Free Fury by G. M. Ford Page B

decision is yours, Mr. Hawes. But I think you would have to agree that if indeed Mr. Corso has been correct all along and something is rotten here, our chances of getting to the bottom of the matter in the meager time left to us are considerably better with Mr. Corso’s help than without.”
    She was slick. Made it easy for him. He made a resigned face and forced a strangled “Okay” from between his lips.

Chapter 8
    Monday, September 17
7:40 P.M. Day 1 of 6
    “No eat?” the waitress asked.
    “Just coffee,” Corso said. He wrinkled an eyebrow at Meg Dougherty.
    “Two,” she added.
    The waitress scowled at the pair, stuffed the order pad into her apron, and walked away muttering beneath her breath.
    The dim overhead light cast a feeble yellow circle over the center of the table, leaving the rest of the booth bathed in shadows. She thought Corso might have smiled.
    “Thanks for bailing me out upstairs,” he said.
    She waved the notion away. “Just saving my own gig, Corso. I don’t do lifeguard work. Believe me, I need the money.”
    The fall of his hair was silhouetted by the windows. Of his face, only the thick black eyebrows were visible in the gloom.
    “You were going to push it, weren’t you?” she asked.
    “I’ve got a bad temper,” he said. “Gets me in trouble sometimes.”
    “He was going to fire your ass.”
    “No,” Corso said. “He can’t fire me. He wanted me to quit.”
    “What’s the difference?”
    “It’s a long story.”
    “I’ve got time.”
    “Hawes and I have quite a history,” Corso explained. “You walked in on the culmination of something that’s been going on for years. It all just sort of came to a head today.”
    Outside, daylight was losing ground to the elements. Cars on Elliott Avenue had their headlights on at three-fifteen in the afternoon. A ground fog, brown with exhaust fumes, stretched upward, reaching to join the thick gray clouds hovering above.
    “You asked for me by name?”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “Mr. Hawes wouldn’t have called me if you hadn’t.”
    “I saw those shots of the bus accident,” Corso said. “Good stuff.” The waitress reappeared. Slid two steaming white mugs across the table.
    “You sure? No eat?”
    Corso said they were sure, sending her muttering back into the kitchen, where she began practicing for the national pot-banging finals.
    “What do you do other than string for the Sun ?”
    “Anything I can,” she answered. “Do quite a bit of work for the Post Intelligencer and the Times . The alternative rags, when they’ve got money to spend. I’m working on a photo essay of the club scene for the local PBS affiliate. In my spare time, I’m trying to get somebody interested in helping me put together a new show.”
    “You said you worked for Barton and Browne?”
    “I started out taking accident pictures. Cracks in sidewalks. Faulty steps. That kind of thing. After a while, they started letting me do witness interviews and victim depositions. Right before I left, I was doing background checks on prospective clients.”
    He had an interesting way of mirroring her actions. Every time she leaned forward into the light, he receded farther into the shadows. If she sat back, he moved forward, as if, for some reason, he needed to maintain a specific distance between them.
    “What about you?”
    “What about me?” he asked.
    “What’s all this big mystery thing surrounding you?”
    “There’s no mystery thing,” he said.
    “Come on,” she countered. “I asked around the newsroom. You’re some kind of famous true-crime writer these days. They say you just about killed a reporter who snuck up on you one time. Put him in the hospital for months.”
    “He was stealing from me,” Corso said.
    “Stealing what?”
    “My privacy.”
    She searched his eyes for irony. Didn’t find it. “They say you haven’t been in the building for years. Nobody knows anything about you.” She hesitated for a moment. Corso