’d rather be, like, 99%. I’m pretty sure I can trust Bert for the same reasons, but I didn’t want to leave even a slight chance.” 

“What are you thinking,” Overbaugh wondered, “that there’s a chance Mack or Bert are compromised? That cops have got to one or both of them?” Overbaugh was a tall and rugged, almost grandfatherly man with a pile of gray hair that crowded his ears and collar. In jeans and a denim jacket and some silver jewelry he cast his line with a natural, cowboy grace.

“Right,” Gontarski said. “And substituting Bert for Mack at the last minute is their way to plant a snitch on the team. Or, maybe it’s another crew, trying to rip us off. Maybe it’s not any of that, but I wasn’t comfortable going ahead with a guy I personally did not brief. You know, like they train guys in the factory. If you think something’s wrong, stop work.”

Overbaugh nodded, patiently, teased his line. “So what’s next?”

“I just need a couple weeks to check things out. Then, if I’m okay with it, we revise the plan with Unsley and try again.”

“How will you check things out?”

“I’ll do some asking around, some vetting.”

“We might have resources we can apply to the problem, too. Two weeks, you said?”

“Well… I said a couple weeks but what I meant was, you know, I’d like to take some time.”

“Hmp,” Overbaugh puffed. “That Fourth of July weekend might be good. Let’s aim for that. No more than that. My mob’s eager to take possession of the haul. Those trucks have to roll to Indiana, my friend.”

Indiana, Fourth of July weekend. In Gontarski’s mind, the cornfield highway stretched to a vanishing point on the horizon, a finish line in time and space. Suddenly, he felt as crowded as the hair on Overbaugh’s shaggy head and wouldn’t have minded having a little panic attack of his own. “Right,” was all he said. Why should it feel like he’d agreed to a new deal with a new devil?

 

* * *

 

Gontarski let his subconscious mind work on the problem. His conscious mind he kept occupied with fishing and reading, staying lubricated on J&B and Miller High Life from the iced-down cooler at his feet. At night he enjoyed a little campfire his wife would have liked and sheltered in their two-person tent. He came back to his little house on Monday and went back to work on Tuesday. 

Always paranoid about talking on the phone, he drove out to Port Huron with some of the syndicate’s expense money in his pocket to visit a semi-retired safecracker named Tim McClatchy. “You know Bert Renner, right? Mack’s brother? I’m thinking about working with him. What do you think? Can you vouch for him?”

“Well what’s wrong with Mack?” McClatchy asked, pouring them both a coffee at the kitchen table of his little cottage. He offered to add a slug of whiskey to Ed’s but Ed held up a hand. 

“Mack’s thinking about hanging it up. Health problems. It was him recommended Bert.”

“Bert seems like a good dude. If you can’t get Mack, Bert might be just as good. Not nearly as experienced, but maybe okay.”

“Do you know,” Ed asked, fanning a few bills on McClatchy’s table, “if there’s any heat on Mack, or Bert? Are both clean? This is a legitimate business enquiry, Tim. I’m not asking just out of politeness. Would you work with Bert?”

Tim pointed to the money, $100, and said, “You don’t have to do that, Ed.”

“I know. I want to compensate for your professional opinion. You see what I’m after?”

“I do. I thought Mack was one of your best friends?”

“He is. That’s why I need an outside opinion.”

McClatchy pinched his nose and fished in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. “I haven’t heard anything about Bert or Mack. If it was me, I’d talk to Bert, and if I thought he could do the job, yeah, I’d work with him.”

Gontarski had the same hundred-dollar conversation with Ferdie Van Wooten over a cup of coffee at a bakery on Telegraph, with Anthony Iovine over a cheeseburger at a beer joint up in Shelby Township, even with old Paul Kwiatkowski in the parking lot at the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak. He talked to some guys he knew less that knew Bert, guys that worked with him or played basketball with him, Fred Staples, Chuck Ott, Barney Neuhausen. Everybody said pretty much the same thing. As far as they knew, neither Mack nor Bert was having any trouble with the law or another set of crooks, nothing that would keep either of them from doing some side work.

