“Hey,” he said, slapping her ass, but not too hard, so it was almost a pat. “I’m talking to you here.”
She didn’t know she was going to do it. It just happened. She doesn’t even know how she had the presence of mind to first yank the plug from the wall. But once she’d done that, she reached her fingers into the two slots of the toaster. Her fingers would have been burned worse than they were had the two slices of bread not been there. She jammed her fingers in, almost like it was a rectangular bowling ball, and came around swinging.
Swinging hard.
The toaster caught him just above the right eye, and the connection of metal against bone made a hell of a noise. The move was so unexpected, so out of the blue, he didn’t have time to bring his arms up, but he had them up when she came at him a second time. The toaster bounced off his arm, and Miranda was thrown slightly off balance, staggered up against the counter.
The blood was pouring out of her father’s head and through his fingers as he put his hand up to the wound.
“Jesus!” he shouted, staggering back himself. “Jesus!”
Miranda’s mother came into the room, looked at her husband, at the bloody toaster still in her daughter’s hand, and shouted, “He’s your father! How dare you! This man is your father!”
She ran out of the kitchen. She ran out of the house. She didn’t even have time to pack her things in a paper bag.
7
THREE TIMES ON MY WAY BACK into the city, Trixie tried to phone me on her cell. When I got back to my desk at the paper, the light on my phone was flashing. I hadn’t even checked the message yet when the phone rang. I picked up.
“Zack,” Trixie said, “I’m sorry about what happened with Benson. Really, I’m sorry about that. But forget about that for now. Those guys, those two in your story. They didn’t always sell stun guns, these guys. They—”
I felt Sarah standing behind me. “I gotta go,” I said, and hung up. I turned around. “’Sup?”
She nodded her head toward Magnuson’s office. “He wants to see us,” she said, and she didn’t look happy.
“Both of us?”
“Apparently.”
“What’s it about? Is he going to apologize for dragging me off the Wickens story and giving it to that asshole Colby?”
“I don’t think so,” Sarah said. “I don’t think that ‘sorry’ is part of Magnuson’s vocabulary.”
I got up, made sure my shirt was well tucked in, and followed Sarah to the far corner of the newsroom, where the managing editor’s corner office looked out over the city.
Even though we could see him in there, sitting at his desk, we didn’t walk right in. Sarah told his secretary we had arrived, as if that were not immediately evident, and she buzzed him. Through the door, we watched him watching us as he picked up his phone. “Send them in,” we heard him say into the phone.
His secretary said, “He’ll see you now.”
We went in. I had a bad feeling.
“Ah, the Walkers,” he said, not getting up to greet us. That seemed like a bad sign to me. “Take a seat,” he said. I would have felt better had he said, “Please, be seated.”
We sat down. Magnuson said, “I didn’t bring you in here because you happen to be married to one another. I brought both of you in because I wanted to speak with you, Mr. Walker, and seeing as how Sarah is your editor, this will impact her as well.” He stared at both of us for a while, but mostly at me.
“I have an old friend,” he said suddenly, “name of Blair Wentworth. We used to work together, as reporters, long ago. Used to get drunk together on a regular basis too. Once, when he’d had a little bit too much one night in the bar, we got into a heated debate about whether Jimmy Carter really had a peanut farm, or whether it was just a load of bullshit, so we walked out, got in a cab, and asked to be taken to Plains, Georgia. Well, that was several hundred, if not thousands, of miles away, and the cabby had some reservations, but we said not to worry, we were newspapermen, and we had expense accounts. Instead of driving us to Georgia, he drove us back to our paper and dropped us off at the front door before we made complete asses of ourselves. If I could find that cabby today, I’d give him a job here. Doing what, I don’t know, but he clearly had more sense than some of the people who work for me here now.”
I blinked.
“Anyway, Blair decided to go off in another direction. He was a pretty business-minded individual, got into community newspapers, worked his way up to publisher of one of them. The Suburban, out in Oakwood. You might have heard of it.”
Oh God.
“We keep in touch, Blair and I, so when something comes across his desk that troubles him, he gives me a call. And I just now got off the phone with him. It was a very interesting call, the most amazing thing. Do you have any idea, Mr. Walker, what it might have been about?”
Sarah turned to look at me.
“Yes,” I said as evenly as I could. “I have a pretty good idea.”
“What is it, Zack?” Sarah asked.