Deadline (2 page)

“About five minutes after your article appeared, I should think,” Watterson said. “That’s a good day’s work, there, Colin. You got a guy fired, did an indictable amount of damage to a German automobile, ended a long-term service contract and contributed directly to the termination of an entire course of study.”

“Aw, buck up, Hal. I’m sure you’ll land on your feet. You could sing in the Vienna Boys Choir. There are loads of job openings out there for castratos.”

“And the paper’s being pulled,” Watterson continued. “I called CJ first thing this morning. Fortunately, most of them were still sitting on the skid. The rest of them are coming back as we speak. The whole print run. Every last one. Website too. We’ll have it back up online by noon with a new front page.”

Colin whistled. “Wow, man. You really can’t spell fourth estate without invertebrate. I’ve got an idea. How about instead of merging the department with broadcasting, we just turn the whole thing into a PR elective?”

“And after this, I think we can both agree that the editorship really isn’t a good fit for your particular skills.”

“That’s cute, chief. Want my badge and gun, too?”

“I think it’s probably a good idea that we take you off the admin beat, especially since Devries is threatening to have you arrested if you come within 25 yards of the front door of the building. Varsity sports is a good place to lay low for a while.”

“Shit, yeah. Who doesn’t want to drive to Timmins in the middle of the winter to watch twelve guys who failed first year communications three times run up and down a basketball court for two hours? And who doesn’t give a better quote than an athlete? Oh, wait. Never mind. I just answered my own question.”

“Contrary to what you might think, Colin, I don’t find any of this in the least bit enjoyable.”

“Ahh, I bet you say that to all your blind dates.”

Watterson’s face reddened. “Excuse me?”

Colin looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Remind me what you did before this that brought you to this sorry, testicle-free state of affairs. Oh yes. You flunked out of teacher’s college and then spent two years working as a traffic reporter for a midmarket Toronto talk radio station that fired you for having sex in the green room with a 17-year-old intern. You married said intern, left the circumstances of your dismissal off your resume and got another job in the public relations department of a chemical company, where you spent eight uneventful years trying to hide the fact that they undercut their competition by farming out the most dangerous work to Malaysian 10-year-olds. After that, you spent six months working for a local hockey coach, whose campaign for the local federal Conservative nomination was moving along pretty well until 14 former players came forward to say he’d offered them more than just skating tips in the shower. You knew about that, too, but you didn’t cut and run until the story broke in the papers. One of the early donors to that campaign was none other than our esteemed college president, who offered you this job when the previous department head dropped dead of a heart attack scraping the ice off his car windows. No doubt he was impressed with your way with words and your slavish willingness to do whatever you were told.”

Hal tried to interrupt, but Colin was on a roll.

“And after that, then what? Let’s see. The intern finds out you contracted chlamydia on a trip to Las Vegas and divorces you, taking the house, the car and your bizarre but prized collection of meerschaum pipes, which she stacks in a small pile in the backyard and attempts to set fire to, not knowing that the pipes themselves are practically inflammable. Sorry, non-flammable. Now you live in a small apartment in the north end of town where you pay the rent on time and sometimes steal the mail from the old man in 3C, who often forgets to lock his box and must be one of the last people left in the western world with a subscription to Playboy.”

Watterson was dumbstruck. “Colin…” he sputtered. “What the…? Did you hack into my computer or something?”

Colin shook his head. “Of course not. Not being an actual reporter, I don’t expect you to have any idea what’s involved in investigative reporting.”

Watterson sat back from his desk. “I don’t get it. What is this? Some sort of blackmail?”

“Not at all,” Colin said. “You have absolutely nothing that I want.”

“Then what is this?” Watterson demanded.

“I’m simply trying to answer a hypothetical question,” Colin said. “The logical thing to ask would be: How does somebody like you end up with the job that you have? This is considering you have no training, no experience, no instincts and no visible aptitude for the job.”

“So?”

