Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

It was all too tempting. He had to get out of the bar. He never noticed how much business was conducted in bars until he had a reason to avoid them entirely. Don tapped his pencil, then pulled a couple of cocktail napkins from the holder and started doing some figuring on them. Richard watched as he added a trio of six-figure numbers.

“You’ve got that look,” Don said, “the one that says you want to call time-out.”

“That’s not it,” Richard said.

“Well, then I’d say that you aren’t as smart as Toni said you were. You should call time-out and take a step back and figure out your next move. Heed the advice of learned counsel. Isn’t there someone you’d like to talk with before you sign on the dotted line?”

“There is. Was. I’m not sure,” Richard said. He looked pained by the admission. “Tell me why this has to happen today.”

Don knew he meant a woman. He debated whether or not he should put the cap on his pen, slide the sheaf of papers back into his file folder, start the pantomime of packing up. “The whole point of this is that we want to put you in the chair next to the guy you are replacing. Make you look like the anointed one. Jack Shea is going to do everything short of kissing you on the cheek and telling Luzerne County that you are the goddamn heir apparent. His tumors are so advanced that the doctors can’t believe he can read the news, much less walk. You’re going to come in there, and Jack’s going to tell everyone that you’re the next man up. So no, technically, it doesn’t have to happen today. But if it doesn’t, and he dies, then it might not happen at all.”

Richard said, “I thought this wasn’t a high-pressure sell.”

Don gathered up his overcoat and briefcase. He put his case on the bar and extracted a pair of discs and handed them to Richard. “This is your predecessor. The living legend. Eight hours of his greatest hits over thirty-two years on the air. The last eighteen as the anchor of Eyewitness News at Six and Eleven. ” And Don wouldn’t realize until a week later that he’d made a mistake in asking Richard, and that he secretly wished Richard would be consumed with a sudden awareness of his limitations and say no. He could just hand the discs back to Don and shake his head and say, You have the wrong man .

“Eight hours?” Richard said, putting the discs into his own briefcase.

“Think about that. Ninety minutes of broadcast, five days a week, forty-eight weeks a year. And then, because you’re dying, an intern boils it down to eight hours of highlights, and the last two duties we’re going to ask you to perform are this: we’d like you to train your replacement, and we’d like you to document your own illness. From the moment the doctor comes in and worries about that spot on the X-ray until the day it takes us thirty-seven takes for him to utter, Tonight is my final broadcast. ” Don took out forty dollars and half-threw it to the bartender.

Richard said, “What do I do with those discs?”

Don finished his club soda and used the cocktail napkin to wipe his mouth, then left it in a ball on the bar top. “We’d like you to edit those eight hours of tape into a two-minute-and-twenty-second highlight package that you’ll write and narrate, and we’ll broadcast it the day he dies.”

There wasn’t much more to explain that wasn’t in the folder. The salary was guaranteed and even for this small market bordered on astronomical, and Richard would be just as much of a fool to say yes as he would be to say no. As Don stepped behind him to make his exit, Richard picked up the folder and swiveled around on his bar stool.

“Well, what do you say?” Don asked. Richard opened the folder and shook his head. The salary was there on the first page. He added $25,000 to it, mumbling something about moving expenses.

Don took the pen, initialed the change, and said, “I take it that’s a yes?”

Don, or more likely someone who worked for him, had thoughtfully affixed little yellow stickers that said SIGN HERE in each of the places where Richard’s signature was legally required. The last time he’d seen little reminders like that, he was signing the sheaf of documents that dissolved his law partnership, transferred the deed to his house, enforced a qualified domestic-relations order dividing his meager retirement savings in half, paying his wife back for suits and ties and prescription medications and every damn thing she could think of, and he’d never had the pleasure of telling her that it was worth every penny to get the fuck out. He smiled and signed. As he was about to hand the folder over, he turned it around so Don could watch him scribble a quick note on its cover, tiny block printing that said WHAT THE FUCK.

IN HER most recent personnel evaluation, the receptionist working the front desk of the Dallas bureau of FBN had been praised as an efficient gatekeeper and traffic cop. Important skills, because the news brought out weirdness in flocks of threes and fours: whistleblowers and their more generic tattling counterparts, self-styled vigilantes with fourteen hours of camcorder footage they thought might be the key to solving the lasting riddles of the Kennedy assassination. Sitting at that desk thirty-seven and a half hours a week, you learned to recognize all the great and dangerous things a city assembled, even a city with as benign and polished a facade as Dallas, which at times seemed to Sally Doerfler to be made entirely out of mirrored glass.

Then came the news alert, a red banner across her computer monitor, followed within thirty seconds by a chorus of ringing phones. Sally knew enough to say, “FBN Dallas Operations, please hold,” and never wait for a reply. “You’ve got thirty seconds, go,” she said to each caller that filled the eight blinking lines. She took notes, gathered the relevant intelligence—plane down at DFW; the conspiracy theorist on line two said, “Ground-to-air missile, Panorama Airlines Flight 503”—and, because it was a holiday, didn’t wait for the assignment editor or the bureau chief, just called it out to the correspondent herself.

Sally didn’t have time to mess with frivolous things. She’d worked here seventeen years and knew how to take initiative, knew what the pressures of the business and the twenty-four-hour news cycle meant. Sally sent the crew to the airport, telling them what the bureau chief would have said, because it was a motto around these parts, and she knew it—they all did—without his having to say it: Get it first and get it right.

In just ten minutes, the calls accounted for two pages in her handwritten call log, a total of seventy-four tips, neatly categorized into convenient categories: false starts, pranksters, conspiracy theorists, and, on maybe one call, valid information. She had passed along to the reporter two separate reports of a man with a bazooka at the airport (later this man would be identified as a sound technician for a competing network carrying a boom microphone and a tripod) and was now on the phone with someone from one of the hospitals who said they’d activated their trauma response teams at Baylor and Methodist and Texas Children’s and Parkland, but someone from the airline or the NTSB (the nurse wasn’t sure) had already told them to stand down. That was as good as confirmation: no survivors.

She was still on the phone, taking tips and callback numbers, when the monitor cut to the reporter doing a stand-up from the airfield, the stopped airport traffic visible over her shoulder, the screen filling with a column of noirish smoke and the now-useless emergency personnel.

Then this teenager emerged through the front door and walked up to her desk. He looked like a good kid, like he was waiting for permission to speak. He had the long, hungry look Sally had been taught to recognize as ambition. He was followed by a girl, and to Sally, they registered immediately as a couple. He opened up the playback window on his video camera, turned it to face her, and hit Play.