the first step. Eight inches up the second step. The crosshairs were on Ferris’s profile, matching each rise. The shooter heard nothing and felt only the pressure of his index finger on the cold metal of the trigger. When Ferris reached the top step, the jail sergeant took a final drag on his cigarette and flipped it away. He opened the gray door and appeared to look into Ferris’s face and say something. The shooter’s crosshairs were on the prisoner’s right sideburn and Ferris seemed to peer up at the sergeant and mouth the last words he would ever speak.
The rifle recoiled into his shoulder like a firm but playful punch, and he did not have to watch as Ferris sank like a bag of water suddenly cut loose from above. The sniper knew that there was now a hole the size of a dime burrowed into the man’s brain, the bullet killing him before he could even blink at its impact.
“Smoke check,” he whispered.
Chapter 2
“I don’t know why I always have to open my big mouth,” Nick whispered to himself.
It wasn’t because he didn’t know better. He’d been in the newspaper business for a dozen years, had read the same old stuff a thousand times, let it get under his skin and then popped off to some senior editor and gotten his own ass in trouble again. It wasn’t that he forgot the lessons, just that he was too foolish to heed them.
“Good morning, Nick,” Deirdre Smith, the city editor, said as she slid past him to get into her own office door. She did not make eye contact. She knew better than to make eye contact. It was one of the lessons she never forgot. Instead she stowed her purse, tapped the spacer key on her computer, which was always booted up, and avoided him even though he filled up her doorway, standing there with the metro page in his fist, leaning into the frame. After tapping a few keys to see how many e-mails she had to answer and probably wishing to God he would just go away, she finally sat down in her chair, elbows on the desk, hands clasped under her chin. “How can I help you, Nick?”
Management training, he thought: Ask if you may assist the employee in some manner. Let them know that you are a partner and that you are there to help them. She smiled her fake smile. He reflected it back with one of his own.
“Man, I hope it wasn’t you who changed the lead paragraph in my story last night, Deirdre,” Nick said and then laid—didn’t toss, but laid—the front page of the section down in front of her. In retrospect, it wasn’t the best way to start. But he was proud of himself for the not-tossing part.
She picked up the paper as if she didn’t know which story he was talking about and pretended to read it for a few seconds.
“Well, first of all, it was a great story, Nick. And it got lots of raves in the morning editors’ meeting,” she said from behind the page. “We all really liked that detail you put in about the number of cigarette butts in his ashtray by the BarcaLounger. You’ve got such a great eye, Nick.”
More management training. If possible, compliment the employee on a task well done before addressing problems with job performance.
“But yes, I did do some tinkering. I thought you missed a major point, which you mentioned much deeper in the story, about this guy’s military past,” she said, looking into his face with that cardboard smile. “I thought it belonged in the lead.”
Nick took a breath and looked at the bulletin board behind her desk and then quoted from memory the deadline story he’d filed the night before:
“ ‘Despondent over the loss of his job as a longtime city park manager, a Dania man killed his wife and two teenage children Wednesday and then patiently waited, chain-smoking cigarettes, until police arrived before firing a shotgun under his own chin, authorities said.’ ”
The city editor glanced up at him with an obvious look of mock confusion wrinkled into her brow. It only pissed him off more, and she knew it. He took the paper from her desk, rattled it as he read.
“‘In a grisly display of firepower, a former Vietnam commando killed his wife and children with a pistol Tuesday and then as police arrived fired a shotgun into his own face, officials said.’ ”