Deadline Man by Jon Talton

Author:Jon Talton [Talton, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General
ISBN: 9781615952090
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2011-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

I am losing time. The Sunday column is due in less than seventeen hours, but I can dig into the evergreen file. A column idea squirreled away for a slow news day. The bosses are so distracted they won’t notice. In fact, they seem to prefer it now when I don’t write about controversial topics—another change from the old days when the Free Press had real balls. But I’m not getting results where it counts. Wendy was my hope for a home run. Troy was under investigation for a massive investment fraud? Maybe that would have made him a target for suicide—or maybe assisted suicide if he made powerful enemies. The only trouble is, it’s apparently not true. Not only did Wendy say he was clean, but I haven’t received one tip about trouble in Troy’s hedge fund. I am further than ever from connecting him to Megan Nyberg, Ryan Meyers, and Heather Brady—kids who should be far out of the orbit of Troy’s lavish life.

I ride back toward Pioneer Square on a quiet, electric Third Avenue bus. As night has arrived, the clientele has changed. I look like the only person aboard who makes more than $25,000 a year. A woman with a long, scraggly beard sits across from me. Parts of downtown are dark and seedy looking, new empty storefronts added just since the last time I was along this way. A long recession will do that.

I pull out my Blackberry, wanting to call Amber. I am missing her. I am missing Pam and Rachel and the two Melindas. I put it away. It’s untrustworthy for much more than calling to order a pizza. Why am I really surprised? It was well-reported, including by our soon-to-be-dead Washington bureau, that the National Security Agency had spied on reporters during the Bush years. I thought most of that was all in the past. And why would anyone be listening in on a business columnist at a paper in Seattle?

That had been Faith’s question to me that afternoon, a quizzical half-smile on her face—after thirty minutes spent fiddling with my computer.

“Has it been slow lately?” she asked, running an anti-virus program while I sat on my desk watching. I told her it had been, and had crashed a couple of times. She nodded and opened different menus. “No obvious viruses,” she said. “I see from the AV program that you’ve been rebooting every day. That’s when we install new anti-virus patches. You wouldn’t get it if you didn’t…”

I nodded cooperatively.

“Sit down here.” I followed her instructions and sat at the keyboard. She got on her knees and swept her black hair out of her face as she watched the CPU on the floor. Her hair fell in a perfect crescent just below her shoulders. “Just open a file and start typing. Any old thing.”

So I did, discreetly appreciating the shape of her denim-clad behind.

“Now stop.”

I stared out the window at the rain. She said, “Now start typing again.”

After a few minutes of this, she went out into the business newsroom and worked on a spare computer.

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