Razzamatazz (A Crime Novel) by Sandra Scoppettone

was trying to get me to suppress a story. You heard him."
    "What I heard was a frightened man who was trying to get you to downplay a story, not suppress it."
    "Same thing."
    "No, it isn't," Colin contradicted. "It really isn't."
    "Well, fuck it. Who cares?"
    "I do. You should. We need the chief of police on our side."
    "Before you got here I managed very well without the chief of police on my side."
    Was he jealous? Colin wondered.
    "So where's the story?" Griffing asked suddenly.
    "I was working on it when Waldo came in."
    Griffing looked at his watch. "You'll have it by three?"
    "I think you should apologize to the chief."
    "You've gotta be kidding, pal."
    "I'm not. You maligned his character. He's not going to forget that so easily."
    Griffing sat behind his desk and picked up his pen. "I want the story by three."
    "Mark, don't you realize what you've done? We've got murder cases here, and you've cut off our best source of information for the future."
    "You sound like there's going to be more murders, pal." He smiled wryly. "Do you know something I don't know?"
    Colin stepped back as if he'd been shot. "What's that supposed to mean?"
    "Take it the way you want." He shuffled the papers on his desk. "The story, Colin. By three."
    Colin felt his limbs beginning to tremble. He wanted to know what Mark had meant but he needed to get away more. He couldn't afford a full-blown panic attack in front of Mark. Quickly he moved to the door and hurried down the stairs. Judy, the bookkeeper, called to him as he rushed by her.
    "Not now," he snapped and ran for his office. Slamming the door shut, he hurled himself into a chair. His mouth was dry, as if he'd been in the sun for hours, but his body was clammy with cold sweat. The noise in the room was deafening. He realized then that it was his own shallow breathing coming in quick gulps.
    He closed his eyes, afraid to see the walls crumbling, the floor buckling, as he had so many times before. Desperately, he tried to remember what Dr. Safier had told him to do, but no constructive thoughts would come. Only the sickening, ruinous ones: He was going to vomit, become insane, die.
    It's not really happening, he told himself. I only think I feel these things. I won't go insane. I won't die. He tried to open his eyes. Hundred-pound weights pressed down on his lids. He was alone, lost, a minute particle swirling in the universe, growing smaller and smaller, ready to disappear, evaporate.
    A roll of nausea eddied through him, and he dropped his head between his knees. When that had passed he sat up slowly, only to have dizziness overtake him. His mind whirled round and round like a dancer gone mad. Then the pains began. First in his elbows, sharp and piercing, then moving on down his arms, jumping to his thighs, knees, calves, shooting through his feet, exiting from his toes.
    It was subsiding. His breathing slowed, began to come more regularly. The dizziness had narrowed, the nausea gone. He had to open his eyes, see that he existed. Slowly he pushed up his lids, the long lashes forming a scrim. He opened them further, until his eyes took in the room. His desk, chair, typewriter were all in place. The walls were straight.
    Holding out his hand, he saw that there was only a slight tremor now. He felt as if the attack had gone on for hours, but experience told him this wasn't true. Looking at his watch he saw that only seven minutes had elapsed. Mark had never witnessed one of his panic attacks, and Colin was grateful he'd been able to get out of his office before it was too late.
    In comparison to others, this attack had been fairly mild. He'd had the first one when he was twenty-seven, following his father's hideous death. Edward Maguire had been a doctor. At the age of fifty-two, when he developed cancer, he refused treatment. Instead, he stayed at home and slowly disintegrated.
    Both Colin and his brother, Brian, had been summoned home for the last week of their father's life. It had been a