Fury by G. M. Ford Read Free Book Online

out a search party. Violet was explaining the concept of room service to Leanne as they walked out the door. “Honey, you can order anything!” she said. “You ever had a surf and turf?”
    Leanne kept her eyes locked on Corso. He waved. She mustered a tight smile she didn’t mean and backed out the door.
    Mrs. V. turned to Hawes. “Call Mr. Robbins at the plant. Have him up tonight’s street run by fifty percent.”
    Hawes sighed. “He’s gonna say it can’t be done.”
    “He always says it can’t be done. Just tell him I said to do it. And tell him I want the first papers in the machines by four-thirty.”
    They watched as Bennett Hawes hurried out the door.

Chapter 5
    Monday, September 17
4:21 P.M. Day 1 of 6
    Corso sat in the red leather chair and watched the rain close over Elliott Bay like a steel curtain. In the distance, the outline of the westbound Bainbridge Island ferry was little more than a half-erased pencil drawing.
    “I don’t need this right now,” Corso said.
    “I know.”
    “My fifteen minutes of fame are over. I’m no longer the Typhoid Mary of the newspaper business. I can walk up the street for a latte without anybody pointing a camera at me. Hell, I can’t even remember the last time anybody threatened to kill me. I like things the way they are. If I’ve got something that pisses me off, I write a column about it. If it really pisses me off, I write a book. For this, people throw money at me. How bad can things be?”
    When she didn’t reply, he got to his feet and walked over to the window. Six stories below, in Myrtle Edwards Park, skeletal trees shivered in the wind. Rain skittered across the black asphalt walkways in sweeping silver lines. Beyond the park, Puget Sound hurled itself upon the black boulders of shore, sending plumes of spray high into the dark sky. Corso tried to remember who it was who said that living in Seattle was like being married to a beautiful woman who was sick all the time. Leo, maybe.
    “You’re going to make me be the one to say it out loud, aren’t you?” he asked after a moment. “Not even going to cut me the slack of saying it first.”
    Natalie Van Der Hoven used class the way Leo used big. As a shield. Corso knew better than to underestimate her. She was a shrewd executive and a practiced negotiator. If you weren’t careful, you found yourself nodding at everything she said, not because you agreed but because any sort of disagreement seemed positively rude.
    She brought a hand to her throat and did her best Scarlett O’Hara. “Whatever do you mean?”
    “That I owe you. That you gave me a job when I was a national leper. After my last employer lost a ten-million-dollar libel judgment on my account. And you take me in and give me a job and what do I do? I screw up again. You damn near lose a newspaper that’s been in your family for a hundred years and guess what? You don’t fire me, you let me keep my job.”
    “I’d like to think our relationship has grown beyond a simple case of mutual obligation,” she said.
    “Don’t start with me,” Corso scoffed. “You know damn well we’re friends, and you know damn well that’s not the point.”
    Corso leaned his forehead against the cool glass. Overhead, a clap of thunder rolled like cannon fire. The tick of rain on the windows rose to a sustained hiss, and then, just as suddenly, abated. Mrs. V. broke the spell.
    “I don’t suppose I have to tell you what a precarious position the Sun finds itself in,” she began. “We’ve reached that unfortunate position on the newspaper food chain where our finances force us to consider our editorial policy.” She took a deep breath. “And allowing finances to dictate news is, as we all know, the first step in a slide toward journalistic hell.” She looked out, over Corso’s head. “A journey, which I say, quite frankly, I have no intention of making. I’ll close the doors first.”
    Something in Corso’s reflected face betrayed him. Mrs.