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The Reporter

Norah put down her cup of coffee as she sat staring at her computer screen. She knew it was almost time to go as the clock ticked steadily on toward midnight. But she wanted to finish telling her story first.

This was the most important part after all. It had been a long night, this Halloween. Different from any she had experienced before. But she was alright with that. She knew that things changed. That was the way of the world. The nature of the beast within us all.

And it wasn't as if she hadn't been informed ahead of time. No, she had known full well what was going to happen. She just hadn't expected it on this of all nights.

But she was a reporter first and foremost and therefore she felt obligated to make sure that all of the events of the night be fit into a nice, neat package of a story ready to be printed in the first edition of the paper the next morning. It was her last job for the paper and she wanted to make sure it was just right. The best piece of work they had ever seen.

The man sitting at the desk next to her cleared his throat. "Are you ready to go yet?" he asked. "It's getting late and we really must be going now..."

"Just a moment," she replied. "I'm almost finished. And than I just want to look it over again."

She heard his sigh and quickly added, "I'm sorry that this is taking longer than expected. But I'm almost there. Honestly."

It wasn't simply that she was wanting to impress her boss with this, but that this would be a piece that could take down the whole mob underworld of the city. And on Halloween too. What better retribution was there in the world? A man would go to jail and she would never have to worry about him again.

Norah slowly typed out the last few lines and than sat, and went over it one last time. She than added a headline to the story and pressed send.

With that she stood up and looked at the black-clothed figure and said "I'm ready now."

The man held out his hand as Norah stepped over a cold-dead body lying on the floor in a pool of blood by her computer. She stopped briefly to examine the bullet wound that had entered through the back of the victims head and exploded with ferocious fury through the front.

Oh well,' she thought to herself. You don't become a top reporter without pissing a few people off.' With that she took the hand of the man beside her. She didn't even look back as she walked with death toward the far door that wasn't a normal part of the newspaper office.

In the morning the lead headline in the paper would read "Reporter Norah Dellis Killed by Halloween Hit-Man." By afternoon thirteen arrests would be made and by evening it would be called the most curious murder ever.

One that people would talk about for years. Always curious and always wondering how a reporter managed to write a Pulitzer Prize winning article about her own death. And that was enough for her ....

Learn more about this author, Shannon Tarvin.
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