Off the Grid

by Monica McCarty

  Sliding the manila envelope into the nylon messenger bag that she used as a briefcase and purse—she’d had it since college (thus the Georgetown Tigers black and orange) and it was not only low-profile but basically indestructible—she slung it over her shoulder as she got out of the car. There were only a few cars left in the garage at this time of night, and the door closed with a slam that echoed in the cement cavern.

  She fumbled with the key fob to lock the doors and swore. She’d left her phone inside. Opening the door, she reached back inside to grab the phone. Before shutting the door again, she decided to toss the lightweight sweater she wore over her sleeveless top in the backseat.

  DCNO was cheap, and it cut any flow of cool air into the building at six p.m. sharp, meaning that even after midnight it would be hot and humid in the office.

  That was one of the problems with the South and the East Coast in the summer—although usually it was cold rooms inside and hot and humid outside. It seemed like she was always taking clothes off and putting them back on a few minutes later.

  She might make a dirty joke about that statement if her love life weren’t so pathetic. Weather was the only reason her clothes came off lately. Few minutes or not.

  But maybe that would change tomorrow. She’d bitten the bullet and set up her first date using the app her friends had told her about. The guy was smoking hot in his picture, which made her think he must be too good to be true. Guys who looked like that didn’t need apps.

  She’d just gotten herself all settled and was about to lock the doors when she saw a shadow move behind her in the reflection of the car window.

  Oh God. Her stomach hit the floor—along with her heart. She had been followed.

  * * *

  • • •

  Maybe it was because it was the second time Brittany was experiencing panic that night, but her head was clearer, and she knew immediately what to do.

  Thank God she still had her keys in her hand. What was the range? Ten feet? Five? She slid off the safety lock, put her finger on the nozzle, and spun around.

  The scream died in her throat. Brittany’s hand froze only seconds away from spraying the police-grade pepper oil into her would-be assailant’s eyes.

  But it wasn’t an assailant. At least not one who meant her physical harm.

  She lowered her hand, her held breath coming in a hard exhale. “What are you doing, Paulie? You scared me half to death! Why are you following me?”

  He’d stepped back when he’d seen the spray and had the gall to be eyeing her angrily—or more angrily than usual. Paul “Paulie” DeCarlo, the investigations editor and senior member of the four-person investigative team at the paper, wasn’t her biggest fan. To put it mildly. He’d made no secret that he didn’t want her as part of “his” team.

  “I wasn’t following you,” he said. “I was on my way to my car and coming over to help you. I can’t believe you almost sprayed me with that stuff.”

  He stared at the hand that was still holding the pink container attached to her key chain.

  “Help me with what?” she asked, sliding it back into her bag and telling herself that she had no reason to feel defensive. He was the one who’d snuck up on her.

  “You looked like you were having problems, and it isn’t safe down here after hours. Didn’t you hear about Doris from advertising? She was mugged a few weeks ago. You shouldn’t be hanging out in parking lots alone this late.”

  Brittany sighed, realizing she’d overreacted. That meeting tonight had made her jumpy. But it was hard to believe Paulie would be concerned about her.

  She tilted her head, studying him. His face hadn’t lost any of its anger. He looked straight out of some seventies cop show. White button-down shirt rolled up at the sleeves, half-done cheap striped tie, dark brown or black slacks (never khakis), untrimmed fluffy mustache, and a tired, been-around-the-block-too-many-times cynicism that made him appear ten years older than his fifty-three years.

  “I did hear about it; that’s why I picked up the pepper spray.” She was taking precautions, but she couldn’t let fear keep her from doing her job. “I appreciate the advice, but I’ve got it under control.”

  “You sure about that? From where I sit, you don’t look like you have anything under control—unless you count a bunch of conspiracy theories. But those are your specialty, right?”

  Brittany ignored the jab, but it wasn’t easy when it found such a perpetually painful mark. “I’m working on something right now.”

  Why was she defending herself to him?

  “Is that so? It better be good, with a reliable source this time, or you’ll be back at that paper in the middle-of-nowhere, writing obits.” Cleveland wasn’t exactly nowhere (even if it felt like it at times), and it hadn’t been obits. But she didn’t correct him. The society pages weren’t much better. “And next time you won’t find another job so easily, even with a boss who wants to get in your pants.”

  Brittany flushed beet red with anger at the crude insinuation, suddenly wishing she hadn’t put the pepper spray in her bag. But he was already walking away.

  Paulie was one of those men who had to have the last word. She let him have it this time, mostly because she knew it was jealousy speaking. Her “tabloid style” articles, as he called them, had been receiving a lot of attention, and the old-school reporter—who hadn’t wanted her on his team in the first place—resented it.

  But she also feared there might be more truth to his accusation than she wanted to admit.

  Brittany had worked hard since she had been publicly discredited and fired for allegedly making up a source five years ago. She’d fought her way back, starting as a fact checker and working for almost nothing at a small paper in Arizona, to gradually bigger and better positions at a handful of papers across the country.

