Dead and Gone by Jack Patterson (universal ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Alexa jerked her arm back and rolled her eyes. “If there’s anyone who is an embarrassment right now, it’s you.”

He sneered as he stared her up and down. “You’re pathetic.”

She sat down and shook her head. “And tomorrow, you’ll be through. No one will ever race for you again—if you even have a team.”

CHAPTER 47

KELLY CLENCHED HER PHONE and hit redial as she navigated the streets of downtown Charlotte. This wasn’t how she expected her Saturday night to go. With Maddie at her mother’s, Kelly had anticipated a time of relaxing on the couch with some nice wine and a romantic mystery. Instead, the evening had devolved into hiding from an intruder, smashing him in the head with a frying pan, and trying to prove her husband wasn’t a spend-a-holic who spent his free time on the road in strip clubs.

So much for the quiet evening.

She swerved off I-277 and onto the College Street exit.

Come on, Cal. What is your problem? Answer your phone.

Even dialing Cal’s apparent new number, she couldn’t get him to pick up. Her frustration turned to fear as her tires screeched while pulling into The Observer parking lot.

She hopped out of her car and hustled toward the front door, tapping on the glass to get the security guard’s attention.

“Can I help you, miss?” the guard asked after he unlocked the door.

“I need to speak to Marc Folsom, the sports editor,” she said.

The guard held up his index finger. “Wait just one minute.”

After what felt like five minutes to Kelly, the guard returned and opened the door. “He just finished for the night and told me to send you up.”

The guard gave Kelly directions to the news department and how to find Folsom before relocking the front door.

She stepped onto the elevator and rubbed the thumb drive in her right hand. The idea of sitting on the couch and reading served to be a far more alluring idea, especially at the moment. But Cal needed her—right now. She tried to suppress any thoughts of what he might be doing or how challenging life might be after getting falsely accused of doing something, even if it wasn’t the first time.

In fact, Cal’s life seemed to be a repetitious pattern of bad to worse. Nothing ever ran smoothly for him. It didn’t bother Kelly too much. She knew what she was getting into when she signed up to marry him: an exciting life of adventure and not much stability. At the time, she didn’t consider how she might want stability later on, choosing to dwell on the tantalizing adventure that awaited them. Yet she had to admit that taking flash drives down to his office at 11 o’clock at night to save his job wasn’t exactly what she had in mind.

Stay calm, Kelly. Just stay calm.

The moment the elevator doors opened, she noticed Folsom standing across the newsroom joking with a colleague. She glanced at her reflection in the stainless steel elevator wall before stepping out. Even through the gross distortion, she could tell her cheeks were red—fire red.

She stormed across the room, toward Folsom. He never saw her coming.

“I’ve got half a mind to slug you into next week,” Kelly said.

The employee talking with Folsom glanced at Kelly and excused himself.

“Now, Kelly—” Folsom began.

“No, there’s no Kelly anything. I can’t believe you had the audacity to fall for some half-wit amateurish prank—and all right in the middle of the biggest story your paper’s covered in the past decade.”

Folsom took a few steps back. “Let’s take this into my office.”

Kelly slapped a file folder on top of a desk to the left of Folsom. “No, we’re doing this right here. You fired him publicly and I’m gonna clear his name publicly.”

He put his hands out in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, Kelly. Please, calm down. I’m on your side.”

“I hardly believe that. I don’t care what you say.”

“Believe what you must, but I want to get Cal reinstated as much as you do.”

She rolled her eyes. “I doubt that.” She pointed at the file. “It’s all there.”

He opened the folder. “What exactly am I looking at?”

“Several things. First, there’s an enlarged printout of the digital file you were sent. I circled the areas that indicate it’s a fake.”

Folsom looked at it closely and nodded.

“Then there’s our personal credit card receipt that is time stamped at the exact same time these credit card purchases were supposedly made. Somebody had to steal his card or the card number.”

He nodded. “What else?”

She picked up another sheet of paper and handed it to him. “These are our phone records, indicating that at the time Cal was supposedly gallivanting around Phoenix, he was on the phone with me. Cal’s got guts, but even if he ever did think about going to a strip club—which he wouldn’t—he’d never have the courage to call me from one.”

Folsom rubbed his chin with his free hand. “You seem pretty adamant he wouldn’t do this.”

“Cal likes being married to me.”

He chuckled and closed the folder. “I can’t really argue with anything in here. Let me talk to my publisher in the morning about this and we’ll see what we can do.”

Kelly stamped her foot. “No. You’ll do it now.” She reached over and picked up a phone off the hook and shoved it into Folsom’s hands.

She stepped off to the side and let Folsom call his publisher to deliver the news.

After several moments of what looked like Folsom pleading, he finally smiled and hung up.

“Good news, Kelly. The publisher has decided to temporarily reinstate Cal until we can undergo a full evaluation. And to be honest, I’ll be surprised if anything more is ever said of this.”

She put her hands on her hips. “Oh, something more better be said of it—like an apology to Cal in front of the entire newsroom. I can’t believe this kind of ridiculousness goes on here. You’d skewer any financial entity you cover that fired