It was starting to look to Ed like he’d over-reacted, though that was from the perspective of hindsight. Still, as the hot arms of June stretched and grasped toward July in awakening summer, Ed’s concerns continued to gnaw at him. It was this overabundant caution, he felt, that had made him as successful as he was, kept him in the game, unblemished, this long. He didn’t have to wash dishes and bar back at Gracie’s or take on stints with buddies’ construction crews. He did these things to provide cover for the cash he’d accumulated and concealed, cash he used to spend keeping his wife in dresses and jewels, or flannel and denim, on vacations to Florida, Mexico, Vegas, or just up to Traverse City or Alpena, often with Mack and Jeanine. With Sharon gone, and childless, Ed no longer had any reason to spend money or the joy of spending it, but the zealous attention with which he’d stewarded it remained. 

This was gradually loosening its grip on the possibility of letting Bert take Mack’s place, though at that same slow pace. He drove down to Toledo and reported to Overbaugh that things were looking good though he was still checking it out, and Overbaugh assured him his group hadn’t uncovered anything either. It was only, Ed thought, on “Miami Vice” that gangsters had contacts on the police force that could tip them off, so he had Ollie Stanek follow Bert around for a few days. “What am I looking for?” Ollie asked. “See if he talks to anybody that smells like cop,” Ed instructed. Was this all too much? Maybe, but this would net him and his crew a little over $120,000 and make a million, he guessed, for the syndicate. With so much at stake, and Overbaugh for a partner, you really couldn’t be too careful. Still, that Fourth of July weekend—the syndicate’s deadline, Overbaugh reminded him—was coming. “Are you ready, then, Ed?” Overbaugh asked. “Not yet,” Gontarski urged. “Not yet.”

In the middle of all this, Ed invited Mack to go to the range; he had a new GLOCK G17 he wanted to practice with. They’d only fired a few rounds before Mack gestured to Ed, tapping his chest and waving his hand as if to dispel a fart, and left the line. Afterward they went to a bar where Mack looked forlornly at an untouched beer in front of him. Like his brother Bert, Mack had a pile of downy, yellow-white hair, the pale skin of his face drawn to a point by a reddish nose. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me, Ed. It’s like I can’t even function anymore.”

“What do the docs say?”

“Oh, they gave me something. Zoloft.”

“Does it help?”

“I dunno. Maybe. You gotta be on it for a while before you can really tell if it’s working. And if it don’t they got half a dozen other pills you can try. I feel like a science experiment, man.”

“Well, what does Jeanine think? She’s helping, right?”

“Oh, Jeanine. Jeanine. She’s a saint, of course. But sometimes I feel like she’s part of the problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ed, I wouldn’t wish what you been through on anyone. So please don’t take this the wrong way. But at least you ain’t got Mother Theresa looking over your shoulder all the time, nagging you. You know she’s always been churchy, Jeanine. I guess, for all these years, the money was so good, the bills got paid and we had nice things, she was willing to look the other way about side work. Besides, she could always go to Confession, pray it away. But the older she gets, the more religious. The more she wrings her hands and worries. So whatever’s going on with my stupid brain, I got the angel of guilt on my shoulder all the time.”

“Jesus.”

“Exactly. Jeanine says now there’s two ways to do things, God’s way or my way, and if you don’t follow one, you’ll get you in trouble with the other. A simple exchange, the way she sees it.”

A simple exchange, Ed thought. Hadn’t he heard that recently?

“She regrets it now, what I been doing,” Mack continued. “She wasn’t complaining about it when we had it but now she makes it sound like I’m the only one that wanted to put an addition on the house or send the kids to private schools.”

“Well, between God’s way and my way, I’ll take my way. It pays better.”

“Ed, I’m so sorry about how I bitched up the All-Tek job. You gotta believe me it was never my intention to mess you up.”

“I know, Mack.”

“And I know all those guys on the crew were affected, too. You gotta believe me when I say I didn’t want that and I was really hoping to make it right by bringing Bert.”

Ed studied Mack. He decided, at that moment, this was not something Mack was exaggerating, and for the first time the insistent suspicions of his professional mind were eclipsed by the sincere concern of a friend’s heart. “Mack, you are absolutely sure Bert’s okay for this? Look at me now. You have to give me your word. Nobody put you up to this?”

“Ed…!” Mack threw open the wide garage door of his face. “Ed, honest to God this is of my own doing and I’m just trying to make it right. Swear on my mother I’d rather go out to the parking lot right now and eat that Glock than betray you. I’m ashamed just to have you think it, Ed, I swear…”

“Okay,” Ed said. “Okay, Mack. Come on, man, it’s okay.”