  But no one had been willing to hire her as a reporter. No one until Jameson Cooper. She’d thought the divorced, fortyish editor in chief of the Chronicle had seen something in her. He’d been impressed by the work she’d done up until her fall from grace, and she thought he’d admired her fortitude and determination in working her way back up.

  But in the past few months she’d realized that might not be all that he was admiring. She’d caught him looking at her when he didn’t think she was aware of it, and lately he seemed to find any excuse to come by her cubicle and chat.

  There was nothing inappropriate or creepy about it—and certainly nothing that would be characterized as sexual harassment—he just seemed to like her. Really like her.

  The worst part was that she liked him, too. He was a nice guy. Funny and smart, easy to talk to, and nice-looking in that bookish, Tom Hiddleston kind of way.

  In other circumstances she might have returned his interest. But he was her boss, and she wouldn’t go there. Ever.

  Women had it hard enough in this business without doing things that legitimately undermined their position. The newsroom might not be the old boy’s frat house it had been once, but there was still enough of that around not to want to feed into it. Being accused of sleeping her way to the top wasn’t going to happen.

  She’d been ignoring her boss’s interest and subtle cues, desperation for this job making her hope it wasn’t there. But if Paulie had noticed, she couldn’t delude herself anymore that her credentials alone had gotten her this job. She may have been a rising hotshot reporter five years ago, but that was a long time ago.

  Whatever Jameson’s reasons for hiring her, he had taken a chance on her and she was determined to make it pay off for both of them with top-notch work. It was the best way to shut up Paulie as well.

  But that wasn’t all or even the most important part of what was driving her this time. It was finding out what happened to her brother, and the information she’d received tonight just might help her do that.

  Anxious to delve in deeper to what was in
that envelope, she was halfway to the stairwell before she realized someone was standing there.

  She looked up to see Nancy, another member of the team, holding the door open. From the younger woman’s chagrined expression, Brittany didn’t need to ask whether she’d heard.

  Nancy waited until Brittany was next to her to speak. “Don’t listen to Paulie. He’s still angry about his protégé leaving for the online job. He wasn’t going to like anyone who replaced him.”

  Brittany smiled at her for trying, but they both knew there was more to it than that. “No, Paulie is right. I need to do better or I’m going to be out of a job.” Jameson had as good as told her as much. “But with my next article, I hope to do that.”

  Nancy’s brows lifted in surprise. “You onto something?”

  Brittany smiled at her friend, whose eyes looked bleary and red behind thick glasses. “I hope so.”

  Nancy was a couple years younger than Brittany’s twenty-seven, and although she was technically her senior on the team, Brittany had been helping her out lately. Nancy had yet to make her mark in the investigative reporting world. Despite good stories and solid reporting, her articles hadn’t really connected with their audience.

  She was a talented writer and probably would have found an appreciative audience twenty years earlier, but she didn’t know how to spin her stories so that they appealed to the modern forty-character social media reader. Even readers of traditional newspapers, whether in print or online, still needed to have their attention grabbed and held. It wasn’t tabloid reporting, as Paulie accused. It wasn’t the quality of the story or work, just the way it was presented.

  Suddenly, something occurred to her. “You must be onto something, too. It’s late.”

  Nancy shook her head. “I wish. Paulie asked me to stay and help him with some research. It was nothing, but it took longer than I expected. I was just leaving when I heard what he said about you and Jameson.” She blushed, hastily correcting herself. “I didn’t mean . . . No one thinks . . .”

  Brittany could see the woman’s discomfort and tried to put an end to it, even as her words filled her with dismay. God, was that what everyone thought? “I know what you meant. Don’t worry about it. Besides, I have a hot date this weekend.”

  “You do?”

  The level of Nancy’s incredulity might have been embarrassing if it weren’t warranted. Brittany nodded and pulled out her phone to show her the picture on the app. “Cute, huh?”

  Nancy let out a low whistle. “I’d say. But hockey? I didn’t think you were a sports fan.”

  Brittany shrugged. “Not usually, but we’ll see. I just hope he has all his teeth.”

  Nancy laughed and said good night.

  At last Brittany hurried up the stairs, eager to get a good look at the fruit of a long and difficult night.

  Two

  Who knew relaxing could be so exhausting?

  John kicked back on the brown plaid polyester sofa that would have looked right at home in a frat house from the sixties, popped a beer, and put his feet up on the coffee table. He grabbed the remote to turn on the TV and started to flip through the channels.

  No one could ever call him a pessimist. Hope sprang eternal every time he sat down to watch TV. But the only sports he could find were soccer and a replay of an earlier track and field meet, which the Finns called “athletics.”

  He would fucking kill for an A’s game. Hell, at this point he was so desperate, he’d even watch the Giants. He just couldn’t get behind soccer. He didn’t care how many people in the world loved it; watching grown men roll around on the ground in fake pain to try to get a penalty call was embarrassing. Give him a real sport like baseball, basketball, American football, rugby, or water polo any day of week.

  Yep, little-known fact: water polo was considered the toughest sport in the world when taking together speed, endurance, strength, agility, skill level, and physicality, beating out Aussie rules football, boxing, and rugby. And that was after the mandatory deduction of man points for the weenie bikini.

