Never Look Away by Linwood Barclay Read Free Book Online

better than to clamber up the metal steps. The pressmen could be a bit sensitive about that sort of thing. They weren't as hard-line as they used to be, but the men--and handful of women--who ran and maintained the presses were staunch unionists. If someone from anywhere else in the paper got up on the boards without their permission--especially management--it suddenly got a lot easier to carry on a conversation. The presses would stop dead. And they wouldn't start running again until the trespassers left.
    But the pressmen, while still a force to be reckoned with, had softened with the times. They knew newspapers were in a tough period from which they might never recover. And the people who worked in this room found it difficult to dislike Madeline Plimpton. She'd always been able to connect with the average working guy, and knew the names of everyone who worked in here.
    Madeline was in her publisher's outfit: a navy knee-length skirt and matching jacket that was not only impervious to printer's ink, but set off her silver-blonde hair. She was a curiosity in some ways. Designer duds, but down here on the boards, I wondered if, in her heart, she wouldn't have been more comfortable in the tight jeans she'd worn as a reporter. She'd look just as good in them today as she did then. I'd only seen Madeline age in the time since her husband had died, and even after that she'd managed to keep any new lines in her face to a minimum.
    I managed to catch her eye when she glanced down.
    "David," she said. It was normally deafening in here, but the presses weren't currently in operation, so I could hear her.
    "Madeline," I said. Considering that we'd come through the newsroom together, years earlier, it had never occurred to me to call her by anything other than her first name. "You got a minute?"
    She nodded, said something to the pressman, and descended the metal staircase. She knew better than to ask me to join her up there. The boards were not a place to hang out.
    Once she was on the floor, I said, "This Reeves story is solid."
    "I'm sorry?" she said.
    "Please," I said. "I get what's going on. We like this new prison. We don't want to make waves. We act real nice and play down local opposition to this thing and we get to sell them the land they need to build."
    Something flickered in Madeline's eyes. Maybe she'd figure out Brian had told me. Fuck him.
    "But this will end up biting us in the ass later, Madeline. Readers, they may not get it right away, but over time, they'll start figuring out that we don't care about news anymore, that we're just a press release delivery system, something that keeps the Target flyer from getting wet, a place where the mayor can see a picture of himself handing out a check to the Boy Scouts. We'll still carry car crashes and three-alarm fires and we'll do the annual pieces on the most popular Halloween costumes and what New Year's resolutions prominent locals are making, but we won't be a fucking newspaper. What's the point in doing all this if we don't care what we are anymore?"
    Madeline looked me in the eye and managed a rueful smile. "How are things, David? How's Jan?"
    She had that way about her. You could blow your stack at her and she'd come back with a question about the weather.
    "Madeline, just let us do our jobs," I said.
    The smile faded. "What's happened to you, David?" she asked.
    "I think a better question would be, what's happened to you?" I said. "Remember the time you and I were covering that hostage taking, the one where the guy was holding his wife and kid, said he was going to kill them if the police didn't back off?"
    She didn't say anything, but I knew she remembered.
    "And we got in between the police and the house, and we saw everything that went down, the cops storming the place, beating the shit out of that guy, even after they'd found out he didn't have a gun. Just about killed him. And the story we put together after, laying it all out just like it happened, even though