Dirk Macklin

Dirk Macklin takes the desk the minute Dale clears out and holds it till sign-off, reading the overnight file into the mic the way another man might read a will. He will not put a claim on air until he has it from two sources that do not know the other exists, and he says so, by name, when a caller tries to skip that step. The stack in front of him is real paper: court dockets, permit filings, expired licenses, the kind of record nobody keeps except somebody who assumes it will need proving later. He has been sued once for reading a name correctly. He has not stopped reading names. When the phone goes quiet he reads the silence too, on the theory that somebody is still there and just hasn't decided to talk yet.