  Having played water polo for most of his teens and early twenties, John might be biased, but he could tell you one thing: he would have been laughed out of the pool had he ever started rolling around, holding his knee, and crying.

  He’d seen enough soccer in the past two months to last him for a lifetime. Settling on a repeat of The Simpsons, he sat back to drink his beer. Chilling. Just like he’d been doing every day for two months.

  God, he was tired. Tonight he vowed to go to bed before 0200. No resort bars or late-night sauna parties for him—no matter how tempting.

  So much for his plan to take it easy and relax while the LC figured out what the hell had gone down in Russia. Being a ski bum in Levi, Finland, had sounded like the perfect job for a temporarily unemployed Navy SEAL who needed to stay off the grid and disappear for a while. Levi was remote—one hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle certainly qualified—his fellow ski bums were too stoned or laid-back to ask a lot of questions, resorts were a mecca for the international labor force who were happy to fill low-paying jobs, and the Finns, like many in the Nordic countries, tended to speak English.

  The latter was a good thing, because after two months, John hadn’t moved much beyond “hello,” “good-bye,” “thank you,” a few swear words, and “do you speak English?” Which, if you’d ever seen those words in Finnish, was pretty understandable. A few years of college Spanish didn’t help much with “hyvää päivänjatkoa,” aka, “have a nice day.”

  His plan had been to find a job on the slopes while the ski season wound down, rent a room in a house with a bunch of guys, and spend his evenings in the local chalets, drinking whatever the Finnish equivalent of a hot toddy was while enjoying the local scenery of the blond, blue-eyed, and long-legged variety.

  He’d say one thing for the Nordic countries. They might not know shit about good sports, but they had some of the best-looking women he’d ever seen in his life.

  Everything had worked pretty much as he’d anticipated. He’d even managed to get in on some avalanche control, volunteering with the local ski patrol, to keep his skills with explosives fresh—until he’d nearly buried himself in an avalanche when a hand charge had gone off too quickly. Accidents like that happened even to the most experienced patrolmen. If they didn’t usually happen to him, John didn’t dwell on it. He never dwelled; it was a waste of time.

  After the ski season had wound down, he’d exchanged his skis and boots for paddles and a river raft, making money by taking tourists down some not-very-thrilling rapids.

  Not exactly his speed, but he wasn’t quite running on all cylinders lately. His sleep since arriving in Finland had been crap—especially since he’d exhausted the Ambien supply his roommate had tracked down. SEALs lived on the sleep aid.

  Next time he needed to disappear for a while he’d pick a country that didn’t have almost twenty-four hours of sunlight. It made it too easy to stay up until two or three in the morning. Of course, the tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed inducements didn’t help with early bedtime. What had the inducement’s name been last night? Martha? He couldn’t remember. That was bad even for him.

  Maybe he was going at this relaxing business a little too hard. Apparently, there was too much of a good thing. He wasn’t in his early twenties anymore; he was almost thirty and way too old to be going out every night.

  If Brand were here, he’d be giving him shit for—

  John stopped, remembering. No Brand. No any of those guys. They were gone. He had to stop thinking about it, embrace the suck, and move the fuck on.

  He finished his beer in one long drink to cool the burning in his chest and popped another, staring so hard at the TV that he didn’t hear one of his roommates come in until he spoke.

  “What are you doing here alone?” Sami asked. He was the only Finn in the house of five guys—i
t was a veritable United Nations around this place with a Russian, a Swede, a German, and a fake Canadian (him). “I thought you’d be at Hullu Poro right now, taking your bows before the concert.”

  Ah, hell, that was tonight? One of his other housemates—the German—was in a local band, and they were playing at the Crazy Reindeer Arena, aka Hullu Poro Areena.

  John ignored the taking-bows comment, hoping it would go away, and lifted his beer with a smile. “Just warming up.”

  “Good,” Sami said, tossing him the paper as he unloaded a bag of groceries—or what a twenty-six-year-old single guy considered groceries. There wasn’t a shortage of crap around this place. If it weren’t for John, these guys wouldn’t have eaten a vegetable or nonprocessed food in weeks. “It wouldn’t do for the hero of the hour to miss out on his celebration.” The young Finn shook his head. “Man, first Marta and now this. You’re on a roll this week, my friend.”

  Marta! That was her name. John’s three other unattached housemates, which included Sami, had all been eyeing the pretty new waitress at their favorite resort bar. John hadn’t been the first one to ask her out. Actually, he hadn’t asked her out at all. She’d done all the asking.

  Which was just the way he liked it. He’d figured out a long time ago that some women didn’t like to be pursued, and if you waited long enough, they would usually come to you. He’d made waiting an art form; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to make the first move.

  “You going to see her again?” Sami asked.

  John shrugged. “Why not?”

  Sami shook his head in disbelief. Despite the popular misconception, not all Finns were blond-haired and blue-eyed, but Sami did fit the Nordic mold and could have walked right off a Viking ship with his long hair and scraggy Vandyke-style beard.