balance, staggered up against the counter.
The blood was pouring out of her father’s head and through his fingers as he put his hand up to the wound.
“Jesus!” he shouted, staggering back himself. “Jesus!”
Miranda’s mother came into the room, looked at her husband, at the bloody toaster still in her daughter’s hand, and shouted, “He’s your father! How dare you! This man is your father!”
She ran out of the kitchen. She ran out of the house. She didn’t even have time to pack her things in a paper bag.
7
“Zack,” Trixie said, “I’m sorry about what happened with Benson. Really, I’m sorry about that. But forget about that for now. Those guys, those two in your story. They didn’t always sell stun guns, these guys. They-”
I felt Sarah standing behind me. “I gotta go,” I said, and hung up. I turned around. “’Sup?”
She nodded her head toward Magnuson’s office. “He wants to see us,” she said, and she didn’t look happy.
“Both of us?”
“Apparently.”
“What’s it about? Is he going to apologize for dragging me off the Wickens story and giving it to that asshole Colby?”
“I don’t think so,” Sarah said. “I don’t think that ‘sorry’ is part of Magnuson’s vocabulary.”
I got up, made sure my shirt was well tucked in, and followed Sarah to the far corner of the newsroom, where the managing editor’s corner office looked out over the city.
Even though we could see him in there, sitting at his desk, we didn’t walk right in. Sarah told his secretary we had arrived, as if that were not immediately evident, and she buzzed him. Through the door, we watched him watching us as he picked up his phone. “Send them in,” we heard him say into the phone.
His secretary said, “He’ll see you now.”
We went in. I had a bad feeling.
“Ah, the Walkers,” he said, not getting up to greet us. That seemed like a bad sign to me. “Take a seat,” he said. I would have felt better had he said, “Please, be seated.”
We sat down. Magnuson said, “I didn’t bring you in here because you happen to be married to one another. I brought both of you in because I wanted to speak with you, Mr. Walker, and seeing as how Sarah is your editor, this will impact her as well.” He stared at both of us for a while, but mostly at me.
“I have an old friend,” he said suddenly, “name of Blair Wentworth. We used to work together, as reporters, long ago. Used to get drunk together on a regular basis too. Once, when he’d had a little bit too much one night in the bar, we got into a heated debate about whether Jimmy Carter really had a peanut farm, or whether it was just a load of bullshit, so we walked out, got in a cab, and asked to be taken to Plains, Georgia. Well, that was several hundred, if not thousands, of miles away, and the cabby had some reservations, but we said not to worry, we were newspapermen, and we had expense accounts. Instead of driving us to Georgia, he drove us back to our paper and dropped us off at the front door before we made complete asses of ourselves. If I could find that cabby today, I’d give him a job here. Doing what, I don’t know, but he clearly had more sense than some of the people who work for me here now.”
I blinked.
“Anyway, Blair decided to go off in another direction. He was a pretty business-minded individual, got into community newspapers, worked his way up to publisher of one of them. The Suburban, out in Oakwood. You might have heard of it.”
Oh God.
“We keep in touch, Blair and I, so when something comes across his desk that troubles him, he gives me a call. And I just now got off the phone with him. It was a very interesting call, the most amazing thing. Do you have any idea, Mr. Walker, what it might have been about?”
Sarah turned to look at me.
“Yes,” I said as evenly as I could. “I have a pretty good idea.”
“What is it, Zack?” Sarah asked.
“Why don’t you tell her, Mr. Walker.”
I cleared my throat. “I was out to Oakwood for lunch-well, actually, I never had any lunch, come to think of it, only a coffee. Which probably explains why I’m feeling a little light-headed all of a sudden. Edgy. I could use a bite to eat.”
“Zack.”
“I had lunch with Martin Benson, who writes a column for the Suburban. I think he may have been left with the impression that I was trying to get him to scrap doing a story on Trixie, which is not at all the case.”
Sarah was speechless. Magnuson was good enough to fill the silence.
“Blair says this Benson fellow told him that you wanted him to surrender his camera phone so he wouldn’t take a picture of this, this woman known as Trixie, who, I understand, has a rather unorthodox line of work.”
“She was, yes, that’s sort of true, but she was very frightened that he was going to take her picture and run it in the paper.”
“That’s what journalists do,” Magnuson said. “We take pictures of people we want to do stories on, and we put them in the paper, whether they like it much or not. I’ll bet you Sarah could explain the whole concept to you if you’re not all that familiar with it.”
“That’s who called you, isn’t it?” Sarah said. “There was no call about a Star Trek convention.”
Magnuson’s bushy eyebrows went up a notch.
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no, there was no call about a Star Trek convention.” I was starting to feel that I’d be lucky to cover anything as newsworthy as a Star Trek convention in the future.
“It’s one thing to try to outsmart the competition when we’re trying to get a story that we want just as much as they do,” Magnuson said. “One time, when I was based in Washington, there was this little runt-nosed jackass from the paper out on the coast, doesn’t matter which one, kept shadowing me, figuring he had a better chance snooping on me and my sources than trying to cultivate any of his own. So I’m on a pay phone, and I know he’s just around the corner, but he doesn’t know that I know, and I ask for Rewrite, tell them I got a hell of a story about a particular congressman who was found dressed in women’s clothes in a whorehouse, and off he dashed. Then I told Rewrite we had to start again. Our paper didn’t have a story about a congressman found dressed in women’s clothes in a whorehouse, but his did.” He sniffed. “Never followed me around again after that.”
I laughed.
“Shut up,” Magnuson said. “You’ve got nothing to laugh about. What you did isn’t the same as what I did. You tried to steer Benson off a story to protect a friend.”
“I didn’t-”
“I can’t fire you outright,” Magnuson said. “That would involve the newspaper guild, and hearings, and back and forth and who needs that shit anyway. So instead, you can remain a reporter.”
I knew it was too soon to think I’d dodged a bullet.
“But not for city. Tomorrow, you start in the homes section.”
I was dumbstruck. Surely, firing would have been more humane.
Sarah, as well, could find no words. She looked back and forth between me and the managing editor.
“I’ll see what I can do about getting someone else for you,” Magnuson told her. “I don’t want you to have to run that department shorthanded, because, I can tell you right now, you’re going to be running that department for the foreseeable future.”
He turned back to look at something on his computer, and it was clear that we were being dismissed.
