Absent Pity by Blake Pierce

Author:Blake Pierce [Pierce, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blake Pierce
Published: 2022-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The moment Amber saw her boss’s name on her phone’s screen, she knew that she was in trouble. Henry wasn’t the kind of guy to call one of his employees just to make sure that they were ok.

He was the kind of boss to call up and make demands, or shout at people for being too weak to make it into work. As a result, Amber was already flinching when she took the call.

“Where are you?” Henry asked, not even waiting for Amber to so much as say hello. “You send me a couple of crosswords, not close to enough for a full page, and you’re not even in the office.”

Amber wondered how much to tell her boss about what was going on. Somehow, she doubted that he would be on board with her simply deciding to help the FBI.

“I… had to take a personal day,” Amber said. “I had some stuff I needed to take care of.”

“You have a job you need to take care of. It’s a slow news day, and I need as many puzzles as you can send over to fill the space.”

That was a big shift from canceling her page the other day. Suddenly, he wanted her puzzles?

Amber didn’t dare say that though, not to her boss.

“I could send over a few more puzzles from my collection of spare ones,” Amber said. “I could email them to you. It wouldn’t take much to fit them together as a page.”

Almost as soon as she said it, Amber knew that she’d said the wrong thing.

“You think I’m going to do your work for you?” Henry demanded, the anger in his voice palpable. “I pay you good money as an editor to be here and produce fully designed pages for this newspaper!”

Which he then cut down or rejected outright, Amber didn’t dare to say. She didn’t dare to answer back at all when it came to her boss. He’d already made it clear that he barely tolerated the existence of a puzzles page at all.

“Where are you?” Henry demanded. “What are you doing with this ‘personal day’ of yours?”

“I… I’m helping the FBI,” Amber said. “I saw the whole thing about the Puzzle Killer on the news and I realized that I could solve the puzzles, so I-”

“I’m sorry, what did you just say?” Henry said. “You’ve spent the day running around with the FBI and I haven’t had a single report back from you on it?”

It was obvious that he hadn’t really listened to a word Amber had said.

“I’m not a reporter,” Amber pointed out. She felt sure that if she could only explain all of this properly to her boss, everything would be all right. Exactly why she thought that Amber didn’t know, because it didn’t fit with any of the things she’d found out about Henry so far in her time working for him.

“No, you’re not a reporter, so why are you running around trying to do a reporter’s job?” Henry demanded, his tone angrier than ever.

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