Deadline

The desk belonged to Hendricks, but the janitor owned it now. He was face down on the green blotter, one arm stretched toward the telephone like he’d been trying to call the one person in this city who gave a damn, only to find the line was busy.

Hendricks didn’t care about the corpse; he cared about the real estate. He’d already cleared his workspace, dragging his telephone, black grease pencil, and the night drop over to the empty desk beside mine—a battered oak number belonging to a rewrite man currently drying out in a sanitarium in Ojai.

“That guy dead?” I asked. My voice sounded small in the high-ceilinged room.

“Three hours,” Hendricks said. He was propped against the edge of his temporary perch, one wingtip shoe dangling off the side, completely unbothered by the fact that three feet away, a dead man was cooling on his old blotter. He didn’t look up from sorting pink carbon copies that smelled like a Monday morning hangover—stale beer, cigarette ash, and regret. He was a man with a face like an unmade bed and a heart to match.

It was my first day on the payroll. Twenty-two years old, carrying a journalism degree that had cost forty thousand dollars I’d have to borrow from a ghost to pay back. The only beat I could land in this town was writing up local bowling league scores for the Tuesday edition. I’d been awake since five, steering my brother’s dying Civic through the gray dawn while the check-engine light blinked at me like an evil eye. The gas station coffee I’d swallowed tasted like burnt dirt and battery acid.

“You found him?”

“Yeah. Called it in.” Hendricks pulled a fresh batch of handwritten sheets from the night drop box and slid them across the gap between our desks. “These are yours. Bay Lanes, Colonial Bowling, the Thursday Night Women’s League. You’ve got ninety minutes to turn them into copy. Get to work.”

On the floor, the janitor’s industrial buffer lay on its side like a dead hound, the black cord stretched tight across the linoleum. His work boots were worn flat along the outside edges—the kind of cheap cardboard leather you buy when your feet hurt but your wallet hurts worse.

“Shouldn’t we—I don’t know—wait with him or something?” I asked.

“Paramedics are on their way,” Hendricks said, his pencil scratching across paper. “Nothing we can do. His ticker just stopped. Happens in this town. Usually when you’re behind on rent.”

Down on the street, a siren started up. A low, lonely wail climbing the buildings before dying somewhere in the fog.

I looked at the sheets in my hand. Someone named Barb had bowled a 203. She’d scrawled Personal Best! in the margin with three exclamation points that looked like little daggers. The paper was still damp where she’d spilled her highball.

“You got a deadline, kid,” Hendricks muttered.

The paramedics came through the loading dock. Two guys in wrinkled whites who looked like they’d seen too many rooms like this one. They didn’t hurry. Speed is for the living, and the janitor was past caring about the clock. One of them checked his wrist for a pulse he knew wasn’t there—just a bit of theater for the paperwork—while the other went back for the wicker basket.

I sat at my own desk, a gray metal monstrosity decorated with the ghost-rings of a thousand forgotten coffee cups, and rolled a sheet of copy paper into the Underwood. The keys hit the carriage with the sound of a small machine gun.

Bay Lanes Monday Night Mixed League: Team standings…

They wheeled him past me a minute later. The sheet was a little too short, leaving his left boot exposed to the cold neon light.

Hendricks was already on his relocated phone with the composing room, screaming at some printer about column inches and font sizes.

I kept typing. In the newspaper business, a man dying at your desk is just another thing you write around.