Surely the paper was well on its way to winning a Pulitzer for a series that made a difference in society, one that changed history.
Why the hell did this wait to happen when Packer was out of the newsroom? He’d been there thirty-two years. The moment he decided to put life in perspective, ward off that heart attack perched outside the window of his existence, Andy Brazil showed up.
Now it was run-through-the-yard time to get Dufus’s bowels wound up that they might unleash what, in Packer’s mind, should have been a humiliation to any creature, except maybe a small domestic cat. Dufus would not chase Packer, or come, and this was not new. The editor sat on the back porch steps while his wife’s dog chewed mulch until it was time to drop his niggling gifts. Packer sighed and got up. He walked back into the air-conditioned house, Dufus on his heels.
“There’s my good little boy,” Mildred cooed as the dog hopped and licked until she picked him up and rocked him in loving arms.
“Don’t mention it,” Packer said, falling into his recliner chair, flicking on television.
He was still sitting there hours later, eating chicken nuggets, and dipping them in Roger’s barbecue sauce. He loudly dug into a big bag of chips, swiping them in sauce, too. After several Coronas with lime, he had forgotten about the window and the heart attack perched beyond it. Mildred was watching Home for the Holidays, again, because she thought it was their life. Go figure. In the first place, Packer did not play the organ and she did not wear a wig or smoke, and they did not live in a small town. Their daughter had never gotten fired, at least not from an art gallery. That was one place she had never worked, probably because she was color blind. Nor was their son gay that Packer knew of or cared to know of, and any intimations to the contrary by his wife went into the Bermuda Triangle of their marital news hole. The editor didn’t listen and the story didn’t run. The End.
Packer pointed the remote control with authority. The volume went up, the ubiquitous Webb staring at the camera in a way that Packer knew meant trouble.
“Shit,” Packer said, hitting a lever on his chair, cranking himself up.
“In a rare, if not shocking, moment of candor today,” Webb said with his sincere expression, “Mayor Charles Search said that because of the Black Widow serial killings, hotel and restaurant business has dropped more than twenty percent, and he himself would not feel safe driving downtown at night. Mayor Search implored Charlotte’s citizens to help police catch a killer who has ruthlessly murdered five…”
Packer was already dialing the phone, bag of potato chips falling out of his lap, scattering over the rug.
‘. an individual the FBI has profiled as a sexual psychopath, a serial killer who will not stop. ” Webb went on.
“Are you listening to this?” Packer exclaimed when Panesa picked up his phone.
“I’m taping it,” he said in a homicidal tone Packer rarely heard.
“This has got to stop.”
Brazil never watched television because his mother monopolized the one at home, and he did not frequent Charlotte’s many sports bars, where there were big screens in every corner. He knew nothing about what had been on the eleven o’clock news this Thursday night, and no one paged him or bothered to find him. All was peaceful as he ran on the Davidson track in complete darkness, close to midnight, no sound but the rhythm of his breathing and falling feet. As pleased as he was about his amazing nonstop journalistic home runs, he could not say that he was happy.
Other people were getting a lot of the same stuff he was. Webb, for example, and no matter how informative or compassionate the story, the bottom line was the scoop. Brazil, of late, was scooping no one, if the truth be told. It just seemed he was because what he wrote routinely ended up on the front page and changed public opinion and seemed to rattle a lot of cages. Brazil would have been satisfied to spend the rest of his days writing pieces that did just this and nothing else. Prizes didn’t matter much, really. But he was realistic.