Triumph (2 page)

Cursing, Gordon pulled over by a concealing hedge and left the key in the van’s ignition as he got out, slamming the door. Kelly clambered from her seat and slid behind the wheel, jamming on sunglasses as she drove over a low curb into the side lot of the gas station. The maneuver got a sidelong glance from a passerby, but nothing more. The place was busy. Without the WBRX logo, the plain white van didn’t draw attention.

“We have to call. It’s the right thing to do.” Laura shrank back against her seat. “But what if the attendants remember us?”

“They’re not even looking,” Kelly reassured her. She rolled down her window to watch Gordon stuff coins into the slot and punch 911, barely able to hear him mutter the information but not his name. He hung up and tore around to the passenger seat she’d vacated.

“Duty done.” He climbed back in and slammed the door. “Not that I want to be a hero. They usually die first.”

Kelly pulled out into traffic. “Someone just saved our lives, Gordon. Return the favor.”

 

They dashed into the WBRX station complex by the back way, shoving through the double doors into a long corridor. Kelly stopped for a moment to peer through the glass wall at shoulder height, surveying the newsroom cubicles.

Relative quiet prevailed. The night shift hadn’t come in and the day shift was mostly gone, though there were still a few reporters and researchers at work inside the maze of low walls. Newsgathering was a twenty-four-hour operation.

“No one’s looking. Just keep going,” she ordered in a whisper. “I don’t want to explain anything to anybody.”

Her dull feature story was suddenly looking a whole hell of a lot more interesting. Monroe Capp might take it away from her. If there was a link between the gun battle and the disintegrating building, Kelly intended to find it. Intuition told her that there was.
Facts first
, she reminded herself.

“You might not have to explain just yet,” Laura said slowly. “I—I didn’t have official permission from the station manager to bring you and a cameraman and equipment to that building.”

Gordon sighed. “They can’t fire me for that.”

“But didn’t you say you took the van?” Laura countered.

“No one was using it, and you told me we weren’t going to be gone long. Besides, I have my own set of keys for it.”

“Stop it, you two,” Kelly said. “I didn’t sign out when I left. So we’re all in this together. Did either of you tell anyone where we were going?”

“No.” In chorus.

“Then we can worry about all that later. Right now we have to get a look at that tape. Gordon, which editing room?”

“First on the left.” He led the way to a windowless room down the hall and Kelly closed the door. There were mismatched chairs in front of an array of digital equipment connected with snaking cords. He commandeered the biggest chair and pulled his laptop out of his backpack.

He connected it to the camera, fumbling with the USB jack. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said to Kelly. “If you’re thinking this is going to be a sensation on the evening news, starring you, forget it. After your intro, I got zip.”

“I want to see it. Beginning to end.”

In less than a minute, he had downloaded the digital footage and fast-forwarded past the long shot of Kelly in front of the abandoned building, and the interior close-ups. In silence, they reviewed the grainy background images of the car in the parking lot as Gordon’s voice, then Laura’s, intertwined with hers. There was a dark blur behind Kelly—the first car. Then a jittery few seconds of the second car, not in focus. The camera had caught a flash of something patterned—a scarf around the neck of the woman she’d seen. After that, it was all a blur, punctuated by gunshots and garbled shouts.

“Even the sound is crappy.” Gordon lowered the volume and zoomed in and out of video, boosting the pixels into a shifting mosaic that revealed nothing. “This is pointless.” He sat back in the swivel chair. “No way to tell what was going on out there. If we could run this through better software, we might be able to see something.”

“What kind of software? Who has it?” Kelly tapped the pause button.

“Not WBRX,” he answered.

“I wonder if the men in those cars ever noticed us. I don’t think the woman did.” Kelly went back several frames to the close-up on the patterned scarf, then forward for a few. “She never got out of the car.”

“You sure about that?” Gordon wanted to know.

“I could be wrong.”

“Maybe you saw something we didn’t. Laura and I didn’t get close to where the floor ended. You were practically in the weeds,” Gordon replied.

“No, I wasn’t. And I wasn’t looking out at the parking lot for very long.”

“It’s possible they saw you,” Gordon insisted.

“Not only that. They could have recognized you, Kelly,” Laura said nervously. “We have to ’fess up. What if someone comes after you or me or Gordon? The police ought to know we were there. Wait a minute—do you think the man who yelled at us to get out was a cop?”

