"I heard what you said." He was already moving toward the elevator. He glanced back once - the brief, assessing look of someone checking whether the person behind them is keeping up. "Lifestyle section, Wilde. I'd think carefully before you committed."
He was at the elevator before she'd finished processing the situation.
She had approximately four seconds.
She went after him.
"You knew it was a live scene," she said, somewhere on Fulton Street, somewhere around the third unmarked car she'd spotted in the block perimeter.
He was watching the intersection. "I suspected."
"That's different from telling me."
"You would have asked more questions."
She looked at him. He'd chosen this parking spot deliberately - clear sightline to the bank entrance, press ID already displayed in the window, exit route open behind them. He'd done this before. He'd done this many times.
"I would have asked more questions," she said, carefully, "because that is, in fact, the job."
"We'll see." His eyes stayed on the block. "Give it five minutes."
She gave it four.
At eleven-oh-four the dark sedan blew the intersection at sixty and the block came alive. Officers converging from three directions. The sedan hitting the delivery truck with a sound she felt in her back teeth before she understood what it was. Three men out of the car and running, scattering.
Cade was out the door before the sound had fully registered.
She grabbed her recorder and went after him.
He moved differently in the field. In the newsroom he was still and controlled, directing everything from a fixed point. Out here he was fluid, immediate, without a single hesitation. He held his press badge up as he crossed into the outer edge of the scene and said "Tribune, Metro Desk" in the same tone someone uses to order coffee, and officers looked at him and let him through.
She was three steps behind him the entire way. Her recorder was running. She was narrating into it - date, time, location, number of officers, the third suspect's last known position - and she was frightened. Her heart was doing something fast and irregular that she refused to let onto her face. And she was staying.
She hadn't decided to stay. She'd just found that she wasn't leaving.
They ended up at the police tape, as far as they were getting. Cade was shooting the sedan, the officers, the alley where the third suspect had gone. Nora was timing the crowd dispersal, reading the sergeant's radio body language, collecting quotes from civilian onlookers who didn't know yet they were being quoted.
She was doing her job. In the middle of this, she was doing her actual job.
"Move back," one of the officers at the tape said.
"Tribune press." Cade's voice was even.
"I understand that. Move back."