Calamity Jayne Heads West Read Free Page B

office, and headed for the back door.
    I generally like to conduct a quick sweep of the building upon entering—you know, like the Secret Service does when a bigwig is coming to town—unless or until I get the green flag from Smitty, the Gazette sports and graphics guru and all-around good guy. Stan Rodgers—publisher, editor in chief, and the big boss man—is known for his mercurial moods. Un-fairly, most of the time I’m the one who gets credit for triggering his little episodes.
    I suppose I should tell you that my employment at the Gazette has been a little like my gramma’s choles-terol numbers: up and down, up and down. I’ve actu-ally been fired by Stan twice. But both times were so not my fault. You tell me: Is it my fault the boss’s wife’sdear Aunt Deanie’s obit pic looked more like a Mr. Stubby Burkholder? And that typo in the Quik Lube ad with the picture of the local mechanics, arms crossed and grinning, that read: We’re here to service you instead of serve you ? Like that wouldn’t have gotten past you, too.
    Thankfully, Stan is first and foremost a man of busi-ness. When I came to him with my dead-shyster-in-the-trunk story last year, he was eager to give me a second—uh, third—chance. Okay, so I sort of black-mailed him into taking me back. Still, it worked out for everyone in the long run. As it happens, I have a certain nose for news that comes in handy when you’re a reporter type. And Stan just wants to sell newspapers. It’s win-win.
    I’m also learning to exploit Stan’s little idiosyn-crasies to my advantage. This knowledge recently nabbed me some tuition assistance, a raise in salary, and office equipment that didn’t qualify for The An-tiques Roadshow . After I’d successfully completed two college journalism courses, Stan the man made good on his promise to replace a bow-legged card table he’d had the chutzpah to call my desk, a chair that could serve double duty as an interrogation tool at Guan-tanamo, and a computer that froze up so often it should be sitting alongside the ice cream cakes at Un-cle Frank’s.
    I crept in the back door of the newspaper office, si-lencing with one hand the stupid little bell Stan had stuck on it last week to alert him of comings and goings. I spotted Smitty bent over ad copy in the layout room.
    “Red, green, or amber?” I whispered.
    “Amber,” he replied. “Proceed with caution.”
    “Roger that,” I told him with a crisp salute, then scur-ried over to my little corner near the back. I ran a hand across the top of my “new” desk—in reality, a cast-offfrom one of the local schools—and sank into my brand-new, black leather, ergonomically approved desk chair. And dropped so fast I almost smacked my chin.
    “What the heck—?” I focused on my computer mon-itor, but had to lift my chin so high to see it that the back of my head touched my shoulder blades and my wrists bent at unnatural angles to access the keyboard. Hello, carpal tunnel!
    “Who’s been sitting in my chair?” I roared, feeling like a character from “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” but looking like one of the seven dwarves. “Okay, who’s the smartass with too much time on their hands?”
    A shadow fell over the top of me. Searing hot breath warmed the part in my hair.
    “You rang?”
    I found my new chair suddenly twirled merry-go-round style, stopping just this side of Vomitville so I could confront the culprit. I gulped when I discovered Goldilocks in this vignette stood over six feet tall, had flaming red hair and hands the size of Papa Bear’s paws.
    “Oh. Hey, Shelby Lynn.” She was the high school homecoming queen I’d teamed up with last fall to get the goods on a reclusive best-selling author. And I’d just solved the who’s been sitting in my chair whodunit in record time. How do I do it?
    “Long time, no see,” I said.
    “You were at my graduation party two weeks ago,” Shelby Lynn reminded me.
    I nodded. “Which reminds me, I never