 

* * *

 

Afterwards, he had conversations with Big John Warmer, the bookmaker, Ned Townes, a probation officer that always had an ear and a hand out, and Orson Boyd, an east side union rep. Each time, he fanned out five $20 bills for their “professional opinion.”

 

* * *

 

Gontarski was working a slow afternoon shift at Gracie’s when one of the waitresses found him and told him someone was there to see him. He was surprised to see Overbaugh idling by the bar. “Hiya, Ed! Came by to see if you were still selling that rod.”

“Hi, Bobby. Come out to my car and I’ll show it to you.” To the bartender, “Going on break.”

Night. Over the rooftops, factory smoke. Overbaugh said, “I wanted you to hear it from me if you haven’t already.” When Gontarski looked at him expectantly, Overbaugh continued, “There’s been… well it’s best to think of it as an accident. Renner’s been killed. Mack Renner.” 

In the shadow of the building, Ed’s dark eyebrows rose. Then his mouth closed tightly and his pock marks roiled. “What happened?”

“We were working our end of the thing, trying to help things along. I went down to see him with some of my guys.”

Gontarski noticed now, a few yards past Overbaugh’s shoulder, silhouettes of men sitting and smoking in a light-colored SUV. 

“I guess we spooked him. He didn’t like the way we were talking to him and pulled heat, so my guys pulled heat, fireworks went off and… unfortunately, Mack got killed.”

Now Gontarski’s eyes were elsewhere, deep in some set of calculations, of scenarios. Overbaugh said again, “It’s best you think of it as an accident, Ed. Hell, I almost got shot myself and it coulda been me, man. I’m sorry. Maybe it was his panic attacks that made him draw on us. It was just business, you understand that.”

“This changes everything,” Ed said. 

“Now wait a minute…”

“This is gonna bring so much heat onto everybody Mack knew. There’s no way we can do the job now.”

Gontarski felt himself jerked forward and thrust back into a parked car. The old man had some power in his claws. The doors of the SUV opened and an occupant put a foot out. Overbaugh put his gray head near Gontarski’s. “Now you listen to me. You’re going ahead with that job. Expectations have been set. No more delays. Those trucks will roll to Indiana July Fourth weekend. If not…” Overbaugh leveled a finger at him. “We’ll take you out, too, Gontarski. It’s that simple.”

A simple exchange, Ed thought. He imagined Overbaugh pulling aside Ollie Stanek, maybe at Ed’s funeral. “Ollie, Ed just wasn’t up to the job. But this thing’s too good to pass up. How do you feel about pulling the crew together?”

Overbaugh asked, “Do we have an understanding?”

 

* * *

 

The Fourth of July was on a Thursday that year. On Wednesday, July third, shortly after 1:00 AM, Brad Ablee was at the security desk at All-Tek watching the monitors while his partner that shift, Kurt Unsley, walked the warehouse. Suddenly, the screen displaying the west camera view was covered in a spider-web of lines. Ablee fussed with a few controls, studied the other cameras for a couple minutes, then picked up his walkie talkie. “Kurt, something weird just happened. West camera this time. Wanna have a look?”

“Okay.”

Unsley took his time crossing the warehouse floor. He’d lingered at the farthest wing from the west service door to give Gontarski’s team time to clear the fence. Opening the door, he walked out under the lights to look up at the externally mounted camera. Smashed pretty good. On the ground below it, the mangled remains of the drone Gontarski’s man had flown into it. He heard Gontarski’s voice, “Stick ‘em up.” Unsley almost laughed. 

“It’s me, Brad,” Unsley called as Gontarski and Sharka trailed him at gunpoint into the office. Ablee started to ask, “Everything okay?” when he saw the two masked gunmen. “They got the drop on me,” Unsley said. 

One of the gunmen circled the desk quickly to relieve Ablee of his sidearm. They’d already zip-tied Unsley’s hands behind his back, and they did the same now to Ablee, pushing them both into chairs. “Which one of these buttons opens the gates?” one of the gunmen asked. 

Unsley had barely gotten the words “go to hell” out before he was pistol whipped. A stream of blood issued rapidly from his nose and the man that hit him produced a pair of pruning shears and reached for Unsley’s hands. “Don’t be a hero, Kurt,” Ablee urged. He gestured with his chin. “That one.”

