Free The Philadelphia Quarry by Howard Owen Page A

summations. His face is like a fist, hard and ready.
    “Know this. Richard Slade did not kill that woman, no matter how much some people want it to be so.”
    I nod. He dials The Look back a notch.
    “Please give my regards to Kate,” he says, and I remind him that he’s likely to see her before I do.
    The most mellifluous laugh in Richmond follows me out into the street.
    I have time for a Camel between Marcus Green’s office and the paper. I’m a block away when my cellphone rings.
    “Willie,” Sarah Goodnight says, “they’re at it again.”
    My ID badge still works, although the guard at the front desk looks a little more alert, or at least awake, than usual.
    As soon as I come out of the elevator, the tension hits me like a blast of sewer air. Rumors have been perching on our computer terminals like buzzards for weeks. Advertising is down. Circulation is down. Expenses aren’t down far enough. Today, it appears, is the day.
    There’s a clot of people over by the features department, where some decidedly uncomfortable-looking human resources boy is watching Beth Reynolds clean out her desk. Jesus Christ, Beth Reynolds has been here longer than I have, and she does what nobody else in the newsroom wants to do. She deals with the brides and—God help her—the brides’ mothers. When they come parading in, determined that absolutely nothing is going to screw up the social event of their lives, that they are not going to brook any sass from some newspaper flunky, Beth is on the receiving end, defusing them and at the same time preserving whatever dignity our poor tree-killing anachronism clings to. When we get the brides’ photos and IDs somehow mixed up, Beth is the one who catches the mistake and averts disaster. Three years ago, we managed to switch photos of a truck driver who’d just saved a woman’s life in a car fire with that of a very self-important bride. Before she was done, Beth had appeased not only the trucker but both the bride and her mother. If we sent Beth Reynolds to Washington, she could make the Republicans lie down with the Democrats.
    And now, apparently, she’s gone. Another one bites the dust.
    “There’s six that we know of,” Sally Velez says before she goes over to offer condolences to a fifty-seven-year-old woman who’s about to not have health insurance.
    A photographer, a page designer, a copy editor, a sportswriter, Beth Reynolds and an assistant city editor. Chip, chip, chip.
    “By the way,” Sally adds, “Wheelie wants to see you. He and Grubby.”
    She sees me blanch.
    “Don’t worry,” she says. “They’re not going to fire your ass. Not now, anyhow.”
    “How do you know?” I figure I must be near the top of the managing editor’s and publisher’s shit lists.
    “All the ones that have been axed so far, they got calls from upstairs this morning.”
    I check my voice mail back at the apartment, then start breathing again. This place makes me crazy, but what else am I going to do? Media relations?
    I walk past Enos Jackson, who looks a little pale. He’s already been brought back from the dead once, thanks to a little secret agreement between me and Grubby, and he doesn’t know that he is—unless Grubby himself gets hauled away—more or less golden.
    “You’re next,” I tell him. He doesn’t seem to think it’s funny.
    Up on the fourth floor, Sandy McCool looks a little flustered, at least compared with her usual unflappable self. When Pete Bocelli in sports did a face-down in the lunchroom two years ago, it was Sandy who had the defibrillator out and working its magic in about thirty seconds while everybody else was crapping their pants. She saved his fat-ass life, then went back and finished her sandwich.
    But Sandy’s the one, I know, who always has to make The Call, the one who then has to see a lifetime of friends and acquaintances come trudging up and then trudging out, escorted by HR, some of them in tears, some of them glaring at her as if