"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."
He took two measured steps. He looked at her. "Stay tight."
"I'm tight," she said.
Something crossed his expression briefly before it went neutral again.
Then everything went wrong.
"Bomb!"
The word came from the alley and the street responded immediately - every body making the same calculation at the same instant, the instinct to move being older and faster than any conscious decision. The tape went slack under the pressure of the crowd and Nora went with it, swept back and sideways, trying to stay upright.
Her heel found the crack in the sidewalk at full stride.
She went down hard - both palms, right knee, her recorder spinning out of her grip across the concrete. She pushed up immediately, the automatic refusal to stay down, and tried to run.
Her ankle gave.
She'd broken the heel clean off in the fall. She kicked the shoe free and tried again and her ankle was wrong, some tendon doing something it was not designed to do, and she was standing in the middle of a cleared sidewalk with one stocking foot and no ability to move quickly enough to matter.
She thought, with great clarity: this is an extremely bad situation.
The block had mostly emptied. A bomb squad vehicle was pulling onto the far end of the street. The sedan still crumpled against the delivery truck. The press SUV half a block away and completely unreachable.
She heard footsteps coming back toward her.
Cade, moving against the last of the dispersing crowd, scanning as he ran. When he found her - one shoe gone, ankle wrong, recorder on the sidewalk - she saw his jaw set, one tight motion, and then he was there.
He didn't ask if she was okay. He didn't say anything. He got his arm around her waist from behind, said "Hold on," and lifted her up and over - her waist to his shoulder, legs in front, arm locked across the backs of her knees - and ran.
She grabbed the back of his jacket with both hands and held on.
He was fast. Much faster than she'd expected. She wasn't light and he wasn't struggling with either of those facts, covering the half-block in the kind of focused sprint that didn't allow for anything except the destination. The press SUV door was open and she was inside and he was in after her in one motion and the door shut.
The locks clicked.
Outside: megaphone, shouted commands, the flat voice of police radios. Inside: quiet.
They sat there and breathed.
His right hand was scraped - she could see it from where she was, two knuckles red against the skin, something he'd caught on the run. He was already looking through the windshield, tracking the scene with the focused calm of someone who had not stopped processing. His jaw was still set. The adrenaline was still working.