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at you, ready to grind you into paste. He was a reporter, a hard-core news dog down to the marrow in his bones. But lately—as much as he hated to admit it—the real rush didn’t come from deadlines.
    It came from a small pile of hundred dollar bills tucked in a white paper envelope.
    Courtesy of his current employers, who apparently had bales of the stuff at hand.
    Now you had to be smart with it. You didn’t go handing the whole thing over to a cop. No sir, you tease that wad out. Make a big deal of opening that envelope, carefully plucking a single Franklin out from his friends. See, it’s not the single Franklin that does the trick—it’s the others. The cop thinks, Shit, this was the easiest hundred I ever made. And there’s plenty more where that came from. One hundred bucks, you were in.
    He’d never enjoyed such power.
    Even better, Knack worked for a Web news aggregator that was almost always mentioned on tabloid TV. Cops heard that name, and knew they weren’t exactly dealing with The New York Times . Ethics, shmethics. It was a whole new media playing field, and the Daily Slab floated in that murky Web space between respectability and sleaze. Not quite the Daily Beast or HuffPo, but then again, no Drudge or TMZ.
    What the Slab had—and what had attracted Knack to it a year ago—was a borderline psychotic obsession with scoops . If it happened anywhere in the world, the Slab wanted to tell you first. And they were willing to hemorrhage cash for the privilege.
    The Slab’s owner was a former dot.com millionaire who lost it all, earned it back, and decided to make his next fortune in news. He could afford the scoops because his checks were the plumpest. His press kit made a lot of noise about “bombing mainstream media back into the Stone Age.” The owner had deep pockets for long-form investigatory pieces, too. Well, long form for the Web at least: a thousand words and up.
    Knack had been looking into an exposé of Martin Green—a man who’d miraculously avoided the shit-splatter of the subprime mortgage meltdown a few years ago. In J-school you were taught to put a face to the story. There was no better face of greed than Green.
    And the best part: Nobody fucking knew it! His editor at the Slab agreed—they loved creating villains as much as scooping mainstream media. Green would be an amazing villain.
    So Knack had been sniffing around Chapel Hill for the past week, trying to flesh out the bio of a man who worked hard to avoid the spotlight. He had a nice house, but nothing ridiculously flashy. He drank, but not to excess. He was divorced, but these days, who wasn’t? No kids. No kinks—as far as Knack could tell.
    It was turning out to be a dull story until a little after midnight, when Knack’s phone rang and a cop told him Green was dead.

    Since then, Knack had been working the scene for hours, but he’d had no luck sneaking behind the yellow tape. The scene had been clamped down sphincter-tight, and not even his envelope of crisp new Franklins could help him out. Which was curious. Green was a player, but he wasn’t the freakin’ president.
    And the clock was ticking.
    Knack noticed that the B and E squad was on the scene, too, along with a security company van. That was interesting. Green appeared to have died following some kind of break-in. His cop source had gone mute after the first tip, but he had told him over the phone: This is a weird one.
    Meaning: It wasn’t a coronary that took out Green.
    It was something else—something weird .
    At 2:31 A.M., Knack pulled out his BlackBerry, thumbed it for a couple of minutes, then hit SEND. He took the little scrap of official info he had from the cops (namely, that a guy named Martin Green had died in his house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina) and teased it out into a 350-word piece, full of innuendo, questions, outright fabrications. Grounded in hard fact, of course.
    The e-mail was opened by the Slab’s night editor at 2:36 A.M., and