She sat behind her desk but I stayed standing because I knew this would be quick.

“I just want to say we are really going to miss you around here, Jack.”

I nodded my thanks.

“I am sure Angela will pick up without a blip.”

“She’s very good and she’s hungry, but she doesn’t have the chops. Not yet, at least, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? The newspaper is supposed to be the community’s watchdog and we’re turning it over to the puppies. Think of all the great journalism we’ve seen in our lifetimes. The corruption exposed, the public benefit. Where’s that going to come from now with every paper in the country getting shredded? Our government? No way. TV, the blogs? Forget it. My friend who took the buyout in Florida says corruption will be the new growth industry without the papers watching.”

She paused as if to ponder the sad state of things.

“Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m just depressed. Angela is great. She’ll do good work and in three or four years she’ll own that beat the way you own it now. But the point is, between now and then, how many stories will she miss? And how many of them would have never gotten by you?”

I only shrugged. These were questions that mattered to her but no longer to me. In twelve days I was out.

“Well,” she said after a delayed silence. “I’m sorry. I’ve always enjoyed working with you.”

“Well, I still have some time. Maybe I’ll find something really good to go out on.”

She smiled brightly.

“That would be great!”

“Anything happening today that you know of?”

“Nothing big,” Dorothy said. “I saw on the overnote that the police chief is meeting with black leaders to talk about racially targeted crime again. But we’ve done that to death.”

“I’m going to take Angela around Parker Center and I’ll see if we can come up with something.”

“Good.”

A few minutes later Angela Cook and I refilled coffee cups and took a table in the cafeteria. It was on the first floor in the space where the old presses had turned for so many decades before they started printing the paper offsite. The conversation with Angela was stiff. I had met her briefly six months earlier when she was a new hire and Fowler had trotted her around the cubicles, making introductions. But since then I hadn’t worked on a story with her, had lunch or coffee with her, or seen her at one of the watering holes favored by the older denizens of the newsroom.

“Where’d you come from, Angela?”

“Tampa. I went to the University of Florida.”

“Good school. Journalism?”

“I got my master’s there, yeah.”

“Have you done any cop shop reporting?”

“Before I went back for my master’s I worked two years in St. Pete. I spent a year on cops.”

I drank some coffee and I needed it. My stomach was empty because I hadn’t been able to keep anything down for twenty-four hours.

“St.