“That all seems kind of amazing,” said Brian Sandler. “I know the place you’re speaking of, that’s Mrs. Gorkin’s place, she runs it with her girls. Any time I’ve been in there, it’s always seemed pretty shipshape to me.”

I thought about the overflowing trash cans, the general appearance of the joint. Even before finding out there might be an actual health problem, the place looked a bit dodgy. If Paul hadn’t been working there, I doubt I’d have gone in. And now there was this other stuff, this business of dropping off packages, other people picking them up.

“Seriously?” I said.

“I’m looking at their file here, and they have a passing grade, Mr. Walker. I’ve been in there personally. Nice people.”

“Mrs. Gorkin?”

“You mentioned your son works there?”

“Well, not anymore. Not since yesterday.”

“Maybe you need to look into that. Getting fired, he might have had an ax to grind, you know?”

“No no, you see, that happened after the other thing. Look, we saved some food from there, so that you could test it. We put it in our fridge as soon as we got back home and—”

“I tell you what. I’m heading out this morning, and I’ll drop in, see how things are at Burger Crisp and I’ll get back to you.”

“Fine,” I said, and gave him my number. “Could you call me this afternoon and let me know what you find out?”

“I’ll get back to you,” Sandler said, in what I thought was a pretty noncommittal way, and hung up.

That’s when I realized Frieda was standing behind me.

“How’s it going?” she asked. “With the feature?”

I sighed. “It’s coming along. Look, I’ve had a few things going on I just needed to deal with, but don’t worry, you’ll get your story.”

“Because the thing is,” Frieda said, almost wincing, like it was hurting her to tell me this, “they want, well, I think Mr. Magnuson wants me to do a performance review on you. To see how you’re doing here.”

“A performance review. Frieda, it’s my second day on the job. How on earth can you be expected to assess my work for a performance review? I haven’t turned in a single story to you yet.”

“Well, that’s certainly true. But if Mr. Magnuson wants me to do it, I’m not going to tell him no. But I don’t want you to feel under any pressure. This would be a chance not only for me to tell you how you’re doing, but a chance to tell me how you feel things are going, whether you have any issues you want to raise, any goals, that kind of thing.”

“My issue would be that this paper is totally fucking me over at the moment, Frieda,” I said. She blinked. I continued, “I’ve gotten some great stories for this paper, but Magnuson feels that because they sort of fell into my lap, or more accurately, because I stumbled into some deep shit a couple of times, I don’t really deserve any credit. And then some dipshit reporter from a two-bit paper in the burbs figures he can give his career a shot by sabotaging mine—may he get trapped in a Wal-Mart cave-in, the son of a bitch—and now I’m sent to the exclamation point section, working with you, no offense, because this is the first newspaper department I’ve worked in where you get cookies in the afternoon, but this is not really where I want to be, so when you do your performance review, in the part where it talks about attitude, you could put down that mine could be categorized as,” and I thought a moment, “miffed.” I smiled. “Yes, fucking miffed.”