LITMIR.BIZ

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up against it so he was standing over her. She looked up at him and waited to hear what he had to say. “One is you will come to me for help if you need it.” She nodded. “Two - you will give me regular updates on your progress or lack thereof. You may not want me to report to the chain of command, but I want to know everything.” She nodded again, but she wasn’t sure she meant this one. “One more, I’ll give you two months. If at the end of two months you still don’t have anything solid, you’ll give up this lead.” She nodded again.

      “You won’t regret this, Will,” she said standing and touching his arm without thinking about it first. She pulled her hand away quickly and made her way to the door fighting the urge to run out of the office. His eyes followed her - she could feel them.

      “I sure hope not,” he said returning to his seat and picking up his reading glasses. She blew Joyce a kiss as she breezed past and rushed to her desk. She packed her laptop and put the disc securely in the bag.

      “Where’s the fire, Little Girl?” Burt asked, watching her from behind the junk yard he called his desk.

      “Some of us actually work around here,” she said looking around to make sure she wasn’t forgetting anything. Afraid of what Burt might have done to her coffee while unattended, she tossed the remaining few drinks in the garbage.

      “Some of us actually earned the right to work here,” he said snorting again.

      “Yes. Some of us have. You, I’m sure, were hired and retained out of pity,” she grabbed her suit jacket off the back of her chair and headed for the door. She tried not to point at Burt and yell, “In your face, loser!”

      As she walked to the elevator, she thought about how competitive she was. She always had to win. She even cheated at Candyland when she was a kid. Sometimes it served her well - like her drive to accomplish great things in her career, but it didn’t serve her so well in her personal life. Who cares, she thought. She hoped her winning spirit wouldn’t let her down now. This story could be her Pulitzer. It could be her book deal, her opportunity to be on talk shows and her opportunity to “in your face” all the people she didn’t like in high school and college, especially the person she saw as her biggest competition - Tara Tierra.

      That wasn’t even her real name. Her real name was Tara Butmacher. No one blamed her for changing it as soon as she turned 18 years old. Tierra actually suited Tara physically. She was perfect. Perfect skin and her hair never moved. Tara grew up across town from Kristine. Her dad had money - a lot of it. Tara and Kristine competed against each other in tennis matches from the time they were seven or eight years old through high school. Then, while in high school, they competed against each other in journalism. Tara always beat Kristine in tennis, but Kristine always beat Tara at journalism. Kristine won some recognition for her work in college, but she was always in a different division because of her smaller, less prestigious school. Tara went to a very old, highly respected and expensive college (thanks to Mr. Butmacher’s fortune) and landed a very good job being a weekend anchor, or news reader as Kristine liked to call her, at one of New York’s lower rated stations. Tara would do an occasional feature on the evening news, but she didn’t get the hard news stories.

      While Kristine considered Tara a pain in her butt from day one, she wondered if she ever even registered a blip on Tara’s radar. Of course, Kristine couldn’t completely blame herself for disliking Tara. Females, even Tara’s friends, typically disliked Tara.

      Tara was untouchable. She had shiny blonde hair, big blue eyes and skin like a porcelain doll. She was one of those people who didn’t seem to sweat. At the end of a grueling three set tennis match Kristine would be drenched with perspiration, ponytail soaked with no makeup left. Tara still looked like she had just walked onto the court. Now that they were both in New York, Kristine had the more prestigious job, but Tara was the one people recognized when they saw her walking down the street.

      Someday Tara may have to report on what a huge success Kristine had made of herself, she thought. Tara would ask what it was like to be recognized as one of the best journalists in the world, and Kristine would blush bashfully and answer with the perfect humble response, “I’m just trying to make the world a better place for our children.” Kristine smiled to herself as the elevator doors opened to the lobby. It was a good daydream that she would make come true someday. But first, she had to get this story. She burst through the doors of the building determined to do just that.

       Chapter Two

      The next two months were filled with excitement - sometimes good, sometimes scary. The good excitement brought leads as she closed in on more and more facts about the story she chased. The scary brought calls to her apartment late at night, a broken lock on her desk drawer in the newsroom, a near miss with a car in a cross-walk, and she was pretty sure someone had broken into her apartment. She had arrived home one night and things were just not right - nothing obvious but an item here or there had been moved. At first she chalked these events up to paranoia, but eventually she conceded these weren’t just coincidence.

      On the morning of the two month deadline given by Will, Kristine left her second floor apartment and stood a match up against the corner of the door. It was a little trick she had learned from a TV show, but it let her know if anyone entered her apartment. She began the ritual after the potential break-in.

      It was a gloomy, crisp fall morning - the kind of morning when the dampness from the last night’s rain made the air feel colder than it was. She left her building and walked the six blocks to work. She considered the 12 blocks to and from work (and any other walking she did to tail a lead) her exercise for the day. She didn’t like to sweat - not even when she was playing tennis trying to get scholarship money, and she certainly didn’t see the benefit of the phrase, “No pain, no gain.” The only thing she liked less than sweating was pain. She would see people jogging on the streets, and they never looked like they were enjoying themselves.

      Feeling threatened made avoiding pain an even more important part of Kristine’s life. She changed her schedule often so she had no routine. She went to work during the busiest time of the morning now. Instead of comments about being early, Ed the security guard made comments about her sleeping late or keeping banker’s hours. Burt Newman was beating her into the office on some mornings - a first since she began at the paper three years ago.

      She also felt the need to perform security checks when she got to her desk. She knew better than to keep anything important in her desk or at her apartment – if anyone broke into them, they wouldn’t find any of her work. She checked the drawers of her desk and around the lock for scratches. She put a piece of clear tape along the side of her drawers so she could tell if they had been opened. Everything seemed okay.

      “Don’t worry, Little Girl. No one cares what you have in your desk,” Burt Newman snarled from across his desk.

      “Mind your own business, Burt,” she said as she docked her computer.

      “The princess is paranoid,” said Burt amused.

      “You know, if you spent half as much time on your personal hygiene as you do trying to piss me off, you wouldn’t be so repulsive to look at and smell. You must have to hold your wife captive so she can’t escape or is she a pathetic mess like you are,” she snapped. As the words came out of her mouth, she was sorry. Her sparring had never gotten so personal or so mean. She saw from the look on his face she had hurt him. “I’m sorry, Burt.”

      “I expect as much from you,” he said and walked away from his desk. She buried her face in her hands and rubbed her temples. Her phone rang. She saw from the extension it was Joyce.

      “Hello?”

      “Mr. Montgomery would like to see you.”

      “I’ll be right there.” Her hand shook a little as she put down the phone. She stood up and picked up her bag, a note pad and a pen. She tried to think of something nice to say to Joyce. It also dawned on her how many people disliked her in that office. The men in the Sports Department liked her, she consoled herself. She sighed - that’s because she

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