Love. Local. Latebreaking.: Book 1 in the newsroom romance series

by H. Laurence Lareau

  Once he’d caught two minutes of video in the workroom, Jake rushed back outside to the front of the house, where he re-set his camera’s controls and snapped it onto the waiting tripod, and quickly adjusted the leveling claw to shoot the cops bringing suspects back out and into a newly arrived paddy wagon.

  As the first scared suspects were escorted—a police euphemism for a fast-walk motivated by deftly applied grinding pressure where handcuffs met skin and bone—to the paddy wagon, Jake pulled back from his steaming-over viewfinder.

  “You aren’t on public property now, asshole,” rasped the gravelly parade-ground voice of the In-Charge Man. “And I’m not in front of your camera. So put it down slowly.” Jake heard an unmistakeable metal ratcheting sound and knew with a sudden jolt of fear that the In-Charge Man was about to handcuff him.

  Chapter Ten

  Des Moines, Iowa

  Tuesday, October 15

  6:45 a.m.

  Jake’s intestines shook with the realization that he was about to be arrested, handcuffed, and taken away to wherever the In-Charge Man’s tender mercies desired. He had just escaped a guns-drawn, adrenaline-fueled violence festival without the bulletproof vest he had stopped by the station to put on this morning. Guns had been everywhere, drawn and ready, within easy reach, all loaded and ready to kill. He had seen—heck, he had captured in portrait-like detail—the transfixing fear overwhelming the drug-house workers as they anticipated a beatdown or a bullet’s fiery penetration.

  Now Jake realized that his own escape from the bust hadn’t been complete. He hadn’t been shot, but he had seen the In-Charge Man’s fury, and he knew that he wasn’t going to be led gently to a seat in a squad car once those cuffs were on. Jake’s martial arts training had taught him how to take a blow, but the training hadn’t exactly emphasized self-defense while handcuffed. At least, Jake thought, nobody fired any shots. That means he won’t shoot me. It would be impossible for him to explain me getting shot, outside the house, without anyone else doing any shooting.

  Luck seemed to be keeping more bullets from him than the vest ever could have. Jake’s thoughts suddenly turned to Karli. He hadn’t seen her since he had followed the cops into the house. She had the vest on, yes, but that wouldn’t have saved her from In-Charge Man’s handcuffs any more that it would’ve saved him.

  And she looked so good today. It would be terrible for her to be cuffed and dragged off.

  His wandering thoughts were cut off by the strong sound of her voice: “You may not be in front of his camera, but you’re in front of mine,” he heard her say. An actual human snarl and a further rattle of the cuffs prompted him to sneak a look back over his shoulder. He saw the back of In-Charge Man, who had turned to look down at Karli. She held her iPhone steadily toward his face and started speaking calmly before he could start yelling at her. “Here’s how this is going to go. You are going to walk away from here and go about your business, while Jake and I are going to forget we ever saw you. If you turn up at the press conference, we will all greet one another as complete strangers, and we will have a nice, friendly interview. So how about you keep yourself from public embarrassment and get back to your bust?”

  A long, unmoving silence followed Karli’s speech. Jake kept as still as a rabbit under a hawk’s shadow, while In-Charge Man and Karli stared resolutely at one another. Karli broke the impasse by glancing back at her iPhone’s horizontal screen, then pinching across its surface to call up the zoom function. In-Charge Man snarled one last time, then turned and stumped off without giving Jake so much as a glance over his departing shoulder.

  “Holy shit, Karli! You’re brilliant,” Jake said. “Thanks.”

  “We’ve overstayed our welcome, I think,” she said, acknowledging his thanks with a quick shrug. “Let’s get to the station before they come up with other ideas. We have a story to tell.”

  Jake turned to power down his gear, pack it up, and schlep the PortaBrace bag and his tripod back to the truck. He and Karli put the gear away and buckled in. Jake, sweaty from the strain of shooting but chilled by the fading of his adrenaline, turned the key and pulled the Ford away from the curb. A companionable silence rode with them for a few blocks, as Jake sighed in relief at the great save Karli had made to keep his wrists out of the In-Charge Man’s cuffs.

