The newsroom is bustling with activity. Copy boys run with sheets in hand from editors and reporters on the newsroom floor down to the pressmen in the basement. The rythmic stacatto of Smith-Coronas and the shouts of editors and ad men fill the air with noise. At a desk, near the door, the Metropolitan Herald’s ace reporter, Bridget Rourke is oblivious to all the activity around her.
Bridget squints down at the black X’s on her map of the city again. Each one has a date next to it. She runs her finger from one X to the next in chronological order. There’s something big going on, she’s sure of that. She grabs the file folder next to the map and flips through a few of the pages, stopping to check a fact here and there, then closes it and scoops all her papers up, stuffing them back into the folder. She uses a pencil to draw a circle around a small section of the waterfront district.
“Chris!” she yells out to the Herald’s staff photographer as he exits from the Editor-in-Chief’s office.
“What can I do for you Bridget?”
“Do you still have that old portable Leica?”
“Sure, gotta scoop you wanna share?” he winks, knowing full-well that the Herald’s top reporter never shares a lead until her byline shows in print.
“If I do, you’ll read all about it in the morning edition.” She smiles back at him. “Can you drop that camera off? I have to make a few calls and then I’ll be covering the mayor’s speech at City Hall, but I’ll need it for tonight. And make sure you leave me some flashbulbs too.”
“Sure thing. It should be on your desk in an hour.”
“Thank you.” She picks up the telephone, waits for Chris to walk away and then dials a number quickly. After the third ring, she hangs up. This is the part she hates the most, the waiting. She’s never been good at it, which is why she has made it to the top as a reporter in New Commerce. Rather than waiting for a story to happen, she’s tracked them down, chasing leads all around the city. It’s how she met him too.
She taps her pencil impatiently on the desk. “Ring already,” she commands. It does, and for a moment she’s startled, but recovers quickly and lifts the receiver to her ear. The voice on the other end is not who she was expecting.
“Yeah?” comes the inquisitive voice on the other end.
“Mo, is he around?”
“Nope. Ain’t seen him in two days. Gotta note that said to wait by the payphone. He said if it rang three times and then stopped, I was to call you and find out what you had.”
“Tell him the waterfront district tonight, about 10. I might have something big.” Bridget hangs up the phone and grabs her note pad, a pencil and her purse. It’s already 11:30 and she has to get down to City Hall for the mayor’s speech at noon.
This is the introduction to Chapter 1 of the scenario:
Death Soldiers of the Jade Hood
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April 26, 2024, 04:39:48 PM
December 26, 2007, 10:43:05 AM