out of a plane if she thought she could catch a hot story in midair, but they worked together like a hand in a well-worn glove. When Nell went off on a tear, he laid methodical foundations, covered their bases, crossed every t and dotted every i. Covered bases like the off-site backup server he rented with out-of-pocket cash.
And every time he prepared to leave the Brooklyn Standard newsroom, like right now, he carefully copied every single piece of material on the Loom investigation—every email and scanned letter, every interview transcript and audio file—to the backup site. Just in case.
They’d been chasing the Loom story for months, ever since the proposal for a new citywide emergency-management system went from a tiny blip to a juggernaut overnight. The Weaver Group was a small tech start-up funded by truckloads of anonymous donations, and they opened doors like they had the key to the city. Department heads, aldermen, everybody picked up the phone when Weaver called. Barron Equity swooped in as a helpful third party to finance the expansion, and the Loom deal had jumped from a hypothetical maybe to signed, sealed, and delivered.
No bureaucracy worked that fast. Not without a helping hand to grease the wheels and a lot of dirty money involved. New York was the latest stop; the Loom had started in Texas and it spread to Wichita Falls to Amarillo to Houston, each increasingly larger city greeting their new digital protector with open arms. People who protested tended to get shouted over or frozen out.
Or worse, Tyler thought, adding his latest page of notes to the backup file and password-protecting the archive. Nell was more down-to-earth about these things; he knew she didn’t believe Arthur Wendt’s death had anything to do with his secret life as an informant, and she wasn’t prepared to blame her Houston contact’s car accident on anything but a muddy patch of road, but Tyler wasn’t so certain.
Better to play it safe.
He drifted by the editor-in-chief’s office, one of the glass-walled enclaves along the far side of the bullpen. Bill’s venetian blinds were down. Never a good sign. The door stood cracked just wide enough for Tyler to hear a voice from inside.
“I know how much you’ve got on your plate,” Bill said. His voice was tinged with the Kentucky drawl that a decade of living in Brooklyn hadn’t managed to sand down. “We’ve all got full plates. But we’re coming up on the five-year anniversary of the Red Hook shooting, and I need a retrospective. I’m not asking you to write a book. One column. Call around, get some quotes, wrap it up in a bow, done. We’ll run it on Friday.”
Silence. Tyler figured Bill was on his office line. He cast a casual glance across the newsroom, seeing who was on the phone, trying to guess which of his coworkers was getting the assignment no one wanted. Then Bill’s voice dropped to a venomous whisper.
“Don’t be so goddamn stupid. You know why I can’t give this to Tyler.” More silence, while Tyler’s stomach coiled into serpentine knots. “Yeah. Well, maybe next time you should think before you talk. Get it done by Thursday morning.”
The receiver clattered into its cradle. Now Tyler just wanted to slip out of the bullpen, to reach the downstairs door and the freedom of the street without anyone cornering him. He held his breath, crossed the crack in the doorway, and—
“Hey. Tyler. Got a sec?”
So much for a quick escape. He poked his head into the office. The back wall of Bill’s cluttered den wore a mosaic of award certificates and framed clippings, a legacy of the paper’s victories. More than a few of Tyler’s and Nell’s pieces were on that wall.
“How ya doin’?” Bill asked, bifocals riding low on the bulb of his nose.
“Heading out,” Tyler said. “Following up a lead on the Weaver Group story.”
“Good, good.” Bill eyed him like a doctor with a bad prognosis to deliver. “You, ah…need to take a couple vacation days soon?”
Tyler had been thinking about that. More like he put a lot of effort and energy into not thinking about it and failed.
“Maybe Friday,” he conceded.
“Why don’t you take Friday and Monday off,” Bill said.
“Really, Friday is fine—”
Bill fluttered his tobacco-stained fingers, waving Tyler’s words away.
“Take Friday and Monday,” he said. “Make it a long weekend.”
* * *
“Welcome to the dark side, mon ami.”
Duke made his office in the back corner of PC Connect, where they rented computers by the hour