  She wasn’t physically imposing. But she was a tight package physically, with the glutes and the posture and the strength and the focus. Her physicality was slim and tempered: knife-like, or maybe scalpel-like. Not physically imposing like a big man—like Will McMillian.

  But man, was she ever imposing. She had utterly disarmed that In-Charge bastard two times, leaving him speechless and without options. And she had saved them both from being arrested—however illegally the first time—and losing the story altogether. Come to think of it, he couldn’t dream up a hotter combination than Karli’s fearless, authoritative speech, her formidable, athletic physique, and her striking, photogenic countenance. She was intellectually stunning, physically arousing, and she had a face that blended those attributes with the kindness of someone who is deeply compassionate and interested. He felt the twitch beginning again and recalled the pulse-quickening combination of her smooth skin and vanilla-and-spice scent. They turned his systems on just as surely as the sight of a fox made beagles bark and give chase.

  He had begun the day resolved to keep her safe. Yet she was the one who had saved them both.

  Just as he took in a breath to say thanks again for the rescue, Karli, who had apparently been thinking thoughts of her own, turned to him and said, “Thanks again for the vest, Jake.”

  Startled, he turned to her and asked the question that had been bubbling in the back of his mind since he’d seen her scared face and heard her asking about vests. “Why weren’t you wearing a vest, Karli? They’re right there at the station, just for stories like this. And you may not realize it until you see the footage, but this was very nearly a trip to the shooting range.”

  “Didn’t you bring it for me?” Karli asked, surprise in her eyes and her voice. “Isn’t that what you put on me?”

  “And if you didn’t know about the station’s vests, why didn’t you ask the cops for one? They told you there were guns and that this was a big drug operation.” Jake’s voice grew more emphatic and stern: “Or did you think it was fine to get shot? Or did you think you would be safe on the sidelines wearing your photog’s vest while he went into the building to get shot?”

  “What?” Karli asked defensively, pulling at the vest’s Velcro straps. “Are you saying you gave me your vest?”

  “Which is better than that moron McMillian did,” Jake said, his eyes flashing and his hands strangling the steering wheel. His fear for Karli’s safety had come back to life, only now it was transformed into fury. “He crushes on you like he does every new face on the news, and he figures he’ll make time by tipping the story to you. But does he ever consider that his gift of a tip might get you shot? Does he ever mention that a vest would be a good idea? No. Because he’s a moron who thinks about everything only as it relates to his dick and whether he can get it serviced.”

  “This tip wasn’t about McMillian having a crush on me, Jake,” Karli said, shrugging out of the vest and dumping it on the seat between them. “He told me the police had been watching my stories and thought I could treat them fairly.”

  “That’s completely bogus, Karli,” Jake answered. “McMillian isn’t connected with any police powers. Wasn’t it obvious that he hadn’t cleared the tip when the boss dude started chewing him out? He was just hoping to get in your good graces—and then into your pants.”

  Karli’s mouth opened wider with each sentence, astonishment mixed with indignation on her face. “You pig!” she exclaimed. “Just because you’re a photog who thinks with your dick, you think everyone else does, too. I’ll have you know that Wil has been a gentleman to me, and there hasn’t even been a hint of him trying to get into my pants.”

  “I think wit
h my dick?” Jake turned his eyes from the road to glare hard at Karli, an odd and unaccustomed feeling of—what, jealousy?—focusing his eyes like lasers on Karli. “I’ve known your good friend Will since high school, and he has only ever talked to any woman because he wants her in the sack. But you know all about him from what, one in-person meeting, a phone call and an entire text message? Boy, you have read that guy’s book cover-to-cover.”

  Jake swung his eyes in exasperation back to the road—just in time to see a cat run out into the street. He jerked the wheel and slammed on the brakes, squealing the tires, raising a cloud of stinky blue burnt-rubber smoke, and stalling the truck.

  “Are you crazy?” Karli yelled, her eyes flashing with anger and fear. “It was just a cat, and you go screeching all over the road!”