“Maybe. Or some kind of special agent. Either way, he was undercover,” Kelly added. “Do you two remember anything about him? He’s nowhere on the tape.” There was no doubt in her mind that their rescuer had stayed out of camera range on purpose.

Gordon folded burly arms across his chest. “Gee whiz. Sorry. I was dodging bullets.”

“I wasn’t trying to blame you for anything,” Kelly said.

Gordon looked a little ashamed of himself for being snotty. “Yeah, I know. Forget it.” The blunt words were somehow soothing. “I don’t think any of us are thinking straight after what happened.”

“Kelly, that man must have been watching you from the second you stepped inside the building,” Laura said.

“Watching from where? I didn’t see any other footprints,” Kelly protested. Then she remembered the slab staircase that she’d passed. And the rickety scaffolding in back. Could have been either. She hadn’t been alone in that building.

“Maybe he can fly.” Gordon again. Sarcasm was his default mode. “No cape, though. Just that leather jacket. I don’t know why you assume he’s a good guy, by the way.”

“I hope he is,” Kelly replied honestly. “Anyway, we just happened to be there for the taping. If no one at the station knew where we were, how would anyone else?”

“My name wasn’t on the whiteboard,” Laura said.

“I assumed you’d entered mine.” Gordon stared at the laptop screen as it flickered and went dark.

“I didn’t.”

The assignment editor listed every reporter at WBRX and where they were, hour by hour, on the all-important whiteboard. In case of breaking news, it took only seconds to find the people nearest the scene and match them up with a crew. Kelly hadn’t bothered to fill in the information, short on time after she’d skipped the afternoon story meeting, not mentioning she was heading out to tape an intro with Gordon and Laura.

“I just thought of something else. The GPS unit in the van transmits to the station,” Gordon pointed out. “Someone around here is going to find out where we were soon enough. And then we’ll catch hell. I need a drink. A big, stiff drink.”

Kelly caught Laura’s worried glance. The last thing they needed was Gordon shooting off his mouth at the bar near WBRX. “Go with him. I’ll cover for both of you here if I have to.”

“I don’t drink, Kelly. You know that.”

“Then I’ll treat you to a ginger ale from the vending machine,” Gordon offered, “I mean, if that’s okay with your mommy.”

He looked toward Kelly, who only nodded.

Shakily, Laura rose and followed him out of the editing room.

Kelly sat back and tried to think.

What, where, when
—she made a mental outline. A routine location taping at an abandoned building had exploded into unexpected violence. What she didn’t know and couldn’t begin to guess at was
who
and
why
. Gordon could be right about it being gang warfare.

Terror had fractured her sense of time. It hadn’t taken long. She’d been pinned for only a few seconds. But Kelly still tingled where the man’s powerful body had pressed against hers, held her so tightly it was hard to breathe—and risked his life to give her a chance to escape.

He must have had backup somewhere in the half-finished building. Nobody was invincible. She hadn’t noticed body armor under that leather jacket. Just a T-shirt.

An adrenaline rush flushed her cheeks with heat. Kelly pushed her long blond hair away from her face and wound a hand through it, avoiding the tender spot where her head had connected with the concrete pillar. She lifted the silky strands away from her neck to cool down.

Preoccupied, she listened to the bulletins coming from the emergency response scanners on the assignment desk, trying to make sense of the brief exchanges between the speakers and remember the codes. She got the gist of it—she’d had a lot of practice.

Not a word about a shoot-out at an abandoned construction site.

She closed her eyes, trying to visualize the man who’d saved all of them. As the seconds ticked by, the feeling that she knew him from somewhere got stronger. Kelly had an excellent memory for faces, a knack that had been honed to a skill as part of her job. Celebrities, politicians, crooks, ordinary citizens—she had to remember them all.

There wasn’t anything ordinary about her guardian angel, and she’d gotten only a glimpse of his profile. But 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.

A half minute of dead air followed. It was a slow night for Atlanta.

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 falling to the floor.

“Here,” he said. “Keep ’em safe until you decide what to do. I’m going home.”

Kelly knew how often he stopped in at the bar the staff reporters and freelancers frequented. She couldn’t ask Laura to babysit him a second time.

“No talking,” she warned him, setting the equipment aside.