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The only sound in the newsroom was the echo of Scott Molina’s keyboard. It was 3 a.m., two hours after the morning paper had gone to print and two hours before the cleaning crew was due to come in. Scott was using the brief ebb between the two tides of the day to get some work done.
Technically he shouldn’t be here. It was against company policy; or, more accurately, against the policy of the conglomerate that had absorbed the company ten years ago. But the old boys’ network still counted for something, if not as much as it once had, and Scott’s habit of afterhours writing was indulged. He supposed it was only a matter of time until even this pleasure would be taken away from him, Russell couldn’t have more than five years left in him as Editor-in-Chief before his cabin at Bass Lake and his grandchildren began to call to him in earnest.
The others who had worked at the paper as long as Russell and himself had either proven themselves to be affable men with no particular ambition or leadership skill, or alkies, burnt out even worse than he was. The uneasy fact was that the next editor would be someone who had no particular allegiance to Molina. How much longer Scott’s own brand of shit, unobtrusive as it generally was, would be tolerated after Russell’s departure was an open question. He would cross that bridge, as he had so many others, when he came to it.
Still, he would miss typing in the empty newsroom when the last of his privilege finally faded away. He had space to think here. He was fifty-five, his faced carved with heavy lines, offset by the pale, thick, horizontal scar across his left cheek. His eyes were underlined by heavy shadows. Still lean except for the slight paunch that alcohol had given him, with gray streaks in his short hair that matched the color of his steel-frame glasses. Scott had come up in a time when there were still typewriters in the office. He still did his best work to the rhythmic pounding of fingers on keys that struck back.
But even an editor as indulgent as Russell couldn’t be expected to allow Scott to do his work on such an anachronism, so the only way Scott could experience the sensation was by pounding his keyboard as hard as humanly possible, with such force that he wore through at least one every six months. It wasn’t the same, but it was better than nothing. The effect could only be appreciated if it was practiced in a quiet space, which The Telegraph only qualified as during this two-hour respite when he could be alone.
The sound of heavy footfalls on the carpet told Scott that he wasn’t as alone as he’d thought. He finished the last sentence in his paragraph, a community calendar article he could have written asleep or under heavy sedation, before turning with a squint into the gloom of the bullpen, hoping he wasn’t in for a problem.
He saw Sunny Wan approaching, with an ingratiating smile that could only mean that he wanted to bum a cigarette. Wan was one of the new breed of non-smoking journalists, though he would lapse at least once a month into the role of a smoking journalist. Scott couldn’t quite bring himself to trust him; then again he couldn’t quite bring himself to trust any non-smoking journalist. Sunny was Asian, though Scott was unsure of which ethnicity; he had a feeling, though he couldn’t articulate why, that it wouldn’t be OK to ask. Stocky but handsome, still a few years shy of thirty, Sunny had started as the big would-be breakout star. He had been recruited by the Telegraph straight out of college. From day one, the bigger markets had been sniffing around Sunny – Sacramento, San Francisco, even Los Angeles.
Scott could see why; Sunny had the makings of a good newsman. His prose was clean and his copy timely; he could write straight objective and op-ed with equal ease. He also had an accurate nose for bullshit, and the instinct to know just what issues to press and just how hard to press them to give real weight to what he wrote without actually pissing anyone off. He was humble without being falsely effacing, got along with management without earning a reputation as a brown noser. But there was something about Sunny that Scott just didn’t quite like. The way he had handled the attention, maybe; it would have almost been better if he had been cocky or preened. His “aw shucks” manner struck Scott as somewhat disingenuous. It wasn’t enough for Sunny to receive the attention – he had to be loved as a super nice guy as well. You had to be careful of guys who wanted to have their cake and eat it too. You never knew which option they would choose if their hands were forced.
What he had never had was that breakout piece that would give him the momentum to make him irresistible to the big boys at the larger markets. Though smart, he was too amiable to be aggressive. The big markets needed their reporters to be attack dogs, to dig up dirt, not simply notice when someone tracked it through the living room. Sunny wasn’t an attack dog; with his affable smile and trademark Hawaiian shirts he was closer to a big friendly Labrador. They waited and waited for Sunny to bring them something more than an easily retrieved dead duck. He never did. Unless something big happened soon, Sunny Wan would spend the rest of his career on The Telegraph, or a paper awfully similar. Just another talented player who never had the right stuff to be called off of the farm team and into the majors.
“Hey Scott, I hate to ask,” Sunny began, but before he could finish Scott had already grabbed the yellow pack of American Spirits off his desktop and shrugged on his pea coat.
“Come on,” he said. “I was just about to have one anyway.”
They strode through the cavernous hall space, the buzz of the overhead fluorescents the only sound now that Scott’s typing had ceased.
“What are you doing here so late?” Scott asked. Sunny shrugged, “Just had a little copy to finish.”
Though he wasn’t sure of Sunny, Scott had to admit that he was hurting for company on his smoke breaks, one of the few times he preferred to be social. The number of smokers had steadily dwindled at The Telegraph, and he could use the company. Even if it was the company of someone he didn’t particularly like. He buttoned up his coat as he headed for the door, and shook loose two cigarettes in anticipation.
They went to the front of the building. Normally, smoking was relegated to behind the loading docks, but Scott didn’t feel like going out that way, and even if Sunny was political, he wasn’t a snitch. They walked through the double glass doors, Scott carefully closing the inner lobby door behind him (God forbid a hint of smoke should drift into the office), and propped out the outer door with a handy cinderblock.
The air was sharp and cold, and as they walked to the parking lot their breath came out in puffs as if they had already lit up. He and Wan lit their cigarettes, and Scott had just begun to search his mind for small talk when the truck entered the parking lot.
The truck was the only vehicle Scott could see on this stretch of road and its engine, in bad repair, split the stillness of the night, sounding like a boiler on the point of exploding. Scott tensed. He knew the vehicles of nearly everyone on staff. The younger kids, who could afford them, drove Priuses. The older generation favored cheap sedans by Honda, Nissan, and Saturn. The few pickup trucks in use were vanity jobs, crisp, well-maintained suburban Rams. Nobody drove anything like the beast that idled before them, a hulking, battered old warhorse of a work truck. Whoever was behind the wheel had come with one intention: to make trouble. Probably a would-be vandal who hadn’t expected to find anyone here. Now, the question was, would he turn tail and run or decide to make Sunny and Scott part of his message?
Scott turned to Sunny, who wore a dreamy smile, apparently unperturbed by the giant, looming truck. These fucking kids, Scott thought, and he could barely repress a shake of his head; they always thought they were so fucking safe. Sunny turned to Scott and, seeing he was on edge, shot him a grin that was probably meant to be reassuring. “Probably just needed to turn ar–”
The engine cut off in the middle of his sentence and Sunny shut up. The driver had left the lights on, pinning them in its beam like escaping prisoners caught in a spotlight as they cut across the yard. Scott racked his mind, trying to figure out what the hell The Telegraph had printed lately that could have pissed someone off so badly. There had been nothing but some fairly innocuous bullshit as far as Scott could remember.
Nothing disturbed the ominous silence that fell when the engine cut. Every instinct in Scott’s body was telling him to run, but he was fairly sure that doing so would result in a bullet in his back. If Scott squinted he could just make out the shape of the man at the wheel. He was alone in the cab of the truck. A dark, broad-shouldered silhouette, hands gripping the steering wheel white-knuckle tight. He was shaking.
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