  The cat scrambled safely across the street. Jake laid his forehead on the arms he had crossed atop the steering wheel. He growled, “Shit!” through gritted teeth. He sucked in his next breath with a wet, shaking sound, then muttered down into his lap: “You’re seriously telling me you want me to run over cats with my truck?”

  “I don’t want you to scare me like that!”

  After another shaky inhalation, Jake raised his head from the wheel, started the engine again, shifted into gear, and began driving with hands at 10:00 and 2:00. He drove for a few minutes, listening to Karli’s angry breathing gradually return to normal as her pen scratched in her notebook.

  “I really wish I had the video of that cop trying to hassle you. My iPhone’s battery was totally dead, though, so I didn’t get a thing.” Karli concluded in exasperation.

  After a pause and more notebook-scratching she said, “It sucks that I couldn’t do a stand-up while we were still there. Even five seconds of me in front of that house, explaining where it was or what they found there would’ve been a nice bridge between the amount seized and the actual raid, wouldn’t it?”

  Jake did not respond by word or gesture. He drove. Carefully.

  “So I think we have to lead with the latest stuff. Vince or I will be able to call and get how many guys they arrested and how much heroin they found. You got video of the drugs and the guys coming out into the wagon, right?”

  Jake nodded, but he said nothing. He continued cautiously driving.

  “Maybe not, though. Didn’t you say that there were a lot of guns in there? Maybe we should lead with video of the guns and drugs.” Karli paused, chewing the end of her pen. “I wonder when the press conference will be. Either they’ll have to get it in before noon today so we don’t beat them and show that they’re leaking, or they’ll wait till tomorrow to see if we can get the rest of the story through the leak. Then they’ll be able to fix the leak for next time.” She turned to Jake. “Which do you think?”

  Jake shrugged and drove, flicking his eyes from mirror to road and back.

  Karli missed the shrug because she’d turned her attention to her backpack. She bent over to rummage through the bag, making frustrated sounds with each new grope into its dark depths. “I really need a diet Dew,” she said, “and I thought I had one in here.” She kept ineffectually pushing the same clutch purse and make-up kit around on the top of the bag’s mounded contents. Then, finally, after picking the bag up into her lap, she stuck her arm deeply in. “Ooh, there it is,” she cooed to herself, then dragged a diet Mountain Dew out from the bottom of the bag, gum wrappers and other backpack detritus stuck to its condensation-damp label. Jake watched out of the corner of his eye as she quickly wiped off the bits and flicked them mostly back into the bag. He saw that she disregarded the wet morsels of garbage that stuck to the Ranger’s transmission hump as she twisted the top off the bottle and took a long, suction-y drink that pulled the bottle’s sides in.

  “That’s better,” she sighed. “Now, I’m thinking this should be a live-from-the-newsroom piece.

  Do you think that would be better than on-set? That choice will be pretty important, because this could well be the piece that catches Chicago’s eye. My reporting is going to be strong, and your pictures are going to make it sing if we can edit it well.”

  Jake shrugged again, unnoticed again, as Karli’s eyes were back in her notebook. He kept driving to the station, at precisely the speed limit.

  As they drew near to the station, Jake broke his silence: “I started this day with a single idea,” he said, his eyes constantly roving in driver’s ed textbook fashion. “I was going to make people safer today. I don’t ever want to be responsible for someone being hurt again. Next time, buy a vest.

  “And thanks for the saves. But I’m not sticking around to edit. Please tell Vince I’m not ready to come back yet. I’m sure you can talk Mary Rose into cutting the story together for you. She has great ideas and will do a super job.”

  Karli, who had been completely absorbed in developing her reporting ideas, looked up with delayed-response surprise. Seeing that Jake looked to be in earnest, she gazed searchingly into his eyes. Feeling the warm swell of tears begin, Jake looked away to pull into a spot, step on the parking brake, and turn the key off.

  “Jake, what happened?” Karli asked, stuffing her notebook, pen, and iPhone into her pack quickly so she could keep talking as he got out to unload. “Why can’t you come back to work? We’re both fine, after all. And I need you.”

  At that last comment, Jake turned sharply to look back at Karli. “You can’t need me...” he began, his throat feeling warm and husky.

