Deadline Read Online Free

case to old man Knapp when the chips are down.”
    “I hear you,” Walker said.
    “Great. The job’s yours. It was yours before you ever walked in. Any questions?”
    “Who do I answer to?”
    “The city editor is Joe Kanin, but I’ve told them to leave you alone. I asked Kanin to help get your legs under you, funnel a few good stories your way till you get used to working in the city again.” He picked up the telephone. “Margie, is Joe free yet?” A few moments later Kanin came in. He was a bald man of medium height and build. Walker sized him up at once as an enemy. Kanin’s attitude was one Walker had seen before, a coldness that telegraphed trouble. All right, pal, you won the Prize, but I run the newsroom. Walker had bucked that tide before.
    Kanin ushered him out into the newsroom. Walker waited at city desk while Kanin dispatched a reporter-photographer team to interview more survivors for the second-day fire story. When they had gone, Kanin stood off and gave him a dose of the icy eye. Walker gave it back to him.
    “What do they call you?” Kanin said. “Do you want to be called Dalton?”
    “Walker’s fine.”
    They made the rounds quickly. Kanin introduced him to everyone in the room, then gave him a desk in a far corner near a row of filing cabinets. It looked like a good place to be—out of the firing line, yet still in the newsroom. Close enough to pick up scuttlebutt, yet not so close that every assistant city editor with a two-headed dog would dump it on him. Byrnes could talk all day about leaving him alone, but Walker knew better.
    He wasn’t in the newsroom long before that judgment was partly confirmed. He had just settled into his desk when Kanin came over with his first assignment. He sat on the edge of Walker’s desk, a scrap of paper in his hand. “Here’s one that’ll make a real reader. And it’ll get you down into the city.”
    “I’ve been down in the city.”
    Kanin ignored him. “How much do you know about the Amish, Walker?”
    “They’re like Mennonites, aren’t they?”
    Kanin smiled crookedly. “Not quite. The Mennonites are less strict than the Amish. The Amish are religious fundamentalists, but they’re also isolationists. They believe the old ways are better, in every facet of their lives. Their religion prohibits any kind of modern technology. Old World Amish can’t have cars. They’re mostly farmers, but they can’t use tractors—nothing powered by fuel, nothing with rubber wheels. They can’t have electricity in their homes. Dancing is prohibited, so is makeup. There is no interchange with other churches. What we have, in other words, is a horse-and-buggy society in the middle of the machine age. You follow me so far?”
    Walker squinted. But he said, “I think so.”
    “Hiram said you like stories with natural conflict, so try this one for size. At Radio City Music Hall there’s a girl dancing with the Rockettes who comes from an Old World Amish family. Maybe you don’t see the story in that, but believe me, it’s there. You have to understand about these people and how they raise their kids. Obedience to parents is like a commandment. To do what this girl has done would mean a total break from her family, excommunication from her church.”
    “Lots of kids break from their families.”
    “You haven’t been listening to me, Walker. Amish kids aren’t like other kids. They’re raised in such isolation that they don’t know how to cope with the real world. The parents won’t even let them go to school beyond the eighth grade, for fear they’ll be tempted by worldly pleasures. I want to know how this girl made the break. What kind of emotional hurdles she went through. How does she feel now? And how the hell did she learn to dance like that, after spending her first eighteen years milking cows and sewing quilts? You tell me, Walker, does that story have natural conflict?”
    Walker had to admit that it did.
    “It’s got another element, as