Nice Girls Finish Last Read Online Free Page B

the dark-humored newsroom drones, but otherwise no one would notice. When you’re trafficking in news from places like Sarajevo, one dead doctor in New York doesn’t mean much. Life is cheap in Casablanca. Unless of course it happens in your building.
    MURDER ON 27, screamed a poster on Democracy Wall, the ten-foot-long employee bulletin board in the hallway leading to the newsroom. Democracy Wall is where we post employee news, gossip, jokes, weird letters from fans, and odd but true news stories. It “belongs” to the workers.
    I skipped the terse bulletin about the murder and scanned the wall instead for news of the executive meetings, rumors about the reshuffle. There was nothing.
    â€œDid you hear about the murder…,” producer Susan Brave said, coming up beside me at the wall.
    â€œCan’t talk now,” I said. “I’m late.”
    I was, in fact, running late for a mandatory security meeting that morning.
    â€œYou’ve probably already heard that a doctor on the twenty-seventh floor was shot and killed last night,” Pete Huculak was saying when I walked into the conference room and took a seat in the back next to Dillon Flinder.
    Pete was the security chief for Jackson Broadcasting and its affiliated enterprises, which included ANN and the JBS building itself.
    â€œI don’t want you to be alarmed. Our security is very good. The security for the commercial floors was pretty relaxed—the tenants wanted it that way so their customers could come and go freely—but something like this couldn’t happen in the broadcast facilities,” Pete said.
    A skeptical murmur swept the room. True, after the World Trade Center bombing, our founder, Georgia Jack Jackson, had installed Star Trek airlock doors leading into and out of the broadcast facilities, as well as a vast system of video surveillance cameras, all of which gave the place a combination biosphere-prison farm atmosphere.
    Despite this, there had been a number of security breaches and other disturbing incidents that put everyone a bit on edge. First, shortly after the new security force came aboard, someone had taken advantage of the transition to swipe a bunch of purses, including mine. Our TV psychologist, Solange Stevenson, had been menaced by an elderly Kansas widower who showed up at ANN, waved an unloaded hunting rifle, and complained that Solange was sending him secret messages (on that special frequency they shared) accusing him of homosexuality. Someone had broken into anchorwoman Bianca de Woody’s dressing room and stolen her wig, two pairs of her shoes, and her spare underwear. And Kerwin Shutz, ANN’s right-wing talk-show host, had been getting these perplexing phone calls that sounded distinctly like someone farting for about a minute before hanging up.
    (Contrary to a popular rumor, I did not make those calls.)
    As if that weren’t bad enough, ANN’s senior war correspondent, Reb “Rambo” Ryan, recently “grounded” after a disturbing incident in Haiti, claimed someone had taken a potshot at him as he was walking down Eighty-fourth Street.
    Pete couldn’t do much about that, but we all felt he could do more about building security, which was why the on-air “Talent” had got together and demanded this meeting. The death of the doctor the night before gave it added urgency.
    Pete and his personally assembled army of fifty company cops marked the third step in the year-long fortification. Keeping nutty fans and nutty terrorists out, not to mention busting cigarette sneaks who defied the company-wide ban on smoking, was a tough job.
    It was the opinion of the masses that Pete was not up to it. Before Pete took over our security a few months earlier, he had done bodyguard and security work for a few celebrities in Hollywood, including Georgia Jack, when Jack was out there trying to buy another movie studio.
    Jack had hired Pete capriciously. Jack did