  “Yes,” Karli interrupted, with a changed, businesslike tone to her voice. “I do. Without your video, I’m never going to get out of flyover country and into a real news market. I came here because there are supposed to be great shooters who can make my reporting come to life. But you’re the only one here who has what it takes to really catch a major market’s eye. So, yeah, I do need you.”

  Jake thought he had heard something else in her voice the first time. If Karli really needed him, he felt inadequate. He wasn’t the kind of man who people could ever need. He couldn’t be relied upon—well, he could: he reliably made dangerous choices. And that made a sore, scraping pain deep inside him. Karli was a dynamo, a real powerhouse, and she always seemed so close to having the kindness that he craved and couldn’t deserve, but it was never directed at him. And then she would go all cold and career-bitchy on him, straight up announcing that she needed to use him instead of needing him.

  As the thoughts raced through his head, she swung her pack onto a businesslike shoulder and reached out to take the equipment bag from Jake. He handed it over without a twitch. It looked like she really didn’t need him, she really did just want to use him.

  “Look,” he said, heaving a deep, shaky breath, “it isn’t like I need the job.” He paused. “Tell Vince I’ll talk to him tomorrow.” With that, he climbed back into the truck, closed his door, and pulled away from the station. And from Karli.

  He couldn’t quite hear her over the truck’s engine, but her lips were easy enough to read: “Asshole.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Des Moines, Iowa

  Tuesday, October 15

  6:00 p.m.

  Stu Heintz, the rookie weekend anchorman, took the news, and himself, very seriously. As the opening credits and music faded to a head-and-shoulders shot of him on the news set, he looked into the teleprompter mounted to the studio camera’s lens and read the words scrolling up the display with a gleaming eye. “Tonight, an exclusive report on one of the largest heroin busts in Des Moines history. Three NewsFirst’s Karli Lewis was on the scene with photographer Jake Gibson, where they followed the police into an eastern Des Moines residence where the drugs were being processed. Karli joins us now, live from the newsroom, with the story. Karli?”

  Karli heard Chuck in her earpiece, telling her to stand by, telling the sound engineer to open her microphone, and calling for the technical director to cut to her camera in the newsroom. From beside the camera, Mary Rose pointed at her. Karli looked earnestly into the camera and began her report, catc
hing Mary Rose’s smiling thumbs-up: “The more than 1,000 pounds of heroin seized in eastern Des Moines today would have found their way across the midwest, police are saying. The search warrant served this morning yielded more than the heroin, too. Thirteen men were arrested at the scene, and police seized more than a dozen guns as well as about $24,000 in cash and relatively small amounts of marijuana and other drugs.

  “Police say that they knew something big was going on in the quiet neighborhood house because there was so much traffic in and out. But they didn’t expect to find as much as the roughly $30,000,000 worth of heroin that was wrapped onto forklift pallets.”

  As Karli finished her live introduction, she heard Chuck call for the package to roll, then for the cut to the recorded part of her story. It opened with Jake’s tense action video of the stun grenades shaking the house. In a continuous take, Jake’s camera swung to the cops smashing the door down. As Karli’s recorded narration went on to detail the scope of the bust, the video rolled mostly as Jake had shot it, with the audio of officers shouting with bleeped-out expletives coming up full volume between Karli’s sentences.

  Once the figures and likely drug cartel relationships had been spelled out by Karli’s narration and sound bites from law enforcement, the video ended and Karli heard Chuck cue her back live. “Each of the thirteen suspects arrested at the scene will have their first appearances in Polk County District Court within 48 hours. Law enforcement personnel told me on condition of anonymity that all of those cases will likely be transferred to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Iowa—where the criminal penalties can be much more severe—within the next few weeks.

  “Three NewsFirst is planning a series of reports over the coming weeks detailing the heroin trade in central Iowa and beyond.” She had gotten Jerry, Holly, and Vince to all agree to the series this afternoon. “Up next week: a heroin dealer sold drugs to a customer who overdosed. Is it right to charge the dealer with murder? Join us for that story, for follow-up on the repercussions of today’s bust, and much more.”