Big Boss Diesel wrote:I'm taking a chance on you with this one, Wicke. You'd better not let me down.
Brandy dismissed the text notification with a swipe of her thumb, and suppressed the urge to sigh. Diesel was not, from what she'd heard, the worst editor to work under, but he did have a terrible knack for sending her ominous messages at just the right time to throw her off balance. Some other, even editor-ier editor must be getting on his case about something or other. She and her aspirations were always a convenient outlet for his frustrations.
For the last eight months of her life Brandy had been buried under a mountain of top ten lists and personality quizzes and sub-200-word analyses of somebody's haircut at some award show—it's what the people want, Diesel would say, waxing his mustache like some kind of supervillain. Maybe it was. Certainly it got pageviews and sold magazines, but it was almost the antithesis of what she'd gotten into the business to do: serious investigative journalism about important issues, a series of words she had said so often in meetings that it now came out of her mouth with the same cadence every time. She knew some of the other writers laughed at her about it, and didn't care. She'd been doing good work at the old newspaper before it closed. She was worth more than this, even if she was stuck with it for now.
This was her chance to get back on track. She'd finally dug her way out of the fluff pieces and gotten permission to work on a story about organized crime in Aldrect, namely why there was so little of it compared to other cities of its size. It was a subject with some personal significance to her, even if she had little to do with her cousins outside the occasional holiday dinner, but more importantly it was a story she knew she could absolutely nail, even being months out of practice. And if she succeeded here, she could make a case to do more work along the same lines, or if all else failed maybe get picked up by another publication.
"More editorial," she said under her breath as she walked. "Not editor-ier. That just sounds silly."
Her first stop was a detective agency, since private eyes were sometimes more talkative than police, and far less likely to be secret mobsters. She hadn't been to this one before, although the name Brodnax had the tang of familiarity when she came across it; for the past few days she'd had the sense that the context she knew it from was just on the tip of her tongue. Terrible. If it didn't come to her soon she'd have to ask Niles just so she could stop grinding her teeth about it; her brother seemed to remember the name of everybody he'd ever met.
In any case, this appeared to be the right place, and she reached up to adjust her bun, make sure the pink streaks didn't show; they weren't dyed in, but they looked like they were, and she found that people thought she was a lot younger than her actual age when they were visible. She wanted this conversation to go as smoothly as possible. Once satisfied, and with one last look at her muted phone, she went inside.