Page 2 of Walking Wounded

The plane banks to the left, a slight shift, just enough to throw off his equilibrium. This is it. Begin the descent.

Hand clenched around his seat belt, Luke allows himself a moment of doubt. Of wonder. What will it be like? This story? The assignment?

Meeting Hal at the airport?

His stomach clenches and he tells himself it’s because of the drastically changing elevation.

~*~

It started with a feature story on the primetime news lineup. Luke was in the office, working on some last-minutes edits for a piece someone enviably higher-up than him had penned and passed off for proofreading. An op-ed about a professor holding a hunger strike on the lawn of an Ivy League campus, accompanied by photos of the woman handcuffed to a stop sign that had been rather creatively embellished into a protest poster. He pushed his glasses up, rubbed at his gritty eyes, and wondered how the hell he’d ended up here, proofing political drivel, when he’d entered college as a naïve, hopeful poet.

“You’re too cynical to be a poet anyway,” Hal had joked.

True.

Sighing, inexplicably depressed with his whole life at the moment, Luke stood and reached for his coffee mug. He might as well refuel if he had to read any more about post-menopausal profs “making statements with their bodies” or whatever the hell it was.

On the way to the break room, he passed Linda’s office, and she hissed at him. Like a cat. Then she snapped her fingers. “Luke, get in here, have you seen this?” she rattled off in a hurry. “Come sit down.”

By the time his butt hit one of her guest chairs, she’d turned up the volume on the massive flat screen that took up one wall of her office.

He watched the story unfold, and felt his mouth gape open. “For real?” He glanced over at his editor.

She nodded, eyes wild with excitement. “For real.”

Senator Matthew Maddox, voted into his first term one year ago, had caused a bit of a stir on Capitol Hill. From unremarkable working class roots, a self-proclaimed Washington outsider, he’d won by a landslide, and had thrown his considerable weight (the man was big as a house in a should-have-been-a-footballer, all-muscle way) toward cutting wasteful spending and political cronyism. The Washington fat cats hated him. The people loved him.

And his father had just been arrested for assault.

“How does someone that old assault anyone?” Luke asked, incredulous.

Linda muted the TV, folded her hands over the remote on her desk, fixing him with one of her laser-guided stares. “I don’t know. But you’re going to find out.”

His heart lurched. “You mean…An assignment? Forme?”

“Yes. You.” She smiled at him, and it did amazing things for her high cheekbones and harsh, vivid eyes. She was fine-featured, beautiful, even, but somewhere between the diamond stud earrings, the just-above-the-shoulders bobbed sleek hair, and the perfect tailoring of her suit jacket, beautiful became terrifying.

“But…a political piece?” he asked, nose already wrinkling at the idea.

“No. A personal one. A human story.Candidis starting to become too…clinical,” she said, her own nose wrinkling. “I don’t like it. That’s not us. There’s going to be eighty-seven news outlets vying for an exclusive on this story, and they’re all going to talk about the political ramifications. I want the nitty-gritty human version of events.”

“Did you just say nitty-gritty?”

“Shut up. Listen.” She leaned toward him, smiling again. “I already made a phone call. I explained who we are–”

“A failing social rag.”

“–to Maddox’s people, told them my angle, and threw the offer out there. And they said yes.”

“They what now?”

“They said yes, loser. They’re giving us an in. They loved the idea of making it a human piece.”

His heart thumped hard behind his sternum. It had been so long since he felt anything like excitement, he didn’t know what to make of it. “You actually want me to go and interview Maddox?”

She shook her head, bob flaring. “No. I want you to interview his father.”

“His…wait.”

---