Marrying Mike...Again by Alicia Scott Read Free Book Online Page A

people in all night, finishing stories, running presses. Newspapers never sleep, right?
    Well, maybe in big cities. Alexandria’s Citizen’s Post, on the other hand, went to bed at eight each night. The presses ran all night long but, thanks to automation, took only six people to run. When the delivery crews arrived at five in the morning, they pulled up to the back, so no one noticed a letter in the front mail drop until offices opened at eight o’clock.
    “Come on, don’t you guys at least have a janitor?” Koontz wanted to know.
    “You mean Hank?”
    “Sure, Hank. Let’s all go talk to Hank.”
    They all went and talked to Hank. He was seventy-five years old and deaf as a doornail. Mike wasn’t sure, but he believed they finally established that Hank hadn’t seen anything. The security guard was worse. Mike and Rusty knew him from his former days as a cop. He’d been a drunkard then and apparently hadn’t done a thing to clean up his act. The editor-in-chief was sorry, but what more could he say? If they did learn anything, they’d pass it along, right? After all, Citizen’s Post had cooperated with them….
    Koontz said, “Sure,” without blinking an eye, but Mike knew his partner was lying. Koontz held reporters in even greater contempt than defense attorneys.
    Three-thirty in the afternoon, they descended the steps of the newspaper building.
    “These kids are like ghosts,” Koontz muttered. “Who really pays attention to a lone thirteen-year-old anyway? Maybe we are safer when they’re traveling in packs.”
    “Vee’s gotta be a new alias.”
    “I don’t like it.” Koontz shook his head. He had a good instinct about these things, so if he was troubled, Mike was troubled.
    He glanced at his watch again. “Three-thirty,” he commented.
    “Afternoon patrol is probably in the east side….”
    “And now school’s out.”
    “Wonderful. Freakin’ wonderful.”
    They headed for their car.
     
    “What now?” Koontz asked a few minutes later. Mike gave it some thought. He’d told Sandra they’d have an ID by the end of the day. There had to be something more they could do.
    “We got a copy of the letter. Let’s take it to the junior high and see if a teacher recognizes the writing style. Maybe some word or phrase will ring some bells.”
    “Oh, so now we head into the east side?”
    “Great plan, isn’t it? Body armor’s in the back. I’ll fasten yours, you fasten mine.”
    Koontz grudgingly got out of the car and popped the trunk. “We are not being paid enough for this,” he said as he fetched two Kevlar vests.
    Mike was more philosophical. “Yeah, but think of how much the city will spend on our funerals.”
     
    The ride from Alexandria’s city center to the east side took less than fifteen minutes, and was as dramatic as crossing from one country into the next. From wide, tree-lined streets, to narrow, cracking asphalt. From quaint brick storefronts and grand stone facades to boarded-up row houses and crumbling old mills. The streets were darker here and it wasn’t just in Mike’s head—as fast as the city installed new street lamps, the dealers sent their runners to shoot them out. Light was bad for business.
    Deeper in, old textile mills, once the lifeblood of the town, sagged on their foundations, condemned, but still inhabited by vagrants sporting crack pipes. A group of teens loitered on one corner, smoking cigarettes and giving Mike and Koontz’s unmarked car a baleful stare. More kids on the next block and now some working girls. The east side was never empty.
    Koontz turned the corner and they were on Main Street, where a few family businesses did their best to survive. There was the local convenience store, known for its hot coffee and good conversation. Smithy Jones ran it with his wife, Bess, and was on good terms with the police. Smithy had been a decorated marine in Vietnam, and the last dope-head stupid enough to stick him up had gone straight from the store