“So I just answered the question. You got the job because you’re willing to do whatever Peter Devries tells you to do. Your whole purpose in life is to be a tiny little whirring cog in the belching black machine that makes life easier and, most importantly, more profitable for rich assholes like our esteemed president. Of course, now that the job will shortly no longer exist, he’s going to tell you
good job now fuck off
, which I’m sure you’ll do just as dutifully as everything else.”

Watterson removed his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. He had switched to a boxier, supposedly more stylish set of frames after his divorce, but they were heavier than his old ones and tended to keep riding down his nose. They also seemed to give him more tension headaches. At least, that was one possible explanation for the increase in their frequency. He had been meaning to get the glasses adjusted for months, but he couldn’t find the damn receipt and wasn’t sure if they’d do the adjustment without it.

“Look, Colin. We only have to live with each other for another couple of months. In January, you’ll be out of here to do your internship,
if
you can find one. Which is
if
you pass final term. Which is a big ‘if’ at the moment.”

Colin smiled. “And ten seconds ago,
I
was the one being accused of blackmail. How the pendulum does swing.”

Watterson put his glasses back on and pulled himself forward, grabbing the mouse to open up his email. “Whatever. Believe it or not, I do actually have other work-related things to do this morning. Seth’s editor as of today. Try to keep your nose out of trouble and maybe we won’t have to do this again before the new year.”

“Once again, you fail to grasp that the whole point of being a reporter is getting one’s nose
into
trouble, but we’ve been over that already. In any event, I can see that you’re subtly attempting to signal that you’d like me to leave, which I am more than happy to do.” Colin got to his feet. “I’ll leave you to your fat chicks and zucchini.”

Watterson looked up sharply and was about to say something, but Colin was already out the door.

A
riel Linson was late.

Ariel was a first-year Early Childhood Education student. She had signed up for the program at Westhill as a safety in the event she didn’t get into law school. Even as her fallback, Westhill was third on the list of preferred schools. Although she didn’t like to admit it, she blamed her current situation on her mother, who had gotten in a car accident when Ariel was in her last year of university. Ariel had been forced to move home since her mom couldn’t get around by herself and there was no one else available to help out. She had transferred as many credits as she could and taken correspondence courses to make up the shortfall, but her mind was elsewhere and her grades had been only so-so. She figured if she could get her ECE, it might boost her chances of getting accepted to teacher’s college, which she had decided she liked more than law school anyway. Westhill had been the only letter that came in with a big red “
Congratulations!
” on the front, so here she was.

The ECE centre was located just north of the admin building. It was a small, circular building with a drop-off area at the front and a small, fenced play area in the rear that backed onto the woods. For ten months of the year it functioned as an actual daycare, and many of the college staff actually had their kids enrolled there. Because of the security concerns (one divorced father had picked up his child for a supposed dental appointment and lit out for Mexico), the doors were locked right after drop-off and did not open again until outdoor playtime started at 10 a.m. Getting in after the doors were locked was a huge pain in the ass. Ariel knew that her instructor would take her into the quiet room in the back to bawl her out where the kids couldn’t hear.

She’d forgotten to charge her phone the previous night, so the alarm hadn’t gone off to wake her up in time. Once she got to school, the admin lot had been full, so she had been forced to park in the one on the other side of the arts building and take the forest path, which she hated because it was so dark and isolating. It was, in almost every measurable respect, shaping up to be a class-A shitty day.

She remembered that she would need her ID to get in and pulled her backpack off her shoulder to get it. As soon as she opened the flap, the wind grabbed her notes from the previous day and scattered them into the trees.

“You have got to be
fucking
kidding me,” she muttered as she watched the pages drift into the bushes. She knew she wouldn’t be able to curse when she got to class (anyone who did that in front of the kids was automatically sent home for the day), so she figured that she might as well get it out of her system now. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!”