On the monitors, Ablee and Unsley watched the gates on the northeast side open and white orbs of truck headlights invade the screens. One of the gunmen left the room. On the monitors viewing the interior, they saw other masked men entering by another service door and moving through some of the rooms, including the loading bay. Then the monitors started going blank. 

Their computer had gone to sleep. The gunman that remained asked for the password. When Unsley hesitated, the gunman touched the pruning shears and Ablee said, “DetroitTigers24, but the Es are threes, the Is are ones and the O is a zero.”

The gunman spent some time with the computer. “So it looks like you have to check in… every hour? With your team number and the word ‘safe?’”

“That’s right.”

The gunman got comfortable at the keyboard and glanced at his watch. “Don’t worry,” he said, “this’ll all be over soon.” At 2:10 AM, he spoke as he typed, “AT0703, safe,” then slipped a thumb drive into a port. 

 

* * *

 

In the point car, a Dodge Charger, Gontarski watched the road in either direction, a burner phone on the seat beside him. A few miles behind him, three medium-duty Peterbilts with every inch of cargo space occupied by water heaters, furnaces, boilers and parts followed. The sun came up over the quiet highway on early morning vacationers and thieves. Ed was thinking about how Jeanine had clutched his shirt and sobbed. “Why, Ed? Why? I told him not to carry that thing around, that sooner or later it was going to cause trouble… oh, God, Ed, why?!” And then, collapsing into his arms, a howling widow’s wail, a sound that had never escaped Ed’s lips but the feeling of which he knew, because it had rended his heart when the cancer took Sharon. 

South on 69, they crossed into Indiana. Three hours from Detroit to the outskirts of Elkhart. The syndicate’s receiving warehouse was a long silver block on a gravel lot. Ed got out of the Charger long enough to stretch his legs and watch the syndicate’s men emerge to greet Ollie and start unloading. There it goes, he thought, into the syndicate’s bowels, while the next shift at All-Tek was punching in to discover Ablee and Unsley hog-tied in a closet. Ed saw Bert climb down from a truck and felt stabbed. He got back into the Charger and headed east.

He'd agreed to meet Overbaugh at an abandoned gas station a few miles down SR 15. Overbaugh was already there, leaning against a Chevy Silverado, enjoying the morning sunshine while tendrils climbed derelict pumps. He reached into the cab of the truck to extract two duffel bags as Ed approached. “I just got word,” Overbaugh said. “Nice work.” He set the duffel bags at Ed’s feet and reached into the pocket of his denim jacket for a flask. 

Ed unzipped the duffel bags to glance inside. The money reek greeted his nostrils.

“Wanna count it?” Overbaugh asked, taking a knock from the flask and offering it to Ed. 

“No need,” Ed replied. “It’s a simple exchange. There’s just one thing I need to know.”

“What’s that?”

The Glock was in Gontarski’s hand now. “Who killed Mack?” 

Overbaugh had started to put the flask away. Now he paused and held it and his other hand at chest height. “Don’t do this, Ed. Don’t end a perfectly good operation on a sour note. I told you before it was business.”

“Just tell me his name. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Ed, honestly, I don’t know who it was. A lot of lead was being flipped around. Could have been anyone.”

“It’ll have to be you then, Bobby. You’re the one that went after him with your goons. It was your fault.”

“It was your fault, Ed. You were the one dragging your feet. Putting everything at risk. I told you the syndicate would help you and that’s what we were trying to do, put the fear of God into Mack.”

“The fear of God,” Ed said acidly. “Who asked you to?” He raised the pistol.

There was a shot that might have come from a hunter, it was so distant, and something punched through Ed’s abdomen, taking his wind with it. He felt his knees going, so he raised the pistol once more, and another shot ripped through his shoulder blades and laid him on his chest on the weed-choked concrete. He was still conscious as waves of pain enveloped him and barely felt the pistol being kicked from his fingers, barely heard Overbaugh’s voice. “You didn’t think I’d come alone, did you?” Then the heft of the duffel bags and a promise, “I’ll see that your crew gets this.”

A truck was started. A truck was pulling away. Ed Gontarski waited for a third bullet to come and finish him off, but it seemed they were just going to let him go by himself. The ground was wet beneath him now, and all he could see was gray earth, green fields, endless white sky, growing darker at the edges.

 

 

 

 

 

Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and short story writer from metro Detroit whose work has appeared in genre, literary and niche publications.