Triumph Read Free Page B

she was confident that his name would come to her. When she calmed down. Too bad they had absolutely no visual for him.
    Gordon and Laura came back in. The assistant producer held an unopened ginger ale, but the cameraman had already cracked a coke and was sipping from it. He set another on the desk for Kelly. She murmured her thanks and left it at that.
    Laura clutched her cold can of ginger ale, then rolled it over her forehead. “That man—well, I guess he wasn’t a security guard either.”
    She seemed to be trying to pull a few facts together herself. “There was supposed to be one on the site—I had it written down.” She started leafing through a notebook, but her hands were unsteady. “Somewhere. I can’t find it. The pages are out of order.”
    “He definitely wasn’t a guard,” Kelly said thoughtfully.
    “Not dramatic enough for you?” Gordon asked. “How about hit man? Or professional assassin? Skip the facts. Just get the story on the air and ask questions later. That’s the WBRX way.”
    “Gordon, don’t.” Laura’s voice quavered.
    “Just thinking aloud. For sure, he was nothing to mess with.” Gordon rubbed his chin. “He had a helluva grip on you, Kelly.”
    She waved away the comment. “Oh, shut up.”
    The cameraman obliged. For three seconds. “So what now?”
    Laura stuffed stray pages inside the notebook, giving up on organizing them. “I can take a cubicle by the assignment desk for a while and keep tabs on the scanners,” she volunteered. “No one will notice.”
    “Thanks, Laura. I was just listening to them from in here. Nothing yet. But people around here would look at me funny if I went out there,” Kelly said. In the station hierarchy, anchors ranked at the top. She’d turned reporter for a day, but some busybody would ask questions if she was seen doing grunt work.
    Kelly turned her head and listened again. The constant crackle was inescapable. Law enforcement, paramedic, and firefighter communications were monitored around the clock at WBRX, and so was an Internet scanner feed that buzzed with tips coming in day and night. When a hot story broke, the newsroom swung into action.
    The routine bulletins droned on. Laura and Gordon got quiet, listening too. Kelly heard the code for an MVA—motor vehicle accident—on a highway ramp.
    Multiple aided. Additional EMS requested to scene.
    A half minute of dead air followed. It was a slow night for Atlanta.
    Attempted robbery, liquor store. Unit en route.
    Still nothing on the shooting. She glanced up at the large clock on the wall of the editing room. A lot of time had passed since then.
    Intuition told Kelly something big had gone down in the parking lot, something she didn’t understand, and she’d gone running in the opposite direction. Why? She mentally answered the question.
    Fear, plain and simple. Concern for Laura and Gordon. The instinct to save her own skin—and the uncharacteristic impulse to obey orders from a guardian angel with rough moves and lightning-fast reflexes.
    Kelly was dying to know what had happened, and not just to him. It had been too long since she’d felt the thrill of being on the scene of an unfolding story, when nothing and no one else mattered.
    “Listen, guys, there’s something else we have to think about,” Laura fretted. “We were at the scene, we saw the cars, and Kelly and I glimpsed who was in them. Um, doesn’t that make us witnesses?”
    “Yes, it does. But you two can leave me out of it,” Gordon said.
    “I don’t make the news, I just get nifty pictures of it. Mr. Film at Eleven, that’s me.”
    “Did you put booze in that soda, Gordon? The tape can be subpoenaed,” Kelly said bluntly.
    “No one’s seen it besides us. I could erase it.” Gordon got up as if every bone in his body ached.
    “No!” Kelly’s vehemence got through to him.
    Without shutting the laptop down, he thrust it and the video camera into Kelly’s arms. She had to struggle to keep both from