The Fix

The presses downstairs were already rolling for the morning edition. The fluorescent tube over my cubicle still buzzed like it had for the last eight years.

I sat there with the white bottle in my hand, rolling it back and forth. Everyone else had gone home. Place was dead.

I had said it out loud this time, told my editor and my sister I was done with the pills, and now, sitting there alone, I could hear both of them breathing down my neck.

I opened the top drawer, put the bottle inside.

On my screen the story I was paid to write sat half done, the cursor blinking on a line about a councilman whose cousin kept winning city contracts. My editor had already sent me three emails about it, each one with more capital letters in the subject line. He had told me that if I did not finish it before morning, he would hand it to Mark.

Before he left, Mark had stopped by my desk, glanced at my screen, and said he could “jump in” if the story was too much for me. He called me “buddy”, which was what he called people when he wanted something they had. He didn't know the only reason I could keep up with him was the bottle in my desk.

The phone lit up beside the keyboard. Sister. It had been ringing for a while; three missed calls already sat under her name in red.

I let it ring. The phone buzzed louder than the presses. If I answered, I’d have to lie, and my sister had developed a radar for the tremor in my voice that appeared after twelve hours without a dose.

Then the screen went dark and it was quiet again. Real quiet.

I looked at the screen: Councilman Harrows. The man sold the city piece by piece while smiling for cameras. Breaking this story was supposed to be my ticket to the national desk, out of this dead-end night shift. But right now, the words were trapped.

Hand went back to the drawer on its own. One more. Just enough to finish the damn piece. Flush the rest after.

"Mark is going to take it," I whispered to the empty room.

I could picture Mark at home, sleeping the sleep of the righteous. He didn’t need a chemical push to see the patterns. He was young, hungry, and clean.

The presses downstairs shifted rhythm, a heavy, steady beat. They were hungry, too. They needed paper and ink and stories to feed the morning crowd. If I didn’t feed them, Mark would.

I grabbed the bottle. The bottle was warm from sitting in the drawer.

"This is the job," I muttered. It was the lie I used to pave over the cracks. The addiction wasn't a weakness; it was just a tool. A mechanic needs a wrench; a night-shift reporter needs focus.

I popped the child-proof cap. The cap popped with that stupid little click it always makes. I tipped a single blue pill into my palm. It looked innocent enough. Just a small circle of compressed blue powder.

The phone lit up again. Sister.

I didn't swallow. I couldn’t. Not with her name flashing.

My hand trembled, a subtle seizure in the thumb, and the pill rattled against the wedding band I still hadn’t pawned. I set the pill on the desk, right next to the keyboard and picked up the phone.

"Hey," I said, pitching my voice low.

"Mark called me," she said. No hello. Her voice was tight. "He said he was 'worried.' He said you were shaking so bad you couldn't hold a pen."

"Mark is a vulture," I snapped, my eyes locked on the blue pill. "I’m finishing the Harrows story. That’s it. I’m just tired, Sarah."

"Don't lie to me," she said. "I know that tone, Danny."

The silence was heavy. It was a low blow because it was true. The fog in my brain thickened. I needed to be sharp to fight her, to fight Mark, to fight the councilman, but my neurotransmitters were misfiring.

"I have to go," I said, my voice cracking. "I have a deadline."

"Danny, please. Just come home. The story isn’t worth it."

"It’s the only thing worth it," I said, and hung up.

I stared at the screen. The cursor blinked.

Then, a new sound cut through the room. A cheerful, two-tone chime.

An email notification slid onto the bottom right of my screen. The sender was Mark. The subject line read: FYI - Found a discrepancy in your Harrows data.

I froze. My hand hovered over the mouse, shaking visibly now. I clicked the email open.

Hey buddy, the email read. I was looking over the public records you pulled on the shell company. I think you missed the transfer date. It doesn’t line up with the Councilman’s vote. Looks like the story falls apart.

I felt the blood drain from my face. Page six. That's where I'd end up. The obituary section and the lost dog ads.

I grabbed the stack of printouts. Withdrawal made the text swim; the numbers danced, blurring together. I physically couldn't make my eyes stop vibrating long enough to check the dates.

Mark was playing me. Or maybe he wasn't. Maybe I had missed it because my brain was starving for dopamine.

"He's lying," I hissed, grabbing a red pen and slashing a line through a paragraph I couldn't read. "He's trying to break me."

The fluorescents were starting to give me a headache. Everything felt too bright and too loud at the same time.

If I couldn't check the numbers, the story died. If the story died, Mark won. If Mark won, I was just a junkie in an empty office with nothing to show for the last ten years of my life.

I looked at the pill on the desk.

It wasn't just a pill anymore. It was focus. It was clarity. It was the only way to read those numbers and prove Mark wrong. It was the difference between the front page and the exit door.