With a sigh, she closed her pack and stepped wearily into the woods to retrieve the pieces of paper. Fortunately, most of them didn’t appear to have gone very far. The undergrowth was pretty thick and the wind kind of died off a bit when she stepped off the path. She started grabbing up the pages, clamping them together in her free hand even though some of them were damp.

“I don’t
fucking
believe this,” she hissed. “Of all the—”

She had been reaching down to grab a list of class management tips when she stopped. A woman was lying on the ground staring up at her with wide open eyes. Or rather, the woman’s head was lying there. The rest of the woman was nowhere to be seen.

Ariel stood up sharply and opened her mouth to scream. When nothing came out, she started running and didn’t stop for a long time.

A
s the newspaper’s production manager, CJ Mathews didn’t consider it part of his job to pull 5,000 copies of the finished product off the shelves two days after it went out.

Technically, that was the responsibility of the distribution manager, Seth Reznik, but there were a couple of problems. First, Seth rarely made it in before 10 a.m. Second, Seth had just been promoted to editor. That meant he wasn’t here to do it and, even if he was, didn’t have to. In Seth’s absence, Hal had dumped the problem on CJ, who was already busy pulling the Devries story off the newspaper’s website and trying to find something else to fill the space. CJ had tried calling twice, but had gotten Seth’s voicemail both times. He knew Seth was up and around because Seth had posted on both the paper’s Facebook page and Twitter feed in the last half hour to announce that he was taking over as editor. The asshole just wasn’t answering his phone.

CJ checked the Facebook page again and saw that somebody named Twiggy644 had posted a reply to Seth’s announcement. It was short and to the point: “Who the fuck cares?” As one of the content monitors, it was CJ’s job to delete abusive posts like that. He left it.

Most of the copies were distributed on campus. Those ones were easy enough to get back. The college’s two satellite campuses in Guelph and Kitchener were a different story, though. Somebody would have to spend about an hour in the car to drive out and round those up. A set number of copies were also distributed to local shopping malls, student bars and restaurants. Getting them back would be a major pain in the ass.

Fuck it
, CJ thought. He decided he would hold the ones that hadn’t gone out and pull the on-campus stuff, but the rest were in the wind. If Hal didn’t like it, he could drive out there and yank them out of people’s hands himself. The whole thing was ridiculous. In CJ’s opinion, pulling the paper would only draw more attention to the whole debacle than leaving copies out there. After all, it wasn’t like the
Westhill Sentinel
was
Time
magazine. It didn’t exactly rocket off the shelves.

CJ tried to avoid the political side of the operation. He preferred the design and layout of the publication over what actually went into it. He already had a technical illustration diploma from Sheridan and was only taking journalism to get some news and magazine layout experience. He had picked Westhill because it had a fast-track study option that allowed him to pick up credits in the summer and be out the door faster. As far as academics were concerned, that was about all Westhill had to recommend itself.

The newsroom was quiet. The only other people in the place were Matt Palczek, who claimed that he’d come close to getting a couple of photos published in National Geographic, but spent most of his time alone in the darkroom printing oversized black and whites of his girlfriend for some gallery show that never seemed to happen; and Shona MacGillivray, an international student from Scotland whose only claim to fame was submitting a story about a Take Back The Night-style march at the Guelph campus that had never happened—she got the names of the organizers and wrote the piece without interviewing anyone. The march had been cancelled due to rain. That didn’t stop her from submitting a dramatic, first-person piece in which one of the marchers was assaulted by a water balloon full of red food colouring tossed by an anonymous member of the crowd that was supposedly lining the path. Colin had been suspicious from the start and confirmed the whole thing was bogus with a single phone call. Even the picture she submitted to accompany the piece was a file photo from a student demonstration published two years previously in the
Toronto Star
.

Colin had hit the roof and demanded she be kicked off the paper and out of the program. Hal had refused for reasons that CJ suspected were more budgetary than ethical. It was no secret that international students paid about four times as much tuition as domestic ones.