Killer Story by Matt Witten

Author:Matt Witten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oceanview Publishing
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, I still hadn’t done a lot of ripping.

I hated to admit it, but Natalie’s script, which I estimated would run about nine minutes, almost as long as mine, was tight. She wrote great descriptions of the Parting Glass—“working-class urban with a touch of college girl”—and Eric’s state of mind—“semi-homicidal brooding.” Viktor was “the Swedish diplomat, reeking of expensive red wine.” The fight scene was gripping, and she managed to insert herself into it. She claimed she tried to get between Eric and Viktor, but Viktor shoved her, knocking her down. I doubted it was true, but it was effective. And the actual scene at the bar was probably so chaotic, none of the people there would be able to say for sure that she was lying.

In the end, my efforts to trash Natalie’s script were limited to suggesting a few picayune word changes, like “dubious” instead of “doubtful.” It was exasperating.

When I finished my edit I went to her cubicle, where she was listening to Beyoncé. She had put on fresh lipstick, and I felt shabby next to her. I gave back her pages and said grudgingly, “Good work.”

She gave me a smile I couldn’t decipher, then handed my own pages back to me. “You too. I had a couple suggestions.”

A couple? Red ink covered the first two pages. Natalie had had no problem at all finding things to rip.

I went back to my desk to look at her comments. No doubt they were all stupid and I could ignore them. My script was solid.

But when I read Natalie’s changes, I got where she was coming from. Mainly what she’d done was make cuts in my account of what happened at the park. Now that the incident was no longer a murder attempt, but somebody firing in the air, my section felt overwritten. Natalie’s cuts right-sized it.

What killed me was, with these cuts my half would actually be shorter than hers.

The other thing Natalie pointed out was that I could have done a better job describing how terrified Brandon was when I confronted him about being gay. “You can punch up the drama of this scene,” Natalie had written in the margin, “which is Brandon realizing you have him by the balls and his secret is about to explode.”

I realized I had downplayed this aspect because I still felt uncomfortable about outing him. I needed to be more cold-blooded.

Like Natalie. Much as I was skeptical of her, I had to admit her remorselessness had virtues when it came to being a good journalist.

I took my laptop and went back to Natalie’s cubicle, where I immediately thought: why did I come to her instead of the other way around? It gives her the power! She greeted me with a bright smile and said, “Shall we dive in?”

“Sure.” As we went through my script, I tried to act cool about it, accepting almost all of her suggestions. We finally finished and combined our two documents into one—which Natalie proceeded to send to Dave herself, without asking me first.

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