The presses kept thumping away down there, same rhythm as always. Didn’t care whether I took the pill or not.

Take it, the room seemed to say. Check the numbers. Save your career. Deal with Sarah later.

My hand moved, not toward the papers, but toward the desk. I touched the pill with the tip of my finger, rolling it back and forth, the friction of the choice burning my skin.

I stared at the pill, then at the email, then back at the pill. If I took it, the trembling would stop. The numbers would stop dancing. I could destroy Mark with a single, lucid paragraph.

But Sarah’s voice was still echoing in the dead air of the office.

"Not yet," I gritted out, the words scraping my throat.

I brushed the pill away. I flicked it away. It rolled and stopped right at the edge like it was daring me. I ignored it and grabbed the stack of printouts, bringing them inches from my face. I needed to verify the transfer date.

My eyes wouldn't track. The rows of financial data swayed like they were underwater. I squeezed my eyes shut, counted to three, and forced them open.

November 14th. Mark was right. The transfer happened on the 14th. The public vote was on the 14th, too.

Felt like someone kicked me in the gut. If the money moved after the vote, it wasn't a bribe; it was just business. The timeline didn't work. The story was nothing but a coincidence drawn in red ink by a desperate man.

"No," I said. "No, I saw it. I know I saw it."

I started tearing through the papers, my shaking hands crinkling the pages. I looked like a madman, digging through a haystack of dry figures.

Think, Danny. Think through the fog.

I grabbed my notebook—a beat-up thing stained with coffee and sweat. I flipped through the pages, the scribbles erratic. Digging up the past. I had to find the interview with the secretary. The one who was afraid to talk.

I found the page, but it was a disaster. I had written it in the dark, in a speeding cab, just trying to get her words down before she bolted.

I held the notebook up to the buzzing fluorescent light. My eyes couldn't lock focus. The blue ink looked like a tangle of wire.

I ran my finger down the page, searching. I skipped the quotes I had already used. I needed the logistics. The boring stuff I usually ignored.

My finger stopped at a scribble in the margin. A circled note.

I squinted, tears of strain pricking my eyes. The first letter was a loop. An 'S'? Maybe a 'G'?

I leaned closer, my nose almost touching the paper, forcing my vibrating pupils to still for just a fraction of a second.

Emer... Ses...

Emergency Session.

And next to it, a date. I couldn't read the number. It looked like a broken stick. I compared it to the line above it. The angle was wrong for a '1'. It was a '7'? No.

I rotated the notebook.

Sun 12.

Sunday the 12th.

I blinked, the realization hitting me harder than the withdrawal. I hadn't thought about the date when I wrote it down; I was just acting as a recording device. But there it was.

Mark's computer said Tuesday. My notebook said Sunday.

I froze.

Sunday. November 12th was a Sunday.

Mark had checked the official city register which only listed the public vote on Tuesday the 14th. But Harrows had held a secret emergency session on Sunday the 12th to approve the contract before the money hit the account.

Mark was wrong. He was looking at the clean version of history. I was holding the dirty truth. Mark reads spreadsheets. I read people.

I started laughing and it came out like a cough. I had him. I had the story. I just needed to type it. I needed to explain the discrepancy, link the secretary’s quote, and hit send.

I reached for the keyboard.

My fingers seized. A violent spasm shot up my forearm, curling my hand into a useless claw. The withdrawal was peaking. My body was on strike, shutting down the machinery until its demands were met.

I stared at the screen. The cursor blinked. Mocking me.

I tried to type with one finger. I missed the key. I hit 'J' instead of 'T'. Backspace. Missed again.

I couldn't do it. I physically could not type the sentence that would save my career.

The elevator at the far end of the hall dinged.

The sound was soft, but in the silence of the night shift, it sounded like a gong. The doors slid open with a heavy grind.

I stopped breathing. Security didn't come up here after midnight. The cleaning crew was gone.

Heavy footsteps echoed on the linoleum. Slow. Deliberate. Not the shuffle of a janitor. These were the confident strides of someone who owned the floor.

"Danny?"

It wasn't Mark.

It was the Editor. The big boss. The man who never left his house after 8 PM.

I spun my chair around, hiding the pill bottle with my body, hiding the single blue pill near the edge of the desk with my elbow.

He stood in the doorway of my cubicle, looking like a storm cloud in a trench coat. He looked at the crumpled papers, the overflow of the trash bin, and finally, at me—sweating, shaking, clutching a notebook like the holy scripture.

"Mark called me," the Editor said, his voice flat. "He says you're spiraling and there's no story, so I checked the logs myself. You haven't saved a draft in four hours, Danny. You're just burning company electricity." He took a step closer, his eyes narrowing as he studied my face.

He held out a hand.

"Give me the notes. Go home. We'll talk in the morning."

