“I’m taking over the story,” Colby said. Just like that. As Paul might say, Hold on, Captain Butter-Me-Up.

“Oh, you just decided, ‘Hey, I think I’d like that story,’ and thought you’d come over here and I’d hand it to you?”

Colby offered me a pitying smile. “Shit, you haven’t been told, have you?”

“Told what?”

“Maybe you should talk to your wifey,” Colby said. “After you’ve done that, you can give me your notes.”

The blood was rushing to my head. I wanted to grab Colby by the neck and strangle him, but I also knew that if I got that close to him I might pass out. My stories on the Wickenses, a family of Timothy McVeigh–worshipping crazies whose plan to kill dozens, if not hundreds, of people had blown up in their faces, if you will, had run in the paper over the last couple of days. They had rented a farmhouse on my father’s property, and I’d gotten to know them, in the last week, somewhat more intimately than I could have ever wanted.

“I don’t believe this,” I said, getting out of my chair and heading straight for Sarah’s glass-walled office.

She was on the phone as I strode in and stood on the other side of her desk. “What’s this about Colby taking the Wickens story?”

“Can I call you back?” Sarah said. She hung up the phone. “What?”

“Cheese Dick says he’s getting the Wickens story. Why the hell would he think he was getting the Wickens story?”

“Fuck,” Sarah said. “That fucking asshole.”

“So it’s not true?”

“Noooo,” Sarah said, stretching out the word and shaking her head slowly in exasperation. “I mean, yes. It’s true.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“It wasn’t my decision.”

“Whose decision was it?”

Sarah tipped her head northward, in the direction of Bertrand Magnuson’s office.

“Magnuson pulled me off the Wickens story? I got the Wickens story. We played it up huge. It was my story. I’m part of that story.”

“I think that’s why Magnuson’s pulling you off it. Look, everyone knows you did a great job on it. Fantastic story. Award material. Pulitzer stuff. But Magnuson feels, you know, that you kind of, how do I put this…”

“Lucked into it?” I said.

Sarah screwed up her face. “Maybe.”

“I would hardly call it luck, having a run-in with that bunch.”

“You think I don’t agree? You think I’d call it lucky, what happened to you up there?” She took a breath. “But the managing editor feels that it might be more appropriate that for the follow-up stories, like whether the Wickenses were part of a larger movement, other crimes that they might have been responsible for, that that’s the kind of thing that Dick is better equipped to handle, what with his contacts in law enforcement and all.”

I stared at her. Sarah broke away, pretended to be looking for something on her desk. She was in management mode and couldn’t bring herself to look me in the eye.