Greg Glenn's office was at the back of the newsroom. one wall was glass, enabling him to look out across the rows of POds where the reporters worked and through the windows along the west wall to the mountain line when it wasn't hidden by smog.

Glenn was a good editor who prized a good read more than anything else about a story. That's what I liked about him. In this business editors are of two schools. Some like facts and cram them into a story until it is so overburdened that practically no one will read it to the end. some like words and never let the facts get in the way.

Glenn liked me because I could write and he pretty much let me choose what I wrote About. He never hustled me for copy and never badly dinged up what I turned in. I had long realized that should he ever leave the paper or be demoted or promoted out of the newsroom, all of this most likely would change. City editors made their own nests. If he were gone, I'd probably find myself back on. the daily cop beat, writing briefs off the police log. Doing little murders. I sat down in the cushioned seat in front of his desk as he finished up a phone call. Glenn was about five years older than me. When I'd first started at the RocAy ten years earlier, he was one of the hot shot writers like I was now. But eventually he made the move into management. Now he wore a suit every day, had one of those little statues on his desk of a Bronco football player with a bobbing head, spent more time on the phone than on any other activity in his life and always paid careful attention to the political winds blowing out of the corporate home office in Cincinnati. He was a forty-year-old guy with a paunch, a wife, two kids and a good salary that wasn't good enough to buy a house in the neighborhood his wife wanted to live in. He told me all of this once over a beer at the Wynkoop, the only night I'd seen him out in the past four years.

Tacked across one wall of Glenn's office were the last seven days of front pages. Each day, the first thing he did was take the seven-day-old edition down and tack up the latest front page. I guess he did this to keep track of the news and the continuity of our coverage. Or maybe, because he never got bylines as a writer anymore, putting the pages up was a way of reminding himself that he was in charge. Glenn hung up and looked up at me.

"Thanks for coming in," he said. "I just wanted to tell you again that I'm sorry about your brother. And if you feel like you want some more time, it's no problem. We'll work something out."

"Thanks. But I'm back."