The pill was three inches from my elbow. One quick motion. I could palm it, swallow it dry, and in five minutes I’d be steady enough to explain the Sunday meeting. I’d be charming. I’d be convincing.

Or I could try to explain a complex financial conspiracy to a skeptical boss while looking and sounding like I was in the middle of a breakdown.

"It's not what you think," I stammered, but my teeth were chattering.

"It looks exactly like what I think," he said. He looked at my hand, the one curled into a claw on the desk. "What are you hiding, Danny?"

"I'm hiding the lead," I rasped, forcing my hand to uncurl. It felt like trying to open a rusty hinge. "And Mark is hiding the truth."

The Editor didn’t blink. He looked at my trembling hand, then at the blue pill on the desk. The silence stretched, heavy and physical. He knew. You don't work the night shift for thirty years without learning what a man looks like when he’s outrunning his own chemistry.

"You're high, Danny," he said, not unkindly, but with a finality that sounded like a gavel. "Go home."

"I'm not high," I said, my voice gaining a jagged edge. "I'm crashing. There's a difference. If I were high, this story would be done, and it would be brilliant, and I wouldn't be coming apart."

I looked at the pill. One swallow. That’s all it would take to stop the shaking, to smooth out the voice, to charm the boss. But if I reached for it now, right in front of him, it was over. The story, the job, the last shred of dignity.

I took a breath that rattled in my chest. I reached out—not for the pill, but for the notebook.

With a sudden, violent motion of my arm, I swept the blue pill off the desk. It hit the floor and skittered away under a filing cabinet, lost in the dust bunnies and forgotten paperclips.

The Editor raised an eyebrow.

I shoved the notebook toward him, flipping it open to the page with the jagged, coffee-stained scrawl.

"Read it," I wheezed. "Mark checked the public record. The vote was Tuesday the 14th. The money moved on the 14th. Looks like a bribe, but the timeline is weak."

I tapped the page, my finger leaving a smudge of sweat on the paper.

"But they got greedy. Harrows held an emergency session on Sunday the 12th. A private quorum. They approved the contract before the public vote. The money moved two days later to cover the tracks. It wasn't just a bribe, Chief. It was premeditated theft."

The Editor looked down at my chicken-scratch handwriting. He squinted. He looked at the screen where Mark’s smug email still glowed. He looked back at the notebook.

"Sunday?" he muttered.

"Sunday," I said.

The Editor stood there for a long moment. He looked at the empty spot on the desk where the pill had been, then at my hands, which were currently vibrating so hard I had to grip the edge of the desk to keep them still.

"You can't type," he stated. It wasn't a question.

"I can type," I lied. "It just..."

The Editor sighed. It was a deep, weary sound, the sound of a man who had seen too many deadlines and too many broken reporters. He walked around the desk.

"Move," he said.

I blinked. "What?"

"Move your ass, Danny. I type faster than you even when you're sober."

He nudged my chair with his hip. I stumbled up, legs stiff, and collapsed onto the spare filing cabinet. The big boss, the man who signed the checks and killed the stories, sat down in my cheap, squeaky chair. He cracked his knuckles.

"Dictate," he commanded. "And don't give me the flowery adjectives. Just the facts. Start with the Sunday meeting."

I stared at him like an idiot. A laugh bubbled up in my throat again, but this time it felt real. It was absurd. It was beautiful.

"The City Council," I began, my voice gaining strength as the words started to flow, "thought the dark would cover their tracks. They didn't count on the 12th being a Sunday."

For twenty minutes, the only sound was the aggressive clatter of the Editor hammering my keyboard and my voice weaving the narrative. He didn't correct me. He didn't edit. He just typed.

When he hit the final period, he smashed the Enter key hard enough to make the monitor jump.

Sent.

He stood up, adjusting his trench coat. "Mark is going to be pissed," he said, a small, cruel smile touching his lips.

He looked at me. The rush wore off and I was just… empty. Done.

"Go home, Danny," the Editor said softly. "And don't come back until you can keep your hands still. If I see you here tomorrow night, I'll fire you. Take a week. Sleep. Eat something that wasn't made in a lab."

He walked to the elevator. Just before the doors closed, he called out, "And pick up your damn phone. That light is driving me crazy."

The doors slid shut.

I was alone again. The presses downstairs were thumping, chewing on the story I had just fed them. The Harrows administration would crumble by breakfast. Mark would have to read my byline over his morning coffee.

I looked at the floor, where the blue pill lay in the shadows. Still waiting.

Then I looked at the phone. The red light was blinking. Sister.

I picked up the receiver.

"Hey," I said. My voice was tired. Dead tired. But it didn't shake.

"Danny?" She sounded scared. "Are you...?"

"I'm done," I said, and for the first time in years, I meant it. "I'm clocking out. I'm coming over."

I grabbed my coat and walked out of the newsroom, leaving the lights on, the pill on the floor.