Shattered Read Online Free Page A

Guy said, “Relax. I'm not going to say anything to impugn the integrity of your high office. You're too valuable a source.” He pretended to think about that for a minute before adding, “In fact, in a county this size, you're my only source.”
    Case scowled at him, still disgruntled. “You better not forget it, either. That jacket looks like you slept in it.”
    Guy glanced down at the jacket, brushed again at the wrinkles, and said, “Damn. I've got a lunch meeting with the commissioners, too.”
    From her desk three feet away Deputy Marge Albrecker spoke up, her attention focused on her computer screen. “Hang it on the shower rod with the hot water going full blast for fifteen minutes. It’ll look good as new.”
    Guy glanced at his watch. “Don't have the time or the shower.”
    Marge grinned at him as she got up to collect some papers from the printer. “Then don't worry about it. People expect reporters to look rumpled—it’s part of their charm.”
    “Yeah, I guess. Kind of makes me wish I was one.” Guy lifted his hand to both of them as he opened the door. “Thanks for the story, John. You know my number if you think of anything you want to add.”
    Case replied sourly, “Nothing you'd want to print, Ace.”
    Guy grinned and stepped out into the salty Florida sun. There were times, bleak, self-pitying times, when he wondered what the hell he was doing here. But on days like this—which outnumbered the bad days a good two hundred to one—he couldn't imagine why he had ever left.
    If Guy Dennison's resume could be plotted on a chart, it would look like the world's longest roller-coaster ride. It began with a Wakefield, North Carolina, radio station and progressed to the Miami Herald, a giant upward curve. A sharp fall led to the position of general reporter on the Gulf Coast Sentinel and another, smaller, upward curve took him to investigative reporter on the Franklin County Summit, then a straight run to newswriter for WECV-TV in Panama City, and another giant leap to crime reporter for WLTL, Tallahassee. A sharp downward slope resulted in a job as staff writer for the Tallahassee Herald and then a small hill and a straightaway took him back to the Gulf Coast Sentinel as managing editor, which position he currently held with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
    It was no secret that his lack of ambition had been a major point of stress in his marriage and no doubt a contributing factor to its ultimate failure. Carol used to accuse him—usually at high pitch and in strident tones—of going out of his way to disguise his talent lest someone offer him a decent-paying job, and sometimes he thought she wasn't far from wrong.
    After the divorce, which for some reason took Guy completely by surprise, he had been seized by the need to prove Carol wrong, or perhaps by the unconscious hope that if he worked hard enough and became important enough, she would somehow love him again. Toward the end of his marriage, he had taken the television job in Panama City and refused to understand why it only exacerbated matters between Carol and himself—which anyone with any insight at all into the woman he loved could have predicted. He had left her home alone with a career and a demanding teenage daughter while he worked long hours sixty-five miles away, and he told himself he was doing it to please her. The truth was that he was escaping from something he didn't understand and couldn't control, and by the time he realized his actions were only punishing them both, it was too late. He let the tide carry him to Tallahassee because he had no place better to go, and was well on his way to becoming the most relentless television reporter in the state when he—inexplicably, most people said—left to write the news again.
    Small-town newspapers were what he knew and what he liked and he no longer apologized for that. He knew that he was living in the end of an era; already the print paper was supported almost entirely by its