Free The Fiance Thief by Tracy South Page B

machine. Used to the weight of his laptop, he buckled a little under the unexpected load, then glared at Claire as she giggled.
    “What are you going to do with this?” he asked.
    “Finish my Ridgeville story,” she said. “I’ll be in the car.” She walked out of the building, leaving him trying tonavigate the door while holding her behemoth of a typewriter. Charlie came out from behind the counter, and held the door open for him. As he started out, Charlie whispered, “A girl who’s disillusioned with diamonds might be hard to handle.”
    He looked outside to see Claire leaning against the car, admiring her ring. “Don’t worry,” Alec told Charlie as he lumbered out the door. “I already figured that out.”
    “I DON’T KNOW HOW you did it, but it’s gone.” Patting Alec’s computer, Sid from the software store turned to Mick and said, “When you throw something away, it stays thrown.”
    “Thanks,” Mick said weakly, avoiding Hank’s stern frown.
    Hank couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Just an hour earlier, Sid had told him this happened all the time, that bumbling editors, writers and other folks who shouldn’t be let at computers without licenses were always throwing away important stuff: annual reports, client data bases, even whole hard drives. It was nothing, Sid said, that a halfway competent systems manager couldn’t solve in fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, the paper didn’t have a systems manager, competent or otherwise.
    Having taken pity on Hank and Mick, Sid had scuttled over with his briefcase and his special retrieval software. As he’d poked around in the computer’s gray matter, he’d said to Hank, “This is how those government guys get busted. They think they’ve destroyed the electronic paper trail, when really it’s just lying there waiting.”
    Now, as he watched his new buddy Sid throw in the virtual towel, Hank grew anxious. “What about all those government secrets you told me about? Never really gone? Wasn’t that what you said?”
    “It was,” he said. He gestured at Mick. “But they didn’t have this guy working for them.” Sid started packing up.
    “I see,” Hank said. “Thank you for your help.” After he said goodbye to Sid, he sat down at Alec’s desk and propped his feet up on it, thinking.
    Mick spoke at last. “Good thing the paper’s only been around a few years, isn’t it? Otherwise, it would be something serious like first time in fifty years the Trib doesn’t publish.’ When you hear first time in four years, it doesn’t sound so bad.”
    “We’re putting out a paper.” Hank surprised himself with his authoritative manner.
    “We can’t. We were cutting it close anyway, with all the editing Alec was going to have to do on Monday. But he and Claire have both filed lots of stories for this edition. They can’t recreate them in an hour or two.”
    “I’ve got my stories. Maybe he kept copies of his somewhere.” He doubted it, though. Alec never kept backups of anything he did, saying it was a waste of space in the computer’s memory.
    “If you’re going to suggest getting him back here, don’t bother,” Mick said. “I told him not to leave the number where they could be reached.” The red of embarrassment finally gave Mick back his color. “I was afraid if we had the number we’d call him about every little thing. He tried to give it to me, but I told him if something so bad he should know about it happened, I was sure he’d hear it on the TV news.”
    “So are you calling the local anchors, or shall I?”
    “I’m going to get something to eat,” Mick said. “Want to come?”
    “You’re not going anywhere,” Hank said, trying to silence that nagging voice in his head that reminded him that he was talking to Mick Regan, the man whose journalistic exploits he had admired from afar, the man whose lectures he’d memorized word for word in j-school. It was thislocal hero, he told himself, who’d scrapped the